Episode Details

Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk

My Guest: Marcus Buckingham is a Cambridge graduate. He spent nearly 20 years at the Gallup Organization, where he co-created the StrengthsFinder assessment. He is a New York Times bestselling author of influential books, including First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Currently, he leads the People + Performance research at the ADP Research Institute.

When you start a business, it's all about love. Seven out of 10 businesses fail, so when you start a business as an entrepreneur, you love what you do, you love your clients, and you surround yourself with people who can love it as much as you do. You all have this passionate delusion that what you're doing is really important and it's gonna work.

Marcus sold his company in 2017 and calls it the biggest mistake of his career. His company was broken down into silos, and the conversation became about maximization, compliance, and efficiency.

"Love is born savoring, it lives in intelligence, but it dies from neglect. Love dies from forgetting." (Pablo Neruda) When you stop talking about love, you destroy it.

Before you sell or scale, ask: Will this lead to more customers falling in love with your company and more employees saying they love working there? If the answer isn't obvious yes, then don't do it.

Great companies protect the founder's flame. Walt Disney, Truett Cathy and Chick-fil-A, Apple's passion for design, Southwest Airlines, and Herb Kelleher. When companies lose their connection to the founding passion, they become the machine. The machine doesn't have a soul, and people can all feel it.

Love is the most powerful force in business. If you want to drive productive human behavior, repeat visits, advocacy, loyalty, collaboration, high performance, the precursor to that is love.

But we don't say the word. Marcus was with 30 C-suite executives, and they spent two hours talking about data. They couldn't even say the word, love. They came to say it about customers, but never about their own employees.

The job of a leader is to change human behavior. You're not paid to hit a goal. You're paid to change behavior so that you hit various goals. You've got two choices: directive (which works temporarily) or designing experiences.

If you want sustainable behavior change, experiences drive behaviors, which drive outcomes.

The best leaders are skilled experience makers. That email you just sent? It's an experience. That meeting? It's an experience. Onboarding? It's an experience. Every touchpoint is picking up what you're putting down.

Culture is just a series of experiences.

Either you are getting people to say "I love that," or you've failed to change their behavior.

"If you are faking your beliefs, I can smell it, and I don't want to follow it." Authenticity is manifested in your beliefs, and they better be coherent with who you authentically are. Your customs are the living manifestation. The things you customarily do have got to flow from your authenticity and your beliefs. The best leaders have their ABCs line up beautifully - they are authentically who they are, you know exactly what they believe, and their customs bring those authentic beliefs to life.

The biggest driver of engagement is your local team leader, not the culture of the company. The culture is like the river, but there's a lot of different eddies. You join a company, but the sun, the moon, and the stars of your work is that local leader. The most important