Transcript of 684: Marcus Buckingham - Design Love In, The 5 Feelings Leaders Must Create, The ABCs of Authentic Leadership, and How to Unleash The Most Powerful Force in Business

Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now on to tonight's featured leader. Marcus Buckingham has spent 30 years studying what actually drives human performance. He co-created StrengthsFinder wrote first Break All the Rules and has sold tens of millions of books. He is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the most cited researchers in the history of leadership and management. His new book is called Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. During our conversation, we discuss why Marcus sold his company in 2017, also why he says it was the biggest mistake of his career. Ooh. Then the 5 sequential feelings every a great leader must create and why the order is non-negotiable. Why the most important job a leader has is not setting goals or building culture, it's designing experiences. And then why love is not soft, it is structural, measurable, and the most powerful force in business. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Marcus Buckingham.

This episode is brought to you by my friends at Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to being the light to the world around them. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through talent or technical services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic. Visit insightglobal.com/learningleader today to learn more. That's insightglobal.com/learningleader. Okay, you open the book, it's 3:00 AM. You're replaying the day that you sold your company and you call yourself the fool who blew it up. Not what I was expecting. What made you say that? What made you think that?

Well, when you start a business, it's all about love because frankly, you know, 7 out of 10 businesses fail, right? So new businesses. So when you start a business as an entrepreneur, which I did back in 2007, you love what you do, you love your clients, you surround yourself with people who can love it as much as you do. You all have this sort of passionate delusion that what you're doing is really important, it's going to work. And so there's a lot of love and you talk about it all the time. And how do you get customers to fall in love with the company? How do you overserve? And there's a lot of love amongst the colleagues and we're all in this together. It's a really, if you've never started a business, it's like it's, there's just a lot of love flowing through the veins of the company.

It feels kind of like your baby because it is.

Totally. And it's very much like when you have a child, it's like your heart is walking around outside of your body all the time.

Yeah.

And you wake up at 3 in the morning and think about the business and then you wake up at 10 at night, you're still noodling about the business, but it's not a, I don't know, it's not a stress. It's more like it's an ongoing love affair with what you're trying to put out in the world, which is amazing. It's amazing. It's, it's love is the context in which humans flourish. And then in 2017, I, um, I felt like we needed more scale, frankly. And this company, this large Fortune 500 company had 3,000 salespeople and, uh, I thought we need more reach. We'd built a cadre of products and services and people that could scale. And what I just didn't have was 3,000 salespeople. So the price was right. I felt the timing was right. I felt the logic was right. But I started the book this way because very soon after that sale, and it's no knock really on the Fortune 500 company, they were just doing what big companies do. They were maximizing the efficiency of the machine. But what that turned into was my little love ball got broken down into silos. And what became the subject of conversation was the efficient running of this big machine.

And so it was a conversation about maximization of compliance, of efficiency, which wasn't— it's not bad. It just means that the love disappears because you stop talking about it anymore. And that's why I quoted Pablo Neruda. Who's arguably the best love poet of the last century, who simply said that love is born in savoring, it lives in intelligence, but it dies from neglect. Love dies from forgetting. It doesn't die from being killed. It just— you stop talking about it anymore. And I found for me, up close and personal, it's why I started the book this way. It's no one's fault. But when you stop talking about love for your own work, love for your colleagues, love for your customers, when you stop talking about it because your attention is a creative act. When you start putting your attention on other things, you destroy love. And we ought to be completely upfront with ourselves about that. You stop talking about it, you destroy it. And we ought to ask ourselves, do we want to live in an increasingly loveless world? Can humans flourish in an increasingly loveless world? Does it make good business sense to live in an increasingly loveless world?

And I think the answer to all those questions is no.

Do you regret selling it?

Yes. Yes. I would not do it again. I would do it again in a very different way. I'm not saying scaling is a bad thing. I'm saying if you are an entrepreneur and you're listening to this and somebody offers you something, one of the most important considerations you should ask yourself, which is me speaking to me, I'm giving myself this advice, is will this lead to more customers falling in love with your company? And will this lead to more employees saying they love working there? And if the the answer to that question is unattended to, or if the answer is an obvious no, then don't do it. And I didn't attend to it as preciously and as intentionally as I should have done because it led to more people saying, I don't love the company. And it led to more people working there saying, I don't love working there. And that's the raw material of the value of the future of a business. And if CFOs or CEOs or general counsels or CHROs don't understand that, it doesn't make it not true. It means they don't understand that. And I, I'm guilty of that. So yeah, I wouldn't do it again.

Did you even know to think or to ask that question at the time though?

No, I think I was too inside the frame to see the picture. Yeah. And you get distracted and you get like, oh my gosh, scale.

Was it a money thing too? You're a human.

I mean, yeah, but no, because I, I, I mean, yes, in a sense, but I wasn't gonna retire. I was gonna stay there and keep growing it. So there was various incentives. To stay and continue to grow. It wasn't like I was cashing out.

There's like an earnout period.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's called an earnout. And so I was like, I knew I had work to do, but I felt this was the fastest way to get to that work. And fortunately, I had many different offers. So it was like, oh, do I want to? And I made what I thought was a rational decision. It wasn't a financially stupid decision. It's just, I'm a builder. I'm a grower. I'm an entrepreneur as much as I'm anything else. And I didn't pursue the most intelligent growth strategy. That's where the where grat comes from.

So one of the natural questions is, is it just not possible at a big company to love like this? Is this just part of the machine? And I have a feeling what you're going to— how you're going to answer that. So if it is possible, they're like, what do we do? What if someone's running the CEO of a very large company, multi-billions? What do they do? What do they implement to ensure that they love their people? That they love their customers, their customers love them, their people love each other. Like, what do you do? How do you get this going?

Well, that's a sort of a two-parter. Yeah. Because we do find companies that are very big that have maintained some of that deep love. And very often those are the companies that protect the founder's flame. A lot of great companies, the founder's story, their vision, their passion, their— has somehow been kindled. And remains strong even yet today. So if we think of Walt Disney, I mean, you can look at the stock price the last 4 or 5 years and you could argue about various growth strategies, but does that company still retain the aura of Walt Disney and the craziness and the wonder and the fantasy of that? Yes. Is it materially, qualitatively different categorically than Six Flags or Universal Studios or so? Yes, it is. It clearly is. If you think of Chick-fil-A, I mean, Truett Cathy has passed on, but the unique, weird wonderfulness of Chick-fil-A and what he was trying to do with it Whatever you think of Chick-fil-A, it's clearly distinctively and very meaningfully different than Raising Cane's. Apple, you think about a company like that, which has maintained its kind of crazy passion for design. Now, you could argue that, is that waning or is it waxing?

Those are questions we could get into. But when a company maintains a close connection to its founder's flame, I mean, you think today of like Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher, for the longest, 30 years of profitability before 2023 when it was sold to a hedge fund. And now, the unassigned seating has gone away, the crazy sort of games have gone away, the vibe of it, which some people hated, but it wasn't bland for sure. It had maintained a connection to Herb Keller has found his flame. When that starts to go away, when companies lose their connection to the founding passion which began it, they start to become the machine and the machine doesn't have a soul and we can all feel it. We like, we humans, we like to personify things. We like to personify companies. We lean into personifications of things. We trust them more because they're not amorphous. They're a human that was trying to do a thing. And when a company can maintain that relationship historically to the thing, the person, it means more, it matters more. So there's that. The other part of that, I think, though, Ryan, is that most CEOs have lost sight of the fact that the data on love— and we can unpack what love means— but the data on love is unequivocal.

If you want to drive productive human behavior on the part of customers or on the part of employees, if you want to drive repeat visits, advocacy, loyalty, collaboration, high performance, which of course CEOs want, the precursor to that is love. Experiences that people love drive behaviors, drive outcomes. Love measurably is the most powerful force in business by far. There's nothing even close. And yet most CEOs have long forgotten that. Go to a business school, go to INSEAD or go to HBR or Harvard Business School or go to Wharton. There's not a single class on how do you design a strategy to maximize the most powerful force in business. Love isn't a coating. It's not, oh, be nice. It's not kumbaya. It's an ingredient that you design into your products and services or the way in which you onboard, select, train, and develop your people. You design it in. And you design it in because you get the best outcomes that way. But most CEOs actually don't believe that because they've missed the data on it. And so they think of love as a lovely little luxury, as opposed to the most powerful driving force of productive human behavior, which it is.

This feels obvious, doesn't it? I mean, what are we doing here? Does it make a CEO sound soft? I mean, We all know how it feels to love somebody, to feel the love of somebody else. It feels obvious that we would try to then bottle that up within our businesses and deploy it both for the people that work at our companies as well as our customers. It just makes sense. So where's the disconnect here?

Well, to some extent, you know, I'm part of the problem, which is that When you actually study customers who come back more often, who advocate more, word of mouth, pay more, employees that give you that discretionary effort, who collaborate more, more creative. When you study people like that, do interviews, focus groups, the word people use is love. They use it all the time. I love that team. I love that company. I love that brand. I love that movie. Like we hear it, but most people do what I did when I heard it, which I heard repeatedly for the last 25 years. I kept changing it. To a different word that was more palatable to the business community. So I changed it to passion or joy or engagement or strengths. And those words are jolly good words, but they're not actually the words people use. When you hear people talking about a really extreme positive human experience at work or as a customer, the word we reach for is love. And it's not a careless exaggeration of the word like, it's a thing we reach for. But that's what actually happens. Most people do what I did.

They go, well, they don't mean love. Love is for family or it's for Love Island. We either flatten it or totally deepen it. Like, it's either it's for my family or it's kissing and chocolates in front of the Eiffel Tower. And we sort of do that with love, when in fact, love deserves curiosity and study because it's always present when we see extreme positive human behavior. So I think it's that we've decided it's love isn't relevant. To the practice of business. And so we're gonna stop talking about it. In fact, I was with a group of 30 CHROs the other day, Ryan, and we spent 2 hours talking about the data that support the love drives performance, and they couldn't even say the word. In the end, they came to say the word about customers, but they never became comfortable even saying the word about their own employees because I think we've got to this place in the world, particularly post-COVID, where really if you look at the chest-thumping behaviors and actions that pass for leadership today, and you could name some of the leaders that stand in that space, really the job of a CHRO is to protect the company from the employees.

And so the book's called Design Love In, but you, you can see a lot of places where we're really trying to design it out. And it's because they think love is— there's a chaotic sort of unpredictable element to love that's amazing because it expands the possibility and the capability space. But to some CFO somewhere or some CHRO who's trying to tighten the experience curve, as it were, and limit the number of choices that people make, whether it leads to things like you will be back in the office, we will have surveillance software when you're back in the office, all of which speaks to control and structure, which is undermined or underpinned pinned by fear, I think, basically, for what people will do if you give them too much space. What we've got today is a world in which there's no love there. Love doesn't have a place in that equation. It's become sort of irrelevant.

Let's think about a high-performance organization, which every single leader listening to this is saying, that's what I'm running, that's what I'm striving for. We have stretch goals, we gotta hit the revenue targets. Budget, profit, whatever. Okay. Marcus, this sounds great for you to write a book about it and to say it and to talk about it. I'm here to hit our number. Okay. This love stuff. Sure. I'll do it when I can. I'll write a thank you note here and there. I'll go pat somebody on the back when they get a big sale, whatever. I'm being dramatic, but you get it. What do you say to that person who says, good for you that you can write this book and you made a bunch of money selling your company. And then it kind of died off because the big company killed it. What about that person who's an SVP of whatever with a very tough stretch goal, a very demanding CEO who is there to beat their goals into submission and then do it again the next year?

Well, that's real, right? Where many of us are in that situation. If you back out of it, you're gonna say, well, look, what's the job of a leader? Whatever level, the job of a leader is really straightforward. Your job is to change human behavior. That's all you're doing. You're not paid to hit a goal. You're paid to change behavior so that you hit various goals. The behavior might be for your customers. It might be the behavior of employees. Your job as a leader is to change people's behavior, hopefully for the better. So the question for you as a leader is, how do you do that? What is the most effective, sustainable way to change humans' behavior? Well, you've really kind of got two choices. You could be directive, which is what most of us do as leaders. Directive means you set a goal. And then you push for that goal and you give coaching feedback and tough coaching about how do you hit that goal. And with customers, you might set pricing or you design really coherent sort of loyalty programs to coerce people directively to change their behavior. People are coin-operated and you'll change your incentive program or you'll change your loyalty program, whatever it is, and we'll change behavior that way, which works.

So if your listeners are listening going, well, that works. Yeah, it works. It works temporarily for a short period of time. If you want to sustain behavior change, you've got to follow an equation. And that equation is really straightforward. It's the one that we apply to our own lives. And the equation is experiences drive behaviors drive outcomes. Experiences drive behaviors drive outcomes. If you want really great outcomes in your health, then the behavior is you got to go to the gym. Well, you're only going to go to the gym if you design experiences at the gym that are positive for you in some way so that you have the behavior that drives the outcome. So if you want sustainable behavioral change in terms of your health, experiences drive behaviors, drive outcomes. If you want to create a flourishing restaurant, you can't coerce people. I mean, yes, you need the right pricing, you need good product, but what you've got to do is create the experiences of the restaurant that drive the behaviors to get people to come out their way, 2, 3, 4 miles out of their way to drive to your restaurant, not someone else's.

And then you get the outcomes you want. So for a leader, the best leaders understand that their job is to maximize that equation, which basically means you're an experience maker. As a leader. You could be directive all you want, but what you're trying to do there is push noodles uphill. What you wanna do is pull a noodle down the hill. And the best way to do that is to craft experiences that people lean into. You are an experience maker as a leader. Now, most people don't say it that way, but the truth of the matter is it's not whether you are an experience maker or not. The question, and the book tries to answer this question, is, uh, are you a skilled one? Because the best leaders are skilled experience makers. They understand that every single touchpoint that exists in their working world is a raw material for making an experience. And the people, whether it's customers or employees, are picking up what you're putting down. That email you just sent, it's not an email, it's an experience. That meeting you just called, it's not a meeting, it's an experience. That big company gathering that you're doing, that's not a big company gathering, it's an experience.

You can design it intentionally so people lean into it and get the behaviors you want, or you can be accidental about it, in which case people are going to pick up what you put down, even if you just dropped it. But they're making an experience. Culture is just a series of experiences, which is why actually it's pretty hard to change. But if you look at the best leaders, they are so unbelievably intentional and intelligent about experience making, both for customers and employees. And really, that's what the book's about. It's like, hey, listen, if you want to drive to these incredible goals and you need to beat people over the head with a big stick to get the goals, okay, fine, you're an average you're an average leader. Just look in the mirror. You're an average leader. You wanna excel sustainably. You wanna differentiate yourself and give yourself an unfair advantage. Become an experience maker. Become an intelligent experience maker, because that will drive the behavior that drives the outcomes. That's really what the data would show, and it's what the book's about.

Danny Meyer, business like life is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple. And it's that hard. Danny Meyer, one of the best restaurateurs of all time. Will Gadara, Unreasonable Hospitality. I just recorded with him, so it's very fresh. Marcus, I don't know if you guys are friends, but you should be. But that is so true. While they may have written it about restaurants, it's about life. It's about business. It's about families. It's about friends. It's all that. It's all about thinking, how did I make that person feel like— I actually see some of the clients I work with in the gym. It's interesting, you know, we're in there to do it, to get a workout in, but still there may be a 3-minute interaction in between sets or after getting off the treadmill or whatever. And that's a deliberate attempt to make that person feel better. Not like in a fake flattery way, but an honest connecting way of let's have a short conversation. Because we're both interested in this thing about working out or something like that. Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple and it's that hard.

I completely agree with you. And Will's great. I don't know Danny, but what we see from the data is, and obviously I'm a data geek, so that's where all of this comes from for me. If you have measured experiences, and by the way, measured experiences, normally we measure them on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being strongly positive, 1 being strongly negative. A lot of the stuff from this book came from something from the data, actually on this that basically undermines a fundamental belief that many leaders have. We seem to believe, many of us, the relationship between experiences and the feeling of those experiences and outcomes is— and I'm sorry, this is going to get a tiny bit wonky, but we think the relationship is linear, as in we think if we move a 2 experience, which is below average, to an average experience, which is a 3, to above average, which is a 4, if we're moving 2s to 3s to 4s, whether it's for our employees or our customers or indeed ourselves, the same amount of outcomes increase. Which means if we've got a lot of customers at 2s, we should move them to 3s.

And if we got a lot of employees just at a 3, then we should move them to 4s. The problem is, and, and then normally, by the way, we put the 4s with the 5s and we call that a top 2 box or percent favorable, or we expand it to net promoter score and we put 9s with 10s, you know? Okay, all of that's wrong because when you look at the data at scale, the relationship between experiences and outcomes isn't linear. It's what's called curvilinear, which means it's like a hockey stick. Moving people's experience from a 2 experience to a 3 doesn't change their behavior at all. Moving their experience from a 3 to a 4 doesn't change their behavior at all. It's only when you do something with a customer or an employee that changes their experience to the point where they go 5 that we can start to predict what they're gonna do next. Like if you say that movie's a 4, I can't predict if you're gonna go back and see it again or who you're gonna tell. If you say that restaurant was a 4 and I moved you from a 3 to a 4, I can't predict if you're gonna go back or spend more.

Or tell anyone else to go to that restaurant. 4s are 3s. Never put a 4 with a 5 again. Never top 2 box again. Never percent favorable again. 4s are 3s, 3s are 2s, 2s are 1s. When it comes to the data, the world's binary. To your point, like the world of business is feelings. Yeah, but actually there's only 2 feelings in the world. There's love and there's everything else that is just not love. There's love, not love. And the data on this is unequivocal, whether it's student grades or patient outcomes or employee productivity or customer loyalty. You've got 5 and everything else is just not a 5. And when you push on 5s, that's when you bump into that word love. 4s, well, what's the word for 4s? I enjoyed it. I respected that leader. I learned a lot from that leader. Like all of these are jolly good words. They don't predict behavior change. So for any leader listening, I'm sorry, I know the bar becomes higher, but I promise you, if you're in the business of behavior change, 5s are the only thing that predict it. Everything else doesn't. And when you unpack the 5, that's when people spontaneously use that word love.

That's why we're talking about love, because it's the most powerful predictor of positive human behavior. That's why it's worth unpacking. It's not a nice to have. It's the fundamental driver of anything good. And anything below that is just, it's like boiling point of water. If you want to predict when the water's going to boil, when will water change its state? When it hits 212. Anything else below that, it's just not boiling. And we ought to, as leaders, we ought to be as binary as that in the world. Either you're getting people to say, I love that, or you've failed to change their behavior. Love is as hard edged, if you will, as that. And that's kind of why I started the book with data, Ryan, because it's like, hey, if we're not careful, love gets really soft. Okay, then soft. It's a driver of behavior. If you're interested in driving behavior as a leader, take love seriously. If you're not, fine, don't read this book.

Have you ever seen the Savannah Bananas?

Yeah. Okay. Yes.

So I went down to Savannah a few months ago to spend time with Jesse Cole, their owner. He actually owns 6 teams now. So it's a banana league. It's not just the bananas. So there's 6 teams anyway. They were all there that day. They were practicing at different times. So some of them were in the weight room, some were on the field, locker rooms, whatever. We did a big tour. Just Jesse, me, and a couple other people were walking around, and every single person that he saw, and we saw lots of them, players, staff, all different types, hundreds. He knew everybody's name. And he wasn't showing off or trying to be, and he was genuinely curious and asking about them, their kids. Like, how is this possible? And I remember The way he looked at me, I think he thought like it was a stupid question when I asked him, like, how do you know everybody's name? How do you know all the details about all these people? And you could just tell, like, he's obsessed. He loves them. He loves what he does. He loves his business. He loves his teams. He loves his people.

Yeah, it's an obsession. We talked about obsession when I recorded with him. I mean, it's not a surprise then when you see them selling out 100,000-seat stadiums after inventing essentially a new sport. And so Those are great, great examples of how love shows up.

Yeah, he's a super interesting character, and he takes his own loves delusionally seriously. As you said, he manifests it in the way that he's designed a product, and but also the way in which he loves on the people that are making the product. I don't know him, but I've seen what he's done, and it's just super intriguing. He reminds me of the person that I profiled very early in the book, Josh D'Amaro. Who, when I was following him around, he was the head of Disney Parks, Resorts, Cruise Lines, Consumer Products, and Imagineering.

Jesse, that's like his number one mentor in, in life is Walt Disney.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And not every Disney executive— I've studied many of them over the years. They're not all like that.

Yeah.

But Josh, and he's, by the way, 2 days ago, right? Took over as the CEO. He's replacing Bob Iger, which I'm so happy about, by the way. Like the board could have picked, they had a number of different possible successors to Bob Iger. It took a fair amount of courage to pick someone. Josh is the kind of person, like you were just describing, you walk the park with him and you can't get 20 yards. Not just because all the cast members are gathering around him and he's hugging them and he knows their names. And there's a chef here and there's a line order cook there and there's a cast member there. And he genuinely is all about them. And they're cutting through 15 layers of hierarchy, which you can imagine at Disney hierarchy exists. And they're breaking through all of that, just coming up. He's got no handlers smoothing his path. But it's not just the cast members, Ryan. Somehow, the guests all know him too. And you can't get 5 yards without them being— It's just a mob scene. And I think as I was writing about it that day, this was a year before he was picked, but I think what I saw that day, a bit like you were describing, what you want from the Savannah Bananas is you want it to be real.

You want the whole ecosystem to be real. It's fun, it's engaging, it's sweet, it's disarmi— You want the whole thing to be like that. Like that. Imagine if the CEO of that company wasn't like that. In a world of fakery, we're just reaching for real. And you could see the guests looking at Josh D'Amaro and in a sense going, thank goodness the head of this company seems to be as geeked out by this whole mysterious world we've built here as we are. Thank goodness he's not a financial cynic who's just extracting value from our own love of Disney. Thank goodness he seems to be as into it as we are. And in a world of AI, frankly, the idea that we're reaching for genuine love, opposite of AI, of course, is genuine emotion, genuine feeling. And not that AI isn't good, it's got some great things, but we want genuine feeling. And you could see that in Josh, and you can see that in the savannah bananas. And of course, they'll be different. I mean, I'm not suggesting that everyone should be, hail fellow, well met, and glad-handing.

I am suggesting that if we take love really, really seriously, we get lots of moral and business benefits from So maybe I can get some free consulting advice from you, Marcus, since you're one of the best in the world at this. Okay. So we run a leadership development company. That's what I run with my teammates. And occasionally you're asked, okay, what's the ROI? Like a CFO will ask me that question. What's the return on investment we're going to get from hiring you guys to work with our leaders at our company? And it's not like the easiest question to answer because it's more subjective. It's a service-oriented type of a thing that we offer, right? And one of the things I say, and I'll be curious to kind of get your take, is the reason why our guys are good, why our team is good, is we authentically live every single thing that we teach. We've done it all ourselves. We continue to do it ourselves when it comes to our purpose and values and behaviors and culture and all this stuff. Like, this is what we actually do. And then we teach the exact same stuff that we live out.

And I think part of why we win and sustain and work with people for years and years in a space that people don't have engagements that long is because of that exact thing, this authenticity of living it out ourselves. Now, that comes from love, that comes from obsession, it comes from curiosity, it comes from us trying to continually raise our standards. When you hear all of that in this service-oriented business, which I know you understand, What do you think?

You know, I spent most of my time trying to figure out over the years, how do you quantify increases in engagement? And if you go back through all the Gallup data, if you were ever talking to a CFO, I would bring up increases in employee engagement are drivers of, not just correlates of, causation drivers of certain behavioral changes on the part of employees. And you can quantify that. And of course, we know that the biggest driver of engagement is your local team leader. It's not the culture of the company. The culture of the company is like the river which you're swimming, but there's a lot of different eddies and the river feels really different according to which part of it you just climbed into. You join a company, but then the sun, the moon, and the stars of your work is that local leader. And I'm sure you've said this to every client you've sold to. It's the most important decision you make is who you make leader of that team. And so goes that team, so goes everything. So if you control over the budget of this company, if you don't understand that, again, it's not because it's not so, it's because you don't understand that.

And so let me try to show you some data which shows quantifiably the effect of, and in fact, by the way, if you, in the book, I'm sure you saw this, Ryan, I show a company, it's a very large retailer in the US. They got like 8,000 stores. And I show the relationship between customer and employee experiences on the x-axis and profitability of the store up the y-axis. And in general, the line of best fit shows that there is a very strong relationship between between experiences of the employees and customers in the store and the profitability of the store, which is great because it quantifies the importance of experience making. You make bad experiences, people don't come back more. You make good experiences, of course people will. But the biggest takeaway from it actually is variation. It's a scatterplot. It's the same company, one stock price, supposedly one culture. But as you can see from the scatterplot, every single store Seems to have created a whole variety of different sorts of experiences for customers and employees. Well, who's the main driver of the creator of those experiences? It's the leader. The leader makes a huge difference inside the same company.

So I can't remember what page that's on, but if you wanted to, like, what's the value of a leader? Show that graph and basically go, what's the difference between the dot on the top right and the dot on the bottom left? Left, it's the leader. And so anything you're doing to— not to sell for you guys, but anything you can do to build the capability of your leaders is money well spent because you're trying to move all the dots up and to the right. And the idea that your people, your team is— I always think of ABC: authenticity, beliefs, customs. Authenticity, beliefs, customs. We reach for authenticity in our leaders. We don't want perfection. We want authenticity. Why? Because that leads to prediction. If you are authentically you, then I can predict you're going to be around the corner, and that means I'm more likely to follow you around the corner. I'm not expecting you to be perfect. I want you to be predictable. That's authenticity. Authenticity is manifested in your beliefs. What do we genuinely believe? And that better be coherent with who you authentically are, because if you are faking your beliefs, I can smell it and I don't want to follow it.

And then, of course, your customs are the living manifestation. You could call them routines or rituals, but in terms of ABC, that the things you customarily do have got to flow from your A's and your B's. So if I think of the best leaders that I know, their ABCs line up beautifully. Like Josh Demeure, I'm not saying he's perfect, but he's authentically who he is. I know exactly what he believes. And then in the book, actually, we detail out some of the very specific kind of weird customs that he has that brings those authentic beliefs to life.

Love it. Let's get even more practical.

Okay.

A very high-aware leader, they have high level of awareness, is listening to this like, I love this. And then they're thinking, wait a second, I'm not sure I'm doing a good job of this for whatever reason. What are some things that a high-awareness-level leader who's leading a team right now, how they could get better? What could they implement immediately following this podcast to say, okay, I've been kind of lax on this love thing. I, again, I try to show my gratitude for my people and for our customers, but I don't know. I don't know if I'm being very honest with myself. Where do we begin? How do we get practical right now?

Yeah, well, obviously there's not a simple answer to that question. There's places to start. The first place to start would be what the heck do your people people mean by love. If someone's going to say, I love working for that leader, what do they mean by that? Do they mean I really, really like that leader? Do they mean I really, really respect that leader? What do they mean? Although everybody's got a different definition of love around the world, it predicts behavior. So there must be a uniform definition of love. We must all mean something similar. If you really push on it, what people mean when they say I love— and by the way, it's weird. It could apply to I love that cup of coffee. I love my mom. Wait, what? I love that movie. I love that mentor. How can we use the word in such different contexts? When you really push on it, though, Ryan, when people use the word love, it's because we're reaching for a meaning, which is it's an experience that helps me feel more fully myself over time, which is basically flourishing. It's a feeling of flourishing. If you think about most of us, we go through life balled up like an armadillo.

Surrounded by armor plating against the harshness of the world, which is sensible because the world is pretty harsh. But inside of us, we want to take what's inside of us and express it. That feels healthy to us. We want to get to 95 and have expressed some of ourselves. So any experience that gives us a chance to take one little piece of armor plating off, and it could be, I love those socks because when I wear them, I don't know, man, I just feel a bit more me. It could be, I love that mentor. Because that mentor was the first person who pushed through my performance rating and went, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, this is the kind of place in which you can really flourish, and I'm going to move you there. Which, by the way, is why we have the word tough love, because sometimes the mentor has got to yank you into a situation where you can be more fully yourself, even if you actually are still cowering in the corner into an area of your world that feels more familiar. So love really means the opportunity to flourish in small ways or large.

So if that's your definition as a leader, then what you should be thinking about is what are the things I could practically do to get people on my team to feel like they are safe enough to express their best self on this team? What could I do? And in the book, and we could go through this if you want, but if you reverse engineer that, and I know this is gonna sound so weird to your listeners, but if you reverse engineered that, you reverse engineer somebody going, I love that leader, or I love working on that team. You find a sequence of 5 feelings and it's sequential. And if a leader knows those 5 feelings, that's like a blueprint. Every leader is different, but there's a blueprint there for what you could do as a leader to get people to the place where they go, I flippin' love working for that leader. Okay.

Control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, and growth. Is that where we're going?

Yes, that's where I was headed.

Okay, let's unpack those 5 feelings of love. And they need to be sequential, right? Each builds on the last. So let's go through them.

And don't get the sequence wrong. And these aren't hierarchical like Maslow's hierarchy. These are sequential. And it's one of the reasons I wrote the book. It was like, if every leader could just take away— love isn't magic. Love's built, love's designed, and you can design it in. That's why in the end, I end up calling the book Design Love In. It's like, you can design in the first feeling. Just imagine. In. Somebody's going to an experience, they're joining your team for the first time, and they're coming into your business for the first time, or they have an experience for the first time. The first feeling they want is a feeling of control. That doesn't mean control over you. That means they want control over their own choices and their own actions. So the question they're asking, even if they don't say it to you, is, what's this world you've invited me into, and how does it work? Which, if you're in a company, it's like, what's the mission of our company? What do you stand for? You know, when Chick-fil-A says we're closed on Sundays, is that loving or unloving? I would say that's super loving because even if you don't agree with it, you know what it is and you can either choose to move into that world or not.

That's a loving thing to do with anybody. And then in that world, how does it work? So for you as a leader, have you been clear about what your world is like? Have you said what you stand for? Going back to the authenticity thing, the more vivid you can be, the more loving it is. Is. And then how do the tools work? What decisions am I allowed to make in the world? Tell me what those decisions are. The opposite of control is powerlessness. And we know from everything that Martin Seligman did about learned helplessness, we humans hate that. We will lean way the heck out. If you're vague as a leader, vagueness as a leader is the most damaging thing you can possibly be because people keep their armadillo plating on. Why? Because they don't know what the world is you invited them into, and they don't know how it works. So that's the first thing. That's control. All right, well, the next one's weird. The next one's so weird, but it's harmony. Think about this, right? You got an armadillo coming in and you want them to keep taking off armor plating. Well, one piece of armor plating that they're going to keep on if you're not careful is the one that protects their emotions in that experience.

And when you you don't show people that you know what they're feeling and you care what they're feeling, they keep the armor plating on. If you have an experience on the team that feels jarring, humans lean out with an emotion that they feel when there's nothing in the experience says, I know what you're feeling and I care what you're feeling. We studied nurses who gave painless injections, and weirdly, there are some who do. And we tried to unpack how they did that. And we looked at the technique with the needle and the swab and the this and the that. But it turns out The reason why some nurses can almost share your pain when you're getting an injection is because they all say the same thing right before they put the needle in. They say, this is going to hurt a little bit. I'll try to make it hurt as little as I can. And somehow in just saying what you're feeling and obviously saying that I care about it, they reduce it. So as leaders, what we need to remember is no matter where you want to move your people to, you've got to meet them before you can move them.

You've gotta tell 'em that you know what they're feeling in the UK, otherwise you can't move them anywhere. You've missed them. Why have you missed them? Because the armor plating's still on. The example I quoted in the book was Audi. I like Audi. I had an A4 and I got to the end of my lease. And you think that a really sophisticated company like Audi would know that at the end of the lease, what most customers are feeling is excitement. 'Cause I'm about to look for a new model and it's like, oh man, it's great. But instead, 3 weeks before the end of my lease, I got a robocall from a very sophisticated company called Audi that simply said in a robo voice, you failed to schedule your termination inspection. And I'm like, I'm like, what? I don't even know what a termination inspection is, but I've already failed it. Next week, same thing. Next week, same thing. And I just leaned out. You know why? I couldn't even put words to it initially, but it was jarring because I was excited and Audi was pissed off. And so in the end, they lost me for 5 years.

I don't hate Audi. It wasn't like it was a 3 or a 2 or a 1 experience. It was disharmonious. I lent out, so they lost me. So the second feeling is harmony. You gotta tell people that you know what they're feeling and you care, otherwise they won't keep leaning in.

I mean, that's kind of a 1. That's, or a 0.

Yeah, it, well, it, it, it wasn't like it was a massive service failure.

It was, it kind of is though. I mean, to have a robocall for a long-term customer who's leasing an expensive car. That's very surprising. It's very stupid.

But we don't take harmony seriously as businesses or as leaders very much.

We don't, we, you know, you, but like, think about the meeting room for a second. Sorry, I, I, I, this one just is a bunch of execs are sitting in a meeting room and say, okay, here's what we're gonna do, guys. When somebody's at the end of their lease of this very nice expensive car, instead of having any sort of human touch, they're gonna get a robo call and they're gonna tell them that they've messed something up. They failed at something. All right, ready? Break. Let's go. Like, how does that happen?

How does that happen?

That's insane. You know?

Well, here, here's one of the big things that leaders that are listening could change right away. We don't design for experiences. When I first was thinking about publishing this book, I thought the pushback would be on the word love, but actually the pushback's on the word experience. Hmm. Because we don't design for experiences, we design for processes. So I think what happened in the case of Audi was The whole notion of an experience that somebody comes to the end of the lease, what are they gonna be experiencing at the end of the lease? What are they gonna be feeling? Have we shown that people come to the end of the lease that we're aware of what they're feeling and that we care about what they're feeling? However we want to have them end up feeling, what are they actually feeling coming into the end of their lease? I don't think that conversation ever happened. Why? The idea of experiences drive behaviors drive outcomes, as obvious as it sounds when you and I are talking about it, I don't think that conversation comes up in most companies because we design for process and efficiency, which leads to silos.

So the problem for Audi was there's a person somewhere in a dealership going, Marcus is coming to the end of his lease. I'm gonna get to selling this new model. But that person's in a different silo than a person who's writing the email or the script for the robocall that comes to Marcus. It's like no one creates a holistic experience map. We talk about customer journeys or customer experience maps, but we don't We don't actually design for a holistic human. Like, just go to a hospital and it's one handoff after another. The person that checks you in isn't the person who takes your vitals. The person who then sees how you're doing in the middle of the night isn't the person who took your vitals. Then there's another healthcare professional, there's another doctor. And the person who's supposed to hold the narrative of that experience coherent, one handoff to another, is you, the patient. Who deep down knows we don't actually know which details matter. But the whole thing has been designed for efficiency, not for a holistic experience, which is probably, Ryan, why the patient outcomes are so bad compared to how much money we spend on them.

We haven't designed for an experience. Go back to Savannah Bananas. He's designed a holistic experience, and as a result, we We cram into stadiums to watch it because it looks— then there's a phrase from a poet whose name I'm blanking on, what beauty it all coheres. Because it's coherent, we're like, we lean in. Audi has designed a desiccated, disconnected, disintegrated set of processes. And the person who's supposed to knit it all together is me, the buyer. Well, that's daft. I mean, Disney isn't a perfect company, right? But I'll tell you what they did do. They created— the first thing you do when you build a Disney park, in case anyone's thinking of building a Disney park, is you build a berm around the whole park so you can't see out. Well, Universal Studios doesn't do that. Six Flags doesn't do that. Why do they build a berm? So that you don't see out. You can't see the Red Roof Inn over there on the parking lot. Because why? Because we're trying to create a holistic experience. And the first thing we gotta do when we get you in is you can't see out. Okay. You start looking at these companies that have figured out whether it's Savannah Banana or it's Disney, they're thinking holistically about a human having an experience.

And for those leaders that are listening, you know, like what could you do differently? Well, you could think about a human. There's a before, there's a during, there's an after to everything. Have you thought that out? Undesigned experiences lead to unpredictable outcomes. That's why that company had a scatterplot graph of all those different stores in the same company producing different outcomes, cuz the experiences weren't designed. Hey leaders, you're an experience designer. That means think about it holistically.

Okay, I cut you off. 3, significance. Yeah.

So significance is the question which comes after harmony, but at some point somebody's gonna say, do you know my story and do you care? There. I just, you know, I'm feeling— you could do my front story, my backstory. And if you listen to the best leaders, when you ask them, how do you motivate people, the answer is always the same. They always say, it depends. It depends on the person. If you ask a teacher, what's the best way to help a student learn, they'll say, it depends on the student. You ask a doctor, what's the best way to help that person get better, depends on the person. There is a point at which the experience has got to be individualized. Don't start there. That's why this is sequential. So many leaders get this wrong. No, no, start with control. Give me the rules, give me the world, Help me know the world and how it works. At some point, though, I'm going to want you to individualize. Tell me you understand my story and what will change because of that story. That's significance. Opposite, of course, is insignificance. And everyone leans out when you start to realize that the leader doesn't really see you.

That's a problem. The fourth one is warmth of others. And it's the fourth one because at some point you pop your head above the parapet, Ryan, and you go, Am I going through this alone? And so the question that people are asking in a loving experience is, who's with me? How can they help? Who's with me? How can they help? So many companies have designed experience— onboarding experiences for customers or onboarding experiences for employees where you're going through it by yourself. There's no deliberate linking of you, not just to others in the social media sense, but the warmth of others. It's super interesting to me that the best patient outcomes in hospitals have come from a group group called the Hospitalist Movement, where they looked at that siloed series, Ryan, of like experiences for patients. And they went, well, we're not gonna change the entire structure of our hospital, but what we could do is we could give each patient a guide all the way through the handoff process. And we'll call them a hospitalist, which they do. And there'll be a physician, like they're a healthcare professional, but their entire job is to explain you to all the other healthcare professionals and to explain all the other healthcare professionals to you.

And as a result of that, you feel held. There's one person in this case who's with you on your little journey. They're gonna help you. We humans love that when we can see intentionally that we're not going through this in a way that's isolated. Well, there's so much that a leader could do for customers or for employees to maximize the warmth of others. We could get into the whole Jeep thing with Jeep ducking and how wonderful it feels when you drive a Wrangler that people give you these plastic ducks. But no one in Jeep tells you how to play. It's like they've got the natural organic warmth of others when you buy a Wrangler, but Jeep's not doing anything with it. It's crazy to me that they wouldn't maximize that in some way.

What would you do for them? What advice do you give them?

Well, so you got to be careful going back to your point about authenticity. You can't blow it by having a big corporate machine come in and go, here are the 3 rules for using a Jeep, duck. And here's, we put it on the left side of the hood, not the right. The green ducks mean this and the white ducks. I wouldn't do anything like that at all. I would instead tell stories about Jeep owners. I would have stories about what people love about their Jeep. And I would share it as an ongoing narrative, a web of love for when you buy a Jeep, you're a certain kind of person. And we've got lots and lots and lots of stories about that. And the way in which you recognize somebody else in the world that has that is you give them a duck. Why a duck? And I would tell the story of Caroline, the Canadian person who came up with Jeep ducking. And her whole thing was just pay a little love forward. And that's what Jeep Wrangler is all about. Pay a little love forward. And hey, here in this dealership, you can buy some ducks.

We don't care how you use them. It's just about being connected to one another in this crazy world. That's how I would do it. It. And I would make it feel kind of human and messy and idiosyncratic. And like, it just came from Caroline, it wasn't us, but we love it and we support it. Like, there's so many ways you could do it in a nurturing way rather than a mechanistic way. But actually at the moment, they're doing it. Like, no one tells you how to play. I just came back one day and there was a duck on my thing. I'm like, what's that? It's weird.

All right, the fifth one's growth.

The fifth one's growth. It's because love is a forward-facing emotion. If you love anyone, then you don't imagine they're ever finished. You always imagine they're going to wake up the next day and have to face the world again. So what everyone in any experience is asking themselves on some level is, how will this experience make me more capable? How will it make me more capable tomorrow? And so there's so many lovely little ways in which you as a leader can help people feel more capable. A tip, a trick, an idea, a thought, anything. Could be big, could be small. More. But that is actually the last feeling on the sequence. Don't start there because people won't give you the right to. And this is what we get wrong when we think about designing love and we think it's just, well, we'll throw a bit of growth and we'll throw a bit of warmth and we'll build it backwards. We'll start with growth and then warmth. It's like, no, what's happening is feeling by feeling by feeling, we're taking off one plate of armor. And if you haven't taken off the first 4, you can't hit them with growth.

It's like banks who try to teach you about financial fluency, but they haven't done any of the first 4, so you are not available emotionally or psychologically for that learning. So as a leader, every leader should know, like, this is a sequence. There's a lot of stuff you could do to give people a feeling of control. Okay, figure that out. Then ongoingly, there's a lot of stuff you could do to give people the feeling that you know what they're feeling and you care. I mean, by the way, simplest thing that leaders could do would be ignore growth, ignore warmth of others, even ignore significance. Just start with the first two. And I would suggest you just check in with each of your people for 15 minutes, one by one every week, and just ask them, how do you feel about last week? What are you working on this week? How can I help? Last week, how'd you feel? What are you working on this week? How can I help? Do that 52 times a year with each person individually, and you'll hit control and hit harmony. Hit control and hit— I'd argue you'll hit significance too, because over time people will feel like you see them.

But if you wanted to operationalize love, which does sound a little weird, but if you wanted to operationalize it, you could do a lot worse than put in place that simple check-in rhythm, because it will hit those first two feelings so well.

Marcus, we opened talking about you and being the fool who blew it up. I want to close by talking about you. Let's fast forward exactly 1 year from today, and you are surrounded by the people you love and that love you, and you guys are popping bottles, right? You're celebrating like crazy. What are you celebrating?

Well, gosh, I am doing this because I have kids, and I don't want them to continue to grow into a world that is accepting of the pragmatic sense of lovelessness. Loveless schools, loveless hospitals, loveless workplaces. I don't think that's okay. We know from data that humans don't thrive in loveless environments at all. We can get by, things function, but on some level they're broken. And one of the things I'm going to do, Ryan, is create a free app, which is going to sound silly as I say this now, but I'm just going to have a free app app that's got like a Staples Easy button on it and allows you just to be a slider, loving, unloving, loving, unloving. And I'm going to give it away and just say, listen, add your light to the sum of light. I've made an AI that's all they're doing. They know everything that's in the book, everything from the last 30 years of research. And all it really is is a design partner. And behind the paywall, if you like, is going to be this AI will sit there as your design partner, loving, unloving, whatever experience it is.

It could be at the bank, it could be the car rental counter, it could be at your work. Look, loving, unloving. And if it's unloving or loving, then you can just tell the AI what you did, and it will come up with ways in which you can build more love or design more love into that. And then you can send that to whoever. So all of us, and this is like a beautiful use of AI, I think, is that sometimes it's tricky for us to figure out, how do I make it more loving? I don't know. I've never— my muscles atrophied. I don't know what to do. But what you can do is notice. You can notice what's loving and what's not. Let's call it what it is. There's a whole bunch of stuff in our world right now that's unloving. Let's not have complicated Yelp reviews or complicated Amazon. We don't need a scale of 1, it's 5 or nothing. So it's love or not love. Let's have everyone use that. And then we can have a really smart, tightly, precisely defined AI help you think about ways in which you can make it more loving.

And if we all add our voices to that, right, we get a world where from the bottom up, we've got a whole group of people going, it's not okay to live in a loveless world. A loveless world doesn't mean, like, for us, we want more love in the world because humans flourish in that way. It doesn't mean soft, it doesn't mean warm and gooey, it doesn't mean kumbaya. It does mean that we should call out unloving when we see it, and it shouldn't be okay to leave it that way. So if I was popping champagne, I would have 10 billion downloads. Let's go with 10 million 10 million downloads of that free app and people would be able to use it in their life to add a little bit of their own light to the sum of light.

So good. The book's called Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. Thanks again, Marcus, for writing it. Just like your past work, so good and so useful, so practical, so important. Honestly, just so important. And I love this topic. And I love that we got a chance to talk about it and we use the word love more in this conversation than maybe any I've ever had. So thank you. I loved it. And I would love to continue our dialog as we both progress, man.

Well, me too, mate. Thank you so much for having me on.

It is the end of the Podcast Club. Thank you for being a member of the End of the Podcast Club. If you are, send me a note, ryan@learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned. Learned from this great conversation with Marcus Buckingham. A few takeaways from my notes. Name your non-negotiables. Marcus is clear. The opposite of design is drift. Decide what loving leadership looks like in your world and then commit to it. Write it down, make it real, make it visible. Remember, we got to start with control. The first feeling of love is giving people orientation before your next new hire onboarding or team meeting, ask yourself, does this person know what world they're walking into and how to navigate it? They need to start with control. How about checking in weekly, one-on-one? Not a performance review, not a status update, a real conversation with another real human being. Marcus says the single most powerful loving practice a leader can do. Most leaders skip it. They get busy, got other things going on. Do not be most leaders. Check in weekly one-on-one, make sure everybody is good and progressing. Then ask two questions about every major decision.

How does this help our customers love us more? How does this help our employees love working here more? Not every choice will satisfy them both, but leaders who ask these consistently will be more effective. Once again, I wanna say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling our friend or two, spreading the love. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Marcus Buckingham. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and you love on The Learning Leader Show, write a review, rate it, hopefully 5 stars, do all of that. You are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.