Just as important as the technical and procedural aspects in creating organizational change is the people side. They are the core of how organizations can move forward. After all, an organization is just as resilient as its people. In this episode, Paul Thallner, Principal at Daggerwing Group, joins Yuri Kruman to discuss his long-time work on the People side of change management. He shares his remarkable story of going from an English major to non-profits, education policy, change management consulting, and, now, writing books. They also dive deep into the excellent lessons from Paul’s latest, Reinventing Resilience, and how he has implemented them as a consultant for some of the best organizations in the world.

Our conversation touched upon many interesting topics, including:

• Why the people side of organizations is important for change

• The value Paul got from being an English major

• How Paul pivoted to organizational change work

• What is resilience

• The difference between resilience and resourcefulness

• How to create a resilient organization

• Self-belief as a way forward

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COMMANDER POD - Episode 4 - Paul Thallner Of Daggerwing Group

In this episode, I am very excited to speak to someone who is not a tech startup CEO. He’s not someone who has built twenty ventures and dabbled in organizational development and people management, but someone whose central life work revolves around this subject. I'm thrilled to welcome Paul Thallner to the show. He is the Principal at Daggerwing Group, which is quite well-known in the industry. He's also the author of a book called Reinventing Resilience. Paul, welcome. Please tell us a bit more about your work. This is scratching the surface.

I'm a Principal at Daggerwing Group, which is a global change management consultancy where we work hard on the people side of change, which is the hardest side of change for organizations most of the time. It's very common for folks to understand and work on the technical aspects or procedure aspects of change but what those things succeed when you also work on the people side of change too. That's what I'm fortunate enough to do every day at Daggerwing Group. It's a phenomenal experience and great clients. There are unbelievably smart people on the team that I get to work with every day. It's wonderful.

I got into this work because I had a lifelong curiosity about why organizations and why people behave the way they do. Way back at the beginning of my professional career, I started working for my fraternity. I don't know if you have a big international audience, but a fraternity is a club that exists at a university. It's a social club.

A lot of these are franchised where there's a central office and lots of different clubs around the country. My job was to go around to each of the different universities and find these gentlemen who were in this organization and teach them that there's more to this organization than simply partying. There are values involved and there are standards of conduct, standards of behavior and ways of being that are important for one's own development. Doesn't that sound familiar? That's what we try to do a lot of times in our organization.

That initial curiosity led to a long career in a number of different permutations where I have been working to understand and advance group change efforts at scale for a very long time. Some of that's been in government, the private sector, and nonprofits, but the thread is around how we get large organizations to see what matters and move in that direction together.

You have given us a bit about your origin story, but I have to go back to looking at your LinkedIn, English Lit major. Not only an English Lit major, a Master's in English Lit. It's not the most obvious starting point for people that go into organizational development. How did that come to bear?

The value that I got out of majoring in English Literature was around understanding the storytelling aspect of complex things. There are characters involved in novels, but there's also the underlying story arc that is present in any poem, in any novel, and any short story. I love tapping into those narratives because they are so important to an author's history, a community's history, and maybe to even a country's history. They seem to be these touchpoints that everybody refers back to help ground them in where they are now and where they want to go.

A lot of times, when I'm talking to executive teams and organizations, we do refer back to some of their past history, their stories. Where did they succeed in the past or what story are you telling yourself now that is limiting the executive team from functioning in the way that it needs to? The discipline around storytelling has been important for me throughout my entire career.

It makes great sense. It's interesting that we touched on the subject. I was doing an episode with another author, and we were talking about this exactly. Why is it that most people, let's say, never write a book? Aside from that question, which is not for here, why are people often afraid to tell their stories? It is the same general premise because it's not original enough, or it's not popular enough. They are afraid to somehow come across as boring or some secrets come out.

One of the things we do in this field is inevitably to empower people to tell their stories and to understand that it's not about being original. It's about retelling the same stories with the same themes in a new context and new generation. It's not at all about originality. It's about thinking about someone not above you and what they are going to think, but thinking about the people you are managing or people 2 or 3 steps behind you because your responsibility is to empower them to tell their story. It is interesting that we are touching upon this.

The one thing that's great about framing it in the context of storytelling is that everybody brings their own story to an organization. What's amazing about organizations is they can bring all those stories together to create an organizational-level narrative that everybody can identify with and become part of. You don't necessarily have to leave your identity at the door and become someone else the minute you join an organization.

You can bring yourself to an organization and make your story part of the story of the organization. When companies do that, great things happen and be awesome if everybody felt that way. I know that a lot of people don't always feel that way at work, which is a big challenge. It's something I'm trying to solve.

We are all attacking this problem from a particular angle. I'm digging a little bit further into your own story. At some point between getting your Master's in English Lit, you decided to head toward organizational development. How did that spark appear? I'm sincerely curious.

This is a bit of an embarrassing story. My career started in the education reform space. After getting a Master's degree, it's not easy to find a job doing English Lit unless you are a professor. I went into the nonprofit world and went into the education reform space. I did some education policy work. I did some work trying to start up networks of charter schools, which are publicly funded private schools.

One of the benefits of being in that field for a little while is that I ascended to the Executive Director role of a nonprofit organization that served a group of about 3,000 low-income students in the city of Upstate New York. The problem was that I got into that job because of my technical expertise, not because of my leadership experience. When I ended up taking over from the founding president who had a very big reputation, I was failing.

I didn't know how to keep the team and the organization together. I didn't know how to lead effectively, and it was a real problem. I tried to consult with friends and family members about what to do and how to solve this problem, and it was a conversation with my sister who's a doctor that has studied emotional intelligence, which that's a whole interesting story too.

I was thinking about getting an MBA at the time, which is what a lot of people do at that stage of life, but she said, “Why don't you look into this program? It's at Case Western Reserve University. It's called a Master's in Positive Organizational Development.” I was like, “Tell me more about it.” “It's about the psychology of groups. It's about how to be a great executive coach or coach leader. It's about how to create sustainable organizations and sustainable systems.”

I'm like, “It sounds a little fluffy. It sounds a little weird. I don't know. Is this my thing?” The thing besides my sister's encouragement that convinced me was that the program is run out of the business school at Case with the Weatherhead School of Management. I signed up. I did the program. It was a completely life-changing experience. Not only did it help me become a better and more effective leader of teams and organizations, but it changed my mindset about what I was supposed to be as a leader.

We all take on this. We wear this cloak that we think we are given. It's like, “I need to be this way. I need to be that way. All of this, I should be,” as opposed to, “Who do you need to be? Who do you want to be?” Instead, I was able to define for myself who I needed and wanted to be as a leader as opposed to letting whatever the circumstances or society, my own weird notions define what my leadership was going to be. That was an incredibly valuable experience. It caused me to pivot a little bit in my career and take and go all in on organizational change work.

Thank you for sharing your story. Not every person is going to give the low side of things. I appreciate you sharing. For a bit of context, I mentioned this before we started. My own experience with getting into this HR, OD, or LD world is very much something between through the back door, something about being almost not anti-academic because I did my academic and did my time there.

It’s seeing something I have been exploring a lot more. I don't have a formal diagnosis, so I have never been officially called ADHD. Most likely that's the case. It fits the profile. The other part is this whole thing about being a highly sensitive person. There's neurodiversity. Now that the more about it, I'm pretty sure my mom is that way. It’s always has been.

I'm pretty sure my father was as well. I'm learning more about my father. For me, all of these things are coming together, and it's starting to click a little bit more belatedly, “Why did I get into this field? What am I doing here as this weird thing in my sixth career? How does this make any sense?” It's not a calling card. It's this thing that I have exuded wherever I have been in a corporate sense. I see pretty quickly right through all the corporate garbage and see exactly what is happening there and all the forces. If my career history in the corporate context shows well, people are not happy with this. They don't like when someone sees right through their BS.

One of the reasons why I got into this space is not because HR is not as advanced in some regard. Technologically not in terms of maybe having the latest practices. It doesn't have much power budget and all of these not great dynamics. It's also ripe not just for disruption, but it's ripe for creating a tremendous positive impact through it seeing it as a prison. One of the reasons why I'm here, and it seems like for yourself as well, is because you are also coming from a very different angle. Part of it is because we see things from a different perspective. We bring a very different set of intelligence to these kinds of problems.

The most important thing is we also come in as consultants. I don't want to minimize the impact of that. Coming in as a consultant versus being in-house as an HR person is vastly different because you already have the buy-in from management. They brought you in. They are paying you probably twice as much for half the time, and you are going to deliver five times the impact.

It's interesting to see those forces come together. Now it’s a very exciting time in this space because of AI, but also, there's an influx of talent. There's an influx of very different perspectives from other areas of business. This conversation is very operable. Let's orient this discussion a little bit more toward organizations during COVID and now after it with a certain different awareness where there's loneliness and alienation. There's very low morale. There are layoffs.

You have all kinds of very negative forces that impact not just morale but resilience. Head in that direction because that's a big subject for you in your writing. Let's dive a little bit further into this subject. What is resilience? You have a great group hanging out in Wharton. You have Katy Milkman and Angela Duckworth, I believe. There's Adam Grant there as well. That's beautiful. That's great. I don't know if grit is the same as resilience, but I would love to start there. How do you define resilience, and how do we get our hands on it? How do we measure it, and then what do we do with it?

During my research for the book, I did a thought experiment where I asked a bunch of people. I said, “Here's a sponge, and here's a steel rod. Squeeze the sponge and let go. What happens? It returns to its un-squished state. Take the steel rod and try and bend it. What happens? It resists the bending pressure. Which one is resilient?” The answer is both because there are so many different ways to interpret this idea of resilience.

Reinventing Resilience: How Organizations Move Beyond Setbacks to Grow Through Challenges

What I came up with in studying resilience was this going back to my training in positive organizational development, which is all about positive psychology and strengths-based approaches to change. It is this idea that we are thinking about resilience in a deficit-based way. This idea is that it's all about setbacks and then recovering from a setback.

What happens when you recover from a setback is you end up where you started. What we don't talk about usually is this idea of growth and learning as a result of experiencing some challenges. That short changes the whole conversation. It keeps us out of growth mode and in a deficit-based framework where all we are doing is trying to fix problems all the time, which is a zero-sum game.

If we can reinvent the idea of resilience, we come up with a new definition, which I have. This is not necessarily entirely original. This is based on the work of many people, but I have defined it as the courage and confidence to grow through challenges as opposed to simply surviving challenges. That comes from the study of what makes individuals resilient, and this hypothesis I had that if the same things that make individuals resilient scale up, could we apply this model to an organizational level so that we can create resilient organizations instead of organizations full of resilient people?

If we added a bunch of resilient people to an organization, the logic would be in order to make a resilient organization, you'd add more resilient people. That linearly does not make sense because human nature doesn't work that way. We have to change the conditions inside an organization to help people not need to bounce back so often because there are all kinds of data around workplace stress, which is a huge problem.

This is something I'm personally passionate about. It's why I wrote the book. It's a global epidemic. As you may know, the World Health Organization declared workplace stress a global epidemic many years ago, and it's a problem that's been persistent for a long period of time, even before COVID. Certainly, since then, it has escalated a lot. We need resilient organizations to not keep people around, but to keep people healthy, extend their life even longer, make them happier, and make the effects of working at an organization positive not just for the company but for the people those folks interact with, like their families and communities.

Let's zoom out for a minute. Not to sound overly cynical, but we are all brewing in the same soup. We have to face a lot of very cynical folks. We hear mindfulness. It means like, “Be aware and produce more.” How do you battle the perception that, “Grit and resilience, do you want me to be in a better state so I can produce more?”

People go to work. It's believing that they are there to do a good job. Generally, people choose to go to work and are trying to perform well. When it gets challenging is when an organization tries to extract additional performance where there isn't any to be gained. That's where people start resisting these efforts to change.

The logic is let's tap into some unseen reserves of resilience in order to raise awareness that people do have more resources at their disposal or more time and energy. That's an approach. It's probably good but not sufficient. It's okay to give people some resilience, mindfulness, and well-being training to help their own ability to cope with very challenging circumstances, which these have been, but it's not sufficient. What we need to do is, as organizations, not offload the responsibility of well-being to the individual, all of it. Everybody's responsible for their own well-being.

The company is also responsible for creating conditions that make it easier to work there or make it easier to do your job, easier to get results, easier to collaborate with colleagues, or easier to get a lay of the land and understand the landscape so that you are not doing work 2 and 3 times, or having enough people and resources around to get the job done so you are not working eighteen hours a day.

Everybody is responsible for their own wellbeing, but the company is also responsible for creating conditions that make it easier to work there or make it easier to do your job.

Those are the responsibilities of an organization that support the idea of mindfulness as opposed to working against it. What happens is when an organization does nothing except encourage individuals to work on their own stuff, they run the risk of creating a rift because if the organization's not doing anything and everybody else is expected to do things that help themselves, that is seen as inauthentic and not terribly helpful. It's both ends. That's where we can overcome some of this cynicism, that it's a forced compliance exercise or productivity enhancer. If people are using it for that purpose, that's not its intention. I don't think it's a good idea from a business perspective. That ultimately will bite organizations down the road sometime.

Maybe I'm picking a needle from a haystack or separating resourcefulness from resilience. A lot of organizations scream it out. What they mean is to be more resourceful and do more with less. Now it's layoffs. It's a very important distinction to me to not see resilience as, “Be more resourceful. We figure it out. You are smart. That's why we hired you.” It is not going to work with Gen Zs, at least.

The reality is people are pretty resourceful. The fact that anyone who's been in the workplace for any period of time has seen so much change in the way they do their work, it would be impossible to make a case that people are not resourceful. It is simply not true. What organizations can do is be candid, honest, and transparent about the realities of the organization.

What's the context that the company is living in? It is being honest like, “We expect you to do this work in this particular way now.” We also know that in 2 or 3 years, we may be doing it a completely different way. We are going to have to adapt and change and things like that. Maybe that's going to be frustrating for you, or maybe that's going to be challenging for folks, but that is how the world is working now. Saying that to people out loud and being honest about the reality of the situation, which is one of the core pieces of my resilience model is important. Organizations that do that put themselves in a good position to weather future challenges a little bit better than ones that don't.

I have two questions that came up. Number one is looking at your background. It's pretty apparent to me that you have worked with a lot of relatively more progressive organizations. They are already coming up perhaps with organizational mindfulness that they have to treat their people well. They have to give them room to grow.

One that is worth mentioning is you worked for an organization that a lot of readers will know great places to work, which, by itself, clearly has to be internally consistent if it's measuring other organizations and it has to do things the right way. Why am I bringing this up? It's beautiful. It's a great thing. It's worth noting that we are talking about this split between calling resilience by its code word resourcefulness, meaning some workplaces are a factory or a sweatshop, choose your analogy.

Some are naturally started by founders that have that additional awareness and want to do things perhaps because they were hazed back in whatever workplace. It's very important to bring that out because something like your framework, my framework, or the framework of anybody doing this work is a lot easier to implement in a company with that, not just awareness, but the infrastructure to implement and the willingness to stick with it to the end.

We will come back to that after this next question. I want to set the scene that we have two very different tracks. One of the most important things for me is in your actual work when you go into organizations, how do you take a company full of resilient people and make a resilient team and then a department company? For me, that's super interesting because that's not something that I hear too often. What's the magic?

The magic is in the hard work and the desire to do it. That's a necessary precondition for anything to work. My model isn't prescriptive that it's a how-to guide to be resilient. It is a framework to have an honest and open conversation about what it's going to take to create an organization that is prepared for the unknown.

We know that whatever is coming down the road in the future is going to be difficult. It's going to be challenging. Instead of waiting for that moment to happen and then scrambling to figure out what to do, let's prepare in advance to assume and expect that there will be significant challenges. Some of them we know every quarter, every year, or every earnings call. All of these things are known. If you are old enough to remember Donald Rumsfeld’s known knowns, then there are unknown unknowns. No one could predict a pandemic. Some people are predicting a recession that may happen. Supply chain issues are still ongoing for a lot of folks. There are a lot of things happening that are causing us to adapt and evolve a lot over time.

When I talk about creating a resilient organization, there are a couple of things that the organizations can practice and work on very explicitly. One is taking a good hard look at whether they believe they can win. It is understanding the team or the organization's ability or self-belief. Do we collectively believe we can win, or are we going down the Blockbuster route or the Bed Bath route where it's like, “We have this thing. We are trying to keep it going, but we know eventually we are going to be a dinosaur.”

What's the self-belief on the team? The other is how honest the team is about the reality of the situation that it's in. A lot of executive teams or even senior leadership teams or other leaders in organizations tend to respond to challenges in 1 of 2 ways. They either bury their head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist, or they panic, freak out, and take drastic immediate measures.

Sometimes that's cost-cutting, layoffs, or dropping a product. There are lots of extreme responses in organizations sometimes. Usually, either one of those reactions is based on a narrative that they think is true or that they want to believe but isn't true. Going back to our original concept of storytelling, if you are honest about what's going on, you can create a story that's true and respond, react, and make business decisions based on that.

It is not based on what you hope it is, what you want it to be, or what you think it could be, but on what it is. If the team has a shared belief about what's true, they can make better decisions. It’s those two things alone. There are lots of other stuff in the model, but those two things, self-belief and collective awareness, are the two core pieces that lead to a resilient organization. When organizations have both of those things, they then have the courage and confidence to grow through challenges.

This is pure gold. I hope you guys are reading it. If you look at sports teams, you often have this postmortem on the latest NBA champion. Look at LeBron James when he won in 2020 against the Warriors. There's always some very strong dynamic wherein there's a regular team dinner. Maybe one member of the team pays each time, something like that.

There's always some very strong factor that continuously reinforces this winning mentality. With that come all sorts of different habits, practices, languages, psychology, and all of these things. There are a lot of sports and military metaphors around what happens in the workplace. Even though many of those are misplaced or are not accurate, in this case, it's right on because it's exactly the same thing. It's looking at how human nature works. Not human nature quantity of one, but how things work in a team.

This is a very important point. It doesn't have to be a hazing. Many of us are always looking for, “I don't fit in this group. How am I going to fit in there? I can't go to the team dinner because it's not kosher.” There's a lot of that type of thing. If you do it very thoughtfully and not in a gimmicky way, it's not like once a quarter exercise if you are offsite, but it is some meaningful ritual that helps people to tell their stories. It helps them to mutually reinforce each other and creates a certain safety in their mind that they are able to share and that people care about them. It's a lot easier to then say, “Let's be more resourceful. Let's do more with less.”

Think about what happens to an individual. One of the examples I remember from grad school was a teacher talking about when you are frozen because of anxiety. He was using golf as a metaphor. If someone says, “Don't hit it into the woods,” what are you going to think about? All you can think about is there's the woods right there, and that's where the ball goes because you have created a vision or a mental model in your head that that's what's going to happen. Lo and behold, it happens. In a lot of ways, the most resilient teams are the ones that do have this straight-down-the-fairway mentality. It's like, “I don't know how far or whether it's going to happen every single time, but I know that we are good enough to do this thing well. My colleagues are around me. I may have a bad day, but people have my back.”

Reinventing Resilience: The most resilient teams are the ones that have this straight-down-the-fairway mentality.

On balance, we are a good team because we all believe that we can do it. That's an important point when it comes to creating resilience because when you have that reserve of hope, optimism, and belief, a little blip on the radar or a little bump in the road isn't going to send you flying off the rails. You are going to be able to absorb it, learn from it, and move on. The challenges become a little bit smaller and easier to handle when you have a strong sense of self-belief and a good understanding of the environment that you are working in.

I want to come back to a previous question. We set up this paradigm where we have the best companies to work for. They are mindful. They are very strong in how they empower people. We then have the dark side of the moon. We have organizations that either don't know how to address this. They may not care. The founders may have been hazed in bad work environments. It might be a frat house. I don't know what.

In that situation, putting more of a coaching hat on rather than consulting, if you are coaching someone who fits the profile of someone mindful, resilient, or someone who wants to empower his or her team in a company that's not great at that, how would you coach them? Maybe you could give us something from your framework or your book. That's a very common scenario.

There are some very large organizations that, on the surface, look like they have an amazing culture across the entire ecosystem or the entire enterprise, but you know that there are parts of the organization that are maybe a little bit less. Nobody's featuring them on Instagram, Fast Company, or any of these because maybe that little corner of the organization isn't that great.

We encounter a lot of organizations that are like that where it's an uneven experience for workers across the enterprise. What we try to do, especially when we are doing culture work or an employee value proposition or even helping develop an operating model for an organization or functional area, we do start with what are some of the things that work. We don't have to create an amazingly glitzy, glamorous culture overnight here that's going to be featured on the front page of Fortune Magazine.

If that's your goal, you can probably make that happen through your PR company, but is that reality? We want to create a reality where everybody has a good experience at work, where they are feeling like they are making a good contribution, are seen and heard, are appreciated, and all that great stuff. It doesn't mean they are singing from the rooftops every day, but it means that they are having a good experience at work and they are able to do their job and focus on what they have to do.

Reinventing Resilience: We want to create a reality where everybody has a good experience at work, where they are feeling like they're making a good contribution.

What we try to do is understand what are the ways of working within the organizations that serve that and what are the ways of working in an organization that erodes or doesn't support that. We then try and bring it to the surface and ask people, “Do you want to keep doing it that way? That seems to be creating a lot of stress, tension, low morale, dissension, or resistance.”

If that's how you want your organization to be, keep doing that. That's great. Maybe that works for you. You are still making money. You are still in business. You are a company, and maybe that's fine. If you want to also factor in the people side, which involves creating an experience where they can give you their best every day and maybe even innovate and come up with new ideas and help you accelerate as a business, then maybe we should change some things and experiment. Let's try some things. It doesn't mean you have to be Pollyanna and start putting posters everywhere. How about let's start with a boss caring about the person that they are leading? That's something that can be done easily. How about asking them how they are doing?

Creating that cultural norming of the behavior, I don't think it has to be super progressive. I'm going to say something that sounds mushy and soft, but it can be interpreted in a lot of ways. If you create a culture of compassion or a culture of coaching, that doesn't have to be everybody walking arm in arm down the hallways every day. That can simply be checking in, “How are you doing?”

For five minutes of our one-on-one, we are going to talk about something other than work. I'm going to show you as a boss that I care about you as a person. I'm going to create a better experience for you at work by doing that. There are lots of things that individuals can do on their own to take it upon themselves to create a good work experience for others, and that can ripple throughout an organization. An organization like Daggerwing that comes in and helps with that accelerates and advances that more quickly through structured planning, coordination, and things like that, but people are doing the work. The people who work there are the ones that have to do the work.

There are a couple of takeaways. I want to make sure readers get this. It's phenomenal. A lot of this work is not glamorous. It's not PR worthy. It's slow, thoughtful, and meaningful. Yes, it goes into some very deep and unstructured parts of the human psyche perhaps, but that's not the point. The point is to be human to others. Make sure that they are okay. Forget resilience for a minute. Are you okay? How is life treating you?

Take five minutes and pay attention, put the phone down. It doesn't have to be rocket science. Consultants come in and frameworks and all of this stuff, and then you have the finance and operations people and are like, “Results.” The challenge is don't think of it as, “I have to adopt McKinsey's framework, BCGs, or this or that one.” A lot of it starts in very basic human dynamics. Care enough to ask.

Caring is the ticket to ride. I don't think you could be a modern manager without caring about the people you manage. The mindset of workers has changed to the point where they are not going to tolerate a dictator, taskmaster, or micromanager. They want to know that their boss has their backs and appreciates their work. That's the reality of the situation.

You can’t be a modern manager today without caring about the people you manage.

People can be irritated by that, call it soft or mushy, or bemoan the fact that society's changing. Fine. Do that on your own time because that's the reality now. If you are not going to adapt as an organization to that reality, you may as well start selling off your assets now because there's no way you can survive or attract workers of any significant value without taking that into consideration.

It turns out even in very hazing environments like finance and so on. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it. In the last part of the show, we ask every guest for a bit of guidance, more from a personal perspective to refresh. From my work, all about being your own commander-in-chief, there are four conversations. There's one with one's body, with one's mind, with other people, and then with the God of the universe. I would love to hear your guidance on what has worked for you in any or perhaps all four of those conversations.

The thing that I would love to share with your readers is this idea of self-reflection and self-belief as a way forward, especially at the younger end of our career or maybe we are a sole proprietor or maybe leader of a small startup or an organization where there's lots and lots of pressure. What ultimately happens is you start living in this land of should, “I should be this. I should be that because I'm taking on the identity of the founder, CEO, or startup.”

There are all these associations that go along with those things that are put upon you and you feel like you should measure up and play that game or role. A lot of people spend the first 15 or 20 years of their career trying to live up to all of those shoulds. Then they hit 40 and then they try to undo all those shoulds for the rest of their life.

My advice to anyone reading now is to start letting go of some of those shoulds because the only thing you should be is yourself. Figure out who that is and be that. Don't let anyone or any other external force define you. Define yourself and you will be more comfortable far sooner and a lot more happy and more successful in the long run.

This is such amazing advice. I wish more people would stop being martyrs to some idea of themselves that was implanted in their head maybe by their parents, by society, or all of the above. It's the single most liberating moment where you realize that all of it is fiction. From beginning to end, it's a fiction. I wish that even people in my life, people that I coach, and loved ones would let go of these things. Usually, you need someone who's an outsider to provide some anchor, loved ones, nevertheless.

Every now and then, look in the mirror and say, “Who are you?”

Paul, thank you so much for this truly amazing conversation. We went very deep and wide. It’s wonderful to have you. Please tell our readers where they can learn more about your work and your book.

I would love for folks to go to ReinventingResilience.com. We can learn about the book and the model and a little bit more about my story but also sign up for the newsletter. It is not because I want to sell you a course or get you on my mailing list. I want to try and create conversations where people are learning and applying some ideas around creating resilient organizations. In my opinion, we cannot survive much longer when we are creating so much workplace stress. It's not good for us and our society. We as leaders who work in organizations need to take some responsibility for lowering workplace stress. I'd love to strike up conversations with folks about that.

We cannot survive much longer when we're creating so much workplace stress.

Tell us where this interest can find your newsletter and maybe Daggerwing.

The newsletter is on ReinventingResilience.com. If you are an organization that is in need of some organizational change work like you are experiencing significant growth or significant change or in need of a new operating model, have a new leader or new executive, or trying to redefine your culture for a new age and a new workforce, DaggerwingGroup.com is where I work on the daily. It's a great consulting company. We are different and unique. We work shoulder to shoulder with our clients as opposed to coming in, doing the analysis, dropping off our recommendations, and taking off. We love working with our clients and forming strong relationships with them so we can help them.

That's the consensus in the industry. You guys do something very special there. Paul, thank you very much for coming to the show. I appreciate you. I hope we can continue this conversation another time. Thanks for coming along.

Thanks so much.

Important Links

• Daggerwing Group

• Reinventing Resilience

• https://ReinventingResilience.com/

About Paul Thallner

Paul is a Principal at Daggerwing Group. He has extensive experience working with executive teams to identify and implement strategic change initiatives. He has led major culture integrations, transformations, and workplace analysis projects. Paul began his career mobilizing change at scale in the public education sector and has held leadership positions in non-profit, government, and private-sector organizations. He enjoys learning to play guitar, long-distance cycling, and rescuing dogs (41 so far). He has a wife and son who love travel experiences as much as he does. Paul is also the author of the upcoming book, Reinventing Resilience.

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Mark Mears and I cover "Starting with WHO Not WHY,". From his remarkable story of going from an English Major to Organizational Development Masters. From a long and storied career as a marketing exec in Fortune 500 hospitality companies to now running "LEAF Growth Ventures." We go deep into his people management philosophy, and how he trains teams to embrace purpose as organizing principles, among other subjects. Enjoy!

Our conversation touched upon many interesting topics, including:

• The purposeful growth revolution

• How to engage people with their head, heart, hands, and habits

• Mark Mears' mantra leadership

• Understanding not just WHO, but WHO you serve

• How to motivate your team and make them feel involved

• How to refocus on ourselves on who we are, who we serve, what our purpose is, and why

Connect with Mark Mears: Website | LinkedIn

Get a copy of his book here: The Purposeful Growth Revolution: 4 Ways to Grow from Leader to Legacy Builder

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COMMANDER POD Episode 5 - Starting With WHO, Not WHY

A 20-Year Veteran Of Fortune 500 Companies Reveals His Lessons For Personal And Team Growth

I realize it's been a moment since we recorded an episode, but I'm excited to say that we're going to restart the engine. I’m excited to welcome Mark Mears. I'm excited to speak to Mark on a number of subjects, but first, a quick intro from my end and I'll let Mark introduce himself a little bit better. He has had a long career working in marketing roles and leadership roles for some household brands like PepsiCo, Pizza Hut, Frito-Lay, and Cheesecake Factory. Those are places that you probably have visited or have eaten their food. Aside from that, Mark has grown a tremendous practice looking at leadership through a little bit different lens with the benefit of old helpless life experiences. I'm going to let Mark take it from here. Mark, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be on with you. I look forward to our discussion.

I feel the same here.

It's been a journey. I appreciate the introduction and the opportunity to share a little bit about where I've been, how I've gotten to where I am, and, more importantly, where I'm going and how I want to bring people along on this journey with me. I call it a purposeful growth revolution. It started when I was president of a $500 million casual dining restaurant concept in Southern California. A parent company recruited me from my role as the Chief Marketing Officer of the Cheesecake Factory.

The goal was threefold. It was, “Turn sales around. We are down double-digit negative in sales. The brand has lost its way. We need a new brand positioning that makes us more youthful, more contemporary, and more food-focused. We then also need to put a new concept in the ground and test it to where we can put more capital behind this brand and use it as a growth engine for our portfolio of brands.”

I took on the challenge and built a team and a vision. I created these sales layers that allowed us within a year to turn that double-digit negative sale into positive growth. I tested and proved a new brand positioning, new menu, and new uniforms. It was new everything that would make this concept shine. It was a new concept that allowed us to then use that restaurant for all day parts including dinner, which we had not been known for, as well as a full bar.

Everything was going great, but we were running, gunning, and burning the candle at both ends only to hear our parent company say, “The board has decided to move in a different direction.” In other words, “This is up for sale.” Instead of putting capital behind us to take the 145 restaurants we had and supercharge them, they decided to use this opportunity to put us up for sale. They said, “We want you to lead the sales process, but you can't tell anybody.” Here I am still trying to navigate those three key imperatives and leading a team of 10,000 employees who I call team members. Words matter. We're going to talk a little bit about that in a minute.

The parent company sold us to a company that we thought was going to be a perfect owner for us. Unfortunately, the deal closed on a Friday. On Monday morning, I was supposed to meet at 8:00 with the new CEO to plan our future together. At 8:05, I'm out the door. They were like, “We've decided to move in a different direction.” I said, “Over the weekend?” They knew all along they were going to bring in their own team, so I and my team, within a few weeks, were ushered out the door. They moved the office from Southern California where our headquarters had been for 30 years to their facility where they had other brands. Everything they said they wouldn't do, they did.

This is Southern California. It was roughly February 21st, 2013. In Southern California, that's about the time when spring starts to emerge. After a fitful night of sleep, I take the dog out back. We had a fig tree in our backyard that was barren from the 6 or 7 weeks of winter that we do get. There, as God as my witness, as the sun was coming over the wall in our backyard, shown on that fig tree at the end of one branch was this little tiny green sprig of a leaf starting to bud. I got this epiphany at that moment that a leaf is a symbol of growth and rebirth. All growth in any tree or plant comes through the leaf through the magic of photosynthesis.

I took the dog inside and started banging out a treatment on my computer for this idea. I got to thinking it also could be an acronym. It's standing for L.E.A.F. Leadership, Engagement, Accountability, and Fulfillment are the words that came to my mind. I had been managing that company in my team with this idea of the rule of threes. Maybe you've heard of it. It's a thing. If you do three things well and focus on those three things, you're going to get further faster, better, bigger, or whatever your objectives are.

My three things became my mantra. One is leadership. We're going to need leadership up and down the ranks. We're going to need engagement. People engage with their heads, hearts, hands, and habits. We're also going to need accountability, which is accountability to ourselves, to each other, and, because we're a publicly traded company, to our shareholders.

Every time I had an opportunity to reinforce that, I did through recognition and reward, leadership, engagement, and accountability. After going through what myself and our team went through, I realized that wasn't very fulfilling. We were chasing numbers for the sake of numbers and trying to achieve a goal for this lofty noble purpose that wasn't our own or was not in our decision-making wheelhouse. I started thinking about this as a four-circle Venn diagram with leadership, engagement, accountability, and fulfillment all intertwined and aligned and revolving around purposeful growth. It’s not just growth, but purposeful growth.

I have written a book called The Purposeful Growth Revolution: 4 Ways to Grow From Leader to Legacy Builder. The idea is I want to inspire individuals, teams, and organizations to find purpose in fulfilling their true growth potential. In doing so, they scatter their seeds to help others along their growth journey. That's where I'm at. That is what I’m excited to talk to you about. I’m excited to bring your audience along this purposeful growth revolution and create a movement behind it.

The Purposeful Growth Revolution: 4 Ways to Grow from Leader to Legacy Builder

Thank you for sharing that with us. Clearly, there's a lot to unpack here. First of all, for a bit of context, we were talking before we hit record about how there are different graphics and different ways to visualize what each of us is doing and so many others are doing as well. It's not even a question of which terminology. It's a question of what are we all trying to do. That’s to contextualize the information.

If we look at something like HR, we wave our hands a lot around here about HR because that's the chosen prism for us to create impact. It's not the only prism, but it is a big one. Before we even continue with the subject of HR, how to create impact through that, and how to bring whether it's your Venn diagram or methodology to bear through that, I want to take a little bit more time to understand your story. Not everyone lands in a seat where they're overseeing 10,000 people in a public company and that might or might not get sold to private equity, Kraft Heinz, or whatever have you.

I would love to bring how you get there. A lot of our guests, maybe the majority, have come from backgrounds where maybe they worked somewhere in corporate, but usually, maybe midway, they started their startup, raised money, etc. This is a very different paradigm from the usual scenario that we tend to get here from our guests. Please tell us a bit about before you got to that leaf on the fig tree and long before experience. How did you get to that place?

I ironically thought I wanted to be a lawyer when I was going to school. I went to the university.

I have a Law degree, too. I know the pain.

Good for you, but I had this romantic view of what I thought a lawyer was. You can't major in pre-law. I went to the University of Kansas and I was told, “You're going to be doing a lot of writing, reading, critical thinking, presentations, and research. I said, “Yes. Probably, we'll do all those things in law school and as a lawyer.” They said, “Instead of the traditional PoliSci, History, some Liberal Arts undergrad, have you thought about getting into the school of journalism? You're going to do all those things there.” I thought, “KU has one of the top journalism programs in the country. I'll get a great education.” I thought I had an idea about Communications Law and how prescient that was with where we are with communications.

I ended up getting into the school of journalism. I had a great professor who saw something in me that I did not see in myself. I was excelling in marketing and communications on that side versus more traditional news and editorial. We had different divisions. I gravitated to marketing communications and fell in love with it.

He said, “Have you asked different people about what it's like being a lawyer?” I said, “No,” and I did. I asked some fraternity brothers of mine that were in law school, “How was it going?” I asked the people not only a few years out of law school and some that had their names on the door. Nobody seemed happy. I said, “This doesn't seem like a career that I want,” once they explain what they do.

He said, “Have you thought about going to grad school instead?” I thought, “No, but let's talk.” I went to Northwestern and got a Master's degree in Integrated Marketing Communications. I was able to study at the feet of the master, Don Schultz, who came up with the concept of integrated marketing communications that has permeated education in marketing communications globally.

I went to work for an ad agency in Dallas and then got my big break working for Pizza Hut. I got recruited there. I worked in marketing for six years in various stages, like advertising, field marketing, and promotions. I was able to use all the tools in my tool set. When you look at integrated marketing communications, you don't just use a hammer. You use every tool in the toolbox. That became my belief system in how to build brands.

Purposeful Growth Revolution: When you look at integrated marketing communications, you don't just use a hammer. You use every tool in the toolbox. That’s how you build brands.

I love building brands and building teams. I've been fortunate to have worked on some tremendous brands with some tremendous people and leaders from Pizza Hut when it was owned by PepsiCo to Frito-Lay on the agency side, McDonald's on the agency side with Leo Burnett, Universal Studios Hollywood as Head of Sales and Marketing, being at the Cheesecake Factory as a Chief Marketing Officer, Noodles & Company, and others. Restaurant, retail, hospitality, and entertainment seem to be my sweet spot and what lights me up because I love serving people. It helps to have that background as we're going to be talking about the importance of who versus your why in a minute.

That’s helpful. Often, when we read a story somewhere, this person who does this amazing stuff landed, but that clearly doesn't work like that. It's been a journey. Let's get a little bit more into the journey. I want to start with this idea. All of us here are like, “Simon Sinek cornered the market and said, ‘Start with why.’” Let's not start with why. Let's start with who. Tell us all about that.

I'm a big fan of Simon Sinek. He says, “Start with why. People want to know why you do what you do before they care how you do it or even what you do.” I believe that, but I believe he's missing something fundamental as a marketer. We're always taught to start with who and the target audience and what are their desires, and the research that we put into them. I got to thinking about not just who, but who you serve. That's important because we know servant leaders are the best leaders. We think about this idea of service and being of service to who.

Let’s go back to that four-circle Venn diagram, which I believe is part of this broader idea of the higher power of fours. I talked to you about the power of threes. With the rule of threes, I believe in the higher power of fours. There are 4 seasons, not 3. There are 4 directions, not 3. There are 4 chambers to the human heart, not 3. There are 4 elements in Adam, the source of life, not 3. I could go on and on with this foreplay, but you get where I'm going.

This four-circle Venn diagram is a model that I’ve developed that uses that higher power of fours. When we talk about who we serve, there are four realms of service. There are spiritual, relational, personal, and professional. We are whole people. Once we laser focus on who we serve, then our why automatically appears or our motivations. Our how is how we invest our time, talents, treasures, triumphs and travails, or our experiences. Our what is what do we do?

All of those are balanced in that four-circle Venn diagram, all revolving around purposeful growth. The importance of purpose cannot be understated. It has everything to do with who we are, why we exist, and what we can do to advance humanity. When you think about who you serve, you think about serving also as a duty. You think about those who served in the Armed Forces and this tremendous sense of duty they have not just to God and country, but to their fellow next to them in the foxhole.

If I think about who I serve, I'm a spiritual person. Personally, I serve God. Others may have a different spiritual belief system, and that's fine. My relations are my family, friends, neighbors, and communities. In terms of personal, it's mind, body, spirit, and soul. I got to look after my mind, body, spirit, and soul or I'm no good to any of them. Professionally, it's my team members, clients or customers, business partners, and also the communities in which I serve. This idea of who you serve is a fundamental question that if we were all to write down, I guarantee you it would lead us to our why, which is our motivations or what lights us up, and then our how and our what.

You have to look after your mind, your body, your spirit, and your soul. Or else you’ll be no good to any of them.

This is brilliant. This is right in line with my work and how I do this. We talked a bit about this before we hit record. I frame it a tiny bit differently, but quite similar. Let’s say we use Maslow’s hierarchy as an example. We use the foundation as a conversation with one's body. Above that is a conversation in one's mind around mental models of life skills. The third one is with other people. The fourth one is with God or the universe. It’s very close. It's a pleasure to find other people that think in this way.

If we zoom out, whether you're sitting and you're managing 10,000 people in a very large corporation, publicly traded or otherwise, or you're sitting in a small startup and you're an HR person of one, the fundamental issue of, “How can I possibly tailor my communication with different employees, different subgroups, demographics, etc.?” How do I do that?

This is nothing against HR people. They're great people like any other, but they're put in front of an almost impossible paradigm. On the one hand, they have a very strong pool of legal compliance. It’s like, “Make sure you treat everyone the same way.” God forbid you say anything that's outside the cage, then that's it. You're done. On the other hand, we don't even need to mention AI. You're human. You happen to be in HR and you want to help a particular human.

The other pool is, “I'm supposed to be the caretaker here in this company. I want to make sure that people have the right incentives, motivations, benefits, rewards, recognition, and all of this stuff so we can help them to grow in this role, in this team, or what have you while helping build what we're building and then increasing revenue and whatever.”

The role itself when you're in HR, even in an ideal sense, you're running HR. It's your show. You're constrained. Both of us and a lot of other people in our shoes, let's say, as authors, consultants, advisors, etc., we can be brought in. Usually, there's a lot of excitement. We’re like, “We're going to change everything.” You can't change everything. It doesn't work.

Even something narrower like, “Let's build a learning and development program. Let's have this speaker introduce his pyramid or his Venn diagram,” is a huge challenge. All of us can have the most brilliant material. We give that shot in the arm, and then what happens the next day? HR is not equipped to do something with this. They can't run with it.

For me, since you've already been in a situation where you managed so many different people, and I imagine running something like that, you have a relatively large HR team and a lot of people, how do you guide HR people specifically to create that kind of impact? I know this is a pretty big question, but I'd love to start diving into that.

I love it. It’s a perfect segue to this idea. My mission or part of the purposeful growth revolution is to put the human back in human resources. I believe words matter. When we talk about this idea of HR and people are called employees, workers, laborers, or God forbid an FTE. They’re like, “You're a 0.5.” You’re like, “I'm half a person?” They're treated like faceless, nameless employee ID automatons instead of the human beings that we are.

Linking it to COVID, we all got a bit of a time out that gave us an opportunity to deeply reflect on not only what but who matters most in our lives. We were sequestered. We were spending a lot of time, maybe too much time, with family. For those who had to homeschool, God bless you, and do your work and everything else. Whether we got COVID ourselves or a member of our family and maybe it was hospitalized, or maybe we knew someone who died, it became real. It wasn't a red or blue issue. It has been made to be, but it's not. It's a global issue and a humanity issue.

I go back to that idea of putting the human back in human resources. People voted with their pink slips and said, “I'm mad as Helen. I'm not going to take it anymore.” We heard the term the Great Resignation, which I believe it should be called the Great Repurposing. Resignation and resign have two outcomes. Either you resigned altogether and quit or worse, possibly, you quit but stayed, or what the kids are calling quiet quitting. Neither of those outcomes is great, so I call it the Great Repurposing. It is an opportunity to refocus ourselves on who we serve and what our purpose is or our why.

We can hone in on how we are unique and differentiate it in what we do so that our what makes sense for us. We see the results from the survey by the Sloan School of Management at MIT which interviewed 34 million people who resigned from their work during COVID. They asked a simple question of why. The number one answer, by ten times more than the second most given answer, was a toxic work environment. People were tired.

Let's put the specifics on there. A toxic environment means what? Is it a toxic boss?

Yes. People leave bad bosses. That's why I don't like the word boss. I never let anyone up and down my career call me a boss even jokingly. I say, “I would like for you to refer me as your leader.” That means it is a responsibility on my part to live up to it every day and it's earned versus if you're a boss and you were probably given a title on a business card, probably you won't last very long.

It all comes down to the leadership. The leader of your direct superior is so important to your well-being. It is not only the mental health, but the physical health of the workplace. When people feel like they're not valued as human beings, they're not treated with respect and dignity, and they're not kept in the loop on things, they're treated as a resource instead of human resources. What if we turned it on its head and we were able to provide more resources for people to be more human than to be treated as a resource themselves? Think about that for a minute.

We think about this idea of putting the human back in human resources. It means less command to control. It means more collaboration and value. There's a lot of work being done on DEI or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and there should be. For me, diversity is important, but it gets you in the room. Inclusion gets you a seat at the table. That's good. Equity gives you an equal voice. What's wrong with that? If we don't have belonging and feel that sense that we're a member of something or a team member that has a valuable role to play and a valuable voice to give as well as ideas and influence, we're not going to achieve the objective. It will be like checking a box.

They’re like, “We hired a diverse candidate. We're working on inclusion and making sure that people get involved in more meetings. Everybody has an equal voice.” They might, but they may not feel safe and vulnerable in voicing their true opinions or their ideas for fear of recrimination or rocking the boat. Maybe it has taken them years to get into that room. They don't want to say something that may come across in any negative way that might get them booted out of that room. It's a real issue with taking something that is a human thing, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, and then making it relevant in a workplace environment. It starts with leadership. It starts with creating a safe environment. When people feel comfortable, they can be the best version of themselves.

Everybody has an equal voice. But they may not feel safe and vulnerable in voicing their true opinions or their ideas for fear of recrimination or rocking the boat.

Let me ask you. We talk a lot about these subjects. They're very heavy. We can talk about them on a high level. A lot of us would say, “I look a certain way. I can't speak up. I'll outsource that.” It also doesn't move the needle. I wanted to ask you from your practical perspective. You have the book. You have all these years of experience. You work with companies. How does it work when you go into a company and you work with teams? What does that look like? This is, for me, the most important thing. I'm always looking for what works out in the field because that's the hard part.

I've been blessed to be in leadership positions where I've had twelve direct reports. It's way too many, but I've had them. I've also been in smaller organizations. This philosophy works regardless of the size of the firm. It's a fundamental mindset of how to treat people and how to set up a foundation for purposeful growth.

In working with teams, I hate the dreaded annual performance appraisal. It sounds like the word appraisal is a piece of property or cattle of some kind. Annual is ridiculous because it's usually some foundation for what raise pool you get or bonus pool you're in. It's usually looking backward instead of being more frequent.

One of the things we learned from Gallup's great research is one of the key things people feel like they're missing is more frequent feedback from their leader. I put together what I call a purposeful growth plan. I come back to the model of who you serve, why you do what you do, how you do it, and even what you do. Most of those appraisals are all around what you do. It's, “Here’s your task. Here are your metrics of performance. Here’s your timeline. Here are the tools and resources. Knock yourself out.” What, though, if we turned it on its head and started with who?

You and I are in a one-on-one. You're my leader and you're asking me the question, “Who do you serve?” If someone's not comfortable with a spiritual answer, I know that's a touchy subject for some people, but I'm telling you it shouldn't be. We're whole people. Those of us who do believe in God, we don't say, “God, I'll see you on Sunday. I got to go to work on Monday. I'll call you if I need You.” It's part of who you are and how you show up in meetings and how you treat people. Your spiritual belief system is intrinsic to who you are.

Your spiritual belief system is intrinsic to who you are.

The relations part is who you serve relationally. I remember all of the long commutes, the late nights, the early mornings, the flight delays, and the weather. I remember who I serve relationally and my family and what I was doing to provide for them. I also was like, “Who do I serve professionally? Who benefits from my service? Who can I bless in a way that will help make them better?”

A team member is one of those professional areas of service. It is like, “I'm here for you as a leader.” The leader should make sure that they do everything they can to advance the agenda of their team member. Why? It’s because they will be likely to stay longer. They'll be more engaged and more productive. They ultimately will help create more profitability for the enterprise. We then look at your motivations. Why do you do what you do? Once I know what lights you up, I know something about you that I can help perpetuate. There are your superpowers. Why are you unique and different, and how can we leverage that for the benefit of the whole team?

I live here in Kansas City. Football's a big deal here with the Chiefs. We've got a quarterback named Patrick Mahomes. You wouldn't go to Patrick and say, “You’re a pretty darn good quarterback, but you can't tackle very well. We're going to put you on the defensive line for a while to round you out.” Some companies do that. They are tamping down on a tremendous strength that someone may have to try to make them well-rounded when instead, like a puzzle, everybody's got different shapes. Your job as the leader is to put that puzzle together so the picture comes through loud and clear.

Finally, we get to the what. It is like, “Here is your role on the team. Here are your deliverables. Here are the metrics to performance.” We've got to get the work done and we've got to get the results, but we start it with that human element. We built a relationship, so I know who you are, what you stand for, what motivates you, and what your superpowers are. As your leader, I can then coach you in the appropriate manner more frequently throughout the process.

Purposeful Growth Revolution: Start with that human element and build a relationship. Understand who they are, what they stand for, what motivates them, and what are their superpowers.

When we were kids and learning to ride a bike, we fell down but got picked up right away and put back on the bike right away. We built that muscle memory of how to do it. That's what's missing in a lot of teams. The leader is more out for themselves. It's, “What can you do for me? I worked hard to get into this leadership position. You work for me.” That’s not flying with the younger-aged Millennials and Gen Z. I have 25-year-old twin daughters this 2023, so I can speak a little bit with research on that.

Their expectation for what work is or should be is so different than what it was when I was growing up. What they would consider a toxic work environment, we would say, “Toughen up, buttercup. Keep your nose to the grindstone. You don't talk about religion. You don't talk about politics. You keep focused on your task at hand.” That's not the way it is anymore. It's not the way it ever should have been, but it's the way we grew up. It's got to be led by the leader of any individual team.

To your point about human resources, the human resource leader can only do so much. It has to be truly led by the CEO because that's where the buck ultimately stops. They have to buy into this and they have to get everybody else on board. I have a big word that I use. It's called alignment. If you think about a rowing team, they're all different shapes and sizes of humans. When they're on cadence and with their oars in the water rowing together, that's called swing. The boat lifts a little off the water and moves swiftly down the channel without resistance.

We need to align the C-Suite behind these philosophies so that they can then operationalize and then internalize. I don't call it a culture. You might say, “Why not? It's not a bad word.” Community is a better word. If you go back to that idea of DEIB for Belonging, you feel like you may be part of a culture, but in a community is where you feel like you belong.

Before we move on to the very last part of the show, for me, it helps to contextualize a bit where we are in the conversation. We look at that typical conversation. Let's say we are in a place where it's a leadership paradigm. It's, “The buck stops here. I'm the one responsible, but I have all these pressures. There are quarterly earnings. There's my board.”

A lot of leaders, even if they mean well, may not have the bandwidth or the language. They probably were hazed themselves and they picked up all sorts of toxic behaviors. Hazing is one of the worst things about the workplace that we don't call hazing, but that's what it is. We all suffer trauma and perpetuate that trauma to other people. Once we go up through the ranks, we make sure that others feel it as well. It's terrible.

When I look at the paradigm of leadership, you have usually very polar opposites. When you have this older male and power authority that is like, “Listen to me,” that may be on the way out because there are so many ways to say, “You've been canceled.” You have the opposite. You have this Kumbaya, “Everyone, have free snacks. Let's help all that.” We know that that's also largely garbage. That's BS. That's not real. After all of these years of over-hiring, we have all of the fan companies and all these startups letting people out the door. Did that ever exist, that whole Lalaland? No, it was a bunch of blah.

Somewhere in the middle, perhaps, or somewhere in another utopian universe, we have a situation, let's say, where a leader, even with all their personal interests and all of that, might have a selfish interest in asking questions, learning about people, understanding them, and helping them to actualize themselves. What do I mean? Unfortunately, human nature is not a new thing. We can't reinvent it. We can't hope for the best. We have to go from what exists. For better or worse, oftentimes, it's not altruism that drives us. It's self-interest. In America, this isn't in the holy water, so to speak.

From the other side, if you're an employee and maybe you're not permanently traumatized from your hazing, and maybe you're a younger Millennial, older Gen Z, or what have you, you're okay. You're more idealistic. You see, “The gates are open. I can be more of myself. I can take the language to its logical conclusion. I will fly my freak flag and I'll be fully myself.” We know that also doesn't work. Everything has limits.

I'm looking at this conversation between leaders, someone who begrudgingly says, “I have to play this game,” which sounds cynical, but often, that's the practice and the employee that is like, I'm going to test how far I can take this because I can quiet quit. I can be recruited to go somewhere else.” In that conversation, how do we turn those cynical pieces into something that's virtuous? How do we create a virtuous cycle?

This is a very tough scenario. I like to think of this in the simplest, most no-nonsense way possible. Why do I, as a leader, want and need to find out who this person is, where they are going, and what their why, who, and all of this stuff is? It sounds like, to most leaders who haven't had that experience, it's a giant waste of time. They’re like, “What do I need all this for?” Why do they need it not only to spy on their employees and all of that? It's simple.

If your role is to help people be aligned around their work and themselves so that they feel at home and they're not worried about all this other stuff to get them to work, you want to make sure that you understand them. You're directing it in the right way. You give them all the resources that they need. You incentivize them and motivate them properly. You coach them and give them benefits, rewards, and recognition.

From the employee side, you want to have all of those things. You may not believe in your heart that this is possible or there's some other ulterior motive, but the keys in each of those conversations, and I believe it, it’s the one-on-one that makes a difference. You can try to motivate on a team call. You can try to motivate at the annual meeting or on the offsite. You have that shot in the arm, but it doesn't last.

Even from a selfish perspective, it's important for leaders to see that paradigm and understand it one-on-one. If you do the right things even for the wrong reasons, great things will come because you will see very quickly someone aligned to their work. You’re like, “Are they clear on why they're here? If not, no problem. Let's reassign them. Let's change their role. Maybe they don't belong here.” You shake things out more quickly.

I agree with everything you said. You mentioned hazing. I never thought of it that way before, but that's probably a good word. I had one of the best jobs in the world, but I had one of the worst bosses. I will use that word. This individual would be in a big horseshoe table room with all of the leaders of every part of the company. We had weekly meetings on Tuesday morning and they were three hours long. He would get the results from the prior week two days ahead of time from finance. He'd go through all of that, and then he would ask each leader questions who only got that information either the night before or the morning of. He would use that as a club. He would wield that.

One time, I was dressed up and down for not knowing the answer to one question. He took me to his office later and said, “Way to take it. That's my theater.” I was like, “Your theater? What?” That was his modus operandi, but because he got results, he was in place for several years as the president of that division. I come to this idea of cynicism and this notion of, “What's in it for me?” That's fine. I don't care how you get there, but you need to get there. I'll tell you that I have, in my book, cited several research studies and several company information elements that suggest that there is no distinction between purpose and profit. As a matter of fact, it's and. It’s not or. It is purpose and profit.

If I can appeal to you on your base bottom line level of why being more purposeful will help you recruit and will help you engage in this area of quiet quitting and, as Gallup reports, historically low levels of engagement, what is that costing the company? What is it costing if they don't stay and they say, “I'm going to feel fulfilled somewhere else.”

Let's look at the cost of what it takes to recruit, hire, train, reward, and hopefully retain a team member. It's not cheap. When you have churn, then you're creating a tremendous burden on your P&L. I've managed my share of P&Ls. Depending on the industry, labor is either number 1 or number 2 as a line item. It is either that or the cost of goods depending on the industry. They're pretty close.

If you think, “We'll manage the labor line by cutting it,” you want to make that more productive. If I can appeal to you in a dollars and cents manner, which I feel like I can, then the human part will come. If I lead with the human part, and you should do this because you should be a good human, there will be a lot of pushback. The good news is the results are such that it's a tremendously powerful case of how and why leaders need to understand the power of purpose. It doesn't take a lot. I'm going to give you my last little model here. All it takes is love.

You've mentioned Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Some of the most fundamental needs are to love and be loved. It's also an acronym. It's not hard. Listen, Observe, Value, and Empower. We all have this need to be seen and heard. There are a lot of people that don't feel in the workplace they're seen or heard. There is also the idea of being valued. When I was a kid growing up, I tried out for different teams. There was nothing better than to see your name on the coach's door that you made the team and the position that you were chosen to play.

When you think about that, when you feel like you're a valued member of a team versus an employee ID number, that's going to make you want to be more engaged. Finally, when you feel empowered to be your very best, that's where the magic happens. It is listening to your team members on a deep level about who they are and what they stand for. It is observing them, coaching them along the journey with frequent check-ins, and valuing their role on the team. It is making them feel that what they do is important, not only to themselves and their family but their teammates, not even to the bigger, broader enterprise. Finally, it is empowering them to be the very best version of themselves. Who would want to leave that? Who would want to quietly quit that?

That's very true. Thank you for sharing your perspective. I have one last little thing I ask every single guest that comes on the show. I enjoyed very much how we found this solid common ground. In my context, I'm always looking for what works for other people with regard to those four conversations with the body, mind, mental models, life skills, and other people or with God, or the universe. Please share with us any major, whether it's tips, strategies, or ways of looking at this subject, for yourself. It is something that's worked for you for probably a long time.

There was a great movie called Glengarry Glen Ross years ago that was with Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, and some other notable stars. Alec Baldwin was the leader of a real estate company where these people were dialing for dollars, trying to sell real estate. He came in one day to do a sales talk. He wrote on this dry-erase board ABC. It stands for Always Be Closing. That was his mantra. I changed the C to Always Be Curious.

What I would recommend for you and your audience on what's worked for me is to be curious. Ask the question behind the question and listen well. When you can do that, you can see someone else's perspective from a different lens. I like to look at people through the lens of LOVE. Listen, Observe, Value, and Empower. I want people to feel that when I interact with them, I'm listening, observing, giving them a sense of value and worth, and then empowering them to be their very best. Always be curious to ask the question and the question behind the question that gets at the answer to those four key elements that make us human as we work together to bring the human back to human resources.

Thank you so much. It's a tremendous pleasure to speak with you. You've shared some excellent wisdom with us. I appreciate you. I hope we'll have more conversations like this in the future. Thank you very much for coming to the show.

It is my pleasure. It was a pleasure to spend time with you and your audience. Thank you.

Important Links

• Mark Mears

• The Purposeful Growth Revolution: 4 Ways to Grow From Leader to Legacy Builder

• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/MarkAMears/

About Mark Mears

Mark possesses a unique and diverse background and is building growth brands such as PepsiCo, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, Frito-Lay, JCPenney, NBCUniversal, amongst others. Mark has also held executive leadership positions, including the SVP and CMO for The Cheesecake Factory, the EVP and CMO for Noodles and Company and President/Chief Concept Officer of Mimi’s Cafe. He's the author of a recent book, "The Purposeful Growth Revolution: 4 Ways to Grow from Leader to Legacy Builder."

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