Season 2, Episode 29: Zach Mercurio

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Jack Hubbard: Well, as I mentioned in the intro. I have been really looking forward to talking with Zach Mercurio. Dr. Mercurio and I have gotten to know each other over the past couple of months.

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Jack Hubbard: and he wrote this amazing book that comes out on May 13th the power of mattering, and I got an advanced copy and look, it's all dog-eared, and there's all kinds of notes on it, and I'm sure that's exactly what Zach wanted. One of the things I loved about the book, and we're going to talk about it is I really related to it, because early in the book he talks about janitorial workers. And and that's a group that

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Jack Hubbard: typically don't see in a book. And I related it because my dad was a was a janitor, and and we'll talk more about that, Zach. What a privilege to have you on today!

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Zach Mercurio: Thanks, Jack, and thanks for reading the book. You're one of the 1st

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Jack Hubbard: Well, you know, it's so interesting to me. I have you and other authors on the on the program, and people say that to me all the time like you actually read the book.

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Jack Hubbard: and well, you said it to me. Why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I read it? But that's that's not true of every interviewer, I think

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Zach Mercurio: It's not true, and I mean and it makes a it makes a big difference, because I'm particularly interested in that. How it hits you as a person.

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Zach Mercurio: and you sharing with me that your family and janitorial work, and how it aligns and syncs up to my study my initial study on janitorial work is really amazing. So I'm glad that's the synchronicity that happens with good preparation

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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, no, that's really true. And I want to dive into the book. But but let's let's start earlier on in your career. Your research, your education, talk a little bit about your background. And what got you to this point?

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Zach Mercurio: I've always been a questioner, and I've always been incredibly interested in how people worked, both, how people work literally. And then also how people work what makes them tick. And I was in an entry level sales position, actually, my 1st job out of college. And I had gotten that job because I was educated for success. I thought success was, Hey, I want to go and

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Zach Mercurio: make a lot of money and be able to say, Hey, I'm in sales.

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Zach Mercurio: But I very quickly realized in that job, as I became more observant of how people around me were doing their work, how they were thinking about their work than the than the work itself.

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Zach Mercurio: and that fascination only grew as I was on my travels to and from sales calls in Washington, DC. Talking to cab drivers when you took cabs, metro conductors, people cleaning the streets, and I found something really inspiring when I talked to these people doing everyday work was that there was a lot of joy. There's a lot of joy out there in everyday work.

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Zach Mercurio: and what I found is that the people who experienced that Joy tended to think about how they were contributing through their work.

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Zach Mercurio: and not about what they were getting from their work.

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Zach Mercurio: and I became obsessed with this idea, and I wanted to study more on what contributes to people experiencing that sense of meaning. And so I ended up leaving that 1st job, and I ended up finding

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Zach Mercurio: that you can research this. You can study this, you know, I studied adult education. And then I studied organizational learning, performance and change. And my focus was on how we develop experiences where people can see themselves and their work as meaningful.

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Zach Mercurio: And that's what led me to what I'm doing today. I'm a part time researcher spent 30% of my time in a place called the Center for meaning and purpose. And then the rest of my time is, I'm out with leaders actually trying some of the work that we're doing

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Jack Hubbard: And you have. And, as I mentioned in the Intro United States Army, Marriott International, Jpmorgan Chase, you've helped a lot of very large companies. And it seems to me, with your 2 books that you have really focused in on leadership and purpose and mattering what drove you to. I mean, that's a pretty narrow niche, and it's an important one. What drove you to that

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Zach Mercurio: Well, I think it comes back to our fundamental needs as human beings.

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Zach Mercurio: You know, I wrote my 1st book on purpose, which is making sure that you know how you're contributing. Your purpose is where your unique gifts make a unique impact.

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Zach Mercurio: you know, for an organization. It's it's if you were to write your organization's obituary. What would people be missing about your organization? What would be missed if you were gone?

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Zach Mercurio: Of what use are you to the world.

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Zach Mercurio: And if you don't have that, if you don't have that bigger purpose, that bigger, why, that bigger will to continue on, very difficult to have harmonized energy

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Zach Mercurio: in life or in an organization. Eric Klinger is a psychologist, and one of my favorite lines, he writes, the human brain cannot sustain purposeless living

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Zach Mercurio: like we are wired to contribute. We're wired to be interdependent. So I wrote that 1st book to kind of serve as that

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Zach Mercurio: that force right, that pulling force for an organization. But then I had a realization in 2019 and then going into the pandemic. And it it was that people were having a very difficult time of believing that they had purpose

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Zach Mercurio: in their work. You know, an organization would have a big purpose statement. But then people on the front line doing the everyday work, would say, oh, well, you know, I'm just doing this anytime. I hear the word just.

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Zach Mercurio: I'm just an accountant. I'm just this. I'm just a line worker. I'm just in finance.

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Zach Mercurio: I there's a signal in my mind that goes off and says that this is a significance issue. There's something that's not aligning up. And I started reading on what must come before purpose.

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Zach Mercurio: And that's the belief that we matter.

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Zach Mercurio: So if you want someone to find their contribution to see their contribution. They 1st have to believe they're worthy of contributing.

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Zach Mercurio: If you want people to use their strengths, they 1st have to believe that they have them. If you want people to care about something in your organization, they 1st have to feel cared for, and I was like the Missing Link is people's everyday experience of mattering. You can have a job that matters, but not experience mattering in your job. And so I actually think, what's fun about this is, I think this book is the Prequel

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Zach Mercurio: to my 1st book.

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Zach Mercurio: that we have to go back to cultivating relationships in which people can see that they're worthy, and they're capable so they can do all of the things that we want for them.

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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, it's interesting. And you talk about the why. And that certainly relates to purpose. And if somebody was doing some kind of a Rorschach test, and and I said to you the word why, you would immediately associate it with somebody who you are associated with, and that's Simon Sinek.

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Jack Hubbard: You work with Simon Sinek in the Optimism Company, and I got to believe that everybody that's now heard this. This comment is jealous because Simon Sinek is just the deal. Talk about the optimism company, and what's it like to work? Simon Sinek

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Zach Mercurio: Well, Simon and I are great compliments. I mean, he's always told me that he's an instigator, you know, like he has these big ideas. You know, these new ways of doing things, new beliefs, or like he illuminates things. We already know that we just didn't have a name for so gifted in that way.

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Zach Mercurio: And one of the ways that we've been working together is that we need to relearn

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Zach Mercurio: the skills to create cultures that enable those things to happen. For example, if you want someone to find their why

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Zach Mercurio: right? They have to believe that they have something to contribute. And there are some skills that we can learn as leaders, as people to make it easier for the next person we interact with to see their why.

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Zach Mercurio: And I think that that's the complement that we've. We've complemented the the idea of purpose of why, with the idea of mattering and what I love about what Simon's doing right now. And what we're doing at the optimism company is that we're really focusing on reteaching human skills

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Zach Mercurio: since the 19 seventies, right? When a military psychologist for the 1st time used the word soft

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Zach Mercurio: to describe relational skills.

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Zach Mercurio: We've been susceptible to an overconfidence bias. So when we see something as simple or soft.

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Zach Mercurio: we think we're better at it than we are.

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Zach Mercurio: and we usually approach it with less rigor.

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Zach Mercurio: And so what's happened since the 19 seventies is that we've tended to leave a lot of the human elements of organizations up to chance while we rigorously scale operations, product strategies and everything else.

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Zach Mercurio: And I think right now. And I think Simon's seeing this. We've been seeing this

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Zach Mercurio: with perpetual disengagement, rising loneliness, feelings of disrespect, feelings of being unincluded, invisible that lack of rigor.

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Zach Mercurio: when it comes to learning, scaling human skills to see here value other people is really what's missing. So that's what that's the mission that we're on

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Zach Mercurio: is to reteach those human skills

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Jack Hubbard: You're on another mission, and that's to talk about how to matter.

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Jack Hubbard: And and this book is pretty amazing. And as I mentioned, it really hit me.

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Jack Hubbard: you know, when I was 16 years old, you know you're a kid, and you're a dope, and you don't know anything. And and you think you know everything, and and so my dad would work in a factory from 7, 30 to 3, 30 every day, never missed a day. Then at 4 o'clock, so we drive up from his other job, and from 4 to midnight he worked as a janitor.

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Jack Hubbard: and I was always very, because I went to a different high school, and he worked in a high school, and it was like, Oh, my dad's a janitor, but he never said just he would always

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Zach Mercurio: Which is.

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Jack Hubbard: Call himself a maintenance preneur. The kids loved him. He ate dinner with my mom every night she brought him dinner, and they ate in the cafeteria, he would talk to the football coach. I mean, people really love that guy.

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Jack Hubbard: And you know, later in life I learned to respect the fact that he gave me this amazing work ethic. And and I now respect the work that janitors do, because it's really important

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Jack Hubbard: where I'm going with this is. I've never seen a book, and I read a lot of books. I've never seen a book where early on in the book, you talk about janitors mattering.

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Jack Hubbard: What was that? Where? Where did you? You talked about blue Collar, and how you interviewed a lot of folks in the blue collar area. What was it that drove you to write early in the book and throughout the book about janitors

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Zach Mercurio: Well.

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Zach Mercurio: I mean, quite frankly, we're missing something. If we're not talking about these occupations because 60% of our workforce resides in frontline service work.

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Zach Mercurio: Almost every knowledge worker's role is reliant on a service worker.

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Zach Mercurio: And so when we talk about work, we we need to be including our service workers because they're the backbone of almost every organization on the planet.

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Zach Mercurio: The way I started to get interested in the life of a cleaning professional is, I was on my way to a professional development conference.

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Zach Mercurio: and I was actually struggling with a research interest. I was a Phd. Student, and I was interested in everything. And I remember I was going to this training. It was free. I had gotten an email about it, and I saw a janitor on my way there. I'd seen her all the time in this academic building. We'd become like passing friends. You know those people. You don't know their names, but you see them every day.

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Zach Mercurio: And she said, Where are you going today? And I said, I'm going to this training, and she goes, how did you hear about that? And I said, Oh, I got got an email about it, and she goes, you know, Zach, I've been here for 12 years, and no one showed me how to get my email up and running.

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Zach Mercurio: And instantly something in my mind went off and said.

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Zach Mercurio: This is a problem. What is going on like? I want to see what this work experience is like. So I embedded myself with this group of janitors for a year and a half, and we were studying what made work meaningful, and what we found was was remarkable. It wasn't big things, it wasn't big actions, it wasn't pay, it wasn't perks, it wasn't free sandwiches.

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Zach Mercurio: It was small interactions in which somebody looked them in the eye, knew their name, thanked them.

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Zach Mercurio: saw them as a person reminded them of their significance. One janitor I worked with said that the moment that changed her entire life, her belief systems about herself

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Zach Mercurio: was when a supervisor took out a dictionary.

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Zach Mercurio: opened it up to the word custodian, and defined it as a person responsible for looking after a building and everyone in it. And just to give you an idea. She said, that she was just clocking in and clocking out. She was miserable over the 1st month, but she said that one moment was the 1st time that anybody

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Zach Mercurio: had shown her she was worthy of responsibility. She's still at the University. She's been there for over 20 years.

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Zach Mercurio: and

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Zach Mercurio: what I love about your story as well is that you mentioned your dad's work as a janitor, but you mentioned all of the relationships he had.

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Zach Mercurio: and this is a lesson for all of us work is relationships.

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Zach Mercurio: and the quality of our experience at work is dependent on the quality of our relationships. If you're a janitor with the building users with your supervisor, with your colleagues. But this this translates to all of us, which means we're all partly responsible for how the next person we interact with experiences. 1 3rd of their waking life

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Jack Hubbard: Wow!

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Jack Hubbard: It's it's it's fascinating. And I, you know, I never really approached my dad about this. But my mom kind of heard through the grapevine that I was kind of dissonant.

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Jack Hubbard: and you know she really came down pretty hard on me, and and had made me realize that he did matter, and and it was so interesting how much pride he took in, how clean his

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Jack Hubbard: part of the building was, and he got the kids

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Jack Hubbard: to throw their stuff away. You know, they'd throw it on the yeah.

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Jack Hubbard: And we're kids, you know. And she kind of told me that. And I'm still 16. So I, you know, in one ear out the other. But but later on I started to understand that a little bit

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Jack Hubbard: you talk about in the book

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Jack Hubbard: this the whole time. The power of mattering is the title, Talk about mattering what is mattering and

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Zach Mercurio: And then

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Jack Hubbard: And talk about it in 2 perspectives. Talk about it in families. Because before we started recording, you talked about how you readers of the book have been changed because of what you've explained around family mattering talk about family mattering and cultural mattering in a business

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Zach Mercurio: So mattering is a 1st and foremost mattering is a survival instinct.

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Zach Mercurio: The 1st thing you did as a human scientists find is you had an instinctive action. You reached out your arms to look for someone to care for you. It's called the Grasp reflex. You did that before you searched for food.

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Zach Mercurio: Nobody would be listening to this podcast if we hadn't mattered enough to someone else in our life to keep us alive.

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Zach Mercurio: so to matter, to someone else. To be important to someone else is our most fundamental survival instinct.

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Zach Mercurio: As we grow up. And as we go to work, that instinct turns into the fundamental need to feel, seen, heard, valued, and needed.

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Zach Mercurio: Now as children, as we're growing up as children and adolescents and families that's actually just called. You may have heard of the name secure attachment, which means when we have, when we're when we have a caregiver, for example, that sees us, hears us and makes us feel important. We can go out and venture out and take risks and experiment and learn, because we know that we have what's called a secure base when we come back.

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Zach Mercurio: The same is true in business. If you've heard of the term, psychological safety, psychological safety is just a more palatable way to talk about adult attachment.

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Zach Mercurio: because if we we are more likely to go out, experiment, contribute, innovate, engage. When we know that we can come back. And someone has our back.

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Zach Mercurio: A leader has a back supports us. We already matter to somebody, so we don't have to go prove our mattering. We can use that as a secure base, and launch out and innovate and experiment and perform.

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Zach Mercurio: And

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Zach Mercurio: I think that when we think about this in terms of business, it's very difficult sometimes to think of how our most basic human needs

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Zach Mercurio: show up in the place where we spend a 3rd of our waking life at work. But mattering is central, so the definition of mattering is when that instinct to be important to somebody is met. We experience mattering. Mattering is the experience of feeling significant to those around us, and it comes from 2 things feeling valued by those around us.

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Zach Mercurio: and then, knowing how we add value to those around us so like your dad's story, like feeling valued by the football coach or the the kids around them, telling him that. But then, knowing how he added value by thinking of his work

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Zach Mercurio: in that way, of how it contributes to other people.

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Zach Mercurio: And what's powerful about mattering is it's 1 of the most fundamental

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Zach Mercurio: needs that's required for motivation, engagement performance, and it's the most dependent on others

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Zach Mercurio: so meaning I can. I can't just sit here and build myself up and say, Oh, you know you matter, and then go into an environment that shows me the evidence of my insignificance and maintain that belief.

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Zach Mercurio: Leaders and organizations have a unique responsibility in that they can create environments that show people the evidence of their significance which helps them develop the 2 beliefs that I'm worthy. And I'm capable, which research finds, drives every productivity, performance, and innovation outcome

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Jack Hubbard: This sounds very easy to me.

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Jack Hubbard: It's not. It's not yeah. And but but my question around easy is, if

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Jack Hubbard: if if it's so important for leaders to help people understand that they matter that they're worthy.

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Jack Hubbard: Why can't they just

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Jack Hubbard: do that? I mean your stories in the book, your story about the custodian whose supervisor opened the book.

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Jack Hubbard: There's also a conversant, a different story in there about a supervisor who just didn't care about their employees right? And and it and it showed in the employees work. This seems easy, Zach, why aren't we doing this better?

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Zach Mercurio: Yeah, well, you know, common sense is not common practice.

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Zach Mercurio: and one of the reasons why is that we? Our attention is more fragmented than ever

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Zach Mercurio: right. A leader's scarcest resource is their attention.

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Zach Mercurio: Most leaders are pressured with what to do and how to do it, and so, when they devote all their attention to what's going on, how they're doing it. They deplete the very attention they need to focus on who they're doing it with and why they're doing it. And so we often spend our times reacting, and we often leave the who and the why

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Zach Mercurio: behind. And we underinvest in that.

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Zach Mercurio: The other key reason why this is not common practice is like, I said, we have

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Zach Mercurio: approached these skills with less rigor.

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Zach Mercurio: Again, less than 2% of the world's population ever gets formal education on how to listen. Well.

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Zach Mercurio: right? So we've left these things up to chance, you know. An example of this is, I was working with a very big retail merchandising company. They have a team teams all over the world that go into grocery stores, and they reset the product overnight.

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Zach Mercurio: It's a very like fast paced results oriented job. The product has to be positioned in a particular way, and they had invited me in to speak with their team on how to translate and scale their purpose people 1st culture.

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Zach Mercurio: And so I was having lunch with some of the executives, and I said, Hey, you know. Tell me about how you maintain quality on your teams.

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Zach Mercurio: And they went through this really ornate, sophisticated process.

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Zach Mercurio: checklists, evaluations, criteria, performance metrics. And then I said, tell me how you make sure everyone feels seen, heard, and valued on your teams.

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Zach Mercurio: And there was just this silence.

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Zach Mercurio: and one person said, Oh, we try to hire the right people.

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Zach Mercurio: or we have a online excellence in supervision course.

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Zach Mercurio: Most people, when they think about leadership and think about the human aspect. Rely on intuition. I just want this person to be a good person. But intuition doesn't scale

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Zach Mercurio: practices and skills do. So we haven't rigorously developed, evaluated and scaled these essential human skills in most organizations as robustly as everything else. And so we get this gap. Now, all of this is happening in an environment, where people have more choices of where, when, and how to work.

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Zach Mercurio: and when people have more choice, they have more discernment, and people are more likely to discern where they want to spend their time, based on what? Based on how they feel.

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Zach Mercurio: And as AI eclipses our operational skills, what do we have left.

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Zach Mercurio: We have to double down on the skills to ensure the next person we interact with feels, seen, heard, valued, and needed.

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Jack Hubbard: Yeah. And here's the other problem.

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Jack Hubbard: If you've got a supervisor who isn't a feeler, isn't, doesn't

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Jack Hubbard: have his or her employees don't matter. They're just a means to his end or her end of getting promoted. When when that negative manager, that negative person, is being coached by a negative manager, and they continue to move up the organization. What happens? The organization gets more bad managers, and we need we need to cut this off.

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Jack Hubbard: I'd love. I'd love to get your opinion on this. So you talked about soft skills

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Jack Hubbard: and and a lot of times what bankers will look at around an interview like this. And your great book is, this is kind of soft.

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Jack Hubbard: I'm curious. Your take on cultural and business significance

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Jack Hubbard: and its relationship to business outcomes

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Zach Mercurio: What financial metric is not mediated through a human being.

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Zach Mercurio: You can't find one. Every organizational output is mediated through a human being. So if I were to ask somebody.

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Zach Mercurio: what

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Zach Mercurio: would a human being need to feel to produce? To perform? Most people would say things like well, they need to feel motivated.

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Zach Mercurio: They need to feel engaged. Well, what do you need to feel motivated and engaged? Well, you need to feel that

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Zach Mercurio: you and your work matters.

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Zach Mercurio: Most people will get there, even if they label it as soft. The problem is is that we're so short term focused is that we try to pursue lagging indicators

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Zach Mercurio: by pursuing lagging indicators. My 1st grader is learning the difference between cause and effect. Right? You can't pursue an effect

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Zach Mercurio: by trying to get an effect you pursue an effect by relentlessly investing in the cause

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Zach Mercurio: performance, innovation, productivity, are all lagging indicators of human energy.

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Zach Mercurio: Human energy also called motivation, is a lagging indicator of mattering.

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Zach Mercurio: It is almost impossible for anything to matter to someone who doesn't believe that they matter

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Zach Mercurio: right? So this is almost the opposite of soft. It's about as touchy-feely as feeding someone who's hungry.

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Zach Mercurio: And it's not a generational thing, either. You know. If I were to ask the audience here, you know. Raise your hand. If you'd prefer to feel insignificant at work.

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Zach Mercurio: I doubt anybody whether they're a boomer, Gen. X. Or millennial. Gen. Z. Would say, oh, me! You know I prefer to feel insignificant because I'm a boomer, or it's only those millennials or Gen. Zs, who want to feel things like, seen, heard valued right?

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Zach Mercurio: So these are the really the leading indicators of everything that we say we want. There's nothing that can be accomplished in an organization without human energy. The problem is is that we have just expected that to happen on its own.

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Zach Mercurio: instead of rigorously evaluating and developing the skills to regenerate that energy, which is what I'm calling for.

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Jack Hubbard: That's for sure.

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Jack Hubbard: I got to ask you about work from home because you talked about the pandemic. Now, here we are, 5 years removed from it. And you know, obviously, we're still talking about it. So a lot of people are now working from home and big debate on whether you should go back to the office or whether you shouldn't.

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Jack Hubbard: I'm curious about what cultures that you've seen

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Jack Hubbard: that have people, many of them work from home.

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Jack Hubbard: and how they've been able to help people understand that they matter

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Zach Mercurio: Great question.

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Zach Mercurio: One of the things that we're missing in this whole work from home return to the office debate is that when we look at engagement and productivity. You look at data from the last 50 years.

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Zach Mercurio: where and when you work doesn't matter much.

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Zach Mercurio: What you experience while you're working does

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Zach Mercurio: so you can mandate people to return to the office. But if your leaders are creating the experience where they feel unseen, unvalued, unneeded, then you will have the same productivity and engagement issues you had when people were working from home.

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Zach Mercurio: If you have people working from home, it's important to note that technology

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Zach Mercurio: has actually made it easier for us to not show people. They matter

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Zach Mercurio: most of the time when people work from home, we use technology for efficiency.

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Zach Mercurio: So we're sending slack messages back and forth all the time we are typing things in our teams, chat, or we're doing quick. Zoom calls with the leader starting the Zoom call, saying, I know nobody wants another zoom call. So let's get through this as quick as possible.

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Zach Mercurio: And we're using technology for efficiency. The best organizations, though, have used technology for connection.

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Zach Mercurio: For example, most meetings could be emails because most meetings are update fests.

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Zach Mercurio: I observe some meetings and organizations that are virtual where everybody gets on. I mean, hundreds of people from around the country gets up for the standing meeting and literally a group of 10 leadership team members go around and do updates

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Zach Mercurio: that could have been an email.

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Zach Mercurio: What can't be an email is looking you in the eye and asking you how your parent is doing because they've been in the hospital. What can't be an email is resolving a conflict in the ways that we've been working with one another, or the ways that a particular product or outcome have come about in terms of how we're relating with one another and resolving that conflict. Those are the things that can't be emails.

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Zach Mercurio: and those take time, and they take attention and intention. And so the the teams that are doing this best from work from home spend their rare time together on video, for example, on how they are with one another, not what they're doing with one another.

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Zach Mercurio: and one of the one of the best practices. I actually, there's this law firm that I work with, and they have a very distributed team, and they're all working on siloed cases. But one of the best practices is their supervisors do micro check-ins

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Zach Mercurio: where they actually pick up the phone and call them

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Zach Mercurio: just to say, Hey, I want to see how you're doing. What's your energy level like? What's your Caseload like right now? And their rule is that they don't talk about work.

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Zach Mercurio: They talk about the person.

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Zach Mercurio: And what this does is 2 things. It helps the person.

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Zach Mercurio: I mean, most people when they see their boss's name on their phone, they get a little tingling of fear, which is a problem.

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Zach Mercurio: But what it does is it normalizes regular non-transactional communication. And it gives the supervisor data

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Zach Mercurio: people's emotions and energy and lives and what they're experiencing are data that you need to lead them.

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Zach Mercurio: So the the people just to recap the people that do it well are the ones that use the technology for connection, not just efficiency. And they have practices that check in on how the people are doing. And they see the person before the employee

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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, it's so true whether it's you work remotely or you work. Next to the office of your manager. The question is, always is spending time with your boss, a reward or a punishment, and unfortunately a lot of it is a punishment. One of the things I always look for in a book

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Jack Hubbard: is a model. So like I learned the Great Lakes by by the model Homes, HOME. S. You have the Nan model, NAN.

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Jack Hubbard: What is the Nand model? And why does it matter around mattering

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Zach Mercurio: When we can name something, we can continue doing it.

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Zach Mercurio: or we can change it. One of the big problems with these these human skills is that we haven't been able to name it and categorize it. So one of the things that I wanted to do is we went and we interviewed hundreds of people researched thousands of employees, and we were distilling. What do leaders do

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Zach Mercurio: to help you feel that you're valued and help? You know that you add value. And there are 3

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Zach Mercurio: practice areas that consistently came to mind for people. And it was my leader notices me.

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Zach Mercurio: So that's the end. They see and hear me. So they see me. They pay attention to the details of my lives and my work, and they check in on me. The second is that they feel affirmed.

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Zach Mercurio: So they feel that they and what they're doing are unique. They have unique gifts, and their leader shows them how those unique gifts make a unique difference

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Zach Mercurio: very different than appreciation or recognition, because appreciation is just showing gratitude for who someone is. Generally you can have an employee appreciation program. Recognition is showing gratitude for what someone does. Again, you can have a recognition ceremony of awards for people's work. But affirmation is knowing

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Zach Mercurio: how your and my unique gifts make a unique difference. It is specific, it is interpersonal.

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Zach Mercurio: and it's from a leader to the person they serve. So affirming and then needing

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Zach Mercurio: this one's very hard for people to wrap their heads around. This is making sure everyone feels essential

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Zach Mercurio: and relied on.

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Zach Mercurio: When people feel replaceable they tend to act replaceable. They don't show up commit. But when people feel irreplaceable they tend to act that way.

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Zach Mercurio: so noticed, affirmed, and needed. And what that does is, it helps, even if you're already doing these things, and it seems like common sense. Once we can name them, we can approach them with more rigor, and we also have a conversation. We also have a question to ask ourselves before and after every conversation. Am I making sure the next person I interact with feels noticed, affirmed, and needed

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Zach Mercurio: today. Did I make sure. The people that I lead feel noticed, affirmed, and needed

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Jack Hubbard: Well, you. You mentioned 2 words that I wanted to talk about, and that's seen and heard. You talked about both of those

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Jack Hubbard: talk about what you mean by feeling seen.

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Jack Hubbard: and how is that different than feeling heard

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Zach Mercurio: So you can know your best friend, but not notice that they're suffering.

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Zach Mercurio: You can know your team members very well. You can know your fellow leaders that you've worked with for a decade, but not notice that someone's feeling left out of discussions. So, noticing the seeing part of noticing is an act of paying deep attention.

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Zach Mercurio: My favorite example of this comes from a distribution center that I worked with, and there were 20 teams, and they all scored really low on their engagement surveys. Except for one, it was an outlier, and whenever that happens, if I'm doing consulting, I go right to that team and say, What do you do? Can we teach everybody? And so I went to that team and I said, What's going on here? And they told me all of them said, It's our supervisor.

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Zach Mercurio: She just gets us. We do anything for her. And so I went to her, and I said, What are you doing, and she had one practice where she would take out this notebook, and on Friday morning she would write down each of her team members names, and she would deliberately think of something she observed about them that week. So if they were nervous about a meeting, or if there was a piece of equipment that wasn't working quite right, and they're frustrated about it. If their kids were starting a new sport she would write it down.

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Zach Mercurio: and she on Monday morning, she said. She looked at that notebook, and she would schedule a 3Â min micro check in with each of them, and just say, Hey, I remember last week. You were nervous about that meeting. I wanted to check in on how that went, and I remember she said to me something that I won't forget, and she said, Zach, there's magic in being remembered.

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Zach Mercurio: So that's what she had learned as a leader. There's magic and being remembered, it wasn't necessarily like that. Her notebook was some profound idea. It was the act of her doing it, and the habit of her remembering details of her people's lives and work, and then saying, I wrote down last week that you were struggling with this. I wanted to check in on that man when we feel remembered by somebody. When somebody thinks about us when we're not there.

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Zach Mercurio: There are few things more powerful than knowing that our presence

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Zach Mercurio: and absence means something to somebody.

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Zach Mercurio: So, seeing somebody is a practice hearing. Somebody

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Zach Mercurio: is coming to understand the meaning behind their words, coming to understand their true voice, their perspectives, which requires a different set of skills and a different set of practices, as well

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Jack Hubbard: Okay, let's get real.

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Jack Hubbard: So I am a culture. And I want to teach this approach.

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Jack Hubbard: I've got some managers who are going to readily accept it. I've got other managers who are going to be passive, aggressive with it. I got other managers that say screw this. I'm not going to do it.

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Jack Hubbard: But in my culture I want to have micro meetings on a regular basis, whatever regular means

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Jack Hubbard: some managers are going to go. This is fabulous. In fact, I'm doing this already. I'm remembering people. I'm taking notes. I call it

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Jack Hubbard: share of heart. But but whatever we call it, I'm I'm doing that. But there are going to be people who are not going to do this very well. Here's where I'm going with this.

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Jack Hubbard: What specific skills do I need as a leader to be able to do what you're talking about? And

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Jack Hubbard: is it teachable

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Zach Mercurio: I think it is teachable.

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Zach Mercurio: and I know it's teachable. And a lot of the people that are defensive about this. It usually is an ability issue.

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Zach Mercurio: Defensiveness is usually a manifestation of underconfidence.

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Zach Mercurio: So you know, there are for any behavior to happen. We need 3 things motivation. I want to do it. Skill, ability. I know how to do it. And environment. The environment makes it possible for me to do it.

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Zach Mercurio: When I have somebody who's like Zach, I don't want to do this. It usually is a skills issue. It's really the defensive reaction to. I don't really know how to do this, or I'm afraid

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Zach Mercurio: that something might happen that jeopardizes my own. How I'm perceived by others in terms of my own or my team's performance. So I'm not going to change anything.

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Zach Mercurio: A couple of ways to to approach this one is, you have to as a as a leader. If you're trying to institute this.

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Zach Mercurio: you have to set the motivation and the right intention.

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Zach Mercurio: and you have to set it as a non-negotiable.

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Zach Mercurio: There are many non-negotiables in organizations already. I mean.

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Zach Mercurio: a banker couldn't do something unethical when they're working on a transaction. The same should be true with leading human beings where they spend a 3rd of their lives.

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Zach Mercurio: So you have to make this a non-negotiable. It's a non-negotiable here that we ensure our people feel that they matter. But that should be a non-negotiable for every working organization. The second, though, is that you can teach these skills. For example, seeing somebody.

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Zach Mercurio: you can teach the skill of asking better questions

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Zach Mercurio: right? So instead of How are you, or how's it going.

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Zach Mercurio: or how was your day? Ask questions like, what has your attention today? What have you been working on today what's been most meaningful to you today for a leader instead of starting your meeting by saying, I hope everybody's doing well.

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Zach Mercurio: I mean, can you imagine if somebody wasn't doing well, would they say not me right? Starting your meeting with with checking in on what's the most difficult aspect of the projects you're working on. And who can help here?

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Zach Mercurio: Right? So sometimes, learning to ask clear, open, and exploratory questions is something that you can learn. You can also learn how to check in on people's emotions.

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Zach Mercurio: You know one practice. There's many ways of doing it. But one practice is right. If I asked my team green, yellow red. How's everybody doing? Red means you're offline. You're struggling. Yellow means there's some things going on that are pulling your attention away. Green means you're in flow. You can learn how to do a check-in like that

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Zach Mercurio: a micro check-in. You can learn how to seek understanding of the meaning behind someone's words.

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Zach Mercurio: So, for example, if someone comes off a meeting, and they say you say, how was that? And they say, Oh, you know

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Zach Mercurio: it went fine, you know. I'm just glad to have that meeting over instead of being like, yeah, I know, that's how the sales team is. Instead of just saying that you can say I noticed there was some frustration there.

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Zach Mercurio: What's going on that led you to to feel that way and going deeper again? All of this is about giving you as the leader data. So you can understand people so you can care for them. So you can develop trust, which, again, is the leading indicator of everything else you say you want.

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Zach Mercurio: So those are some examples. But I mean, you know, we've categorized over 25 skills that leaders can learn like that for each of those areas noticed, affirmed, and needed. But it just gives you an example that these are learnable. They are teachable. But the 1st is, it has to be a non-negotiable in your organization, and you have to be willing to have the courage to make it a non-negotiable

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Jack Hubbard: Well, they're learnable. But here's here's the last question I want to ask you. What about Scalable?

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Jack Hubbard: You talked about the organization, the outlier where the manager remembered people and really asked great questions. You also alluded to the fact that the rest of the organization, much of the rest of the organization, maybe, wasn't there. How do you make what happened over here? Scalable over here?

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Zach Mercurio: Yeah, I mean, I think, looking at this as basic competencies and skills is very helpful. And if you're an organization, if you're a leader. You've likely had the skill to scale other things in your organization. Operational processes.

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Zach Mercurio: product innovation processes in your organization. So you already have the skill set to scale it. What I've seen work when it comes to scaling these things is one you have to set the motivation and the right intention. Here's why we're doing this. And here's why it matters. The second is that you have to develop the right skills.

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Zach Mercurio: This is where most organizations go wrong.

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Zach Mercurio: So, noticing, affirming, needing. What are the skills that every leader must be able to demonstrate, to lead other human beings in your organization, to make sure they feel noticed, affirmed and needed.

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Zach Mercurio: And then you have to measure those skills.

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Zach Mercurio: And I really want to see organizations move from measuring emotional states to measuring behaviors.

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Zach Mercurio: Emotional states is like, how engaged are you in your work? How appreciated do you feel? And I want them to move toward

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Zach Mercurio: how frequently does your manager check in on how you're doing.

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Zach Mercurio: One is never 5 is always.

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Zach Mercurio: And when we start measuring behaviors from a self-assessment perspective, and then a team assessment perspective, for example, at least quarterly.

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Zach Mercurio: and then you tie promotion and other rewards. To that

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Zach Mercurio: you will very slowly start seeing the culture start scaling and shifting.

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Zach Mercurio: so measure the right behaviors. And then the final piece is, you have to optimize the environment.

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Zach Mercurio: You can't do a training on making sure people feel that they matter. If you're leading distribution centers. And then the distribution center manager goes back and their people have a scan gun that has a GPS tracker that tracks every moment of their day

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Zach Mercurio: because your environment doesn't make it possible for your manager to care.

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Zach Mercurio: Sometimes the environment makes it impossible to do the things you're training them to do.

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Zach Mercurio: whether it's collaboration, whether it's connection. So you have to look at your environment and ask yourself

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Zach Mercurio: what factors in our environment

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Zach Mercurio: will make these behaviors possible which ones are making these behaviors impossible. And what can we do to remove them? And that's how you scale. I mean, that's how you scale these skills. But it takes work. It takes investment. But once you do, it can be incredibly incredibly powerful. We worked with a large global travel agency who worked with 600 leaders across multiple continents.

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Zach Mercurio: And we implemented behaviors. They created a mattering blueprint. Here's how everybody will feel noticed here affirmed here needed here. They measured people on those behaviors for over a year. This is all remote jobs, and they saw a 50% reduction in attrition

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Zach Mercurio: and a significant score that's sustained over a year and a half in engagement.

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Zach Mercurio: sometimes effort, sometimes for a employee, even knowing your leader is thinking about making sure you feel that you matter is one of the most significant interventions you could do

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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, I did a sales training recently, and the leader not only didn't

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Jack Hubbard: introduce and leave, they introduced and stayed, but they talked about how, and he went all around the room and talked about why each individual he didn't say mattered, but mattered to the, to to the bank. That was just a that was such a great way to start, and the culture, you know, makes it happen on an ongoing basis as well

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Zach Mercurio: What I love about that is, that's a practice. Another way. You can think about this in your organization, because again, you know, the luxury of my job is, I don't have to do your job.

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Zach Mercurio: If you're listening, I get to study how people work. You actually have to go do it. So think you're the expert listening to this, podcast you're the context expert. You're the expert in your business, your team, your organization. So I want you to use that and think about this.

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Zach Mercurio: Think about when leaders in your organization make people feel that they matter, what practices and skills are they doing and write those down.

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Zach Mercurio: and those are the things you should be teaching, and then ask yourself, what is the way in which we teach? Evaluate these skills for everybody that leads anybody, and this gets it out of oh, it's just Jack. That's just what Jack does. Jack's a great leader and turns it into. No, this is how people lead here.

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Zach Mercurio: And this is this is the way we lead here. These are the competencies you need to have, and that's a very powerful exercise as well

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Jack Hubbard: Well, I've been very much looking forward to this because I just absolutely love this book, the power of mattering how leaders can create a culture of significance. Zach Mercurio thanks so much. The book comes out. May 13.th How can people get a hold of the book? How can people get a hold of you. If they want you to speak or train their organization, tell us, tell us a little bit about how they can do that

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Zach Mercurio: Yeah, there's 2 ways. You can go to zachmercurio.com. There's information about the book there, and we have some companion workbooks and book. Club discussion guides all of that to help scale this work. And then I'm also on Linkedin. I have a great community on Linkedin, where we disagree with one another. We have these great dialogues in the comments, and I really like engaging there, and I'm at Zach Mercurio there as well

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Jack Hubbard: Well, Zach, thank you so much for your time. As I mentioned, I have been really looking forward to this interview, and you absolutely like the book, did not disappoint Zach Mercurio. Thanks for your time today.

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Zach Mercurio: Thank you. Jack.

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Jack Hubbard: Okay, that was awesome. Was that okay?

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Zach Mercurio: Yeah, it was fun.

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Jack Hubbard: Hello!

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Zach Mercurio: I like that. I'm glad we did. I'm glad we talked about the scaling conversation. I'm glad you brought in your personal

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Zach Mercurio: story, so I think that you could listen to that and get some useful things that you could take right away

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Jack Hubbard: No doubt. And that's 1 of the things I do want to do with these podcasts is really give some practical help. Your questions were fantastic. And I added, a couple. And so the program is going to be on April.

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Jack Hubbard: I'll tell you on April 9th we.

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Jack Hubbard: Oh, great

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Jack Hubbard: you the links to. Yeah, so it'll be before the book comes out. We'll get you the links to all of this. I'll send you the full link so you can send that off to Harvard Business Review Press, and you can use it in any way you want from a marketing perspective.

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Zach Mercurio: Oh, that's awesome. Thank you. I appreciate that

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Jack Hubbard: Thank you, Zach, really appreciate it all the best with the book, and I hope we can stay in touch

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Zach Mercurio: Yeah. Thanks. Jack.

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Jack Hubbard: Thanks for your time.

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Zach Mercurio: Bye, bye.