Build a Workplace People Actually Want to Work In with Dr. Benjamin Granger

When I look at organizations, I really like my good friend Steve Hunt's definition of a company, which is it's a group of people who are using shared resources to accomplish a shared objective. I think that definition applies to every known organization, small or large, single-person company versus millions of employees. It's a group of people who are using shared resources to accomplish a shared objective. And people and resources are made of matter. They're made of those atoms that make up the same coffee cup and teacup that Stephen Hawking described. So over time, you put a bunch of people and resources together, and over time, if that group is left unattended, what's going to happen? It's going to start to pull away from each other. Natural entropy is going to happen. So People have to invest resources and energy into keeping it together. And it's my contention that it is leaders which are the most important force to combat entropy.

Ben, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. I'm going to jump right into it. Rumor is You wanted to be a psychologist as early as grade school. Now, that's not a normal thing. You hear astronaut or NFL player, but rarely do you hear psychologist from a little person saying, what do I want to be when I grow up? So tell me where that original inspiration comes from.

I think it came from my very first psychology class, which in my high school, when we were sophomores, we had a psych class. And I took it mostly because the teacher was really cool. We got along. She liked me. I liked her. So, I joined the class. I had some friends in there. But when I started to realize this is all about the human mind and how people think and what they're going to do, I was hooked. And ever since then, like you said, I had my eye on it. I'm one of those rare people, Nick, who had never changed their major in college. I went in going psych and I came out going psych.

Yeah, that does seem to be rare these days.

Yes.

And so can you define organizational psychology for the audience, for those that aren't familiar with the term and what the discipline is?

Sure. So, so kind of going back to 10th grade, I kind of knew I wanted to go into psychology. Obviously, at that point, I really didn't know all about the subfields. Just like any field, there's many, many subfields. So, once I got into undergraduate, I started learning about this other subfield of organizational psychology, which is all about how you can apply the principles of human psychology to the workplace. And that immediately, once I learned about that field, I think I was a junior when I heard about that, that I was like, that's what I want to do because I'm interested in business, but I'm, you know, I don't know exactly what I want to do. I'm not really interested in counseling people. I knew that would just wear me down. I'm very emotionally sensitive. And so, I knew that would just tear me apart. But I wanted to do something in psychology and I say, ah, apply it to business and how companies operate. That's what I want to do.

What percentage of your classmates that you went to school with ended up in the counseling-type fields versus the business type fields?

Good question. Vast majority of them went to clinical and counseling. Vast majority. So I would, I would estimate maybe 10 to 15% of my psychology undergrads went the organizational or the social route.

Yeah, that's interesting. Well, just like you, I think that I would bring a lot of that wear and tear home. If I, if I ended up in the, you know, in that side of the clinical side of things. But just like you, I'm fascinated by business and by human beings. So, it sounds like you ended up at the intersection of both of those things. Now, we're obviously here today because we're talking about your upcoming book. So, why did you decide to write a book about these findings and these observations that you've had in the workplace?

I actually, at first, did not intend to write this book. So, when I started this project, I can look back, it was roughly 4 years ago. And I was— I have been working for a wonderful company called Qualtrics, and I have been with them for about 10 years now. Well, about 4 years ago, they decided to give me this phenomenal job title of Chief Workplace Psychologist. Now, You know, that's kind of a very different new job title. I thought it was phenomenal. That's fantastic. The problem was I felt a little imposter syndrome because I'm surrounded by incredible psychologists. I've been working with them for a decade. And so, I was like, ooh, I have to earn this. I really got to lean into this. And so, what I started doing, Nick, you're going to love this, started voraciously reading books.

I can tell by reading your book.

Yeah, I started tearing through books. And when I read, I write. I was just writing these ideas. I was putting them on my notes in my iPad, in my iPhone. And then I started putting it on paper. And about 2 years into that process, I was doing some prayer, some meditation, and then it just kind of hit me. You should put this together in a book. Not a week later, Nick, I got reached out to by a publisher, and the publisher was reading some of my material that I published, you know, just in the normal course of my work. And they said, hey, you know, we've been reading your stuff, we'd be interested, maybe would you, you know, would you be interested working on a book? And I said, well, it's funny you should ask because kind of just decided to put one together. And so from there, my objective was, hey, I've been picking up a lot of really fascinating learnings from my reading, from my client work. I work with large organizations all over the world. We analyze a lot of data that we have access to. And so, all of that can illuminate a bunch of really, really practical insights that I thought, hey, I've been struggling with these as a leader. Let me share them.

I love the title of your book, A Leader Worth Following, because it meets the title test. We often think about titles that fit the I want or I want to be, and I want to be a leader worth following is something that I think every person listening or watching this podcast, listening to or watching this podcast can also say, yeah, I'd love to be a leader worth following. There's a distinction that you make early in the book. There are leaders who people follow because they have to. What's the second distinction?

People who follow leaders because they want to. And I think that as I got into this research on the different styles of leadership, one of the ahas I had was when I ran across— I was doing some research in evolutionary psychology. You probably saw a heavy dose of that in the book. And I think it really offers a useful backdrop to explain why do humans operate the way that they do? Because a lot of times the stuff we do makes very little logical sense. And so it's— I think it's very useful to look back way in time and say, well, why did that behavior behavior pattern or that inclination emerge. And it helps us understand ourselves a lot better. Well, when we kind of look— and I was doing some reading in evolutionary psychology— what got me really interested was this idea that all social species engage in social status striving. Every social species: crawfish, crickets, ducks, chickens, primates, humans. And there's a path that all species use that are social, and that is dominance. There's a dominant alpha, and they use force or the threat of force to get their way and to gain access to resources. That's universal. All social species engage in dominance. But in humans, there's another path that humans use that no other species, at least to our knowledge, uses, which is prestige. And that is that path to gaining social status is not by using force or the threat of force, but rather it's by saying, I'm good at something and I'm going to use that talent to share with the group for the group benefit. Other people are going to benefit from this. And so other people confer status. And so that to me, there was sort of this one-to-one alignment between, okay, we all know leaders we have to follow or we feel we have to follow, and they tend to use dominance and they tend to use force. or the threat of that. But the leaders we want to follow, that's not what they do at all. We follow them because they have something, they offer something that's valuable to us and our group. And so that's what really got me interested in this idea of what are some of the ways that leaders that we want to follow and how can organizational leaders become that or evolve into that?

I think you did a great job setting up the book, talking about the evolutionary psychology as well as your interests, and then making that distinction. Because any reader who's at that stage in the book where they're listening or watching to this pod— they're watching this podcast and, and they hear you say that, they go, well, I want to be a leader worth following. I want people to want to follow me, not through force, but through prestige.

Right.

And so, can you highlight the difference between And although you don't love the terms, hard skills versus soft skills, and then also tell us which are harder to acquire.

Yeah, I love this. The hard skills, I think we all would associate with knowledge or skills that are directly tied to a role or a job. You know, I'm a good coder. I know how to code software, or I'm proficient in Excel or Google Slides. or using prompting AI. Those would be hard skills. And traditionally, and this is still true today, I know sometimes it feels cliché, but I consult with hundreds of organizations. And when I talk to them about this, it is still true that many, many companies in many job roles promote people based on their advanced hard skills. If you're the best coder, The question your leaders might ask is, okay, how do we scale your coding ability? Well, we put you over other people. That's sort of the natural progression. So this has been very common. It still is very common. Soft skills, which, like you said, Nick, I kind of challenge that use of the word, but it is something we've used in the past. So soft skills would be more of the social skills that we possess, the ability to speak The ability to communicate ideas to other people, the ability to actively listen, to make people feel heard, to convey an idea and get people inspired by it. But what's interesting about those soft skills is that they are powered by some of the most advanced parts of our brains, and they're actually really recent to develop. The parts of the brains that enable those soft skills, those quote unquote soft skills, are the things that differentiate us from other species on the planet. And so, to me, that is the most human part of it. Now, as we combine that, those facts with the fact that we're now moving into an intelligent technology augmented world, AI, I talk about quantum computing as the next potential big thing we're gonna run into. We're gonna be surrounded by technology in the work that we do. And so, it's my belief that, yes, we absolutely have to lean into those technologies. Those hard skills do matter. But leaders worth following, the leaders that we want to follow, the leaders that bring out the best in groups of people and make organizations more effective are going to be the ones that also lean into those traditionally what we call soft skills, the active listening, the demonstrating vulnerability, the communicating, the things that make us uniquely human.

And those things that make us uniquely human, the soft skills, they are all learned skills, right? So you talked about the book, you talked in the book about this question of, are leaders born with leadership abilities or are these abilities developed through learning and experience? And there was an interesting kind of takeaway from your exploration into this subject. Could you share that with us? Yeah.

Basically, in a way, I tee it up as sort of this old nature versus nurture argument. And I pose this hypothetical question to the reader. You know, imagine your company said, you know, Nick, Ben, y'all are responsible for determining where we spend our leadership budget. Should we invest in training and developing our leaders, or should we just go out and find the best leaders already and attract them in? So somewhat of a nature versus nurture argument. And there's a whole line of research that I got interested in by a psychologist named Richard Arvey. And he and his team used this fascinating dataset called the Minnesota Twin Study Registry. And there's this whole series of research that's been done all the way back to the '70s and the '80s of looking at twins that grew up together, identical and fraternal twins that grew up together. and also were split up early in life and were raised in different environments. And they looked at leadership emergence. And to cut to the chase, my overall conclusion from looking at that work and also some other work that we've looked at, just available in the literature, is that, you know, does genetics matter in terms of determining leaders? Absolutely. You know, some people are born with a little bit more horsepower under the engine. when it comes to leadership. That is absolutely true. But it is also true that the environment and the ability to learn those skills is there also. And what Richard Arvey and his colleagues found is that more of it is learnable than is just you're born with it. So the answer to that question, should you go hire or develop them? The answer is both. You should do both. You should go find those people who have have that natural inclination and who've developed those skills. But also, everybody has this range within them. You know, we look at this thing like a bell curve, right, of leadership ability, and every person can find their spot on that bell curve. But I would submit that we all have a bell curve internally. We all have a range. And so, my argument really is move forward in your range. And you might not be as born to be a great leader as, you know, another leader out there. That's true. But that does not mean you can't improve and you can't move up on your own little bell curve.

Yeah, that message, when I read it, was very optimistic because it said to me as the reader and as the aspiring leader that a lot of the traits that lead to a successful leadership role or experience They are learnable. They are not fixed. You know, if you think about the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset, like our brains are malleable, they can change, our leadership abilities can grow. And I just find that really positive because if I'm sitting back living under my potential on the wrong end of the bell curve, I can say, I could say I have agency over this. And that's what's so inspiring as a reader of your work. Is to say, okay, the tools that are in the back half of the book, I can use them and then I can actually move within my own internal bell curve.

Exactly. I love that takeaway.

Yeah. There's another concept that I thought would be interesting to talk about in the first half of this podcast, Ben, and that was organizational entropy as far as leadership is concerned. Because most companies, it doesn't feel like— and, you know, I work in the small business space a lot— doesn't feel like leadership development is necessarily at the forefront of what companies are focusing on. And so what can happen to a company when leadership is neglected?

Well, to quote the book, it becomes a veritable disaster. So This is a part of the book where my inner physics nerd comes out, and I couldn't help myself. So, I do a lot of reading in cosmology and astrophysics and even quantum physics. And honestly, to me, it's an exercise in just expanding my mind. And I think you see that come out in the book. But one of the concepts I ran across in doing some of that research or that reading, I should say, because I'm not an expert in those areas, but I'm definitely a student, was, was this notion of entropy, which is a measure of disorder. And I ran across this really solidified when I was reading A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, which I would highly recommend. It's just a mind-expanding book and it's a very easy read. And basically what Hawking suggests is that, you know, if you take any physical object, he uses this analogy of a teacup. And he says, you know, he's British, right? So he has his teacup and his teacup sitting on his counter. I'm a coffee drinker as a Cajun, so I could say my coffee cup. The atoms that make up that coffee cup can never become more ordered over time. So if you just— if we left that coffee cup on a table and we just left it for hundreds and hundreds of years, eventually the structural integrity of it would degrade. The atoms are going through entropy. So, it can't ever become more ordered. But let's say, and I'm quoting Hawking here, basically, if that coffee cup or that teacup falls on the ground and gets shattered, you could conceivably put it back together, right? It would just take a tremendous amount of time and effort and energy. And so, I use that analogy to bring to organizations because when I look at organizations, I really like my good friend, Steve Hunt's definition of a company, which is it's a group of people who are using shared resources to accomplish a shared objective. I think that definition applies to every known organization, small or large, single-person company versus millions of employees. It's a group of people who are using shared resources to accomplish a shared objective. And people and resources are made of matter. They're made of those atoms that make up the same coffee cup and teacup that Stephen Hawking described. So over time, you put a bunch of people and resources together, and over time, if that group is left unattended, what's going to happen? It's going to start to pull away from each other. Natural entropy is going to happen. So people have to invest resources and energy into keeping it together. And it's my contention that it is leaders which are the most important force to combat entropy. This is going to be especially important as we move into a future where things change so dramatically. My clients right now, Nick, are really struggling with how fast customer expectations are evolving, with the demands they're getting from the market to infuse AI. You know, there's this huge push to be more efficient. The purse strings are tightening. The legislation around tariffs is literally changing overnight the way that companies do business in other countries. So, let's assume that those changes are only going to happen faster and faster and faster in the future. If that's true, entropy is going to be more likely to occur. And so, that is my belief that leaders, that source of the combat, that entropy or that measure of disorder, that's only going to become more important. Leaders will only become more important in the future.

I love that argument. It makes total sense to me. And I've watched it happen in a small little test environment at my company, BookThinkers. I mean, there was a period of time last year where I felt like I took my eye off the ball. And we stopped meeting as regularly. You know, I was guilty of what you talked about in the book, skipping team meetings, skipping one-on-one reviews, things like that.

Me too.

And you watch, you know, you watch what kind of impact it has on the culture and then that impact on the culture trickles down to customer interactions and it trickles down into new business and it trickles down into customer turnover and things like that. So, You know, the goal of a leader is to limit entropy. I think that that makes a lot of sense. Moving on a little bit into the book, I love that you kicked off the chapter on experience management with some content from Will Goddard.

Yes.

Unreasonable Hospitality. I had a chance to meet Will towards the end of last year and ask him some questions and actually implemented a lot of what he taught me for the event that we hosted last year. I'm a big fan of Unreasonable Hospitality. Tell me why you decided to feature that content?

Well, you know what's funny? My chief marketing officer was— we were talking about this book, actually. And I was pitching this idea of, hey, we can— let's do this work together because I think it'll be mutually beneficial. And around that same time, she said, oh, well, it just so happens tonight I'm going to this dinner and I'm gonna be meeting what Will Goddard is putting on for CMOs. And I was like, well, who's Will Kidara? So anyway, started looking into it, and then I realized the connection between Will and Danny Meyer, who— Danny Meyer has been a person that obviously shares our values, that as a company of creating great experiences, he's keynoted sessions at our conference. And I'm like, wow, okay, small world here. I found the book and I read it, and I'm like, this is exactly what I'm looking for. And at the time, I was toward the end. I was kind of at the end stages of putting my manuscript. And one of the things I wanted to do was include some, just some relatable case studies of features, some leaders. And I thought, oh, this is just perfect. I'm reading it right toward the end of the book. I thought Will's examples of just the way he leaned in to actually, you know, lead by example, that servant leadership that we talk about. to drive that, what 11 Madison Park did, which is nothing less than incredible. It was just a perfect example.

Yeah, when we recently, Book Thinkers, we recently sat down and looked at our core values and we decided to add unreasonable hospitality, like that term, because it's a way of thinking about customer first. But as you highlight with the dream team at Qualtrics, it's It's a way of looking at the smallest, often overlooked details and trying to make them magnificent. And I think that if a, if a leader is trying to combat entropy, like we talked about, what a great way to make people feel seen and heard and loved and accounted for on your team and in your customer base by just going above and beyond and creating exceptional experiences.

And by the way, I mean, I would totally agree. And I would add You know, all the research that we do on what drives consumer behavior, what drives consumer loyalty, what drives consumer repurchase and advocacy, one of the things we see over and over again— companies inevitably mess up, leaders inevitably mess up. But if in those moments where you show that you really care about them, you engaging in that unreasonable hospitality, for example, when you do mess up, They're much, much more likely to forgive you because they know where your motive is. And when we look at trust as a topic, that's something I talk a little bit about. And I think chapter 8, trust is one of those things that is heavily, heavily dependent upon the other person's perception of what your motive is. If they believe that you're doing it for them, you're doing something for them. Back to prestige, back to unreasonable hospitality. When you go and make a mistake, and you will because we're human and we're imperfect, they'll be far more likely to forgive you because they know your heart's in the right place. They know your intentions are good.

And to your point about artificial intelligence and every company out there being forced to implement more and more AI, yes, the world is becoming more high-tech, but by implementing more high-touch human vulnerability into our experiences, it just, like you said, you get a little bit more forgiveness. People are more likely to do business with you. So I thought that was an excellent area of the book. Ben, one of your big inspirations as far as leadership goes came from an experience that you had at, I think, the Atlanta airport at a TGI Fridays. And I want you to, I want you to tell everybody about this experience that you had kind of people watching, it seems.

Yeah, I learned that from my wife. She's an avid people watcher. But I was, I travel a lot for work. I was in the Atlanta airport and it was a little late. So, I had literally just started putting ideas together and decided on this book. So, this is just a couple of years ago. And I sat down at the airport, ordered a burger, popped open my laptop, started taking some notes. And then I suddenly noticed all the body language of the workers changed, like palpably. I could see it. And I kind of look up and try to figure out what is going on. And I see this woman walk into the restaurant. She did not have a normal TGI Friday's garb on, but she had a badge. And so, I could tell, like, okay, she must be like the big boss. So in the book, I assign her a name, Lisa. But Lisa basically comes in, walks straight to the back of the restaurant, starts having a conversation with what looked like the assistant manager, the restaurant manager. And they're talking. And then I noticed Lisa just kind of abruptly leaves her conversation and goes behind me. And so I turn and there's this massive table, probably like 15 seats. And there's one lone busser who's just Picking up dishes, picking up stuff. I mean, he has a massive job on his hands. And Lisa went and started helping him clean the table. They were talking, they were laughing with each other. And I'm like, look at this. The big boss, probably 2 or 3 levels above this busser, maybe more, just left the conversation with the other boss, literally helping him clean the table. And then once he was done with the dishes, she wiped the table. And then on her way back, she, she stops and she sees these— I guess I couldn't tell what they were. It was like ketchup packages, is my guess. She picks them up off the floor. So I'm just sitting there, you know, and I'm like, okay, I'm taking notes. So I'm literally taking notes on it. I actually preserved some of my unedited notes in the book just, just for fun. But that was, that was like, okay, back to Will Goddard. Why did I choose to include him? Well, I was like, That's— this is— it's just back to what you were saying, Nick. It's a lot of times just these little small things of leaders demonstrating that they're willing to go and do the dirtiest jobs. Those are the leaders we want to follow. We don't want to follow the ones in the ivory towers who point their fingers and direct, and they direct from the back. You know, those are, those are the leaders we have to follow. The leaders we want to follow are the ones like Lisa and the ones like Will.

Yeah, and a little callback. I mean, going and helping the busser clean up the table is not a hard skill, right? The decision in that moment that she made was not about, do I have the skill set? Have I practiced busing tables? I mean, she probably had in the past. Like a lot of leaders have gone through every role. But it was more of a soft skill. It was empathy. It was a recognition and an awareness of an opportunity to help somebody. And so, that just highlights it. It's not always about the degree. It's not always about the certification. Sometimes it's just about being a human, and that's what makes you a leader worth following. It was probably one of my favorite stories from your book. I'm curious if you will go back to the Atlanta airport at some point, see if she still works there, ask about her, and try to get her a copy of the book.

Yeah. Believe it or not, I haven't even considered that, but I fly through Atlanta a lot, and, uh, you just gave me an idea. I think that's a great idea, especially because, as I point out, I was like of half a mind to go talk to her and tell her like, hey, you know, I'm writing this book and I really admired what you just did, and I just didn't have the guts to do it. So maybe I owe her if, if she happens to still work there. This is a great suggestion.

Listen, that kind of moment has happened to me so many times. And there's this guy that pops up on my social media feed every once in a while, and he's wearing either those Ray-Ban glasses that film everything or the metal glasses or something, but he just talks to everybody that he walks by. Hey, cool shirt. Hey, I love your shoes. What an awesome dog. What's your dog's name? And I aspire to be a little bit more like that because there are moments where I'd love to thank a veteran for His service, and I don't say anything. And I, just like you, I, I would like to do more of that. So hopefully this is a little encouragement for you next time you're in the airport to find Lisa.

Yeah.

Thank you.

And then I'll find out what her real name is too.

Yes. And then you'll have to go back and see the second edition that Wiley has printed. As we get towards the, we'll say, back third of our conversation here, I'd love to give the audience some of the practical tips, some examples of the practical tips that you have in the book. Because like I told you when we first jumped on, I loved how actionable your book was. It wasn't just a philosophy on leadership, which is important. It was a series of small shifts that you can make. And one of the first ones that I loved was evaluating your communication as a leader. You know, we all communicate both verbally and with our body language and in so many other ways. But oftentimes our either verbal or written communication is not received with the same intention that we were trying to give it. And so right before you send an email, let's say, Company-wide or team-wide, how do you go back through and evaluate what you're about to say?

Yeah, basically put it through a series of questions. And by the way, I don't do this for every email, but this is for really important emails where I know we really got to get aligned here. But I'll put it through a series of questions of, for example, if somebody disagrees with me on this, what holes could they poke in this? If somebody doesn't have all the context that I have, would they understand what I'm saying or what I'm asking? If, um, yeah, so those sorts of questions. And it's not an— I don't give an exhaustive list, but one of the mechanisms I talk a little bit about in the book that I have found really helpful is this idea of, well, what's actually— what are we actually doing when we're communicating with words? When we're talking like we are right now, when we're writing something out like an email, when we're in a one-on-one meeting, when we're talking to a group. What I— we often say, oh yeah, well, we're communicating. Okay, well, what does that mean? Well, the way I like to look at it is we are all trying to build a shared mental image. And not just a visual image, but when you look at how neuroscientists talk about the images that emerge in our minds, or psychologists. The images aren't necessarily just a visual image like looking at a picture. It can be that, but it's the mental representation of whatever it is we're thinking about or talking about. And so when we communicate, our goal is not to exchange words. Our goal is to exchange meaning and is to exchange and share a mental image. And there's a whole line of research. Back to when I was in graduate school, we had professors at my university in our program who looked at shared mental models. What's the import? How do you build a shared mental model? Some of those groups were working with the Department of Defense and looking at airline pilots who are sitting in on a team, a squadron of pilots. Super critical that they have a shared mental model. So there's a whole line of research on how to do this. But I think 2 suggestions I would give. One is to go through that, kind of just double-check that you're, you're not allowing your understanding or your perception and assuming that everybody else is going to have the same perception as you, because that's never true. Underline the word never. It's never true. Everybody has a unique lens that they look at it through. But the other thing I would recommend— so look at it through a different lens, try to attack that message from different lenses. And the other is to remind yourself of what you're actually doing, and that is to— you want to paint an image that's as similar as possible to the one in your mind in the other person's mind. To me, that completely changes how I think about my communication, and it encourages me to use visual imagery to get animated with my body language. And that's another thing I talk quite a bit about in the book too.

Yes, that's chapter 6, I believe. Uh, we'll get to, we'll get to some of my favorite takeaways from there in just a moment. Uh, to reinforce what you just said when you said underline never, I mean, I even think about the communication I have with my wife and most of our experiences in life have been shared for a long time. We see the world through a very similar lens, but it's also a wildly different lens in some situations. And so, I think it was a good lesson for me to think about how I communicate with her and try to defend some of my points a little bit or look at them through a different perspective before I make them. I think that was pretty useful.

Glad I could help.

We'll skip through a couple of these, but I'll just tell the audience about them briefly. You had some great lessons that I wrote down about framing. and parlay sports betting. My father-in-law and my brother-in-law are big sports bettors. I'm not because I, I understand some of the odds that you put in the book. They're fun to throw a little bit of money around sometimes, but when you're multiplying 50% by 50% by 50% by 50%, you end up with 6%.

Yes.

That's kind of scary. But the way that, the way that those big sports betting companies frame and lead consumers into those situations was really interesting. So if the audience is interested in learning more about that, grab a copy of the book. Moving forward a little bit, I loved the takeaways that you had from— and correct my pronunciation— Rogelberg.

Yep.

Stephen Rogelberg's work on meeting science. Can you touch on that for just a minute? I mean, that's going to change the way that I host every meeting, I think, moving forward.

Yeah. Firstly, shout out to Dr. Stephen Rogelberg. He's a fellow organizational psychologist. He's in our field. He's a bit of a celebrity. But he is probably one of the world's leading experts in meetings, which we all, we all know, love, and hate at some times. And so he's written a couple of books that are really impactful. Glad We Met is probably his most practical that he wrote. And then it's another, The Surprising Science of Meetings. But, um, one of the couple of things he said, and I am a notorious— I was notorious for not doing these things. I want to be clear. Like, when I read his stuff, I'm like, oh my goodness, I got to change my behavior. But like you said earlier, Nick, not showing up to one-on-one team meetings and not one-on-ones, or say, oh, there's an important client meeting, so I'm going to I'm going to push my one-on-one. And he just really challenges you to say, what signals does that send? And what's the blast radius of that? And I think you nailed it earlier. Like, that doesn't just live beyond that employee. He also— one of the things that's been really impactful for me is he reminds us that, and I share this in the book, one-on-one meetings are not for managers. They're for the employees. And so, if you're a people leader, think about that. There's a time and a place for updates. And it's not to say you can't give updates in a one-on-one, but make that dedicated time for your subordinate. They're the ones bringing the issues that need to be discussed. If you need updates, send it via email, send it via Slack, or maybe you carve out some time toward the end of the one-on-one. He talks about making it regular, making it, you know, if it's weekly, do 30 minutes a week. If it's biweekly, do 60 minutes. And then one other that has really been impactful, and I've seen the effects of this live— I thought this was such a fascinating suggestion— when you go into a group meeting, instead of listing out the bullet points of the topics to be discussed, frame them as questions to be answered. And so what he suggests is that when you go into a meeting and you have You know, 3 to 5 questions that need to get answered, it pre-engages them. It pre-engages their brain. It gets them thinking about it because we all want to solve problems. That's inherently human. And so, it really wires people to come into that meeting and have a really productive conversation.

Well, those suggestions that you just made in the Additional suggestions in the book. I mean, these are really great examples of how you can just find a 1% improvement somewhere in an entire book like this, implement it, and change the trajectory of your business or your relationship with somebody on your team. And so I just wanted to thank you for putting those in the book. And I'm happy that you— I'm happy that Steven Rogelberg is a celebrity in the space and that you've read his books and then kind of summarize your favorite takeaways for me, because now I get to benefit from them. That's one of the reasons that I love the work that I get to do, Ben. Let's just fast forward a little bit, maybe talk about 1 or 2 concepts from chapters 5 and 6, and then I think that'll be a good preview of the first half of the book for the audience. In chapter 5, you talked about a powerful type of self-talk that I also do pretty regularly, which is to talk to my future self or to imagine that I am in the future. Giving advice back to my younger self. Talk about your version of that and why you think it's useful for a leader to do.

So, I call it— that little section is called Travel Back to the Future because I'm a massive— that's my favorite movie of all time, number one. Number 2 closely behind. But basically, it's this idea that there are so many experiences that we dread. That's especially true at work. I can think of— I mean, this still happens to me weekly. Oh, I gotta go, I gotta get on a plane and I gotta go somewhere for a 1-hour meeting and it's gonna take me 24 hours of travel to go to this 1-hour meeting in London. You know, that, that happens and I'm dreading it. And, or I'm getting ready to go in to have a tough conversation with a subordinate about a performance issue. And I'm dreading it, whatever it is, things that, that we really don't— we don't think we want to do. And underline, think we want to do. But how often do we go through an experience that we were dreading and then we leave it saying, really glad I did that, I'm really glad I experienced that? I would say more often than not. I look back on those experiences and say that. And what— even if it wasn't particularly pleasant in the moment, when you are able to look at it through the lens of a future self, you are able to see the growth that comes from those experiences. You know, there's a line in the Depeche Mode song Enjoy the Silence that says, you know, pain can only do harm. And that's totally wrong. It's not right. With all due respect to the song and Depeche Mode, I'm a big fan, but that, that taken out of context is absolutely incorrect. So this whole idea, you know, and I also quote Albus Dumbledore in, in, in the first Harry Potter. There's this great line that's always stuck with me, even when I was writing my dissertation years ago. That people have a knack precisely for those things that are worse for them. And a lot of times that's avoiding unpleasant experiences. So to get to the point, what I recommend people do is spend some time thinking about, like, okay, think about those experiences from yourself 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, and saying, man, I miss those butterflies I used to feel going into a meeting. I miss being in the jungle with the craziness and being with my team at 9:00 p.m. at night, that I advocate for that too often, but sometimes we have to do that. You're going to miss that. You're going to miss those things. And so, if you're able to fast forward a little bit, think about it from that perspective. For me, it just helps me reframe those experiences, and I can start to see this is not a pointless exercise. I'm going to get something really valuable from it.

I mean, mic drop moment, I think, for the audience. I've thought a lot about this subject and I've talked to my future self a lot, but rarely is it about overcoming the resistance of something like a business meeting or a hard conversation with a subordinate. More often, I've thought about it through the lens of, let's say, exercise. I mean, if it's tough for you to put on your running shoes and go for a run, I understand that. But when you wake up tomorrow, will you be more happy?

Yeah.

If you went for the run or if you didn't. And so nobody's ever regretted exercising. And I think if, you know, it was a kind of a big breakthrough for me to think about it through the lens that you're suggesting, which is to apply it as a leader to difficult business conversations and just get you to live a little bit of a bolder professional life and overcome that resistance. So great takeaways. Final question before we wrap up, and I'll just pick one of them because I wrote many, Ben. I wrote many things from the book. But in, in the chapter on body language, I thought, I mean, you dedicated a big chunk of that chapter to the art of a handshake. And so why is it so important to understand how to shake a hand from a psychology perspective?

I'm going to go back to something we already talked about, which is the lenses through which we look at the world. And everybody looks at the A little bit later in the book, I talk about this really fascinating cognitive bias that is universal to all humans. All humans engage in it. It's evolutionarily derived. It emerged for a reason, and it's called the fundamental attribution error. So what does this have to do with handshakes? Well, let's say, you know, you, you and I meet for the first time, Nick, and We give a handshake and I'm just gonna make this up. Let's say I give you a wet towel handshake and it's just plop. And you're like, what is up with this guy? It's just, it comes off as not confident. Well, what happens, whether we like it or not, what happens is your image of me in your mind starts to emerge. And that initial image, that first impression, so to speak, it's very difficult to change. It's not that it can't change. It's that that now colors the lens through which you interpret everything that I do and say. So if your story, when you first meet somebody or you're first interacting with somebody in a meeting or start of the meeting, which is normally when we shake hands in business, I think that leaders have to take more personal ownership and control over the image that emerges in the other person's mind. That's the overarching argument I'm making with this. And that is those early experiences, that initial handshake. My practical guidance is go in for a nice, firm, but definitely not painful handshake. You want to be viewed as confident. But the most important thing with handshakes, is in a business context, I strongly recommend what I call the peer handshake. And that is where your palm is perpendicular to the ground. And I contrast that with alpha handshakes, which you go in and you kind of pull somebody's hand over to where you get the upper hand. And I talk a lot about what that communicates from an evolutionary perspective. Or the other hand, where I come and I give you this one the beta handshake that basically communicates to you that I'm inferior. So, in a business context, I suggest going in for this peer handshake. Basically communicates, hey, we're even, we're equal. And it's a great place to start. And it is unlikely to lead that person to think that you're aggressive. It's also unlikely to lead that person to think that— build an image that you're a sheep that they can just chomp on. You want to be viewed, especially early on in the interaction, as somebody who's formidable but respectful.

Well, Ben, I feel like we've only touched on a small fraction of what was in your book, but the intention here is to give my audience a preview for what they might learn if they decide to grab a copy of your book. For those in the audience that want to learn more about you or go buy a copy, where should they go? How do they get one?

Great place to go would be benjamingranger.com. And I have a bunch of cool stuff here. You can get pre-order links to the book, which is coming out soon. Buy it on your favorite online platform. And I also have a cool little thing. I'm deeply inspired by music. And in fact, here's a funny story, Nick. When I was, you know, I'm a first-time author. I'm very naive when it comes to stuff. So I had all these epigraphs of song quotes. I had like 30 song quotes scattered throughout the book, and I'm a big rock music fan, so they're all over the place. And I thought it was very clever. And then I send my first manuscript to the publisher, and they're like, you got permission for all these? I'm like, what's a permission? So I didn't know about copyright issues. So anyway, I had to scale them back. But what I did on that website, benjamingranger.com, is on one of the tabs I put a song list, a playlist of songs that deeply inspired me. And as you read the book, it's a good companion. I break it down by chapter so you can kind of look and see, hey, what, where, where did that song inspire? What's the connection there? So, I find it really helpful. And by the way, it's deeply connected to one of the tips I make in how to open our peripheral vision. So, okay, let me not give away too much. BenjaminGranger.com is a great place to go.

Amazing. Well, we will have that link in the show notes below for the audience. Final thought here. If your book, now I know it's not out yet, but if it was deleted and it was never able to come out, but you could leave the world with just one simple message from it, of course, those that would like to improve their leadership, what would that message be?

I'm going to steal a quote from Stephen Hawking that might be one of my favorite quotes of all time. And that is, mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. All we need to do is make sure that we keep talking.