How to Design an Exceptional Employee Experience | Jim Harter of Gallup

Good morning. Thank you, Chris, for the intro. I'm a huge admirer of all of your work, and just a pleasure for me to be here with you today and looking forward to the interactions we have as the day goes on here. So our founder, George Gallup has a quote that we've used quite a bit. He said this decades ago, there's 5 billion ways to lead a life, and we should go study all of them. That was decades ago. Of course, we have more people in the world now, but that's kind of the mission of our organization, really, is to study people and outcomes that are important to them and organizations, and to really study the human experience, the ambitions of people, the human will, and to build analytics, advice, and learning around that. So I want to share with you some of the things we've learned. We've got about 70 million individuals that we've studied that are in our workplace database. A lot of people don't know this, but we study, go take deep dives into workplaces and study what matters to managers and employees and executives and organizational leaders. And we've learned some kind of generalizable truths about human nature that hopefully you'll find useful from an application standpoint. You wonder, going back to Dr. Gallup's statement, how many people have built their lives around architecture? I was in Prague a while back and went up to that castle, and there's a cathedral up on the castle called St. Vitus Cathedral. Took a tour of it, and just a beautiful structure. And they told me how these families were, and it took them upwards of several centuries to build that thing, and how these families, generation after generation, would live right next to it, who were building it. So their entire lives were around architecture. I wonder how many lives were like that in history. But of course, with technology nowadays, you all have figured out ways to do it more efficiently. But it's just amazing. I go around the world, look at architecture. I have no idea how you guys do it, but all the planning, the vision, the planning and the execution to get it done right is just remarkable to me. But from a workplace culture standpoint, we've gotten a lot done historically as human beings, including architecture, through command and control management. So the question is, is command and control management going to get us where we need to be in the future? And so we've been exploring that quite a bit. And so this talk is really about how to design an exceptional employee experience, to really think about how people are best managed in the modern workforce, and to utilize all the different pieces of information that we've been able to collect all the research, the piles of research data, and to kind of pull out some nuggets that you might be able to apply. We might take a step back and ask this question also. What is the purpose of an organization? Think about that for a second. Some people might say, well, the purpose of an organization is to get a lot of stuff done. You need an organization to get done what you need to get done. I asked a colleague of mine, his name is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He spent his whole life pretty much studying flow, the state where you get into a flow state where you're so absorbed in your work that time passes quickly. His answer was, the purpose of an organization is to improve lives. Now you could argue improve lives outside the organization through what you produce, but you could also argue it might be about improving the lives within the organization. Don Clifton, my mentor for 17 years and the father of strengths based psychology, said that the job of management isn't just getting work done through people, it's getting people done through work. And I'd argue with you, from everything we've looked at, that's really got to be our mentality going forward if we're going to match what we're doing in organizations with the the modern workforce. So you've probably seen a number of these things in terms of your observations and the organizations you work for. In the changing workforce, there's more racial cultural diversity increasing rapidly than prior generations. Remote working is on the rise. And we see that statistically workers are more matrix than ever before. Digitization is changing things considerably. A lot more mobile technology that blurs work and life, more contingent and gig jobs. In organizations, the most desired perk is workplace flexibility. People want more flexible work environments when they choose their organization, but on the other side. So as we kind of think about the current state, there's been declines over the recent decades in GDP per capita growth. There's been huge advances on the positive side in the science of management. We know a lot more about what it takes to manage people effectively than ever before. But there's been a problem in terms of practices of management. They haven't kept up with the science. So we have to figure out ways to translate the science effectively so people can use it in the right way. And the newer workforce has changing expectations of what work should be. And so that's the current state. So what does the new workforce want? What's the shift? The shift is from a traditional approach. When I was younger, we'd go to work we wanted a paycheck. We wanted just a satisfying workplace. We knew we were going to have a boss that had a command and control kind of approach that delegated to us what to do and we followed it. We had our annual reviews. We probably had a manager that was an expert on our weaknesses, really got to know what we didn't do well and reminded us of that. And work was a job. Work and life were separate. This newer workforce expects something different. They don't just want a paycheck, they want a purpose. They want to connect to something meaningful. I can't think of an occupation that has a more important purpose than the ones you all are involved in. They want to develop. They don't just want a boss, they want a coach. They want someone who continually gives them advice, mentors, helps them think about their future. Maybe one of the best outcomes of coaching someone is they can see where they're headed. You're helping them see what they can be. They want ongoing conversations. They want a manager who knows their strengths. Doesn't mean that they don't know anything about their weaknesses. But they've got to lead with strengths and know who they are first. It's a shortcut to getting to know someone effectively and builds trust. And there's got to be an awareness that work and life are blended. Work is a part of my identity. It's not just something I show up for and separate from the rest of my life. And so that's a shift that we have to be conscientious about as we're designing what we do in our workforces. Another current state. Half of people are looking for a new job or watching for openings. You've probably seen this in your own work. 35% report changing jobs in the past three years. This is really troubling to me. When people change jobs, they change companies. Somehow they're not seeing their future in their current company. That's an opportunity, big opportunity. And in terms of them knowing really what's going on in their organization, less than half can strongly agree. They know what their organization stands for. There's no clarity in their mind about what the organization's about. And they don't really believe in the organization's values. And so these are opportunities. We've been trending employee engagement for quite some time now. We have got a global poll, a world poll, where we track data in a couple hundred countries. And we've done in depth studies in the US of course as well. And we've been able to see how engagement is doing over Time. What is employee engagement? It's really the involvement and enthusiasm people have with their work and workplace. When they show up, do they put in that discretionary effort that you're looking for? So we've got a trend on global, it's gone from 11%. In 2009, we started our first global polls. Back then we took on a long term initiative to measure the will of the world with representative sample in the globe. It's gone up a little bit and that's a meaningful growth because we have large sample sizes here. So the positive side is globally, it has gone up, it's improved. That represents a lot of people. In the US we've seen some trend upward as well. From 26% we first started measuring this to 34% in the last decade. An increase of about 6 percentage points represents millions of people. But it's still not where we want it to be. 34% efficiency is not good enough. Neither is 15%, of course. But on the positive side, so hopefully I haven't depressed you yet. On the positive side, there are organizations that have done best practices in this space and they've started on average at 42% and over time gotten to 70% efficiency. Now these percentages I'm showing you here represent a bar that's pretty high. We set a high bar because that high bar predicts high levels of performance, dependability and high levels of efficiency in organizations. But to get to 70% is pretty remarkable. Now these are organizations that think about engagement in terms of part of their strategy. It's initiated by the CEO and executives in the organization owned at the top. It's embedded in their communication systems, it's embedded in their development systems. So you're seeing it's not a separate HR initiative and it's embedded in their accountability system. So managers know what their responsibility is. It's part of their ongoing responsibility. So there are best practices that get organizations to that level. But the good news is it's all very changeable and I'm very optimistic about that. These kind of trends relate to earnings per share growth of 4.3 times of competition on average. So when you study growth over time, so you might think about it, we've had some recessions in this time period. We've been measuring it during a recession period. You've got the high engagement. Companies are holding their own where the competitors are dropping. And in thriving times, they're exceeding their competition in terms of growth trajectory. I wanted to show you this chart because it kind of leads into a little bit of A discussion about the employee experience. This is our trend on the mood of America. A thousand people every day in the US the top green line. It's the percentage of people with a lot of happiness and enjoyment without a lot of stress and worry. You can see that mood varies a lot, a lot more than I would have guessed, from close to 70%. Happiness and enjoyment without a lot of stress and worry down into the 30s on some days. The bottom is kind of the reciprocal. That's percent with a lot of worry and stress, without a lot of enjoyment, happiness. But just look at that top line for a minute. What do you think explains those peaks? Pardon me? Work life. Weekends. Yes, it's weekends. And what else? Holidays. Weekends and holidays. The valleys start on Mondays, unless Monday's a holiday. And there used to be a theory that there's a blue Monday effect. It actually is just as bad on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays. There's a little bit of a peak up on Fridays, thank God it's Friday kind of thing. And so there's these. So we have to kind of dig. We could have stopped right there and just say, well, people need more weekends and holidays. And that solves the well being issue, right? Well, it's not realistic for one. But secondly, there are some patterns underlying these data that tell us why. Why are weekends and holidays better for people? You can do what you want. There's some autonomy. You've got a little bit more social time than you would normally have. We know that in great workplaces you can have some social time mixed in there and still be highly productive, even more productive. So there's a lot of things we can learn from. So autonomy is a big one. You can also have a workplace with high autonomy. When we study workplaces that are highly engaged, that drop from Sunday to Monday doesn't go away, but it gets cut in half. You think about how that carries over day after day after day. So we dug a little deeper into this and we wanted to measure the physiological responses of people during weekdays and weekends. So we attached these devices to them. They agreed to all of it. They answered some questions about how they felt in various moments throughout the day. And we had them spit in a tube. Why would we do something so disgusting? Well, we wanted to capture their cortisol, the stress hormone cortisol. And that can be captured through saliva samples. So we looked at their moods in the moment, connected that to the saliva samples and the stress cortisol. Our goal is to understand are these moments that people say they're Experiencing high stress, high interest, et cetera, correlated with actual physiological responses. And we found, like other studies that have been done, that it does. When people say they're stressed, they actually are physiologically stressed. When they have higher interest, they have lower levels of cortisol. And this kind of shows you a picture of what it looks like with interest. So someone with low engagement on the left, someone with high engagement on the right, you can see the difference in that experience during the day about their level of interest in the activities that they're doing. When we asked people, one of the questions was, do you like who you're with in the moment? Probably going like this. But when people are highly engaged, they like who they're with. Pretty much throughout the day. The disengaged people have these peaks that go like this. So they start off the day griping probably with their friend, drops, and it comes back up about noon when they're having lunch with their friend. And then before they leave, they probably gripe with their friend as well. So you got these ups and downs in terms of liking who you're with. But in any event, there are connections here. The other thing we found was that on weekdays, the sleep awakening cortisol, which is where it peaks, was significantly different between engaged and disengaged workers. But on weekends it was no different. So the weekend is kind of a control. So what's actually happening has a lot to do with the quality of the work environment. Now just think for a minute about how those experiences recur over and over again. And people, the remembering self probably doesn't register, but it could affect health over time. In fact, engagement does relate to health over time and our own resiliency. So let's think about the employee experience and how we turn this into something that's productive and positive for organizations. You've probably all seen the employee lifecycle. I think no matter how you define the employee lifecycle, we could all probably agree that these things occur. We attract someone, we hire them, we do some sort of onboarding, whether it's structured or not. Then at some point they depart. And in between onboarding and departure, stuff happens. Can we all agree on those things? Okay. What we find is there's a lot of variance not only in attraction, hiring, onboarding and departure, but there's huge amount of variance in that stuff that happens in between. And we gotta kinda nail down what that is and how it can create a better employee experience. The reason is the experience people have today in the workplace leaves the organization very quickly. The culture that exists in the organization gets transmitted outside. No company can hide behind their brand anymore or it's very difficult. The actual cultural experience employees have transfers and people kind of know what's going on in organizations now. So the employee life cycle, these are those stages we just talked about. The employee experience is the actual journey someone takes through those stages. And that experiential journey is going to vary considerably by people based on all the different conduits that affect them, including their manager. So ideally, we want a journey where we're recruiting top talent, we're bringing in top talent, we're picking the stars to join our organization. We're affirming their decision to join during the onboarding phase and building on top of that, we're engaging them through their strengths and their purpose. We have a performance management system where we can drive expectations of the organization and we develop people toward their career growth. Then when they depart, they have a positive exit experience which accentuates their brand. Again, the question people often ask is why does perform come before develop? Why don't we develop and then get performance? Well, we know they both kind of happen simultaneously. Goes back to that quote that Don Clifton made years ago, Getting people done through work. It's very difficult for anybody to really truly develop unless they perform. We've seen this with interns. One of the great values of internships nowadays is that people can perform and learn as they're performing. So key to development is in the midst of performance, not separate. We don't just get people to perform and then they take off. In fact, if someone's developing while right before they depart, they're going to have a positive exit experience. We're setting them up for success in another endeavor they might get into. We'll go through each of these. Another critical piece to this is a starting point. We first have to identify the organization's purpose real clearly, what we want our brand to represent and what kind of culture we want to create. To really specify the type of culture. Do we want an agile culture? Do we want an inclusive culture? And that's got to be intentionally embedded in each one of these stages. We've got to go through each one of these stages and know how we're addressing our purpose, our brand and our culture so that it actually does resonate with someone. It's not something we just say, but it actually is experienced in people's lives as they're going through this journey. So that's one thing. Then there are these key conduits. The manager is a key one. The role of the individual in the organization, what team they're on, the space they're working in, and whether that's functional or not, and how their work affects their overall well being. These are all areas that are going to influence whether you have a good experience in each one of these stages. But how do we purposefully put our purpose, intentionally put our purpose, our brand and what we want to represent and our intended culture into each one of these stages so it's really experienced. That's the challenge attraction. For younger employees, compensation actually falls below opportunities to learn advance. I'm not saying compensation is unimportant, it's very important. But opportunities to learn in advance is ranked higher. Quality of their manager is now a criteria people look for when they're looking to join an organization. They're savvy about that now. And to have interesting work. We can hire more effectively if we use scientific selection systems that resonate with people and are easy to use. But if we select the top 20%, we can boost productivity by as much as 10% by using a good selection system. Onboarding. Unfortunately, only 12% of people can strongly agree the organization does a good job of onboarding. So that's low hanging fruit right there to get right. We saw globally the engagement numbers. Two in 10 people say their performance is managed in a way that motivates them. The number one reason people join organizations and change jobs, number one reason they change jobs is career growth opportunities. So development's essential. And the exit experience. Employees who have a positive exit experience are 2.9 times more likely to recommend the organization to others. That brand ambassador piece. So how do we create an exit experience where people reflect back on it and say positive things about the organization? Let me start with departure because if we start with we know that at some point everybody's going to depart, whether it's retirement, whether they're leaving for an opportunity where they can grow, or almost any experience outside of something unethical that happens in the organization where they have to be fired, you want that employee to feel heard when they're leaving. And actually throughout their whole experience, most people that join an organization, unless they only maybe join for one day, have probably contributed something. Do we have a record of what they actually contributed? And did we tell them what they contributed as they're about to leave the organization? And how do we get them to be a brand ambassador? About half of employees will tell us that after they made the departure decision, that nobody had even talked with them about it before they made the decision or they hadn't Even approached anybody about the issue that they were having. So just knowing what's going on in people's lives is pretty important here. Attraction. People are looking for opportunities to grow. They're going to use, as I mentioned earlier, the quality of management as a criteria. They want meaningful work. They want flexibility where that's possible. And flexibility can vary considerably in how it's defined. They're going to take a look at what their office space and place is going to be, and, of course, pay and benefits come into the decision. Onboarding. These are the five questions that we found you got to answer in that early onboarding phase. First, people need to know what you believe in here. What does the organization believe in? That's that purpose component we talked about earlier. What are my strengths? What's my role in the organization? These seem like basics, but they're overlooked. Who are my partners here? You can even go so far as to say, who are my friends? Who has my back? And a big one that gets left out of a lot of management, even at these early stages, is, what kind of potential do I have here? What's my future look like in this organization? If we can answer those five for every single person, we've gotten off to a really good start in terms of setting them up for success and knowing they've got potential in the organization, they don't always have to look out. Hiring. Of course, we want an engaging process when they're being hired, so they're attracted. We want them to know what our employment brand is, what we're about, and that's got to be lived out once they're hired. We reviewed 100 years of selection research, and we can group selection criteria that you might use into these four categories that you could leverage to make better selection decisions. How do you go about leveraging prior experiences and achievements someone's had before they joined their organization, whether that's in high school or college or other jobs that they've had. How do we know what innate tendencies predict whether someone will be successful in this role? Fortunately, science is advanced enough that we can actually develop tools where we can hire based on these innate tendencies, or sometimes we call them talents that people have that fit their jobs and be much more effective at getting people in the right jobs to begin with? How do we leverage multiple interviews? We all know that any one interview is going to have some bias inherent in it. How do we combine multiple interviews together to make a better decision to reduce some of those biases? And then one that gets left out a lot, I think, is really important. I experienced this in my work life is on the job observation of people through internships and work activities. And I'd go all the way back to say we need to start embedding internships and job tryouts at the high school level so people can get a really good idea about what the work is before they have all these aspirations about this is what I want to do. They've got to see the day to day work. It also gives you a chance to build up what we call game film on someone. Athletic organizations are really good at capturing game film and it allows them to predict who's going to be the best performer in the future. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better. If you can capture game film on someone before they come into your organization, all the better for you. All the better for them. So those are four areas that come out of that 100 year research study. These are a couple resources and you can get these on gallup.com if you want. But these are some historical resources on what we think of as what we describe as employee engagement. First Break all the Rules describes our journey to understand what engagement really is in organizations, how it links to outcomes. 12 our book 12 the Elements of Great Management is really a list of 12 different stories from great managers embedded with updated research. So updated research on each of the 12 elements that range from clarity of expectations all the way to learning and growth opportunities. So these are a couple resources available to see that history. So when you hear people talk about Q12 or Gallup's measure of employee engagement, this goes back decades. I spent the first part of my career torturing employees with 200 question surveys and I learned that that wasn't very effective. So we took a different path. And we also learned along the way. We partnered with Frank Schmidt. He's an expert in meta analysis, Iowa psychologist from University of Iowa. He taught us meta analysis and what that allowed us to do is understand, really answer a question. Are there some generalizable elements across organizations that predict success, predict performance consistently? We found out there were. If you think about these that are listed here, they're really kind of human nature at work. When I come to work to do any kind of activity, do I know what I'm expected to do? Do I have what I need to do it? Do I have a chance to do what I do best? These cut across industries, countries, do I get recognition when I do something well in a way that's meaningful to me? Am I cared about? Do I have a chance to develop If I say something, does my opinion actually count? Do I connect myself to a bigger mission or purpose? How do I feel about my co workers? Do I have the right kind of conversations about my progress? Can I see where I'm headed and do I have chances to build on top of that with learning and growth opportunities? Now people ask, shouldn't these change with the new workforce with different expectations? They've always defined high performance. My answer, from everything we've looked at, would say the needs don't change, but how you approach them does. These are disruptors. They can affect how we approach all these. What about digitization? We've got to really lean in on development with digitization because people need to be retrained. So we got to think a lot more about that. In a matrix environment, we know that there's higher levels of collaboration than in non matrix environments. But what's at risk? What's at risk is clarity of expectations. Because people have to. If you're in a matrix environment, you got a lot of stuff coming at you. You've got to be more conscientious about how you set priorities and expectations. It's actually just the opposite in a remote setting. In a remote setting, people are more equipped generally to know what they're supposed to do, have the materials and equipment to do it. Organizations are more purposeful about remote working than they've ever been before. But what's at risk in a remote setting? Collaboration connections with co workers. So managers have to be really good at connecting with people and connecting them with other people in a remote setting. So how we approach the needs and what we really have to kind of lean into and emphasize is a bit different depending on the situation. That's why great managers are so important. When we get those 12 right, we see all kinds of improvements in performance. These aren't perfect correlations, but the difference between a top and bottom quartile unit, work unit or manager led team on these outcomes is substantially different, whether it's turnover, absenteeism or shrinkage. In a business that tracks shrinkage or theft. Quality metrics, all these productivity, sales, customer metrics, these all add up to 21% higher profit for business units in the top quartile versus the bottom. It doesn't guarantee success, but it improves your probability of success. Here's another way of looking at that. If we combine all these outcomes together and rank organizations from top to bottom and just draw the line in the middle, above or below average on a combined composite metric, Those at the first percentile of engagement have a 20% chance of above average performance or success and Those at the 99th percentile have an 80% chance. So improving engagement improves your probabilities. I think most people want to improve their probabilities. Additional impacts from getting this right improves people's lives, improves how they interpret their commute time if they have a longer commute. The default is that people hate long commutes. Their stress is less than it normally would be if they have high. Maybe because they're thinking about their work in a positive way, when they're anticipating it and when they're leaving work. Vacation times interpret it differently. You know, six weeks of vacation can't make up for disengagement. How people interpret non work times when they're asked to work, when it's non traditional work times. We've got papers on all this inclusivity, how they interpret the people around them and whether they're an ambassador for the organization or not. Shifting engagement. I mentioned kind of some systemic things we can do from making it part of your strategy to how you develop manager development programs to good communication systems. But in the end, engagement grows through the manager. About 70% of the variance in team engagement is influenced by the manager. So this is a picture of manager led teams shifting across time. So how you grow that overall company figure is through manager led teams across time. You're actually intervening at the level where it's actionable, which is a manager led team. And so the goal is to shift that distribution over of manager led team engagement. And so we design a lot of programs for organizations to try to do that. Everything we've just kind of been going over also has to be embedded in performance management. We're referring to performance development. If it isn't, you've got two separate things out there. You've got an engagement program that might sit over in hr, which I would argue it should be highly supported by hr, but it's got to be owned by the business folks if it's going to work. Same thing with performance management. And what you're trying to do with engagement has to be consistent with what you're trying to do with performance management. So you've got to do three things we found in performance management. Establish expectations that are clear, collaborative and aligned. The low hanging fruit is collaborative. People oftentimes overlook that when you, when you involve someone in their goal setting, it actually boosts their engagement significantly. That simple task of just involving them and aligned with the organization. So establishing expectations. The toughest one is continually coaching. So it's frequent, focused and Future oriented, getting managers to continually coach and then creating accountability. We'll spend a little bit of time on that continual coaching one here in a second and creating accountability. I've heard a lot of companies talking about changing their performance management system, throwing out ratings and all that. Whatever you do with performance management, make sure you've got that accountability, whether that's through better designed performance measurement. In some way, top performers want accountability because it helps them shine. And you talk about remote working and all these other things that are going on. You can't forget about that accountability component. It's got to be achievement oriented, perceived as fair and developmental, future oriented. So those are three. That's kind of a, that's one way of thinking about it. That kind of condenses it into three very actionable categories. If you break this down a little bit more, we found there are five conversations that every manager can have with their employees that will boost their engagement and improve their performance. There are a couple of them on the end, the first and the fifth that are more slow down type conversations where we're going to be reflective, we're going to think about who you are, we're going to think about your future role in relationship orientation, progress reviews. Then in the middle you've got quick connects that could just be acknowledging that they're present, that they're alive. Let them know they actually matter. Second, check ins. How are you doing? Do you have any successes recently? Do you have any barriers? Developmental coaching could last five minutes and change their lives or it could be a 30 minute discussion. It could be, could have wide range there, but that's really about helping them think about something they did. You notice something in action, you're helping them recognition it. And so those are five. But on the surface that all sounds great. But why is it easier to say we should have ongoing conversations than actually do it? Well, you could say one reason is we're busy, right? Everybody's busy. Another reason could be you've worked with someone for a while and it'd just be really awkward to start doing that. Might feel kind of creepy, I don't know. But there's a shortcut to actually making that feel more normal and natural. And this is another resource for you. Many of you that I've talked to work with this tool. It's a strengths based tool that is a shortcut to development, shortcut to understanding another person. And it makes the conversation a lot more natural because you're understanding something about them that's new and you've got language around things you probably already observed before and it's a common language and so you know how they execute things, you know how they influence others. We were talking a little bit earlier about sometimes people get in your space and start doing your job for you and it gets kind of frustrating. Well, if you knew that person was an activator, you might take a step back and say, well, maybe that's just kind of what they do. And I have to step in and slow them down a little bit. But it understands. So these strengths can be weaknesses too, by the way. So I've got high focus sometimes my wife doesn't like my high focus, but. Or I could be so focused I'm just not paying attention to what's going on around me. But it also helps me get a lot done. So all of these can kind of work that way as well. But if we know what our strengths are and we know what situations they help us get better, we're all much more effective. And we just speed up our conversation about each other so we don't have to try to figure each other out. It's scientifically based, continually. Us researchers continually work on refining it and tweaking it. But it's scientifically based tool that has helped a lot of organizations. About 20 million people have learned their strengths. So what that does is it just adds a lot more depth. I won't go through all these, but it adds a lot more depth to each one of these conversations. Where you've got it embedded in how you're thinking about someone's role, how they're collaborating with others. You might get better at that. Quick connect how you check in with someone who might have one theme versus another, how you coach someone developmentally through their strengths naturally. And then those progress reviews where you're helping them think about their purpose, their goals, all the different metrics they're responsible for, how they develop over time, their strategy, how they work with their team and even open up the door for how can you help them outside of work? You know, not everybody wants to do that, but to think about their broader well being and what work can do to influence their well being. And we find that when people feel their manager cares about them, they naturally open up and that helps you understand their situation better than you ever could have before. So knowing all this, why is it so hard to change organizations? Every organization, most of the leaders we talk to say we've got to change our organization, we've got to change our culture. How do you change a culture? Well, it really kind of comes down to figuring out how you bring multiple tribes together. Now, some of you might have smaller organizations where you don't have as many. When I say tribes, teams, one of the biggest challenges of leadership, I would say, is bringing multiple teams together. How can you build bring multiple teams together, though, if the managers themselves aren't developing, if they're not developing, they're not seeing the big picture. They're not seeing the incentive in reaching out to another manager and telling my co workers they need to work with this team because it helps their organization get better. So it's the manager experience. I'm going to end with this point. I think it's a central one to getting this right, is to think about what that manager's experience is. If we get their experience right, it cascades to the people they manage, and it also encourages them to reach out to other people around them so that when they're working with a team, it's not us versus them. What's our natural default as human beings? When we're on a team, we want our team to do well. But it's easy to move into talk, even if you know the difference. It's easy to move into discussions where you're saying, they did this. It's not us, it's them. So they're blaming the other teams for what's going on. Managers who are developing are much less likely to do that. They're much more likely to think about the big picture. So on a positive end, if we think about the manager's experience right now, they have a voice in involvement in decision making. That's good. They tell us they have some autonomy and control over their work. They have what they perceive as a more collaborative work environment than individual contributors do. They have opportunities for career advancement, probably because they've been promoted to manager, and they get some motivation from pay incentives. But unfortunately, managers on average have less clear expectations than the people they manage. They report excessive workload and distractions. The role of manager, based on all the things I commented on earlier, has gotten much more complex than it's ever been. There's all kinds of things coming at managers now. They report more job stress and frustration than the people they manage. They report less focus on their strengths than the people they manage. And they're more disappointed in performance reviews than the people they manage. And these are the people given their performance reviews. So we've got a big opportunity right here about thinking about the manager's experience. To get the employee experience right, we've got to get the manager experience right. First thing Is selection. It's about half selection, half development. Organizations put people in managerial roles for what are the reasons? What do you think are the top two reasons managers say they're put into managerial roles? Top performing, individual contributor. What else? Tenure. They've stuck around a long time. On the surface, both those things seem equitable. They seem equitable. If you stick around for a long time, you should be promoted. And if you performed highly, then you should also be promoted. But the problem is neither of those two things have a direct relationship to your ability to manage other people. And so when people kind of naturally get into that managerial role through those reasons, they frustrate themselves eventually. And they frustrate the people that they manage, unless they have some natural inclinations toward managing other people. Managing the complexity of all the idiosyncrasies that come with people. Some people look forward to that. Some people can't stand it. So getting people the right experiences to know whether they have those natural inclinations is one piece of it. You can also use tools to understand that before you hire them in the first place, you kind of know who's likely to be in that camp of naturally kind of gifted manager to begin with. The other thing is cultural. Individual contributors have to know that they can get to a really high level of esteem and performance without being a manager. They objectively say, if I was a manager, I might not be that effective, but I can continue to shine and maybe even make more money as an individual contributor. The other is, in terms of hiring, is some traits we found in great managers you can actually select for with the right tools. People who naturally inspire their teams, people who are naturally good at setting goals and arranging resources for teams to excel. People who initiate, influence others to act and push through adversity and resistance. People who are really good at collaborating and building committed teams with deep bonds, and those who utilize their thought process to take a more analytical approach to strategy and decision making. There are people that are just more naturally good at those five things than others. And then there's a development component as well. And engagement is part of that. Two thirds of managers are either not engaged or actively disengaged. Engaged managers create engaged teams. So part of how the managers experience their work, not only through who they are, but also through how they're managed themselves, is a big, big component. While there's billions of dollars spent on manager development, only 30% can strongly agree there's someone at work who encourages their development. Another low hanging fruit that we could do something about immediately. So I'll Just kind of summarize this, talk with this and then we'll get to some more questions and discussion with Chris. So you take everything I just presented to you and you kind of put it in a nutshell, so to speak. You think about the role of human nature in business. Most organizations that are for profit want some stock increase. They want real profit increase, which is increase with an existing business. Some people get it growth through acquisitions, but this is through existing business. Real profit increase and then sustainable growth over time is important to that. To get sustainable growth, we've got to have engaged customers. Got to have customers who are psychologically committed to what we're providing them and they have to feel involved and enthusiastic about what we're doing with them and they come back. The best predictor of engaged customers is having engaged employees. We've got to have engaged employees who are thinking about the customer every day and partnering with their co workers to meet the customers demands. To get engaged employees, we have to start by first identifying strengths. It's an accelerator. It helps us more efficiently engage them because we can not assume everybody's engaged in the same way. Get to know them more effectively, get each person into the right job, the right fit so that they can perform at a high level. But I'm going to exaggerate a little bit here, but this whole thing kind of falls apart if you don't get this next one right. What is it? Managers. Great managers. Both the people you select, how you get them into those roles and how you develop them over time will determine your organization's success or failure. Whether you want to be an agile organization, whether you want to. It's really hard to have an agile culture without great managers because they're just not cooperating with each other or whether you want to respond quickly to customer demands in the marketplace. This is another resource for anyone who's interested. A week from today we'll release it. It's a summary of. I went through here a couple sections. There's five sections in this particular book. One on strategy, culture, employment, brand. I went through today with employee experience with you boss to coach. I went through some of that with you here today and there's a whole section on the future of work, including topics like diversity, inclusion, office space, a whole lot of AI, a lot of the more modern issues that organizations are dealing with, and how the manager plays a critical role in all of those. I thank you for your time this morning and look forward to more discussion.