Steve  0:08  
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Steve  0:58  
Welcome back to the At Work in America show. My name is Steve Boese, and I am so excited today. It's a Monday morning as we record this where I live, and I can't think of a better way to start the week than to talk to a great friend of ours, great friend of the show. I haven't seen him in a while, and it's great to see Marcus Buckingham is with us. We're going to be talking about his new book, Design Love In, which is coming out April 7. Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. Marcus, welcome back to the show. It's great to see you. How are you?

Marcus Buckingham  1:33  
It's great to see you too. Steve, I'm great. Yeah. I'm looking forward to this, looking forward to the book launch. It's an interesting time to be at work, and so hopefully this will start an interesting and productive conversation for folks as they think about what they're doing and the kind of value they want to add.

Steve  1:50  
Yeah, for sure. Marcus, well, great to see you again, and it can be a tough time to be talking about love, especially in the workplace, like I feel like today, many, if not most, organizations, are feeling the pressure right of the combined forces of efficiency, productivity, profitability, the influence of AI, which is becoming greater every day. And to talk about, hey, we need to take a step back. We need to stop. We need to really think about, how can we design love, and I want to talk to you about your definition of love in a second, into the organization, both for our customers, for our employees, the way we operate in our community. That can be maybe a tough sell when an organization is operating in a world which doesn't seem to value much of that, right, and values the transaction. So maybe we'll set some bigger context and think about, Hey, why do we need to be talking about love in these contexts now?

Marcus Buckingham  2:54  
Yeah, well, it's, you know, me. I'm a, I'm a data geek by sort of disposition. If you start with the data and you just look at the outcomes that we all want from business, whether it's ourselves or whether it's our customers. We want productivity. We want loyalty, advocacy. We want resilience. We want people telling their friends to come shop here or telling their friends to come work here. We want those extreme positive outcomes, and if you unpack those extreme positive outcomes, Steve, you bump into two really compelling discoveries. The first is that what drives those outcomes isn't directives, setting goals, giving coaching feedback or with customers, pricing and and doing loyalty programs, and I mean those things work for a short time. But if you really want to drive those outcomes sustainably, the first discovery you make is that experiences drive behaviors, drive outcomes. So if you want to actually get those outcomes sustainably, you've got to go back upstream and go, Well, if we want extreme positive outcomes, we've got to design extreme positive experiences, not extreme positive processes, not extreme positive silos. We need extreme positive experiences, and not just moments. I mean, an experience lives inside the person. Somehow they've picked up on all these touch points of an experience, and that's then what changes their behavior. So experiences are the raw material, if you like, of creating extreme positive outcomes, which means that for leaders, any leader, you better be really smart at being an experience maker. Do you are experience an experience maker? Whether you like it or not, the question is, are you? Is are you a skilled one? So that's the first discovery is that the raw material of any like, what do leaders do? They make experiences, which either drive the right behaviors and outcomes or the wrong ones? And the second is that if you unpack, well, what sort of experiences, and I pushed this away for so long, Steve, as you know, but if you really interview people, do focus groups with people that are having extreme positive experiences, either at work or as a customer, the word they instill typically reach for to define the experience is love. They'll say, I love that, I love this, I love that team, I love that brand, I love that movie, I love those shoes, I love the word we use to describe extreme positive experiences is love. And so we could push that away and say, it's not it's not businessy enough, it's not serious enough. They don't mean love. They mean passion or joy or engagement. And I did a lot of that, but, but honestly, the word that we use in natural language is love. And so what that leads to, of course, is a couple of things. One, love is the most powerful driver of any productive human behaviors. Love is the most powerful driver in business. Most leaders in businesses today can't even say the word, let alone have a strategy for unleashing it. It's the most bizarre thing. It's the most powerful driver of anything good, but we can't even talk about it. And second, if you really sort of unpack that, the two questions that any really smart business leader should be asking is simply, do we have more customers loving our business tomorrow than today? And do we have more people loving working here tomorrow than today. Not every decision will drive those two questions, Steve, but those are the two questions that predict the future value of your business. So love, in this case, is a supremely intelligent thing to be an expert in. And yet, frankly, you go to INSEAD, you go to Wharton, you go to Harvard Business School, there isn't a single class on how do you, as a leader, intentionally design experiences that people love. That's weird, and that's, in a sense, that's why I wrote the book. Steed was to go, Hey, this is the most powerful driver of anything good. We should probably unpack it a wee bit and figure out how we operationalize it. 

Steve  6:40  
It's super interesting that you, you kind of locked in on that, hey, this is the most important thing we should be talking about. Yet we're not, we're not really training for it. We're not educating for it. I love every so often you'll see in the in the business news, where someone takes, like, all the earn the transcripts of the earnings calls of the S&P 500 companies, and the CEOs and the CFOs who speak on those calls, and they say, Oh, this word was said so many more times. Or this thing was that uncertainty was said a bunch of times. Or AI was said, I bet if we scoured those transcripts for the word love, probably would hardly find it very rarely, right, like almost never and I wonder why that is.

Marcus Buckingham  7:23  
Well, I think there's two reasons, really, maybe there's 10 reasons. But yeah, I was in a room in New York awhile ago with the 30 top HR executives, the 30 biggest companies in the world, and I brought up some of this data on love. And we were there for two hours, and they eventually came around to being able to say the word in relation to customers. Yes, we want customers to love our brand. They never became comfortable saying the word in relationship to their own employees. 

Steve  7:52  
Interesting.

Marcus Buckingham  7:53  
I think, on one level, because they've become it's like the rise of the General Council, you know, HR, as you well know, is the sort of bastard child of human development and legal. And at the moment, we're living in a world in which legal is winning. We are in the HR community, particularly, protecting the company from the employees. Yeah, that seems to be like, and therefore love. It's like, Heck, we're trying to design love out man. We are trying to design love out of the workplace. Are you kidding? So there's an awful lot of kind of the the the prevailing wisdom inside of HR is we need to be compliant. We need to be transactional. We need to be lined up and locked in so that, so that we don't let the company be harmed by whatever it is we're saying to or for the employees. So some part of it, I think, is that it's the domination of legal over HR, but the other part of it is we don't know from data. We don't know from data. We don't take love seriously, because we think like if you were to measure experiences on a scale of one to five, with five being strongly positive and one being strongly negative. We think, and I know this is going to sound a little data wonky, but we think the relationship between experiences at time one and outcomes at time two is linear, which means we think that if we move a two experience which is below average to a three experience which is average, or we move a three experience two of four, which is above average, we get the same amount of performance increase or outcomes increase like and if we have a lot of people or a lot of customers that are in the two, three or four range, it sure looks as though it's sensible to ignore the fives and just focus on moving the twos to the threes and the threes to the fours. In fact, we then put the fours with the fives, and we call that percent favorable. The percentages of people saying fours and fives is bigger. So it's a good thing to present to the board, you know. But actually, the truth of the matter is, and I you know, meta analytically across study after study after study, this is so clear, the relationship between experiences and outcomes is what's called curvilinear which means it's a hockey stick. Basically, moving a two experience to a three doesn't drive any behavior at all. Moving a three experience to a four doesn't drive behavior at all. It's only when you move a four experience to a five you do something with customers or employees where they go five, that's when you can start to predict what they're going to do next, whether it's productivity or loyalty or resilience or retention. So so we're living in a world where we've got the data wrong. Fours aren't fives. Fours are threes. Are twos or ones. In terms of prediction, if we are in HR, if we're in the prediction business, namely, we're trying to create experiences which actually predict what people are going to do. We've got to understand that fives are different. Fours predict nothing, nothing. So for your listeners, if you take nothing away from our time on this call, don't ever put fours with fives again. Don't ever use net promoter score again. Don't ever put nines with 10s.

Steve  10:54  
If it's above 80, it's good enough kind of thing.

Marcus Buckingham  11:00  
The score is based on the idea of a linear relationship between experiences and outcomes. Like you take the nines and the 10s, and from that, you subtract the sixes and below, and you get your net promoter score. That is complete bunkum, yeah. From a measurement standpoint, sixes aren't the same as as 10s. 10s are different. You can't subtract. It's like subtracting oranges from apples. Net Promoter Score was made by people of Bain who didn't know from data. Sorry, Bain, but they didn't know from data, and we, in HR, thought it was okay. And so we don't take love seriously because we don't take fives seriously because we don't know data. So it's funny, like you end up with love, which is all sort of com by R. And if you're not careful, it gets a bit smushy, but it starts from, like, data fluency. Hey, HR leaders, you got to understand the curvilinear relationship between experiences and the behaviors you want. If you don't get that, then you're in thrall to an understanding of the world that isn't real. 

Steve  11:59  
And you've got a great you've got this chart in the book that describes this and shows it right, that hockey stick where essentially almost nothing happens, right outcome, right from ones to twos to threes to fours, and then it shoots up into the right as you move people into those five experiences. And certainly, you know, the argument we're making is focusing on, how do we develop, how do we create those experiences and foster those experience well, we have to demonstrate. We have to do it differently. It's not optimizing transactions, right? It's not compliance engine, you know, accountability 100% it's something else. And I guess that's maybe what we should talk about next. Is as you as a leader, okay, if I'm buying the data, I accept that as truth, and I want to create these five experiences. What's my path to create those? And I think we're, we're so focused on the optimization, transactional side of this, this, this lever, certainly in HR, I think we are. I Yeah, I'd love your thoughts on let's start thinking about the creation of those five experiences. 

Marcus Buckingham  13:06  
It's almost like the first thing we have to do is move we live in a one three world, where we are fixated on the ones, and moving into threes, which is your transactional thing, where it's like, Oh, we got a one. Let's say it's we'll do exit interviews with people that leave, and we'll study a lot about the exit to figure out which isn't bad. No one's suggesting that's bad, but that moves you to a three. We need to move into a 1, 3, 5, world. Those leaders that are really going to make a difference in building the kind of workplaces which customers want to shop at or come to or employees want to work at. You got to live in a 1, 3, 5 world, which means you got to be super curious about the fives. Why? Because they drive behavior. Nothing else does. I mean, it's that blunt. So if you unpack the fives, as I mentioned before, the word people say is love, love, love, love, love, which is sort of, you know, mea culpa. I pushed that away for decades, yeah, and changed the word to engagement or passion or joy, but the word they use is love. And so the question for us, which is an interesting sort of question, which sort of question, which every leader should unpack, is, what do people mean when they say that? Because if we wanted to create more people saying that, we better understand what the ingredients are. And by the way, the whole point of the book is that love isn't a coating. Doesn't mean do something lovingly. Doesn't mean do it friendly or nicely. Loves, not a coating. It's an ingredient. You can design it in to recruiting, to onboarding, to performance management. So you can design it in, or you could design it out. So it's an ingredient.

Steve  14:32  
And specifically in the book, you talk about tough love, quote, unquote, being quite valuable at times.

Marcus Buckingham  14:36  
L doesn't mean soft like, if you go, how do we use the word love? Because we use it in all sorts of weird context. Steed, right. We I love this desk, I love my mom, I love that leader, I love that movie. Like it looks initially as though we're just careless in using that word, but we actually, if you look at when we use that word around the world, this is around the world. This isn't the US. Based around the world, when we when we humans, instinctively put the word love, there is a common meaning, and the meaning is what drives the behavior, by the way, and the meaning, if I could say it the way, the way I define it in the book, is it's a deep and unwavering commitment to the flourishing of a human. When we choose the word love, it's because something about that experience enabled us to flourish to if you imagine, we all go through life like wrapped up like an armadillo, armor plated, because the world's scary, but inside of us, we know we've got something inside of us that needs to come out. We want our life to give us a chance to express it, so any experience we bump into that allows us to take off one little plate of armor and express some little part of us, and it could be something as daft as a pair of socks. I love those socks. Why? Because I don't know. I just feel a bit more me when I put them on. I love that song. Why? Well, I don't know what the chords were or anything, but something about the way that that verse went, it just touched me. Sure, I love that leader. Why? Well, because she cut through my performance rating and actually saw me, which goes by the way to tough love. Because sometimes you go the toughest conversations I've ever had with anyone is with someone who loved me and who said, look, it's the wrong job for you, man, I put you in it, but you're not going to flourish in it. So if you think that love is really the removal of armor plating. Any experience which gets us to take one little plate of armor off and we open up a little bit, it's like, what's the definition of flourishing is, is feeling more fully yourself over time. Okay? Any experience which makes us feel more fully ourselves over time, we attach the word love to that which doesn't mean soft, it means expression. And so if you think about the fives, the fives is really any flipping experience. It could be sitting at the deli counter, it could be renting a car. It could be joining a team, any experience where we get somehow, some little chance to be seen or love, some little chance to express what's inside of us. The word we reach for, instinctively for that is love. Yeah. Now the question, of course, is, okay, well, fine. Well, how do you operationalize that? How do you design that in Well, that's a whole different set of questions, but the first thing for a leader to really get curious about is when people are reaching for that word. In my context, on my team, in my business, what do they mean by flourishing? What do they mean by becoming or feeling more fully yourself over time? How do I What are the touch points I could use to design that in? Not easy, but pretty darn impossible if you're not even trying. 

Steve  17:42  
Then also figuring out, hey, are these strategies I'm pursuing or these interventions I'm implementing? Are they being effective? How do I find out? What's my mechanism to understand? You know, because I think we only we are. So maybe this is a fundamental thing, and I started having problems with this a decade ago in the HR context, was, this is maybe a stretch, but I'll say it anyway, it became very fashionable to tell everybody in HR, you must stop what you're doing and go get an MBA. Like that was like the code for a while, probably 7, 8, 10, years. And I feel like that was the impetus, at least in this field, to sort of take some of this away and drive us all towards sort of this optimization, transactional relationship with people who became just, you talk about this in the book quite, quite, quite a lot just just cogs or just resources, or just the the idea of calling people an FTE, right, which is so dehumanizing in many ways, right, the FTE, that we went that direction, and we went way too far on it in this business.

Marcus Buckingham  18:54  
Well, if we're going to say, Listen, what are you as a leader, whether you're in HR, whether you're just in some other discipline of function. You're an experience maker. You are making experiences that drive behaviors. Okay, well, then we ought to be pretty expert in experience design. How do you with every experience, there's a before, there's a during, there's an after. With every experience, you've got a whole person moving through that entire experience. And yet, we often design experiences for process which leads to a lot of silos, which leads to a lot of handoffs. Handoffs are unloving because you've probably felt whenever you call your insurer. Let's say you have to tell your story to the three people that you get handed off to. We live in a world of handoffs. HR has disintegrated itself, literally, over the last 30 years. So if you call somebody about family leave, it's a different person than if you call someone about an employee relations issue, it's a different person if you call about a compensation issue, and you're going to have to just repeat your whole life story almost from one to another. It's unloving. It's super unloving. And then we in HR wonder why loyalty has fallen through the floor, or engagement is so low we've designed love. Out and and the most obvious place to see you and I were talking about this, but if you go to the HR Technology Conference, I mean, almost all of the HR tools are extensions human capital management tools, particularly, are extensions of financial tools. Well, they are fundamentally built on financial systems. And so that's where the FTE comes from. It's really, it's really sort of insidious that the language we start to use to talk about humans who flourish only in loving environments becomes increasingly love less. FTE isn't a bad word combination, it's but it's fundamentally Loveless, as is the word head count. Yeah, can I have half a head? I need to go get a head. Yeah. And we need to be really careful. I mean, Disney people can laugh about, well, we they call all their people cast members. No, no. That's really intelligent. That is experience intelligence in action, language matters, yeah. And when you call, when you call all your people, FTEs, as you were saying, you've basically reduced the human to an element of a financial transaction. And we in HR are okay with that. We've become okay with that, so that we almost don't know how to talk about our people if we don't call them headcount or FTEs, yeah, because of the MBAs. And it's like we've we've allowed ourselves to be reduced to elements of a transaction, because we've been told that unless we understand finances, we can't sit at the table, right? And what we've missed is our job was never to count things. A pig doesn't get any fatter by weighing it every day. When you go to MBA school, you learn how to weigh a pig a lot. What we got to do is figure out, well, how do you make it this is a bad analogy, I realize, as I'm going on with this, how do you make the pig fatter? What are the experiences that we've got to create in recruiting, in onboarding, in the way in which we do performance management, in the way in which we do team building, how do we design experiences so that we get more productivity, more collaboration, more innovation, more resilience? That's, that's we're in the business in HR of predicting the future. We're not in the business of transacting the today, yeah, unless we are, in which case we're not very valuable, right?

Steve  22:23  
And you can make an increasingly persuasive argument that the technology today is become so proficient and so effective, it's going to handle all that stuff for you anyway, totally. So if you're, if you're in an HR person, I would be thinking, if we have to appeal to your sense of self preservation at a base that's fine, that the technology is going to take away the compliance stuff and the transaction stuff and the payroll processing stuff and the counting things, right? Yeah, technology is better at it anyway than the people are. So where does that leave you? Right?

Marcus Buckingham  22:56  
Where it leaves you interestingly, is you're in the experience making business, AI and tech in general, they don't do experience making very well at all. Best, best, best case somebody. Maybe we put an AI in place to enable you to figure out some issue to do with your pay, and we put an AI bot in there. Well, it might be better than a really grumpy employee who actually was outsourced anyway. So it doesn't even work for your company? Yeah, so maybe it's better to talk to an AI than it is to talk to an employee who's grumpy, who's going to sludge you and almost make it deliberately more friction filled. Okay, fine. You've gone from a one to a three, but if you but that doesn't drive anything, it doesn't drive anything, it doesn't drive productive behavior. So for us in HR, we've got to realize that and go, the only people that are really, really good at creating experiences for other people are people, and if we've lost the fluency in that, well, that doesn't mean it's not vitally important. It means we've lost the fluency in that. And if we want to preserve our jobs, we will define a world by the way in which experiences drive behaviors drive outcomes. So if you want great outcomes, you got to make experiences. And then we, in the HR function, particularly, should come into that space and go we know from experience building, we are not where that's what humans do for other humans. We think about all of the elements of, how do you make an experience? Of, say, onboarding, that when the person gets done with it, they're like, I love this company. Normally, we don't even think about that, because we don't know the data, so that we don't think the fives, it's fives, and everything else is just not a five. We don't, we don't hold ourselves to that standard, because we haven't sort of unpacked all the data. But if we did, then, lo and behold, all of a sudden, we become vitally important to getting more and more people in the company to go, I flip and love this company, which, of course, is the metric.

Steve  24:45  
And not completion percentage of various forms along the way, which we know we need to do great but, but that's typically the metric, right? That's typically what we're we're measuring on in the pace of completion and accuracy, etc, etc. 

Marcus Buckingham  24:59  
So, just one quick thing on that, Steve, you know, we, we do end up measuring the wrong things, even with employee surveys, or, as you said, like completion percentages and so forth. The simplest way that you would measure how much love is in the system, like, if I could wave my magic wand, the simplest thing you'd have is a love that dial, love that didn't love that, love that, didn't love that of any, any part of an experience, and we don't break it down into dimensions. We're not breaking it down into sort of all those mystery shopper categories of, did you feel this? And did you feel that? It's like, no, did you love it or not? Did you love it or not? We could revel it. If you and I we wanted to go start a business, the business we would blow up is employee sentiment, measurement, yeah, which is too slow, it's too complicated, it's too everything. You just have a dial that just was like love, that didn't love that. And that way the CEO, at any time, would be able to know how much love is in the system. Are we getting more love? Are we getting less? And then we could figure out what to do in order to get more of it. But we've over we so over complicated how we measure employee experience.

Steve  26:00  
One of the things I love about the book, Marcus, the book's called Design Love In, how to unleash the most powerful force in business, is you offer some really actionable and practical ideas to do just that, to design love in. Now, we can't, obviously cover all of it, right? We want folks to go out get the book and read it. It's, you know, it's not a super long book, but it's longer than a 20 minute conversation can cover. But you you're not just telling people, oh, you should love your people more or love your customers more and be more softy, touchy feely. It's not that at all, right, you offer some really specific ideas for designing the systems and the processes around these concepts and bringing more love in. I'd love for you maybe to share a couple of either examples or stories that maybe you encountered in doing the research for the book or the interviews you did. You know, what's one or two things you'd love to people just to grab onto which will sort of, you know, pique them interest into learning more about this and how they can do it in their organization well.

Marcus Buckingham  26:54  
Every organization is different, of course, and every person is different. Is different. But if you the main body, sort of the heart of the book, was, if you go to study people who go, I love that, and you reverse engineer that, and you go, How'd they get there? Let's say they're just starting with a company, but then 90 days in, they're like, I love that. Or maybe they're a customer who's just walking into your restaurant, whatever. And then afterwards, they're walking around with love in their heart. How'd they get that? Was it just magic? Was it service recovery? Like what how did, how did you go from an initial part of an experience to walking around saying, I love that? Well, if you reverse engineer it, Steve, you you find that there is a sequence, not a hierarchy, a sequence of five feelings. And we humans, although we are different, if you were to say sort of meta analytically, what are the five feelings that lead to love? Well, here's what they are. And of course, what that turns into is a blueprint for how do you design them in and I'll just run through them real quick, because they lead then to actions that you can take. The first feeling, weirdly, is control, okay? And I don't mean control over someone else. Humans lean into an experience when we feel like we understand what the experience is. What is the world you're asking me to move into? What decisions can I make? What tools do you give me and do they work? So anything you can do somebody that is mission, like, who are we as a company? What do we stand for? Chick fil A going We're closed on Sunday. That is a lovable that's a loving action in the past when Southwest Airlines said we do not assign seats. That is that, weirdly, that gives you control, because you can go, I as a passenger, I'll either go for that experience or won't. It's so beautifully clear. Clarity leads to control. The next feeling is harmony. Harmony is the feeling that you understand what I'm feeling. In the UK, we found a whole bunch of nurses who give painless injections, and we're like, Well, how did how do they do that? Yeah, and it turns out that they all say the same thing before they plunge the needle, and they all said some version of and they said it differently. Some were very lovable, and some are very business like it wasn't their tone wasn't the thing it was. They all said, this is going to hurt a little bit. I'll try to make it hurt as little as I can. And just in saying what you're feeling, you share the pain. You rate the pain lower. So harmony is the second feeling. The third feeling is significance, which means, do you understand my story and do you care? So if you want to design love in as a leader, whether it's for customers or employees, at some point in the journey, people want to know that it depends on me. Not right away, right away, I want, I want the rules. That's what control is. Tell me the rules. I want those. But at some point I want you to go, do you understand my front and back story? And if you understand the front and back story, how did I get here? What did I what am I going through today? Then, does anything change? Does any part of my route change? That's significance, the opposite of which, of course, is insignificance. And when we feel that, we lean way the heck out. Yeah, the fourth feeling is warmth of others. We humans hate going through experiences by ourselves. We hate being isolated. So at some point. You're you're going to respond to my question, which is often unspoken, by the way, Steed, but the question I have is, who's with me, and how can they help who is with me? How can they help? You look around and we see, even in things like onboarding, we humans don't like to feel isolated at all. We lean into an experience in which we can feel that there are people going through this with us together. How have you orchestrated that? How have you played into that? I own a Jeep, and and Jeep has the most wonderful organic warmth of others, which they weirdly do nothing with, right? There's a thing called Jeep ducking, where no one told me how to play this game. I just came back one day. There's a bunch of plastic ducks all over my Jeep and you want to go. And of course, it turns out there was some Canadian woman who decided one day to put a duck on somebody else's Jeep to make them feel better. If she had a Wrangler, they had a Wrangler, I don't know. Goodness. Anyway, you caught on. So now there's Jeep ducking all over. Does Jeep do anything with that? Not a thing. Not a thing. There's a couple of dealerships to do. But what could you know as a leader, we want the warmth of others. And then the last one is growth. The last feeling is growth. Love is a forward facing emotion. So if you love anyone, you don't imagine they're ever finished. They're never completed. They've got to wake up tomorrow and face the world again. And so any small thing you could it could be the smallest thing. My company was bought by ADP. They paid 25 million people every two weeks. But it's not a paycheck, it's actually a communication device. What could ADP be doing to be able to teach you one small thing about financial literacy, one small thing about what you could do with the money they get, a paychecks, a communication device. Just so you know, there's such a strong link between love and learning and loyalty. So if you think about those five feelings, Steve, of control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, and growth. Each one of those. As a leader, you can start going, Oh, how do I give people more of a feeling of control? Have I done that? Have I told them what decisions they can make in this environment? Or have I done what Martin settlement called learned helplessness? Have I actually given them a bunch of tools that don't work, or have I actually been super unclear about what decisions they're allowed to make, you know? And yeah, you could go through, like almost, almost step by step. You could look at each of those five feelings as an imperative for, how do you design love into a process.

Steve  32:20  
And when you look at it that way, when you break it down into those components, it becomes less opaque. It becomes less just amorphous. And which we talked about at the beginning of the conversation about, hey, it's easy to walk away from some of this stuff or not want to talk about it, right? You're in your meeting with the CHROs, of those large companies. They're uncomfortable even talking about love, because it's hard to define, very difficult to measure traditionally...

Marcus Buckingham  32:45  
But if you look at like, if you look at control and harmony, let's say, and you're trying to you're trying to design a process as a leader for your characters to hug children in parks, which is a real challenge that the Walt Disney Company faced, obviously. Now, if your general counsel for Walt Disney way back when, you would say, we don't want, I'm sorry, we do not want our cast members hugging any children. They very much. There's a rule in place that says Thou shalt not hug. The Disney Company was like, Well, no, no, we're not going to do that. But how would you how would you operationalize hugging a kid. Well, what's super interesting is that the way that they did it, if you think about control and harmony, who, how do we give that kid a feeling of control, and how do we meet them where they're at and the kids three, how do you do that? How do you teach cast members how to do that? That seems like a completely insurmountable challenge, but, of course, they solved it because they are not perfect at all, but but very intelligent experientially. They created the Disney hugging rule, which is, which is what they tell their cast members, you don't Stop hugging the kid until the kid stops hugging. You don't Stop hugging till the kid stops hanging. Okay? That is a so sophisticated as a way to design love into something not run away from it? Yeah, Allied General Counsel is going don't touch a kid. No, no. There's a way to do this. There's a way to do this. Contrast that with like what Mike Nichols, is doing right now at Starbucks, where he's told all the baristas. Now, let's go back to what we used to do and put words on a cup. Write words on a cup. We used to write words on a cup. We're going to write words on a cup, but there's no control. There's no harmony. So the guest is like or the customer. Think about the control of the customer. Why are you doing that? What's that for? Who are you for me? When they used to write words on a cup, it was because Starbucks stood their mission was about the third space. The mission was about a place absent, you know, home and work, that you could come to, that you could on, take off, a couple of those, those plates of armor, yeah, and harmony. Like people used to write stuff that really fit you. The barista was motivated and incented to think about, who is that guest, what they're going through. You can't just come in, ask what he's doing right now, and just go write words on a cup. It's unloving. It's mechanistic, yeah, functional, but it doesn't work. 

Steve  35:07  
It becomes transactional. Hey, you didn't, it's that old hacky thing. Oh, you didn't have the enough pieces of flair, right? From, from the opposite movie, right? It becomes that. It becomes meaningless, right? It's, yes, it's Marcus, man. I'm gonna tell you what this this is great work. This is a great conversation. I'm going to encourage everybody listening to on April 7 or pre order, if you can Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business, you will take away things from, hopefully, from this conversation, took away a couple things, but from the book, you will take away great ideas, great strategies and great ways to influence your organization for the best. And honestly, we need it right now. It is not an easy time to be in organizations, particularly large organizations, right? You are the incentives to drive towards the transaction, to drive towards efficiency, only to drive towards things we can concretely measure and count, like we talked about, that's maybe never been higher. But I also think through because of that, because of what's happening with AI, the lack of trust, right? Trust is down in all institutions in the United States, right? According to most survey data, is about who do you trust in terms of institutions, government, business, the church, you know, my the school, I don't trust anybody. This is the time is right for this, I believe, and I hope, I hope that lots of people buy the book and also, but not just that. Just really think about these things in their workplace.

Marcus Buckingham  36:46  
Amen to that. Yeah, the time is now we're living in an increasingly loveless world. And as we say in the book, you get more of what you accept, and if you keep allowing ourselves to find it acceptable to treat other people the way that we do, to think that companies really are just functional efficiency makers. If that's really all we're doing, then at some point you fast forward and 10 years or so, and we will have completely lost our fluency in how to create experiences that help people flourish, which, if you think about the world of HR is entirely what our darn job is. So for us, it's more important than ever to become serious about the environments and experiences that help humans flourish. It is a win. Win. Steve, I think, I mean, there's if you want sustainable business outcomes and you don't know from love well, then you're experientially unintelligent. It's unintelligent to not be able to think about and be clear about what needs to be designed into experiences to make them flourish.

Steve  37:45  
And I wore my special shirt for today's show. I love shirt that I dug out of the closet for today, but I love the book Marcus. I love talking to you. It's great to see you again. It's been a while, but I'm so glad we're able to connect today and talk about this. And yeah, let's have a come back soon, hopefully, and we can talk some more about this. And just that's I would love it too, man, it's been I love this conversation. And thank you again. We'll put link links to get in touch with Marcus and his company. The book, of course, will be on the show notes as well. Marcus, thanks so much for spending some time. I know you're super busy running into the launch of the book here in another week or so. We really appreciate taking the time today.

Marcus Buckingham  38:18  
Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me great stuff.

Steve  38:18  
Thank you, Marcus, thanks everybody for listening. Thanks to our friends at Workhuman, of course, and man, thanks everybody for checking out the show. Go to hrhappyur.net. For all the archives and anywhere you get your podcasts. And my name is Steed Boese, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time, and bye for now. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai