Boost Employee Engagement with Playful Leadership with Chris Marshall

Every day, businesses are watching their teams burn out. They're looking at creativity flatlining and employee engagement is plummeting. Their traditional solutions, they're just not working. So, what's really behind this crisis? And more importantly, how can businesses fix it before it's too late? And that's what we're talking about today on Experience Leadership.

Welcome to Experience Leadership, A podcast that challenges small business owners and entrepreneurs just like you to dare to be the exception. Join our host, customer experience expert Marc Haine, as he uncovers relevant and timely content to help you script and direct your business and teams to create jaw-dropping experiences your customers and staff deserve. Here is the host of Experience Leadership, author of Lights! Camera! Action!, customer experience expert Marc Haine.

Welcome to this episode! I am your host, Customer and Employee Experience Strategist Marc Haine. It is so great to have you here. My guest today is the Playfulness Guy, Chris Marshall. And today, we're going to be tackling one of the biggest and most expensive problems companies face today. My one ask is if you know somebody who could use this information, please make sure that you go ahead and share a link to this episode. And if you haven't done so yet, make sure that you're subscribed to this podcast. It's free. It won't cost you a dime. And it'll feed my ego just enough to keep me producing more episodes. I know that workplace stress, burnout, and disengagement are no longer just minor hiccups. They are massive, expensive business problems. Leaders everywhere are scrambling to find ways to keep their teams motivated, creative, and frankly, just happy to show up to work. But as much as we try new systems, tools, and strategies, the needle just isn't moving. And that brings us to our Question of the Day. So, I have to ask you, are your employees thriving or are they just Surviving. How much is that disengagement, burnout, and high turnover really costing your business both financially and culturally? And if you don't think that makes a difference, the culturally part of it, stay tuned because we'll have a lot of conversation about this. But I want you to be part of this conversation. So, my encouragement to you is if you have any feedback about today's episode, go ahead, share this episode on your favorite social media platform. Hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership. And be part of the conversation. As I mentioned, I am super excited to welcome Chris Marshall to the show. Chris is on a mission to shake up how we think about work leadership and what it means to thrive in an ever-changing world. Chris is a pioneering behavioral scientist, a psychotherapist, and futurist whose groundbreaking work really focuses on one key ingredient most businesses have overlooked. And that is playfulness. As the founder of the Playfulness Institute, Chris has made it his life's work to show organizations how they can transform their culture, skyrocket creativity, and improve employee well-being all through the power of play. He's an engaging speaker. He's author of Decoding Change and has an upcoming book, The Playful Advantage. Chris, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you.

Thank you so much, Marc. And thank you for that lovely introduction. I've got to now live up to that. Please do.

And that's my thing. I lobbed the ball into your court and now you just have to live up to my expectation. So, why don't we start off by talking about a little bit about who your clients are and how do you serve them?

Yeah, sure. So, within the Playfulness Institute, our clients kind of spread quite a wide range of people. So, it's normally organizations. That's kind of where the Playfulness Institute targets its clients is working with organizations from really startups all the way through to very well-established national, even multinational. And what we're trying to do there is essentially provide both education around playfulness, because we really misunderstand it. I'm sure our conversation will go there, but also help train leaders and managers to actually embrace kind of the elements of playfulness. And really what we're talking about with playfulness is we're talking about human thriving. We're talking about connection. We're talking about the kind of social glue which bonds us together. We're talking about stress reduction, learning faster, all these wonderful things. So yeah, we have a very wide client base. We are also now tagging on where we're hoping to also train coaches and therapists in using playfulness to get even better kind of outcomes with their clients. So yeah, it's an expanding field.

And it's so interesting because when you look at the whole theory of playfulness when you see how kids learn the best and how they thrive in environments where they get to play. And then somewhere along the way, probably maybe it's the first year of college, we get shot down and the play stops for some reason.

So you're absolutely right. And it's one of the bizarrest things that we have in kind of our human society and our kind of cultural narrative, if you want to put it that way, is that we absolutely do. We absolutely understand that as kids Play is fundamental to development. It's not just about free time. It's not just about burning off energy. It's how kids learn both new skills physically, emotional skills, social skills. And then as you say, something weird happens as we become adults. We kind of go, okay, well, play's for kids. I'm just going to stop that. I'm going to be stressed and serious now. And we're overlooking the fact that I'm going to even kind of big this up even more. That playfulness. So I'm going to separate play and playfulness for your listeners. So play to my mind is the involvement in an activity. So a game, a challenge, it's a specific activity that you're involved in in the moment. Playfulness, however, is a mindset we bring to it. And you'll know this, that sometimes you're really not in the mood to play. You might go along with the activity. In that case, you are still playing, but not playful. Likewise, we don't need a game to be playful. We can bring playfulness to any situation in life, any challenge, any task, anything like that. But you're absolutely right. And as kids, we're kind of like, okay, we need to bake it into the national curriculum. I mean, in most countries around the world, they have built into them play for the simple reason that that's how kids learn and thrive. And then, as you say, somewhere in that mix, I would say it's even earlier than kind of like college. I think it's kind of like very early on in the schooling career that They start to funnel you into more rigid thinking, more linear thinking, more rational, logical, deductive thought. And I'm not saying that that's bad, by the way. We need both, but we've gone too far the other way. And this is where we start getting into this very weird world of what we have as beliefs around what success looks like, what our personality should be if we're a successful person. Yeah. I mean, we could go anywhere with this conversation on playfulness because it weaves its way into The bubble is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

Chris, you've been studying workplace culture for a long time. From your perspective, what is the biggest issue you think facing businesses today when it comes to employee wellbeing? So, let's take a big step back to kind of the beginning.

So, okay, if we're addressing employee wellbeing, then I think it's actually tied up. For me, it's in— if we look at numbers, things like employee engagement, if we look at numbers of job satisfaction, if we look at stress and burnout, I think those to me are kind of the biggest issues that we're seeing, and we can actually put numbers on these. So, there was a recent Gallup study looking at employee engagement, and essentially what they do is they separate it into actively engaged, disengaged, and actively disengaged employees. And really what they were finding, I mean, the shocking findings of their research is that about 20% of employees are actively engaged.

Wow.

So that is 20% of people's workforce globally are turning up to work and completely invested in what they're doing. There is a big part who are disengaged but not actively disengaged, and they're essentially turning up, they're doing the job, but they're not going to do much more than that. And then you get the bottom kind of 20% or so who are actively disengaged. Now, these ones, they are quite happy to throw the company under the bus. They're so far disengaged that they're just like, I don't even like where I work. So I mean, that's a major issue.

And I'll let the world know it. Right. And I'll tell the world how unhappy I am.

Yeah. Whether it's to friends or their community or social media or just any opportunity. So that's, they put a figure on it. I'm not sure how they measure it. It's amazing that they do. But that was $8.8 trillion per year, the cost to the global workforce. So that's quite a big one. When we look at job satisfaction, It's linked to employee engagement, but different. That's massive. We're seeing rising burnout. We're seeing rising stress. We're seeing rising anxiety. So, when we're actually kind of looking at the overall wellness of an organization, if we take those kind of as proxies for how well it's functioning, we have to actually come back and say, it's not doing very well. Workplaces are broken. Then we add into this, I mean, this is kind of where a lot of my work as kind of a futurist, and certainly the work that went into, you mentioned my book, Decoding Change. So that's looking at how the world's changing because we're at this, in my opinion, this pivotal point in global change, certainly from the human perspective. When we add that in, so we're adding disruption, uncertainty, chaos, complexity, it's not a great bedfellow for all these other things going on. Like when we're already stressed, we don't want to be adding more external stresses in the environment, but that's the situation that we're in.

And it's interesting because as we go forward, it doesn't seem like our awareness seems to be at an all-time high. And yet, it seems like we're doing nothing about it. Are there any specific behaviors or patterns that you see that leaders should be looking out for that would be indicating that there's a problem here even before? Because you mentioned the talks, kind of the bottom 20% of the actively disengaged. I mean, for me, those are so easy to find every single day because those are the people who are coming to work bellyaching and bitching about everything. They're the people who are gossiping behind other people's back. Ultimately, these are the people who are causing the workplace to be more and more toxic. And leaders, I find all too often, are too scared to even do anything like that. But that to me is blatantly obvious. But what are the patterns that leaders should be looking out for when people are kind of bleeding into this area of disengagement?

So, I think it's about getting closer to people. That, for me, is the key. We've run companies. So, if we kind of— I'm going to really throw kind of traditional management theory under the bus for a minute, because I think it has a lot to answer for. But we have run with this idea, and we can go back hundreds of years to some of the origins of this, but we've run with this idea that things, essentially, what the business organization should be doing is chasing efficiency and reducing variability at every single possible kind of junction. But the downside of that is you start to run organizations, not really wanting humans involved, because we're, by definition, not kind of homogeneous. We are variable, we are diverse. And when you start trying to get rid of the human factor out of a workplace, as we have been trying to do for hundreds of years, we're essentially sending messages to our workforce and our people, That we don't really want them to show up as them. We just want them to exchange some labor and then go home. And so, for me, it's about rehumanizing workplaces. That's the starting point. And when you start looking through that lens, so whether you call it human-centered organizations, or whether you call it person-centered management, or whatever catchy phrase you want to add to it, it's essentially seeing humans for who they are. And when you start doing that and start looking through that lens, you start to just notice what's going right and what's going wrong. It's when you go the opposite way of, okay, well, people aren't working hard enough, so we're just going to put in a load more incentives and perhaps even punishments, and we're going to measure all these KPIs and everything else. Well, it might work for a short time, but you likely destroy that human factor in the workplace as well. So, the first step is to get closer to people and to actually treat people as And as soon as you do that, you actually get real insight and awareness. That's what I'm gonna suggest. It's instead of just aggregated data at the top.

Right. Do you, do you think that with COVID and people working remote, do you think it gave leaders insight into that their people who used to show up, work it every day in kind of their role, all of a sudden became more human because all of a sudden we started seeing them at their kitchen table with their kids, with their dogs, with the open chest of drawers with clothes strewn everywhere. Do you think that helped humanize our perception of our employees?

Yes and no. That's a very uncommittal answer, isn't it? I think it did to some degree. I think it showed, I think it brought a new level of acceptable authenticity to things. I can remember being in COVID and running kind of like webinars and holding events and things like that. And having people kind of come on and speak, and all of a sudden their cat would walk across the camera, or like the kid would run in and kind of go, can you come and play ball? So I think there was, there was a rehumanization at an individual-to-individual level, but then kind of what seemed to happen and what we're seeing now in this kind of the work organization saying, no, you must now come back into the office.

Yes.

Is they just go, we don't know how to measure it. And that's the issue really, isn't it? That everything needs to be able to be measured. But that's really not how we get the best out of people. Yes, I'm not completely against measuring things, by the way, but when it's how you run everything, and when it's the final kind of deciding factor of whether you do something or don't do something, just what comes out in pure data, then you are missing an awful lot of information.

Yes.

You are missing an awful lot from what your understanding is. So I think COVID did bring forward some authenticity. I think there was a relaxation within certain aspects, but then I think managers started panicking going, oh my word, we can't cope with this variability. We can't do this. We need to actually come back towards this kind of funneling things back into more efficient and less variability kind of frameworks. So I think we're still fighting it.

Is it that they can't contend with it or they can't control it? Because when COVID first hit, People were scrambling to buy software to put onto laptops so they could track productivity and make sure that you're punching on keyboards. But it's kind of like buying security cameras. You think, oh, I'm just going to put security cameras around my property. I'll be able to see if somebody shoplifts. But nobody sits in front of the cameras for 24 hours a day looking at 5 different screens unless you're a casino. Nobody's doing that work. So, so we became this whole thing of, yeah, I bought all this software to monitor people, but I don't have—

People.

the time to meter out 25 or 50 employees to figure out how often they logged in and all this sort of stuff, right? And so then, this whole idea of, well, let's take a look at outcomes. Are they fulfilling outcomes? But then, when people weren't on a call at 9 AM because the person slept in because they worked until 3 AM, it's like, hmm, now we can't control any of this. And this makes me feel really, really uncomfortable as a leader.

I think there you've hit it on the head. Okay, so we have to bring this back to how we're wired. So, the psychology and neuroscience of us as humans, we like certainty. We don't particularly like uncertainty or unfamiliarity. And so, into that certainty piece is measuring stuff. It actually allows us to feel pretty good about ourselves because we're like, okay, I'm completely certain about this because I can measure it and I can record it and I can analyze it. And it's either efficient or it's not. And I think what you've just touched on there is kind of one of the key pieces, is we're basically pandering to the emotions of the manager because they're freaking out in the back. And they're just like, for me, it's actually a distinct lack of trust in human capability and the teams you are working with. So, I think that's another starting point, is actually, if you wanna be a leader or a manager, I believe you should have a fundamental belief in human nature and the people you're employing. If you don't, I think you're in the wrong job because that's essentially what you're dealing with is you're dealing with people. And if you don't believe in them, why are you hiring them? And what are you doing?

It's so interesting that you see that because I see this time and time again. You know, people go through the exercise of hiring the very best prospects that they could possibly bring into their business. And then the people come in and then it's like they have this hard time of being able to look at people and say, I trust what you do, I trust your capacity. Because it's— and I found that, I found this when I was an employee versus when I became a consultant. It's like, wait a second, as a consultant, people give me a lot more, they give me a lot more respect, they give me a lot more credence to what I'm telling them, and they pay me more. And I'm doing really nothing different than when I was an employee.

There you go. You found the magic formula here.

Yeah, it's the whole familiarity breeds contempt, right?

But I think, okay, so let's, I mean, let's flip this on its, on its head in your situation, because I think you've painted a beautiful picture for everybody, is that you're, from the way you're talking, I'm going to assume you're happier in what you're doing. You're doing the same stuff, but you're probably doing it in a far better way as well. You're bringing more of you to the tasks at hand. Whereas in a rigid environment, this is what I'm trying to say, is in a rigid environment where you're saying, okay, not only I want you to do this, but this is exactly how I want you to do it, then you don't actually want a human in that role because that's essentially a robot. It's AI. And that's coming, but it only works in the simplest of environments because maybe we need to put a layer on top of this. So, not every single environment, business environment, or environment we work in in life or travel through in life is simple, i.e., simple being we can see the inputs and we know the correlation between A and B.

Right.

So, if we do A, we get B. That's a simple environment. And in that environment, we actually have best practices. That's where best practices live and exist. It's linear thinking. You just punch it in and you get the outcome you're expecting. Beautiful. But then that's only a small part of the world. We just run it as if that is the entirety of it. As soon as we get to anything complex, then we might be able to see the input and output, but it's less obvious, the relationship. So now we get to good practices. And good practices is essentially what you are talking about, where you have a desired outcome, you may be measuring an outcome, but you just take the step back and say, you decide how you get there. And therefore, you start to build creativity and innovation. And guess what? That's when companies start to flourish is when they go, we expect an outcome in this kind of timeframe. Okay, so it's not completely, you know, take a year to, I don't know, write a letter. It's actually something tangible.

Yes.

But you're just saying, I'm not going to prescribe the method because this is a complex system you're working in. And then we can actually go to even more kind of disruptive environments. So we get into chaotic systems, we get into systems where we can't even connect the dots in those. And in those, we really need to be able to step back and actually kind of think about things like psychological safety, which allows us To actually put on top of that things like playfulness. And playfulness, as we've kind of alluded to, is our natural adaptability mechanism. When everything is in a complete mess, far from being serious and being kind of rigid, you want to be playful. It's where we can kind of find meaning in disruption. It's where we can put pieces together. It's where we can engage in with our imagination. It's where we can bring safety to others around us. And so, depending on the environment you're working in, and I have no idea whether it's where this point I'm making came from, or what you said to get me here. I've completely lost my thread. But depending on the environment you're in, it changes how we need to think. And that's part of the issue of what we're talking about, is management tends to go, well, no, this is best practice, and I'm just gonna apply it no matter what the environment, no matter what the case. But normally, that is, it's detrimental, not only to the organization, but to all the employees underneath it.

And a lot of what you say, like, my background, my very first job, in hospitality was McDonald's. And so, when you think about linear thinking, when you think about best practices, when you're thinking about standing operating procedures, McDonald's was the model for that. If you were a cashier, you had— and I mean, the biggest joke was, would you like an apple pie with that? They structured it so they got rid of the human component variable by bringing humans into a role to be essentially robotic, right? But then, over years—

Yeah.

People realized by making fun of it that You know, they'd— would you like to supersize that? No, thank you, that's fine. Would you like an apple pie with that? No, thank you. Right? And it became this, this thing that McDonald's ensured consistency across the board, across their brand, but we took out the human element to it.

Yeah.

And so then why do you go to a full-service restaurant where you could have a little banter with the server, or work in, uh, you know, you go to teppanyaki restaurants where you get to talk to the chef? As they're cooking for you and having that kind of an experience, it changes the whole dynamic, right? So when we come back, I'd like to delve more into how we can leverage this idea of playfulness into our culture so that we can turn the tides. And we'll get to that right after this. When the spotlight shines on your business, are customers applauding or yawning? In other words, how is your business performing? Make your business A star with a new book, Lights! Camera! Action!, Business Operational Excellence Through the Lens of Live Theater by Marc Haine. Marc uses his business and acting experience to help you see your business like a live show so you can create a performance your customers will never forget.

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Action! today at your favorite online retailer or directly at marchaine.com. Welcome back. I am speaking with the Playfulness Guy, Chris Marshall. Chris, you were mentioning your book earlier, and I thought you were going to go on to it, so I switched it. So, why don't you tell us a little bit about your book?

So, Decoding Change, this was released in 2022. And essentially, this was coming from— so, I took a behavioral science approach to helping people understand what's going on in the world and how the world's changing. Because one of my kind of conversations with a lot of people is that they know the world's changing, they know it's disruptive, But actually, when you ask them, well, how is it changing? We tend to kind of draw a blank. And so, what I've done here is I've looked at kind of, well, we can call them kind of trends and megatrends, the biggest driving forces of change in our current world. And what I offer people is essentially a way of looking at change, which isn't the kind of the hyper-paced change that we see in mass media, which is kind of the 24-hour news cycle. which is really designed to keep you in a complete state of flux and not know what's going on and complete chaos. And instead, what I kind of offer here is we look at long history, we look at trends and megatrends, which is a far slower pace of change, but gives you that kind of clarity and direction. So we're using an awful lot of kind of behavioral science skills here to slow things down so that we're not completely, I don't know, frazzled by the pace of change. We're not frazzled out by uncertainty, which obviously sparks our stress response, and all these kind of things which stand in the way of us understanding the change going on. And the subtitle is Understanding What the Heck's Going On and Why We Should Be Optimistic About the Future. And the optimism part really feeds into kind of my work now on playfulness, because I'm not denying that kind of humanity has a few hurdles up ahead. We really do.

Really?

It's big. It's geopolitical risk, it's climate change, whatever it might be, whether it's AI kind of replacing 30% of the workforce or whatever the figure is today. I think since DeepSeek, it's probably far more. But we have these hurdles. But the optimism for me comes from when you actually look at human nature, when you really pare this back, certainly through history, you can't be anything other than in absolute awe of human nature and our ability to be the most adaptable, creative, innovative creatures to have ever walked this Earth. I mean, there's multiple times through history our species should have been wiped out, and we have adapted and overcome them. And I honestly believe that we can do the same in the coming challenges. And in fact, the more we can embrace that side of us, of our kind of creative natures, if we kind of call it that, our playful nature, the easier the transition is going to be, the less kind of like turbulence we're actually going to create for ourselves. And so that's kind of part of the message in there. And then you alluded to the kind of my The book that I'm just about to publish called The Playful Advantage, which actually kind of looks at playfulness within the organizational setting. And why I've chosen to focus on organizations, by the way, is I believe that we are social creatures. If we look at this from an evolutionary point of view, there's a reason why we existed in tribes. Today, the organization is probably one of the last places of community. I like the way you said that. And yet, we're not treating workplaces like they are any sort of community. just somewhere where we kind of turn up and we're told exactly what to do and then told to go home. But if we actually kind of examine that, it's so true, isn't it, that they are, that we've disbanded so many others. Like most people, certainly in the westernized world, most people live on a street where they might just about know their first neighbor and maybe the second neighbor. But for most people, they wouldn't even know that.

Yeah.

We, social media has replaced so much more, which is a complete fake window into people's lives. We're not actually It's not a community, it's just essentially kind of like fake posters of what people want you to believe. And therefore, where we kind of, if we look at community from a point of view of common purpose, common values, common goals, then the organization is that thing today. And it hasn't been designed to be that historically, but it needs to be in the future.

I love that. I've been on a soapbox for the last half year talking about how we have to stop looking at, oh, this is a great place to work because we're a big happy family. Into, because most families are dysfunctional. And besides which, you can't fire Uncle George from the Thanksgiving Day table. But falling into this idea of community. And I was working with an organization who was struggling with some things. And the more I thought about it, the more it mirrored community building within our organization. So, I love the fact that you've tripped over that and you said that because it's something that's just made so much more sense to me that if we start looking at our workplaces, At our community, at our teams, at our shifts, at our departments, as communities within communities, it changes the whole dynamic of what we believe people are. And you mentioned this whole kind of the human evolution and how brilliant we are as a species. But I also, at the same token, realize that every person that we bring into our organization has their own capacity, capabilities, and superpowers that they bring with them.

Yeah.

And unfortunately, in the industrial world, we're limiting people to stay within the job description. That's the box. Don't move. And so, this whole idea of playfulness now kind of being the pathway of helping people flourish just makes so much sense to me. So, if it's so fundamentally important, Chris, why are we overlooking it? And why have we overlooked it for so long?

Okay. So, for this, we need to go back to— I'm going to throw a few more kind of things under the bus. It's essentially just all I do is I Just throw traditions out the window. But we need to go back to kind of thinking. So we're talking about kind of Calvinism, the Protestant Reformation. I mean, we're going back hundreds of years now.

Mm-hmm.

And if we go back to that, and the reason why I'm going back to that is that's where we start to see this idea of austerity, of hard work, of not showing emotions, uh, really come to the fore in those kind of theological ideas. about actually what it was to be a good person and actually even a sinful person. So this is kind of going back, as I said, hundreds of years, but it starts there. And then we kind of come forward only slightly to the Industrial Revolution and we meet the guy Frederick Winslow Taylor, obviously Taylorism. He really didn't want humans. He wanted machines. He was born a few hundred years too soon, I think. But he was the guy with a stopwatch who was all about efficiency. He stripped factories of any inefficient processes. And yes, you've got beneficial results from a profitability point of view. And these things, I mean, what we know from psychology and things is cultural narratives are really, really hard to break. It's kind of like, I'm not sure it is this, but I'm going to call it anyway. It's the dead horse theory that we keep flogging the dead horse, even though it's long gone. And those are baked into our fundamental beliefs and values. So I think I mentioned right at the start of this conversation, even about the value, if you ask somebody, what does a successful business person look like? They will give you this vision and image in their head of probably, I mean, it depends whereabouts that they are in the world. If they come from Silicon Valley, it's very different.

You mean t-shirts and jeans and haven't shaved in 3 days? Yeah.

But for most people, it's kind of this combination of successful, they've got That they've got their kind of their life together. It's not messy. They've got everything sorted out. They're quite serious. They're diligent. They get their heart, their, you know, kind of head down. And even if that's right or wrong, it doesn't matter. What's fascinating is how common the same view is. We have a singular view of what it is rather than the diversity. And you talked about kind of bringing everybody's superpowers to the table. At that point, we don't have this one single image of what success looks like because everybody brings their own version. So the reason why we've been kind of going down this route is simply just, in my opinion, a long history of doing it. And we haven't really had to change it until now because I'm kind of in a production economy, in an economy which is predominantly kind of production-oriented. Efficiency works. But we're no longer really in a production economy. We're now in a knowledge economy, and that's a completely different beast. We're not just churning out widgets. We're basically employing people, highly talented people, to think well and to do their best thinking. That's very different to turning up and loading in some coal into a fire where maybe Taylor was right in that environment. We don't necessarily want them to think about it. So the environment has shifted and we're now only slowly starting to catch up. And this is where I think we kind of have all these issues around burnout and engagement and everything else, is because we're trying to run the organization as if it's still a factory. It's not a factory. We're no longer in that production system. We're in a completely different environment. Now we need new tools, new perspectives, and new ways of actually harnessing the talents that we will 100% require over the coming decades. companies to actually survive and adapt and thrive in this new environment. Right.

And I would even push back a little bit about the whole knowledge economy side of it, because I would challenge that we're more now, I think, bled into this idea of relationship, interpersonal economy now where— because I mean, when you think about it, when you— the Taylorism was all about, we want their hands, we just want them to do the work. You don't have to think, you don't have to do anything, just keep doing the work. And then to your point, then we want, now we want the hands and we want the brain. And, but I think in today's economy, we want the, we want the hands, we want the brain, but we also want their heart. We want them to find purpose in what they're doing because we realized very quickly that if there is no purpose, there is no mission.

Exactly. Yeah. No, very well put. Yeah. And, and so in this new environment, we need that new approach because trying to run it as a factory system, just as a recipe, So, let's really stir the pot and get things moving.

What does a playful leadership style look like? For somebody tuning in going, yeah, no, I understand what you're saying. But what does it look like? Because for me to play at work seems counterintuitive.

Yeah, perhaps even ridiculous. Because again, talking about our belief systems, we have this idea that playfulness is leisure time. It's not serious work. That there's a time to be playful and there's a time to be serious. And we completely confuse it. So, coming back to that definition I gave you first, and then we can go into kind of what are the kind of the pillars in an organization that drive both a playful climate and culture. But if we come back to that idea that playfulness is a mindset or a state, we're not entirely sure. I'm going to be honest. In the academic world, we're not entirely sure what playfulness is. It's It could be a mindset, it could be a trait, it could be a state, it could be an embodied experience. It's something so fundamental to being a thriving human that it kind of transgresses all of these different boundaries. I mean, it's amazing. But because it's a state or the way that we bring ourselves to something, we can apply it to everything. It doesn't need to be just leisure time. It isn't just, oh, when you've done the serious work, then okay, now you can be playful. And it isn't playing, I don't know, playing card games or a board game or installing a slide in the office. That's not playfulness. We know that play can foster playfulness. It is a cultivator, hence why we use it with kids. But in a workplace, it becomes quite hard to do serious work and introduce play to get playfulness. It's far easier to build a culture and climate which fosters these things naturally. Okay. So, let's kind of peel this back. What do we need in place? To have a playful climate and culture. First off, we need to understand the relationship between play and stress. So, as a kind of what we start seeing is, in my opinion, stress and playfulness sit at the opposite end of the same spectrum, if you like. So, we have 2 evolutionary mechanisms. The stress response, which we all know, is that kind of fight, flight, freeze response. It was very, very good at getting us out of immediate life-threatening danger when a A lion turned up at the mouth of the cave. What it also does is fear, stress stops us being playful because we don't want to be playful when the lion shows up. When we're not stressed, however, it's not just the absence of stress. It's not that we're stressed or nothing. At the other end of the spectrum is joy and playfulness. And that has an evolutionary purpose too. And the evolutionary purpose of playfulness seems to be that it's when we become explorers. We start asking what-if questions, we start increasing curiosity, we start increasing creativity, we start increasing connection with ourselves and others. And so, it's this kind of— so, Professor Fredrickson came up with this idea of broaden and build theory, which is associated with positive emotions. So, first off, we have to understand that. And if we start understanding that, then we start to peel back the layers of an organization and start going, okay, well, if it's something to do with stress, I.e., the absence of stress and threat. So come back to your idea of, or your example of being an employee and now a consultant. If you have more autonomy, then that is one area where potentially it can remove the feeling of pressure or threat or judgment, is that you are being given a little bit of freedom to go, okay, well, I'm free to navigate this how I see best. I've still got an outcome. I still need to deliver a very good end result, But I'm just being given a little bit of space to be me, rather than follow your process, which isn't me. So, psychological safety is one of the key underpillings, under kind of currents, if you like. You can't have playfulness unless you're safe. So, that's number one. If you're creating an environment where your employees feel constantly threatened, judged, they're fearful, anxious, like— You'll shut them down. Don't start trying to put playfulness in. You're not going to get anywhere near it. Start with safety. But we've been talking about psychological safety as if it's like the golden magic pill, that you just get psychological safety and all your worries go away. I love Amy Edmondson's work, I really do, but it's not the end goal, it's the starting point, it's the foundation. And once you've got that foundation in place, then you can start really building on top of it. And this is where we start building playfulness on top. So, what are the other things which really kind of inspire playfulness? In my model of playfulness, the 3-pillar model, I have 3 parts: curiosity, creativity, and connectedness. So, we know that playfulness kind of exists quite a lot within a social setting. We can be playful just individually, but we like to be playful with others. So, you know, kind of making sure environments kind of offer that opportunity for connection. So, group work, group task, group challenge, is all brilliant for these things. We've already talked a little bit about autonomy, also purpose. So, this is where we come back to kind of values, is when we're playful, we have a real deep connection with what we're doing. It doesn't necessarily have to be our life mission, but it has to come back to its alignment of the company's values and our values. And this comes into hiring in a massive way. And actually, companies not just setting their values and sticking it on a wall and going, oh yeah, yeah, we've set our values, and they mean nothing. They're just a throwaway statement. But when we are connected on a value level, all of a sudden we start to actually believe in what we are doing. We have a goal. We can start actually creating kind of like our narrative about why we are putting in the hard work, because it's fundamentally true to something we are aiming for. We also start to build environments. So within neuroscience, we have this idea of co-regulation where my psychological state is affected by your psychological state. And we pick that up. It's not just by voice or what you are saying or even your body language. It's the sum total of all that. And as you start to do this, then you start to see that that energy of playfulness, because playfulness is an energy. Let's to kind of put it into very simple terms, we turn up with more energy, we're more excited, then that co-regulation effect starts to spread as well. And then I think the final part of kind of really building playfulness is allowing people to explore and experiment. So that allows them to feel like kind of the curiosity and creativity parts. One of the lovely examples I see, so the company Spanx, so this was founded by Sara Blakely. She has oops meetings. And that serves 2 purposes. Firstly, you have to have a very good level of psychological safety if you want your staff to turn up and talk about mistakes. That's number one. So, fair do's, you know, she clearly has that. But then there's enough— where playfulness comes in is, even the name of it is invoking playfulness. This isn't the kind of— she could have called it, I don't know, the Mistake Judgment Committee.

The Shitstorm Meeting.

Yeah. And instantly, you'd be like, well, I'm not turning up to that. And if I do, I'm not sharing anything. And we overlook, so within organizations, certainly within a disruptive environment or kind of an uncertain world, which we're in now, we need to not only kind of embrace our mistakes, but allow others and ourselves to learn from them. And there's only one way that really happens is when we don't bury them, which seems to be the company policy that most people have is like, oh no, we don't talk about our mistakes. We only like to talk about the things that are good. the things that went right. But the most innovative companies, they're the ones who are not only being creative and experimenting, but when they make a mistake, it's a learning opportunity. And that's playfulness. That's not getting caught up in the emotion of it and feeling the fear of judgment. So, there are lots of different pillars, and it depends on the organization of how they score in kind of each of those areas. Because if you take one away completely, then you could lose playfulness. But each company will likely have a certain amount of strength in each area. There's There's very rarely a company where I've come across where they have no creativity, or no autonomy, or no psychological safety. These things aren't either on or off, they're scales, aren't they?

Right.

But it's coming back to that, really, a person-centered approach. It's putting the person at the heart of the decision-making, and understanding what their experience of their role is. And as you do that, you start to build out all these areas for people to be more playful. And when you do that, you start to see organizations that thrive. Not just get rid of burnout and anxiety, but actually thrive. Places where people love to be and turn up, and it really is a true community at that point.

Am I right in assuming that when you publish your book, you're going to have actual steps to be able to start people being able to problem-solve their corporate culture and be able to start implementing some of this? Because, you know, I get it, you know, there's so much I wish I had 3 hours with you because I think we could turn this into a masterclass on how to make a cultural shift. But ultimately, some of the keys that you really fell into, you talked about creating kind of a safety mindset or a safe space to be able to work. And you said that's the start. But I would even argue that things like trust is a precursor to that. But even better than that is leadership humility needs to take the forefront.

Yeah.

Right?

Because I think that it all follows to your point. If somebody decides, hey, this sounds really good, I think I'm going to create a playful environment in my workplace, and trust is so low, and the people who have been the most toxic are deemed the most successful because they have the higher sales and they're toeing the corporate line, and because of that, they get rewarded for it. Somebody coming into that is going to have a really hard time shifting that culture, aren't they?

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And these things don't shift overnight. I think that's the other thing to kind of say, is a lot of companies fall into the trap of the quick-win solution.

Yes.

And you see this in team-building days, another thing I'm gonna throw under the bus. But you do, you kind of, I don't know, at some level, managers and leaders know that playfulness is important. They won't ever say those words, because they don't understand the actual meaning of it, but they understand it at some level. And the reason I say that is when things get really bad and there's a toxic culture and employees aren't talking to each other, they go, okay, we know the magic kind of pill here. We just bring in a consultant who runs a playdate. And you end up, I don't know, you've probably done hundreds of these as well, but kind of like building towers out of spaghetti and marshmallows, or making paper airplanes and seeing whose goes the furthest. And they're great fun in the moment. Well, actually, they're great fun for half The other half feel more awkward and kind of put out than they did even before the thing. But there's no learning. They're kind of like, yes, you inspired playfulness for a moment, and then you took no learning from it. You didn't change the culture, you didn't change the climate. And so, changing a culture and climate requires a lot more work than just bringing in somebody for a morning. But it's so much more worthwhile because you are now fundamentally changing the environment in which people are showing up and working.

Right.

And so, it's an ongoing thing. It's not just a kind of like, oh, we need to rewrite our value system, and we need to make sure everybody's grievances are heard. Those could be great bits to put in place, but they're not going to be the only things you need to do. It's not a one-stop kind of like, oh, okay, yeah, we've done it all. Now, let's get on with work again. It's an ongoing thing. And that's really, for me, where the person-centered part comes in. Because if you run it from a person-centered approach, you know it's an ongoing thing. Yeah, it's actually watching and observing your team and hopefully trusting in their abilities and their capabilities. And you actually switch from being a manager or a controller of people to an empowerer. Yeah, I think that's the mindset shift, is that you're fostering people to be the best they can rather than controlling them to be the least variable that you want.

And empowering them to be part of your community as well. Because that, again, I think that changes the whole conversation. This has been absolutely brilliant, Chris. For people tuning in, how can they get in touch with you if they want to work with you, Chris?

So, I think probably the first place to go is just to theplayfulnessinstitute.org. So, we're a not-for-profit institute, which, as I said right at the start, is all about education and things. We will be in the not-too-distant future running training programs for leaders and managers. So that's something else to look out for. But in the meantime, there's a ton of information on there. We've got insights on case studies. We've got insights on how leaders can actually implement playfulness. We've even got a playfulness kind of assessment if you want to find out how playful you are. So that uses my 3-pillar model. So it scores you on curiosity, creativity, and connectedness.

Okay.

And actually even asks you how playful you think your workplace is, and is there a gap between your playfulness and that?

Well, and the first test to whether or not you even have an inkling of playfulness is if you look at that suggestion to click that link and you go, why do I need to know if I'm playful or not? I don't— then you fail.

It automatically throws you out at that point.

This has been so good, Chris. Do you have any last thoughts about what we've been talking about today?

It's just such a big topic. I think I'd probably, just to wrap it up, I think it's just a reminder that play and playfulness are different. Play is the activity. We're not actually talking about turning our offices and workplaces into a place of games and jokes and office clowns. We're just talking about playfulness as this adaptability mechanism that brings the very best of who we are to the table. It's about human thriving. That's what playfulness really is. And if we can embrace it in this highly disruptive world, we're actually going to each in a very small way, make the future so much more manageable and easy to navigate through.

I love it. Thank you, Chris. Thank you so much for this today. This is, you know, I, I love speaking to people who are born of my heart. And, uh, you know, I've gone into every, every business I've ever been into, hospitality and stuff, and I used to go up to the servers and they come into work and it's like, oh, hi, hi, Jeanette, how are you today? Where are you playing? And they'd look at me and go, what? Playing? Yeah, yeah. What section are you playing in? She goes, playing? I said, well, hopefully when you're going out to your customers, you're going out there to have some fun. And so, that actually became the vernacular that we use. Today, I'm playing here. Today, I'm playing here. And so, but it changes the whole mindset of why we come into work every single day.

Yeah, completely. Yeah, completely. I love that example and that story. So, thank you, Marc. Yeah, thank you very much.

Thank you for being here. It's, you know, I could tell your passion, your expertise, the amount of research that you've done on this. When your book is out, please, please, please message me so that I can put the link in the show notes so that people consuming this podcast after it's published can get to it very, really quickly. Because I think it's more conversations we need to have in the workplace to be able to switch going from toxic workplaces to going to thriving workplaces. So, thank you, Chris, for joining me today.

Thank you.

Why don't you let me know if this was of value to you? As And as always, my offer stands. If you would like 30 minutes of my time to brainstorm your business with you and your team, feel free to book some time on my online calendar. The link is in the show notes. It's the one marked meetwith.marchaine.com. And as you can tell, Chris and I are dedicated to business people just like you. Business operations, business owners, leaders just like you. So, if you're planning a leadership retreat, if you're thinking about a conference, If you just need expert help, please feel free to reach out to Chris and myself. Our contact information is in the show notes. It would be our honor to be of service. And while you're at it, why don't you go ahead, leave a comment or review about this episode? I'd love to get your feedback. Did you get anything of value today? There were so many hot nuggets today. Did any of it resonate? And of course, if you haven't done so yet, please make sure that you subscribe. That way, you get the notification whenever I bring you fresh new content each and week with amazing, amazing experts like Chris Marshall, please make sure that you subscribe because then you'll get that notification. Thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe. I hope you stay healthy. And I hope you dare to be the exception.

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