684: Marcus Buckingham - Design Love In, The 5 Feelings Leaders Must Create, The ABCs of Authentic Leadership, and How to Unleash The Most Powerful Force in Business

- Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show.

Presented by Insight Global, I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleiter.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleiter.com.

Now onto the night's feature of leader, Marcus Buckingham has spent 30 years studying what actually drives human performance. She co-created Strengths Finder, wrote first, break all the rules,

and has sold tens of millions of books. She has a New York Times bestselling author and one of the most cited researchers in the history of leadership and management. His new book is called Design Love in How To Unleash

The Most Powerful Force and Business during our conversation we discussed. Why Marcus sold his company in 2017? And also why he says it was the biggest mistake of his career.

Then the five sequential feelings every great leader must create and why the order is non-negotiable.

Why the most important job a leader has

is not setting goals or building culture. It's designing experiences and then why love is not soft. It is structural, measurable and the most powerful force and business. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation

with Marcus Buckingham. This episode is brought to you by my friends at Insight Global. Insight Global was a staffing and professional services company dedicated

to being the light to the world around them.

“If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people”

or transform your business through talent or technical services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person

can be magic. Visit Insight Global.com/learningleader to day to learn more. That's Insight Global.com/learningleader. - Okay, you open the book. It's 3am.

You're replying the day that you sold your company and you call yourself the fool who blew it up. Not what I was expecting. What made you say that? What made you think that?

- Well, when you start a business, it's all about love because frankly, you know, seven out of 10 businesses fail, right? So new businesses. So when you start a business as an entrepreneur,

which I did back in 2007, you love what you do, you love your clients, you surround yourself with people who can love it as much as you do. You all had this sort of passionate delusion

“of what you're doing is really important.”

It's gonna work. And so there's a lot of love. And you talk about it all the time and how do you get customers to fall in love with the company and how do you over-serve?

And there's a lot of love amongst the colleagues and we're all in this together.

It's a really, if you've never started a business,

it's like it's, there's just a lot of love flowing through the veins of the company. - It feels kind of like your baby 'cause it is. - Totally. And it's very much like when you have a child,

it's like your heart is walking around that side of your body all the time. - Yeah. - And you wake up at three in the morning and think about the business and then you wake up

at 10 and night, you're still noodling about the business, but it's not a, I don't know, it's not a stress, it's more like it's an ongoing love affair with what you're trying to put out in the world. Which is amazing, it's amazing.

It's, love is the context in which humans flow it. And then in 2017, I felt like we needed more scale, frankly, and this company, this large Fortune 500er company, had 3,000 salespeople. And I thought we need more reach.

We'd built a cadre of products and services and people that could scale. And I, what I just didn't have was 3,000 salespeople. So the price was right. I felt the timing was right.

I felt the logic was right. But I started the book this way because very soon after that sale. And it's no knock really on the Fortune 500 company. They were just doing what big companies do.

They were maximizing the efficiency of the machine. But what they turned into is my little of ball. Got broken down into silos. And what became the subject of conversation was the efficient running of this big machine.

And so it was a conversation about maximization of compliance, of efficiency. Which wasn't, but it's not bad. It just means it means that the love disappears. You stop talking about it anymore.

“And that's why I've quoted Pablo Neruda,”

who's arguably the best love per the last century, who simply said that love is born in savoring. It lives in intelligence. But it dies from neglect, love dies from forgetting.

It just used stop talking about it anymore.

And I found, for me, up close and personal, that's why I started the book this way. It's no one's fault. But when you stop talking about love for your own work, love for your colleagues, love for your customers,

when you stop talking about it, because your attention is a creative act. When you start putting your attention on other things, you destroy love. And we ought to be completely upfront with ourselves about that.

You stop talking about it, you destroy it. And we ought to ask ourselves, do we want to live in an increasingly loveless world? Can humans flourish in an increasingly loveless world?

Does it make good business sense to live in an increasingly loveless world? And I think the answer to all those questions is no. Do you regret selling it? Yes.

Yes. I would not do it again. I would do it again in a very different way. I'm not saying scaling is a bad thing. I'm saying, if you are an entrepreneur and you're listening

to this, and somebody offers you something,

one of the most important considerations

“you should ask yourself, which is me speaking to me.”

I'm giving myself this advice, is will this lead to more customers falling in love with your company? And will this lead to more employees saying they love working there? And if the answer to that question is unattended to, or if the answer is an obvious, no, then don't do it.

And I didn't attend to it as preciously and as intentionally as I should have done. Because it led to more people saying, I don't love the company. And it led to more people working there,

saying, I don't love working there. And that's the raw material of the value of the future of a business. And if CFOs or CEOs or general counsels or CATROs don't understand that, it doesn't make it not true. It means they don't understand that.

And I'm guilty of that. So yeah, I wouldn't do it again.

Did you even know to think or to ask that question

at the time, though? No, I think I was too inside the frame to see the picture. And you get distracted and you get like, oh my gosh, scale. Was it a money thing, too? You're a human, I mean.

Yeah, but no, because I, I mean, yes, in a sense, but I wasn't going to retire. I was going to stay there and keep growing it. So there was various incentives to stay and continue to grow. It wasn't like I was caching out.

He was like an urinal period in the fall. Exactly. Exactly, it's called an urinal. And so I was like, I knew I had work to do. But I felt this was the fastest way to get to that work.

And unfortunately, I had many different offers. So it was like, oh, do I want it? And I made what I thought was a rational decision. It wasn't a financially stupid decision. It's just, I'm a builder, I'm a grower.

I'm an entrepreneur as much as I made anything else. And I didn't pursue the most intelligent growth strategy. That's where the regret comes from.

“So one of the natural questions is, is it just not possible?”

It a big company, the love like this? Is this just part of the machine? And I have a feeling what you're going to have to answer that? So if it is possible, they're like, what do we do?

What does someone's running the CEO of a very large company? Multi-billions. What do they do? What do they implement to ensure that they love their people? That they love their customers?

Their customers love them. Their people love each other. Like, what do you do? How do you get this going? Well, that's a sort of a two-parta.

Yeah. We do find companies that are very big, that have maintained some of that deep love. And very often, those are the companies that protect the founders' flame. A lot of great companies, the founders' story, their vision, their passion there, has somehow been kindled and remains strong even yet today.

So if we think of what Disney-- I mean, you could look at a stock price the last four or five years, and you could argue about various growth strategies, but does that company still retain the aura of what Disney and the craziness and the wonder and the fantasy of that? Yes.

We're really qualitatively different categorically than six flags or universal studios. Yes, it is. It clearly is. If you think of Chick-fil-A, I mean, true, a Kathy has passed on, but his--the unique, weird, wonderful nurse of Chick-fil-A, and what he was trying to do with it, whatever you think

of Chick-fil-A, it's clearly distinctively and very, being equally different than raising chains. Apple. You think about a company like that, which is maintained, it's kind of crazy passion for design.

“Now, you could argue that is that waning or is it waxing?”

Those are questions we could get into, but when a company maintains a close connection to its founders' flame, you think today of like Southwest Airlines, Herb Keller her, for the longest, 30 years of profitability before 2023 when it was sold to a hedge fund. And now, the unassigned seating has gone away. The crazy sort of games have gone away.

The vibe of it, which some people hated, but it wasn't bland, for sure. And it maintained a connection to Herb Keller has found its flame.

passion, which began at, they start to become the machine, and the machine doesn't have a soul, and we can all feel it. We like, we humans, we like to personify things, we like to personify companies, we lean into personifications of things, we trust them more, because they're not amorphous, they're a human that was trying to do a thing, and when a company can maintain that relationship

historically, do the thing, the person, it means more, it matters more. So there's that, the other part of that, I think, though, run is that most CEOs have lost sight of the fact that the data on love, and we can unpack what love means, but the data on love is now unequivocal.

“If you want to drive productive human behavior on the part of customers are on the part”

of employees, if you want to drive repeat visits advocacy, loyalty, collaboration, a high performance, which of course CEOs want, the precursor to that is love, experiences the

people love, drive behaviors, drive outcomes, love, measureably, is the most powerful

force in business by far, there's nothing even close, and yet most CEOs have long forgotten that, go to a business school, go to in Seattle, go to HBR, or have a business school, or go to Warton, there's not a single class on how do you design a strategy to maximize the most powerful force in business, love isn't a coating, it's not, it's not come by are, it's an ingredient that you design into your products and services or the way in which

you onboard, select, train, and develop your people, you design it in, and you design in because you get the best outcomes that way, but most CEOs actually don't believe

“that because they've missed the data on it, and so they think of love as a lovely little”

luxury, as opposed to the most powerful driving force of productive human behavior, which

it is, this feels obvious, doesn't it? I mean, what are we doing here, is it make a CEO sound soft? I mean, we all know how it feels to love somebody, to feel the love of somebody else, it feels obvious that we would try to then bottle that up within our businesses and deploy it both for the people that work at our companies as well as our customers, it just makes sense. So where's the misconnect here? Well, to some extent, you know, I'm part

of the problem, which is that when you actually study customers who come back more often, who advocate more, word of mouth, pay more, employees that give you that discretionary effort, who collaborate more more creative, when you study people like that, do interviews, focus groups, the word people use is love, they use it all the time, I love that team, I love that company, I love that brand, I love that movie, like we hear it, but most people

do are I did, when I heard it, which I heard repeatedly for the last 25 years, I kept changing it to a different word that was more palatable to the business community, so I changed it to passion or joy or engagement or strengths, and those words are jolly good words, but they're not actually the words people use. When you hear people talking about a really extreme positive human experience at work or as a customer, the word we reach for is love,

and it's not a careless exaggeration of the word like, it's a thing we reach for, but that's what actually happens. Most people do I did, they go, they don't mean love, love is for family or it's for a violent, we either flatten it or totally deepen it, like it's either it's for my family or it's hissing in chocolates in front of the eye for tower, and we sort of do that with love, when in fact love deserves curiosity and study because it's

“always present when we see extreme positive human behavior, so I think it's that we've decided”

it's love isn't relevant to the practice of business, and so we're going to stop talking about it. In fact, I was at the group of 30CHRs the other day, Ryan, and we spent two hours talking about the data that support the love drives performance, and they couldn't even say the

word. In the end, they came to say the word about customers, but they never became comfortable

even saying the word about their own employees, because I think we've got to this place in the world, particularly post-COVID, where really, if you look at the chest thumping behaviors and actions that pass for leadership today, and you could name some of the leaders that stand in that space, really the job of a CHRO is to protect the company from the employees, and so the books called design love in, but you can see a lot of places where we're really trying to design it out,

and it's because I think love is, you know, there's a chaotic sort of unpredictable element to love that's amazing, because it expands the possibility in the capability space, but to some CFO somewhere, or some CHRO, who's trying to tighten the experience curve as it were and limit

office, we will have surveillance software when you're back in the office, all of which speaks to

control and structure, which is undermined or underpinned by fear, I think, basically for what

people will do if you give them too much space. What we've got today as a world in which there's no love there, love doesn't have a place in that equation, it's become sort of irrelevant. Let's think about a high performance organization, which every single leader listening to this

“is saying, that's what I'm running, that's what I'm striving for. We have stretch goals,”

we've got to hit the revenue targets, budget, profit, whatever, okay. Marcus, this sounds great for you to write a book about it and to say it and to talk about it. I'm here to hit our number, okay. This love stuff sure, I'll do it when I can't all write a thank you note here and there, I'll go pat somebody on the back when they get a big sale, whatever. I'm being dramatic, but you get it. What do you say to that person who says,

good for you that you can write this book and you made a bunch of money selling your company, and then it kind of died off because the big company killed it. What about that person who's an SVP of whatever, with a very tough stretch goal, a very demanding CEO who is there to beat their goals into submission and then do it again the next year? Well, and that's real, right? Many of us are in that situation. If you back out of it, you're going to say, well, what's the

job of a leader, whatever level? The job of a leader is really straightforward. Your job is to change

“human behavior. That's what you're doing. You're not paid to hit a goal. You're paid to change”

behavior so that you hit various goals. The behavior might be for your customers, it might be the behavior or employees. Your job as a leader is to change people's behavior, hopefully for the better. So the question for you is a leader, is how do you do that? What is the most effective sustainable way to change human's behavior? Well, you've really kind of got two choices. You could be directive, which is what most of us do as leaders. Directive means you set a goal and then you

push for that goal and you give coaching feedback and tough coaching about how do you hit that goal. And with customers, you might set pricing or you design really coherent sort of loyalty programs to coerce people directly to change their behavior. People are coin-operated and you'll change your incentive program or you'll change your loyalty program, whatever it is, and we'll change behavior that way, which works. So if your listeners are listening, well, that works. Yeah, it works.

It works for a temporarily for a short period of time. If you want to sustain behavior change, you've got to follow an equation and that equation's really straightforward. It's the one that we apply to our own lives. And the equation is experiences, drive behaviors, drive outcomes. Experience to drive behaviors, drive outcomes. If you want really great outcomes from in your health, then the behavior is you've got to go to the gym. Well, you're only going to go to the gym if you design experiences

the gym that are positive for you in some way, so that you have the behavior that drives the outcome. So if you want sustainable behavior change in terms of your health, experience it, drive behaviors,

“drive outcomes. If you want to create a flourishing restaurant, you can't coerce people.”

I mean, yes, you need the right pricing or a neat good product. But what you've got to do is create the experiences of the restaurant that drives the behaviors to get people to come out their way two, three, four miles out of their way to drive to your restaurant, not someone else's. And then you get the outcomes you want. So for a leader, the best leaders understand that their

job is to maximize that equation, which basically means you're an experienced maker as a leader.

You could be directible, you want. But what you're trying to do there is push noodles up hill. What you want to do is pull the noodle down there. And the best way to do that is to craft experiences that people lean into. You're an experienced maker as a leader. Now, most people don't say it that way. But the truth of the matter is, it's not whether you are an experienced maker or not. The question and the book tries to answer this question is, are you a skilled

one? Because the best leaders are skilled experience makers. They understand that every single touch point that exists in their working world is a raw material for making an experience. And the people, whether it's customers or employees are picking up what you're putting down, that email you just sent, it's not an email. It's an experience. That meeting you just call, it's not a meeting. It's an experience. That big company gathering that you're doing. That's not a big company

gathering. It's an experience. You can design it intentionally so people lean into it and get the behaviors you want. Or you can be accidental about it in which case people are going to pick up what you put down even if you just dropped it. But they're making an experience. Culture is just a series of experiences, which is why actually it's pretty hard to change. But if you look at the best leaders, they are so unbelievably intentional and intelligent about experience making.

Both for customers and employees. I'm really that's what the book's about. It's like, hey,

listen, if you want to drive to these incredible goals and you need to beat people over the

head with a big stick to get the goals, okay, fine, you're an average leader. Just look in the mirror, you're an average leader. You want to excel sustainably. You want to differentiate yourself and give

because that will drive the behavior that drives the outcomes. That's really what the data

“would show and it's what the books about. Danny Meyer, business like life is all about how you make”

people feel. It's that simple and it's that hard. Danny Meyer, one of the best restaurant tours of all time, will get there a unreasonable hospitality. I just recorded with him. So it's very fresh, Marcus. I don't know if you guys are friends, but you should be. But that is so true while they may have written it about restaurants. It's about life. It's about business. It's about families. It's about friends. It's all that it's all about thinking, how did I make that person feel? Like,

I actually see some of the clients I work with in the gym. It's interesting. You know, we're in there to do it to get a workout in, but still there may be a three-minute interaction in between sets or after getting off of treadmill or whatever. And that's a deliberate attempt to make that person feel better, not like in a fake flattery way, but an honest connecting way of, let's have a short conversation because we're both interested in this thing about working out or something like that.

“Business like life is all about how you make people feel, it's that simple and it's that hard.”

I completely agree with you and will's great. I don't know Danny, but what we see from the data is and obviously I'm a data geek. So that's where all of this comes from for me. If you have measured experiences. And by the way, measured experiences normally we measure them on a scale of one to five. Five being strongly positive, one being strongly negative. A lot of the stuff from this book came from something from the data actually on this that is basically undermines a fundamental

belief that many leaders have. We seem to believe many of us, the relationship between experiences and the feeling of those experiences and outcomes is, and I'm sorry, it's going to get a tiny bit one key, but within the relationships linear, as in we think if we move a two experience, which is below average, to an average experience, which is a three to above average, which is a four. If we're moving two to three to fours, whether it's for our employees or our customers or

indeed ourselves, the same amount of outcomes increase. Which means if we've got a lot of customers at twos, we should move them to threes. And if we got a lot of employees just at a three,

then we should move them to fours. The problem is, and then normally by the way, we put the

fours with the fives. And we call that a top two box or percent favorable, or we'd expand it to net promoter score and we put nines with tens, you know. Okay, all of that's wrong. Because when you look at the data at scale, the relationship between experiences and outcomes isn't linear. It's what's called curve a linear, which means it's like a hockey stick. Moving people's experience from a two experience to a three doesn't change their behavior at all.

Moving their experience from a three to a four doesn't change their behavior at all. It's only when you do something with a customer or an employee that changes their experience to the point where they go five that we can start to predict what they're going to do next. Like if you say that movie's a four, I can't predict if you're going to go back and see it again or who you're going to tell. If you say that restaurant was a four and I moved you from a three to a

four, I can't predict if you're going to go back or spend more or tell anyone else to go

to that restaurant. Four's a three's. Never put a four with a five again. Never top two box again.

Never percent favorable again. Four's a three's three's the two's two's the ones. When it comes to the data, the world's binary to your point, like the world's of business is feelings. Yeah, but actually there's only two feelings in the world. There's love and there's everything else that is just not love. Hmm. There's love, not love. And the data on this is unequivocal whether it's student grades or patient outcomes or employee

productivity or customer loyalty, you've got five and everything else is just not a five. And when you push on five's, that's when you bump into that word love. Four's, what what's the word for? I enjoyed it. I respected that leader. I learned a lot from that leader. Like all of these are jolly good words. They don't predict behavior change. So for any leader listening, I'm sorry, I know the bar becomes higher, but I promise you if you're in the business of behavior change.

“Fives are the only thing that predicted everything else does in. And when you unpack the five,”

that's when people spontaneously use that word love. That's why we're talking about love

because it's the most powerful predictor of positive human behavior. That's why it's worth

unpacking. It's not a nice to have. It's the fundamental driver of anything good. And anything below that is just, it's like boiling point of water. If you want to predict when the water's going to boil, when it will water change its state when it hits too 12. Anything else below that? It's just not boiling. And we ought to as leaders, we ought to be as binary as that in the world. Either you're getting people to say I love that or you've failed to change their behavior.

data wrong, because it's like, hey, I do not care for love gets really soft. Okay, then soft,

it's a driver of behavior. If you're interested in driving behavior as a leader, take love seriously. If you're not fine, don't read this book. Have you ever seen the Savannah Bananas? Yeah. Okay. Yes. So I went down the Savannah a few months ago to spend time with Jesse Cole, there. He actually owns 16 now. So it's a banana leaf. It's not just the bananas. So there's 16s. Anyway, they were all there that day. They were practicing at different times. So some of them were

the way room, some were the field, lockers, wherever. We did a big tour, this Jesse me and a couple other people were walking around. And every single person that he saw, and we saw lots of them players, staff, all different types, hundreds. He knew everybody's name. Every and he wasn't showing

off or like trying to be, and he was genuinely curious and asking about them, their kids. Like,

“how was this possible? And remember, the way he looked at me, I think he thought like it was a”

stupid question. When I asked him like, how do you know everybody's name? How do you know all the details about all these people? And you could just tell like, he's obsessed. He loves them. He loves what he does. He loves his business. He loves his teams. He loves his people. Yeah, it's an obsession. We talked about obsession when I recorded with them. I mean, it's not a surprise. Then when you see them selling out 100,000 seed stadiums after inventing essentially a new sport. And so those are

great, great examples of how love shows up. Yeah, he's a super interesting character. And he takes his own loves delusionally seriously. As you said, he manifests it in the way that he's designed

a product. And but also the way in which he loves on the people that are making the product. I don't

know him, but I've seen what he's done. And it's just it's super intriguing. He reminds me of the person that I profiled very early in the book, Josh Demarrow, who when I was following him around, he was the head of Disney parks, resorts, cruise lines, consumer products, and imaginary.

“Jesse, that's like his number one mentor in life is Walt Disney. Yes, yeah, absolutely.”

And not every Disney executive, I've studied many them over the years. They're not all like that. But Josh, and he's by the way, two days ago, right? Took over as the CEO, he's replacing Bob Igo, which I'm so happy about, by the way. Like the board could have picked, they had a number of different possible successes to Bob Igo. It took a fair amount of courage to pick someone. Josh is the kind of person like you were just describing. You walked apart with him and you can't

get 20 yards. Not just because all the cast members are gathering around him and he's hugging them and he knows their names, and there's a chef here, and there's a line order cook there, and there's a cast member there, and he genuinely is all about them. And they're cutting through 15 layers of hierarchy, which you can imagine it Disney hierarchy exists. And they're breaking through all of that, just coming up, he's got no handlers smoothing his path. But it's not just

the cast members, right? Somehow the guests all know him too, and you can't get five yards without them being, he's just a mop scene. And I think as I was writing about it that day, this was a year before he was picked. But I think what I saw that day, a bit like you were describing, what you want from the Savannah bananas is, you want it to be real. You want the whole ecosystem to be real. It's fun, it's engaging, it's sweet, it's disarming. You want the whole thing to be like that.

Imagine if the CEO of that company wasn't like that. In a world of fakery, we're just reaching for real. And you could see the guests looking at Justamara in a sense going, "Thank goodness, the head of this company seems to be as geeked out by this whole mysterious world we've built here as we are. Thank goodness he's not a financial cynic. He's just extracting value from our own love of Disney. Thank goodness he seems to be as into it as we are." And in a world of AI,

frankly, the idea that we're reaching for genuine love, opposite of AI, of course, is genuine emotion. Genuine feeling. And not that AI isn't good, it's got some great things, but we want genuine feeling. And you can see that in Josh and you can see that in the Savannah bananas. And of course, there'll be different. I'm not suggesting that everyone should be hail fellow well, Matt, just and glad-hanging. I am suggesting that if we take love really,

really seriously, we get lots of moral and business benefits from it. So maybe I can get some pre-consulting advice for me, Marcus, and sheer one of the best in the world with this, okay?

“So we run a leadership development company. That's what I run with my teammates. And”

occasionally you're asked, "Okay, what's the ROI?" Like a CFO, we'll ask me that question. What's the return on investment? We're going to get from hiring you guys to work with our leaders at our company. And it's not like the easiest question to answer because it's more subjective, it's a service-oriented type of a thing that we offer, right? And one of the things I say,

is we authentically live every single thing that we teach. We've done it all ourselves, we continue to do it ourselves when it comes to our purpose and values and behaviors and culture and all the stuff. Like this is what we actually do, and then we just teach the exact same stuff that we live

“out. And I think part of why we win and sustain and work with people for years and years in a space”

that people don't have engagements that long is because of that exact thing. This authenticity of living it out ourselves. Now, that comes from love, that comes from obsession, it comes from curiosity, it comes from us trying to continually raise our standards. When you hear all of that in this service-oriented business, which I know you understand, what do you think? You know, I spent most of my time trying to figure out over the years how do you quantify

increases in engagement? And if you go back through all the Gallup data, if you ever took into CFO, I would bring up increases in employee engagement. Our drivers of, not just correlates of, causation drivers of certain behavioral changes on the part of employees, and you can quantify that. And of course, we know that the biggest driver of engagement is your local team leader. It's not the culture of the company. The culture of the company is like the river which

you're swimming, but there's a lot of different eddies. And the river feels really different according to which part of it you just climbed into. You join a company, but then the sun, the moon, and the stars of your work is that local leader. And I'm sure you've said this to

every client you've sold to. It's the most important decision you make is who you make leader,

of that team. And so goes that team, so goes everything. So if you control over the budget of this company, if you don't understand that, again, it's not because it's not so. It's because you don't understand that. And so let me try to show you some data which shows, quantifiably, the effect of, and in fact, by the way, if you in the book, I'm sure you saw this Ryan, I show a company, it's a very large retailer in the US. They got like 8,000 stores. And I show the the relationship

between customer and employee experiences on the x-axis and profitability of the store up the y-axis. And in general, the line of best fit shows that there is a very strong relationship between experiences of the employees and customers in the store and the profitability of the store, which is great because it quantifies the importance of experience making. You make bad experiences. People don't come back more. You make good experiences, of course, people will.

But the biggest takeaway from it actually is variation. It's a scatter plot. It's the same company, one stock price, supposedly one culture. But as you can see from the scatter plot, every single store seems to have created a whole variety of different sorts of experiences

“for customers and employees. Well, who's the main driver of the creator of those experiences?”

It's the leader. The leader makes a huge difference inside the same company. So I can't remember what page that's on. But if if you wanted to like what's the value of a leader, show that graph and basically go, what's the difference between the dot on the top right and the dot on the bottom left? It's the leader. And so anything you're doing to not to sell for you guys, but anything you can do to build the capability of your leaders is money will spend because you're

trying to move all the dots up into the right. And the idea that your people, your team,

is I always think of ABC, authenticity beliefs, customs, authenticity beliefs, customs.

We reach for authenticity in our leaders. We don't want perfection. We want authenticity. Why? Because that leads to prediction. If you are authentically youth and I could predict you're going to be around the corner, that means I'm going to get a folly around the corner. I'm

“not expecting you to be perfect. I want you to be predictable. That's what authenticity.”

Authenticity is manifested in your beliefs. What do we genuinely believe? And they better that better be coherent with who you authentically are because if you are faking your beliefs, I can smell it. And I don't want to follow it. And then of course, your customs are the living manifestation. You could call them routines or rituals. But in terms of ABC, that the things you customarily do have got a flow from your A's and your B's. So if I think of the best leaders that

I know, their ABCs line up beautifully. Like Josh tomorrow, I'm not saying he's perfect, but he's authentically who he is. I know exactly what he believes. And then in the book, actually, we detail out some of the very specific kind of weird customs that he has that brings those authentic beliefs to life. Love it. Let's give you even more practical. I vary high aware leader, they're high level awareness is listening to this. I love this. And then they're

thinking, wait a second. I'm not sure I'm doing a good job of this for whatever reason. What are

some things that a high awareness level leader who's leading a team right now, how they could get

lags on this love thing. Again, I try to show my gratitude for my people and for our customers, but I don't know. I don't know. I'm being very honest myself. Where do we begin? How do we get practical right now? Yeah, well, obviously there's not a simple answer to that question. There's

“places to start. The first place to start would be what the heck do your people mean by love?”

If someone's going to say, I love working for that leader. What do they mean by that? Do they mean I really, really like that leader? Do they mean I really, really respect that leader? What do do they mean? Although everybody's got a different definition of love around the world. They predict a heavier. So there must be a uniform definition of love. It must be must all mean something similar. If you really push on it, what people mean when they say, I love, and by the way, it's weird.

It could apply to, I love that cup of coffee. I love my mom. Wait, what? I love that movie. I love that mentor. How can we use the word in such different contexts? When you really push on it, I run, when people use the word love, it's because we're reaching for a meaning, which is,

it's an experience that helps me feel more fully myself over time, which is basically flourishing.

It's a feeling of flourishing. If you think about most of us, we go through life, balled up like an armadillo, surrounded by armour plating against the harshness of the world. Which is sensible, because the world is pretty harsh. But inside of us, we want to take what's inside of us and express it. That feels healthy to us. We want to get to 95 and express some of us. So any experience that gives us a chance to take one little piece of armour plating off.

And it could be, I love those socks, because when I wear them, I don't know, man. I just feel, I just feel a bit more me. It could be, I love that mentor, because that mentor was the first person who pushed through my performance rating and went, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, this is the kind of place in which you can really flourish. And I'm going to move you there, which, by the way, is why we have the word tough love, because sometimes the mentor has got a yank you into a situation

where you can be more fully yourself. Even if you actually are still cowering in the corner into an area of your world that feels more familiar. So love really means the opportunity to flourish in

“small ways or large. So if that's your definition as a leader, then what you should be thinking about”

is what are the things I could practically do to get people on my team to feel like they are safe enough to express their best self on this team? What could I do? And in the book, and we could go through this if you want, but if you reverse engineer that, and I know this is going to sound so weird to your listeners, but if you reverse engineer that, you reverse engineer somebody going, I love that leader, or I love working on that team. You find a sequence of five feelings.

And it's sequential. And if a leader knows those five feelings, that's like a blueprint. A really is different, but there's a blueprint there for what you could do as a leader to get people to the place where they go. I flip and love work in for that leader. Okay, control harmony significance, warm pavelers and growth. Is that where we're going? Yes, that's where I was headed. Okay, let's unpack those five feelings of love, and they need to

be sequential right at each bill in the last. So let's go through them. And don't get the sequence wrong. And these are hierarchical, like massless, hierarchy. These are sequential. And it's one of the reasons I wrote the book. So it's like, if every leader could just

“take away, love isn't magic. Love's built. Love's designed. And you can design it in. That's why”

in the end I end up calling the book, design love in. It's like you can design in. The first feeling,

just imagine. Somebody's going to an experience they're joining your team for the first time, and they're coming into your business for the first time, or they have an experience for the first time. The first feeling they want is a feeling of control. That doesn't mean control over you. That means they want control over their own choices and their own actions. So the question they're asking, even if they don't say it to you is, what's this world you've invited me into? And how does

it work? Which if you're in a company, it's like, what's the mission of our company? What do you stand for? You know, when Chick-fil-A says, we're closed on Sundays. Is that loving or unloving? I would say that's super loving, because even if you don't agree with it, you know what it is. And you can either choose to move into that world or not. That's a loving thing to do with anybody. And then in that world, how does it work? So for you as a leader, have you been clear about what your world is like?

Have you said what you stand for? Going back to the authenticity thing, the more vivid you can be, the more loving it is. And then how do the tools work? What decisions am I allowed to make in the world? Tell me what those decisions are. The opposite of control is powerlessness. And we know from everything that Martin Saligman did about learned helplessness. We humans hate that. We will lean way the heck out. If your vague as a leader, vagueness as a leader is the most damaging

thing you can possibly be, because people keep their armadillo plating on, why? Because they don't

know what the world is you invited them into and they don't know how it works. So that's the first thing.

Think about this, right? You've got an armadillo coming again. And you want them to keep taking off

“armadilating. Well, one piece of armadilating that they're going to keep on if you're not careful”

is the one that protects their emotions in that experience. And when you don't show people that you know what they're feeling and you care what they're feeling, they keep the armadilating on. If you have an experience on the team that feels jarring, humans lean out with an emotion that they feel when there's nothing in the experience as I know what you're feeling and I care what you're feeling. We studied nurses who gave painless injections and weirdly there are some who

do and we tried to unpack how they did that and we looked at the technique with the needle and the swab and the this and the that. But it turns out the reason why some nurses can almost

share your pain when you're getting an injection is because they all say the same thing right

before they put the needle in. They say this is going to hurt a little bit. I'll try to make a hurt as little as I can. And somehow in just saying what you're feeling and obviously saying

“that I care about it, they reduce it. So as leaders what we need to remember is no matter where”

you want to move your people to, you've got to meet them before you can move them. You've got to tell them that you know what they're feeling and that you care. Otherwise you can't move them anywhere. You've missed them. Why have you missed them? Because they are not plating still on. The example I put in the book was Audi. I like Audi. I had an A4 and I got to the end of my lease and you think that a resophisticated coming like Audi would know that at the end of the

lease what most customers are feeling is excitement because I'm about to look for a new model and it's like oh man, it's great. But instead three weeks before the end of my lease I got a robot call from a very sophisticated company called Audi that simply said in a robot voice, you failed to schedule your termination inspection. And I'm like what? I don't even know what termination inspection is but I've already failed it. Next week, same thing, next week, same thing. And I just

leaned out you know why I couldn't even put words to it initially but it was jarring because I was excited and Audi was pissed off. And so in the end they lost me for five years. I don't hate Audi. It wasn't like it was a three or a two or a one experience. It was disharmonious. I lend out so they lost me. So the second feeling is harmony. You got to tell people that you know what they're feeling in UK, otherwise they won't keep leaning in. I mean that's kind of a one. That's or a zero.

Yeah, well it wasn't like it was a massive service failure. It was kind of is though I mean to have a robot call for a long term customer who's leasing expensive car, that's very surprising. It's very stupid. But we don't take harmony seriously as businesses or as leaders very much. We don't. We you know you. But like think about the meeting room for a second. Sorry, I this one just

is a bunch of the exact for sitting in a meeting room and say okay here's what we're going to do

guys. When somebody's at the end of their lease of this very nice expensive car instead of having any sort of human touch they're going to get a Robo call and they're going to tell them that they

“messed something up. They failed at something. All right, ready, break, let's go. Like how does it happen?”

How does that happen? That's insane. You know. Well, here's one of the big things that leaders that are listening could change right away. We don't design for experiences. When I first was thinking about publishing this book, I thought the pushback would be on the word love. But actually, the pushbacks on the word experience. Because we don't design for experiences. We design for processes. So I think what happened in the case of Audi was they whole notion of an experience that somebody

comes to the end of the lease. What are they going to be experiencing at the end of the lease? What are they going to be feeling? Have we shown that people coming to the end of the lease that were aware of what they're feeling? And that we care about what they're feeling. However, we want to have them end up feeling. What are they actually feeling coming into the end of their lease? I don't think that conversation ever happened. Why? The idea of experiences, drop a

haze of your drive-out comes as obvious as it sounds when you and I are talking about it. I don't think that conversation comes up in most companies because we design for process and efficiency, which leads to silos. So the problem for Audi was, there's a person somewhere in a dealership going, Marcus is coming to the end of his lease. I'm going to get to selling this new model. But that person's in a different silo than a person who's writing the email or the

script for the robot call that comes to Marcus. It's like no one creates a holistic experience map. We talk about customer journeys or customer experience maps, but we don't actually design for a holistic human. Like just go to a hospital and it's one hand off after another. The person that checks you in isn't the person who takes your vitals. The person who then sees how you're doing the middle of the night isn't the person who took your vitals. Then there's another

healthcare professional. There's another doctor and the person who's supposed to hold the narrative of that experience coherent. One hand off to another is you, the patient who deep down knows,

not for a holistic experience, which is probably why the patient outcomes are so bad compared to how much money we spend on them. We haven't designed for an experience. Go back to Savannah bananas. He's designed a holistic experience. As a result, we cram into stadiums to watch it, because it looks, then there's a phrase from a poet who's name I'm blanking on, what beauty it all cohears. Because it's coherent. We lean in. Audi has designed

a desiccated, disconnected, disintegrated set of processes. And the person who's supposed to knit it all together is me, the buyer. Well, that's daft. I mean, Disney isn't a perfect company

around, but I tell you what they did do. They created the first thing you do when you build a

Disney park, in case anyone's thinking you're building a Disney park, is you build a bum around the whole park. So you can't see out. Well, universal studios doesn't do that. Six flags doesn't do that. Why do they build a bum so that you don't see out? You can't see the red roof end over there on the parking lot. Because why? Because we're trying to create a holistic experience. And the first thing we got to do when we get you in is you can't see out. Okay, you start looking

at these companies that have figured out, whether it's a banner banner, it means Disney. They're thinking holistically about a human having an experience. And for those leaders that are listening, you know, like, what could you do differently? Well, you could think about a human, there's a before there's a during those and after to everything. Have you thought that out?

“Undesigned experiences lead to unpredictable outcomes. That's why that company had a”

scatterpot graph of all those different stores in the same company, producing different outcomes. Because the experiences were designed. Hey, leaders, you're an experienced designer. That means think about a holistically. Okay, I cut you off. Three significance. Yeah, so significance is the question, which comes off to harmony. But at some point, somebody's going to say, do you know my story and do you care? Like, just you know, I'm feeling

you can do my front story, my back story. And if you listen to the best leaders when you ask them,

how do you motivate people? The answer is always the same. They always say it depends on the person.

If you are ask a teacher, what's the best way to help a student learn? They'll say it depends on the student. You ask a doctor, what's the best way to help that person get better depends on the person. There is a point at which the experience has got to be individualized. Don't start there. That's why this is sequential. So many leaders get this wrong. No, no, start with control. Give me the rules. Give me the world. Help me know the world that how it works. At some point, oh,

I'm going to want you to individualize. Tell me you understand my story and what will change because of that story. That's significance. Opposite, of course, is insignificant. And everyone leans out when you start to realize that the leader doesn't really see you. That's a problem. The fourth

one is warmth of others. And it's the fourth one because at some point you pop your head above the

parapet line and you go, am I going through this alone? And so the question that people are asking

“and a loving experience is who's with me? How can they help? Who's with me? How can they help?”

So many companies have designed experience onboarding experiences for customers or onboarding as brands or employees, where you're going through it by yourself. There's no deliberate linking of you, not just to others in the social media sense, but the warmth of others. It's super interesting to me that the best patient outcomes and hospitals have come from a group called the hospitalist movement, where they looked at that siloed series, Ryan of like experiences

for patients. And they went, well, we're not going to change the entire structure of our hospital, but what we could do is we could give each patient a guide all the way through the handoff process and we'll call them a hospitalist, which they do. And they'll be a physician, like their healthcare professional, but their entire job is to explain you to all the other healthcare professionals and to explain all the other healthcare professionals to you. And as a result of that,

you feel held. There's one person in this case who's with you on your little journey. They're going to help you. We humans love that when we can see intentionally that we're not going through this in a way that's isolated. Well, there's so much that a leader could do for customers or from employees to maximize the warmth of others. I could get into the whole Jeep thing with Jeep Ducking and have wonderful it feels when you drive a Wrangler that people give you these plastic

ducks, but no one in Jeep tells you how to play. It's like they've got the natural organic warmth of others when you buy a Wrangler, but Jeep's not doing anything with it. It's crazy to

“me that they wouldn't maximize that in some way. What would you do for them? What advice do you give them?”

Well, so you got to be careful going back to your point about authenticity. You can't blow it

And here's we put it on the left side of the hood, not the right. The green ducks mean this, and the white ducks, but I wouldn't do anything like that at all. I would instead tell stories about Jeep owners. I would have stories about what people love about their Jeep. And I would share it as an ongoing narrative, a web of love. For when you buy a Jeep, you're a certain kind of person, and we've got lots and lots and lots of stories about that. And the way in which you recognize

somebody else in the world that has that is you give them a duck. Why a duck? And I would tell the story of Caroline, the Canadian person who came up with Jeep ducking, and her whole thing was just

“pale at a love forward. And that's what Jeep Wrangler's all about, pale at a love forward. And hey,”

here in this dealership, you can buy some ducks. We don't care how you use them. It's just about being connected to one another in this crazy world about like that's how I would do it. And I would make it feel kind of human and messy and idiosyncratic. And like it just came from Caroline, wasn't us, but we love it. And we support it. Like there's so many ways you could do it in a nurturing way, rather than a mechanistic way. But actually at the moment, they didn't like no one tells

you how to play. I just came back one day and there was a duck on my finger. What's that? That's weird. All right, the fifth one's growth. The fifth one's growth. The fifth one's growth. The fifth one's growth. The fifth one's growth. The fifth one's love is a forward facing emotion. If you love

anyone, then you don't imagine they're ever finished. You always imagine they're going to wake

up the next day and have to face the world again. So we're everyone in any experience is asking

“themselves on some level is how will this experience make me more capable? How would it make me”

more capable tomorrow? And so there's so many lovely little ways in which you as a leader can help people feel more capable. A tip, a trick, an idea, a thought, anything could be big, could be small. But that is actually the last feeling on the sequence. Don't start there because people won't give you the right to. And this is what we get wrong when we think about designing love and we think it's just, well, we'll throw a bit of growth and we'll throw a bit of warmth and we'll build it backwards,

we'll start with growth and then warmth and it's like, no, what's happening is feeling by feeling

by feeling we're taking off one plate of armor. And if you haven't taken off the first four,

you can't hit them with growth. It's like banks who try to teach you about financial fluency, but they haven't done any of the first four. So you're not available emotionally or psychologically for that learning. So as a leader, every leader should know, like, this is a sequence. There's a lot of stuff you could do to give people a feeling of control. Okay, figure that out. Then, on-goingly, there's a lot of stuff you could do to give people the feeling that you know what they're

feeling and you care. And by the way, simplest thing the leaders could do would be ignore growth, ignore warmth above this, even ignore significant. Just start with the first two. And I would suggest you just check in with each of your people for 15 minutes, one by one, every week. And just ask them, how do you feel about last week? What do you work on this week? How can I help? Last week, how do you feel? What do you work on this week? How can I help? Do that 50, 2 times a year with each

person individually. And you'll hit control and hit harmony. Hit control and hit up. I'd argue your hit significance, too. Because over time, people will feel like you see them. But if you wanted to operationalize love, which does sound a little weird, but if you wanted to operationalize that, you could do a lot worse than put in place that simple check in rhythm. Because it will hit

those first two feelings so well. Marcus, we opened talking about you and being the fool who blew

it up. I want to close by talking about you. Let's fast forward exactly one year from today. And you are surrounded by the people you love and that love you and you guys are pop and bottles.

“Right? You're celebrating like crazy. What are you celebrating?”

Well, gosh, I am doing this because I have kids and I don't want them to continue to grow into a world that is accepting of the pragmatic sense of lovelessness, loveless schools, loveless hospitals, loveless workplaces. I don't think that's okay. We know from data that humans don't thrive in loveless environments at all. We can get by things function, but on some level they're broken. And one of the things I'm going to do is create a free app,

which is going to sound silly as I say this now. But I'm just going to have a free app that's got like a staple's easy button on it. And it allows you to just be a slider, loving, unloving, loving, unloving. And I'm going to give it away and just so listen, add your light to the sum of light. I've made an AI that's all they're doing. They know everything that's in the book, everything that's in the last 30 years of research, and all it really is is a design partner.

And behind the paywall if you like is going to be, this AI will sit there as your design partner, loving, unloving. Whatever experience it is, it could be the bank, it could be the car rental counter, it could be your work, loving, unloving. And if it's unloving or loving, then you can just tell

more love into that. And then you can send that to whoever. So all of us, this is like a

“beautiful use of AI, I think, is that sometimes it's tricky for us to figure out, how do I make”

it more loving? I don't know. I've never, I'm at muscle's atrophied. I don't know what to do. But what

you can do is notice, you can notice what's loving or what's not. It's call it what it is. There's a whole bunch of stuff in our world right now. It's unloving. Let's not have complicated yellow reviews or complicated Amazon. We don't need a scalar one. It's five or nothing. So it's love or not love. They're tough. Everyone use that. And then we can have a really smart, tightly precisely defined AI help you think about ways in which you can make it more loving. And if we all add our voices

to that, right? We get a world where, from the bottom up, we've got a whole group of people going, it's not okay to live in a loveless world. A loveless world doesn't mean, like, for us, we want more love in the world because humans flourish in that way. It doesn't mean soft. It doesn't mean woman gooey. It doesn't mean cumbaya. It doesn't mean that we should call out unloving when we see it. And it shouldn't

be okay to leave it that way. So if I was popping champagne, I would have 10 billion downloads.

Let's go with 10 million. 10 million downloads of that free app. And people would be able to use it in their life to add a little bit of their own light to the sum of light. So good. The book's called design love in how to unleash the most powerful force in business. Thanks again, Marcus, for writing

“it, just like your past work. So good. And so useful. So practical. So important. Honestly,”

just so important. And I love this topic. And I love that we got a chance to talk about it. And we use the word love more in this conversation than maybe any I've ever had. So thank you. I loved it. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progressmen. Well, me too, mate. Thank you so much to have me on. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are sent me a note, Ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know. You

learned from this great conversation with Marcus Buckingham. A few takeaways from my notes name, your non-negotiable's Marcus is clear. The opposite of design is drift. Decide what loving leadership looks like in your world. And then commit to it, write it down, make it real, make it visible. Remember, we got to start with control. The first feeling of love is giving people orientation. Before your next new hire on boarding or team meeting, ask yourself, does this person

know what world they're walking into and how to navigate it? They need to start with control. How about checking in weekly one on one? Not a performance review. Not a status update.

A real conversation with another real human being. Marcus says, the single most powerful

loving practice a leader can do. Most leaders skip it. They get busy. Got other things going on. Do not be most leaders. Check in weekly one on one. Make sure everybody is good and progressing. Then ask two questions about every major decision. How does this help our customers love us more? How does this help our employees love working here more? Not every choice. We'll satisfy them both. But leaders who ask these consistently will be more effective. Once again, I want to say thank you

so much for continuing the spread of message and telling our friend or two, spreading the love. Hey,

“you should listen to this episode of the learning leadership with Marcus Buckingham. I think”

it'll help people become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and you love on the learning leadership. Right to review, rated hopefully five stars. Do all of that. You are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so so much, fucking soon. Hey, wait.