Shift The Workplace: Leadership Strategies For A Flow Prone Workplace Environment with Joe Mechlinski

Leadership to me is caught, not taught. So, you know, when you think about the, I love talking about the flock of starlings that fly in these millions and millions of birds in unison, in formation. You know, how do they do that without a phone, without a Bluetooth, without a, like, how do they do that fluid and flexible? They like, they fly in these crazy formations and they make these crazy sounds. And from what I read is that they basically look at the 6 to 7 birds around them. Monkey see, monkey do. So from a change manager perspective, Jim Rohn said it, you know, you're the average of the 5 people you surround yourself with. I think we sometimes forget that everything we do is communication and you're communicating how to be. What does it take to do the impossible?

What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions institutions to achieve paradigm shifting.

Nothing is ever the same again.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Rhian Dorris. And together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Joe Machlinski, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. Really great to have you here, sir.

Thanks for having me, brother. Good to see you.

Yeah, you too. You too. You've been just an amazing mentor to me personally, Joe, and a great friend to myself and Stephen. And we both consider you a real domain expert on a number of things that we're gonna be going into today. So I'm really excited to chat and I'm gonna begin by trying to make you blush a little bit here by reading out your bio. So give me one moment, we'll make that happen. So you're the founder and CEO of Shift and a New York Times bestselling author of a number of books that we're gonna be talking about today. And your focus really has been on changing the way we live, we work to transform the way in which we live. And at Shift, which is a tech-enabled management consulting firm nationally recognized as a best workplace, you've helped leaders build healthy and high-performing organizations by disrupting outdated norms, building engaged teams, and using technology to unlock human potential, which obviously is something that's of tremendous interest to the Flow Research Collective audience. And you're passionate about equity in the workplace and also a partner at Conscious Venture Partners, which is a group that invests in minority and female-founded businesses. And on the whole, you are dedicated to empowering audiences to wake up to what's possible and to live a life of meaning and purpose and leaning into that mindset. You presented a TEDx talk about the future of work, which was the number one most watched TEDx talk in the world on YouTube in August 2022. So congratulations on that. That's an exciting one. And the question I wanted to start with begins with a quote from your book, which I recommend everyone check out, Shift the Work: The Revolutionary Science of Moving from Apathetic to All In Using Your Head, Heart, and Gut. And it's a simple quote, but I really like the way you worded it. And it is, the single greatest lever to unlocking human potential is a more engaged workforce. Better you, better us, better all. Could you chop up that quote for us a little bit and tell us what you were getting at there?

Yeah, well, I look at first, it's nice to be here, my man, and I love talking about all these different things that we're going to dig into today. I mean, I think the last 2+ years of this pandemic has definitely interrupted the pattern, which was, you know, going on for thousands of years, which is we've been designing our entire lives around work and not the other way around. You know, for me, you know, part of this story, but, you know, I grew up in the inner city of Baltimore and, you know, I was I was one of 200 out of 1,000 that made it out of the high school of my class. And I credit often my dad who didn't lose his job. I was part of a community that was decimated during the sort of the great flight of manufacturing out of the city. And when people lost their job, there was a lot of sort of death and destruction that came with it. And so, I sort of was just very lucky hopping on these lily pads. Of safety and security because my dad was this like, you know, and it still is the most honorable, hardworking, consistent human being I've ever met. And so, you know, when I got to college, I was like, all right, everybody's gonna be happy 'cause I went to Hopkins and thinking that like, you know, these are very wealthy, very smart people. And I just remember doing an internship at Merrill Lynch, not to out 'em, but it was like, I got there and I just like, I got to the top guy and I was like, so tell me what life is like. What is it like sitting in your seat? You're wealthy beyond belief, you're successful beyond measure. What is it like? And this dude looked fucking burnt. He looked tired. He looked, he didn't seem happy. You know, you and I jammed on this before. There's a great book by David Brooks called The Second Mountain, which basically is like the first mountain we all keep climbing is this fame and this fortune mountain as opposed to the second mountain, which is like this fulfillment and living a whole life. And I, you know, had a lot of death happen in my life and I just kept having that. My mom died when I was 23 and I don't know, I just left school thinking to myself, why are we doing this the opposite way? When in fact, by the way, anybody listening to this, particularly part of your community, knows that to get higher levels of performance, it's not done the way we do it, which is command and control or telling people where they have to be and when. Um, you know, if you're looking for like an unlock, then you gotta look for not like a workforce, but a work choice. Like people have to have choice. And so for me, over the last 20 years, I think if you can affect the, the, the time, the 8 to 10 hours that we all spend at this thing we call work, when we go home, or in this case, when you leave your home office to go hang out with your, your buds, your family, your partners, et cetera. Like you're more of yourself, not less of yourself. And I think everybody will intuitively get that. Like you didn't get chipped away of like the human spirit and the human, you know, experience. And I think that's a big part of what, you know, in the downside of capitalism, the downside of the workplace, the downside of corporate America, it's basically chipping away at what we all know intuitively is good.

That really resonates. I love the point around choice as well. And that reminds me of autonomy, which is one of the big triggers for flow and all the work you do in different ways undoubtedly makes workplaces more prone to flow as well. And one thing I want to just dive into a little bit further, Joan, you can share as much or as little as you like, but you have had a pretty wild upbringing, I would say, based on the great dinners that you and I have had. How did the experiences that you had, you know, really from, from zero through to your 30s, drive your interest and passion for the kind of work you do now, helping people flourish and, you know, increase engagement in the workplace? What was the link there?

Well, as you serve up another softball— such a good friend. Um, so yeah, I grew up in Baltimore. I We'll just double-click here for another second. My parents had me when they were young. My mom was an aspiring actress. She was very creative, very spiritual. But when she had me, she got diabetes and she got it hard. My dad, you know, had kind of a troubled past as well, but he found it like the straight and narrow. But like, they just couldn't— they didn't have any money, you know. So they got divorced young and I was, you know, kind of bounced around a lot. You know, I lived on people's couches and, you know, it just wasn't very stable. I went to 5 schools in 5 years. And I was, look, you know, my mom was amazing, but we lived on food stamps. The refrigerator was empty often. And that does things to you because like, I know inside this is not where I should be. Like, I know inside that I'm not, this is not the existence that will be the existence moving forward. But, but to be sort of trapped, what felt like in jail of like not having optionality. Not feeling like you can have the basics. And, you know, that really did drive me. There was a lot of pain. There was a lot of trauma to that. And then you just add up the community and the environment, and it was everywhere, right? So there was, you know, there was a lot of violence. There was a lot of drugs. There were a lot of things that happened when I was 13, 14, and 15 that generally don't happen to people until they're 23, 24, and 25. And, you know, as I kept running away from this environment and as I said, I got to Hopkins I was like, immediately found out that I was not as smart as everyone else, that potentially they made a mistake in letting me in. And I just said, it's time to buck up. And my dad is just this like hard-charging, again, consistent, humble human being who both my parents gave me this like, just this insatiable thirst for learning and this desire to win and succeed. And so, I think in a lot of ways I ran from my past. I used that pain and turn it into the purpose, as, you know, kind of all of our friends might say, you know. And I think as I got into this space, I think part of me kept feeling the imposter syndrome of when I got to Hopkins, I was like, ah, they're going to figure me out. When I got a job at Andersen Consulting right out of school, I was like, I had a mentor sit me down and say, you just are not employable. I mean, if we're just like, we're going to cut to the chase here. And, you know, I think in a lot of ways it was some of the best advice I'd ever been given. And You know, for me, I have this like weird story of where I never worked in corporate America. I've never worked for someone outside of the odds and ends jobs of like just getting to, you know, getting to the place that I am right now. And so for me, there was a moment where I was like 8 years old. I was with my mom and we had the church deliver us some food that day. And I remember like rifling through the bag and I like, they gave us good stuff and I was like, oh yes, like it's just like And yeah, I mean, it really is true that, you know, when you're hungry, you just, you'd be surprised at what you might do. And I remember that time they gave us too much and my mom was like, well, we're going to give the rest of the way to someone else. And I was like, irate, irate. I mean, how could you, right? We barely have enough to make it through. And I mean, really having rage at 8 or 9 for her.

Where was that coming from in her, do you think?

Because I was mad at her that we didn't have a more, like, secure, safe, easy existence and experience. And so we gave it to some—

go ahead. Yeah, what prompted her to want to, to want to give it away, given you—

this is my mother, right? So what I learned from her and from my father, which is like, if you ask my mom for $20 that she didn't have, she'd give you the money in her pocket and the shirt off her back, you know, the proverbial shirt. And I think like from a generosity gene standpoint, I went like, if you've seen the Grinch, had a heart that was two sizes too small and then decided to like be nice to people and all of a sudden his heart grew. When we gave that away, my heart grew and I was like, oh my, it was an unlock. It was like I just found another level to a video game that I didn't know existed. And And from that point forward, for me, I knew I was going to be okay. I believed what my mom and dad said, which was I was special and that there was something in my life that I was going to have a chance to not give back, not pay it forward, but be of service. And part of that is just by trying to live a life of honor and integrity and also drawing a circle of concern and compassion that's just a little wider than some, and not because I'm righteous or more resourced, but I do think, you know, we're having this moment where when times are hard, you know, I'm going to protect my family. Well, Rian, I mean, we are like 99.9%, you know, biologically brothers, and we don't use that as part of our psyche. And I think that's our generation's opportunity, which is how do we widen this circle of concern? Because, you know, I think we all get down with like a rising tide lifts all boats. I think we all get down when it's good for you, it's good for me in an environment where it's not a win-lose. And so when you unpack that quote of a better you, a better us, and a better all, for me, it's like, yeah, put your oxygen mask on first for sure. But how much do you really need? Right? You know, I've been on boards, I've started a foundation, I've, you know, certainly given a lot back to the city in which I came from. And when I'm at these charity events, every once in a while it hits me, you know, as they parade the young kid up and they're, you know, I was at one recently for Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Great organization. I'm glad we raised money. But when you parade a kid up there, in front of all these wealthy people and you say, hey, will you help me live longer? And everybody's like, oh, I'll give you a little money. I'll give you— like, we give them spare. We don't give them all. We give them just enough. And that's an exercise in withholding. And it's withholding because we don't trust and we don't think we have enough in this mindset of scarcity. And so I know we're all the way down like another rabbit hole, but for me, having come from not a lot, What I will say is we all have more than enough. And I think it's an opportunity where, you know, we all know how this is going to go at the end of our lives. You know, there's a great book called The Five Regrets of Dying from Bronnie Ware, who, you know, said this, like, you know, you're not going to say, gosh, how much stuff am I taking with me? It's how did I live? How did I love? Did I live a life that was my doing or someone else's? And I think that's the opportunity of, like, you know, we just get to be of service, and particularly during hard moments like this. So That's how it all worked.

Yeah, I love that point, Joe, about the widening of the circle of concern. Bob Keegan and Lisa Lahey's adult development work, a lot of it centers around becoming more of an adult is almost equal to having a wider and wider circle of concern. I want to talk about how that bridges into leadership in another one of your books, which came out in 2013, a few years after the financial crisis, Grow Regardless. You mentioned that we've all seen executives who've used the economy as an excuse for poor management and weak leadership and bad decision-making and have sort of blamed that on external factors like the government. So I'd love if you could speak a little bit to that pattern and then to how you see the relationship between leadership and having a wide circle of concern as a leader, especially of a big organization where you literally have a wide circle of concern. A lot of people you're influencing?

Well, I think one, if I could have renamed that book Grow Regardless, I would have named it Love Regardless, you know, and without sounding too cheesy for today's discussion, you know, I do think that all of us are sort of caught up in this go-go mentality, right? And it's hard, you know, I think even the pandemic really reveals this more. It's like if, uh, If Nike sends all of its people back to the office, what would New Balance and Under Armour have to do? They'd have to do it too because they're doing it, right? It's the notion of don't bring a knife to a gunfight, right? So we've got this narrative of othering, we've got this narrative of not enough. And then when we think about leadership, you know, the best sometimes we've got is what was done to us. That's really what we're pinging off of. So, you know, when I talk to, you know, parents, They're like, man, my kids have got it easy compared to me. And trust me, I have my moments at my, you know, 12-year-old and my 10-year-old. I'm like, you have no idea. Like, we've got food in the fridge, multiple fridges, multi— I mean, in fact, just as a quick aside, you know, I'm a little prepper sometimes. I've got like more food in the house than— I mean, it's like the one thing Erica and I, my wife, will sometimes have like a little funny debate about, like, how many bottles of ketchup do you need, Joe? And I'm like, well, just like, like our pantry. I, you know, I'm still working out like the idea of choice, right? But getting back to the leadership thing, as I just think that, you know, and look, I'm not a patriarchy expert, but I do think as men, there is a narrative about how we lead, and it's tending to be something around over people, right? There's a notion about power. I know Robert Greene talks a lot about this in some of his books. And I think when I think about power, You know, look, grab your favorite example, you know, whether it's Kanye right now or Elvis or all these stars that like amassed fame and fortune and let's call it power. How many times does this really work out? It's just, it's hard to find a moment where it does, you know, and I think from a leadership perspective in a lot of companies right now, you know, you have people who've worked their whole lives to sit in the executive suite their whole lives. I mean, just have a little compassion for a second. And the best that they're going to do is stay too long, right? Where they wear out their welcome and they're calling old plays for new times. They're doing a little bit better than it was done to them, but they know it's still not as good as it could be. Or they get fired for something silly and stupid. And again, the incentive, the game theory here is just terrible because you've got this sort of structure of an adult-child relationship. It's like an ancestor of the Fordism model of the thinkers and the doers. And then Taylorism, which was basically this book about patriarchy. It's empire thinking. It's, you know, this idea of command and control because if we don't, they will, right? And I think in a lot of ways, the microcosm of that and how it plays inside of organizations is lack of trust, lack of time preference where we all have a different risk profile because maybe you and I are in different places in our life and I'm trying to preserve and you're trying to grow. All of these create these tension points. And the way that we solve them is we depend on who's got the power and who doesn't, who makes the decisions and who doesn't. And I think what you're starting to see is, you know, certainly practices like holacracy that Zappos tried and Morningstar and a few other organizations that you would, that you would read about in Reinventing Organizations, which is an amazing book. By Frederick Luloe that people should check out. It was sort of a self-published underground book that, in my mind, did a really, really nice job of talking about how society mirrors business and vice versa. And I think in this moment, as you're seeing, certainly a lot of intersections right now. There's the mental health, there's the political environment, there is social justice, there's the environment, there's the economy. There's just overall wellbeing and how we're treating each other. And I think this is probably the biggest moment humans have had because we can kill ourselves now. We can kill the whole thing and we're not real stable. And I think in some ways, like what we should have on cable television, just popped in my head, is like a picture of the Earth from the moon. Like it should just be there all the time. Like anytime we get a little squirrely with each other, we should just remind ourselves that we are literally on a rock hurling through the universe at 66,000 miles miles an hour, and it is like, it's like a bubble that you blow. It could just— it is sitting here as fragile as it gets. And I think we need to understand that, you know, when and if the aliens come, like, we gotta have other problems than, you know, who got the bigger bonus last month. So yeah, I think, I think this is definitely a moment, and I think I'm, I'm bullish in a lot of ways, but I'm also bearish because I, I think, you know, we can all only do what we decide to heal and feel and, and how we work through that as, as men specifically, I think, is we're still in the very early days of it.

To build on what you mentioned there around some of the challenges with male leadership and leadership in general in the current moment, one of the models I'm always a fan of is Charlie Munger's inverse thinking. And sometimes speaking to the opposite of something can clarify a concept or an idea. And so I'm curious, you know, you've worked with God knows how many leaders across God knows how many organizations. What are some of the most damaging and most negative leadership qualities that you see being exhibited? And I think elucidating that will help people clarify, you know, the opposite as well, hopefully.

Well, in no particular order, the first one that comes up to me is legacy thinking. So we can only do things the way that they are because that's the way they've always been done. And so in my TED Talk, I talked about the QWERTY keyboard just as like an innocuous exercise, this little thing here. You know, for 142 years we've been typing on a configuration that was designed to be the most complex configuration of this keyboard so that we didn't break it because we were typing so fast, right? Like, how ridiculous is that? Okay. School bells, right? These are things that are basically designed to get us ready to work on the factory floor, and we still do that today. The notion of when we retire. So this, there are countless examples of legacy thinking. And, you know, it's, I use the analogy of like we're rowing a boat, right? But we're like paddling forward, but we're looking back. And I think that is an inherent bias that a lot of leaders, including myself, you know, fall victim and trapped to. And I think it's really important to, to try back to the inverse of like, you know, what could be possible? How might we, what if that type of design thinking prompts. But I also think, you know, there, I was, I was watching a guy recently on a podcast talk about like buried dreams, like how many of us are really living on our bucket list. And I think, you know, sort of starting from that place again, it's a privilege, it's a luxury depending on where you are in your life and in the world right now. Legacy thinking is a big one because it basically squashes ideas. And take it one step further. You heard me jam about this, which is like children. You know, my son is 10, my daughter's 12. I try hard not to chip away their free will because, you know, they came out and they're looking at things from a vantage point that feels a little more consistent with probably the way we'd all want to see it, which is they haven't been beaten up by the world. They haven't been told the world's not fair, not kind in the same way that maybe you and I have lived through. And so they look at it with like a different lens. And then we tell 'em, no, no, no, don't do that. You gotta hurry up because, you know, there's all this danger and destruction in the world. And there is, but like, why do we discount it just because they're children? And so it's just something I think about a lot. So legacy thinking is definitely a big one. Second, I would say beyond that, is, is just not having, going back to the sort of the circle of concern. You know, it's a bias that there's not enough. And so, you know, as you think about the idea of not enoughness, I, you know, this is not a new age talk. This is like, there is always a way when everything's on the table, pure and simple. And from a leadership standpoint, what that will sometimes mean is the death of something. Or someone figuratively or literally.

What would be— I'd love to hear. Yeah, that's a really, really interesting one. That one strikes me. What would be an example potentially of that, either a hypothetical one or one that you've seen?

Well, I mean, look, there are moments we've all had a chance to watch when the peaceful transition of power happens in an organization or a country. I mean, regardless of your politics, we've done that one thing in America fairly well up until the last election. And so it requires me to decide as a leader that the, the whole is worth more than me as an individual. Or back to my beliefs, that maybe I have to be willing to kill my identity, my ego, my construct of the way things could be or should be from my vantage point, so that they could be something different. Letting go, surrendering— these are more of the feminine energetic sort of ways of looking at the world. And as men, we don't do this one so well. And I think it's— you're starting to hear it, you're starting to see it, you're starting to see people take care of their employees. Or, you know, from a leadership standpoint, you know, we're talking about taking the high road or taking the long view. Those are just notions that feel a little like the Platinum Rule, right? It's not about treating me like I want to be treated. It's like, how does Rian want to be treated? And as I think about a lot of leadership right now, again, if you're thinking of what was done to me, legacy, what could be done, legacy, or if you're not willing to put it all on the table, you know, what that then creates is an environment where people will, you know, leadership to me is caught, not taught. So, you know, when you think about the, I love talking about the flock of starlings that fly in these millions and millions of birds, birds in unison, in formation. You know, how do they do that without a phone, without a Bluetooth, without a— like, how do they do that fluid and flexible? They, they like, they fly in these crazy formations and they make these crazy sounds. And from what I read is that they basically look at the 6 to 7 birds around them, monkey see, monkey do. So from a change management perspective, Jim Rohn said it, you know, you're the average of the 5 people you surround yourself with. I think we sometimes forget that everything we do is communication and you're communicating how to be. And, you know, I think another way to think about this is like, it's better to be an example of what you're trying to demonstrate or you're trying to lead from than it is an explanation. Like, let me tell you about it. And I think that we're feeling that, I think intuitively. And I think you're seeing, you know, some leaders really do what needs to be sometimes, what needs to be done sometimes. And that means stepping down, stepping away, letting someone else have the proverbial reins. And I think those are the kind of moments that you wish were in more movies, right? You'd see that sort of hero's journey where you learn that it's not just like the story of the phoenix of burning yourself down to build yourself back up. That's one metaphor of way of looking at it. But for me, it's also just, it's the scariest thing in the world, which is to let go of what you think is true. You know, and I've had many of those moments in my life, and I, and I am also in awe of so many leaders who I've watched do this. Um, and I think that type of inspiration is what gives us the fuel, the jet fuel, to make it through those really dark moments of the soul. And you're trying to figure out, who am I and what do I do? And, you know, is there a way through this? And Generally speaking, it is a letting go of something and a sitting with and then trying to figure out what's next. And that's not easy. I'm still working on that one.

Yeah, that's beautifully put, Joe. Thanks for that breakdown. One more question I want to ask you related roughly to leadership, and then I want to touch on one of your current projects, which is a really interesting one, is about flow. So again, you've worked with with tons and tons of organizations and leaders and been involved in lots of them. Are there any that come to mind that had particularly high levels of flow, either within the team as a whole or within individuals? And were there any common characteristics or variables amidst those organizations that seemed to at least have a very high level of flow within the teams?

I just got back from a small gathering to celebrate the life of Tony Hsieh. The CEO and founder of Zappos, someone who's been heralded as certainly an icon, a disruptor, you know, a leader ahead of his time. I was fortunate enough to meet him, but I have not worked with him. I would not be speaking from the vantage point of being in the room as it happened, but having been in the room after his passing recently, I would say he embodies the leadership that we really want to, I think, think about and reflect on because He was not a pusher. He would lightly pluck and nudge. And so there's an example of not exertion of your power, right? Clearly he was the smartest in some ways. Clearly he had the answers, but he understood that the more that people owned it here, right? Like the more that I believe that, you know, I've come up with something and I can take that ownership of something, back to an unlock of flow, right? That I have this autonomy, I have this mastery of something, then I have a greater ability to perform at higher levels than I ever thought were possible. I mean, he even tried the idea of self-management and holacracy. And again, I know people have talked about him at length, but you're getting me in a little recency effect of just, you know, honestly being inspired and really in awe of 2 years after his passing, watching people, you know, and I mean this with nothing but respect for him and them, but sob and weep. 2 years later, people he worked with, being in a room where you hear these stories that you'd never hear ever from a CEO who would really find himself in such a place of humility. Like, he came from humility. It came from like that idea that I can learn something from everyone I meet, that, that someone is better than me at something than, than, than, than I am better at them at everything. And I think in a lot of ways that like hits home for me in a way that back to the big narrative, let's just call it what it is. Zappos beat Amazon. What do you mean they beat 'em? They beat 'em with a shoe. One shoe, a SKU, one SKU, a shoe. Amazon beat them in a, or Zappos beat them in a way that they paid $1 billion for this company. And I mean, that says something. So Drucker has a quote, culture eats strategy for breakfast, or strategy eats culture for breakfast, or I botched it, but it's one of those two. I think what Tony figured out, it's not one or the other, it's both. He trusted his customer, he trusted his employees. He led from that place of trust. Now look, there's only been one Zappos. There's other examples like Morningstar, Patagonia. I mean, Patagonia, I think, is another amazing example of here's a guy who decided to give up his wealth and decided to, again, as sort of a sacrifice of self, put on display what does it look like to give all of your money back to the Earth. And you and I jammed on this before. I think Charles Eisenstein says this best about ownership. This is not ours. None of this is ours. We're not going to be here very long. Ownership. So if you unlock that or unwind that notion, then maybe we should just try to think about in the next 100 years, what are we doing to be good ancestors? And how do we think about this in a way that from a company standpoint, right now, most of companies that are out there that I've worked with are just starting to wake up to the harm they're causing both people the environment. We don't charge companies for all the waste that they produce. I mean, that's nuts. At some point, hopefully we rectify that. I'm a hardcore capitalist. I believe in the free market, but I believe in a free, fair market. I believe in a market where people take responsibility and companies do it too. You know, and I think we've got to be very, very mindful that we have still got a lot of work to do there. So, you know, from a, you know, other companies that we work with, I can jam later on, but I would just say that like, The one that captures my heart and my attention in this moment is, is one that we've all likely either bought from, heard of, read about. And I think in a lot of situations, like, we're so addicted to new information and new stories, like, sometimes we forget that there's some really good ones sitting right under our nose. And that's a good one.

Pardon the interruption. Thanks for tuning into Flow Research Collective Radio. If you're listening to this, here's a bold bet I'm willing to make about you. My guess is even though you're a high performer, you're still only performing at about half of your capacity. Maybe even 10%. Now even if I'm wrong, assuming that you're performing at less than your full potential opens up the possibility for you to improve. And that's good news. When you've already outperformed most of your peers by a long shot, you've got a skill stack that people envy, it's why you earn what you earn, and yet you're just warming up. You know those days when you knock out more in your morning than most do in an entire day? Well, what if you could perform at that level every day, reliably, consistently? What would that unlock for you? Now, here at the Flow Research Collective, we study the human nervous system when it's functioning at its absolute best. After training thousands of high performers, from Navy SEALs to Fortune 100 executives, here's what we've found. You're evolutionary hardwired to perform at your best. All it takes is pressing the right mental buttons and pulling the right biological levers, so to speak. It's about getting your neurobiology to work for you instead of against you. Now, if you want to make operating at a 10 out of 10 level as natural as breathing, just go to getmoreflow.com. We'll show you how to reliably trigger a flow state where you feel limitless and you do your very best work. This won't require any biohacking or nootropics or gadgets or caffeine guzzling. This higher gear is endogenous, which means it's a state that your brain produces on its own. No external stimulus is required. Just go to getmoreflow.com. To learn how to get your biology working for you instead of against you so you can make peak performance second nature.

All the best.

I love that quote as well. Everyone's better than me at something. It's a really, that's a really powerful and practical way of bringing about humility into interactions. Just holding that belief. And it's true. It's probably universally true for literally everyone. So I know, Joe, one big really overarching question that relates to one of your primary current projects is, especially in this remote world that we're currently in, how do you get people on the same page aligned around the same coherent productive narratives without adding meetings and without being able to rally people in the office? So Could you tee up that, that really, that problem statement and situation that people are in? And then would love to speak a little bit about Latch specifically, which is, you know, what you're currently building.

Awesome, man. So have you seen the documentary The Redeem Team?

I haven't, but I'll add it to the watch list here.

I think you're gonna dig it. So this is about the USA Olympic basketball team in 2008. So very quickly, People, when they think of basketball in the United States, they know we dominated until 1988 when we lost to the Russians. And then we decided to not play with amateurs anymore. We sent in the big dogs, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan. We called it the Dream Team. And these guys did two things. I mean, they dominated like no other team has dominated. I mean, they'd never put that many stars on a team, frankly, in any sport. But the second thing that happened is for the next 10 years or so, the rest of the world saw the NBA on display with these stars. And in '92, there was about 2 dozen international players in the NBA. A decade later, it was 3 times that. And what happened was in 2004, instead of sending our best and brightest, we sent some of our best, but a lot of our best and brightest went back to their home teams and they kicked our butt in 2004. Dwyane Wade, LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony. So I'm not a huge basketball fan, but I watched this and I was like, that's pretty crazy. So they called in the big dogs, Kobe Bryant, Coach K. And there was this moment that really to me hits home with what we're all looking and facing, this distributed workforce, this blended work environment, this hybrid moment, which is, you know, Coach K was giving them the workup. Kobe was playing defense, not just offense, practicing hard, setting the example. But there was a moment That turned into momentum. There was this serendipitous moment where a lot of the young guys were out partying in Vegas because that was where they were practicing. They come into the hotel at 4 o'clock in the morning, they open up the elevators like Sesame, open, and who do they see in his workout gear at 4 o'clock in the morning? Kobe Bryant. And they're like, this guy is just different. Like, what the— right? I mean, here you have LeBron James, arguably one of the best, right? Looking at Kobe going, a whole nother level. So we just got done talking about this, which is, you know, caught, not taught, right? Kobe wasn't preaching, right? He wasn't teaching. He was showing. He was demonstrating. And that was like a little tipping point. And so let's go back to pre-pandemic. We'd all have these serendipitous moments in the lunchroom or in the parking lot or, you know, the meeting after the meeting where A lot of times that's where the magic happened. A lot of times that's where authentic relating or connections happened or really good ideas. You know, the idea of like Google designing their entire workplace for casual collisions so that you could have those serendipitous moments. Well, March 16th, 2020 was sort of an odd day because all these companies who never thought they'd let their people work from home decided to let their work people work from home. And we all like cheered from the streets. It was amazing. I was excited. I was like, finally, we're giving people freedom. We're treating them like adults. But as everything, it had trade-offs, right? And one of the trade-offs was we're gonna sit in an office by ourselves without any of those casual collisions. And so we went from like having serendipitous meetings sometimes with scheduled meetings to like these blended Zoom meetings. So what we've done over the last 2 years is we've basically taken out serendipity. And we've now got— I can bring people in a room or a Zoom. That's the two plays. And so we go back to like the question you asked earlier about one of the things that happens with a bias, like back to the legacy, like we only have these two ways to collaborate, we only have these two ways to connect, is it creates a blind spot. And that blind spot usually creates a bind of an absolute or a binary. And when you look at the The data right now, people are burned out. They're burned out because there are 252% more meetings on the books. 252%. So that's what we've done. Like hit the more button on the meetings cuz we gotta get everybody on the same, we gotta get our culture together because, you know, we talked about this at dinner. It's like if your company building looked like this beautiful bottle, the culture was the, the sparkling water. It held the culture together. Well, now there is no building. We're all in this blended hybrid kind of environment where, you know, beyond it feeling more like a network, we, we've only been doing this for 2 years, man. Like 2 million years of reading the room, walking in, kind of picking up on the subtle cues and the emotional intelligence. And now we're trying to do this on a 2D screen and most of us aren't digital natives. Slack is interesting. Zoom and Loom, all interesting. Teams, interesting. But for us, you know, we had been thinking about like, what's a way to asynchronously, a silent meeting? How do you collaborate when, you know, you're not trying to add more to people's plate? And so look, it's taken 20 years to think about this. We acquired a small tech firm last year that had an element. They were basically a micro learning management platform. And so we deconstructed it, we reconstructed it, we tested it. We took it to our clients, this new idea, and we're calling it Latch, which is basically how do you pulse a question to your team? People have heard that, like micro surveying and, and like getting a real-time pulse, not your annual surveys. But I also then, how do you push out a story so that the pulse question immediately is, is, is followed by a story from a teammate, from an executive that's saying, hey, Rian, We're gonna roll out new values in the next couple weeks. And one of the values is this notion of, you know, respecting everyone's freedom within a framework. And when I think about that, these are the things that it makes me think about. How do I let people think about getting to do things as opposed to having to do them? How do I help people see that life is happening to them and not for them, or for them and not to them? How do I help leaders, you know, really allow their people to have more trust? And I would tell a story. We'll go back to the Kobe Bryant moment, right? All of a sudden we're creating a little bit of serendipity here, which is, it's not corporate propaganda. It's not some big up high from the ivory tower telling us like where we gotta be and when. It's a quick 3-minute story. And then for all my OD folks listening to this, all the folks that geek out on adult learning and you read The Fifth Discipline and you think you gotta like understand how we change our behavior, Atomic Habits. Et cetera, which by the way, just as a quick aside, no offense to James Clear, Charles Ludwig, The Power of Habit is much better than Atomic Habits. But that's just my quick point of view about that particular book. I know one gets a lot more press than the other. And so I'm just out trying to shine a little light on that. So anyway, at the end of that video, just like in Facebook or LinkedIn, instead of asking for people to like it or comment, how about ask people to reflect What did they learn? And what are they going to go do? And you run this no-huddle offense. So it's like, you know, you, you don't have to get the team together. We walk to the line and you're able to, within 5 minutes, pulse them, push out a message, and pull in their sentiment. And we've got our leaders right now able to help, you know, in one example, you know, we've been working with a big financial institution called, you know, I guess I can say this, John Hancock. For a while. And, you know, we had been doing a lot of change management through the last 6 years before the pandemic. It'd take us about a year to get everybody on the same page, whether it's new values, high-performing sales team, etc. Well, this year we were able to do that same type of work, transformational work, in 90 days. Because this thing not only allows you to, to run that no-huddle offense, but we've got on the back end some AI measuring the sentiment of all this. And so we're literally able, just like your Oura Ring or your Fitbit, You know, these wearables from a technology perspective that kind of give us the nudge of like, hey, today you should take it easy, or tomorrow go hard. Well, how about it tells you that with your team? Who needs to be taken easy today? Who needs a little kick in the butt? Who needs a hug tomorrow? Like, we, we rolled out the latest release last week, and I gotta tell you, like, I, I suck at reading the Zoom. I don't know about you, but like, I am lights out scary in front of people. I don't mind wearing that. I'm working on my, you know, self-deprecating nature here. But on Zoom, I am wrong about half the time. Half the time I'm like, I think everybody likes it, right? So this thing picked up on that most of the team's behavior last week was insecure. Insecure. That's interesting. Would that have been a word you would've used to describe shift? Never. But that's what they're feeling. And I would just come back to, you know, leaders with a blind spot who think everything is like them or always done the way that it's always done. Like, this is basically going to help unlock that blind spot.

I love the description, Joe, of it being like an aura ring for the overall organism of your team or company. That's, I think it's a really Amazing way to describe it. What is it about the blend of microsurveys and then these narratives that shapes culture so powerfully? I mean, a lot of folks, I think, listening probably don't really explicitly understand how culture gets shaped in general. So maybe you could speak to that for a moment as well.

So if we were to really get down to brass tacks, Gallup has been studying the workplace for 20 years. I've been studying the workplace for 20 20 years, you all been studying the workplace for quite some time. We'd get back and part of what you would hear with 5 generations in the workforce is something like this: we don't feel heard, we don't feel seen, we don't feel understood, we don't feel like we have a voice, and we don't feel like our vote counts. So we're talking about more or less some sense of control. So the reason that you should start off in a conversation, you know, whether it's appreciative inquiry or authentic relating generally is a question, right? Because it's a recognition that as a leader, there's an asymmetrical imbalance of power. So it's time for me to shut up and time for me to truly listen from here, not just waiting for what I'm gonna say next. So by creating this habit where when I send something to you, you get a chance to say something first, that's the first piece. The second piece is from a story perspective. Storytelling's been around for 30,000 years. The reason I tell you the Kobe Bryant story is cuz everyone will be thinking about that serendipitous moment and how they can create that serendipitous moment within their organization when they're not in the building. And so storytelling, you know, I'm not the neuroscientist. I think there's one in this call here, but I, I believe if you'll brush up my neuroscience here is that there's a thing called mirror neurons. Am I, close on this, right?

And so, yeah, absolutely.

It's my simplistic way of saying when someone's sharing a story and we have a, basically a shared experience together that we have this— well, you clean it up for me. How would you say it? How would you help people unpack like the power of authentic storytelling and why that would be so important? You tell me.

I think the way that I think about it is that stories emit these signals out into the organism of the team or the workplace, and then those signals get interpreted as the way things work here, the norms, the values, and then they end up dropping into behavior, which then kind of compounds on the stories and the loop goes, you know, over and over again. And then that's how culture sort of propagates out. That's the way I always think about it in terms of signaling, signaling mechanisms. Each story emits a little signal, which turns into behavior, which emits more signals, and so on it goes.

So, well, and it also speaks to groupthink, right? Is that in tribe, right? I want to be in the group. I want to be in the team. I don't want to be voted off the island. So when people are hearing that story, they want to see themselves in that, number one. But then after, after this like little 3 to 5 minute bit, You know, the, the, we've got to stop passively consuming things, right? So, you know, there's this notion of like, you know, remember when TED was amazing? 2008, 9, and 10, TEDx came out. We were all like, wow.

Yeah, I remember lying in bed as a, God, I must have been like 13 or 14, watching TED Talk after TED Talk.

Yeah, it was crazy. And then like, I find myself sometimes, I don't know if you can relate to this, but like Like I've read over 1,000 books. Okay. I can almost tell you where the book's going after the first sentence or two, right? Because there's just a pattern and it's not a knock on me or other authors that are writing these books, but it's a question about, are you applying and integrating? Are you finding a way to institutionalizing this into the, the, you know, going from psyche to behavior, right? From belief to behavior. How does it show up? And I think from a change management perspective, you know, we don't keep New Year's resolutions. And Simon Sinek did the why thing, and that was a really big, good piece. And Tony Robbins talks a lot about leverage on yourself. But I think the other thing is you just make it part of the practice, which is at the end of every meeting— I mean, true story, when I first started, I was 23 in this business. I had— and I don't know if you know what it's like to be young in a business, Graham, just saying. And I didn't really know what to say. So, you know what I asked? I was like, what do you guys think leadership looks like? And then I would listen and then we would collect the thoughts and we would co-create and we'd figure it all out. But at the end of that conversation, I would go, hey, I don't want this just to be like good chatting, right? I want us to do something with it. And that's a little bit of my blue collar chip. And I think in a lot of ways, like adult learning and change management and just the idea of stacking a new concept in the, in the, in the, in your own little zeitgeist is really important. You gotta make time for it. It's why journaling is really effective. It's why group therapy really works. It's why, again, at the end of a meeting, my invitation for all of us is just to say, so how did that sit? How did that land? What did that make you think about? And then go around, hear it from everyone so everyone can start to build on each other. And then what's kind of really cool, and then say, how are you gonna apply it? What would you do next? How would it look? And that's what the platform does, is it's collecting all of that in a group fashion, almost like a virtual water cooler or a corporate social network. And again, you're sort of getting that, that effect, that aftershock of like, wow, that seems good. But going back to the TED Talk, it's like, you know, after like your 100th TED Talk, what are you really retaining, right? I think the old adage, and this is totally not me backing up with a site, but it's like, you know, you remember things that you're interested in, which is a big Richard Saul Wurman thing, but you'll hear about 10% of it, right? You'll retain, right? And if you listen and write, I think it goes to 35%. If you listen, write, and participate, about 70%. If you listen, write, participate, and then my favorite part is teach. Like, if you want to be good at something, you learn how to teach it. And it goes up to about 90%. And in my mind, my life, it's— I remember thinking when I was like 22, 23, I was like, look, I want to be I want to be, you know, a badass that can help influence the most powerful organizations and leaders in the world. The only way that's going to happen is if I am someone that they would admire and respect, which means I have to live it to such a degree that it's like the bee, not the flower, right? Right. I have to be the flower, not the bee, because they got enough bees swarming around them. I want them to come to us at Shift. I want them to understand that we're a type of company that falls often but gets back up a lot and finds a way to get back up and makes it better.

Amazing, Joe. Well, on that note, I just wanna say, first off, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us and amazing storytelling as well. That Kobe story is epic. I actually have never heard that before either. It's an amazing one. The contrast between The two greats and one great being shocked at how great the other great is, is really powerful. Where can people learn more about you? Where can people check out Latch as well? Because I'm sure a lot of our listeners would be interested in implementing Latch with their teams. And then you can mention as well wherever people can buy Shift the Work and Grow Regardless.

Yeah, listen, one of the things I love to do is I love to be with people. And so if you have any interest in myself or my team coming in to help you with a gathering or a meeting, you could go check out joemaklinski.com would be the first place. You know, but from a Shift and a company perspective, you know, if you go to shiftthework.com, which was the name of my last book, all the basic information about Latch and kind of who we are, we've got a kick-ass Stories at Shift newsletter that goes out every other week that I would encourage you to go check out. We try to put up a lot of content without a lot of stages and gates. We're not crazy internet marketers. We actually probably give a little too much away. So, you know, community is a big deal and like real conversations are a real big deal. So, you know, if you're interested, give us a buzz.

Yeah, your newsletter, by the way, I get it every few weeks and I read it all the time as well. It's fantastic. It's one of the few that I actually read. So Means a lot, man. Everyone check it out.

Coming from you.

And thanks so much for everything, Joe. And I just want to say as well, while we're still on the recording, thank you for all of your mentorship because it's really positively impacted mine and Stephen's ability to grow FRC as well and this whole community. So yeah, you've been a real just treasure to us as well. So I wanted to say that too. Thanks for everything.

Hey, sign of a great relationship is when we both think we're getting the better end of the stick.

And I definitely think I'm getting the I think I'm getting the good end, so that— but yeah, must be a great relationship then. All right, sir, thanks so much.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Question for you: when was the last time you were in the zone? When you were in so deep that afterward you were stunned by how much you got done even though very little time had passed? Now you've got bold goals, yet you're slammed with work and you're short on time, and you know the heights of productivity you can achieve when you get into the zone because you've been there before, but it's a mild form of torture knowing how productive you're capable of being without access to that level of output all the time. So how do you get into the zone whenever you need it? There's still a lot that we don't know about flow states, but over the last 25 years of researching it, we've learned a lot, and we've shared our findings with thousands of high performers. You're in flow during those moments of total absorption when you're so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Time passes strangely, and performance just soars. I mean, motivation and productivity, creativity and innovation, learning and memory, cooperation and collaboration all skyrocket. In some studies, as high as 500% above baseline. Now imagine what you can accomplish if you could reliably increase your productivity by 5x. And the best part? Flow is accessible to everyone, anywhere, at any time. You don't need to pop a pill. You don't need to be surfing a monster wave. You don't need to meditate on a mountaintop for 10 years to get there. Flow is accessible to you right here, right now. If you'd like to amp up your productivity and get leverage on every second, go to getmoreflow.com. Just think of your 10 out of 10 days when you get more done in the morning than you typically do in a full day. Now imagine if you tapped into that level of performance with push-button consistency every day. All this is possible when you trigger flow frequently and reliably. Just go to getmoreflow.com to unblock your flow and unlock peak performance.

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