The Customer-Driven Leader (Episode 7) ~ Dr. Ben Granger

James welcomes Dr. Ben Granger, author of A Leader Worth Following, who serves as Chief Workplace Psychologist at Qualtrics. James and Ben discuss his new book and how leadership drives the ultimate business outcomes we hope to achieve in Experience Management (XM). His research has been published and featured in major academic and media outlets, including ABC News, Business Insider, Bloomberg, CNBC, Fast Company, Fortune, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Don't miss this one!

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:05

Hey, good morning, everybody. Sorry for the slight delay due to technical difficulties, but here we are. Welcome to the Customer Driven Leader Podcast, where we explore the critical impact that leaders have in creating and sustaining winning cultures that positively impact customer experiences. I'm your host, Dr. James Killian, and I'd like to thank you for being with us. And I'd like to thank the XM Global Collaborative for sponsoring this really great event. I'm super excited to introduce my next guest. In this episode, we have uh Dr. Benjamin Grange, not Granger. That's really important because he's going to be very famous soon with his uh new book coming out. He's author of A Leader Worth Following. And he currently serves as chief workplace psychologist at Qualtrics. He's a former colleague of mine of many years. His research has been published and featured in major academia and media outlets like ABC News, Business Insider, Bloomberg, CNBC, Fast Company, Fortune, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and he's a really kick-ass guy and a really good friend, too. So, Ben, welcome to the show. Good to have you on.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Great to be with you, brother.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

It's been really exciting to me to watch your journey. You know, you've always been well known, kind of semi-famous, and now you're you're really just getting out there. And we definitely want to talk about the book here in a little bit. But both of us actually have been working on pieces, my own book as well. And I thought it was really humorous that just recently both of us back to back were on Dr. Gary David's podcast experience by design. He was very, very excited that he had two Iopsychologists as his guests back to back consecutively. So that was going to talk about the book here in just a minute. But Ben, you know, we talked about how, um, and you've seen some of the episodes here, how I have bookends and I start and finish the same way with every guest. And so the first question that I'm going to ask you is the one I ask everybody. A leader, team, or company is customer driven when what? Can you please finish that sentence?

SPEAKER_01 2:20

When they really behave in a way that's consistent with their values. And I would I say that because it's true that not every organization has a value of being customer driven explicitly. In fact, I was just on a con I had a conversation with a business consultant yesterday who said he had a client in Germany who one of their core values is profit. That's the first time I've ever heard that as a core value.

SPEAKER_02 2:51

I don't think that's part of the tacos framework for Qualters.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

No, I don't think so. No, but but I do think if you look at 99% of the values that organizations that I work with at least have, there's always something about the customer in it or the way that the customer should be treated. And uh I think that where a lot of companies fall short is in the way that they go about their business. Sometimes it's consistent with that value, and sometimes it's not. It's just window dressing. So I think that to me is the simplest answer.

SPEAKER_02 3:30

Yeah, I love that response. Uh concise and to the point and uh spot on as well. I, you know, it's you can throw out any cliche that you want here, really, but you know, you you gotta walk the talk. Right. And and I I know that um, and as practitioners of experience management, you and I have both been fortunate to work with organizations that really do live those values and they believe in them deeply. And you can see it in the behaviors of the senior most leaders, the mid-managers, the frontline managers, and the associates. And then we've also seen the very opposite, which is a great idea, maybe at the top, but there's a lack of execution and follow-through with the extension of the brand to the customer and exactly.

SPEAKER_01 4:19

Exactly. And a lack of ownership or accountability. And I think you're right, James. It's a lot of times that shows up at the top. Um, one one thing I would also add is as a consultant, having worked with many cut uh companies, and I'm curious your thoughts here too, James, because I know you've been in the same position, but one of the things I really appreciate observing is internal communication norms. How do people at multiple levels within an organization communicate with each other? To me, you know, I don't have data on this, but anecdotally, there's a strong correlation there between how senior leaders and people many levels below them communicate with each other and how they actually show up for their customers at the end. So I think you're right on that. It's it's really what I like to look at is it's are those values being lived at the top of the house? And that's going to create an environment that either allows people or encourages people to do the same with each other and with their customers or not.

SPEAKER_02 5:22

Yeah, agreed. And uh I think that um this is one of the things that that I really stress in in my model um is how there's never been more stress or pressure on leaders to deliver short-term results than in today's business environment. Uh, and part of what I've incorporated in there is uh some of the work by um Dr. Robert Hogan of Hogan Assessment Systems, and he talks about personality derailers, right? And essentially the the concept is behavioral change is easy under normal conditions, right? When the heat isn't on, you can say, here's how we're going to act for our customer. But when the pressure is on, the tendency to backslide or derail into you know customer avoidant behaviors is definitely present. Um curious if you've seen any any market trends that that support um that kind of behavioral issue.

SPEAKER_01 6:25

Yes, um, we have. And remind me to make sure I I touch on that in the market trends, but I fully agree with this. And my my study has been more on the cognitive psychology side, less on the personality, but it jives with what Dr. Hogan would say, in that one of the things I did a lot of reading on and study on is the the dual system of the mind, of the human mind, and that sometimes you know it was classically presented as system one and system two. It's like, thanks for the descriptive uh names there, psychologists. And this is why Mark and Very colorful, very colorful. Right, very sexy. Uh so when they uh thankfully others came after and said, Okay, let's call system one the automatic system, let's call system two the reflective system. Very useful. Daniel Kahneman Amos Traversky, you know, if you follow any of their work back in the 70s and the 80s, very much in this in this vein. But it it's it's similar what you're saying, James, in that when what we do know about the two systems of the mind is that this the reflective system is powered by the more advanced parts of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, for example. The automatic system is the more primitive part of the brain. Both are important though. And so, like, for example, like per tying it back to personality, people's personalities are not either good or bad. It's how they show up with those personalities and learn to work with those behavioral tendencies. Same thing with the system one, system two. System one's not bad just because it's primitive, it operates the way it does precisely because it helped humans evolve over time. And so, but one of the challenges is that when we are faced with lots of uncertainty, constant change, and that change is accelerating, and we're feeling the pressure. And as I think you correctly pointed out, business leaders find themselves with so much pressure to deliver in the short term that people in those environments are more likely to rely on the automatic system. Ironically, those are the times when we need to engage the higher order parts of our brains. So I think it's very similar to what you're saying on the personality side. And I bet that somewhere in the neurological, this is beyond me, right? I'm not a neuroscientist, but I bet that there's some interconnection between those personality derailers and our likelihood to default to the automatic system.

SPEAKER_02 9:05

I I think you're absolutely right. I maybe we could coin a phrase, something along the line of um the lizard brain doesn't win the long game.

SPEAKER_03 9:15

Oh how about that?

SPEAKER_02 9:17

I just came up with that. We're we're gonna trademark that and uh we're gonna take it on a roadshop.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

That's gold. You can you just came up with that.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

That's me, man.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

I like that.

SPEAKER_02 9:31

Well, let's do this. I I because I like to bring in some some some personal pieces into the the discussion as well. Because, you know, yes, you and I are academics and we're practitioners and we're speakers and authors on these things. Um, but but there's always something personal that we've felt that's influenced or impacted how we think about what we research and study and talk about. Do you have a good example of a bad experience that you've suffered as a customer yourself, or or maybe uh that you've witnessed one of your customers or clients have to deal with that really shaped how you thinking about how you're thinking about experience management?

SPEAKER_01 10:14

So this isn't like a horrible experience, but it's it's just so perfect from the work that you and I have done for a long time, James. I think you're gonna like this one. Um I was in the market. All right, so let me start with a little context. So in my job, and my jobs I've had at Qualtrics, a lot of my work has been on how to help organizations measure employee and consumer experience. And one of the things I feel really strongly about is a lot of companies make the mistake of score chasing, right? When they have their employee measures and their consumer measures, it's all about that number, it's about the hard numbers. We got to achieve an NPS of this amount, and we're below the benchmark. How do we get that number up? And so a lot of times, and very similar to like in baseball with saber metrics and money ball, right? You you want to you maximize those metrics, and that's not a bad, you know. Look, I I have no problem with data-driven decisions or data-driven companies. I like those. But the problem in experience metrics, as you know, is that there's not a one-to-one connection between the rating a consumer gives or an employee gives and what they actually feel. There's a there's a there's a chasm, right? So when we're asking a question of a consumer, we're basically asking them about think back in your memory bank about your interactions with the company, make a judgment about those, and then map that judgment to a response that's usually on a one to five scale or on a zero to ten scale. Right. So you lose a lot of information. Um and yet it's still predictive, as as you know, it's still predictive, which is amazing. Okay. So in those companies that care about the score, what inevitably happens is there are pressures that are put on people to encourage people to respond in a certain way. Okay. There's the context for this story, right? So this is I think I know where you're going with this. For the watcher, right? This is what I do for a living, right? So, okay, a couple years ago, I'm out buying a vehicle and I decided on a truck, and just so happens that this dealership, the franchisee, is a customer. So I know I know what I know what's going on behind the scenes. They don't know that, of course. The sales team doesn't know this. So I'm decide on the vehicle, I'm getting ready to drive this thing off the lot, and the sales rep comes in and says, Oh, Ben, one more thing before you leave. And he goes inside and he comes out and he brings a packet, like a literal packet, probably 12-page packet of paper. Okay. And he says, Before you leave, you're gonna you're gonna get a survey in about a week about your experience here at the dealership. And I want to walk through item by item to make sure that you'll give us a five out of five on all of them, because we don't accept anything less than a five. And I just had a good old chuckle. I just literally start laughing. I was like, man, you have no idea who you're talking to.

SPEAKER_02 13:38

Yeah, we we've all experienced that, you know. You know, um, you have to give me a nine or ten out of this scale, or I fail.

SPEAKER_03 13:45

Right. Right.

SPEAKER_02 13:47

Like, please don't make it impact my family. I have to feed my babies.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

So, so this is actually a really important point. Um, you know Dr. Shauna Waters well. Um she and I are actually working on a piece right now on the problems that we run into with goal setting when you put the practice of goal setting, which is one of the most well-supported practices in organizational psychology and human motivation, and you plop it into a large messy organization, and it doesn't surprise, surprise, it doesn't work exactly the way it does in the controlled settings, right? Yeah, sure, right? But but one of the things we we point out in this piece is when you tie goals to existential threats, my job's on the line, or you would you have people sandbag, right? People protect themselves first, and it's not because they're bad. I had this this this really wacky interaction one time with a very senior executive at a uh um auto manufacturer, and we were meeting and we were talking about this gaming the system, you know, how do we make sure the reps don't game the system? And this guy looked at me crudges like I was in moron, and he said, Oh, we don't hire people like that. That would never happen here. We don't hire people like that. Hold on a second, hold on a second. Firstly, how do you control for that in your hiring? Two, are you saying that everybody you hire is so solid in their behavior that they're impervious to the impacts of the environment and the people you hire don't change over time? That's essentially amazing.

SPEAKER_02 15:38

How did this guy do it, Ben?

SPEAKER_01 15:40

It's incredible, it's inexplicable, James. So it's nonsensical. Human beings adapt to their environment. And when you tie an existential threat, my pay, my livelihood, my job, to a goal like NPS or CSAT, what are people gonna do? They're going to figure out how to protect themselves. And it's not because they're bad people, it's because they're in a shit environment.

SPEAKER_02 16:05

Yeah. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Right.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 16:11

I um you know, it's it's really interesting. You're talking about the score chasing. Um, one of the folks I I interviewed for my book was um Professor Rob Markey, um, who's one of the co-creators of the Net Promoter Score. And and I don't know if you've interacted with him, but he's a really like calm, relaxed guy. And he's like, you know, James, the Net Promoter Score was never intended to be a vanity metric. It was intended to be part of a system.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

And God bless it.

SPEAKER_02 16:40

Right, right. And and um, and yeah, the whole score chasing, and you and I have been combating that for a very long time. And and I think um advancing on the beach head and and pushing it back a little bit, but but it is complex. It it is a challenge. It is, you know, it is um I I thought that was really interesting about the um about the um the protecting of the the existential protection that you're talking about, because I'm curious if you've seen this. I I I certainly am. We can all agree that there's a lot of really cool stuff happening right now. There's also a lot of fear in the job market. And one of the phenomenons that it's created is something um that's being referred to as job hugging. And, you know, if you're talking about the goal setting, which I think is a fascinating point to bring up, um, particularly with all the disruption going. I mean, how fast do you have to change those goals to adapt to what's going on? But one of the things with this job hugging that I think is really um bothering me a good bit for want of a better description, is that we all know that in order for organizations to really become customer driven, which means you have to be advancing on behalf of the customer, right? You have to actually be innovating on things that the customer in many cases didn't even know they should be thinking about until you've actually helped lead them down that path. In order to do that, you have to make big, bold moves. I think we can agree on that. I mean, at Qualtrics, we used to call them big bets, right? Um, I don't think individuals, teams, or leaders are making those big bets the way that they used to right now because they're afraid of rocking the boat. They're afraid of missing their number, they're afraid of losing their job. Curious if you've seen that or you've if you have a perspective on that.

SPEAKER_01 18:41

You know, Dr. Shauna told a great true example of a person, a business leader, a very senior business leader. She was coaching. And the story goes, he was looking at setting his basically his uh profit growth target for the year. I think it was profit growth, margin growth. Don't quote me on that, but it was a big target for the company. And he was aiming for something in the realm of I think it was like 51%. Like he was going big, he wanted to swing big. And once he started playing around with it and he started realizing how his pay was going to be tied to it, how his family's livelihood was going to be tied to it, he eventually came down to 28%. So he cut it almost in half. Now let's go to goal setting theory for a minute. I mean, you and I both know the the generally speaking, all things being equal, the more aggressive your goal, the better your performance. With some caveats, right? You you don't want to push people to extremes. But when you come down that far, what it what it is reflective of is the current environment, which is and it's like you said, don't hate the player, hate the game. There's a lot of things I'm concerned about also with the way that the game's being played right now, because to me it seems to be uh very short-term focused. Yeah. I think you look at the I often think of the sort of like a pendulum swinging over time of who has the leverage. Is it the market, the street, the senior leadership, or is it talent? And that swings back and forth. Right now we're in a period of organizations have a quite a bit more leverage. Um, but um it also reminds me of you know some of the thought leaders just about 10 years ago when we were like knee deep in this space, they would say, you know, the war for talent's over and talent won.

SPEAKER_02 20:51

Right. Well, that hasn't aged well.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

It hasn't aged well. Now, I do think that's gonna come back at some point, but it's not gonna come back until we experience a great deal of pain because that's human nature, right? We have to really stub our toe and break our leg before we realize don't walk up that mountain, let's gotta go back. But uh, I think there's a lot of truth in what you're saying. We're seeing it in our broader research too. You had asked this question earlier, I forgot to answer, but the broader consumer trends research that we do, and the employee trends research that we do, we're seeing a lot of symptoms of this. We we we're noticing that you know, three-quarters of the global workforce are experiencing a significant amount of change. By the way, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Um, we saw this interesting finding this year, James, where we went out to almost 34,000 global employees across 24 countries, five continents, all major industries. We are asking them about change. Now, I was joking with Marcus Wolfe, who you know well. Sure. Yeah. Uh he was my co one of my co researchers on this, Matt Evans. We were working on this together. Sure. And uh when we were going in. The study setting um ad hoc hypotheses, by the way. We thought, hey, all right, people who experience more change are going to be worse off psychologically. If we would have bet money, we would have lost.

SPEAKER_03 22:14

Not the case, huh?

SPEAKER_01 22:15

Yeah, no. What we saw was very consistent with the Yerkes-Dotson law. So essentially what we saw was this sort of inverted U relationship when you track the amount of change people experience on the x-axis. So, in other words, the people who were the worst off psychologically were the people who experienced the least amount of change over the last year. Fascinating. People who experienced an extreme amount of change, they were they also wasn't great, but it was the people in the middle who, yeah, I've experienced a lot. Yeah, I've experienced a significant amount. They were the best off psychologically. We also saw a symptom here, too, of that strongly correlate with the amount of pressure people were feeling too in their jobs. So they're feeling the squeeze. Again, wasn't necessarily inherently bad, but it was the type of change in pressure that made a difference. And so, for example, we saw uh disruptive org changes like uh leadership churn, riffs and re-orgs had a you saw, you know, naturally people did not respond well in those environments. That's to be expected, but changes to the ways of working, changes to technology, AI, um, even RTO policies actually had a positive uh relation to job attitudes. People were more engaged, people were felt more higher well-being, which is kind of interesting. So it kind of led us to a preliminary conclusion that you know, change in itself isn't the enemy. And in fact, if the world is evolving and changing, which I think we all would agree with, and we're sitting there in our organization and we're stagnant while everybody else is moving, that's not a good place to be. And so there's a there's a Goldilocks zone where employees and consumers need to feel the progress. Um, it's kind of like flying at 300, you know, 500 miles an hour at cruising speed. You don't feel like you're moving, right? Einstein's theory of relativity. You feel it when you feel the acceleration when you're taking off. But when you're going the same speed as everybody else, you're moving in the right direction. And that that actually equates to better psychological outcomes.

SPEAKER_02 24:29

That's fascinating, Ben. So, um, so what's the implication then for practitioners of experience management and particularly employee experience here? Is it to shape and create the right experiences that eliminate the extremes so that everybody kind of gets into the you in the middle? Or what are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_01 24:50

I think that that's one, but um, that's hard to, you know, it is hard to operationalize that. It's like, okay, well, what does that exactly mean? So I think there's a few sub things in there. One is engaging in ongoing conversation, and one of my favorite points, you know, you you know this, James. So during hectic times, these are often times when companies like pause their consumer employee listening programs, you know, and adjusting the dumbest thing in the world. Exactly. But come on, allow me to um kind of interpret that in a in a benevolent way. Uh during COVID, this happened a lot, right? With the the shit hit the fan, things were changing, it was it was chaotic, and a lot of leaders justified the decision to pause those things because it was like, hey, our goal is to get our employees at home equipped to work safely. Our job, uh that's our main priority. And and I'm here saying, amen. You know, that is a great goal. That that should be your number one goal. So if you think of those things as, oh, we're just serving our customers, we're just serving our employees, it's easy then to frame it as we don't have time for that extraneous activity. I think it's so important that we reframe that. We're not just running surveys. This is a listening, listening programs that allow us to stay connected and have conversation. And during times of change and disruption, those are the times when you need to talk more, not less. You don't say.

unknown 26:32

Right.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

But when you frame it that way, everybody says, well, of course. So I think it is important. It goes back to your point earlier, James, about the leadership mindset at the top of the house. What do they see this as? Um, is it a is it a way that we can have conversation? So getting off of the survey thing, during those times of change when people are bombarded with it, finding that Goldilocks on employees, acknowledging it's not going to be the same for every individual. But you have to talk about that. You have to have ongoing conversation. That can take the form of one-on-ones, that can take the form of team meetings, increase your communication. The other thing I would always also advise leaders during these times, especially when you're going through really disruptive like rifts and acquisitions and mergers, when people really feel the pressure. Actually, I'll give two. These and these I talk about in the book. Um, one, maintain grounded optimism. Um, I love the Stockdale paradox as laid out by Jim Collins and good to great, but yeah, it's like, hey, you don't want to be overly Pollyannish. Oh, it's it's gonna be fine. After we get through this part, it's gonna be great. Bullshit. Everybody's gonna see through that, right? No, it's not gonna be all great. It's gonna be rough, and you have to be willing to face the brutal reality of the state you're in, but you have to have grounded optimism that we will get through this period together. Yeah, and one of the ways to do that, go back to goal setting. You take those big audacious goals that you're now putting on people, because a lot of times after those disruptive changes, people are feeling like they're being asked to do more than they were yesterday. And that can be bad if it's unmanaged. But one way you can kind of manage it is to break those big audacious goals into small ones. And then as you make progress, celebrate those publicly. And so that helps people feeling like their work matters. It helps people feeling like they're contributing to the organization's goals, it helps to infuse some positive emotions, which are highly contagious, and they can combat some of the negative emotions that inevitably show up.

SPEAKER_02 28:41

Oh, yeah. And um, I I agree with that. And and there's a really great book uh by Steve Magnus called Do Hard Things. Um, I'm a big fan of this, and um and um even our our triathlete coach um you know borrows from some of that. And I remember she said once that, you know, after a big long, hard training camp over a long weekend, she said, All right, you know, we rode 300 miles and we ran, you know, 50 miles, and we hiked 18 miles, and we did strength training. We did, and and she says, uh, here's the thing, you know, mate, she's Australian, when you do hard things, the habits you had yesterday become smaller and more easily manageable. And right. I mean, and what you're saying, I I think is really important because you're you're also um a recovering endurance athlete, right? Yes. And if you you can take that and apply it to your work, if you take the ultimate goal and compartmentalize it into manageable bite-sized chunks, and you're creating winning habits on a daily basis, which is largely what my work is about, all of a sudden that big, scary, hairy, audacious goal, it's just uh doing a thing that you get into the habit of doing on a daily basis, and you have a compounding effect over time. And that can do great things for the psyche, right? Um, but I, you know, it but then you take the the flip side of that and you get into the command and control stage, and you you were talking about the pandemic, and I I remember um I was still at Qualtrics at the time with you, and there was a major um beverage company, and they paused their employee listening program, and we're really trying to counsel them not to do that. And the response was, well, we know what kind of scores that we're going to get, and that would impact you know our quarterly bonuses. So we're not gonna ask that right now. So bringing it full circle back to score chasing and creating poor habits, um, and that's a function of culture, and that's a function of leadership for sure.

SPEAKER_01 30:56

Completely agree. And you know, I saw some good just to balance that too, as we saw a lot of the same things, James. I've also seen some really courageous companies um and some courageous leaders. One that really sticks in my mind was I was in Thailand for a global operation summit with a um global restaurant, quick serve restaurant chain. And I remember the head of their Asia Pacific region got up and boldly in front of his peers, fellow COOs and franchisees, said, Here's all the negative scores we got from our consumers, and this is a celebration. And I'm sitting there like, oh, I like where this is going. But his point was our customers trust us enough, our associates aren't out there gaming the system, so that's a good sign. And now we have honest feedback from our consumers to where we know what to do. Not a day later did the COO of the Ireland um um uh British region come up and and celebrate negative scores they got from their associates for the same reasons, and so it's a reframing, it's not about the scores. The goal should be to make the scores reflect what's actually in people's minds. Because when those scores do reflect what's in people's minds, honesty, that means your data's worth something, and now you can do cool stuff with it. But if you insert incentives and you put existential threats in between that, that's right, the distance between what's actually in people's minds and the scores widens, and now your data's not worth shit.

SPEAKER_02 32:45

Totally agree. Uh and um I I want to get to your book here in just a second, but before we we go there, I kind of to put a bow on this. One of the things that um that I'm pieces of data that I'm getting from practitioners, from thought leaders, from experts, and experience management, both on the employee experience and the customer experience side, one of the trends that they're saying is that a lot of the programs out there right now are in some state of failure. Um do you see that? Uh, do you agree with that? And and what are some observations that you've got um and what should we be doing about it?

SPEAKER_01 33:28

We're we're actually right in the middle of a very large research project, both qualitative and quantitative, on the future of the field of experience management. And we're trying to project out what's going to change about the roles of XM professionals. And a lot of that has been very illuminating and I think offers us a potential answer to this question. Um, very curious if it jives with what you've been hearing. But I think one of the failure modes or the reasons why we see these in failure is the siloed nature of these programs. Um, oftentimes customer experience is very, very far removed from the employee experience. Worse even, those programs and teams are far removed from the business and what the business objectives are. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've just asked the question of an EX practitioner or a CX practitioner, hey, how does your company make money?

SPEAKER_02 34:32

And they have no clue. They have no clue.

SPEAKER_01 34:34

They have no idea. That's a problem. So it is good that organizations have experts in listening and analysis, but I think we have to realize that those capabilities are becoming commoditized. You know, that knowledge, that deep knowledge and expertise is becoming commoditized with AI. Um, will we need like deep experts in survey design in five years? Uh I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 35:08

I mean, I'm kind of it's getting pretty good pretty fast.

SPEAKER_01 35:12

Right. Like I don't want to say no, but I also I'm not confident to say yeah, you know. So, but but one thing we have seen over and over and over in our interviews, it was ubiquitous. Both business leaders and XM professionals was the real successful programs are connected. The EX professional knows who their counterpart is on the CX side. And you'd be surprised. I mean, maybe you wouldn't, James, but I think sometimes our little maybe your listeners might be surprised how often those people don't know each other. Like James, how often were you the matchmaker?

SPEAKER_02 35:49

Oh, oh yes. Well, I I'll even go a step further if I can insert something real quick because I um I I won't say who, but but it's it's it's one of the major athletic wear producers in Portland. You can figure out you know which one. Um, but I I remember this meeting with uh about 30 of the HR team um there globally. Um and it became very apparent as I was introducing myself to all these people that none of these people had met one another. And so the the person who handled the onboarding survey had never met or talked to the person who did the exit survey, and those people had never met or talked to the person who did the engagement survey, and nobody talked to the 360 because that was the leadership development person way over there, right? And nobody had talked to the training because that's learning and development, that's a different program. And so just the fact that either virtually or physically, none of these people who, yes, okay, were accountable for different swim lanes, but they were also in the same pool. Same pool. And that was that was a real I my gosh, I had been doing this work for goodness at the time, probably you know, 17, 18 years, and that was the first time that I had seen something like that, and it really shifted how I think about running meetings and and working with clients because of that. It's like, hey, does everybody here actually know one another? Does everybody here actually know what each other is accountable for? But to your point, I think that um yes, the days of quote unquote doing an engagement survey, they're gone. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:35

Yeah, I think so too. And um, and you know, back to your question, I mean, that's a great example. It's unfortunate, but it's a great example of exactly what I'm what I'm talking about. I think that is that is absolutely one of the reasons these programs are are failing, is because they're siloed, they're they're disconnected from what really matters to the business, back to the values we talked about earlier. And and look, let's get real for a minute. Those met those metrics around margin growth, profit growth, customer logo growth, those are important. Absolutely. I don't think we should myopically focus on that and just just focus, we have to focus on the things that drive it and and the levers to pull. But if we don't even know what those are and we can't articulate that, then what are we doing? And that's where I think you are more likely to find an obsession with the numbers. You know, there's uh it's not a perfect relationship, but I'd bet that the more siloed the program is, the more myopically focused on the score versus no, we're we're not focused on the score, we're focused on the behavior. We're focused on the attitudes because we know that those behaviors and attitudes ladder up to these business metrics that we're driving toward. And I can articulate that as an XM professional. And I have a relationship with my CFO or my CIO or my CTO or my CX or EX uh practitioner. So, in short, we do believe, firmly believe, that in the very near future, and I'd say start now, um, build relationships across the aisle. Ask questions, understand what other people's objectives are, start to form a bigger image in your mind of where your work fits in with that. That's gonna help you contextualize because again, we're gonna have technologies come in who can do a lot of the work we used to do, like that. So our job has to change. And we're our part of that change might be contextualizing and being a good business partner.

SPEAKER_02 39:50

I think that's right. And and and business partner um, I think is absolutely critical there. I mean, in in today's world, uh if you look at decision making, um, much of decision making these days that impacts the HR side of things, you really have to involve the office of the CIO because so much of that is now technology related, and certainly with advances in AI, right? But also important to reach across the aisle and talk to the office of the CFO, like how much money are we spending? How much is this costing? What kind of return are we expecting to get on it? Those are still, um, particularly on the EX side of the house, uh, those are still um approaches or avenues that that really are are um not pursued with the vigor that they should be. I agree. Um just because you know HR has has for a very long time um struggled to prove its value. And so tying that um financial, the fiscal responsibility, the fiduciary uh responsibility, I think is just really, really important. So well, let's let's let's let's put a put a pen in that one and let's shift over to some fun stuff. Tell us about your book. How did you get started on it? Like, like what is it about? Like, I can't wait to to read it. I haven't I haven't gotten my copy yet. Are you still owe me that?

SPEAKER_01 41:16

It's on the way. It's on the way I shipped it last week. Um, I think I gotta double check on pretty sure I did. So um this started, I think I started the project about four and a half years ago. Goodness. And uh James, you'll you'll remember this. I think you'll resonate with this well. What what had basically happened was I started doing a lot of work with uh different reporters, different media outlets, and I was representing a lot of our research that we would that we do. And basically our head of PR said, hey, it would really benefit everybody if we elevated your title so that we could you know open more doors and things like that. So they came up with this phenomenal job title of chief workplace psychologist. So at the time I was like, Yeah, don't I don't know what that means, but sign me up, you know.

SPEAKER_02 42:07

Still the same guy I was yesterday.

SPEAKER_01 42:09

Still the same guy. But and and actually that's that's an important point too, because as you know, uh folks like yourself, we're surrounded by incredible psychologists and behavior science. I mean, we had we have and had just a critical mass of extreme talent on the on that side, I think you would agree. Yes. So I had a moment of imposter phenomenon, you know, where I'm like, you know, do I but do I deserve this? So I decided I was like, you know what, I gotta earn it. And I went just on an absolute tear through the literature on books. I started in our field of organizational psychology, but I allowed myself the freedom to take it where it needed to go. And so that got me into leadership because a lot of our work, I mean, my overall, and I talk about this at the beginning of the book. I had no intention of being a leadership guy, right? It's a leadership book, but I had no intention of that, never. I actually didn't intend to write a book either. Um, when I started this project, I was just studying, I was just learning. And so, but that took me to leadership. Leadership took me to evolutionary psychology, evolutionary psychology took me to biology and anthropology. That took me to astrophysics and quantum physics. That within that was neuro, a little touch on neuroscience. So I just allowed myself the freedom to go where I needed to go. And so as I was reading, I was also writing. I had hundreds and hundreds of notes on my iPhone, James. So I started organizing them. And then one day I'm sitting there in church. Um you know, sometimes you get that little nudge. And I've learned over time that when when I've when I'm in a good state and I get a nudge, go with it. When I'm not in a good state and I get a nudge, ignore it. So at that point I was in a very good state. Um and I was like, okay. And I got that nudge to write a book. I was like, I could put this stuff together, all these observations I'm making, and shared with other leaders who are struggling with the same things I'm struggling with. And then not two, three days later, I got hit up by a major publisher. And so you just can't make you can't make this stuff up. So they reached out and said, Hey, we read something you wrote, you know, whatever. Would you be interested in partnering on a book on a similar topic? And I said, Well, it just so happens I kind of just decided to write one and have a lot of notes. So from that point on, that was about two and a half years ago. That's when I actually decided to write the book. And uh really what it's about is um all this learning that I did through my own personal experience, through the research we've done together at Qualtrics, through the outside reading I've done in these all these different fields. And it's looking at the current state and saying, we are in this crazy, highly unpredictable environment. The pace of change is going to accelerate. We uh we have to understand ourselves better. Leaders must understand themselves better, how they show up matters, the environments they create. And so, really, it's a very, it's both a deep, gets very deep, goes into evolutionary history, looks at why we do the weird things we do. We talk about the systems of the mind that we mentioned earlier, but it's also a very practical book. And so in every chapter, I leave the reader with some very practical tips on how they can better themselves as a leader and show up better for both employees and customers.

SPEAKER_02 45:46

I love that. Um so much synergy there um with you know my interests and passions and um uh out of private message that we have between us, which I thought was really funny. Uh, you made a joke that uh we ought to go on a dual book tour called a customer-driven leader worth following. I thought that was really not a bad idea.

SPEAKER_00 46:07

It's still not a bad idea.

SPEAKER_02 46:08

There's definitely some synergies there. I um so I love the practical application. I'm a big fan of that as well. I mean, I there's many years ago there was a uh a research paper that was published, I th I think it was through um Academy uh I can't remember, it doesn't matter, but but basically it showed that it took five years for an empirical journal article to actually be you know published in a reputable uh you know publication that was peer-reviewed. Uh it was Academy of Management, that's what it was. And um, you know, and you think like how much shit comes out about leadership in that same five-year window that has absolutely no, you know, solid, sound theoretical basis a whole lot. So it's it's good. It's a crowded space. Yeah, it is. It is. Um there is no barrier to entry, that is for sure. And that's why I love the fact that somebody like you who's got the academic chops and the practitioner chops and you know has worked in the trenches bringing this practical application in addition to, you know, some of the academic and theoretical background. If I were to to put you on the spot and say, you know, what are maybe two or three big takeaways that that you think that people would really be interested in in getting from this, what what would those be?

SPEAKER_01 47:33

One of the biggest surprises I found on my journey, my learning journey. And I also think is a has incredibly important practical applications, is when in history did uh humans learn to talk and listen to each other? So I sort of took it for granted as a primal experience we all share that surely humans have always been able to communicate with words, but that's not true at all. And so uh would what this is disputed, but most of the estimates that I was able to find were uh human speech developed about somewhere between 100 to 200,000 years ago. Now, for most listeners, that's gonna sound like a long time, but consider this yes, that is a long time for people who think in terms of days, months, uh, years, decades. Yeah, that's a long time. But if you zoom out and you look at it from a cosmic perspective, uh it's like uh we learned to talk yesterday and we learned to write an hour ago. Because humans have been, mankind has been communicating nonverbally for many millions of years. Yeah, and so this really got me rethinking. Oh, well, no wonder there's so much angst among people about poor communication in an organization, which is very, yeah, I think generally very low fidelity emails, text messages, social media. Um, that's low fidelity communication now that now that I view it that way. And so that's where we're when a lot of what I talk about. I have a whole chapter on chapter four about how to create ongoing dialogue, how to upgrade your written communication, how to upgrade your verbal communication. There's the second big takeaway related to that, but it also has some other implications, is the importance of body language. So, as you and I know, we and we have another colleague we've worked with for a long time, was also a geek in body language, Dr. Brakovich. Leo Brakovich. Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_03 49:39

But uh Leo.

SPEAKER_01 49:40

Yeah, he's a great guy, super sharp, um, fellow body language nerd. And that I think is a place where we really need to better understand how our body language, when we're having a conversation with somebody, when we're shaking hands with somebody, when we're uh trying to console an employee, when we're talking to an irate customer, matters a lot. And we have to bring our unconscious tendencies, because uh for most of us, our body language flows unconsciously. It just we we just naturally do it. But I think that's a place where we need to bring that unconscious up to the level of our reflective system, the higher order parts of our brain, where we can make a conscious decision about how to show up. Quick tips here you're having a one-on-one with an employee, don't cross your arms. You're having a one-on-one with an employee about a performance conversation, don't sit across a desk from them. You know, you're in a customer meeting, sit side by side with them, not across the table if you can. You know, so those sorts of things, removing physical barriers. When you shake somebody's hand, you know, watch out for those people who come in and they give you a big old over-the-hander and a slap on the back, right? That communicates something. Don't do that for one. Yeah, but how do you control yourself to make sure that your unconscious brain doesn't take over and make you small because you're not gonna notice that, but it's likely to happen. So a lot of practical tips there. Um, a lot more, but I think those are a couple of big ones.

SPEAKER_02 51:13

I love that. You know, again, the lizard brain doesn't win the long game, right? I love that long. I'm telling you, we need a placard or a banner or something. So um, well, Ben, we're we're gonna land the plane here. Um, really appreciate you being on. Um, as always, it's just great to interact with you. Just you're a treasure trove of information and insight. Right back at you, brother. Really appreciate that. So, so um the other side of the book end is what I call two things. And that is could be in the form of stop starts or continues, if you will. But one thing you'd recommend to organizations out there that they could start doing to improve their experience management programs, and one thing to maybe stop doing uh in order to improve their experience management programs.

SPEAKER_01 51:58

Yeah, start, I would say go find your counterparts, meet them, know who they are. Do that today. Like go find out who the person is on the employer, the customer, start a relationship with those people. Second sub tip there once you get to know them, find out what matters to them, what they're held accountable to, and then think what do I have in my back pocket that I can help you and just offer the proactive gift. That is it's a magical how to kick start a virtuous risk reciprocal cycle with that and build a really good relationship.

SPEAKER_02 52:38

Love that. Love that and stop score chasing, stop score chasing. I think we've beaten that one down. Um, Ben, I I know you've got um a few different um like your website for your book, and obviously uh you know, some other avenues here. How can people best get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_01 52:57

Yeah, best place to go would be benjamengranger.com. I said it's easy, but uh James, you're right on as Granger. But uh it's easy. Benjamin Granger, like HermioneGranger.com. And uh quick quick things on there. I got I gotta brag a little bit uh because I'm just beyond blown away by this. Um I hit two national bestseller lists last week. So I hit the USA Today top 15, and I hit the AP top 15. Um, I'm just beyond excited about that. Publishers week, I should say.

SPEAKER_02 53:31

As am I, and I you know, I know it was uh what a couple of weeks ago you and I were talking, and you said, I can't say anything about it yet, but I I feel like you know the book's actually gonna be pretty big. And and to see that announcement from you on LinkedIn um really warmed my heart. I uh you know, thank you. You are deserving of this, so so please take it. You put in the hard work, and um, I'm excited to see where this goes for you. And I'm excited to read the book too.

SPEAKER_01 53:58

So I can't wait to hear one one quick if you could spare 30 more seconds. On the website, I also have a companion playlist, uh, songs that inspired me as I wrote each chapter. I have a broken down by the chapter. So it's a little bit of a scavenger hunt to see if you can spot the connection between the song and what's being talked about in the chapter, but it's also a memory aid, too, so that next time you go and you hear that song, you'll remember our conversation. I love it.

SPEAKER_02 54:26

Dr. Benjamin Granger, thank you for being on, and thank you everybody for being with us. We'll go ahead and sign off now. Everybody take care. Thanks, Ben.