April 8, 2026 • 28 mins
Business consultant and author Marcus Buckingham explains why love is the most powerful force in business
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
episode is going to be a slightly longer one part
of the series where I interview fascinating people about how
they take their days from great to awesome and any
(00:24):
advice they have for the rest of us. So today
I am delighted to welcome Marcus Buckingham to Before Breakfast.
Marcus is a longtime thought leader on leadership. He's a speaker.
He is also the author of the new book Design
Love In Marcus. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Thanks for having me, Laura, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Very excited to have you. Why don't you tell our
listeners a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Well, I'm a psychometrician actually by training, which means that
I measure things about human beings that are really important
but you can't count. So how do you measure strengths?
How do you measure talents? How do you measure how
satisfied or half you are with your life? All those
kinds of things that kind of make life worth living.
So I spent seventeen years with the Gallop organization and
building something called strength Finder, which is all about how
(01:05):
do you find out what your strengths are? And then,
in the seventeen years since then, just built my own
business focused on how do you help leaders to get
the most out themselves and the most other people that
they lead and the people that they serve.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Absolutely well, I know a lot of listeners have done
the various strength finders' assessments over the years. So in
the intro to your new book, to Design Love in
you talk about coming to love as a topic, which
we'll get to at a sec but at some kind
of dark moments for yourself. I wonder if you could
talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, well, I've built my company over ten years focused
on folks, on helping leaders to get the best out
of the people that they lead. And we've built this lovely, entrepreneurial,
passionate group of people who'd come together to serve our
clients in a way that was very loving. I mean
it was. It was the kind of environment where you
(01:59):
have family member joining the company and everyone else who
is friends feels like family. Everyone's sort of wearing company merch.
It's all very passionate actually. And then because I believed
in the mission so much, I sold the company in
twenty seventeen to a much much larger fortune of average
company that had three thousand salespeople. Because in my brain,
I'm thinking, if you want to spread the mission quickly,
(02:20):
you need a lot of smart friends. So a three
thousand person sales person organization is enticing because of that.
And yet over time, quite quickly, the passion drained away,
the love drained away, And it wasn't It wasn't the
bigger company's fault, per se. It was just when you
get inside a big organization, other considerations start to dominate
(02:43):
the conversation. It's the monthly returns, it's the quarterly earnings,
it's the performance reviews, it's the run this by legals.
And what happens with love passion isn't that. It's not
like it gets killed. It just dies from neglect. You
just start talking about other things. So for me, I
saw up close and personal what happens when you don't
(03:05):
make love. I know how to say that sounds I'm
saying of it. If you don't make love the central
organizing principle of how you do work, whether it's the
employee side of things or the customer side of things,
then it slips away and you wake up one day
and you realize that nobody talks about it anymore, and
everyone's just going through the motions of that day. And
(03:26):
so that was the impetus of the book really is
to go, wait a minute, there is life is too
short for us to be going through the motions of
the day to get through the day. So that was
the impetus of the book. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Well, love is kind of a funny word for a
business book, as I know, you know, and you kind
of shied away from that word at the beginning, right,
You kept looking for like synonyms that sound more business appropriate.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yes. Well, the first thing to see is that when
you look at the relationship between an experience, let's say
it's an employee experience, the relationship experience, and an outcome
like profitability or productivity or loyalty, the relationship isn't and
this is going to get a little datory, but the
relationship isn't linear. It's curve linear, which means that if
(04:14):
you've got a scale of one to five and the
quality of the experience five being strongly agree and one
being strongly disagree, moving someone from a two to a
three experience or a three to a four experience doesn't
drive their performance at all or their loyalty. It's really
only when you get to a five strongly agree that
you can see any kind of relationship to their next behavior.
So when you look at extreme positive behaviors, the thing
(04:37):
that drives them is extreme positive experiences, not fours, not threes, fives.
And then when you dive into the fives and you go,
what the heck of people saying when they say that
they're having an extreme positive experience at work, in their day,
in their life, what are they saying? Well, the word
they actually say, the word we humans always say, which
you want to extrive an extreme positive experience is love.
(04:59):
We say I love that. Now, we say it about
all sorts of things, Laura, we say it about I
love those shoes, I love that movie, I love that song,
I love my mom, I love that mentor so we
use it in all sorts of interesting contexts. But when
we're trying to explain something extreme positive, we pick the
word love. And I kept hearing it as a researcher,
and I kept trying to change it into things that
were more palatable to the business world. Those so things
(05:22):
like passion or joy or engagement or stray and those
are good words, but they're not actually what the words
that we humans use when we're trying to explain something
that's extremely positive for us, the word we pick is love.
And so as a researcher in the end, I just
had to go crying out loud, Marcus. Just go with
the word people are using. Let's explore it, let's be
(05:43):
curious about it, because it's the only thing that drives behavior.
So love is predictive of positive human behavior in a
way that no other word is respect, learning, enjoyment, satisfaction,
None of those predict what someone's going to do next.
So if we want to be serious about actual, super
productive human behavior, well we've got to go to the
(06:05):
thing that causes it. And the thing that causes it
is love.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
And how do you define love then, because people like again,
you use it with all sorts of things. I love
my mom, I love my job. We mean different things
when we're saying that.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Yeah. Yeah, so well, first of all, there's eight billion
definitions of the word love, right, there's many as many
definitions there are humans alive. And yet when you look
at the data around the world, when people use the
word love in China, we can predict their behavior. People
use the word love in Argentina. We can predict their behavior.
Wherever you go around the world, love is predictive. So
there must be something common about that definition of love,
(06:40):
even though every humans got their own definition. So in
the end, if you push and push and push on that,
what you bump into is this definition. Love is the
deep and unwavering commitment of the flourishing of a human
So if you think about their word flourishing, every single
one of us as human beings feel that we've got
something unique inside of us, and we want to get
to the end of our life and feel that we've
had some chances to express what's inside of us. If
(07:01):
you've got kids, you want them to be able to
express what's inside of them. And yet most of us
go through life balled up like an armadillo with armor
plating because the world's scary and frankly, it doesn't care
that much about us. So we go through life balled up.
Any time we bump into any sort of experience that
allows us to take one plate of armor off, even
if it's a small thing, like I love that outfit,
(07:23):
I know it sounds silly, but if you feel more yourself,
if you feel more fully yourself wearing that outfit, the
word you pick is love. If you work for a
leader who cuts through your performance review and allows you
to stretch yourself in some way that expresses the best
of you, use the word love. If you've seen a
movie where a scene, or a character or some aspect
of the movie helps you sort of explain your own
(07:46):
experience to yourself a little bit better. You walk out
of the movie and go, I love that. So in
a way, love just means bigger any experience, no matter
how small or how large, which lets us take the
armor plating off a moment even and let's just take
what's inside and put it out. The word we humans
(08:07):
reach for to describe the specificity that experience is love,
whether it's about a shoe or whether it's about a
mom So there is something common about what we mean
when we say love. And it's not like it's not
lots and lots and lots of like. Love is just
categorically different as an experience.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Love isn't just more likes. Well, we're going to take
a quick ad break and I'll be back with more
from Marcus Buckingham. Well, I am back talking with Marcus
Buckingham about how to design love in so we've been
talking that, you know, people having love as a driving force.
(08:50):
You know, we want to be a company that people
love to work for, or you know, companies that are
selling things want customers to love their products. But part
of that is flourishing as humans. And you know, you
talk about this a lot. So much of the world
seems designed not for humans these days. I mean so
much of what we experience in terms of you know,
robocalls or you know, horrible customer experiences at a doctor's
(09:14):
office or in an airline. I mean, it's like people
forgot there were humans or something.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Yeah, it's funny we coming out with the word love.
I thought the problem would be that people would go,
oh love, that's not real, or oh love, come on.
I thought they'd pushed back against the word love. But
funnily enough, the word that people push back more on
is experiences we humans we go through. Let's say you
go to the doctor's office. That's an experience for us,
(09:42):
and we as the human are going through that experience.
You would have thought the doctors, let's say, would have
designed an experience as though the whole human was going
through it. But we don't. We design it for process.
So in the doctor's office, there's a series of handoffs
that you have from the person who's there as the
receptionist or the person who that hands you off to
(10:02):
one nurse, to another nurse, to the doctor, to a
different nurse on the way out to and insurer, one
handoff after another. If you call your bank, it's one
handoff after another. If you call your airline, it's one
handoff off another, call the insurance company it and we
have to we as the human, have to contain the
coherence of our own story, repeating our story, whether it's
(10:26):
at the hospital, whether it's at the restaurant, whether it's
at the bank. We're the ones who have to try
to keep the coherence of our story together because the
whole darn world we live in has not been designed
for a coherent experience. It's one vertical process after another,
and we're just handed off. The whole world's been designed transactionally,
(10:46):
which is why, for the first time, by the way,
in thirty years, we asked this question. I started doing
this back in the early two thousands when I was
still at Gallup. We were just measuring trust, trust in
big business, trust in school RULs, trust in the government,
trust in big media. Last year was the first year
where not a single one of those institutions I've just
(11:08):
mentioned had more than fifteen percent of people saying I
strongly trust them. We are living in a world where
we just do not trust the institutions that are a
big part of our world, from schools to hospitals to banks.
But we just don't think it's not built for us,
because it's not. It's built for process and efficiency and transactionalism,
(11:29):
and it feels terrible for us. It feels terrible when
you call your bank. It feels terrible when you try
to buy tickets for a Taylor Swift concert and she's
outsourced the selling of tickets to Ticketmaster, who then gouge you.
But by the way, which is why she took that
back interestingly enough, because she did take the experience seriously
and started, I think it's taylorswifticks dot Com to take
(11:51):
it back in so that she could own the totality
of the experience. But most experiences for us in our
world are designed as though we aren't the human going
through them and it feels rotten.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Yeah, and you say that it's not so much that
people are evil about it. I mean they're not. It's
not immoral. It's just a moral right that it hasn't
been considered to make a human being flourish, right.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I mean. The simplest and the most banal example would
be you go to a restaurant and the person who
you made the reservation through, who is probably interactive voice response,
by the way, which is not a relationship strategy. It's
a containment strategy. That's what IVR is. You've made your
reservation online. The person you bump into at the hostess
down is not the same person whose voice you have
been when you made the reservation. The person who seeks
(12:37):
you is not the same person. The person you can
order your drink from is not the same person. The
person who then takes your order is not the person
who brings you. The whole thing is designed to efficiently
contain table four as efficiently as possible. It's not designed
to go you're a human, you probably want to feel
as that there's another human going through the experience with
(12:59):
you who's probably thinking about you as having a holistic experience.
Even something as banal as a restaurant isn't designed that
way for you. And so we live in a world
where trust is low, love is low. There's an experience
which back in the late eighth nineteenth century, actually a
(13:21):
very famous sociologist called Amil Durkheim coined to term an
m which means alien nation. We live in a world
which feels like it's blind to us humans as employees
of work. We're not called employees. We're called full time
equivalents FTEs or headcount. All of the human capital management
(13:41):
systems that do our pay, that do our recognition, programs,
that do our goal setting, those are all extensions of
financial systems. All of our human systems are actually financial systems.
And so we live in a world where of humanity.
Even at school, if you think about it, the uniqueness
of the student from the ages about zero to ten,
the uniqueness of your child is kind of interesting to
(14:03):
schools from ten onwards, it's how closely do you match
up to the standardized testing that we're going to do
all the way up through college actually, and the great
point average of the seniors who graduate from the college.
That's the preoccupation of schools, education at large, and then
it continues at work. So and there are exceptions, that's
(14:23):
beautiful leaders and beautiful managers and beautiful teachers who really
get to know us as unique humans. But most of
the world is set up to turn us from a
human into a financial element of a transaction and more.
With AI barreling down the track, we're going to get
more of that, not less of that. And the point
(14:43):
of this book is that's stupid. It makes very bad
business sense. Why because love's the most powerful driver of
productive human behavior for employees or for customers. So when
you put systems in place that drive love out, you
are undermining the behaviors that you want, whether it's productivity
or loyal or advocacy or word of mouth or whatever
it is.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
So let's say somebody is yeah, listening to this, and
they are a manager of a team, and they're like, Okay, well,
I may not be the CEO of a huge corporation,
but I would still like people to love to work
with me, yeah, right, and to help my team members flourish.
What are some of the things that a manager can
(15:23):
do to cultivate that within their team.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Well, the simplest thing that you can do if you
think about what's the handmaiden of love? Well, attention is
the handmaiden of love. Humans don't do very well when
we're ignored. Like, what's the opposite of love? Hate? No,
the opposite of love is ignoring someone. So the simplest
thing that a manager can do, which so many managers don't.
But you know that put upon and the company's yanking
(15:48):
them one way and another. But really, what you should
do is check in with each of your people for
fifteen minutes, one on one every week. It's the simplest thing.
Are some two questions, and do it fifty two times
a year. And the two questions are how do you
feel about last week? And what are you working on
this week? And how can I help? Do it fifty
two times a year. It's fifteen minutes and you're not
coming in with some amazing coaching tip every week, that's fine.
(16:11):
What you're doing is giving someone the benefit of attention
about the short term past. How was last week for you?
Did you love it or loath it? What'd you love like? Seriously,
go what'd you love about last week? And what's your loath? Okay, interesting,
I'm right with you now. What's your focus for this week?
How can I help? And you just keep doing that
fifty two times a year. Then for all of you,
(16:34):
but you and the rest of your team, what you'll
be doing is establishing emotional harmony with your team, because,
if you think about it, a year oscillates. Everybody goes
through ups and downs and challenges, and what you want
as a person on a team is just having a
leader who pays attention to it. They don't have to
fix it, they just have to pay attention to it
every week. Now, maybe on some weeks you can tweak
(16:56):
or adjust or course correct, but for most of us
when we go to work, we feel unseen. So if
you want to fix that, have a frequent light touch
check in or conversation call or whatever you want, check
in touch base. It turns out when you look at
the modality, it doesn't matter. You can do it online,
you can do it with an email, you can do
it face to face, you can do it on the phone.
What matters isn't the modality of it, Laura, it's the
(17:20):
frequency of it. Do you repeatedly touch based on each
of your people about the near term future every week.
If you don't do that, by the way, that sounds
boring to you to do, then you shouldn't lead people,
because leading is actually individualized attention to the human and
the work and the human and the work and the
human and the work. Gosh, you do that fifty two
(17:40):
times a year, you'll be in the top five percent
of leaders in terms of the loyalty and the productivity
you get from your people.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
And then one other thing you mentioned is is sort
of paying attention to customs, which I know a lot
of people listening to this show are very much into
routines and rituals. Are there certain sort of rituals that
good managers do in our to build love into their teams.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Well, the two but by the way, every single leader,
of course, I call it the ABCS of leadership Authenticity, beliefs, customs.
So whatever your customs are, they better be authentic and
they better be a manifestation of your beliefs. If you're
trying to fake it. If your customs are just a manipulation,
we humans can sort of sniff that out. So the
(18:24):
C comes after the A and the B. Authenticity means
we don't need you to be perfect, we need you
to be you beliefs means don't assume that we can
read your mind. What do you believe is deeply important
to you? Tell us, help us know that because we
can't actually dive into your heart. Customs would be like,
what are the things that you repeatedly do that bring
those first two to life? If you were to think
(18:46):
about some super predictable ones that probably work for most leaders,
although the way in which you do that might vary
according to your style. First of all, catch people doing
things right. There's a million different ways in which things
can go wrong. Your goal as a leader should be
to keep looking for excellence. And when you say good job,
that is not the end of a sentence. It's the
(19:08):
beginning of an inquiry. So when you say good job
to someone, that should be the beginning of why did
that work for you? Let's unpack that a little bit,
why so that you can do it again, so that
we can refine it or improve it. Let's look at
the bits that worked. Because excellence in any job isn't
just the opposite of failure. It's like you don't write
a great poem by fixing all the dangling partibles or
the split infinitives. So you as the leader. You've got
(19:30):
to be really interested in what works. When it works,
what works, catch people doing things right, not just to
make them happier, but because that's the raw material for
future greatness. Is current goodness, not current badness. So many
leaders get kind of get drawn into remediation and fixedness. No,
(19:50):
keep looking for what's right. And then another custom, which
is do it once a quarter for yourself. I would
suggest you actually don't want to quote it with each
of your people, but start with yourself. Just take a
black pad around with you for a week, draw a
line down the middle of it right, loved it at
the top of one column, and loathed it a top
of the other. Take it around with you for a week.
Any time you find some activity or interaction that you love,
(20:13):
that you lean into, that you find yourself looking forward to.
Time speeds up when you're doing it. Scribble it down
and loved it column and in the loaded it when
you see the opposite when you're procrastinating, when time drags
on when you're doing it, Okay, scribble that down. Take
an inventory of a regular week of your life and
put it through the lens of love. I know again,
I know that sounds a bit combin our. But really,
(20:34):
what you're trying to do is use love as your
decoder for what are the particular activities or situations that
super energize you. No one else is going to do
it for you. I actually call those lower red threads.
Every job has thousands of different activities in it, and
some of the threads are pretty neutral. You just got
to do them. They're black, they're green, they're gray, whatever,
you just got to do them. But some of the
(20:55):
threads are red. These are activities that you love, and
everyone's colorblind to your red threads. Even your mum, who
may love you to the anth degree, doesn't know what
your red threads are. She doesn't know what activities, moments,
or situations super energize you. You do, You do know them.
You're the wisest person about what you love in your life.
Do love it, loath it once a quarter, and use
(21:17):
the raw material of your own day or week to
pinpoint where are my red threads. Because if you want
a really really happy life at work or frankly life,
you don't need a red quilt. There's research out of
the Mayor Clinic which suggests you need twenty percent red
threads twenty percent red threads.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
That's the equivalent of one day a week, right.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Exactly, or twenty percent every day. But you don't need
one hundred percent every day. You're never going to find
a job you love like, that's just not real. But
you can find the love and what you do that's different.
That's doable.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Yeah. Absolutely, Well, we're going to take one more quick
ad break and then I will be back with Marcus Buckingham. Well,
I am back talking with Marcus Buckingham, the author of
the new book Design Love in So we've been talking
about things that energize us, you know, as we go
about our schedules. I'm curious about you your schedule. This
(22:15):
is a time management podcast. So do you have any
you know, rituals or things you do during your day
that you think make you more productive.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Well, not to be too subperfrentual, but I start The
first thing is attitudinal. You've got to think to yourself,
my day is my smartest, wisest, most loving friend, which
I know sounds a bit silly, but so many of
us look through the look at our days as something
to get through the days. The enemy. It's a to
(22:44):
do list that rolled over from yesterday, and I've got
to get through the day, get through the list. And
of course there is some part about this real, but
I always start off every day. It's right now, it's
early in my day. I start off and go, what
red threads am I going to weave today? Because my
trying to show me my day is trying to show
me a whole bunch of threads, And it's basically saying
(23:06):
to me, every day, is this one read? Is that
one read? Is this one read? My Day's trying to
help me find the energy that I need to be
invigurated in my life. It's trying to if I would
but listen. So for me, initially, it's always start off
and go, what red threats will I leave today? Because
if I don't set that intention around, what are the
activities that I can seek out, linger on pay attention to.
(23:27):
If I don't do it, no one's doing it. So
every day for me starts that way. Over time, I
end up writing, I mean, I've written down, you know,
ten or so red threads that I know will invigorate me.
They always do so for me, and it's going to
sound boring, but one of my red threads is finding
(23:47):
patterns in data. I love finding patterns in data. And
if I let days go by and I don't do that,
I don't sit with some data to go what does
it mean? Which I know for some of your listeners,
I'm sure sounds like pulling teeth.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
We love data over here. This is exactly how people
spend their time, for instance, is fascinating. I love looking
at data sets of thousands of people and how they
spend their time.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yes, absolutely so for me, Like if you the moment
you say the word data set and patterns, I just
lean in. I just always have leaned in, and I'm
just so I love doing that. I love, I mean
turning it into narrative. I love turning data into narrative.
So for me, that could be a podcast like this,
by the way, which is I mean I'm loving like
(24:29):
times fine by For me, I don't know how much
time has gone by, but it could be three hours.
I don't know. It's just whipping by. For me, I
will deliberately seek out opportunities to Now. I can write,
I can record, I can do it put. But any
time where I can seek out an opportunity to tell
a story from data, I'm going to lean in and
see that out. So those sort of rituals for me
(24:52):
give me some intention and control, not control over you
or control over someone else, but gives me control over
way in which I'm spending the time in my own days.
That's hugely important. It gives me agency absolutely.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Well, Marcus, I always ask my guest, So we've sort
of been getting at this, but what is something you
have done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Well that's a jolly good question. I mean, for me,
the challenge in a day is always that it doesn't
like no one who's calling you knows you the way
that you know you. So for me, every day has
to start off and it's not really like something I
did that is special about a particular day. For me,
(25:39):
every day's got to be do you want to take
love seriously in your own life? Marcus? Do you want
to make sure that that day today you're feeling a
little bit more full of yourself today as compared to yesterday. So,
for I mean, I'm not saying I have every single
day is an awesome day. But once you understand that
(26:01):
love is your decoder and that love is available, activities
that you love interactions that you love, situations that you
love that are so specific and unique to you. Once
you understand that that's there every day, then I don't know.
For me, it feels like every day is being designed
by me to have a lot of love in it,
and that is awesome. I mean, I'm sorry to sound
(26:24):
too woo woo.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
That works for me. We're going to design love into
our days as well in order to take them.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Just some great one quick thing about that, Laura. The
opposite of design. I've been thinking about a lot about
this because of the book. But what's the opposite of design?
What happened with my company, what happens to so many
people in their lives is drift. When you don't design,
you drift. And sometimes you're lucky, you have a great day,
but in a world which is pulling you and pushing
you this way and that, which doesn't really think about
(26:51):
your flourishing very much at all. In fact, as we
talked about, it sort of ignores your flourishing. You can
drift a long way from the authority and the energy
that you need to have a full life. It's not bad,
it's just you've drifted. And so design feels like the
right word to say, no, no, no, let's bring it back.
We're all designers. You can design experiences in your own
(27:12):
life that invigorate you, and it's up to you to
do it because no one else.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Well, yeah, absolutely, it's all about being intentional with our time,
our lives, everything we are doing. So, Marcus, where can
people find you?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Well, rather unsurprisingly, probably got a design loove in dot com,
which is the book site. We've just launched the pre
orders of the book and we're doing this masterclass series
for folks with the book with the Harvard Business Review
who's the publisher, So Design Love in dot Com would
be great. And then my various socials I'm always pottering about,
trying to be helpful and thought provoking for folks.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Excellent, Well, Michaus, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback
about this or any other episode, you can always reach
me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime,
this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
(28:11):
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach
me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast
is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia,
please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(28:33):
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
episode is going to be a slightly longer one part
of the series where I interview fascinating people about how
they take their days from great to awesome and any
(00:24):
advice they have for the rest of us. So today
I am delighted to welcome Marcus Buckingham to Before Breakfast.
Marcus is a longtime thought leader on leadership. He's a speaker.
He is also the author of the new book Design
Love In Marcus. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Thanks for having me, Laura, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Very excited to have you. Why don't you tell our
listeners a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Well, I'm a psychometrician actually by training, which means that
I measure things about human beings that are really important
but you can't count. So how do you measure strengths?
How do you measure talents? How do you measure how
satisfied or half you are with your life? All those
kinds of things that kind of make life worth living.
So I spent seventeen years with the Gallop organization and
building something called strength Finder, which is all about how
(01:05):
do you find out what your strengths are? And then,
in the seventeen years since then, just built my own
business focused on how do you help leaders to get
the most out themselves and the most other people that
they lead and the people that they serve.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Absolutely well, I know a lot of listeners have done
the various strength finders' assessments over the years. So in
the intro to your new book, to Design Love in
you talk about coming to love as a topic, which
we'll get to at a sec but at some kind
of dark moments for yourself. I wonder if you could
talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, well, I've built my company over ten years focused
on folks, on helping leaders to get the best out
of the people that they lead. And we've built this lovely, entrepreneurial,
passionate group of people who'd come together to serve our
clients in a way that was very loving. I mean
it was. It was the kind of environment where you
(01:59):
have family member joining the company and everyone else who
is friends feels like family. Everyone's sort of wearing company merch.
It's all very passionate actually. And then because I believed
in the mission so much, I sold the company in
twenty seventeen to a much much larger fortune of average
company that had three thousand salespeople. Because in my brain,
I'm thinking, if you want to spread the mission quickly,
(02:20):
you need a lot of smart friends. So a three
thousand person sales person organization is enticing because of that.
And yet over time, quite quickly, the passion drained away,
the love drained away, And it wasn't It wasn't the
bigger company's fault, per se. It was just when you
get inside a big organization, other considerations start to dominate
(02:43):
the conversation. It's the monthly returns, it's the quarterly earnings,
it's the performance reviews, it's the run this by legals.
And what happens with love passion isn't that. It's not
like it gets killed. It just dies from neglect. You
just start talking about other things. So for me, I
saw up close and personal what happens when you don't
(03:05):
make love. I know how to say that sounds I'm
saying of it. If you don't make love the central
organizing principle of how you do work, whether it's the
employee side of things or the customer side of things,
then it slips away and you wake up one day
and you realize that nobody talks about it anymore, and
everyone's just going through the motions of that day. And
(03:26):
so that was the impetus of the book really is
to go, wait a minute, there is life is too
short for us to be going through the motions of
the day to get through the day. So that was
the impetus of the book. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Well, love is kind of a funny word for a
business book, as I know, you know, and you kind
of shied away from that word at the beginning, right,
You kept looking for like synonyms that sound more business appropriate.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yes. Well, the first thing to see is that when
you look at the relationship between an experience, let's say
it's an employee experience, the relationship experience, and an outcome
like profitability or productivity or loyalty, the relationship isn't and
this is going to get a little datory, but the
relationship isn't linear. It's curve linear, which means that if
(04:14):
you've got a scale of one to five and the
quality of the experience five being strongly agree and one
being strongly disagree, moving someone from a two to a
three experience or a three to a four experience doesn't
drive their performance at all or their loyalty. It's really
only when you get to a five strongly agree that
you can see any kind of relationship to their next behavior.
So when you look at extreme positive behaviors, the thing
(04:37):
that drives them is extreme positive experiences, not fours, not threes, fives.
And then when you dive into the fives and you go,
what the heck of people saying when they say that
they're having an extreme positive experience at work, in their day,
in their life, what are they saying? Well, the word
they actually say, the word we humans always say, which
you want to extrive an extreme positive experience is love.
(04:59):
We say I love that. Now, we say it about
all sorts of things, Laura, we say it about I
love those shoes, I love that movie, I love that song,
I love my mom, I love that mentor so we
use it in all sorts of interesting contexts. But when
we're trying to explain something extreme positive, we pick the
word love. And I kept hearing it as a researcher,
and I kept trying to change it into things that
were more palatable to the business world. Those so things
(05:22):
like passion or joy or engagement or stray and those
are good words, but they're not actually what the words
that we humans use when we're trying to explain something
that's extremely positive for us, the word we pick is love.
And so as a researcher in the end, I just
had to go crying out loud, Marcus. Just go with
the word people are using. Let's explore it, let's be
(05:43):
curious about it, because it's the only thing that drives behavior.
So love is predictive of positive human behavior in a
way that no other word is respect, learning, enjoyment, satisfaction,
None of those predict what someone's going to do next.
So if we want to be serious about actual, super
productive human behavior, well we've got to go to the
(06:05):
thing that causes it. And the thing that causes it
is love.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
And how do you define love then, because people like again,
you use it with all sorts of things. I love
my mom, I love my job. We mean different things
when we're saying that.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Yeah. Yeah, so well, first of all, there's eight billion
definitions of the word love, right, there's many as many
definitions there are humans alive. And yet when you look
at the data around the world, when people use the
word love in China, we can predict their behavior. People
use the word love in Argentina. We can predict their behavior.
Wherever you go around the world, love is predictive. So
there must be something common about that definition of love,
(06:40):
even though every humans got their own definition. So in
the end, if you push and push and push on that,
what you bump into is this definition. Love is the
deep and unwavering commitment of the flourishing of a human
So if you think about their word flourishing, every single
one of us as human beings feel that we've got
something unique inside of us, and we want to get
to the end of our life and feel that we've
had some chances to express what's inside of us. If
(07:01):
you've got kids, you want them to be able to
express what's inside of them. And yet most of us
go through life balled up like an armadillo with armor
plating because the world's scary and frankly, it doesn't care
that much about us. So we go through life balled up.
Any time we bump into any sort of experience that
allows us to take one plate of armor off, even
if it's a small thing, like I love that outfit,
(07:23):
I know it sounds silly, but if you feel more yourself,
if you feel more fully yourself wearing that outfit, the
word you pick is love. If you work for a
leader who cuts through your performance review and allows you
to stretch yourself in some way that expresses the best
of you, use the word love. If you've seen a
movie where a scene, or a character or some aspect
of the movie helps you sort of explain your own
(07:46):
experience to yourself a little bit better. You walk out
of the movie and go, I love that. So in
a way, love just means bigger any experience, no matter
how small or how large, which lets us take the
armor plating off a moment even and let's just take
what's inside and put it out. The word we humans
(08:07):
reach for to describe the specificity that experience is love,
whether it's about a shoe or whether it's about a
mom So there is something common about what we mean
when we say love. And it's not like it's not
lots and lots and lots of like. Love is just
categorically different as an experience.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Love isn't just more likes. Well, we're going to take
a quick ad break and I'll be back with more
from Marcus Buckingham. Well, I am back talking with Marcus
Buckingham about how to design love in so we've been
talking that, you know, people having love as a driving force.
(08:50):
You know, we want to be a company that people
love to work for, or you know, companies that are
selling things want customers to love their products. But part
of that is flourishing as humans. And you know, you
talk about this a lot. So much of the world
seems designed not for humans these days. I mean so
much of what we experience in terms of you know,
robocalls or you know, horrible customer experiences at a doctor's
(09:14):
office or in an airline. I mean, it's like people
forgot there were humans or something.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Yeah, it's funny we coming out with the word love.
I thought the problem would be that people would go,
oh love, that's not real, or oh love, come on.
I thought they'd pushed back against the word love. But
funnily enough, the word that people push back more on
is experiences we humans we go through. Let's say you
go to the doctor's office. That's an experience for us,
(09:42):
and we as the human are going through that experience.
You would have thought the doctors, let's say, would have
designed an experience as though the whole human was going
through it. But we don't. We design it for process.
So in the doctor's office, there's a series of handoffs
that you have from the person who's there as the
receptionist or the person who that hands you off to
(10:02):
one nurse, to another nurse, to the doctor, to a
different nurse on the way out to and insurer, one
handoff after another. If you call your bank, it's one
handoff after another. If you call your airline, it's one
handoff off another, call the insurance company it and we
have to we as the human, have to contain the
coherence of our own story, repeating our story, whether it's
(10:26):
at the hospital, whether it's at the restaurant, whether it's
at the bank. We're the ones who have to try
to keep the coherence of our story together because the
whole darn world we live in has not been designed
for a coherent experience. It's one vertical process after another,
and we're just handed off. The whole world's been designed transactionally,
(10:46):
which is why, for the first time, by the way,
in thirty years, we asked this question. I started doing
this back in the early two thousands when I was
still at Gallup. We were just measuring trust, trust in
big business, trust in school RULs, trust in the government,
trust in big media. Last year was the first year
where not a single one of those institutions I've just
(11:08):
mentioned had more than fifteen percent of people saying I
strongly trust them. We are living in a world where
we just do not trust the institutions that are a
big part of our world, from schools to hospitals to banks.
But we just don't think it's not built for us,
because it's not. It's built for process and efficiency and transactionalism,
(11:29):
and it feels terrible for us. It feels terrible when
you call your bank. It feels terrible when you try
to buy tickets for a Taylor Swift concert and she's
outsourced the selling of tickets to Ticketmaster, who then gouge you.
But by the way, which is why she took that
back interestingly enough, because she did take the experience seriously
and started, I think it's taylorswifticks dot Com to take
(11:51):
it back in so that she could own the totality
of the experience. But most experiences for us in our
world are designed as though we aren't the human going
through them and it feels rotten.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Yeah, and you say that it's not so much that
people are evil about it. I mean they're not. It's
not immoral. It's just a moral right that it hasn't
been considered to make a human being flourish, right.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I mean. The simplest and the most banal example would
be you go to a restaurant and the person who
you made the reservation through, who is probably interactive voice response,
by the way, which is not a relationship strategy. It's
a containment strategy. That's what IVR is. You've made your
reservation online. The person you bump into at the hostess
down is not the same person whose voice you have
been when you made the reservation. The person who seeks
(12:37):
you is not the same person. The person you can
order your drink from is not the same person. The
person who then takes your order is not the person
who brings you. The whole thing is designed to efficiently
contain table four as efficiently as possible. It's not designed
to go you're a human, you probably want to feel
as that there's another human going through the experience with
(12:59):
you who's probably thinking about you as having a holistic experience.
Even something as banal as a restaurant isn't designed that
way for you. And so we live in a world
where trust is low, love is low. There's an experience
which back in the late eighth nineteenth century, actually a
(13:21):
very famous sociologist called Amil Durkheim coined to term an
m which means alien nation. We live in a world
which feels like it's blind to us humans as employees
of work. We're not called employees. We're called full time
equivalents FTEs or headcount. All of the human capital management
(13:41):
systems that do our pay, that do our recognition, programs,
that do our goal setting, those are all extensions of
financial systems. All of our human systems are actually financial systems.
And so we live in a world where of humanity.
Even at school, if you think about it, the uniqueness
of the student from the ages about zero to ten,
the uniqueness of your child is kind of interesting to
(14:03):
schools from ten onwards, it's how closely do you match
up to the standardized testing that we're going to do
all the way up through college actually, and the great
point average of the seniors who graduate from the college.
That's the preoccupation of schools, education at large, and then
it continues at work. So and there are exceptions, that's
(14:23):
beautiful leaders and beautiful managers and beautiful teachers who really
get to know us as unique humans. But most of
the world is set up to turn us from a
human into a financial element of a transaction and more.
With AI barreling down the track, we're going to get
more of that, not less of that. And the point
(14:43):
of this book is that's stupid. It makes very bad
business sense. Why because love's the most powerful driver of
productive human behavior for employees or for customers. So when
you put systems in place that drive love out, you
are undermining the behaviors that you want, whether it's productivity
or loyal or advocacy or word of mouth or whatever
it is.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
So let's say somebody is yeah, listening to this, and
they are a manager of a team, and they're like, Okay, well,
I may not be the CEO of a huge corporation,
but I would still like people to love to work
with me, yeah, right, and to help my team members flourish.
What are some of the things that a manager can
(15:23):
do to cultivate that within their team.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Well, the simplest thing that you can do if you
think about what's the handmaiden of love? Well, attention is
the handmaiden of love. Humans don't do very well when
we're ignored. Like, what's the opposite of love? Hate? No,
the opposite of love is ignoring someone. So the simplest
thing that a manager can do, which so many managers don't.
But you know that put upon and the company's yanking
(15:48):
them one way and another. But really, what you should
do is check in with each of your people for
fifteen minutes, one on one every week. It's the simplest thing.
Are some two questions, and do it fifty two times
a year. And the two questions are how do you
feel about last week? And what are you working on
this week? And how can I help? Do it fifty
two times a year. It's fifteen minutes and you're not
coming in with some amazing coaching tip every week, that's fine.
(16:11):
What you're doing is giving someone the benefit of attention
about the short term past. How was last week for you?
Did you love it or loath it? What'd you love like? Seriously,
go what'd you love about last week? And what's your loath? Okay, interesting,
I'm right with you now. What's your focus for this week?
How can I help? And you just keep doing that
fifty two times a year. Then for all of you,
(16:34):
but you and the rest of your team, what you'll
be doing is establishing emotional harmony with your team, because,
if you think about it, a year oscillates. Everybody goes
through ups and downs and challenges, and what you want
as a person on a team is just having a
leader who pays attention to it. They don't have to
fix it, they just have to pay attention to it
every week. Now, maybe on some weeks you can tweak
(16:56):
or adjust or course correct, but for most of us
when we go to work, we feel unseen. So if
you want to fix that, have a frequent light touch
check in or conversation call or whatever you want, check
in touch base. It turns out when you look at
the modality, it doesn't matter. You can do it online,
you can do it with an email, you can do
it face to face, you can do it on the phone.
What matters isn't the modality of it, Laura, it's the
(17:20):
frequency of it. Do you repeatedly touch based on each
of your people about the near term future every week.
If you don't do that, by the way, that sounds
boring to you to do, then you shouldn't lead people,
because leading is actually individualized attention to the human and
the work and the human and the work and the
human and the work. Gosh, you do that fifty two
(17:40):
times a year, you'll be in the top five percent
of leaders in terms of the loyalty and the productivity
you get from your people.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
And then one other thing you mentioned is is sort
of paying attention to customs, which I know a lot
of people listening to this show are very much into
routines and rituals. Are there certain sort of rituals that
good managers do in our to build love into their teams.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Well, the two but by the way, every single leader,
of course, I call it the ABCS of leadership Authenticity, beliefs, customs.
So whatever your customs are, they better be authentic and
they better be a manifestation of your beliefs. If you're
trying to fake it. If your customs are just a manipulation,
we humans can sort of sniff that out. So the
(18:24):
C comes after the A and the B. Authenticity means
we don't need you to be perfect, we need you
to be you beliefs means don't assume that we can
read your mind. What do you believe is deeply important
to you? Tell us, help us know that because we
can't actually dive into your heart. Customs would be like,
what are the things that you repeatedly do that bring
those first two to life? If you were to think
(18:46):
about some super predictable ones that probably work for most leaders,
although the way in which you do that might vary
according to your style. First of all, catch people doing
things right. There's a million different ways in which things
can go wrong. Your goal as a leader should be
to keep looking for excellence. And when you say good job,
that is not the end of a sentence. It's the
(19:08):
beginning of an inquiry. So when you say good job
to someone, that should be the beginning of why did
that work for you? Let's unpack that a little bit,
why so that you can do it again, so that
we can refine it or improve it. Let's look at
the bits that worked. Because excellence in any job isn't
just the opposite of failure. It's like you don't write
a great poem by fixing all the dangling partibles or
the split infinitives. So you as the leader. You've got
(19:30):
to be really interested in what works. When it works,
what works, catch people doing things right, not just to
make them happier, but because that's the raw material for
future greatness. Is current goodness, not current badness. So many
leaders get kind of get drawn into remediation and fixedness. No,
(19:50):
keep looking for what's right. And then another custom, which
is do it once a quarter for yourself. I would
suggest you actually don't want to quote it with each
of your people, but start with yourself. Just take a
black pad around with you for a week, draw a
line down the middle of it right, loved it at
the top of one column, and loathed it a top
of the other. Take it around with you for a week.
Any time you find some activity or interaction that you love,
(20:13):
that you lean into, that you find yourself looking forward to.
Time speeds up when you're doing it. Scribble it down
and loved it column and in the loaded it when
you see the opposite when you're procrastinating, when time drags
on when you're doing it, Okay, scribble that down. Take
an inventory of a regular week of your life and
put it through the lens of love. I know again,
I know that sounds a bit combin our. But really,
(20:34):
what you're trying to do is use love as your
decoder for what are the particular activities or situations that
super energize you. No one else is going to do
it for you. I actually call those lower red threads.
Every job has thousands of different activities in it, and
some of the threads are pretty neutral. You just got
to do them. They're black, they're green, they're gray, whatever,
you just got to do them. But some of the
(20:55):
threads are red. These are activities that you love, and
everyone's colorblind to your red threads. Even your mum, who
may love you to the anth degree, doesn't know what
your red threads are. She doesn't know what activities, moments,
or situations super energize you. You do, You do know them.
You're the wisest person about what you love in your life.
Do love it, loath it once a quarter, and use
(21:17):
the raw material of your own day or week to
pinpoint where are my red threads. Because if you want
a really really happy life at work or frankly life,
you don't need a red quilt. There's research out of
the Mayor Clinic which suggests you need twenty percent red
threads twenty percent red threads.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
That's the equivalent of one day a week, right.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Exactly, or twenty percent every day. But you don't need
one hundred percent every day. You're never going to find
a job you love like, that's just not real. But
you can find the love and what you do that's different.
That's doable.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Yeah. Absolutely, Well, we're going to take one more quick
ad break and then I will be back with Marcus Buckingham. Well,
I am back talking with Marcus Buckingham, the author of
the new book Design Love in So we've been talking
about things that energize us, you know, as we go
about our schedules. I'm curious about you your schedule. This
(22:15):
is a time management podcast. So do you have any
you know, rituals or things you do during your day
that you think make you more productive.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Well, not to be too subperfrentual, but I start The
first thing is attitudinal. You've got to think to yourself,
my day is my smartest, wisest, most loving friend, which
I know sounds a bit silly, but so many of
us look through the look at our days as something
to get through the days. The enemy. It's a to
(22:44):
do list that rolled over from yesterday, and I've got
to get through the day, get through the list. And
of course there is some part about this real, but
I always start off every day. It's right now, it's
early in my day. I start off and go, what
red threads am I going to weave today? Because my
trying to show me my day is trying to show
me a whole bunch of threads, And it's basically saying
(23:06):
to me, every day, is this one read? Is that
one read? Is this one read? My Day's trying to
help me find the energy that I need to be
invigurated in my life. It's trying to if I would
but listen. So for me, initially, it's always start off
and go, what red threats will I leave today? Because
if I don't set that intention around, what are the
activities that I can seek out, linger on pay attention to.
(23:27):
If I don't do it, no one's doing it. So
every day for me starts that way. Over time, I
end up writing, I mean, I've written down, you know,
ten or so red threads that I know will invigorate me.
They always do so for me, and it's going to
sound boring, but one of my red threads is finding
(23:47):
patterns in data. I love finding patterns in data. And
if I let days go by and I don't do that,
I don't sit with some data to go what does
it mean? Which I know for some of your listeners,
I'm sure sounds like pulling teeth.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
We love data over here. This is exactly how people
spend their time, for instance, is fascinating. I love looking
at data sets of thousands of people and how they
spend their time.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Yes, absolutely so for me, Like if you the moment
you say the word data set and patterns, I just
lean in. I just always have leaned in, and I'm
just so I love doing that. I love, I mean
turning it into narrative. I love turning data into narrative.
So for me, that could be a podcast like this,
by the way, which is I mean I'm loving like
(24:29):
times fine by For me, I don't know how much
time has gone by, but it could be three hours.
I don't know. It's just whipping by. For me, I
will deliberately seek out opportunities to Now. I can write,
I can record, I can do it put. But any
time where I can seek out an opportunity to tell
a story from data, I'm going to lean in and
see that out. So those sort of rituals for me
(24:52):
give me some intention and control, not control over you
or control over someone else, but gives me control over
way in which I'm spending the time in my own days.
That's hugely important. It gives me agency absolutely.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Well, Marcus, I always ask my guest, So we've sort
of been getting at this, but what is something you
have done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Well that's a jolly good question. I mean, for me,
the challenge in a day is always that it doesn't
like no one who's calling you knows you the way
that you know you. So for me, every day has
to start off and it's not really like something I
did that is special about a particular day. For me,
(25:39):
every day's got to be do you want to take
love seriously in your own life? Marcus? Do you want
to make sure that that day today you're feeling a
little bit more full of yourself today as compared to yesterday. So,
for I mean, I'm not saying I have every single
day is an awesome day. But once you understand that
(26:01):
love is your decoder and that love is available, activities
that you love interactions that you love, situations that you
love that are so specific and unique to you. Once
you understand that that's there every day, then I don't know.
For me, it feels like every day is being designed
by me to have a lot of love in it,
and that is awesome. I mean, I'm sorry to sound
(26:24):
too woo woo.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
That works for me. We're going to design love into
our days as well in order to take them.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Just some great one quick thing about that, Laura. The
opposite of design. I've been thinking about a lot about
this because of the book. But what's the opposite of design?
What happened with my company, what happens to so many
people in their lives is drift. When you don't design,
you drift. And sometimes you're lucky, you have a great day,
but in a world which is pulling you and pushing
you this way and that, which doesn't really think about
(26:51):
your flourishing very much at all. In fact, as we
talked about, it sort of ignores your flourishing. You can
drift a long way from the authority and the energy
that you need to have a full life. It's not bad,
it's just you've drifted. And so design feels like the
right word to say, no, no, no, let's bring it back.
We're all designers. You can design experiences in your own
(27:12):
life that invigorate you, and it's up to you to
do it because no one else.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Well, yeah, absolutely, it's all about being intentional with our time,
our lives, everything we are doing. So, Marcus, where can
people find you?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
Well, rather unsurprisingly, probably got a design loove in dot com,
which is the book site. We've just launched the pre
orders of the book and we're doing this masterclass series
for folks with the book with the Harvard Business Review
who's the publisher, So Design Love in dot Com would
be great. And then my various socials I'm always pottering about,
trying to be helpful and thought provoking for folks.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Excellent, Well, Michaus, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback
about this or any other episode, you can always reach
me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime,
this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
(28:11):
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach
me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast
is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia,
please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(28:33):
listen to your favorite shows.
Before Breakfast News
Host
Laura Vanderkam
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