Ron Friedman Takes on Bad Workplaces

Did you know that over 80% of the world’s employees are disengaged at work? That figure is both enormous and depressing. Unfortunately, too many workplaces can be a mediocre environment — the kind of environment that saps people’s spirit, engagement, motivation and life.

That’s why I’m thrilled to talk to Ron Friedman, PhD, the author of The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace. In this conversation we explore:

• The three human psychological needs required for a great work experience
• Why Employee of the Month awards are disincentives
• The barriers to organizational change
• The impact of design and setting on employee interaction

And much, much more! So listen in here! Don’t forget to rate this podcast on iTunes.

Full Transcript

Michael:  So I’m talking in this interview with Ron Friedman. Ron Friedman, PhD, doctor and academic, and he is the author of The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace. And, of course, I am fascinated in this because I have seen great workplaces but I have seen, far more often, kind of mediocre places to work. Places that kind of sap people’s spirit and engagement, and motivation, and life. And you can guess, as a man who’s kind of committed to the whole idea of doing less good work and more great work, that somebody that’s put the science and the research behind what it takes to create one of the best places to work is an interesting conversation indeed.

But you know, I didn’t want it to be a couple of guys violently agreeing with each other, so one of the statistics I know to be true, because Ron talks about it in his book, is that at least 70 percent of people in North America, 80 percent of people—over 80 percent of people around the world, are pretty much disengaged in the work that they do. That is enormous and depressing, but it has stayed that way for the last 20 or 30 years. So we start off by having a little tussle about, “Can you even change this, or are we just doomed to have a lucky one in five people happy at work and the rest of us just grinding it out?”

So, here we go, my conversation with Dr. Ron Friedman, author of The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace.

Okay, Ron, I’ve given you the big spiel, I’ve given you the big introduction, and I’m going to start our conversation with a question I started asking all of my guests on the Great Work podcast, and it’s this: What are you taking a stand against? I mean, what are you up against that you’re actually in the ring for?

Ron:  Well, one thing that I would say I spent the last few years working against are bad workplace practices. And the reason I went down this path is because I was exposed to many of them as an employee.

Michael: Right.

Ron: So, my background is I’m a psychologist, and then I decided, you know what? After teaching for many years, I’m going to go off into the corporate world, and so I became a pollster. So my job was to measure public opinion, figure out what people think, and then advise corporations on how they can shift those opinions. And in the process of being part of a number of organizations and advising for a variety of different clients I came to experience a lot of these practices firsthand. Like, for example, it’s 9 o’clock so we need you to be in front of a computer …

Michael:  Mm-hm.

Ron:  … and you can’t go home until 6 o’clock.

Michael: Right.

Ron: Why? Because we’ve always kind of done it this way, and if you’re not here we can’t monitor you, and if we can’t monitor you then we assume you’re not doing your best work. And so, it was practices like that, and I give a whole array of them that I talk about in my book,The Best Place To Work, that are really wrong-headed and, in fact, damage productivity.

Michael:  Right, so let me—because I mean, I’ve read the book. I really enjoyed it. I like how you bring a kind of a robust, science-based insight into conversations about how do we make our places better places to work, and more engaging for the folks in there. But I want to go to the kind of the wrap-up chapter, because it’s depressing. And here’s why it’s depressing: You go…

Ron:   That’s not what I was going for.

Michael: Well, here’s the depressing bit: You reference Gallup. You reference, kind of infer, Marcus Buckingham’s work about their ongoing measurement of employee engagement.

Ron:  Right.

Michael:  And so, for—I don’t know, I came across Tom Peter’s banging drums about employee engagement at least 20 years ago. Marcus Buckingham must have been doing it about the same period of time. And the statistic is grim. It’s like, 70 percent of American workers are disengaged, 18 percent are actively disengaged, and that hasn’t budged an iota in what, 10, 20, 30 years of Gallup research. So, here’s my question: Are you and I just kind of wasting our time, here? Or do you really, truly, in your heart, believe that we can actually change this? Because, you know, it feels pretty stuck to me.

Ron: Yeah, I completely agree with you. So, just to recap, 70 percent of American workers, over 80 percent, I think it’s 84 percent, of workers worldwide are not fully engaged at work. And so, the question is: How do we shift these numbers? And I think we’ve actually turned the corner. I think we now have enough evidence that we can make actionable, that people can apply, whether they’re a manager, whether they’re a CEO, whether they’re an intern, to the way they work, to elevate both their engagement and productivity.

And so, you know, to bring it to the—if we’re going to go on the 30,000 foot view, what is it that makes for a great work experience? And it’s actually quite simple. It’s when we have our three basic human psychological needs fulfilled. So, what are those needs?

The first need is the need for competence. So, feeling like you’re good at your job, but also, critically, having opportunities to grow that competence on a regular basis. So it’s not enough to come into work and feeling like, you know, “I’m good at writing memos.” That’s great …

Michael: Right.

Ron:   … but you need to go beyond that because you’re going to get bored every once in a while, and so you need to have stretch goals that allow you to grow your competence over time.

The second basic psychological need is the need for relatedness. So, feeling like you’re connected to the people around you in a meaningful way, in an authentic way. So, feeling like you’re respected, valued, appreciated, all the good things that happen when we’re around people who value us.

And then the final need is the need for autonomy. So, feeling like you have some say in how you go about doing your job.

When we have those basic human psychological needs fulfilled, we tend to be happier, healthier, more productive, and it has been proven, frankly, over decades in a variety of cultures, regardless of age, regardless of gender. So, the main question is, well, how do we start applying some of these? How do we start allowing people to experience more psychologically fulfilling experiences? And there are some very concrete things that anyone can do to elevate their experience at work, and that’s what I talk about in the book.

Michael:  Okay, I want to come back to those, because those are three interesting drivers of psychological engagement. I want to kind of go macro rather than micro, just for a moment, and the question, I guess, is this: So, you think we’ve turned the corner, which is great news. Is the change that has to happen to kind of change that slightly depressing percentage …

Ron: Mm-hm.

Michael:  … does it happen within organizations, or can it only really happen when old organizations crumble and new organizations come? I mean, is it just that old organizations are finally kind of kicking the bucket and there’s this kind of bursting forth of new, smaller, more nimble, more kind of millennial league, to coin a phrase? Is it that, or is there actually ways that you can change old-school companies to help them be great places to work?

Ron:  I think that managers have long suspected that many of the things they’re required to do on a regular basis are ineffective. And they haven’t had the data to support that contention, and now they do. So, for example, we now have evidence showing that if you give people the Employee of the Month award, they’re going to be less motivated rather than more motivated.

Michael:  Ah, yeah.

Ron:  Why is that?

Michael:  Well, yeah, unpack that.

Ron:  Sure.

Michael: Because, I mean, I read that, and laughed and I read it in the book. It feels true.

Ron:  Yeah.

Michael:  What’s the data behind that?

Ron:  So, there’s this research showing that if you recognize people, that they’re going to be less motivated moving forward because—especially when it’s tied to a timeline. So, if you give people a reward every month, then they know that it is—the question becomes, “Did I get the award because management needed to fill a position, or is it because they actually value what I work—the work that I’m doing?”

The other thing is, is if you get that reward, you also are becoming—you become less motivated, because you now have that kind of sneaking suspicion that, “Am I going to be rewarded again, given that I just received the award?” So, it has the ironic impact of actually making the person you want to recognize less motivated. So …

Michael:   Just to say, Ron, you’ve already won the Podcast Guest of the Month with me. Just wanted to let you know that while you’re carrying on. But go on, go on.

Ron: It’s an honour, thank you. You know, and I think that’s just one example, another example. And we talked about allowing people the flexibility to work when and where they’d like, and so I think for many years, people have suspected that if I allow my employees the opportunity to work when and where they feel most suited, assuming that it is—assuming that the work allows for it, right?

Michael:  Yes.

Ron: So, we can’t have the receptionist not showing up at work, because no one’s going to be picking up the phone. But assuming your job allows you, and most jobs fall into the category, or at least white-collar jobs fall into the category of work that can be done flexibly, …

Michael: Yes.

Ron:   … when you provide people opportunities to work flexibly, they end up becoming more productive. So, why is that? Well, it’s a couple of things. One is we talked about the psychological need for autonomy. So, autonomy is feeling like you have some say in how you go about doing your job. When you have the ability to control when and where you work, you feel like the work you’re doing is your choice.

You’re not being pressured to do it; you’re doing it because you want to do it. That makes you more motivated. The other thing is it allows you to work during your best hours. So, we are not equally effective over the 40 hours of our week. So, for example, in my case, I’m a morning person. So, I tend to be most impactful between the hours of nine and twelve. Four o’clock …

Michael: Yeah, and sadly we’re recording this at four o clock, so…

Ron:  … four o’ clock, I get on a podcast with some guy… Just kidding. Just kidding. But the reality is that I would not be quite as good at writing my next article right now, and so—but I am good in the context of being around other people and that’s why I’m doing this podcast now, is because when you’re around other people, that’s naturally energizing.

Michael: Got it.

Ron: So, that’s, you know, if you want to schedule your day in an intelligent way, doing your deep-focus work early in the morning is a good idea, and then scheduling afternoon meetings makes sense. So, my point is, is that the nine o’clock hour, to me, is doubly as valuable as the four o’clock hour. So, if I can schedule my day according to when I know I am best, I am going to get more done. And so, that also speaks to why you want to provide people with flexibility when you can.

Michael: Oh, yeah. That’s a really interesting—I’ve never—I mean, I’ve heard something like this before, but I’ve never heard somebody say it like you just did, “My nine o’clock is twice as valuable as my four o’clock.

Ron:  Yeah.

Michael:  That’s a really great way of kind of quantifying and helping kind of measure out how you spend your time. Because I certainly, even though I’ve always thought that, I still spend my time like each hour is worth the same amount.

Ron: Right.

Michael:  And I love the way you’re reframing that.

Ron:  And I, you know, I would also add to that that I think that our happiness return on investment, potentially also has that different weighting. So, I’ve been thinking about this recently, where I think that you have—if you work on a Sunday …

Michael:  Hmm.

Ron:   … that does more damage to your happiness than there would be working on a Monday, right? That kind of—that’s kind of obvious.

Michael:  Right.

Ron:  But if you think about it in the inverse, which is that Sunday is my day to maximize my happiness for the week, and I’m going to schedule it accordingly, I think there’s a lot to be gained with that sort of thinking.

Michael:  I love that. All right, so I’m going to get meta on you, because you talked about the three psychological needs, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and you know, the good data that we have is that if we can provide people, as is appropriate for their roles, and it often is, that degree of autonomy, that choice, that competence, that ability to grow and stretch in their work, and that relatedness, that kind of connection with other people, they’re going to be more engaged, they’re going to be more motivated, it’s going to be a better workplace. So, my question is okay, nobody’s going to disagree with that, or not many people, not intellectually. So, what’s the barrier to letting that go? And if I’m a senior leader in an organization, I can feel that allowing other people autonomy and competency and mastery undermines my own sense of autonomy and competency and mastery. So, while I’m like, “Yeah, I kind of get this in theory,” in practice I’m like, “Yeah, it’s pretty uncomfortable to let that go.” So, how do you deal with that need to preserve old structures, “because I’ve got really comfortable, and I flourish at the top,” and you know, in the sweet spot of those old structures?

Ron:  So, I’m going to answer that, but let me just question the framework for the question just a little bit, and that is—I think that the main barrier to having the psychological need fulfillment in most workplaces is not people saying, “I don’t like this idea of providing people with competence-growing experiences,” or, “I don’t like the idea of people having close relationships at work,” though to some extent that is the case. I think the central barrier is the gap between knowing and doing, and it’s not so much the “I know I need to grow people’s competence and I’m not doing it,” but more so of, “I’m very busy as a manager. I am barely responding to my emails, and showing up in conference calls, and getting to my next presentation in time …”

Michael:  Right.

Ron:  “… to have to worry about whether, you know, Melissa in Accounting is feeling sufficiently motivated …”

Michael:  Right, right.

Ron:   “… because she’s having a growth experience.” So, it’s within that context that I think that we need to find easily applied solutions that anyone can use. And so, one example of it, and I give plenty of them in the book …

Michael:  You do, yeah.

Ron:  … is for growing people’s connections with one another, right? So, how do you do that? How do you get people to become friends, right? It’s one thing to give people a computer, a nice desk, maybe a window, but how do you get them to like one another?

And you know, some quad managers frankly would question whether that’s their job. They’re not in kindergarten. They’re not, you know, they’re not a cheerleader, that’s not their role. Their role is to provide people with the tools they need to function effectively.

Michael: Right.

Ron: And so, there are some simple things you can do. So, for example, when you hire people, rather than simply introducing them by their professional CV, take a little time to ask them about what they like to do on their personal time. So, for example, if I know about you, Michael, that you happen to like to eat branzino—I know that’s true, because we had dinner together …

Michael:  That’s right, and that was a fantastic meal at a restaurant that you guided us to. So, that was fantastic, in Brooklyn.

Ron:  So if I know that about you, I can introduce you to the team by saying, “Here’s Michael. Not only has he written all these fantastic books, he’s a great speaker, he has a wonderful podcast that his mother listens to, but he happens to like branzino.” And that gives me—you an opportunity to bond with people over your next business trip …

Michael: Mm-hm.

Ron:  … over, you know, before a conference call. And it’s—when we have their shared connections, when we know what we have in common with one another, that’s when our friendships blossom. And so, that’s just one example of making an insight actionable and also simple for people to achieve.

So, to get back to your original question, which is how do you get people who aren’t quite as comfortable with providing autonomy or competence or relatedness, how do you get them more comfortable? And I think that’s where you have to look at the data. And this is where senior leaders—this is kind of like their Achilles heel, right? They like data and they want to know that what you’re recommending is going to be proven to work.

And so we have all of this …

Michael:  So long as it confirms what my bias already is.

Ron:  Exactly. So, we have, you know, some really eye-opening statistics. Like, for example, companies who are on the Fortune magazine’s Top 100 Best Places to Work, their stock returns tend to be essentially double what the average company is returning.

Michael: Right.

Ron:  And so, they’re almost doubly as profitable. And so, there is a lot of evidence showing that when you provide people with strong workplaces that they can enjoy working in, they’re going to be more productive, and therefore you’re going to be more effective as a leader, and your company’s going to be more profitable.

Michael:   All right, Ron, we’re in this section, I haven’t got a name for it yet. I’m, you know, I could call it the Rapid Fire section but every podcast calls it the Rapid Fire. I’m not going to call it that, but it’s still kind of a rapid fire question section. So three standard questions I ask all my guests, and here’s the very first one: What was the crossroad decision that made all the difference?

Ron:  Well, I’m going to cheat a little bit. I’m going to name two. So, the first one for me was leaving academics. And so I, you know, I invested all these years in becoming a psychology professor, and then after my first year of teaching I decided I was going to throw it away and join the corporate world. And that turned out to be a great decision. You know, you really don’t know where these things are going to lead when you do them, but you know, had I not taken that background of having studied thousands of studies in human motivation and then applied it to the corporate world, I never would have written the book.

Michael: Brilliant.

Ron:  The second is deciding to leave the corporate world to write the book and start a business.

Michael: Right.

Ron: And you know, we talked about this a little before the podcast, but it’s—I have to say, you know, being able to work for yourself and having a very clear picture on how every minute is spent, because you know, you can’t justify just sitting in a meeting if you’re—if you have yourself to answer to. I think that’s been really great, and has led me to think very deeply about how I spend my time and how we, as employees, just more generally spend our time over the course of the work day, and how we can better utilize every minute of our day.

Michael: Great, lovely. Two great crossroads, there. All right, question number two: Whose work has influenced your work?

Ron:  Well, you know, rather—I’m going to cheat here, too. Man, I’m kind of a cheater, I’ve noticed.

Michael:  You kind of are.

Ron:  Yeah.

Michael: Yeah, I’m noticing that. You’re hacking every system I’ve got.

Ron:  I’m not going to name authors, although it would be easy for me to say Malcom Gladwell, Daniel Pink, and the Freakonomic guys …

Michael:  Yeah.

Ron:  … because they have deeply inspired my work. But what I will say are experiences that I’ve had working for two different people. One is when I was a graduate student, I worked for two advisors: one is Edward Deci, who came up with self-determination theory, who really kind of drove the ideas in my book, and also Andy Elliot. And, being in academics, what you learn is to anticipate every problem that reviewers are going to have with your study …

Michael: Right.

Ron:   … before you actually do the study. And that has led me, really, to question every study that I report in a way that reviewers might anticipate. And so, I think that has made me extra-special diligent in kind of deciding which study makes the cut and which doesn’t.

Michael: That’s great.

Ron:  The other work experience that I had was working for a guy named Joel Benenson who, at the time that I was working for him, was Barack Obama’s pollster, and is now Hillary Clinton’s pollster.

Michael: Mm-hm.

Ron:  And that experience, really, being a consultant, more generally, has led me to be very focused on what are the actionable recommendations that come out of what I just reported. And so, what I do in The Best Place To Work, and really, anything that I work on, is I try to distill down not just the information, but then translate it into an action item that anyone can apply to improve the way they work. And I learned that being a consultant, not being an academic.

Michael:   All right, third and final question: What’s your current great work?

Ron: I was going to name the podcast. Is that cheating?

Michael:  A little cheating, yeah.

Ron: Okay. I am—so over the last year, since the book has come out, I have been working on doing this online program called The Peak Work Performance Summit, which is a series of me interviewing various very well-known and very accomplished authors about their advice for how anyone can improve the way they work, to be more impactful, utilizing scientific insight.

Michael: Brilliant.

Ron: And so, I ran this summit in January. It was very successful. We’re going to do it again in September, and Michael, if you’d be willing, we’d love to have you as a guest.

Michael: Oh, yeah. Look, I saw it, and you had some great guests in that January summit, so I would love to be part of that. Thank you.

Ron:  It just got better. And so, I’ve been devoting a lot of time to that, and it’s been really interesting, because I think it’s fascinating to hear a lot of these authors, like the ones that we named over the course of this interview, like Marshall Goldsmith and Daniel Pink and Adam Grant, and really drilling down on, “Well, you know, you wrote this great book, here, but how do I apply this personally? Not just for, you know, if I’m a manager, what do I do if it’s just me and I’ve just started out? How do I become better at using my time?” And it’s wonderful to hear those answers of really inspiring work.

Michael: Cool. Three good questions, three great answers. Let’s get back to our original interview. So, let me give you an impossible question, because you make the point in the book where you go, “Look, I don’t give you just a whole range of tactics, because a bakery is different from a bank is different from a courier service.” So, you’re giving kind of principles as much as, or kind of as well as, specific tactics.

So, you know, you talk about in one of your chapters, you know, the power of place and how office design totally shapes the way we work, and you give a whole range of insights and tactics that we could use. But really, your key principle is, you know, to quote Churchill, you know, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards they shape us.” But if there was a place to start, kind of, this is your generic answer, when you don’t know anything about the organization, the size, the growth, the stagnation, wherever it is, is there a place where you kind of go, as your default, “Well, if I had to give you an advice of a place to start, this is the place to look”?

Ron: Yeah, start with the end in mind. Meaning, what are the activities the people on your team need to achieve to be successful?

Michael: Right.

Ron:  So, what most organizations do is they tend to—one of two things: one is they kind of find whatever real estate is available and then put their team there. The other option is to kind of think about, “Well, what have I seen on Business Insider,” or, “What seems to be fashionable at the moment?” It used to be the case that people wanted a closed office, now they want open offices. They’re not quite sure anymore because they’ve heard—they’ve read enough of these articles where both of them are slammed. And the truth is neither one is a one-size-fits-all solution, and it’s because they all have downsides. So, open offices look very nice and they can improve the frequency of dialogue between people …

Michael: So, that relatedness piece?

Ron:  That relatedness piece. But what we need to recognize is when it comes to productivity, not all conversations are equally valuable, right? And so, you can have a lot of distraction when you’re working in an open office. It leads to a higher level of anxiety, and what I’ve personally experienced working in open offices is that you end up having to either come in early, stay late, or work over the weekend, because that’s when the work gets done. You can’t get any work done between nine and five.

Michael: Right.

Ron:  I think it’s just something really disappointing about most organizations, where people feel like they need to leave the building in order to be successful.

Michael:  Right, I’ve walked that same path. Worked in a great place with an open office. Socially, it’s a whole lot of fun. Practically, I’m like, “Okay, I’m now going to the coffee shop to actually get my work done.”

Ron: Exactly, exactly. And to be fair, you know, private offices aren’t, you know, as great as you might think either, because what ends up happening is people are isolated from one another. And so we talk about the role of serendipity, and I think that is something that is worth considering. What ends up happening is people need to get on one another’s Outlook calendar in order to meet, and so that’s kind of—that’s not an ideal situation either.

And so, what I argue in the book is that there is research showing that when you provide people—let me take a step back. When you think about autonomy, what did we say when it comes to autonomy, is having that feeling of choice. You’re working in a way in which you feel like you’ll be most successful, and because you fully endorse the way that you’ve decided to pursue solving the tasks on your plate.

So, if you give people a choice of a variety of different settings, so, thinking of kind of a range of options, where you give people that private office where they can work, but then also offer some open spaces that don’t require …

Michael:  Mm-hm.

Ron:  … reserving a conference room in order to have a meeting. So, having, you know, a coffee shop that people can go to, or social settings, really, that are not as formal. You know, we invest a lot of money in our conference rooms that hardly get used unless we’re in a very formal meeting.

Michael: That’s true, yeah.

Ron: And if we just spent, you know, a fraction of that on building social spaces that invite people to spend some time together, even when they’re not talking about work, I think we’d all be better off.

So, I don’t know that I’ve answered your question. I’ve kind of gone off on a long screed, but let me just circle back, and that is start with the end in mind.

Michael: Yeah, nice.

Ron: And so, if people are looking—if you have a team that is comprised of writers, for example, or researchers, that need a lot of—need the ability to focus very quietly, you might want to err on the side of providing private offices, or providing social spaces that demand quiet. So, an office library, for example. Pick place where people can go where they can be free of their screens and free of their cell phones, and really focus. That is one example of an approach that I think would work.

Michael:  I like that. You know, I love the metaphor you use around this particular topic, the ‘caves and campfires’ metaphor in the book. It’s really powerful, and that piece around creating an environment that allows different places for different types of work, and allows autonomy, so you get to choose which one is needed there and then. Very powerful.

Ron:  Thank you.

Michael:  So one of the—you’ve got a lot of good people blurbing your book. Adam Grant, Dan Pink, Marshall Goldsmith, a bunch of kind of familiar faces. But one of the ones that I don’t see very often, and who I love, is a guy called Edgar Schein. He’s one of the real thinkers in this space, for me. And you know, when he talks about understanding organizational culture, he gives a simple but powerful three-level model.

You know, the first level is artifacts. So, that’s the stuff you see. You know, you walk in and everybody’s wearing jeans, and it’s open plan, and there’s espresso machines everywhere, and the CEO isn’t wearing a shirt. So, something like that. And you know, that’s telling you something about the culture, although it’s easy enough to misinterpret what the artifacts are.

And then, the next level down is espoused values. So, it’s like, you know, here’s what we say about who we are and what we do. You know, it’s what appears in the Fortune article about the company. It’s what gets laminated and slapped up on the wall, or kind of painted on the wall if you’re cool, about what the values are and how we do things around here.

And then at that kind of deeper level is, I think he calls it hidden assumptions, or something like that. They’re kind of the deeper, slower rhythms that really drive how we do the work around here.

And his piece says that if you have all three of those in alignment you have a really strong culture. If you have them out of alignment, and often the top two levels are out of alignment with the bottom level, it’s a kind of fake culture.

Ron: Mm-hm.

Michael: How do you help people get those three levels aligned? Because the danger with people reading the book as any book on culture change or improving an organization, is that the focus is on the first two levels, but they don’t really tackle the structural, behavioural, kind of habitual ways of behaving that truly define or influence a culture.

Ron:  Well, I would start by saying I think there’s a lot of confusion about what it means to have a good culture, and what it means to have an operational workplace culture that’s effective.

Michael: Right.

Ron:  So, I think the word—people love the word “culture.” I’ve noticed that a lot.

Michael: That’s true, yes.

Ron:  We need a good culture, and they misinterpret that to mean, as you rightly pointed out, the artifacts, the thing on the very sort of shallow level. And so, they have things like Ice Cream Wednesday …

Michael: Right.

Ron:   … or they’ll have, you know, a barbecue in the summer and invite everyone. And all those things are important and nice and good, but really, what it means—we talk about culture, it really comes down to the behaviours of the people at the top.

Michael: Right.

Ron:  And so, we can have a wonderful painting on the wall, and we can have all of those amenities, but ultimately, it’s the behaviour of the people at the top that dictates what gets done and what gets repeated by others. And I bring, in the book, an evolutionary lens to it. And the idea is that we tend to mimic one another. We have that built into our—into the way that—into our thinking, is that we’re born with a brain that’s designed to mimic. And we spend more time paying closer attention to the people at the top, because they can direct our career in a way that’s valuable, and they determine our success. And so, because we’re spending more time looking at the people at the top, we tend to mimic their behaviours more frequently.

And so, if you want to change an organizational culture, what you really need to focus on are not the amenities, but really looking at the behaviours of people at the inner circle of the CEO and determining what behaviours are valuable to the culture that we want to create, and which ones we really want to root out.

Michael:  Nice.

Ron:  And you know, there’s all this research showing that it’s the personality of the CEO that then dictates the personality of their senior leadership team, and that then trickles down to the organization. So, in the book, I talk about research that’s been done, historical research looking at the biographies of CEOs to determine what their personality really was like. And so, you know, research that’s been done, that’s on some level blind, I think, coded by people. They took certain excerpts and had them coded to determine what is the CEO’s personality, and then they were able to find that, in fact, when you have a warm and trusting CEO you have a much more cohesive senior leadership team, but when you have an anxious CEO you have a senior leadership team that’s unwilling to change their attitude, even in the face of new information, and I think that’s so powerful.

I mean, it really goes to show that it’s the behaviours that are driving the entire organization. Just one individual can shift an entire organization. It just goes to show how, if you could really isolate the senior leadership team and say to them on a structural—you know, on a cultural level, “What is the culture that’s going to make us successful?” And how do we behave in a way that gets people to appreciate that and then mimic those behaviours?

Michael:  Ron, it’s a really powerful place to end, and so even though, I mean, we’ve barely—we haven’t really even touched the book. I mean, we kind of got into this great conversation. The book is full of insights, research-based, about how to build a great place, a powerful place, an engaging and motivating place to work. For people who are like, “Damn it, Michael, you just teased me. I don’t know anything about Ron or the book,” where can they find more about you and the book on the Internet?

Ron:  Well, there are two places. The first, I would say, is ignite80. That’s the name of my company. I-G-N-I-T-E, the number 8-0, dot com. And the reason it’s called ignite80 is because of that Gallup research showing that over 80 percent of the world’s employees are not fully engaged at work. And so, the mission of ignite80 is to turn those numbers around. And the way that we do that is we go and talk with senior leaders, we give presentations, and do keynotes on how to build a great workplace using scientifically proven practices.

Michael: Nice.

Ron: The other place is thebestplacetoworkbook.com, where you can go and sign up, and you can get the opening chapter for free.

Michael: Perfect. Ron, it’s been a total pleasure talking to you. I mean, I knew it would be. We had dinner, I guess a month ago or so, and it was a great conversation over dinner, so this is just a kind of carry-on with the conversation, but with me having drunk a little less wine, so I may be a little more coherent.

Ron:  Thank you, Michael, it’s been a pleasure.

Michael:  All right.

 

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ABOUT MICHAEL BUNGAY STANIER & BOX OF CRAYONS

Michael Bungay Stanier is the Senior Partner and Founder of Box of Crayons, a company that helps people and organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work. They're best know from their coaching programs that give busy managers the tools to coach in 10 minutes or less.

Download free chapters of Michael's latest book The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever here.

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