How Leaders Can Create a Culture of Significance

What does it really mean to create a culture where people perform at their best?

In this episode of Leading People, I’m joined by Zach Mercurio, researcher, speaker, and author of The Power of Mattering, to explore how leaders can create a culture of significance — one where people feel seen, valued, and needed.

Drawing on decades of research into motivation and human performance, Zach explains why performance, resilience, and engagement suffer when people feel invisible or replaceable — and why leaders play a pivotal role in shaping the everyday signals that tell people whether they matter.

In our conversation, we explore:

• What a culture of significance really looks like in practice
• Why people perform better when they feel valued and needed
• How leaders often unintentionally signal that people don’t matter
• Small, everyday leadership behaviours that have an outsized impact
• Why significance isn’t a “soft” idea — but a serious performance driver

Zach brings these principles to life through compelling stories from an array of organisations. 

Whether you lead a team, work in HR or L&D, or care about creating environments where people thrive and perform, this episode offers practical insights you can apply immediately.

Curious?

🎧 Let’s have a listen

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Check out the Power of Mattering on Zach's website

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Why Mattering
• 2:29 Zack’s Path And Early Insights
• 5:49 Defining Mattering And Its Impact
• 10:28 Withdrawal, Desperation, And The Data
• 14:18 Loneliness, Connection Quality, Not Quantity
• 18:07 Belonging vs Inclusion vs Mattering
• 22:01 Becoming A Noticer: Questions That Work
• 27:14 Attention, Bias, And Intentional Practice
• 31:49 Feeling Heard: Beyond Active Listening
• 37:02 Affirmation Over Recognition
• 42:10 Stories Of Significance That Stick
• 46:14 Laddering Impact: Lessons From NASA
• 50:56 Scaling Mattering Across Organisations
• 56:22 Permission To Be Human Again
• 1:00:05 Tanya At The Airport: Everyday Leadership
• 1:04:12 Closing, Next Steps, And Teaser

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Welcome to Leading People with me, Jerry Murray. This is the podcast for leaders and HR decision makers who want to bring out the best in themselves and others. Every other week, I sit down with leading authors, researchers, and practitioners for deep dive conversations about the strategies, insights, and tools that drive personal and organizational success. And in between, I bring you one simple thing: short episodes that deliver practical insights and tips for immediate use. Whether you're here for useful tools or thought-provoking ideas, leading people is your guide to better leadership. Why do some people give their best at work while others slowly disengage, even when they're capable and committed? In this episode, we explore a powerful but often overlooked driver of performance whether people feel that they truly matter. And how leaders shape the everyday culture that makes that possible. My guest is Zack McCurio, researcher, speaker, and author of The Power of Mattering. Zack's work shows that motivation, resilience, and performance don't start with incentives or systems. They start with people believing that they are seen, valued, and needed. In our conversation, we unpack what mattering really means, why it's foundational to performance, and what leaders can do in very practical ways to create a culture where people do their best work. Let's hear what Zach has to say. Zach McCurio, welcome to Leading People.

SPEAKER_01: 1:55

Hi, Jerry. It's good to be here.

SPEAKER_02: 1:57

You're coming in from quite far away, actually, today, I think. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:02

Yeah, Fort Collins, Colorado.

SPEAKER_02: 2:04

Yeah, the nice place. Uh the Rockies in the background. It's um, you guys have a what a privilege. Um, so I bought your book in May. I probably one of the first people to buy it, because I only c I'd only just come out. I think I'd ordered it. And I was so I was so taken by this book. I read it in my spare time in about two days. Really, it was just a book I couldn't put down. Um, but before we get to the book, uh, how did you get to where you are today? Were there any people or places or events that stood out, or were there any epiphany moments that led you to the work you're doing today?

SPEAKER_01: 2:39

Well, the one constant has been that it's ordinary people doing ordinary things with extraordinary perspectives that I've met along the way. You know, I have three chapters of those. Chapter one was I was in a job that I hated after university. I was selling advertising, selling radio advertising, but I I hated the job not because of the job, but it was because every time I'd go into the office, all people would talk about was what did they do the last weekend? What are they doing the next weekend? And then we'd go into sales meetings and talk about how much money we could get from people. And I would go out as a sales rep and talk to the people. And there was a disconnect there. I I couldn't believe so many people were living for two sevenths of their lives, the days that we came with the letter S. And so I started doing a little informal experiment where I would just see people, cab drivers, bus drivers, people working at a bookstore that seemed really joyful. And I would just talk to them. And one of the things I started uncovering is that when people found a lot of joy and energy in their work, they didn't talk to me about what they did. You know, they were telling stories to me about why they did it. They were talking about the people they served. And so I started thinking, I was like, there's got to be a way to change this to where more people can see why their job exists and can focus on that purpose. So I left that job. I went and got my master's degree in adult education and then in um organizational learning, performance, and change. And in that chapter two, I uh my first study was with a group of janitors, university cleaners, on how people in a very difficult job come to experience meaningfulness in their work. And what we found again was it was small moments where someone else showed them how they were significant, remembered their names, looked them in the eye, told them that they were glad that they were here, showed them the difference that they made, said, you know, this place wouldn't be clean if it wasn't for you. Uh and that research led to this final chapter that I'm in right now is that over the last five years, more people have felt invisible, overlooked, ignored in work. Engagement is at a 10-year low. Again, um, more people feel uncared for than ever. And as we looked at our research and my experiences, I we said, you know, there's a name for that. And it's called not experiencing mattering, that we matter. Um, and that led me to to where I'm at today, you know, writing the book, putting this research out, helping to reskill people to show the next person that they interact with how they're significant.

SPEAKER_02: 5:23

Okay. So let's get to this fantastic book The Power of Mattering, How Leaders Can Create a Culture of Significance. So there's there's tons to explore, and we we won't have time to get through it all. So, listeners, you're gonna have to read the book. However, we're gonna get a flavor of it now. So, why does mattering matter both at an individual and an organizational level?

SPEAKER_01: 5:49

First off, the need to be important to another person is our most primal survival instinct. We wouldn't be here talking. This podcast wouldn't exist, no one would be listening if at some point we all hadn't mattered enough to another human being to keep us alive. So that drive to be important is a biological survival instinct. That's why when I talk to leaders who say this is kind of the soft stuff, I say it's about as soft as feeding someone who's hungry. It is the most primal instinct we have. Now, as we grow up, that biological instinct to matter turns into the fundamental psychological need to feel seen, heard, valued, and needed by those around us. Just like the need for sleep doesn't go away, the need to matter to other people doesn't go away. And when we experience that, when we do feel seen, when others hear us, when they pay attention to us, when they show us how we're valued, we experience what psychologists call mattering. And mattering is the experience of being significant to those around us that comes from feeling valued and knowing how we add value and why it matters in work, especially, is that for so long in work, we have had this subconscious belief. Many of us maybe haven't said it, organizations haven't said it, but we've had this subconscious belief that people should be valued once they add value. So once you add value, we'll give you a promotion, perks, awards, whatever. But psychologically, the opposite is true. People need to be valued to add value. Because when we feel seen and heard and valued, we develop two beliefs. Self-esteem, I'm worthy, self-efficacy, I'm capable. That is the confidence needed to add value. And the more we add value, the more how we see how we are valued, and that's the upward spiral that we create. Uh just as mattering comes first as human beings, like our first primal instinct, it comes before pretty much everything we say we want. If you want someone to find their purpose, their contribution, they first have to believe they're worthy of contributing. If you want your team members to use their strengths and talents, they first have to believe they have them. If you want your people to share their voice, they first have to believe their voice is significant. You know, if I were to summarize the research on work motivation from the last 50 years, I'd summarize it in one line. It is almost impossible for anything to matter to a human being who doesn't first believe that they matter. So this is not only an instinct, but it's an imperative for any organization that cares about any outcome that results from human energy.

SPEAKER_02: 8:23

And it it underpins a lot of that negative data we see around engagement, and you name it, right? Because you've got quite an impressive array of uh statistics in the early part of your book to just help us understand the impact of not mattering is potentially having on not just the people, but the performance of the overall business that uh you know people are are working in. On leading people, the goal is to bring you cutting-edge thought leadership from many of the leading thinkers and practitioners in leadership today. Each guest shares their insights, wisdom, and practical advice so we can all get better at bringing out the best in ourselves and others. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share a link with friends, family, and colleagues. And stay informed by joining our Leading People LinkedIn community of HR leaders and talent professionals.

SPEAKER_01: 9:28

Yeah, just imagine going into a room full of people, maybe your friends, and having no one notice anything about you, um, having no one ever have people talk over you. You raise an idea, someone brushes you off, um, someone doesn't remember your name that you thought you knew. I mean, think about what you do, the visceral reaction. So when people feel insignificant in everyday relationships, two things typically happen. They either withdraw. So we either leave the relationship, right? Or we leave the room, or we never want to go back there. Um, quiet quitting, for example, in the States, this was a big trend, right? There was a TikTok influencer that said, hey, if you have a job that you don't like, just do the bare minimum just to get by. And it went viral, which is disturbing. But it's not the result of an entitled lazy generation. Quiet quitting was the inevitable withdrawal response to people who feel insignificant. Um, or it can be much louder, acts of desperation, you know, yelling to be heard. I've heard, I've had people describe to me the feeling of not mattering at work, that it feels like I'm in a room. Everybody's listening, but nobody really cares. Like I feel like I'm in a room yelling. And so acts of desperation, complaining, blaming, gossiping, a lot of toxic behaviors in cultures are actually the desperate cries for attention and significance that have been systematically um um rooted out of a culture that people are trying to get that significance from. So it has big consequences. You mentioned some data, engagement. Everybody talks about engagement. Engagement is at its lowest point that it's been in 10 years. This is despite all of the well-being programs, DEI programs, 42% on average across sector wage increases, the rise of perks. Um, but nothing's moved the needle. And if you look at two data points, you'll see that just 39% of people in a sample of 15,000 strongly agree that someone at work cared for them as a person. Just 30% of people strongly agree that someone invested in their unique potential. So you can't solve that through a program or a perk. You can only solve that through a relationship. This the solution is at the interactional level, which is where mattering happens. Um, and so you know, a lot of the things we're seeing are just manifestations of this mattering deficit in everyday relationships.

SPEAKER_02: 11:48

I I've been looking at engagement numbers since the mid-2000s, and honestly, that 15 to 18 percent of the truly, you know, the really engaged, that hasn't moved much. And the bottom end has the bottom end, yeah, you get some fluctuation in the middle. Kind of sometimes I wondered whether because a lot of the original research came from the studies that Gallup did, but I often wondered whether the measurement system needed to change as because you know you if you keep measuring something over and over again, it keeps coming out the same, even though people are doing things in organizations. However, perhaps it's not the measurements system or scales. It's it really is the fundamental stuff that's going on on the day-to-day basis between individuals and the relationships they have or don't have with each other.

SPEAKER_01: 12:32

There's some interesting, there was an interesting finding in 2024. WorkHuman did a study and found that 30% of their respondents self-reported, in a self-report survey, that they felt quote unquote invisible or flat out ignored at work every day. Um, the American Psychological Association does some great research and finds that on average, about 65% of people feel underappreciated in work. Uh, American Psychiatric Association found that almost eight out of 10 people feel lonely at work, right? And actually, this is despite the fact that we're more connected than ever. So, right now, you know, it's the work day here as we're recording. 38 million people are sending messages back and forth on Slack right now. The average adult sends 30 to 40 text-based messages to peers. We're on more platforms, Teams, Zoom than ever, but we're more lonely than ever. And why is that? Well, it's then it's not the quantity of interactions that matters, the quality.

SPEAKER_02: 13:27

Yeah, because a lot of that's transactional. Exactly. It isn't necessarily relationship uh driven, it's really like, and even then that can become very um what would the what would be the word? I mean, it's just empty in a way, it's just like stuff flying back and s back and forth between people on a daily basis. So uh yeah, let's let's now start to unpack a few of the distinctions you make in the book. And and by the way, for those who who may not have feel they've got enough time to read the full book, the Harvard Business Review article is equally um riveting. So if you want the shorter version, maybe you can get a look at that.

SPEAKER_01: 14:06

Yeah, if people if people leave a review that says this could have been an article uh for the book, this is the article. So this is the article, this is the article. Right, okay.

SPEAKER_02: 14:15

Okay, so let's let's get into this. This is a very, I think before we can get into the whole mattering thing, there's probably people out there rolling their eyes going, oh my god, you know, the guys are talking about mattering and that, and you should see where I'm here where I work daily. However, this distinction about belonging and mattering, because you'll hear people saying, but you belong. We feel that you belong to our group, etc. What is the distinction you make between belonging and mattering? I think it's quite an important one.

SPEAKER_01: 14:43

Okay, can I just address your your little quip before that, though? Because you were like, there's someone listening that's all the this mattering stuff. If you're listening to this, raise your hand if you'd prefer to feel insignificant at work. There's no question. None of you, nobody here, even the person who's listening that's like, oh, this mattering stuff is like, yeah, I'd prefer to feel unimportant. You know, I'm a baby boomer, a Gen Xer. So I'd, you know, I'd prefer to feel unseen. It's only those Gen Zers that want to feel the fluffy things like seen, heard, valued, right? It's ridiculous. The need to be significant, we all have it. It's everywhere. So let's just call it what it is: a basic need that you have, even if you didn't want to admit that you have it. But the second thing I would say is I think it's really important to distinguish belonging and inclusion from mattering, because we've talked a lot about belonging. I'll use a sports example, right? Belonging is being picked for the team. It's feeling like you're part of and connected to a group. Inclusion is being able to take an equitable role in the group. It's being asked to play in the game and able to play in the game. And then mattering is feeling that the team wouldn't be complete without you. Mattering is feeling significant to individuals in that group. The reason why this is important is because I can feel that I belong in a group. I could feel like I am welcomed, I'm accepted, uh, did a great onboarding program, uh I'm represented in the group. I can feel that I'm included in the group, I can take an equitable role, I see myself in the group. But have no one noticed that uh I may be a caretaker for a parent who's in the hospital, or have no one be able to name my unique gifts relative to anybody else in the group, or have never had any leader show me exactly how my unique inputs make a unique difference. So I can feel that I belong, I can feel that I'm included and feel utterly insignificant. It's like that, it's like when I um talked to a friend recently who moved abroad. I asked her how it was going. And she said, Oh, it's going really well. You know, I'm in this like uh after work soccer club, we do, I know it's football over there, but soccer club, we do um, you know, I'm invited to all these conversations, I get invited to parties, it's great. But I feel absolutely invisible. That is the experience of not mattering, and that is what's happening. And the difference between belonging, inclusion, and mattering is mattering happens through interpersonal interactions. So you can't actually provide a symbol of mattering. You have to experience mattering through interactions.

SPEAKER_02: 17:18

Okay. So that would probably nicely segue into what can leaders do to create a culture of mattering. And some of the things I want to maybe uh go into one or two of the key points you made in the in the book, which is this notion of uh ensuring that people feel both seen and heard. And um in terms of seeing, like if there's people out there going, but I look at my people all the time, you know. Um I look I look in the cameras, they're on the on the other side. I can I ask them to put their cameras on so I can see them. Um so uh however, you have some nice distinctions here about being able to pay attention to somebody, and you also talk about the role that questions can play in that in paying attention. Would you like to explain a little bit what you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01: 18:15

Yeah, when we ask people, you know, when do you most feel that you matter to a leader? We've asked thousands of people that question. One of the things that they talk about is feeling noticed. Now, no feeling noticed is different than feeling known, right? Like you can know your best friend, but not notice that they're suffering. You can know your team very well, but not notice that one of them is a little less energized than they used to be on a project, or is feeling left out of discussions, or all of a sudden seems like they're a little bit more distant, right? Noticing is the deliberate act of paying attention to the details, the ebbs and flows of someone's life and work, and offering them an action that shows them that you're paying attention. And um the other side of noticing is hearing somebody, which results from actually listening for deeper meaning in what you're uncovering as you're noticing. But the first part of being a noticer is being someone who pays attention and observes and um actually seeks the data so they can notice people. And one of the one of the ways to do that, one of the lowest barrier ways to do that, is to simply learn the skill of asking better questions. We tend to ask really poor questions of each other. Like, for example, I have an eight year old and a 10 year old. I travel a lot, I got a lot of things going on. If someone asks me, hey, how are you? My brain can't compute the last like 10 hours of living a complex life. So I just say, Good you? Right? It doesn't help anybody. It doesn't give that person data to notice me. It doesn't help me feel seen. But if somebody asks me, hey, you know. What is your attention today? What have you been thinking about most today? I had a great question. Somebody asked me, um, it was a networking call. It was happened a couple days ago, and he asked me, uh, what were you working on five minutes before we connected? And I thought that was so great. And why was it great? Because I could answer it. And so there are three qualities of good questions. I mean, one is they should be clear. Like a clear question has an object and a time frame. So what has your attention? That's the object. Today, that's the time frame. Uh, what have you been working on, the object five minutes before we talked? The time frame. We can answer that question. They should be uh open, not closed. So, how'd the meeting go? Did the meeting go well? Right, instead of ones that someone can answer with a yes or no or good or not good answer, what was the most interesting thing you learned at the meeting that I should know? Right? That's an open question. And then this one's sneaky, and it's asking more exploratory questions than you do evaluative questions. I have a 10-year-old who does play competitive soccer. If he comes home from practice and I say, Did you hustle at practice? Do you think he's gonna be like, oh no, I didn't? Right? An evaluative question is any question in which we're in the position to judge the quality of someone's response. We do this all the time at work. I see leaders do this all the time. What's the status on that? What's going on with that project? Are you gonna get that done by next Friday? Uh, what are we looking at in terms of the forecast for this quarter? Anytime you ask someone an evaluative question, you will get a self-defensive protective answer. You won't get the full data. So instead, ask more exploratory questions. Like, um, you know, my like my kids' example, like coming home from practice, instead of, did you hustle? What's an effort you were proud of? Instead of, hey, are you gonna get that done by next Friday? Any log jams that are getting you getting in the way of getting this project done? Anything I can help with? When you ask exploratory questions, you give that person the power. So make sure your questions are clear, open, and exploratory. And please don't open meetings by saying, How's everybody doing? Good.

SPEAKER_02: 22:08

A lot of people answer that question full time.

SPEAKER_01: 22:10

Because remember, you know, there's people in the back and nobody's gonna say, not good, or I hope everybody's doing well. Like we've gotta, great leaders go beyond the greetings. They ask questions that people can actually answer. And I will say this, and you mentioned this earlier about the digital communications being transactional. A great test for everyone listening, if you're a leader, is to think about if you called your direct report out of the blue right now, what do you think their first reaction would be? And if you think it would be fear or anxiety or terror, you have a problem. And the problem is not that you're a bad leader, the problem is that that just signals that too many of your interactions are transactional. You ask things from people instead of asking what you can do for people and asking people how they're doing. Uh, and so think about the interactions you have, the meetings you have, where can you add in some questions that actually understand how the person is beyond the greetings, so you can get that data to actually see them.

SPEAKER_02: 23:08

Yeah. I mean, a lot of questions, uh, I mean, this is quite an important distinction. It's particularly an important distinction when there's any matter of conflict that might be arising, is that we tend to have presuppositions built into most of our questions, like some of the examples you gave. And those presuppositions, I mean, the classic one, of course, is the lawyer with the leading question. Uh, you would admit that you were there, weren't you, or there or thereabouts when the crime took place, which rather than you know, rather than an open questions, where were you at 11 o'clock that night? I mean, so which would give the person a chance to to answer the question from their own perspective. So we have to pay a lot of attention to um whether we are loading our questions with uh with these evaluations because you get it horribly wrong when somebody, as you say, goes, he's judging me now, or she's judging me in the way they ask that question. They're they're they're supposing that something is not right. Yeah, yeah. By the way, I wanted to just point out to you being Irish, we also call it soccer because we have our own football as well. So just so you know, Irish style have their own okay. It's a bit like your um it's like Aussie rules football, or you know, we do a lot of kicking and catching, and so I'm always sensitive to that because some in the Europeans are a little bit uh I know, you know, when I say soccer, they're like football. You know, no, I know, I know they look at you, yeah. And and I'm actually a so I'm actually a soccer dad because I have only I only have girls, but particularly my youngest girl who's currently 17, she's like she's playing virtually every weekend and training two nights a week. Yeah, same thing. I never thought I'd ever end up in a football field without I thought maybe if I didn't have boys I wouldn't, but but uh it's really enjoyable. However, I uh actually what's really enjoyable about it is this year I've noticed the kids the connection between the kids has been they got a new new coach, yeah, and the connection between the kids uh well their kids, they're they're yeah, late teenagers and early 20-year-olds, the bonding is is something special. And what what's happening is they tell me that they enjoy they enjoy each other's company more, they're hanging out more together, they're they're not just playing football together, they're they're really feeling part of something. And they did a few things to make sure that the the players who, as you say, the ones who got to join the team, you know, joining the team um is one thing, being included is another thing, but they've actually made it so that everybody feels that they matter, that their contribution, they know which position they can play in, etc. So actually, it's a pretty good example of what you described earlier about just belonging and being included. But this year the they always belonged because they were part of the club. They always were included if they were picked for the team. But this year there's something happening, and I suspect it might be mattering that's going on. I must have a chat with the coach about it and find out. You're listening to leading people with me, Jerry Murray. My guest today is Zach McCurio, author of The Power of Mattering. Coming up the small leadership behaviors that signal to people that they matter, and why those moments have such a powerful impact on performance.

SPEAKER_01: 26:36

This is an interesting parallel because when we look at when you look at studies on attributes of sports coaches that are highly successful, you will see that they are very good at understanding the player, but the understanding the person before the player. They do that deep work because I mean, one of the things that we know is that you can't lead someone you don't understand.

SPEAKER_03: 26:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 26:57

And understanding takes time. You can care about your people from afar, but to care for anything, whether it's a pet or a houseplant, you have to deeply understand it. And understanding takes time and attention. And I will say, one of the things that um that you can't just do is just ask these questions and just start asking better questions. You actually have to pay attention. And one of the things we find is that the great leaders actually note down what they observe. So there's three behaviors of being a great notice or one, observing. So what part of that is asking really good questions that get you to understand the data of the people that you lead. The second is writing it down. I mean, noting, uh, retraining our mind to pay attention. Gloria Marks, an American psychologist, found that about 10 years ago, our attention span on any one thing was about 40, uh, two and a half, two and a half minutes. But then she repeated the survey and this experiments uh 10 years later. And two years ago, it was about 47 seconds. So think about what that does for the person in front of us. So we have to retrain our mind to pay attention and write it down. And then the last thing is that people share back what they observe. I remember when we talked last week that you were frustrated about that meeting. Is that right? Uh I remembered uh that uh you mentioned that you were having trouble with that piece of equipment in the distribution center that I promised we'd get fixed. Did we get that fixed for you? And it's closing that loop between asking the question, noting down what you want to remember, and sharing back what you observe that actually creates that loop of noticing, of the act of paying attention.

SPEAKER_02: 28:34

And from a purely neuroscience perspective, paying attention takes conscious effort and is, you know, it really requires okay, if you can get it to become a more unconscious practice, however, you you know, anybody listening out there who wants to improve their paying attention, it really means putting focused effort into doing it. Maybe this is why friends who know each other well don't notice things about each other because they're operating a lot at an unconscious level, because it's just your mate that you're going, you've you know, how many times did you meet him at at the bar or or wherever the social occasion is, so you just fit back into that mold. I'm wondering if you've uncovered anything about that in your research and yeah, can I that's a such a brilliant point.

SPEAKER_01: 29:17

One of the things that happens is we we think we're better at this stuff than we are. Really, anytime you call something soft or simple, we're susceptible to an overconfidence bias.

SPEAKER_02: 29:27

Dunning Kruger again is Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 29:29

We think we're better, yeah. We think we're better than we are. I mean, and we that's what's happened with soft skills over the last 50 years, of which these have been lumped into. But uh, I will say that there's been experiments done where psychologists will have a stranger give someone directions, and then they will monitor the nonverbal and verbal interest that the person gives the stranger, and then they'll have their spouse or partner, uh significant other, give them directions and they measure the amount of interest and verbal interest and nonverbal interest. And you're smiling because you probably know that every time the person they're closest to, they actually notice the least and they express the less interest in. It's called our closeness communication bias. This is especially important at work because we see people in the same context day in and day out. It's one of the only places where that happens so consistently. And so we may think we know people. And then what happens is uh our meetings all start the same way. Our one-on-ones go the same way. We go into automatic attention, which is helpful for brushing your teeth without thinking about it, unhelpful for social relationships. And so, as what you said, you have to one of the best ways to get out of this, what's called automaticity, which is our just natural way of going through things, is to have articulated intention. It's why pilots have a checklist every day, even though they've done it every day. They have a checklist, they have to go through. It's why surgeons have a checklist they have to go through, because the stakes are too high for intuition alone, right? The I think the same is true when we're leading people who spend one-third of their one-waking life in the place we're responsible for. Like we have to have the articulated attention. I'm going to ask a curiosity-based question in this conversation. I'm going to hear and note what this person says and look back on it. And that articulated intention is really important.

SPEAKER_02: 31:21

And that probably nicely leads us into the other side of questions, and that is listening. And you make this beautiful distinction that there's quite a difference between you know what's been overpopularized, popularized, uh, was it who was it, Carl Rogers or somebody, active listening, right? And yeah, you you kind of go, well, okay, but do people feel heard? Tell us about that.

SPEAKER_01: 31:46

Yeah, I mean, the origins of Carl Rogers' active listening is often overlooked. So the origins were that there were in the US Air Force was having a lot of problems with Air Force gunners, people on the tails of airplanes going back into civilian life. So you go from this like really high octane position where your life is in danger, and you go back to civilian life and you're sitting with people at a high school football game. And they were they were having a lot of behavioral problems, a lot of depression, a lot of rage, and they couldn't figure out why. And Carl Rogers went and interviewed all of them. But what he just said was just he goes, just tell me about your anger. Tell me what it's like to be angry. And he just sat there and he just listened. And what he found was that they were angry because of this hidden resentment of civilians. They would say things like, I just can't believe everybody's living their normal life, and I have had this experience. But the Air Force never knew that because they were trying to treat them, they were trying to fix them. And so he called this listening for total meaning, trying to get to the meaning and the feelings beyond the words, which is an art and takes a lot of practice. But what that has turned into, active listening, this special kind of listening, has turned into active listening courses. Now, I don't know if if if you're like me, I can tell when someone's gone to an active listening course. Right? Because they're like, Yep. Mm-hmm. Let me say what I heard you said was right. You can do, and Carl Rogers says this, you can do all of the acts of listening. You can do all of the physical acts, but the person across from you can still feel utterly unhurt.

SPEAKER_02: 33:26

Some people who go on those courses also learn to be just what I'm doing now, actively interrupting.

SPEAKER_01: 33:30

Actively interrupting. Yeah, or but it it the and the the feeling of being misunderstood. For example, if someone comes from a meeting and you say, How did the meeting go? And that person goes, Oh, it was okay. Uh, and then someone comes from a meeting, same person, someone you say, How did the meeting go? And they say, Oh, it was okay. That there's two different messages, right? There's the words being spoken, and then there's how the words are being spoken, and the meaning and feeling behind the words. The person who helps someone feel heard was the first person who comes off, you could probably get away with saying, Oh, okay, you know, that's good. The second person, if you were to say, Oh, okay, that's good. Thanks for telling me, that person walks away having that inner feeling of the, oh, it was okay. Feel utterly unheard, the feeling, the meaning behind the words. So what someone who listens for total meaning does to help someone feel heard is in that scenario, they would say, I would recommend they say, Hey, I'm I'm sensing you're frustrated. Is that right? And then that opens the door to the inner world, the voice beneath the words that are spoken. Um and so listening for total meaning, acknowledging feelings. Uh, if someone, you know, for example, I see this in virtual remote settings, someone will be on a call, and it's very unnatural because in remote settings we have a literally a red button that says leave and it has someone walking out the door. But if someone's frustrated on a call or angry on a call and you sense that, it's unnatural because now with remote work, we can just click leave and I don't have to think about that person until next week. But listening for total meaning is picking up the phone after and saying, Hey, I noticed that you were you looked a little bit angry. Is that right? Can you tell me more about that? And that opens the door, right? And that takes skill.

SPEAKER_02: 35:26

I I got myself in a situation, oh, must be 10, 12 years ago, where I was asked to do one of these team events, and I got this very lengthy shopping list from the boss about all the things that were wrong. Um and I hit upon a way of doing a listening exercise by actually getting people first to identify their values around work because there's a lot of meaning in values. Um, and I gave them a list of 50, and then they got I said, pick 10 that matter to you, you know. And then I got them to try and pick another 10. And I said, okay, let's just get three that you know, if you didn't have them, it wouldn't be worth going to work. And then the exercise was now you explain to this your colleague who is not allowed to uh interrupt you in any way, shape, or form, they're not even allowed to take notes, they literally have to give you their total attention, and you just explain each value and why it matters to you, and the other person will now play it back to you as best they can, and the exercise is done when you say you got it, right? And then you swap around. And I have had people in tears after that exercise, not tears of of despair, but tears of joy, and said, I've never been listened to before in my life. I've never felt heard. There it is, right there. Yeah, it it but they struggle not to interrupt each other, and some cultures are really they really fight with this. And I say, guys, I'm gonna teach you the questions in a second run, but just sit there and listen. And people go away, the rapport between them, just you can see these people who didn't know each other that well. This maybe a training where there's lots of different all of a sudden you see this click, right? And they start talking to each other in a totally different way. It's um it was kind of expedient. I I was kind of put in the situation where I had to figure out how to do this, and I've been running the exercise now for the last 10, 12 years, and every time I run it, uh people come up to me and say, That made that's made a huge difference. Just in one gesture.

SPEAKER_01: 37:24

And right now, that space to be heard is shrinking right more and more and more in our daily interactions. I mean, you can go observe it. You can go any workplace, go to the airport, go to the coffee shop, you'll see that people's space to actually feel heard. Everything's more efficient, everything's competing for our attention. We have more notifications than ever. And that specialness of feeling heard. And um, Morris Rosenberg, who is the founder of really this concept of mattering in the 1980s, uh, said that being paid attention to is the most elementary form of mattering. Yeah, like occupying someone's attention. I mean, I would say time and attention are the currency of care. You cannot have care without it. And so that feeling heard is so important to feeling that you matter and having your inner voice. You know, there's a sociologist named Nick Cauldry, and he talks about voice as not the words that we say, but our inner perspectives, our inner experience, our inner life um experiences invited out.

SPEAKER_02: 38:34

Yeah. So if we're going back to the leaders again, so we've we've really done this quite we've covered quite well some of the essence of the noticing aspect of your book and your recommendations. What about uh this aspect of affirming people and really showing that they're appreciated or needed? And some of the words that jumped out at me in the book was this concept of being grateful, uh recognizing the uniqueness of individuals, uh using that when you're giving feedback and how that itself impacts the performance that people are prepared to give when they are treated that way. They're made feel grateful, people are great, show their gratefulness. There's a sense of uniqueness uh in the feedback and and and how that impacts their day-to-day work performance.

SPEAKER_01: 39:24

Yeah, and this builds upon noticing people because the better we notice people, the better we can actually affirm them. And affirmation is showing someone how their uniqueness makes a unique impact. It's very important for leaders to understand it's different than recognition or appreciation, right? Appreciation is showing general gratitude for who someone is, someone in their role. You can do that in an appreciation week or with a free meal. Recognition is showing gratitude for what someone does. You can do that through an award or a promotion or more pay. But affirmation is showing somebody how their specific gifts make a specific impact. It's validation. Validating something. Someone's proof of impact. And it happens through two areas, right? Naming people's unique gifts, showing them how their unique gifts make a unique difference. Um, naming people's unique gifts, for example, are we we have four gifts. You know, our interviewees say that they're, you know, they feel like they matter when people recognize these four things. One is their strengths, you know, when people recognize what they love to do and what they're good at. But there's more than that. We often stop there as leaders. The second is their purpose. What's lost when they're gone? What impact do only they make on the team? The third is their perspective. How do only they see the work and the team and the world, and then their wisdom? What's only what's something only they can teach us because of their own life and career experience? And when those things are named by leaders, it's very powerful. Because I had a coach who once told me, Zach, it's you can't read the label when you're inside the jar. So one of the things that is powerful about leaders and powerful about mattering in general, is mattering is usually determined on what are called reflected appraisals, what someone reflects back to us that we may not see in ourselves. And so this plays into when you're giving gratitude for somebody or saying thank you or good job. Leaders who tend to cultivate mattering go beyond good job. Go beyond thank you. And they show people the difference they make in exactly how they make it. Um, there are four major components to meaningful gratitude. Anytime anybody listening says thank you or good job, describe the setting. Like when and where did what you're thanking them for happen. Then uh, so for example, at the beginning of this, before this podcast interview, Jerry, right? You were there. I'm not just saying thank you at one o'clock every day. The second is name the behavior. So, what did the person actually do that was unique and interesting? So at the beginning of this podcast interview, Jerry, when you made the connection between your trip to Colorado and where I live, right? So Jerry made the connection. That's that's clear. The third is describe the unique gifts that the person had. Well, you know, you were intentional about how you made that link, right? You were able to, you remembered where I lived uh based on my bio, and you connected back to your experience there. And so you're intentional and thoughtful. And then finally, what's the impact that it had? So describe the person's impact. Well, how did it impact you or someone else? Well, you know, it's always nice to have that rapport before you go into a podcast interview so the conversation flows easier. And if just one person takes away something that was brought out because of that rapport today to improve someone else's life, that's because of you, Jerry. So thank you.

SPEAKER_02: 42:36

So I just got top marks, ladies and gentlemen, out there. Um, I'm I'm feeling really good about myself now.

SPEAKER_01: 42:41

Is that giving me it's much different though than saying, uh, thanks for thanks thanks for the intro, right? Thanks for having me, right? Um and obviously I don't want people to sit down and say, all right, now I'm doing the SBGI model of feedback. But but these components should be part of gratitude because it's what makes gratitude meaningful. And I would say one of the things you can do is just close the gap between your intention and your actions. You know, think of someone you're grateful for right now, and think about the last time you told them explicitly in that way. Oftentimes there's a gap. The John Templeton Foundation found 90% of people can name someone they're grateful for, less than 20% said they told them explicitly in the last seven days.

SPEAKER_02: 43:29

Yeah. It was very interesting earlier you mentioned this the notion of wisdom. And one of the one of the this kind of emerged from doing this podcast. One of the things I really appreciate is the amount of wisdom that every guest brings. It's not just that they're regurgitating their book or whatever. There's there's there's a depth beyond just what they wrote about or what they studied. There's that sense that they've traveled some sort of a there's a there's a life being lived around this, and there's stuff they they take out from their day-to-day. And and based on that, do you tell tell us about this notion of stories of significance? And can you give some examples of stories of significance that you've come across in your work?

SPEAKER_01: 44:16

Yeah, a story of significance is the indisputable proof that someone matters that they can't argue with. It's telling uh uh it's giving someone the evidence of their significance. So showing some of the impact they make, their unique gifts, but then showing them the impact that they have on others is what it means to have to tell stories of significance. I'll give a perfect example. And one of my favorites, I got to work with the National Park Service here in the States. There's some parks I know you've visited in the West that are in some pretty inhospitable locations. Well, all of these sprawling parks have these large maintenance teams that have to work very low pay, uh, very difficult infrastructure, really tough to recruit these positions, really high turnover. And there was a maintenance supervisor that was brought over to manage these parks in the West, all their maintenance themes. And about a year after he took over, recruitment was easier, applications went up, engagement went up, uh, and morale seemed to go up, engagement scores went up. And so I got to go and talk to this manager. I was like, what do you do? And he said, you know, I have a real I have a really simple practice. I go around the parks, I visit different parks all throughout the week in Utah, and I go around and I take pictures. If there was a bridge that was repaired, I would take a picture of visitors walking over the bridge. If there was a bathroom that was open now, and there was a shorter line for the other bathroom, I take a picture. If there was a family walking on a new trail, I take a picture. And then every Friday I just send an email and the subject line is look what you did. And I just attach a group of about 20 pictures to the email and I send it to the whole maintenance staff. And he said, Um, you know, they can't argue whether they matter. I give them photographic proof. And I loved that line. That's what affirmation is. That look what you did. Um, how are you collecting and telling back stories of people's significance? It come, it can come down to not just on the end user, but asking peers to share how their peers make an impact on them. Um, it's you instead of gathering customer satisfaction surveys or client satisfaction surveys. I mean, no one's been emotionally moved by a net promoter score. Uh, right. But instead asking them, how did so-and-so impact your life today? What kind of difference did this make uh in your life or in your routine, depending on what it is, and collecting and sharing those stories back? I have a leader who has a story bank on her phone. So she's in retail. She has a team that um, she, if she sees a customer walk out after an interaction with one of her associates, she actually writes down just really quickly on a note what she saw. Then she makes sure to like feed that back. Hey, yesterday I noticed that. Uh, and it goes a long way because you know, when people feel like they matter, they act like they matter.

SPEAKER_02: 47:05

Yeah. When people tell us the tell us the story about the plumbers. That was a good story.

SPEAKER_01: 47:10

Uh, because I put this into practice. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 47:13

Yeah, because it because this was one about the guys had just come off shift, hadn't they? And they were good, they were thrown into a workshop with you. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01: 47:22

So this guy, big plumbing company. I mean, big uh commercial plumbing company, uh, they're well known. And um the the supervisor asked me to come do a session around mattering and purpose at work. What I didn't know is after pretty much a 14-hour shift, about 50 plumbers, journeyman plumbers, they had some, it was in their warehouse, this cold metal chairs, they're sitting there. I literally, they were, they were, they turned their chairs to face each other. So I was in the front, they were facing away from me, eating their like catered sandwiches. And that's what this room was like. And what I did was I had done some research on this. Uh, I knew this was gonna happen. And I had some uh did some research on this company, and I realized that they did the plumbing infrastructure for this plaza that is brand new. And it happened at the time to house my uh child's favorite donut shop, it was this brand new donut shop. We'd go like every Saturday because when his younger sibling was born, like he loved that just time going there. And so I had a picture of him stuffing his face with a donut. So this this group, and they did not want to be there. So I just put his this picture on the screen of him stuffing his face with this donut. And I just said, Hey, uh, curious, what do you see here? And you know, one person joked, Oh, well, your kid loves donuts. And I was like, Yeah, okay, great, great. But what else do you see here? And then someone said, Oh, that's the exchange, which is the name of the plaza. That's the exchange. We we worked on that project. Instantly, everybody's attention changed. Oh, yeah, that's the exchange. That's so-and-so. And I said, Yeah, do you see this like absolute joy of this kid eating his eating this donut? He had his eyes closed as he was eating it. I was like, You created that because you worked on the infrastructure for that storefront, right? And they all said, Yeah. And we had an amazing conversation. And after the session, uh Journeyman Plumber came up to me and he had been there for 30 years. He said, I've been doing this for 30 years, and I've never thought about my job that way. I said, What do you mean that way? He goes, The people that used all these buildings, I've never thought about them. I've never thought that I had any sort of impact on them. And that's sad. Um, that's the only reason why his job existed. That's the only reason why you would have a plumber, is because human beings use the infrastructure in which you do the plumbing for. But he had never had anybody who showed him the downstream impact of his work in his 30 years. And I would argue that most people in most jobs, very few and far between, have had anybody say, look what you did.

SPEAKER_02: 49:57

Yeah. Now that brings us very nicely into um without recounting the famous NASA stories about putting the janitor saying he was helping put a man on the moon and all that. There's something in that you extracted from looking at the way NASA went about things, particularly that whole idea of putting somebody on the moon in the 60s. And you talked about the impact and value of laddering in terms of how do so leaders might be going out there, but I have pockets in my organizations, people who actually do a great job getting people to matter, but we still don't have a culture of mattering. And one of the things um it struck me was that that this is not not this is quite a useful um thing to reference point this laddering idea. Could you maybe explain that for my listeners?

SPEAKER_01: 50:43

First of all, the the most one of the most important parts of mattering is feeling needed. Like if we don't feel relied on, if our presence and absence doesn't matter, we won't show up. You know, when people feel replaceable, they will psychologically act replaceable. When people feel irreplaceable, they act irreplaceable. One of the things that NASA did is that NASA had a major challenge. I mean, they had 300,000 contract workers. Many people don't know that, that were working on very small parts of this major mission. And I'll add this nobody knew whether the mission was possible or not. So talk about perceived futility of work. Like, what are we doing? Is just this, is this just a governmental symbolic exercise? Right? You have engineers, janitors, as you mentioned, um, seamstresses sewing the Lunar Lander parachutes, astronauts, physicists, chemists. How do you get them all to see how they're needed to something 10 years down the line, in which chances are high that they wouldn't even be contracted for when this was accomplished or not? And Andrew Carn at the Wharton School did this brilliant archival study. He looked at meeting minutes, he looked at uh NASA facilities, he looked at photos of blackboards and whiteboards at NASA, and he found something really remarkable. Every work unit had what was called a ladder to the moon. And at the top was to put a person on the moon by the end of the decade, the ultimate purpose. But at the bottom was the tasks that they were working on that month. And the next rung up was a tangible, measurable objective that that task was needed for. The next rung up was a tangible, measurable objective that that objective was needed for, all the way to how that was needed to put a person on the moon by the end of the decade to advance science. And so they didn't just weren't just told that they were needed. They could visibly see measurably exactly how they were needed. And this is a concept called laddering. So if you think about this, can everybody in every area of your organization see their ladder measurably? See, see the, you know, one of the five words that I say every leader should be able to tell their people is if it wasn't for you. And show them exactly how they and their inputs are measurably needed for something bigger. And that's why I think that with all of this, like it's easy to tell people that they matter. It takes skill and practice and habits to show them exactly how they matter. And that's the distinction, I think, between good leaders and great leaders.

SPEAKER_02: 53:05

So skill, practice and habits, which comes from actually practice. We have the saying in neuroscience, not practice makes perfect, but practice makes permanent. So obviously, as long as you practice and practice, let's say, the right way of doing things, uh, whatever right means, but you're likely to create those habits by literally paying attention to it and developing the skills and practicing them, right?

SPEAKER_01: 53:32

Yeah. And it's interaction by interaction. So, like culture, for example, I see so many failed culture initiatives, values on the wall, mission statements, big culture retreats, strategic plans, all of that. Culture is an accumulation of interactions. So your next interaction is an act of culture building.

SPEAKER_03: 53:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 53:53

Even if it's someone that what you do when an employee is underperforming and has to tell you that that interaction, how you show up in that direction is your culture.

SPEAKER_02: 54:05

Yeah. Now you you you also we won't really go into a lot of depth on this, but you also talk in the book about how an organization can scale mattering. Yeah. Would you like to share a couple of key pointers to any leader out there who's going, I actually, this is exciting stuff, and and I can see how little pockets of my organization are doing this. How am I going to get this scaled in? Because there's been many, many, many different concepts and ideas where people have tried them out, but they end up in the the organization, the homeostasis of or whatever it's called of an organization, always pulls it back to actually, this is how we do things here, and your little pocket of experimenting in the corner.

SPEAKER_03: 54:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 54:50

Sadly, it's the elastic band effect, it pulls it back. What have you seen, or what have you experienced in your work that that that could can provide some hope or insights for leaders who say, I'd like to be able to scale this stuff?

SPEAKER_01: 55:04

You have to you have to treat leadership as a separate occupation that requires a separate set of occupational skills. So, and this is what's missing in many organizations. You would you would never equip, you would never not equip, evaluate, constantly evaluate, making sure that person is certified and accountant, for example, in your organization. You'd make sure they have the skills, you'd make sure they have the controls that are needed to continue doing their work well, that there was quality there. Um, but yet we we let the people who go out and lead the people just do it with a couple modules on excellence and supervision on an LMS all the time. You have to treat leadership as a separate occupation with a separate set of skills, a separate set of standards, and a separate set of evaluation. And so one of the first things is to make sure that your people are developing the skills that we talked about to make sure people feel seen, heard, valued, and needed to the organization, that they're measured on them, they're evaluated on them, and they're promoted only if they're observed doing them while performing well. So stop promoting people who treat people poorly but perform well. Only promote people that treat people well while performing well and exhibit these skills. That's going to go a long way right there. The second thing though is you have to measure these things. So making sure that leaders are doing at least quarterly self-assessments on the frequency of behaviors to see, hear, and value people, and assessing each team, having their team assess the behaviors their leader does uh on a quarterly basis and getting them together to talk about it. Um and then making sure it's clear. So the making sure it's clear to employees. Here's what you should expect from your leader. You should expect to feel noticed, affirmed, and needed. And if it's not happening, here's what to do. Leaders, here's the behaviors that are expected of you in a leadership role here. Um, and then I would say the final piece is make sure that your environment makes it possible to do the things you want people to do. This is, I see this often. You send somebody to a session and they learn about doing meaningful check-ins, but then you throw a manager out on a distribution center floor with a GPS tracker on their scan gun to track their everyday work, or you load them up with meetings or administrative tasks so they have no time to check in. There's nothing more frustrated than knowing what we should do as a leader and being in an environment that makes it impossible for us to do it. So anytime you're gonna um anytime you're gonna unveil anything or give people a new skill or invest in evaluating a new skill, you have to make sure the environment makes it possible for them to do it.

SPEAKER_02: 57:47

Yeah, those are incredibly important uh and those three three great three great insights there. Actually, we have something we call the leadership impact survey, and there's actually a lot of what you've written about your space. We developed it many years ago. I'm gonna take another look at it. An awful lot of what you have written about in the book is reflected in the survey, and it's deliberately 180 degrees because a lot of smart managers can manage upwards. Um, and and they're and their manager is going to be exercising confirmation bias. They put the person in the job, so they're going to say, well, give them a break. Peer group doesn't actually have the same experience. So actually, asking the people who get led or managed what it's like to be managed by this person is going to serve you very, very well out there to because it's not it's not trying to catch the manager out, it's trying to help them see their blind spots reflected back from the people who have to you know experience them every day, but also it gives an opportunity to the people to feel that if action starts to take place, that what their opinion actually matters, right? So if they can can influence the the way their leader um leads. Oh, and I think it's different.

SPEAKER_01: 58:55

I think it actually helps the leader feel that they matter. Uh because the more the more as a leader you have an opportunity to invest in people, show them how they matter, the more you actually see how you matter beyond just producing, producing results from your team. Um, that you're actually responsible for the people and how they feel in producing those results. And you know, one of the groups that we did this with, I remember a woman who was a senior leader, and we had had all of them think about these behaviors that they would commit to. And this is a high performance organization. And she said that this is giving me permission to be human again.

SPEAKER_02: 59:31

Whoa.

SPEAKER_01: 59:33

So so when an organization gives a leader the permission and the skills and the expectations to do things like see someone, hear someone, affirm someone's gifts, show them the impact that they make, remind them how they need it, that that is performance. It can give leaders the permission to be human again and often systems that reduce them to their output.

SPEAKER_02: 59:57

Okay. So Zach, coming to the end. And I'd like to finish on the story of Tanya at the airport. And perhaps out of this story, you could leave my listeners with two or three key takeaways just based on that one example.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:12

Yeah, so as I was finishing my book, I got asked to go down and observe this really high-performing unit of a global cleanliness team for an airline. So these are people that go on your planes as you're disembarking and they clean the planes. Uh, if you notice what happens when people come on the planes to clean, most people just brush by them. So I got to go down and actually clean with them. One of the things I noticed is that when I put on that vest, I became invisible. People just brushed by me on the planes. That's every single day. But I wanted to know why this cleanliness team had the highest audit scores in the and highest turnaround times in the whole airline. And the first person I met was this woman named Tanya. And she was the cleanliness support coordinator for the airline. Now, what's important for you to know is that she is not the direct supervisor of the cleaning crew. The cleaning crew is a contracting crew whose supervisor is remote, absent. But what I noticed is Tanya, the first thing that happens, Tanya went up to the ticketing agent to get me my pass to go through security. She started giving me this bio about how long the ticketing agent's been there. She complimented her on her smile, and it was just amazing. That person just lit up. Then we go through TSA and she's asking TSA agents about someone who just bought a new house, asking him about the house, asking them about their kids, holding up the line behind us. We go down to the concourse area. She passes by one of the wheelchair attendants and says, Hey, I just want to let you know, like, thank you for being here. I saw what you did with so-and-so yesterday and that difficult customer, and it was amazing. Then she goes down to the tarmac level. Now, these are these are people coming in and out of the airplanes. It's high turnover. If you want to look at what this looks like, you go down into this area, there's a countdown. So a plane gets to the gate and it counts down. And then you have to go on that plane and get a specific audit score of how clean the airplane is. It's high pressure. But she stops and she sees this guy who's sitting on break on his phone. Now, this guy was from Ghana, Africa, and he was working to send money home to his daughter. And she said to him, Hey, can you just show me a picture of your daughter? I want to remember why I'm here today. And then she went back into the break room and she talked, uh, told each of them how what she appreciated about each of them. Woman got up, hugged her, said, You know, I just want to let you know you make a real difference for me. And then she goes right up to the airplane, audits, has these great conversations about things they need to fix. No emotion, no uh anger amongst people trying to get these performance results. She's the highest performance in the airline. She wasn't these people's supervisor, right? But what she did is she made the choice to lead them. She wasn't their leader, she made the choice to lead. And it happened in everyday interactions. And what she told me is she said, Zach, my job is relationships. Everything else follows. Everything else follows. I can I can tell somebody that their audit score wasn't high and have someone give me a hug after because they're happy to see me.

SPEAKER_03: 1:03:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:13

That is the relational groundwork that's needed to build the trust that's needed for high performance. And I asked her, I said, How did you develop this? And she said, My leader does it for me. And this is how mattering begets mattering. So one thing I would say to leave you with is your next great leadership act is really your next interaction.

unknown: 1:03:32

Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:33

It's not your not your product launch, not your quarterly results, um, not your big project that you're proud of. It is how you show up with the next person you interact with. The second is it's a choice. You're you don't need your organization's permission to show up and care for the next person you interact with. It's a choice. It's your choice, it's your responsibility, and each interaction is an act of culture building. And ask yourself, what's the culture I'm building in my next interaction?

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:59

So I'm going to put links in the show notes, both to your book and to your website. And uh how can people get in touch with you? And do you have anything special to offer them?

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:12

Yeah, I mean, go to zacmercurio.com. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. And if you connect with me on LinkedIn and you can mention that you listen to us here, uh, then I have a companion workbook. It's like a 30-page workbook that includes a self-assessment, um, includes some reflection questions uh around each of the practices that we covered, and includes also a nice overview of what mattering is and why it matters too. And I'm happy to send that your way.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:37

Great. So, Zach McCurio, thanks for sharing your insights, tips, and wisdom with me and my listeners here today. Thanks, Jerry. Coming up on leading people.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:50

The starting point really is about being explicit about what the organization is really for beyond profit and who it's accountable to. And once that's clearer and there's that shared understanding, leaders can then ask, well, what behaviours does this require from us? And are we actually enabling those behaviors or are we getting in the way? Are we making it easy for people to behave in the way that really we know we we want them to? And are we giving them a reason to want to show up and give of their best every day?

SPEAKER_02: 1:05:31

That was Ali Gibbons, author of The Power of Ownership Culture, talking about why performance ultimately comes back to purpose, behavior, and helping people feel that what they do really makes a difference. In our next episode, we'll be exploring how employee ownership, culture, and leadership responsibility come together and what it really takes to build organizations where people don't just turn up but truly engage. And remember, before our next full episode, there's another one simple thing episode waiting for you. A quick and actionable tip to help you lead and live better. Keep an eye out for it wherever you listen to this podcast. Until next time.