The 5-Step System For Creating A Culture of Positivity, Productivity, and Profitability with JoAnna Brandi

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Welcome back to the Business Systems Summit. I'm your host, David Jenyns. My name is David Jenyns, and in this session we're going to be chatting with Joanna Brandi, and her business is Return on Happiness, which for the last 25 years Joanna's been teaching, coaching, leading, and inspiring companies to go beyond this idea of just customer satisfaction and really embrace the idea of customer care. And it's about creating real relationships that are built on enthusiasm and energy that creates a strong emotional bond between customers and employees. Now, the effects of this obviously can be felt in many different ways, whether it's from customer loyalty, repeat business, referrals, and just ends up impacting that bottom line, which obviously motivates a lot of small and medium-sized business owners. Now, I think what I like most about her work is she's been able to systemize this process down to something that's very actionable, very easy to follow. She's worked with hundreds of companies over the years, everything from multinationals all the way down to small privately held companies. And she is very happy to share these insights and strategies. She shares them in her books, through her keynotes, through her coaching. So it's definitely with great pleasure that I get to welcome Joanna to the summit.

Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here.

Well, I know we have a lot to cover. You're going to basically take us through your 5-step system for creating a culture of positivity, productivity, and profitability. And yeah, there are these 5 key steps we're going to go through. Just before we start those, I'd love for you, if you could just talk to a little bit some of the problems and challenges that you see business owners have and how this system aims to solve some of those for them?

Oh yeah, well I think the number one problem that I'm hearing about right now is employee retention. Yeah. Since it's so easy for search people, recruiters, headhunters to find people with LinkedIn, everybody's always out looking to steal somebody else's employees. We are at employment here. I don't know what it's like over there, but here we are, especially in Florida, absolutely at full employment. So what the business owners are worried about here is that someone's going to come along and cherry-pick their best employees.

Hmm.

Retention is used— it used to be that it was customer retention. People come to me because of customer retention, but now more so because of employee retention. So that's a key thing, because when you lose an important employee, when you lose a key person, you're not only losing the person losing every single customer relationship they have. You're losing every single relationship they have with the team members, and you basically go back to zero before you can replace that person and get them back up to speed. So everybody wants to keep their employees happy now, and happiness is really becoming a KPI, which I'm thrilled about. Yes, because for many years people thought happiness was about this stuff, you know, like, oh no, we don't want to make them happy, we just want them make them productive. Well, it's indisputable now that there's the connection between happiness, or I like to say positivity, to get away from that, the yellow smiley face thing. There's a definite connection between positivity and productivity and profitability, because when someone is having a positive experience at work day after day and they have positive relationships at work, they go home feeling good at night. They want to come back to work the next day.

I think one of the reasons it feels like it's often overlooked and up until now hasn't got that much attention is because some people see it quite hard to quantify because it is so far-reaching. Happy employees, they're more efficient, they engage better with the clients, they put in that extra effort, and it's because it's so far-reaching. And then there's the cost. You were talking about that idea of when, you know, we want to make sure that these team members stay. The cost of them going is very high, not only in that relationship that they've got with customers, but then retraining the new person to take over that role, and then it takes time to get back up to speed. So it's staff turnover, and having high staff turnover can be extremely costly for business.

Absolutely. And the intelligence goes along with them as well.

Yes. Yeah.

Not everything can be looked up on the internet. And I think we forget that. We forget that as an employee, the longer an employee is with a company, the longer they know the ins and outs of getting stuff done quickly, efficiently. They know who to talk to, they know where to go, they know how to work the system. You lose a key person like that and it's very difficult to replace and it takes a really long time. So that's, I think, key right now is employee retention and hiring new employees. That's the other thing they're telling me is they can't find people.

Yeah. And then I think a lot of the stereotype around millennials and things like that, people are really looking for meaning in work now more so than they ever have.

Absolutely.

So it's, you want to work for a company that you feel proud to work at and you feel like you're making an impact and positioning yourself as a company with a purpose and meaning then magnetizes not only great staff to you but also customers as well who believe similarly in that mission that you've got.

Yeah, and that's becoming more and more. I was at a writer's conference recently and it was the kind of conference that people, aspiring copywriters went to, to listen to some of the best copywriters that are in the business because we're all selling all the time. So we're all looking for how do we say it in such a way that we attract the customers that we're looking for. And I love that word magnetize, by the way. I just, ooh, I love it. Because that's what it is. You want to become a magnetic manager. You want to be a magnetic leader. You want people to want to be around you. But the statistics about millennials, more and more millennials now won't buy from a company that doesn't hold their values, that doesn't share the same set of values that they have. So millennials as consumers are now looking to work with companies that are doing good in the world. Now, there'll always be people that are looking for the lowest price, the cheapest made thing, but as a group moving through society right now who will have money to spend because they're building their careers, they want to eat organic food, they want to make sure their children are not playing with toys that are going to kill them. You know, they're just— you're a parent, you know what I'm talking about. When my grandchildren were little, the look on my daughter's face when somebody walked in the door with a toy that was made from plastic instead of organic wood, it was, you know, it was like, uh-oh, we know where that's going to end up. Because they had a set of standards for how they wanted to raise their family. Families are tending to be smaller nowadays, and parents really want to put a lot of energy and effort into raising their children in the way they want them raised. And that means they're going to consume differently.

Well, I think, I mean, your 5-step process, it'd be good if we dive in because that kind of really articulates some of the problems.

Let's dive in.

Yeah, tell us about this, the first step in your process.

Well, this is about leadership. So, you know, getting to profitability, it begins with leadership. And, you know, it was very funny, I sent you a list of what I wanted to talk about tonight, and as I sat down to think about it before I got on the phone call, I realized that the very first step in this process is the very first step in the very first book I wrote, I don't know, 25, 26 years ago. I actually found a copy of it, picked it off the, Winning at Customer Retention, and it looks backwards I guess on the thing here. But the very first part, the very first number one, this is 101 ways to keep them happy, keep them loyal, and keep them coming back. The very first one is know thyself.

Mm-hmm.

It's the same thing with a leader. The very first step in becoming a positive, what I call a positive energizer, a positive leader, is to know who you are. It's about emotional intelligence. It's about understanding who you are. It's about self-awareness. It's about self-management. It's about understanding what you want to be, who you want to be, and how you want to be as a leader. Not what you want to do as a leader, not what you want to have as a leader, but what is it you want to be? And that's a big question. It's a philosophical question. It's the kind of question I think every leader needs needs to answer before they can become a really good leader of other people.

Is this go to maybe India and go on a spiritual journey and maybe sit in a cave to find this answer? Like how asking the right questions leads to the right answer. What are your tips on how someone can uncover that?

Well, I talk about this. I have a course called The Practice of Positive Leadership, and that's the very first thing that we talk about. We talk about values. What are your values? What's important to you? You don't have to go sit on a cushion and you don't have to go to India, but you do have to reflect, who am I? How do I treat people? How do I treat myself? How do I think about myself when I make a mistake? When I do something wrong, do I beat myself up emotionally? Do I get over it quickly? Am I quick to anger? How do I act with other people? Do I fully listen to what they have to say? Or am I listening just to see where there's an opening and I can get a few words in edgewise? So it really is a self-reflective process of sitting back and saying, who am I? Who do I want to be? How do I want to be? Then really taking a look at how do I show up in the world? Because sometimes there's a gap between what you think you are and what your employees perceive you as being. Because they hear what they say but they see what you do. So you can say you're fair, but if they don't see you being fair according to their definition of fair, then you're not fair. You can say you're trustworthy, but they are watching what you're doing to make sure that you're taking all of the steps to earn their trust. Yes, this is— this is all falls in the area of emotional intelligence. And Daniel Goleman, when he first came out with the book Emotional Intelligence, says that 67%, clearly two-thirds of a leader's ability to lead comes from emotional intelligence, which he calls EQ, instead of IQ. But typically we were not hiring people for their emotional intelligence. We were hiring people for their technical expertise, for what was on their resume, for what kind of degree they had. We've not for a long time— it's starting now, which is great— but for a very long time, we weren't looking for the qualities of emotional intelligence. And that's only one piece, you know. The self-awareness and the self-management is one piece of emotional intelligence, and the other piece is the social awareness— how aware am I of your needs— and relationship management. So how well am I managing the relationship? Am I making deposits to the emotional bank account that you're keeping track of somewhere in your being?

It feels like this first step, I think I could imagine, yeah, getting very clear on values, your values that you hold to be true then. So that's kind of the ideal state. And then also thinking in terms of, well, how am I actually Am I living to those values? This is also going to be a process, I'm imagining, for some people depending on where they're at, and really for everybody, just always reflecting. It's an ongoing process then to making sure, am I in alignment with those values?

Perfect. That's the perfect word. Am I continually in alignment with that?

Yes.

There's an acronym I use. I actually teach it in one of the other steps, which is about relationships. Which is, am I building trust? And there are several different questions you can ask yourself about that. Am I showing respect? Again, several different questions. Am I giving appreciation in as many ways as possible? Am I communicating without blame or judgment, without criticism, without cynicism? And am I communicating frequently so people really understand what I need? And am I being kind in all, in all how I do that?

Mm-hmm.

You know, there are certain steps that people can take to evaluate, but the process of self-reflection is not one that we are typically taught. If you've had a good mentor, or if you've done a lot of studying on your own, then, then you do that. But to sit down at the end of the day and say, how did I behave as a leader today? To sit down at the beginning of the day and say, what are my intentions today? And write those to the— today I intend to be aware, today I intend to be kind, today I intend to be appreciative, today I intend to be, and then throughout the day, stop, take a breath, go back to your intentions. Am I being aware? Am I being respectful? Am I being what I said I wanted to be today? And that's a question I ask in my workshops. The question I actually ask is, how many times a day do you check your phone? And everybody laughs. I mean, they literally laugh. It's hysterical. Watch, they pick up their phone, they look at the phone as if the answer's going to be there. And I go, no, really, how many times a day do you check your phone? 400? Depending on the business and how reliant they are on that, they'll say, you know, even if it's 40 times. And then my next question is, how many times a day do you check your state? And there's dead silence in the room. And they go, state of what?

State of my mobile phone. Oh, yes.

Mind. Your state of heart. Your state of leadership. Have you been in integrity with the state that you want to create as a leader, with the be, which it's all about the being. The ironic thing about emotional intelligence is that it's directly connected to the bottom line. Because the state of being that a leader creates is connected to the climate in the organization.

Mm-hmm.

And according to Daniel Goleman, 30% of your financial results come from the climate that you create as a leader. And that's huge. 30% of your financial results come from the climate. So if you're creating a climate of fear and If you're creating a climate of blame, of shame, of toxicity, you're not going to get those financial results. If you are creating the opposite of that, if your intention is to create a climate of appreciation, of gratitude, of support, of love, of the kinds of things that make people flourish and blossom, your financial results are going to go through the roof because Everybody wants to be appreciated.

Yeah, this particular topic feels— it falls into the camp of important but not urgent. And usually busy business owners, they are always working on the urgent, and that's oftentimes where they don't create that space. And I think that's— I mean, that's really what we try and teach with the idea of creating systems. Systems are about allowing certain functions in the organization and tasks to happen where other team members can step in to create the space, which then gives the business owner the opportunity to work on these important areas that are usually neglected.

There is a company that I have been studying with. They're not my client. They don't need me. I love them. They love me. They invite me to come. I've sat in on their classes. I've studied with them when they bring in teachers from the outside. And one of the things that they— you're talking about the Stephen Covey grid. About the— where it's important but not urgent. And that's quadrant— is that quadrant 2?

Yes, top right.

Quadrant 2. So they had, and they are a very successful company, and every Tuesday morning at the same time they have a Q2 meeting. And a Q2 meeting is anyone in the company that wants to show up can show up, and the topics are things that are important but not urgent. So somebody can show up and say, you know, I was dealing with a customer the other day and the customer gave me a great idea. I don't know what to do with this great idea. And they'll play around with that. But can you imagine somebody setting up a meeting like this is years that this meeting goes on called the Q2 meeting. And then I took that idea because that's basically what I do is gather ideas and do my rating from that. I've been in and like you said, in and out of hundreds of companies. Well, I want other people to know about that. So for many years, I speak for Vistage, which is the world's largest CEO organization. So for many years, in some of the programs that I taught for them, there was this idea of have a Q2 meeting every Tuesday morning. Now, if you don't want it to be long, this is another thing I've learned along the way, if you don't want it to be too long, make it 20 minutes and don't put chairs in the room. Have everybody stand up. Don't let them get too cozy. You know, 20 minutes, you're in, you're out. But stuff that ordinarily would not be said, it's going to get said.

Yeah, I like it. And putting this step 1 as an agenda item for that, I think would be very helpful. So then we move to step number 2, which is around this idea of creating positive meaning.

Yes. Well, that— and that's where you started, is creating positive meaning. So how do you create positive meaning? And that's a big one. People really need to believe that their jobs are important. So people in the organization have to know how what they do is instrumental in the success of the entire business and how, how that is important in the world. And that's getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I mean, people are wanting to know, how am I affecting the environment? How am I affecting the planet? How— they're not only wanting to know how am I affecting the bottom line anymore. They want to know, how does the work I do affect the overall good? And once again, that becomes a reflective process. That becomes the kind of process, especially as a company is growing. A company— the meaning someone has is going to change as a company grows. So the important thing to remember is people want to know that their work has impact. So how can you have that discussion with your employee about what the impact of of their work is on the final work product, on the customer's life, on the life of the community, and in some cases now as we're extending out, the life of the planet, the environment itself. And people really want to do that. So when people are connected to meaning, they're working from their heart, not just from their head. So that's a very, very important part of a leader's job is to discover that meaning. So one of the exercises that I teach is to— we call this a time-in exercise. Get your favorite beverage and sit down. Set a timer for 10 minutes or 20 minutes. I would love to see people do this for 20 minutes. And journal about what is work at its best? What could work be if it met all my aspirations for work? And then ask your employees to do the same exercise and see what happens. Because there's an aspirational quality of work. We don't just go to work to make money. I just, over the last 2 years, I've done a lot more work with nonprofits than I've ever done before in my career. There is such a difference working with nonprofits than working with for-profit people. Because the meaning, the connection to meaning comes through in everything they do.

It's funny, when I first got started in business, it was very easy to dismiss and think things like, getting your dream and your mission and your purpose. Very easy to dismiss that as airy-fairy topics. I just want to get down to selling things. And the more that I sort of mature in business, I start to realize that's really where it starts. You have to be very clear on the difference in the world that the business is here to make and for whom, and you're solving a very meaningful problem. And then if you can articulate that, again, it just comes back to that thing we talked about earlier about magnetizing the right staff and customers to you as well that resonate and go, "Hey, I believe in that mission and I want to help support that mission." So for that step 2, and you talked about an activity, the takeaway or the deliverable or the way to really create positive meaning, do you have any tips on— yeah, there's lots of different components, but even something like what are we trying to distill that meaning down to?

We're trying to distill that meaning down to why. Why is what I do important, and how do I contribute to the good of the whole?

Yeah.

So when you see Simon Sinek do his— I don't know, I'm sure you've seen his— everybody's seen his presentations. What's in the middle? It's the why. So it's how do we distill it down to the why? And in addition to that, It's the art, and I think it's an art, of being able to interpret circumstances, no matter what those circumstances are, in a positive light so that you motivate people. So if there's a recession coming or if there's a— this actually happened to me back many, many years ago when I was in the corporate world and there was a recession coming. And you know how people get. The word is out. Everybody starts getting like this, oh my God, my budgets are going to be cut or what's going to happen. Before people could begin doing that, the owner of the company that I worked for, and at the time there was probably 600 or 800 of us, so it was a whole bunch of us, he gathered us together. He called for an all hands on deck meeting, which I don't think we'd ever even had. And all these noises started coming out of speakers we didn't even know we had, that we all had to be at the cafeteria at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. We didn't know why we were going. So of course, everybody making up their own story. You know, did somebody die? I mean, did he sell the company? So we all get there, we're all crammed in, you know, shoulder to shoulder. He stands up, they built a little platform for him. He stands up there and he says, "I hear there's going to be a recession, and I'm here to tell you that we're not participating in it." And then he laid out a plan to take a product that we were not gonna release for another 8 or 10 months, and speed it up because he knew that the competition— he knew exactly what the competition was going to do. They were just going to cut their budgets and go underground. So we were able to get not only not participate in that recession, but we were able to get a new product out into the marketplace during a recession that was a winner. Now that's the gift of interpretation, the positive interpretation of circumstances.

I think that leads into your next step, and there's probably some extra points you can articulate around the idea of creating a positive climate. Like, that speaks straight to that.

Yes, it does. Yes, it does. So I'll just take a little look here and see, 'cause I did make some notes. Boy, that's probably my longest one. The first thing about creating a positive climate for me, and the way I teach it, is to create safe emotional space. Now, you don't go to school and learn most people don't even know what I'm talking about when I say, how do you create safe emotional space? Now, that's creating an environment where people feel free to express themselves without fear of recrimination or humiliation. So picture these young, wonderful millennial people that are coming into the workplace, and they do believe that their ideas are really valid. They're not scared of anything. You know, probably it was 20 years before I was able to raise my hand to say, "I got an idea!" But these kids, you know, the first meeting they're out there challenging the CEO and they're out there and they're, you know, and what happens if when they express themselves they're put down or they're ignored or they're told that we tried that once before but it didn't work or we don't have the budget for that? How many times is that person going to voluntarily give of themselves before they shut down. Hmm. Generally 2 or 3. And then what you've done is you've created a disengaged employee. Because if you want engaged employees— a very close relationship between engagement and happiness, they're not the same thing, but there's a very close relationship between engagement and happiness— if you want an engaged employee, that employee has to feel free to speak up. They have to feel free to fail. So in a positive climate, we're giving people the space they need to try new things and fail. Yay, you failed! How fabulous! What'd you learn? How can we do it differently the next time? What did we learn that's possible just by you trying it? So when you create that kind of environment, people are willingly, they willingly give of themselves and make contribution. Another piece of that is what I call honoring each other.

Just before you move on from that point, because I see it as really important, particularly with work that we do around systemizing business and getting business owners to step back from the operations. Because what happens oftentimes, the business owner trains the employee that whenever you've got a problem, you come to me, I solve that problem, I'm the firefighter. You effectively train— it's like learned helplessness.

It is learned helplessness.

There you go. We see it all the time, and that's really what binds and traps the business owner in the business is because now the team doesn't step up. They don't solve their own problems. They don't try things because they've been shut down so many times that now it's just the business owner, and that just becomes really one of the biggest reasons that the business owner can't step out.

I ran a division of this publishing company in New York I worked for. I ran a division. So essentially, I ran a bit— I was an intrapreneur. So I ran a business inside the business, and I was that person. I wanted to be the smart one. I was the creative one, so I wanted everybody to bring their problems to me. And after years and years and years of going home every weekend with two briefcases full of work, I got sick enough that I realized that I was killing myself and I wasn't developing my staff. And then I was very fortunate. One day I got on the railroad and I went into Manhattan. I was— this was in New York. I went into Manhattan to go to a luncheon, a women's luncheon, and there was a woman speaking and she talked about letting go and she talked about allowing your employees to be stars. And she said, "It's the hardest thing in the world because they are not gonna do it as well as you." So you're gonna have to struggle through whatever emotions you have around it not getting done right because it's not getting done your way. But what will happen after a while, you'll free them, they'll come up with great ideas, and they'll shine so brightly that they'll shine on you, and you're the one who'll get the promotion. And it happened that way. But we're afraid of letting go. And when the entrepreneur— and especially sounds like you're dealing with those mid-sized businesses— people start a business because they're good technically at what they do, and they trap themselves in those businesses. So this is part of that letting go. This is part of that right up front process of how do I want to be? Do I want to be free? Do I want to give people the space that they need? And do I want to be accepting enough to go through what it takes to watch them fall on their face once in a while? That's the hard— it's like, you'll find it with— I don't know how you— I think you probably have young kids. It's the same thing with raising kids. You know, you can keep doing it for them, or you can let them try it on their own and take the chance that the cake is going to fall flat or the doghouse is going to be built wrong or something not so wonderful is going to happen in the backyard, you know.

That metaphor of the children is such a great one because now the way that I look at it is I prefer them— if they're going to climb up the table and then fall off the table, I prefer them to do that when I'm there and I prefer them to make the mistake when I'm at least— I can then help out in the cleanup. But let them make the mistake so that way later on when they're on their own, they know what that mistake looks like, they know how to recover, and it's much better in the safety. I take every Saturday, I take my kids up for their swimming lessons. And similarly, if they're in the pool and they slip and they fall off the end, I kind of want to give them a second or two to try and get themselves safe again. Because there's going to be a time when that will happen and I'm not there.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. I think though with entrepreneurs and so many of them, and again, through the years of speaking at so many different associations, working with pool builders and car wash owners, and, you know, all of these people started the business on their own. I'll tell you what happens, my own theory. They become superstitious.

That's right.

Well, I—

yeah, I get it.

Yeah, because they know— I discovered this in the place that I was working because we were so successful. We kept growing and growing in high technology while high technology was growing. So we kept growing and growing and outgrowing buildings and moving to another building and moving to another building. And finally we were on our third building when I noticed though that instead of— at that point, the prevailing sophisticated corporate color was gray. Instead of having a sophisticated, gorgeous gray carpet, we had an orange carpet that looks like that wall behind me. And I went to the owner and I said, why? Why? Every— how come every place we go, do we have an orange carpet? Because it's not even, you know, in style anymore. He said to me, I know it's not. I have to have it specially made every time. We have to have it specially dyed. So I said, why do we have to have the orange carpet? He said, I said, it's very stressful. He said, exactly. It keeps people on their toes. That's when I began developing this theory, and then I saw it play out with business owner after business owner after business owner. Sometimes people are successful, but they don't know exactly what made them successful. So they're afraid to not do things the same way because you may just break something that made them success. Does that make sense?

Yeah, makes perfect sense.

I've worked with companies that are bringing in the next level of family, you know, where dad, mom are moving out and kids are moving in. Oh my gosh, don't ever work with family businesses because not only do you have the superstition, you have all other kinds of stuff. That go with that.

Yeah. To come back to the idea for this point as well, any final points? And I know you said it was one of your biggest ones, but any final sort of shorter points on the, I suppose, creating the positive climate?

Yes. Oh yeah, I got a bunch. I think the thing that we don't express enough in business is hope and optimism. So it's the open expression of hope and optimism. It's being willing to forgive. Instead of hanging on to grudges and things like that. It's doing the things that build resilience. It's practicing compassion. These are words that we never used in business before, and that's what I think positive psychology really brings to a business. It's understanding that when you bring these, these qualities to the business, what you're building is something called psychological capital. And when you have psychological capital, you can do anything. Because you've built up this emotional reservoir of people wanting to do whatever needs to be done. And part of that is this honoring one another. One of my clients used to have a phrase that they used: if someone came to you, no matter what they had to say, they wanted you to think that— it's to say to yourself, what is that person's positive intent? Because no matter what that person is saying, behind it or how they're saying it, behind it is a positive intent. So to always look for the positive intent, and to look for things, to look for times and places to appreciate. In positive psychology, we teach a ratio of 3 to 1, 3 times more positivity than negativity. But what we have found is in high-performance organizations, you will find 5 times more positivity than negativity. So it's 5 times more focusing on the, the acknowledgement, the celebration. You know, you're celebrating your successes, you're recognizing people for what they do right, you're recognizing people for helping each other out. So you're literally building up, as we mentioned earlier, a great big emotional bank account, and that creates that, that creates that positive climate. And that's when people start having fun. Fun because they're safe.

This sounds like business owners are running a giant adult daycare because this sounds like perfect parenting advice. Like, that's what you try and do with your kids. You want to reinforce positive behavior. Like, that's— you focus on the good and you bring it up. One point I did want to ask, I suppose, to bring it to a real actionable step for someone Some of the things that you've spoken about require you to keep going back to that step 1 and know yourself and being reflective and conscious. Are there any particular steps, to the point of literally scheduling something in on a calendar or something, that can really anchor an action item for this step of creating a positive climate?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I like rituals. I think rituals are very, very important. So 2 of the rituals that I recommend to people Both of them have to do with meetings, and the first one is to, at the beginning of the meeting, have everyone express gratitude for something.

Yes.

When everyone's expressing gratitude, is a heart-based emotion. So when everyone's expressing gratitude, you get everybody on the same wavelength, because the wavelength, there is a physical wavelength, the heart rate variability wavelength that looks like a sine wave of appreciation and gratitude. So when you start a meeting, get everybody to speak something that they're grateful for. It can be something personal, it can be something business. At the end of the meeting, you close every meeting, whether the meeting's on the phone or whether the meeting's in person, with what I call a circle of appreciation. If you're in person, you stand up and you circle around, and even if there's, even if that, you have to move around the table any funny way, and you look at everybody that you've just spent the last hour with and you say, I appreciate, just one sentence, I appreciate how the team functioned today. I appreciate that you brought donuts. I appreciate the fact that we came to a conclusion and where each one of us have a to-do list to go. And when people do that, they leave on a very positive note. Those are two rituals that are really easy to do. One of my clients have, in the beginning of the ritual, instead of doing the gratitude, just verbally. They have a jar in the middle of the table and they have little slips of paper and everybody takes a little strip of paper and writes their gratitude on that strip of paper before they say it out loud and then puts the strip of paper into the jar. The jar remains in the business room, in the meeting room, as a sign of all of the things that we're grateful for because symbology is very important in business.

Mm, I like the action step. And the second one you mentioned as well, almost reminded me of the way that a team comes together before they go out onto the sports field and they put their hands in the middle and go team.

Absolutely. Absolutely. One of my clients has a— they have a morning crew out. They are a trash and recycling company. And so the teams in that organization that are the most successful, and they've got different divisions, so it's really easy to figure out which are the most successful are the teams that have an upbeat morning crew out in the morning. And when the crew is out there, they give, that's where they give awards. If somebody, if a customer wrote in and said, you know, David did a great job or what have you, that's when they announce those kinds of things. That's when they do some of their appreciation, 'cause they don't see each other when they come back. And those teams, when they get out there, and I've been there at 5 o'clock in the morning when they go out on a crew out, and you know, when they go out there, these guys are like, yeah, yeah! They go out now, how are they going to greet a customer? They're going to greet a customer with a smile on their face. But when you go to the places where they don't have that, for whatever reason, and there's lots of reasons, but when you go to a place where they don't have that, the customers aren't treated as well.

Yes, yeah. That one leads into your next step as well, which is this idea of creating positive relationships, and that's probably going to be not only with staff but then also clients as well.

Absolutely, absolutely. And that's positive relationships in the realm of positive psychology, has a lot to do with listening for and recognizing other people's strengths. Now that's a practice. I do positivity practices. That's what I teach people, positivity practices. That's a practice. It's also an art, because when I'm talking to you, I can speak at a rate of about— I'm a fast-talking New Yorker, so you know, I'm speaking maybe 125, 150 words a minute. Right? But you're capable of actually listening at about 400 words a minute. So while I'm saying something to you, you might be planning what you're having for dinner later, or figuring out how you're going to edit this, or what you're going to say next. Most people aren't really listening. So one of the things I teach, and I have an exercise that I use to teach this, is that how do you listen for somebody's strengths? So The one thing that you can do, let's say an employee comes in after the weekend, and you stop him or her at the door and say, "Joe, what'd you do over the weekend?" And then Joe starts talking about what he did over the weekend. You say, "What's one thing you did over the weekend that you feel really proud about?" The moment Joe starts talking about what he's proud about, put on a different set of ears, because what you're going to hear him talk about is his strengths. And then you have the opportunity as a leader to acknowledge it, to appreciate it, to affirm it, to anchor it. And there's so many ways that you can do that, letting people know that you hear who they are when they are at their best. The more you do that, the stronger the team becomes. So positive relationships come from training yourself to notice other people's strengths, speaking those strengths out loud to them, and asking them how they can build on them, asking them how they can use those strengths to make a bigger contribution, asking them how they can use those strengths to solve a problem that the company has. So I might say to you, you know, David, I've got this issue, and I know you not very long, but I know that one of your biggest strengths is developing systems. How can we find a system so not only do we fix the problem, but we keep the problem from occurring the next time. Now, how does that make you feel when I say that to you?

Kind of puffed up my chest a little bit then.

Good, because what it says is, I get you, I heard you, I understand you, I know what makes you tick. There's nothing that a human being wants more than to be recognized and heard and appreciated. So when, when you know that your manager, your leader does that, and then they're gonna come looking for you when their strengths are there. One of my clients, she's an eye doctor, and she's an introvert, and she's in a growing area, and the practice is growing, and she's having a hard time managing her staff because she's never been schooled in this. They taught her how to look in people's eyes. That's what they taught her. They didn't teach her how to manage a team. So one of the things that we do we only work by phone, is I helped her identify the strengths of the people that she worked with. And they speak those strengths out loud now. And then she took these pretty, you know, she took these little, you know, sticky things, and she wrote people's strengths on them. And while they were, one night she came in, and the day before their team meeting, she plastered them all over the walls. So the next morning they walked in, and now they sit in their team room surrounded by their own strengths. So now whenever there's a problem, she can look at the wall and she can go, okay, what kind of strengths do we need in order to fix this problem? And who's got those strengths? Because strengths are people's superpowers.

Yes, and that's another good example of, like you were saying, like anchoring it into the physical thing. Talking about, you know, putting things in the jar, and now we're talking about, you know, sticking things to the roof. It just, you know, adds that extra level of meaning to something. So I like that. And then it leads us to the final point, which is around this idea of positive communication. And a lot of these really are interwoven.

They're all interwoven. They're all interwoven. And that is, it's impossible to separate them. And that's the good thing about it. You don't have to be a linear, iterative person in order to do this. It doesn't make any— when I show it on a slide, it's kind of a You know, cultivating positive emotion kind of goes around like this because it doesn't matter where you come in. You can do any one of these steps in any order and any combination, and it'll still work. So for those of us who aren't linear, that works pretty well. So positive communication— first of all, communicating frequently is important because it creates context. And if there's one thing I've seen through the years consistently that goes wrong in organizations is is that people don't know what's going on. And then they're surprised, and then management is surprised when things go wrong, and people didn't know what they were expected to do in the first place. So frequent communication is really important, and it can be concise, and it doesn't have to be an hour-long lecture, but that frequent communication, especially when there's change going on in an organization, and I don't know too many organizations that aren't going through rapid change right now. So that's really important, is that the communication is frequent and it's positive. Because it creates context, it fosters commitment, and gives direction. It builds trust. It does all those things that help you build relationships. Then there's something that we call best self-feedback, and a best self-feedback statement would sound like this. It might say, David Jenyns, one of the ways that you add value and make important contribution to the business community is by Finding people that create great systems and taking your time to go put all these things together and create summits so that you can spread the word out in the marketplace. See, I'm noticing you doing what you do best and I'm telling you why that matters.

Mm-hmm.

Now inside a team, and I do this at every meeting I have, especially the CEO meetings I do, 'Cause these are intact teams, these are intact groups of people. I actually have them do this with one another. So, you know, I'll put somebody's name. Generally, I'll know, I know the names of the people that are going to be there. So on the slide, I'll put the name of somebody, you know, and say, Beth, one of the ways that you add value to this team is— and I'll say, will somebody please finish this sentence? And then someone will say, Beth, one of the ways that you add value to this on this team is that you always keep the conversation going when we get stuck. And I remember a time when— because then it anchors them back to a behavior. So best self-feedback is a great way of telling people that you're noticing their strengths and telling them how they matter and what the context is. And you can do that. I tell people to practice doing this 3 to 5 times during a day. Find 3 to 5 people in the course of during your day and give them one piece of best self-feedback. Because basically what you're saying is, when you're at your best, here's what I see.

Mm-hmm. I think, because you've shared so many great strategies underneath each of these different topics, that for someone to wrap this together and think, right, what's the next smallest step that I can take to get me on this journey, I could almost imagine them looking at the 5 points that you've given and for each one coming up with one of the steps, an action item, a repeatable task, a, you know, making space to have some time with yourself or building something into a meeting underneath each one of them. Just figure out just one and then just start making that happen consistently. And then over time, you can then start to layer it on top. I'd love for your insights on how someone then goes about bringing this into reality.

Well, there's two ways that I can think of immediately. One is I'm going to write you a report that you can then distribute to the people that are listening to this, because I realize that it sounds— I know that people really like the concrete, and I've made every one of these things concrete. So you'll get a report that people can download however you do it, or I could put it on my website for them. You know I wasn't going to leave you hanging on that one. The other one is take my course. This is the practice of positive leadership course. Course, and it's a 10-unit course. It's, it's quite robust. It has all of these things plus positivity practices, but each one of these things is a step in the right direction. There is a special report that I have that has my favorite appreciating, empowering, and asset-focused questions. So just changing the way you ask questions instead of saying what's wrong here and who's to blame, Being able to ask questions about what did we learn here? What's strong here? Where are we strong? Where are our strengths? And how can we capitalize on our strengths? Sharing good news, I think, is very, very important. Always having that question, what I appreciate about this is. So someone comes in, they see you at your desk, you're doing something, and the manager says, you know, what I really appreciate about what you're doing is. Simple. This stuff is so simple, but it's cumulative. It's outside our realm of emotional intelligence because you made reference to daycare centers and children and things like that. We somehow got the idea, and it's probably my generation and the generation that came before me, we were done, we didn't need a lot of, we would have liked praise, But we were told what we were supposed to do. We did what we're supposed to do. We didn't complain about that front boss anyway. We didn't complain about, you know, we just did it. But the world has changed and employees won't stand for that anymore. So this is a way of— it's not coddling people. It's treating human beings with respect and love because when you give them that They'll do anything for you. And the thing about the customer experience that everybody talks about is how do we get discretionary behavior? How do we get our people to go the extra mile? Well, you get your people to go the extra mile when you, as a leader, have your little checklist every day of what are the 5 or 6 things did I do today to build more positivity in my team? That's when you get discretionary behavior. Because when you build that emotional— but we all have this little kind of checklist in our head, and you look at me and you snarl over my work, or you say something negative, I'm putting a check— I'm putting a check mark in the negative column for you, baby, because you're not— you're not being a good boss. But when you come over and you tell me what you appreciate about what I've done, and you savor it with me, and you give me the opportunity to tell you how I did it so that I can— that I can say it over again and get the pleasure of saying it again. And every time you do that, by the way, every time you experience a positive emotion, you change the biochemistry of the body. So every time you're changing someone's biochemistry, they feel good. And you're also building new neural pathways in the brain. So the more of this stuff you do, the easier it is for that person to get to that place of happiness where happiness comes from. It's not just a state of mind, it's a state of body. The state of brain. So the more of this you do, the better the results you get, the easier it is to get people to try new things, to go out of their ways, to give back to the community. And the best part of it is, when those people go home at the end of the day, there's a positive spillover into their family. When we devalue people in the workplace, when we put people down, when we only notice their mistakes, when we never tell them when they do something right, but we always point out when they do something wrong, they go home demoralized at the end of the day, and that's how they treat their children. And they say— I've been trying to track this down for years— but there is a belief that the children who bully other children in schools come from parents who work in toxic work environments, because the parents take that toxicity and negativity home with them. So creating a positive work environment helps create this positive spillover effect where we have happy customers, happy employees, happy families, happier communities. Happy people are more generous, so they give more money to worthwhile causes. So there's this beautiful spillover effect of doing this kind of work inside an organization.

I really love your work, and I think it's a message that needs to get out spread far and wide. I think I'll add the links to your website so people can check out, find out more about your course and check out your book.

Yeah, the course, the course is great because you can do it on your own, you can do it with your team. And if they— I'll put a special, special 77. If they use the word special 77, I'll take $77 off the price, which may be an inducement. And we'll make sure— I'm sure we're going to give them some kind of a document, right?

Yes, yeah, perfect. Well, a big thank you, Joanna, for your time. Very generous with your insights, and I know people will get a lot from it, so thank you.

Oh, thank you. This is such an opportunity for me to get my work out there, and I just— it's become more of a mission for me. It really does. I want to see happier families. I want to see happier workplaces. I want to see happier communities. We got to change things.

And you can feel the healing. It comes.

This is one way to do it. Very good. People spend more time at work than they do anyplace else, so if we can create a positive environment at work, we can change the world.

Thank you, Joanna.

Thank you.

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