Don't 'Follow Your Bliss.' Instead, Find Love in Your Work.

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Do every single one of your team members spend at least 20% of their time every single day doing work that they love to do? Welcome back to Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. I'm your host, business coach Steve Sandusky. In today's show, I talked to Marcus Buckingham. Marcus is the author of two of the best-selling business books of all time. He spent 2 decades studying excellence at the Gallup organization and co-creating the StrengthsFinder tool. He is known as the world's most prominent researcher on strengths and leadership at work. Today, he leads research at the ADP Research Institute and is the author of the new bestseller, Love and Work. Marcus made a provocative statement in our conversation today. He said to me, quote, You build a company not to get work done through people, but to get people done through work. End quote. That is the essence of our conversation. It's about how to decode your own loves, turn them into their most powerful expression, and do the same for those you lead and those you love. With that, let's get started with Marcus Buckingham. Marcus, I read in your book that you said you are a long-suffering Nebraska Cornhusker fan. And how did someone who grew up in England become a Cornhusker fan?

Well, the Gallup organization was headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska, late '80s. And now it's moved all the way to Omaha, Nebraska, but it was in Lincoln, Nebraska. And my father was the chief human resources officer for a company with 7,000 pubs. And he was looking to find a way to select better pub managers, because frankly, the success of a pub doesn't really depend upon the beer. It depends upon the, quality of the person who's the owner or the runner of the pub itself. And he went looking for ways to be selective. And he found them in the Gallup organization in Lincoln, Nebraska, where there was a chap called Don Clifton, who was the chairman, but also the chief scientist of Gallup at the time. And he had pioneered a way to do pre-employment selection to pick out the talents of people before they were hired. And I was just about to go up to university and study psychology. Don Clifton came over to our house when I was 16 and was talking about this study of what works, this study of success and excellence in a particular job. He was doing it because my dad wanted the help to find pub managers, but I was fascinated from the moment I heard him talk. So all the way through my university time, in the summers, I would go over to Lincoln, Nebraska for 2, 3 months at a time. Then when I graduated, I perhaps could have gone to London and found something there, but I just was so intrigued by this applied approach to what became positive psychology. At the time, Marty Seligman hadn't come out and talked to Don about it, which he did in '88, '89. So I came over in '87. I was coming initially for a year, and I was going to come back, be trained for a year, come back. One thing led to another, and I stayed there for 6 or 7 years and became a long-suffering corner. Now, at the time, the Nebraska Cornhuskers under Tom Osborne, they were pretty darn good. I mean, they almost won the national championship in 1984, and then they won it in '95 and '96. And so those are the good years. And then unfortunately, since then, since Tom Osborne left, they've struggled a wee bit.

Yeah. Well, I ask you that question because I was born and raised in Omaha, and I know well the trials and tribulations of the Nebraska Cornhuskers going back for many decades. So yes, we can commiserate together.

Yes, I hope they get back on their feet because they were so dominant. It was such a pleasure to watch them. And now it's challenging. It's just one of those examples where if you don't really have the leader that you need, the team can slide sideways. And then momentum is a funny thing, right? Once you get going in the wrong direction with your momentum, all sorts of things, very difficult to turn that around.

Yeah, and so Tom Osborne, as we both know, he was the longstanding coach for the Huskers starting back in the early 1970s. One of the things I found very interesting, and I think this is applicable to what we're talking about here today, is I would always tell people that the Cornhuskers, they never got the best talent because it's like, really, who wants to go to Lincoln, Nebraska versus USC or Ohio State or whatever? But what they did was they had the systems, They had the discipline, they had the processes where they would take people of average to above average talent, but they would run them through a system and a structure and a process and consistency that they were able to turn these people into All-Americans. And I'm still fascinated to this day by what Osborn and his team were able to do through that. You've probably seen some of that, you know, in your work that you've done as well.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's the old idea that there are— and it's a falsehood that there are A players and B players and C players and D players. The bottom line is that every single person is unique, and they've got unique qualities and contributions that they can make. The challenge is to build the kind of team where you put somebody in the right role on the team, and you have a particular way of running that team so that you can find the right spots for the right people. That's what Tom Osman did so well. He had a particular approach. And that approach was very run-heavy. And it was very run-heavy because obviously the winters in the, well, even the fall and the winter in Nebraska is not really conducive to throwing the ball as much. So if you get these really great offensive linemen and you have a system in place where you've got great running backs and you do pick, I mean, he picked, he searched the world over for the best running backs and put together a system where perhaps they might not have been the high-flying players at Miami or at USC, but they worked really well as A-players in that system that he built. So, you know, talent equals fit really, doesn't it? Like, is there such a thing as a talented player versus a not talented player? Not necessarily. It really depends upon what role you have them in the team. You could take an A-player in one system and they turn into a C-player in a different system. It's part of the genius of great coaching and great team leaders that you know kind of what team you're putting together. And then you very deliberately go out and find people that can fit into that team well.

And I want to just ask you one question about Gallup, and then we can move on to some of the work that you're doing today. So as you think about your time at Gallup, what are one or two key learnings that have stuck with you through all these years?

Well, I think the two big things that I learned from Don Clifton was, first of all, that if you study excellence, you get a different set of conclusions than you would If you studied failure and then inverted it. At the time, and then still probably today, even as you look at some of the stuff that you read in the business press, business books, and so on, the idea is there that failure is worth studying. Failure is in fact worth celebrating because when you study failure, you can learn what it will take to succeed and excel. What Don taught me from the get-go was that's a complete falsehood. You learn nothing about excellence at all from studying failure. Failure has its own patterns and its own configuration, and it's worth investigating if you want to avoid it. But if you want to get to excellence, you can't infer what excellence looks like from studying what doesn't work. You can't infer happiness from studying depressed people. You can't infer what a great marriage looks like from studying divorce. I mean, if you study divorce, you discover that people argue a lot. I mean, there's a lot of research on that. There's a lot of conflict in divorce. But if you then say, well, if you want a happy marriage, you shouldn't argue, the data doesn't back that up at all. In fact, you study the really happy marriages and you find there's absolutely no statistically significant difference between the number of fights in a happy marriage and the number of arguments in an unhappy one. There's no difference at all. The difference is what happens in the space between the arguments. And for whatever reason, in the happiest marriages, in the space between the arguments, the argument is almost like a cue or a trigger for more intimacy, for reaching toward one another, for learning more about one another. So whatever that is that happens in the space between the arguments, you learn nothing about it from studying the rotten marriages. Everywhere you look, we've got this kind of false belief that if you study bad and invert it, you get good. But you don't. You just get not bad. So his deep understanding there that excellence has its own configuration. Don't do exit interviews with employees that leave in order to learn how to get other employees to stay. Don't study unhappy customers to learn how to make the happy ones happy. It's sort of a prevalent approach to research that we have. But Don's genius, I think, was going, no, no, no. If you want to understand excellence, you got to study it. So that's the first thing I think that I took away from my time there. And the second is data. You got to do the research. If you want to understand something, you have to do methodologically sound research to know what's true and what's not. As an example, there's so much today, so much opinion today, some of it really well-intended opinion, which begins with the sentence, "I think that." And what Don taught me was that's all fine. "I think" is fine. But if you really want to know what's true, you actually have to go out into the field and do research where you are measuring something reliably. Validly and seeing whether what you're measuring actually bears fruit in terms of your hypothesis. So take something like all leaders are humble. Okay. Well, that's— you could make a case for saying that the best leaders are humble and that they are not overconfident or overimpressed with their own abilities. You could make that thesis. But what I learned from Don is if you're going to have that thesis, you got to be able to then go out and do what's called a concurrent validity study and have 100 really good leaders over here in your study group. And 100 average leaders over here in your contrast group and see whether or not if you're asking a whole bunch of ego questions or humility questions, do— is it true in fact that the study group has less ego and more humility than the contrast group? As it happens in that case, the research does not bear that out. The best leaders are not humble. There's absolutely no data at all that show that the best leaders have humility. What you see actually is the best leaders have a really, really strong sense of ego. Not egotistical, but a very strong sense of their own right to captain the ship. When you try to measure humility in the best leaders, and you find words or questions or ways to measure the existence or not of humility, you don't actually find that the best leaders have much of that. What they have is something else called expertise orientation. They have a really, really heightened sense of expertise orientation, which means they know they don't have all the answers. They know, in fact, that they've got very few deep answers in certain places and that other people are out there who are way smarter than they are in all sorts of different areas. So that might come across as something that looks a bit like humility because it's like somebody saying, I don't know the answer to this and this and this and this. I need somebody else who's got deeper expertise than I do to come in and inform me about this and this and this and this. Expertise orientation. It's a really positive, actually very powerful attribute to have where you realize that there's an awful lot of stuff you don't know. It's a very valuable quality to have as a leader. Ego is about self-belief. Do I stand for something? What do I stand for? Am I legitimate? Am I significant? I mean, the best leaders claim significance. That doesn't mean they're putting anyone else down. It does mean that they feel like they have a right to say that there's a better future and that I'm going to help define what that future is. So you, people in my company, people in my org, you can be as confident about creating that future as I am. That's what we define as ego. It's that claim that I have a right to say that there's a better future. And some people don't have that. And if they don't have that, they can't lead very well because they don't really believe they have a right to. Now, that isn't a terribly popular belief at the moment because it sounds like it's egotistical. But egotistical is when you become the better future is just all about you. And if you really look at the best leaders, they have the ego, but they have a sense of mission too. They have a sense of expertise orientation. And so it's this combination of good, strong qualities that make a leader believe that they have a right to lead and believe that it's not just about them. It's not a circular arrow that kind of the better future is for me. That's okay. That's egocentrism. And that's clearly not a productive or healthy leader at all.

And the second thing I wanted to just briefly touch on, let's go back to Don Clifton for a second here. So you talk about how Don has influenced you, and I'm sure obviously you have many other influences as well. In Don's case, do you know who influenced him? Who were some of the people that preceded him that he learned from that helped influence his thinking? Do you have any idea on who that might be?

Don was a professor of psychology and a professor of maths at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Certainly, the eminent psychologists of the '60s, I know he was influenced, for example, by Carl Rogers and the humanistic approach or the Rogerian approach to understanding our interrelationship with one another. I know also that he was tremendously influenced by Peter Drucker. And Drucker, as you know, the organizational sort of quintessential organizational management theorist of the '50s and the '60s. He was so influenced by Peter Drucker and everything that Drucker said about managers and leaders that actually in 1984, the first year I went over there, Don Clifton took the whole company of Gallup to go visit Peter Drucker in Estes Park in Colorado to sort of sit at his feet. And he was getting on in years at that time. Peter Drucker was, but he was so influenced, Don was so influenced by Peter that he took the whole company out to see him and listen to his wisdom.

So you had a long and stellar career at Gallup. You leave Gallup and you start your own company. So now you're an entrepreneur. Was there anything in your entrepreneurial journey as you were building your business that you realized, hmm, now that I'm actually running a company, this might be a little bit different or maybe more difficult in practice than what I was learning or teaching at Gallup? Anything along those lines?

Yeah, I left Gallup. I mean, Don died in 2003, and I left right around then. As I wrote in First Break All the Rules, the first book I wrote, people leave their manager, not their company, as a generalization. And Don had been my mentor for 17 years. And so with his passing, it was like an opportunity to go, okay, do I want to continue to measure things? Or do I want to try to improve the things I'm measuring? Do you want to keep measuring engagement? Or do you want to build it? Do you want to keep measuring strengths? Like we just released StrengthsFinder in 2001. And that's great. But then, do you actually want to build strengths? So that's kind of where my brain had gone to, Steve, was rather than just continuing to measure something, can we actually do something about it? Can we build better teams? Can we build better organizations? Can we help team leaders to get a clear understanding of the strengths of their people and then build those? So I left to do that. You think, "Well, what one thing is necessary and sufficient to build a business? Is it money? Is it capital? Is it drive?" Of course, the answer to that question is it's none of those things. The one thing that's necessary and sufficient to build a business is a customer. For me, I learned that in an incredibly hard way. As you kind of come out into a business and you start thinking, "Well, I can just tell people what they need." Of course, that's not what happens. Customers tell you what they need. And then you've got to try to figure out how to deliver for them. And so the biggest learning for me was going, I need to be looking at this business of mine from the outside in, always from the outside in. What do these customers want? What's usable? Not what's theoretically correct, but what's practically usable for these customers. So we got into the coaching business, we got into the training business, but then we got into the technology business and trying to build tools that team leaders actually want to use. That's really, really, really tricky. Team leaders are really busy. And so with most sort of workplace software that's people-related, most of that software is human resources software. And most of it, you have to coerce people to use, whether it's putting your goals in or doing ratings or doing surveys or doing payroll, or all of those things are HR-driven. And so it's a nightmare actually for HR to try to get people to actually use the darn software that we put in front of you. Well, I wasn't building HR software. I was trying to build tools that help team leaders do what the best team leaders do. How do you figure out the uniqueness of your team? How do you motivate and manage your team based upon their uniqueness? How do you talk to them frequently about what they're working on this week and how you can coach them or help them, which is necessarily in the work. It's not something you do once a year. Or twice a year. It's just in the work. And so the challenge there is, how do you build stuff that people naturally want to use when they're really busy anyway? And so my biggest learning, I think, for me was the customer's always right. If they don't want to use it, it's because you didn't build it right. Doesn't matter whether or not it's beautifully designed. If very busy people in the world of work don't go, oh my word, I've got to have that, then they're right, you're not. You've got to figure out how to tweak or alter what you're making so that people go, ooh, Yeah, please don't take that away. That remains a continual challenge and a really great challenge, actually, to try and see yourself from the outside in.

All right, well, let's dig into your book here. And Joseph Campbell famously said, "Follow your bliss." We've got other folks who have said, "Do what you love and the money will follow." Others will say, "If you do what you love, you'll never work another day in your life." Steve Jobs, he said, "The only way to do great work is to love what you do." So in your new book, "Love and Work," in your research? Are those things true? Are they nuanced? What have you found?

Well, going back to the data point, there's actually very little data that say the most successful people do what they love or love all that they do. There may be some data that somebody has, but if you look and look and look in all the research that I've been a part of, when you study highly successful people, they don't love all that they do. So initially, that would seem to be setting you up for failure if you say to somebody, do what you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life again. It's like, or even follow your bliss, because it's like, wow, what does that mean? Does that mean I should, A, know what's blissful, and B, I should find it as though my life then will be blissful? And the research on that seems to suggest that no one has that. No one has something where they love to do all that they do. But when you push on it a little further, you do find that the most successful people in any profession They might not love all that they do, but they find love in what they do. They find the love in what they do, which is a really different thing. They find the love in what they do. And it does seem as though if you dive into the data, it's an everyday thing. They find the love in what they do every day. And when you push on that, it seems as though 20% is a useful threshold. 20% of what you do every day. This was actually research that came out of the Mayo Clinic studying burnout in doctors and nurses. Pre-pandemic. The pandemic just kind of upped the pressure on that profession. But they found that if you— if whatever you were, whether you were an emergency room nurse or neonatal nurse or an orthopedic surgeon or whatever particular kind of healthcare professional you were, if you had activities that you love to do 20% of the day, every day, you were far less likely to burn out. And if you went below that, 19, 18, 17, 16, there was almost a commensurate— so perfect 1% linear increase in burnout risk. Now, funnily enough, above the 20% threshold, it doesn't seem as though 40% makes you twice as resilient or 60% what you love makes you 3 times as resilient. It doesn't seem to be that way at all. It seems as though if we can find 20% of our activities that we love every day and we can be intentional around that, then we are much more likely to thrive, much more likely to be nourished by our job. And the activities of the job itself are themselves nourishing for us. When we look around at the most successful people, And of course, my entire career has just been sort of spent interviewing from housekeepers to, you know, maintenance workers, to lawyers, to teachers, doctors, dentists. That's really all I've done. But when you interview those people, you don't find that they're balanced. There's no work-life balance. Balance is a false god. You look at nature, nothing healthy in nature is balanced. Everything healthy in nature is moving. Health is motion. So if you study really successful people, you find that somehow they're moving through all the domains of their life, whether it's work, whether it's their family life, whether it's their community, their faith, they're moving through these domains of their life, and getting nourishment from each of those domains, to keep moving, to keep learning, to keep growing. And of course, one of those big domains is work. 40, 50 hours a week, if you don't get nourishment every day from some of the activities, moments, situation, context that you bump into every day, if your work is loveless, then you are clearly not going to be able to continue to move healthily through your life. If you just suck it up so that you can get money in a transactional sense to then go home and buy things for the people you love. If you don't expect love from your work, that's a terrible— from a psychological standpoint, it's a terrible trade. It's a terrible trade-off because a big domain of your life is loveless. So when you look at really successful people, you discover that, yeah, to Steve Jobs' point, you'll never be great at something if you don't love to do it. But that doesn't mean you've got to love what you do. It means that you've got to take your love seriously. Which are the specific things that you love to do? The activities, moments, 5 minutes here, 7 minutes here, 10 minutes there. What are the— I call them red threads, as if your day is made up of a fabric of many thousands of different threads, many thousands of different moments, situations, contexts, people, interactions. And some of the threads, pretty emotionally neutral. They lift you up a little, down a little. They're gray, green, blue, black, but some of them are red. Some of these threads are emotionally uplifting for you. They're invigorating for you for no good reason, nothing to do with your race or your gender or your age or how you grew up. Just due to the random clash of the chromosomes in your brain, they create in some people a love of a specific activity versus somebody else might hate it. Some people love persuading other people to do something they didn't intend to do. Other people hate that. Some people love wooing people to get them to like them. Other people hate that. Some people love to find moments where the books balance and getting the numbers to line up perfectly. Other people hate that. Like, it's weird how varied we are in terms of what we love and what we don't. And if you really push on that word love, you just find, oh, I see. The most successful people took their loves seriously. They look for red threads every day and they weave them into contribution every day. And they realize that if they don't do that, no one else will because everybody else is colorblind to your red threads. No one can tell you which particular activities you love better than you. And that really, when you push on love and work, It's like, oh, they're finding nourishment every single day by paying attention to these red threads every day and weaving them into contribution every day. And there's all sorts of biochemical reasons, Steve, why that leads to greater contribution and greater learning and greater growth. But that's really what one should mean when we say find love in what you do.

Let's take this to an extreme and see if there's a potential danger in this. And you may be familiar with Sarah Jaffe's recent book called Work Won't Love You Back. And I think she was trying to make an argument that we think of this idea of a labor of love, or that we love our work so much that we would do it for free, or we're kind of shocked that people pay us to do this. So there might be some jobs where people are so passionate about it that they're willing to work for less. Maybe it's because of the impact that they can make in the job. Maybe it's a teacher, maybe it's a social worker, a healthcare worker, that sort of thing. And as a result of that, employers may take advantage of people or in those types of positions where people do it for passion. Is that an issue? Do you come across that, or how do you view that?

I don't think so. I think unfortunately, if you study people, if you study pathology, if you study things that aren't working, you derive, as we talked about at the beginning, you derive a bunch of conclusions about what optimal functioning looks like that are just wrong. Wrong. So if you study a bunch of really unhappy teachers or a bunch of really unhappy healthcare workers, you might well find that a bunch of them are like, look, I just so love this, but I'm being exploited because people are taking advantage of the fact that I really, really love this. And then you'll conclude from that, as I think Sarah does, by saying, well, you shouldn't love your job because then you'll be exploited. And that's not so. It's when you study really great nurses and really great teachers, you find a ton of love in what they do. But then again, you study really great boron miners, you find a ton of love in what they do. You study really great housekeepers, you find that the best ones find very specific red threads in what they do. You study the best lawyers in a certain field, you'll find the same. Anywhere you look, you'll find that love and excellence go hand in hand. There's no excellence ever without love. You can't excel consistently without finding some activities that you love. So what that leads to then is, okay, then we need love in our work, unquestionably. It needs to be nourishing for us, unquestionably. For every job done excellently, there needs to be love in it, unquestionably. That's kind of point one. Point 2, a totally separate point would be, how do we compensate people for their work? That's a totally different question. That's an economic question. How much is that job worth? That's an economic question. It's not so that we would make a decision around that based upon whether there's love or no love in it. We don't compensate nurses the way that we do because there is or isn't love in what they do. We compensate nurses the way that we do because of some calculation that a CFO has made about how much the nurses can be paid. At the moment, clearly, we're making a bad calculation about that because so many nurses are leaving the profession because they're not paid enough. Okay. Well, that's not a psychological issue about love. That's an economic issue about the value of a certain role. So Sarah's, in this case, conflating two things. You study excellence in any role, you find love in it. Therefore, we need to figure out ways in which you can find love in what you do. Point 1. Point 2, how much is that job worth? Yeah, okay, that's a different question. It's a different question. Do some people design loveless work? Yeah, we can design really boring jobs. Many companies assume that many jobs are loveless. They shouldn't be surprised that people don't love them. I mean, take nursing as an example. If you want to find love in what you do as a nurse, you have a certain set of conditions that have to happen. One is you better be on a team And that team better be small enough so the team leader can actually see what you love and help you configure your responsibilities so that the team has ideally a bunch of collaboration going on amongst the team members. Everyone's threads are a little bit different. Everyone's loves are a little bit different. The best team leaders see the uniqueness of each nurse and put together teams where they can support one another so that those nurses, each one of them individually, can do more of what they love. Not all, again, it's just 20%, but that needs a team to kind of figure that out. And it needs a team leader to configure that team. Unfortunately, in hospitals, there are no teams. The average nurse supervisor to nurse ratio is 1 to 60. Why? Well, because that makes financial sense to the CFO. Unfortunately, it makes zero sense for a nurse. That poor nurse supervisor can't possibly get to know the uniqueness of each of those nurses and figure out how to pull teams together when the ratio is 1 to 60. You can't do it. And so one of the reasons why nursing is the least resilient profession, as measured through survey instruments that measure resilience— nursing is the least resilient of all professions because We've created this context for work in which none of those individual nurses can be seen by anyone else. And so they feel lonely, they feel isolated, they don't feel as though their unique loves are present at work and that no one cares, which they don't. Second least resilient profession is teachers. Why? No teams in schools. No teams anywhere in schools. And if you don't live on a team, then you're not gonna be able to have your red threads be combined with someone else's in order to ensure that the team is a red quilt, even though you personally don't need to have your job be a red quilt. Teams are the context in which you bring your unique, weird red threads to work and you combine it with the red threads of others and boom, you get something amazing. Well, if your work environment doesn't have any teams in it, it's going to be really tricky for you to be super productive and derive nourishment from your work.

So as we talk about these red threads, you said that some research shows, and I think you mentioned it came from the Mayo Clinic, that if we can find approximately 20% of our workday every day, something that we would call this red thread, then that's a threshold that we're going to really enjoy our work. Now, also, as you well know, Gallup's research has shown that consistently less than 20% of employees say that they are actively engaged at work. Is there a direct correlation, or what is or is not a correlation between those who hit that 20% threshold of finding the red threads in their work and saying that they are actively engaged? Is there a connection there?

Yeah, if you look at the drivers of engagement across the last 2 or 3 decades, if you really look at what drives engagement most, the strongest correlates to overall engagement and the things that flow from that, productivity, retention, and so forth. I have a chance to use my strengths every day. I was excited to go to work every day last week. I do work that I love and that I'm good at. Those 3 questions. If you have strongly disagrees or disagrees to those 3 questions, it's statistically speaking, but also psychologically speaking, virtually impossible for you to be engaged at work. It's also weirdly, virtually impossible for you to feel connected. So inclusion, in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion, if you don't feel like you personally fit your work, it almost doesn't matter what the DE&I initiatives are that are going on around you. It's very hard to feel like you're seen, heard, and valued as a unique human being if you don't think that your job and you have some sort of strengths or love-based fit. So absolutely, Steve, the level of disengagement that we've seen over the last 30 years is a function of the fact that most companies, even yet today, what they're really trying to do is measure your success by comparing you to a model, a competency model, a skills model, cascaded goals model. If you look at really all the human capital management systems that most of us live within inside of companies, your uniqueness, the unique strengths that you bring or the unique red threads that you find that in a particular day, companies aren't just uninterested in those. They are actively trying to grind those down. Those unique loves that you have are an impediment to you matching the model. So most companies, when you really— even today, you push on it, most companies have decided that the best way to get consistent performance outcomes is to standardize the method that people should use to achieve the outcomes. And if you work for the federal government, if you're one of the 3 million people that work for the Office of Personal Management, by law, you are measured against lists of competencies and attributes and skills. And you cannot get promoted to the next level above unless you prove, using ratings from peers and bosses, that you've got the requisite level of competency on each of the attributes by law. And these attributes They're standardized. Everybody in the same role needs to have the same list of competencies. And so your uniqueness, the unique strengths that you bring to any role, it's an impediment, gets in the way. In fact, performance improvement really comes down to saying to you, you need to be more like this standardized model that we designed before you joined the company. That's what success looks like. Here's the list of attributes. You have to meet them. Here's the list of goals. You have to meet them. So we've got a situation where it's weird. It's like we've designed work as though your individuality is a bug rather than a feature. And of course, it starts in school. From the age of about 9 onwards, learning is just information transfer and confirmation through testing, standardized testing, which leads into a GPA. And so your uniqueness as a human is— and the more and more and more we've turned subjects that used to be qualitative in terms of how you write or how you express yourself, or even how you solve a math problem. We've turned that into multiple choice where it's like, no, no, no, no, no. In order to get a reliable measure of your GPA, we've turned even writing essays into multiple choice. And the standard way in which your first paragraph should look like that, and the second paragraph will look like this, and the third will look like this, and then we'll rate you against that standardized model. We've created a system where your uniqueness is not interesting to us at all. All, from students all the way up. And then to your point, we wonder why so many people are disengaged, but we also wonder why so many kids are on Adderall and so many kids are prescribed Xanax to take the edge off the Adderall, Wellbutrin to try to jack up their overall wellbeing. Well, we're medicating our kids and our workers because we've created a situation that deliberately separates people from themselves. Okay, that's sort of awful, actually. But the data is the data is the data. Most people are not engaged at work precisely because of the things I was just talking about. And it's a crying shame. And gosh, yes, would be great if we could go back into the schools. And rather than try to fish people out when they're drowning in the river, when they're at work, we could go upstream and stop them from being pushed in the river in the first place. Maybe we could start helping kids all the way through high school figure out a little bit more about their uniqueness and what they love and how we can turn that into contribution.

Yeah, and I think that's a nice segue into a couple of long quotes that I want to read, and bear with me for just a moment here. This first one is from your book, and in the book you wrote, the real key to success and satisfaction in life lies in identifying which activities you are drawn back to practice over and over again. These red threads, these activities that you love, pull you back to them so that the practice doesn't feel like something you are deliberately doing or even something that you're forcing yourself to do. Instead, the practice feels like something you can't stop yourself from doing. Practice is not a conscious discipline demanding grit and stick-to-itiveness. Instead, seen through the lens of love, practice is an obsession. So that's a quote from your book. I want to compare and contrast that from a second quote, and this comes from a book by George Leonard written in 1991 called Mastery. And in this excerpt, he makes a distinction between practice as a noun and practice as a verb. And I want to get your feedback on this in just a moment. So he wrote, a practice as a noun can be anything you practice on a regular basis as an integral part of your life, not in order to gain something else, but for its own sake. It might be a sport or a martial art. It might be gardening or bridge or yoga or meditation or community service. A doctor practices medicine and an attorney practices law. And each of them also has a practice. But if that practice is only a collection of patients or clients, a way of making a living, it isn't a master's practice. For a master, the rewards gained along the way are fine, but they are not the main reason for the journey. Ultimately, the master and the master's path are one. So Leonard writes about mastery. You talk about practice through the lens of love being an obsession. Do you see some connection between people who are finding these red threads in work, who are doing the work for the love of the work, is there some connection between this idea of mastery? Any thoughts on that?

Completely. If you look at the studies of the most successful people in any role, they've taken their craft really seriously, more seriously even than the people who perhaps wrote the job description. So my very first job that I studied in any sort of depth was hotel housekeepers, which probably many people would go, A, that's a mundane job. B, that's probably a job that anybody could do. C, that's probably a job that anyone would want to get out of as soon as possible. But if you interview the world's best housekeepers, I happen to interview the 8 best at Walt Disney World, they find red threads in what they do. They think of the role as a craft. So everybody's who's excelling finds different red threads. But I remember one of them talked about, you take the little fluffy toys that the kids leave on the bed. And every day, you'll arrange them in a little scene. So that one day, the kids come back and they see Mickey and Minnie dancing on the windowsill. And the next day, they'll come back in and Goofy's sitting with his arm around Mickey and they're watching TV. One's got his arm on the remote control, the other's got his arm positioned in an empty French fry container. And the kids are delighted by this show, this quote unquote show that this housekeeper's putting on. And they can't wait to come back the next day to see what's happening next. That's a choice that housekeeper was making, that they're not backstage, they're on stage, and they're making a show for their guests. And it's ironic that there were rules in place that you should not touch any more of the guests' possessions than you need to, to clean the room. There's rules in place that if you find an empty French fry container, you throw it away. So that housekeeper was breaking all sorts of generic rules, just like the housekeeper who said, "I like sitting on the toilet." or lying in the tub, or the last thing I do is I lie on the bed and turn on the ceiling fan. And even at the time, I can remember asking, why would you do that? And she said, because that's the first thing a guest does after a long day out in the park. You come back in and flop down on the bed and you turn on the ceiling fan. And if dust comes off the top of the fan, doesn't matter how clean the rest of the room is, the guest's going to think it's as dirty as the top of the fan. And you hear that and you go, Wow, that housekeeper loves the craft of seeing each room from the actual eye level, quote unquote, perspective of the guest. Well, that's someone who's taken the craft seriously in a job which supposedly doesn't require mastery. No, housekeeping done really, really, really well requires mastery. Any job done really well requires mastery. And I don't know if that's what Leonard was necessarily referring to, but certainly, when you— going all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, if your entire focus is just studying people that excel at any job, what you find is that they have devoted, whether it's 10,000 hours and we can get into sort of talking about Anders Ericsson stuff and Malcolm Gladwell stuff around that, but put that aside for a minute. They've devoted a significant amount of time to the practice of their craft. As Hippocrates way back, way back when in ancient Greek times said, "Life is short, the art is long." And really the craft is long. It's like if you want to get really, really good at being a bartender, you need to have a mastery mindset. I remember one of the things that my dad did with Don way back when is they figured out, genius, that you go to a pub not just because of the beer, maybe not even because of the beer, but because somebody knows your name. And somebody knows, it's like Cheers, you know, where everybody knows your name. They know your name and the drink that goes with the name. Because then it feels like, I mean, the pub is short for public house. That's really what a pub is. It's a house, but it's a house that feels like a home because people know your name and something about you. So they started something called the 100 Club, where they would reward bartenders for knowing the names of 100 people and the drinks to go with them. They thought that was a great number, 100. If you could actually make the 100 Club, you got a special badge and you got a bonus. It was a big— Now, they had 7,000 pubs. So they started this kind of national competition to see how many people could get into the 100 Club. Well, that ran for a long time, for many years until they had the first founder member of the 3,000 Club. A bartender in the middle of Leeds, in admittedly a very busy pub, could remember the names and the drinks to go with them of 3,000 regulars. Well, that's mastery. And that bartender at some point took it upon themselves to go, this is a craft that has certain elements of it that will require kind of obsession to try to remember that many people, their name, something about them, the drink or the thing that they order most frequently. Like, that's mastery. We don't tend to think of jobs in this way. We tend to think of jobs in terms of the lowest common denominator. What's the minimum requirement? It's like when we have scripts in jobs. Ritz-Carlton famously said that from now on, every single person who's in a guest services role in a Ritz-Carlton, no one will say, "You're welcome," ever. Everyone from now on, whether you're a housekeeper or front desk person or whatever, you're going to say, "It's my pleasure." Because our whole brand at Ritz-Carlton will be ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. So therefore, ladies and gentlemen don't say, "You're welcome." They say, "It's my pleasure." And many, many, many other service companies copied this. Here's the script. It's my pleasure. And the point of doing that is for its content. That's the minimum requirement. And they've decided that script will serve as our minimum requirement. And by the way, that's great. But if you wanted to think about the maximum requirement of guest service, no script is ever going to help you get to the maximum requirement. You're going to have to take a mastery mindset and go, what are the kinds of things that you could do to ensure that each guest, once you've said, it's my pleasure, that, that guest then feels as though their emotions are being understood and heard, that you are really caring of their experience, that you are going whatever the extra mile might be for that guest at that moment in the right way. Okay, all of that, no script will help that. The only thing that's going to help that is you, the particular guest service professional, taking a mastery approach to your craft and really thinking about and using your judgment and your emotional intelligence and your wit and your wisdom to figure out what could I do to do something extraordinary for that guest. There's no script will help that. You got to take a mastery mindset, and it takes a long time to get really, really, really good at anything.

So how can I, as the leader of the company, how can I create the conditions, the environment, the culture to create a mastery mindset? I know I can't instill it in them. It has to come from them. But how can I create the right conditions for mastery and for the Red Threads to help people find those Red Threads, find more of those Red Threads, or at least get to this minimum threshold of 20%? How do I do that as a leader?

Well, the first thing you need is a talent brand. So the talent brand should say, listen, the point of this company here is actually— the point of it is to help you find what these Red Threads are so that you can contribute them. That's the entire point of our company, which is why I love companies like Lululemon that say, when you first join, I want to know your goals. I want to know your goals when you join us. And if one of your goals is leave quite quickly to start my own shoe company or start my own fitness studio, that's so great. If your goal is to become a CEO, that's great too. But whatever your goals are, whatever your aspirations are, we are really interested in how Lululemon could be part of that journey for you. But the point isn't Lululemon. The point is you. Like, that idea is a really interesting idea of that you build a company not to get work done through people, but to get people done through work. It's like that's a different— and particularly when labor markets are as tight as they are, 3.6% unemployment, you've kind of got to change your talent brand. Don't be telling everybody about the company. Say that the point of the company is to figure you out. We're really interested in you. And if we become part of your journey, as you express the best of yourself, that's amazing. But we are super curious about what your red threads are, whatever language you want to use around that, what your strengths are, what your uniqueness is, what you're passionate about. We want We want to help you find that so that you can contribute it. That's the first thing. Get your talent brand right. We are really interested in something that's inside of you. And we want to help you express it through the work that you do here. So that's a very distinctive thing that a leader can do. Second is make sure that the focus of everything you do in your company is on teams. We know that the natural condition for people to work is teams. The oldest human art ever found is a 50,000-year-old mural in Indonesia, which is a painting of a team of hunters, where each hunter has been given an animal characteristic, like the tail of a crocodile or the trunk of an elephant or the face of a cat, to denote some sort of personality characteristic that that particular hunter had, like the guile of a crocodile or the strength of an elephant. So 50,000 years ago, we knew that the point of a team was to put together different people with different loves, and put them together in a useful combination so that they could do together what they could never do alone, which sounds really obvious when you sort of say it like that. But of course, today we introduce teams, if we introduce them at all, as a repudiation of the individual. We say there's no I in team. There's no I in team. The point of a team is for you to be reminded that you are not as important as the team. But actually, that's not why we made teams at all. It's the exact opposite. We made teams because each individual, that person 50,000 years ago sat in the cave, looked at each individual and went, ooh, what happens if I combined you all together into a thing called, what do we call that? We'll call it a team. And so, the thing the leader can do is say, listen, we need to study our best teams. We need to have a really clear understanding in our company of what teams are here. How quickly can we do onboarding leading to team joining? What are we doing to intentionally help new people join a team, particularly in a hybrid or remote working environment? What are we doing? For a leader, love flourishes on teams. You've got to make a really clear focus on teams. And then lastly, the way in which love is expressed into work is a function of a team leader talking to a team member frequently about love and work. And how frequently? Every week, one-on-one. I mean, if there's one ritual, Steve, that is the most effective in helping people feel like their loves are turned into strengths that work, it would be a weekly one-on-one for 15 minutes between a team leader and a team member every week. And if you're the team leader, you're just asking two questions every week. What did you love and loathe last week? And then, what are your priorities this week? And how can I help? Just that 52 weeks out of the year. When you look at the data on that, those managers that do that 52 weeks out of the year, what were you into last week? And then, what's this next week look like for you? How can I help? Every week. There's enough complexity in those two little questions. You don't need cascaded goals, a 360-degree survey, a competency model. You don't need any of that. You just ask the person, how was last week for you emotionally, up or down? Which bits of it and why? And then this week that's upcoming, what are you working on? How can I help? If you do that every single week, there's a lot of people that might say, well, I can't do that because I've got too many people. When of course the response to that is, well, then you've got too many people. Like, what's the perfect span of control? Well, it's not span of control. It's span of attention. And the perfect span of attention for any team leader is the number of people that you can check in with individually every week. Some people can do it with 20. Like they're that good. And they love it so much, they can hold that amount of individuality in their brain at any one time. Some people can barely check in with one person. So it's like for you as a leader, if you can't check in with each person every week about what they love about last week and what they're doing next week, Don't lead people. Like if you don't want to do that, if that sounds boring to you, then don't lead anyone because leading is that. It's seeing what the person's into and what frustrates them and then seeing what the next week holds and how can we give you— I don't need to change your job. Go back to the Mayo Clinic data. We don't need 100% of what you love next week. It's not like we don't need to do that. But we do need to make sure that your days are filled with things that invigorate you. We do. We know that when you are doing activities that are red threads, we know your brain has a different chemical cocktail in it of anandamide and norepinephrine and dopamine, oxytocin, elevated levels of serotonin, all of which open your mind up for more information, more input, more innovation, more creativity. All sorts of good things happen when that cocktail's in your brain. And when you're doing something that's red, thready, you got that cocktail in your brain, you're better. It's like you're on fire without the burnout. If a senior leader could wave a magic wand to create a more love-filled workplace, which of course means a more productive, more creative, more innovative, more resilient, more collaborative workplace, then they would go have every single team leader check in with each person every week. If I could do that, then we can have one by one, one conversation, one week at a time, we can have really intelligent actions being taken to help people find their Red Threads at work and turn them into contribution.

I want to wrap up with just a couple of final questions here. One is that I heard you on a podcast with Steve Bartlett, and at the end of the podcast, he did something really interesting. He said that he asked his guests to come up with a question that he will then ask his next podcast guest. And you don't know who that next podcast guest is. So I went back, asked a previous guest to come up with a question for you. And of course, he doesn't know this is for you. The question is, let's say that you have one huge adventure left in you. What would that adventure be? And why would you want to do that?

My adventure here would be we've got to change the schools. We have a systematic problem in the way that we educate our kids. And it leads to the kinds of pharmacological solutions that we give kids these days, the Adderalls, the Xanaxes, and so on. So my next great adventure for the next 10 years is going to be what can we do to teach self-mastery in schools? Because at the moment, companies are having graduates graduate who are utterly clueless in terms of being able to describe to their new team members, where can you rely on me the most? What do I want people to turn to me for? When am I at my best? All sorts of things that as a company, you'd want to go, oh no, I want people to know how to answer those questions, because I want them to be able to have some self-mastery when they come and join our company and try to add value. And schools aren't doing any of that. So from a company standpoint, that's a miss. Then of course, from an individual standpoint, what a shame. All the uniqueness of a child that they knew at 9, we kind of beat out of them for the next 10 years after that. Then we wonder why people are so unhappy and so anxious. I feel like I would be remiss if I got hit by a bus tomorrow,. And I hadn't tried in an intelligent way to address that. I don't exactly know how to do that today, Steve, but I think that's the next great adventure for me. And I'm going to do my darndest to ensure that in 10 years' time, we've at least got some really intelligent, practical self-mastery programming or curricula for students to benefit from. At the moment, there's really nothing.

Well, if past performance is any indication of future results, I am confident that you will find a way to figure that out based on the success you've had in the past. All right, Marcus, well, just to wrap up here, any final comments? And of course, I want you to mention your book and what's the best way for folks to connect with you.

Well, yeah, the book's called Love and Work, and it sort of speaks for itself. It's trying to help you find what you love and do it for the rest of your life. And that's That's not idealistic, it's realistic. We can do that. I hope the book is a really practical thing for if you're 65, if you're 45, heck, if you're 21 and you're just graduating and you want to try to figure out what the right way is to have a scavenger hunt for love in your career. That's what I hope the book would do for the people that read it, help them live a first-rate version of their own life. We do have a programming thing that we're doing through my website, loveandwork.org, which we did with Harvard Business Review. If you have the book, then we've got 6 hours or so of programming for you. Because some people learn best through books, some people learn best through video, some people learn best through lecture notes. So on loveandwork.org, we've got a Love and Work Leader Series. We've just finished the first cohort. But if you've got a book, it's free. And we're going to start the next cohort over the summer. And so if you're interested in how the heck do I, whether I'm leading a team or whether I'm a team member, how the heck do I identify that which I love and turn it into contribution, then I'd love to point people to loveandwork.org and they can see all about it.

Excellent. All right, Marcus, appreciate the time today. Fantastic book, and appreciate all the great work that you're doing.

It's my pleasure, Steve.

One of the key ideas I took away from my conversation with Marcus is that the most effective ritual to help people feel like their loves are turned into strengths that work is to do a weekly one-on-one for 15 minutes between the team leader and a team member every week. And you're just asking 2 questions every meeting. First question is, what did you love and loathe last week? And the second is, what are your priorities this week and how can I help? Managers that do that 52 weeks out of the year have highly engaged, loyal employees. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. Take care and be safe.

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