- Employalty, it's kind of a funny portmanteau word, but you're going to want to hear more about this. Hi, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the "Wedding Business Solutions" podcast. I am so excited to have my friend, Joe Mull, on, who has just written a great new book called "Employalty", Hey, Joe.

- Alan, I am so excited to be here with you today. Thanks for the invite, man.

- Well, I just literally finished listening to your book, and I say listening. It is reading, but is listening to the book. And one of the things I loved is that you did your own audio because I do know your voice, you have a great voice. So thank you for reading your own book.

- Oh, thank you my friend. This is the first time I've done an audio book. I've written three books, but this is the first one that we recorded for that format. And I have to tell you, it was a lot of fun.

- Yeah, and it was very natural. It's what I try to do with my books. It's just you talking. I mean, it was really what it is, is it was just you talking. Because I know you, it really just felt like you talking to me, which is wonderful. So, let's go back. Employalty, and most people are listening, not watching, so they're not going to see it. It is in the show notes all there. So this is a word that combines a bunch of things, which is a portmanteau word, but it actually combines three things, not two. It looks like it's employee, loyalty, whatever, but it's more than that. What is it?

- Yeah, we're playing a little bit of a trick on the readers, admittedly, right? If you're going to buy a book called "Employalty", it's probably because you're really gunning for more employee loyalty, right? At a time when it's harder than ever before to find and keep devoted people in organizations of all shapes and sizes. But once you get into the book, what you find out is that employalty is actually the combination of employer, loyalty, and humanity. So there's a massive recalibration taking place right now around how work fits into people's lives. And also, business owners and leaders, people's bosses, they still don't understand or engineer the conditions that lead people at work to care and try and join and stay. And so, what we've done is marry together a whole bunch of social science research with what's activates people at work with what's happening in the labor market right now. And what's clear as day is that if you want to attract and retain talent, you've got to create a more humane employee experience because that's what activates commitment at work.

- Yeah, and it's one of the things I love in the book is the angle that you're coming at this with is not the angle that people typically have is, "All right, so let's give people more benefits, let's give more reward about this, let's pay them more. They're going to be more loyal because we're going to pay them more." And that doesn't make people loyal, right? People are loyal to people because of how they feel. They're not loyal to your logo and your motto and all those kind of things. So that was really enjoyed and I resonated with a lot of things in the book from my personal experience as an employee as well as being a boss. Because #BossBetter 'cause that is Joe. And boss is not a bad four-letter word, you also said that. Just talk about that for a second 'cause the word boss sometimes like, "Oh, it's my boss. It's my boss," right? But it's not a bad word.

- You're right about that. I get beat up on LinkedIn sometimes by people who want to have these sort of what I think are semantic discussions about which words we can and can't use when talking about leadership or people who lead other people in certain kinds of roles. And look, I get it. The word boss in some corners of the world is not a nice connotation. Sometimes we use it, you know, "I handled that like a boss", right? Like I dominated it. But, the word boss is not a dirty word because it's the word your employees use.

- Right.

- If somebody walks into your office and talks to the person sitting at the front desk and says, "Hey, can I talk to your boss?" That person's not going to go, "Whoa! Time out. Salty language, sailor. Calm it down." Right?

- Right.

- And the truth is, if you hire somebody new and they have just finished their first week on the job and they go home and their neighbor wanders over while they're sitting out on the patio and says, "Hey, how's it going? What's new?" And they start talking about your person's new job. At some point the neighbor's going to say, "What do you think of your new boss?" And same thing, that person is not going to push back and say, "Hey, we don't like that term. You need to call them my chief motivation officer. Thank you."

- Yeah. We have that in the wedding and event industry where they don't want to be called vendors. And I get it because there's that same connotation. There's a vendor, street vendor or whatever, but if you ask people who are getting married, they'll say, "Yeah, these are my vendors." Right? So it's the same.

- Yeah.

- Years ago I had a DJ who said, "Would you please call us mobile music entertainers?" And this was when I was at The Knot, I was vice president of sales and we're publishing magazines and stuff. And I said, "I will as soon as couples start calling you that."

- Right, nobody's Googling that.

- Nobody is googling that.

- Right.

- So it it's those type of things. So what you talked about, there were a bunch of things in there and there were these nine dimensions of a great, is it of a great job or what? What is it the nine dimensions of?

- Right, so we, in the process of writing this book, we analyzed more than 200 research studies and articles on why people quit a job or decide to take a new job or decide to stay long-term with an organization. And we can say with conviction that finding and keeping employees becomes much easier if your organization is winning in three areas of the employee experience. We call them ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss. These are the three factors that we know make up a kind of internal psychological scorecard that every employee in every job and every company on planet Earth is walking around with. And underneath each of those three factors are three dimensions. So, ideal job is made up of compensation, workload, and flexibility. If my money's right, my workload's right, and I got some flexibility around when, where, and how I work, that's my ideal job. It fits into my life like a puzzle piece snapping into place. Meaningful work, it's purpose, strengths, and belonging. If I'm doing work that I believe makes a difference, it has purpose. If I'm doing work that aligns with my strengths, right? I get to use my talents and gifts. And if I'm doing work on a team or in a place where I experience belonging, I'm a celebrated and accepted member of the team, that's meaningful work. And now my commitment goes up, my loyalty goes up, and my effort goes up.

- Right.

- And then the third factor, great boss is really made up of trust, coaching, and advocacy, which are three different kinds of behaviors that when leaders engage in them make an employee go, "Wow, I've got a great boss." And so when you get all of those dimensions together, you've really created what we call a destination workplace. And you make it much more likely that people are going to join, they're going to stay, and they're going to care and try.

- Right, and you have some great examples in there. I love when you tell the stories of real people. And you also talk about when you become this destination, you start getting more good applicants because they're hearing from other people, "This is a great place to work." And what makes it a great place to work is I feel belonging, I feel like I'm being treated well. I'm being valued, I'm being compensated. I'm doing work that matters. All these nine dimensions. And I think everybody listening, including myself, can go back and think about where some of these boxes were checked, but not enough of them.

- Yep.

- And what makes you leave? I'm in this industry 'cause I was being compensated very well in a job where they valued what I was doing, but I did not feel a conviction to the job I was doing. I actually felt the opposite. I felt dirty. I felt I was cheating people. I didn't believe in what I was selling. Just the opposite of that as I was being told, "You must sell these to people whether they want them or not." And that's hard. It's really hard. And it made me leave a job with great pay, good benefits, company car, et cetera, while my wife was pregnant to take a job in a new industry that was commissioned only where I had to go buy a car, pay for my own benefits and all that. That's how bad it was.

- Wow. Yeah.

- I jumped off of that ledge. Well, you know, 32 years later, here I am, but that's another-

- Here you are. Here I am. And that's the thing is sometimes it leads you to the better thing. And you told the story about a woman sitting in a Burger King parking lot who is crying, right? And the company then's throwing money at her, which they wouldn't do before, but now they're throwing money at her because now they realize if she's not doing it, who is going to do this? We can't find somebody to do it. And then they wanted her back and wanted her back. And she's like, "No. I don't want to end up in the hospital again."

- Right. You know, when I wrote this book I was very intentional in trying to source stories and case studies and examples from real world workplaces, especially small businesses. I know so many of your listeners, Alan, are running small businesses of their own. I'm a small business owner. I have three employees plus me. So, there is a place in the world for stories about Apple and Google and Southwest and Patagonia and all of the big companies that we point to when we talk about workplace culture. But, let's talk about the small electricians group that is based out of Oklahoma that we wrote about. Let's talk about a plumber in West Virginia. Let's talk about a small HVAC team at a hospital in Kentucky which we wrote about in the book. A nonprofit in Seattle that we wrote about that works with a diversion program for young juvenile offenders. And we wanted to showcase these real stories to overcome the perception that big companies are the only ones who can devote themselves to the resources and the effort that it takes to engineer all of the experiences that we write about in the book. And it's just not true. And I would actually argue that a smaller business is more agile and has a much shorter runway to making the kind of changes that employers need to make if they're really going to become a destination workplace. And to your point, Alan, about the job started out great, but then it didn't go so well after a while. Commitment is a relationship and relationships change, people change. What's important to us at 22 might not be what's important to us at 42. And if an employer isn't meeting the changing needs and values of its workforce, they eventually become a departure organization. And that's what happened with you.

- Yeah, and you also talked about something which I just phrased a little differently. It's just the right person in the right seat, which there was a person who, her job was not graphic design, it was something that she did. She, I think, was the assistant to the CEO or something like that. And she was really good at it. She really enjoyed it. And if you have the right person in the wrong seat, they could be a great person. And you said this. Sometimes it's, we need to part ways because you need, you're really talented, but just not at this.

- Yeah.

- You need to go find it. And I've said this, I probably posted this on our National Speakers Association group when things came up, but I've always hire people, not resumes. Because a resume is what someone has given you a chance to do, not what you're capable of. And I once hired somebody, actually, she's a good friend now. She ended up being my number two sales rep out of 50 or 60 reps. And her resume would not have gotten a look at if we had gotten in a lot more resumes, but we just happened to not get a lot of resumes. Went, met with her, liked her, and I said, "You know what, by the paper I shouldn't hire you, but I think you can do this job."

- Yeah.

- And I want you to do something for me. And she said, "What?" I said, "I want you to prove me right." Because-

- And it sounds like along the way you had a certain amount of willingness to adjust the job role to fit her strengths. So many positions and leaders will create roles with a clear set of, "This is exactly what I want this person to do and they better be great in all these areas. And if they're not, then it's a failure." Right?

- Right.

- It's their failure to meet our needs when the reality is, if you can come up with a handful of things that you know are going to need to leave with somebody in a particular role, but you can leave enough space and agency for people to come in and demonstrate what their talent, skills, and strengths are, all of a sudden you are positioning people to use their greatest gifts on your behalf. And we know that when people get to use their gifts and strengths at least three hours a day, not only does their engagement go up, but their overall health and wellbeing goes up and you benefit as the employer.

- You also told the story, was it the medical office, the medical workers or whatever? Where they had this whole list of requirements. You had to be a high school graduate and you had to do this and you had to do this. And they're like, "Wait a second, you don't need those things to do this. And if we're waiting for someone who knows all these things already, we're not going to find them. So we can teach you this." And they came up with this great, I call it a mentoring program, but it was something else.

- Yeah.

- What was it?

- It's funny, you know, sometimes the universe sends you a gift. And as I was writing this book, this happened to me a couple of times. When you're on the lookout for real world examples, your antenna are kind of up. And so I was the keynote speaker for a healthcare conference out on the West Coast. And I was standing in the back of the room waiting to go on. And right before me, they were doing these series of micro presentations where somebody would get up and speak for, it was like eight or 12 minutes on a topic. And so, the last person stood up and a woman named Jessica out of Massachusetts, and she presented on how her organization was struggling to fill these frontline roles in her organization to a crisis point. And so they convened a committee to say we need to go about finding people in a completely different way. And they did several things that really ended up supercharging their pipeline, but one of the most interesting was they blew up the job description, which is what you're alluding to. They said, "We read this job description and we laughed and we said, 'We don't really need any of this. You don't have to have a high school diploma. You don't have to have experience with Microsoft Office. You don't have to have a background in customer service. If you want to work in healthcare, come be awesome. we'll teach you the rest.'" That is almost word for word the job description that they came up with. And then they created a cohort program where they would hire people into the cohort program, pay them a base salary, put them through a training for a couple of weeks, and then hire out of the cohort. And guess what? Now, they are not having any problem filling those roles.

- Right. It's almost like an apprenticeship, right?

- Yes.

- Come in, let us show you what the job is. Let's teach you what it is. Let's found out. I think a lot of people might know the Zappos stories, where people will go to Zappos, they go through the training program, and then they would pay you if you don't want to take the job. And if you really want the job, you're willing to give up this bonus. So the next book I want everybody to read after "Employalty", if you haven't read it, is a book called "Why Work Sucks". And I don't know if you've read that one, Joe, but you spoke-

- I have not.

- But you spoke about it the same thing in here, and this was written by people from Best Buy's corporate offices. And there were two people that were tasked with finding out why they had so much turnover in the corporate offices. And the short story is they came up with something called a ROWE, R-O-W-E, which is a Results-Only Work Environment.

- I've heard of that.

- and this entirely reminds me of the HVAC story that you told about

- Yes.

- at the hospital, where just get the job done and if you can do other stuff around this, cool. As long as you got the job done, we are just going to be a hundred percent done by the end of every month. And I think back to, first of all this book, "Why Work Sucks" is they talked about do we own your time? No, we own the results that we hired you for. When I was regional sales director at The Knot, when I was VP of sales, my sales reps worked from home, therefore I was not sitting watching them. We didn't have little webcams on them. And other than a meeting that you had to be in at a certain time or whatever, this is the number you need to hit. Go do it. And if you could do that in four hours a day, knock yourself out. Just go do it. And nobody taught me that. Nobody taught me that but I realized that as an employee that became a boss, what do you really hire me for? You hire me to get this job done. And if your kid has a thing at school, go. I have kids, I want to go. You have kids, go. Go and do it. So this HVAC story, right? That was the same thing.

- It was the same thing. And there's this kind of through line theme through several of the case studies in the book, and through what you just described in your own experience, Alan, around what do you believe about people? Do you believe that left to their own devices people are shady, that they are unethical, that they're going to try to get away with doing laundry and watching Netflix when they're supposed to be working from home?

- Right.

- Or do you believe that most people have integrity, that most people do want to do a good job and prove that they can do a good job, for example, in a remote environment because they want to be in that kind of a circumstance? I mentioned this in the book, but I was speaking at a conference right around the time I started writing the book and was talking about some of the innovations that workplaces are using to find and keep talent. And of course, remote work came up and afterwards a hospital administrator walked up to me and he said, "I just can't get behind it, man. You don't know what people are doing. You don't know if they're double dipping. You don't know if they're giving you the hours that you're paying 'em for. I just can't do it." And I said, "Well, the problems you just listed aren't problems of remote work. They're problems of trust." And the underlying sort of foundation of his concerns are the belief systems operating in the background around people's integrity. And so when you actually look at the data around remote work, and Gallup has been studying this for years, we know that remote employees actually can be up to three times as engaged in their work provided they just get ongoing feedback from their boss.

- Right.

- And so we have to kind of do a little bit of work between our ears to figure out what we believe about people

- Right.

- in order to create the kind of environment that people want to be a part of.

- Right, now, it's easy in sales to do this results-only work environment. You mentioned also in the book, it's also hard in some cases 'cause you have to be in certain places in certain times. Like a receptionist has to be at the desk at these times, a nurse has to be in the hospital on their shift, right? There's things like that. In the hospitality industry, events happen, they have to happen at a certain time, at a certain date. Now again, the sales people can be working remotely. They could do stuff.

- Yeah.

- So how would this work? Let's say I'm a caterer in a wedding venue, right? And I have these people who might be part-time because they're working at events. How does this concept here of employalty work when you're working with maybe odd hours, what we know is tough in the wedding and event industry. It's weekends, it's nights, it's all that kind of stuff there. I know you have experience with that as well.

- Yeah.

- So how, for the people that are listening, want to be able to use these dimensions, right? These three dimensions over there, you know, having purpose and having a great boss and all, how would that work here?

- You know, yes, and I think some of what you're specifically alluding to around flexibility is probably the most challenging part in terms of what you've just described because we know flexibility is one of these nine dimensions. It's a part of that ideal job. But we also know that it's the number one most in-demand workplace benefit in the world right now. People want to have some influence over when, where, and how they work, and that's the biggest thing for people to remember. Flexibility is not just about working from home. And as you said, Alan, like there are some jobs that you just can't do from home, like flight attendant, right? And but if we can look at it through the lens of how do I give my employees some power to define some aspect of when, where, and how they work, you're actually creating the psychological building blocks for commitment. So for example, maybe they get to decide what days of the week they work or how long their shifts are, or start times or end times, or the kinds of events they go to, or who they work with, or the kind of work that they do. Really it's about autonomy, right? Flexibility is not about work from home. That's just one piece. It's about understanding that if we can empower people, give them some influence, we're actually creating the conditions that appeal to people. And so I get asked this question a lot, I do a lot of work in healthcare and so I get asked this question a lot by hospitals and doctor's offices. Like, "Hey, man. We've got a patient schedule and that never changes. It's impossible to give people that autonomy." And that's bunk. I actually think it's easier when you know we have to be open these hours and serve this many people, you can have a standing schedule of services and support, but within that schedule, can we stagger it? Can we figure out, "Okay, we've got a group of people who really only want to work 32 hours a week, but we've got some other people who want to work 42 hours a week. And we've got some people who will prioritize weekends." You know, healthcare especially has been doing four, tens and condensed scheduling for years and giving people choice and priority based on seniority, et cetera. So it can be done. There are ways to give people more flexibility.

- And the thing is, while you want to shoot for all nine dimensions, you can still have great employees and loyalty with seven, right? 'Cause you had this one lady who took a cut in pay

- Yep.

- but every other box was checked and she's like, "I will stay with these people forever now,"

- Yeah.

- because of that. And I think that's the thing. This whole idea of do I have any say, do I have any flexibility, is my employer, my boss, allowing me to fail because I'm learning from the failure. And I might have told this story already. I was at a wedding and the wait staff came around and it had said on the menu, they had a little menu there and it said, "Beef was the default. If you want chicken or if you want vegetarian, you could ask." And they come over and they start putting down beef, chicken, beef, chicken, beef, chicken, beef, chicken.

- Oh wow.

- And I looked and I said, "Well, nobody ever asked us what we want." And she said, "Well, yeah, the caterer just wants us to do it this way and you guys can just swap." Which first of all is a problem that we're going to touch each other's plates, okay. That's a problem, okay.

- Oh yeah!

- But the second thing was, there was no flexibility. Like, well, can they put two beefs in a row? "No, no, no, no, no, no. They told us to do it this way." So then dessert comes, I'm sitting with my 92-year-old aunt, 93-year-old uncle. And they come by and the first thing that was crazy is the dance floor was packed. I mean, the DJ was just amazing. And there's empty tables, and they come over and they start putting dessert at the empty tables, not where people were sitting. Like, don't start with whether people are sitting. So again, nobody walks into the room and is able to go, "Don't put them here, let's put them where the people are." "No, we have to start with this table," right? So they come over and they start to do chocolate, apple, chocolate, apple, chocolate, apple.

- Uh oh.

- And they put an apple in front of my aunt and my uncle wanted chocolate, I'm sorry, he wanted apple, but that would've been two apples in a row. And I said, "Well, he wants apple." And she goes to put the chocolate on his plate. I said, "He wants apple." And she goes to put the chocolate on his plate. And I grabbed the apple out of her other hand and I said, "He's 93. Give him the apple!" But standing right there with people, they couldn't even make the decision 'cause they must feel like they don't have agency to be able to make such a simple thing. Hand the old man his apple, right?

- Yes, and we talk in that whole Great Boss section of the book about when you grant people trust, you actually are the opposite of a micromanager, right? And what you're describing, Alan, is a leader or a policy or both that said, "Don't think, just do." And in the face of an opportunity to be of even greater service to customers and create an even better guest experience, they were beholden to the demands, to the dictate of whatever that policy or that leader said. And it actually ended up doing harm to the experience for the guests at that event. And you know what? That's a miserable experience for those employees who are walking around and who know this is stupid. Like, "Why are we doing it this way?" "Don't think, just do." And you hear that enough times, you feel like "I'm a commodity", right? They could hire monkeys to do this.

- Right.

- I'm just a robot. Why am I here? And people leave.

- Yeah. And again, so many stories resonated. One resonated with me when I was a regional sales director I had anywhere from 12 to 1516 sales reps and when they would call and say, "I'm having this issue with a client," I would say, "Okay, so what do you think we should do," instead of "Do this".

- Do this, yep.

- And the reason was a couple of things. First of all, it's like, well it's your customer and you know them better than I do, so what do you think we should do? and when they would first do this, they would go, "Uh, you want to know what I think?" It's like, "Yeah, it's your customer. I want to know what you think." The other thing was I don't want you coming to me for every little thing.

- Yeah.

- And if they would say, "Well, I think we should do this," I say, "Will that make them happy?" And if they said yes, I'll said, "Well, then go do that." And if it was something I didn't think we could do, I said, "Well, you know what? I don't think we can do that, but what else could we do?" Or "Why don't we do this then. Maybe come up with another suggestion." And you-

- You just described coaching, and that's one of the nine dimensions. It's one of the components of being a great boss is not just telling people what to do, giving people an answer every time they ask you a question. It's mining people for their insights, their creativity, their experiences. It's asking open-ended questions in the right order to create self-actualization. It's amazing, Alan, as you know, I'm known as the Boss Better guy because that's our podcast and it's a big part of the training that we've been doing for years. And it is amazing to me how many leaders I encounter who will tell me, "How do I get my employees to be more critical thinkers?" "How do I get my employees to take more ownership of their work?" "How do I get employees to stop asking me the same questions over and over and over again?" And the answer is all coaching, right? But that requires two levels of investment. One, it requires the organization to invest in that kind of training for their leaders, because coaching is a skill that needs to be learned and developed. The second investment is on the part of the leader who needs to practice, right? They need to invest time to get good at it, and that does take time, and those conversations themselves take time. It's almost always faster to just say, "Oh, put that paperwork there. Well, we talked about it at the staff meeting last week. Why don't you listen well?"

- Right.

- Versus. "Well here, come in. What's your first instinct? What options do you see?" And you're not playing gotcha, right? You're not doing it to make 'em feel stupid. You're walking them through the thought processes that you want to eventually happen alone behind their eyes.

- Right, and it comes back to trust again. You have to trust people and if you're hiring somebody and you don't trust them, there's a problem, right? But then you also, if you're a senior leader and you have a manager who has a lot of turnover, it's not necessarily the people that have been hired below them. The problem could be at that level, and some people don't want to give up that authority. That manager doesn't want to give up. They want to feel important. For me, I always said, when I was VP of sales, I said to my sales directors and my sales reps, "If you guys are doing the job that we hired you to do and trained you to do, it should look like I'm doing nothing."

- Right, right.

- And if I'm putting out fires all day, I have to look in the mirror and say, "That's my fault."

- Right, and you're just trading time. That's all you're doing in that kind of a circumstance. And we know that a lot of leaders create co-dependent relationships with their direct reports in their teams, where they come to believe that that's how they are needed and that's how they prove their worth to the organization. You know, if you hear a leader who says, "I can't get away for vacation because these people don't know what to do," or, "I have too many questions." Well, that's actually a failure of delegation. It's a failure of mentoring. It's a failure of teaching and coaching. But the piece about trust too is that, yes, if you don't trust somebody you shouldn't hire them, but you're not going to have the same amount of trust in them on day one as you have maybe on day 30 or day 60. Trust is, it's a plant, right? It starts as a seed, you've got to nurture it and see if it can grow. I have an employee on my team right now who's been here for three years and I trust her in ways that I maybe never even imagined I would when I first hired her. So she came in, she proved competence, she proved integrity, and I was able to release more and more trust to her and in her as a result of her performance. So there's a correlation there. We don't need to trust blindly, but we can start with trust and allow people to earn more.

- Right, and that's another thing you said in the book is that we as looking down the ladder have to give more trust and then see that it's earned. But we have to earn the trust of the people

- Yes.

- that are looking up.

- Yes, it's a two-way street. And we've all probably had experiences where we've worked for someone that we didn't trust. And there are a whole host of reasons why that might be. Maybe they betrayed us in some way. They promised one thing and did another. Maybe they took credit for our work and blamed a failure on us that was outside of our control. Or if you've ever been in a place where, like the boss' son got hired and named department head but had no idea what he was doing, well you don't trust that person because they're incompetent, right? So there's a whole host of reasons why employees may not trust a direct supervisor. So there are a whole host of habits and routines and interactions that direct supervisors, really leaders at all levels, need to engage in to imbue that relationship with trust going both ways.

- Yeah.

- But it's fragile, Alan, and it can be fleeting, right? And you can spend years building trust, but then one bad interaction or one bad decision can tear it all down. I talk in the book a couple of times about how, unfortunately, common it is for an employee somewhere to maybe get a new opportunity within the organization and they've decided they're going to accept it. But then their boss comes back and scuttles it because I can't afford to lose you right now. That relationship is done, it is over. I've decided that my convenience is more important than your professional growth, development, your financial needs, and your humanity, your agency, your ability to choose your path. I've decided that it's all subjugated to my needs. That relationship is over.

- Yeah. I remember when I became VP of sales, I hit the pie in the sky number that my predecessor had never hit.

- Ah!

- And I got a very large check. Actually, I had to go back to them because I'm also a accounting and marketing major, son of an accountant. And I said, "Look at that plan again. I think you owe me a little bit more." It was a very, very large check. And my reward was that the next bonus opportunity if I had hit that was half of what that was. So the reward for doing what you asked me to do was that the next time if you do it we're going to pay you half of that.

- We move the goalposts.

- And also, I'm okay with you moving the goalposts, but then the reward if I get to the goalpost was now half? Well, why am I going to work to get there? But I also remember being asked to move into a different position. And I didn't really want to go, but I said to myself, "If I was them, I'm the person in the company that I would put there." Right? Right? I have the skillset and all that, and although I would rather not because I like it where I am. Look, if we were looking to do that and I looked down, I'd said, "I'm kind of the only person that I would put in that position." And I took that even though it wasn't, I didn't think it was where I wanted to be 'cause I really loved what I was doing, I was excelling at, all that kind of stuff.

- Yeah.

- So, all right, we can definitely do this forever, which we will do when we see each other in July. But, you have to get the book "Employalty'. Again, I did the audio book, like I said. It is not a long book to begin with. The audio was, what is it, four hours, five hours? Something like that.

- I think it's a little, it's about six and a half, but I talk fast. You talk fast and I listened at 1.2, so it might've been five hours for me, but that's what it was. But it really goes by very easily. It's so easy to relate to. There's so many things in the industry. If people want to find out more about you, what you do, how to get the book, we're going to put it in the show notes anyway, but what's the short story on that?

- Oh, thank you, Alan. That's really generous. To find me, I'm at joemull.com. J-O-E-M-U-L-L.com. Or you can go to bossbetternow.com and you'll find me as well. The book is available anywhere you like to buy books. It's "Employalty", which is just E-M-P-loyalty and it's on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And if you want to support your local independent bookstore, you can go to indiebound.org and order the book there and they will source it from your local independent bookstore. We're big fans of that.

- Nice. Yeah, I get these deposits every month through IngramSpark that people are buying my books through these little independent stores. I have no idea where, and all of a sudden it's like, "You just made $18." Like cool. I can go get a coffee at Starbucks or something.

- That's amazing. Something like that. That went very good. Joe, thank you so much. Thanks for, first of all, thanks for writing the book and thanks for coming on here, my friend. Yeah, I enjoyed the book. I enjoyed our talk. I hope everybody did as well. You do have two other books, right? So if they can find those as well in those places, Amazon and all those.

- You got it, you got it.

- And then we will come and talk about more stuff another time.

- I'd love to, man, and thank you. I mean, I'm doing a lot of these, right? You launched a new book into the world and you do a lot of podcast interviews and media. It is so refreshing, Alan, to talk to someone who, first of all has read the book, right? And is recalling the stories and the ideas and the framework. It just really makes for such a richer discussion and that's so generous of you. So thank you for doing that. But who also has a head for leadership and to understand workplace culture as you do, and to be able to tie it all together in a conversation like this is just a blast, man. Thank you so much for having me.

- All right, well thank you. And tune in next time for another great discussion and I will see you at the conference, my friend.

- Thank you.