The Power of Mattering

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When Zach Mercurio’s new book, The Power of Mattering, arrived on my desk I devoured it. It’s the most essential book about workplace culture that I’ve read in a couple of years.

‘People want to know that they matter to those around them, and that their work makes a difference in the lives of other,’ so said a report by America’s top doctor in 2020.

In 2022 the US Surgeon General issued a note in response to rising levels of mental health issues (and as chat of ‘quiet quitting’ was taking hold).

Amongst the essentials for better working was ‘mattering’ to others.

The concept dates back to the 1980s when psychologists found that teenagers who felt like they were significant to their parents showed better levels of mental health.

People who feel that they don’t matter have been found to suffer higher levels of loneliness and suffer worse health outcomes as a result.

The interesting thing about this is that it is way more pervasive than we might imagine. 65% of entry level workers report feeling like they don’t matter in the US, but amongst senior executive 70% report that ‘no one really knows them’.

The idea of mattering isn’t new, in the 1980s psychologists Morris Rosenberg and Claire McCullough studied a sample of 6500 adolescent teens. They found that a big predictor of wellbeing was whether the young people felt significant to their parents. When they felt that they mattered they had higher self-esteem, less anxiety and less depression.

Feeling valued has an impact at work too. In a study of 1700 working adults, 93% of those who felt valued said they were motivated to do their best. 88% were engaged at work. When we feel valued by our boss we do a better job, it’s hard to imagine a healthy culture where this isn’t the case.

I talked to Zach and I left convinced that this is where good culture needs to start in 2025.  Below you’ll find some key points and a full transcript.

 

Read more : Wall Street Journal: The Power of Mattering at Work

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Key facts

Explore the full Mattering playlist

Full transcript

Bruce Daisley

Zach, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, sorry, we’re gonna have to do this again. Zach, thank you so much for joining it. I wonder if you could kick off by introducing who you are and what you do.

Zach Mercurio

Yeah, of course. I’m happy to be here. I have two jobs. First, I’m a senior fellow in the department of psychology center for meaning and purpose at Colorado state university. We study what makes life and work meaningful. And those two things are intertwined. And then the rest of my time is I’m out with leaders. A lot of my research started with frontline supervisors, helping to create team environments where people feel that they matter and feel that their work and they are significant.

But then we work with leaders of all types, helping people to really enact what I call the hard skills of caring.

Bruce Daisley

I really enjoyed your book and it’s, think it was largely because I think it’s, it’s one of those things where you’ve been going along and having your thoughts and then someone appears to structure them and makes them feel more coherent. So I’ll give you the two things. one of the pieces of data I use all the time is that Gallup in their global workforce report, they say that the biggest predictor of whether you’re engaged with work is whether you’ve got a best friend at work. Anyway, one of the things that I use to explain that is I use a bit of poetry by a poet called David White. it’s like, I always make apologies for using the poetry, but I say that he uses this poetry, which is, describes friendship. said, friendship is the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of gifting someone the sight of another. Anyway and then I always put that alongside the fact that galloping there in the rest of their data, they say that the, um, the biggest predictor of, of the next biggest predictor of work, of engagement at work is whether we’ve received direct feedback from our boss this week. Anyway, and what I always say to people is these are the same thing. These are about feeling seen. And then I read your book.

And this whole book is about this concept of mattering and it perfectly encapsulates those things, the thing that I’d been searching for. So I wonder if you could give me the opening pitch. What is mattering? Could you explain the whole concept?

Zach Mercurio

Well, since you were talking about the Gallup engagement data, their latest data that was released in January found that it’s at the lowest rate it’s been in 10 years. Now this is despite the employee engagement industry becoming a $10 billion industry on its own. And one of the drivers that they found was just 39% of workers said they had someone at work who cared about them as a person. Just 30 % said they had someone at work who invested in their unique potential. So it does, even the data from January reinforces what you just said, that what we’re really facing is not a disengagement crisis. It’s a mattering deficit. And mattering is the experience of feeling significant to the people around you. It is a survival instinct, first and foremost.

The first thing you did as a human being was you reached out to find someone to care for you. Nobody would be listening to us right now if at some point we all hadn’t mattered enough to someone at some point to keep us alive. And so that need to matter turns into the fundamental need to feel seen, to feel heard, to feel valued, to feel needed. And real quick, because I think this is important, it’s different than belonging or inclusion. Belonging is feeling welcomed, accepted and connected in a group. Inclusion is feeling that you can take an active role in that group, but mattering is feeling significant to members of that group. And I think that that’s a very key point. I can feel like I belong. I can feel like I’m included, but not feel seen, heard, valued and needed by you.

Bruce Daisley 

I saw people talking on TikTok this week about when you realize that you’re the spare friend in a group, you realize that, you know, the other people in a group, they’ve got plans without you sometimes and you’re the spare friend. And I guess that would be that. It’s like that realization. You want to feel like you are significant. I saw something that in your book, you cite the fact that research on this goes back to the 1980s and that a big predictor of wellbeing.

for young people was whether young people felt significant to their parents. This is sort of very well established. I ended up sort of reading other papers that are followed in the history of that. This seems well established in psychology.

Zach Mercurio

It’s very well established. In fact, it all goes back to childhood attachment. So, childhood attachment, if I have a secure relationship with a caregiver that I know that I matter to them, when I’m growing up, I’m more likely to be able to go out, take risks, experiment, and learn because I know that somebody already cares for me. That’s not at risk. And secure attachment actually manifests in the workplace.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of psychological safety, right? Psychological safety, the belief that we can speak up without fear, people are more innovative when they have psychological safety. But psychological safety is just adult attachment. For example, if I have a secure base, if I have a leader who cares for me and I know has my back, I can go out, experiment, innovate, take risks because I know someone has my back. That’s where true confidence comes from.

And so this notion of mattering is very primal. It’s very instinctual. And it starts very early on. And when you mentioned that realization that you’re the spare friend.

the realization that you’re not seen, that you’re unneeded, that someone can’t name a unique gift that you have. Because mattering is a unique survival instinct, the results can be devastating. And when people don’t feel like they matter to other people, two things typically happen. They either withdraw, they isolate. In the States, I don’t know if you had, did you have quiet quitting in the UK?

Bruce Daisley

Yeah, most definitely. Yeah.

Zach Mercurio

Yeah, right. This quiet quitting trend, right? This career coach influencer on TikTok said, if you don’t like your job and you don’t want to quit, just try doing the bare minimum. Try doing this instead. And it caught on. We should be troubled that that caught on. Quiet quitting is the inevitable withdrawal response to people who feel insignificant. It’s very hard psychologically for anything to matter to a person who doesn’t believe that they matter.

Bruce Daisley 

As you raise a really interesting question, a reframing I guess, around the notion that someone might be toxic at work. You know, we often consider whether it’s when you inherit a team or you switch teams and someone will tip you off that there’s a toxic employee. And I guess the question that we’re invited to reframe then is, is someone innately toxic or do they not feel significant? Do they not feel like they matter to anyone?

Give us a perspective on that because that’s really powerful opportunities to reframe someone’s baddie narrative into something that maybe is something that invites a touch more sympathy.

Zach Mercurio

glad you caught that. I’m glad you’re bringing that up because we either withdraw when we feel insignificant or react out in desperation. I was once doing a talk with a large group, multiple different leaders, and one woman came up to me and said, Zach, what do I do with the office Eeyores? Eeyores the sad donkey from Winnie the Pooh, always complaining. And everybody crowded around me like I was about to bestow some wisdom about what to do. And I said, well, how do you currently handle these people?

And they all said, well, we try not to CC them on emails. We try not to invite them to meetings anymore. We try to avoid them.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the civil rights movement here in the U.S., he had this profound quote that relates to what we’re talking about with mattering. said, protest is the language of the unheard.

Zach Mercurio 

Acts of desperation, complaining, blaming, protesting. These are often the behaviors of people who feel insignificant. A lot of people say to me, Zach, well, they’re narcissists. I have narcissists on my team. Less than 1 % of the population is a clinical narcissist. So the chances are that you do not have a narcissist. The chances are you have someone that’s been environmentally conditioned to behave in the way they’re behaving to you.

What’s interesting about leaders is when we think like that, we’re part of the environment. So what I like to do is I like to tell people, you know, one thing that you can do regarding this is drop the labels. We call people difficult people, high performers, low performers, high potentials. In organizations, we love the labels, but labels make us worse leaders because the moment you label somebody is the moment you cease seeking to understand them. So instead of saying, this is a difficult person, encourage everybody to say this is a human being who’s behaving in ways that I perceive as difficult.

Bruce Daisley

So this is that very famous Pygmalion experiment, isn’t there? Where teachers were, I wonder if you could talk through that because that’s a perfect illustration of what you’re saying there.

Zach Mercurio 

Yes. And you know, there’s a, and I’ll send it to you after the show, but there’s a great paper in Harvard business review. I it’s from the eighties. It’s called Pygmalion and management. And it relates to this. yeah. So Robert Rosenthal, had two groups of students, in an elementary school and one group of students, he told their teachers that, this group of students is really likely to blossom in the next year. The other group of students, you know, is a randomized experiment. He told those teachers, you know, they’re not really likely to bloom. They’re not likely to succeed. And he gave them both an IQ test, but he told the teachers it was an aptitude test. It was a basic IQ test. And, he measured them several points, but then a year later, the group that was told that they were going to blossom actually had higher IQs on that IQ test. The group that was told they were not going to blossom.

on this false aptitude test had lower IQ scores. And this has been replicated in almost every setting. For example, if I tell a doctor you’re going into a doctor’s office and I tell them, Hey, I just want to let you know, Bruce really overestimates his pain. He’s kind of a complainer. Chances are, no matter what you say, that person will under diagnose you and under treat you. How we see people affects how we treat them.

How we treat them affects how they see themselves, how they see themselves affects how they act. So for example, those people that came up to me, what do I do with this difficult person? Well, if you see someone as difficult, you’re likely to treat them as an issue to be dealt with. Have you ever been in a group and felt like you’re the annoying issue to be dealt with, or you’re at a meeting and nobody wants to hear you? How do you feel? Well, you turn inward, right? You start acting a little bit more grumpy or you go a gossip to somebody who will listen to you. And then you act that way and then the perceptions continue.

Bruce Daisley

We’ve established the notion that this is of substance, this matters, this quest for significance is one of the things that lights us up as human beings. Let’s start taking steps then to think about how a leader might think about this, how a leader might set about trying to imbue a sense of mattering in their team. How would you advise them to get started?

Zach Mercurio 

The first thing to do right now is to think about when you most felt that you mattered in your work. And I’m sure there’s multiple generations listening and I’m sure nobody, you know, is raising their hand being like, when I got my direct deposit, you know, when I got my paycheck, when I won employee of the month, you’re likely thinking about not big actions, but small interactions. And when we ask people to tell us about a time when they most felt that they mattered in their work.

They talk about small interactions. We seem to be program obsessed, programs, initiatives, platforms, but really mattering happens in moments. And so your next great leadership axis really in your next interaction. And this is what’s actually very exciting about this work because it is not about adding something more to your plate. It’s about optimizing the interactions you already have. And when we’ve codified what behaviors leaders do, when we’ve researched hundreds of people is that we found that leaders tend to do three things. And you’re probably thinking about these moments when you’re thinking about that question. When do I feel that I matter? It’s when we feel noticed. You mentioned this earlier beautifully, you know, when we feel seen and heard, there’s a big difference between knowing somebody and noticing them though. You can know your best friend and not notice that they’re suffering. When we affirm people, when we show them how their uniqueness makes a unique difference. mean, I think the,

The role of a leader is to illuminate in others what they don’t yet see in themselves. And when leaders do that, they affirm them and then showing them how they’re needed. And there are skills for each of these, but the key is, that to start mattering happens in moments. It happens through interactions, not big actions. And there are certain skills we can learn to notice, affirm and need people.

Bruce Daisley

Yeah, there was a phrase that you used that particularly stood out. It’s sort of leaders reminding team members, you’ll need to remind me of it, but was, was, you know, leaders actually sort of trying to reach for that sense of saying to someone, were important for me today, or you, you were valuable for me today. Actually trying to get into the habit of articulating that seems to be quite potent.

Zach Mercurio

Yeah, if I were to describe the leaders that I’ve seen do this really well, they give people the indisputable evidence of their significance. At the beginning of the book, I tell a story that has shaped sort of how I think about these moments of mattering. And it was with a custodian, a cleaner named Jane, and she did not want to be in this job. She said that she was as she could have been anywhere else in her life. She kept saying to herself, why are you just a janitor? She had all these negative toxic thoughts.

She would clock in, clock out, that’s it. And there was one supervisor who noticed that she was struggling. And he brought her into a break room and had her open the dictionary and read the word custodian, the definition of that word, of her job. And it was a person responsible for a building and everyone in it. And he said, Jane, that is you. That’s why you’re here. I don’t care how you got into this building and got into this job, but the reason your job exists is because all of these people here need you.

She said that that was the first time in her life that someone made her feel worthy. It changed her belief systems about herself. She’s actually been at the university for over 20 years as a cleaner right now. That one moment, and what’s so elegant about what the leader did was he noticed that she was struggling, but then he thought about her and he took action. But then what he did is he gave her the indisputable evidence of her significance.

Right? You look at, read that word custodian, you read that definition, you can’t really argue with it. Like, no, that’s not me. Right? And that’s what leaders who do this tend to do. They give people the indisputable evidence of their significance. And he reminded her in that moment, in a three minute interaction, that she was needed and that it was inarguable that she was needed. Like these students in this residence hall needed you.

Bruce Daisley 

think it’s a really good example because were that to not be brought to bear by other members of the management there, then it would immediately appear to be artificial words. You need to go through with your deeds as well as with your words to make that.

Zach Mercurio

Yes. Absolutely. And what I love about this is that many people tell people that they matter. That doesn’t do very much. Showing them exactly how they matter does. That’s why a lot of organizations who have a big purpose statement, but their people don’t feel it and see it every day and they don’t see the real evidence of their significance. It’s very easy to develop dissonance. Say, it’s not really true. They’re just telling me I make a difference. But mattering is about showing people how they make a unique difference.

Bruce Daisley

There was a woman you referenced at the end of the book who was on an airline or was helping airline shifts. And she seemed to do this in a very everyday manner. was saying, I’m not sure if you remember that example, there’s a woman at the end who was sort of telling people, look, you were great for me today. There’s some cake for you in the restroom. You’ve done this. And it was just, it seemed to be greeting everyone with something that seemed considered about the way that they’ve done their job. And it was just a perfect illustration that when you can do this naturally, seems to build something of substance.

Zach Mercurio 

I’m very glad you brought that up because that job that she was in is also tied to performance. So a lot of people ask me, you know, at this point in the conversation, like Zach, this all sounds good, but you know, what is it? I have to, you know, run an organization here or run a team. And the impetus for that is I was finishing the book and a major airline in the U S that I had been working for said, Zach, we have this really high performing team located right where you are in Denver, Colorado. Can you go figure out what they’re doing? You know, cause we want to.

We want to teach everybody else. Now this is the global cleanliness crew. So literally when an airplane comes and parks at the gate, they have an app on their phone. starts counting down. It is a performance metric driven business. Turnaround time is everything. And the people that make sure your plane turns around are the people coming in, cleaning and getting the plane ready. I got to see the app. So I went and spent the day with them. I actually put on a vest. I went in and started cleaning airplanes. was…

It was really amazing. You know, I have a 10 and a seven year old. thought I was like the coolest person ever because I got to be around airplanes. But I, the first person I met was, was this woman named Tanya and Tanya is a real person. That’s her real name. And she was the cleanliness support coordinator for the airline. And I went to the desk. We went to the ticket desk to get my badge, to go through security. And she’s talking to the woman there. Like they were best friends. She’s complimenting them on their smile. She’s giving me this woman’s biography basically on her experience with the company. She’s one of the best gate agents. And then we go through TSA, which is our security to get on the plane. And she’s stopping the line asking TSA agents about their vacations, about their trip that they went on last week with their kids and naming their kids. As we go down into the cleaning area, we’re passing by these walkways. There’s a cleaner coming by on the opposite walkway. She goes, hey, I left you cake in the break room. Make sure to get it. And then tell me when you get it. Tell me what it’s like. Tell me if you liked it.

And then as we’re going down into the, as we’re going down at the cramped like airline level, was a guy there. He’s an employee. He’s actually from Ghana, Africa, and he’s working so he can send money home to his family, which is what many of frontline workers are doing. And she said, Hey, you know, show me your daughter again. Show me your daughter. want to, I want to remember why you’re here and why I’m here. And then she goes into the break room.

Zach Mercurio 

And she has cake with all of her people. And one cleaner got up and hugged her and said, know, Tony, I just want to let you know that you make a real difference here. She went around to each person every day, every person she met, she goes, what can I do for you today? What are you struggling with? Now guess what? They have the shortest turnaround times in the entire airline. Her team has the lowest, lowest incident rate in the entire airline. They were trying to figure out what she does, but what she did was she chose to lead through interactions.

And you know, what’s even more interesting about this case is that she was not their leader. They were contractors. She was not even their direct supervisor. And what I think is powerful about that, I’m glad you brought it up, is that, you know, this is a choice. Leading this way is a choice. It’s a choice we make in every interaction. And, and that’s, that’s the, that’s the power of this.

Bruce DaisleyThere seems to be something critical here that actually this is humanity and humanity and interaction when it’s allowed time to breathe. And I guess it’s helpful then because it’s maybe the dark material that’s squeezed, maybe it’s the dark matter that’s squeezed out of work when work is so heavily overloaded and scheduled. So what I immediately think is that a of people might say to me now, well, you know, I’ve got back.

about meetings all day, or someone swung by my desk but was on email or was answering a Teams message. And this is this stuff that’s silently squeezed out of work when we’re overloaded and overladened. One of the things we often hear is that when work intensity goes up, socialization goes down. And this might be labeled as socialization. I think it illustrates that there’s something more to the interactions between people than lazy chit chat, you know, it illustrates that that humanity actually has a real potency to it because it makes you feel like have been noticed and it wasn’t just someone going through a tick list of acknowledging the names of my loved ones. It seems to be like you’re actually putting a value to the stuff that is often disregarded or seen as irrelevant.

Zach Mercurio

But again, it’s the stuff. Like for example, think of the leader that most inspired you in your life. And you’ll probably think about the things I just talked about that Tanya did. Someone believed in you, someone challenged you, someone invested in you, someone gave you a chance. Someone affirmed you. And yes, hurry and care can’t coexist. One of the things that’s really pressing us down right now is our hurry addiction.

There was a research by McKinsey that found that people managers on average, people managers quote unquote, spend about 23 % of their time with the people they lead. So we are, we have so many things coming at us, but the hope in this is that you can optimize even the in-between moments. Like if you want to talk about fast plays, I’ll take you down to that airport thing. I mean, it’s in and out. mean, they’re,

There is like no time for rest, right? But what what she did and what great leaders do is they tend to optimize the in-between moments And I talk about this because there was a composer who said The music it happens in the space between the notes The liminal space the in-between space the same is true with culture in my experience the notes are like the meetings the rituals the onboarding program the Awards banquet

Those are the big notes, but where culture is actually crafted is in the in-between. It’s before a virtual meeting starts, instead of answering an email, another email, ask the person, you know, I remembered last week you were nervous about that meeting. I wanted to check in on how that went. It’s as you’re walking to the next meeting, instead of looking at your phone, it’s saying, hey, I remembered your parent was in the hospital. How you doing? Is that affecting your work? Anything I can take off your plate?

Those little things will create trust and loyalty that in the long term will drive performance. And you see that time and time again in the research.

Bruce Daisley 

And so you refer to noticing, affirming and needing. And do you see them as stages of this or just three prompts for us to think about a way to provide this sense of mattering?

Zach Mercurio

Yeah, I think about it in two ways. One, they’re the qualities of moments that help us to see how we matter. When we’re noticed, when we’re affirmed, when we’re needed. They don’t all have to be three, be present in any one moment, but there tend to be these three characteristics. But what I most like to do is to group skills underneath each of them. Because I think that what has happened is in the 1960s, it was a military psychologist here in the United States, which I can never forgive.

because he called relational skills soft skills. And I understand what he was trying to do, but the problem is the human brain has what’s called an overconfidence bias. So if you see something as soft or simple, your brain automatically devotes less energy to it. So we’ve approached these skills with less rigor over the last half century. And so one of the things I like to do is to…

to name these as skills because it gives them more rigor. So noticing, for example, is the skill of seeing and hearing somebody. Seeing somebody is paying attention to the details, ebbs and flows of their lives. I tell a story about a distribution center manager I worked with who had a very high performing team as compared to her peers. And I wanted to know why I love outliers. And I went to her and I said, well, you what do you do? And she showed me this notebook.

where she writes down each of her team members names on Friday. She has 19 team members and she writes down one thing she noticed about them. Struggling with a piece of equipment. Struggling with a coworker feeling left out, had an idea that wasn’t followed up on. And then she said she starts her week by just looking at that list and scheduling in her mind a three minute micro check in to say, hey, I remembered last week that that piece of equipment was giving you trouble. Did we get that fixed for you? And I remember she looked at me and she said, Zach, there’s magic in being remembered.

And, but what I love about it is she had a practice. She didn’t leave it up to chance. And I see this time and time again, that leaders have practices, right? Asking better questions instead of how are you? How’s it going? Some leaders I’ve, I’ve watched open meetings like this. say, how’s everybody doing good? Can you imagine if you weren’t good, would you say, no, not me, you know, or, or we say to people, I hope everybody’s doing well today.

Bruce Daisley

It’s really interesting because I guess her little notebook there, that three minute check-in probably provides as much value as the 30 minute catch up that we might schedule as a meeting. Because it…

Zach Mercurio

And let me tell you something, they brought me in as a consultant because they were doing all this engagement surveys and they were trying to figure this out. What’s going on? What’s going on in this team? And her team members all said some version of, it’s our supervisor. She just gets us. We’d do anything for her. But as you were saying, it’s built in those moments.

Bruce Daisley

Yeah, absolutely. There’s something that it actually came out a little bit in the Tanya example. there’s something that you said about the norm of that you say in the book about the norm of reciprocity. And it made me reflect on how sometimes we can consider this act of noticing to be a one way flow. Maybe because we don’t want to be a suck up or a kiss ass, but actually it came out in your Tanya example where someone said to her, you’re so good for us.

And reciprocating this or sharing some of this back seems to be a sign of a healthy organization rather than of a political one. I’d be interested if you could explore that.

Zach Mercurio 

Yes. I mean, another brilliant question, Bruce, because mattering is non-directional. Some people ask me, Zach, what do I do if my leader doesn’t do this for me? And I always say, do you do it for them? Because your leader may not feel that they matter. I just worked with a group of 150 CEOs on this here in the States. And one guy came up to me after, and I thought he was going to like, you know, give me all this, how this is not, this is too fluffy, touchy feely.

But he looked at me and he says, I really needed this. I never get to think about like the influence I get to make. I only think about the results I produce. And so do you do this for your leader? Like, do you notice them? Do you ask about their life? Do you offer them help? Do you notice, hey, I know this has probably been a tough week for you. w you know, with what’s going on in our global economy right now, I wonder how many workers have reached out to their CEO.

And said, Hey, I know this is really tough right now. Anything I can do to help. Right. We are not passive recipients of culture. are active constructors of it. And when you start taking responsibility for being the leader you wish you had creating the culture you wish you had in your next interaction, I think that’s where cultures really start to come alive.

Bruce Daisley

if that’s when a team member has someone who they often say that person’s good for culture and no one can quite put their finger on it, but maybe it’s because they just, they elevate the standard of caring, of interaction, of people asking about each other’s weekend or people asking about each other’s lives outside of work. Maybe that’s what that cultural catalyst often does, just brings the norm of asking about things of more meaning.

Zach Mercurio

And you know, and I want to make it clear that this is not just about personal stuff. You know, a lot of people will say to me, depending on whatever region of the world I’m working in, they’ll say, Zach, people don’t want to talk about their personal lives here. That’s okay. They still have lives here. And what I mean by that is that they may want to talk about the details of their work. Even noticing those details and checking in is a form of noticing. So this is not about being everybody’s best friend. This is about what you open the podcast with.

Zach Mercuriowhich is seeing people. If there’s someone who’s working on something really hard and you know that they’re struggling with it and they’re trying and failing and trying and failing, just even saying, I just want to let you know that I notice what you’re doing and I’m here to help whenever you need it. Just that, even in the work context, can help people feel remembered. We’ve talked about noticing, but affirming people instead of just saying, hey, good job or thank you. at the same time every day to say, Hey, I just want to let you know that, know, your perspective, you know, Bruce, your ability to bring in David White poetry, to give meaning to things like that perspective and wisdom, like that makes this show better. and here’s how it makes it better for me. Like naming someone’s unique perspective, their unique wisdom, showing them how they make a unique difference in how you say thank you to them. it doesn’t have to be like these big in depth, super deep conversations.

What it does have to be is intentional and it does have to be skillful.

Bruce Daisley

tell me you work with organizations, you’re called into sort of big groups of organizations. This seems to be, as you’ve exactly said, seems to be the sort of thing that’s either labeled as soft skills. we’ve got some people who are good at those soft skills and which is an unfortunate devaluing of it. How do you systematize this then? How do you systematize a culture of mattering? How do you systematize a culture that does overtly try to pay attention to what’s going on around us.

Zach Mercurio

Well, it’s really the principles of scaling anything. And a lot of business leaders, lot of leaders who are listening right now, probably already really good at scaling. Scaling product systems, scaling, infrastructure scaling, IT scaling, any process. It’s about applying those same level of rigor to scaling the human skills. And there’s a couple of ways to do that. One.

We have to focus on what’s important and make sure it’s important and make sure it matters to people. Mark, who is a senior vice president of American express global business travel. It’s a big travel agency. have dispersed workforce. Everybody works remotely and they’re in the travel industry and the pandemic crushed them. And morale was really low. mean, he said people were crying at their, you know, on camera and.

He said, Zach, I think that this is a mattering problem. And I said, well, well, let’s, let’s start to figure this out. And so we, we met with all of their 350 leaders across the globe of their major teams. And we simply had them for an hour. Think about who in their life helps them feel that they matter and write down the skills that they use. And after that session.

One woman reached out to me, she’d been a VP for a long time. She goes, this just gave me the permission to be a person again at work. So we did that. So you have to foster the motivation, but then you have to name the skills. So what we did is we had got them back together for three hours, virtually. had them go through the noticing, affirming and needing practices, but we had them commit to behaviors that they as a leadership team would commit to, to make sure people feel seen, affirmed and needed.

And I mean, it got granular. They created a 25 page handbook for behaviors checklist behaviors that they would abide by. And then guess what? They turned that into a blueprint and it said, we feel that people should feel noticed, affirmed and needed here. And they gave it to all their employees and said, this is what you can expect from me. And then they measured it. They measured themselves on it every quarter and they measured their team on it. They didn’t measure their team on engagement.

Zach Mercurio 

They measured their team on observed behavior of them. Does my leader check in on me at least weekly? Does my leader remember details of my work? And then they would have conversations about it together as teams. And they saw a 50 % reduction in attrition in a year and a half. And that’s still going strong and engagement score increase, that should be obvious. So.

Bruce Daisley

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The only thing I worry about there is Goodwin’s law, which is any measure which becomes a target ceases to be a good measure. And the only thing I worry about there is that it might, there’s an art to bringing some integrity to the way that’s done. I love the rigor of doing it. I think it illustrates as… Yeah.

Zach Mercurio 

Yes, right.

The key though, the key is that it’s behavioral. So the, the, the, I like about behavioral assessments is that when they’re, when the assessment is built by the people committing to the behavior, it’s much different. So they built these behaviors based on some of the work that we did, but they were measuring frequency of behavior, not how good of a leader you are, not how transformational of a leader you are, not how engaged I am when I take this survey and What I find is when you can get down and start talking about behaviors, you can actually do something about it.

Bruce Daisley 

Yeah. Yeah. Most, most definitely. There was, there was something that you said, I think it might even be the last sentence. yeah. It was the last sentence. Here’s a good rule for every leader. Always assume the people around you feel unseen, undervalued and lonely and act accordingly. And I thought, even if there was only one maxim that people thought about applying and bringing to the way they did their business, that’s a really potent.

Articulation of exactly what you’re saying here, isn’t it?

Zach Mercurio

Yeah. mean, the truth is, is that one out of every three people, according to the American Psychiatric Association feels persistently lonely. Seven out of 10 people, if we were an organization, all of us here right now, seven out of 10 of us would be emotionally uninvested in our work. If you go by that Gallup study, four, only four out of 10 of us would say that someone at work where I spend a third of my one waking life cares about me as a person.

And so we can assume that the people around us feel unseen, unheard, undervalued, but then the act accordingly part is really important because we also underestimate our impact. Nick Epley, he’s a psychologist. did some studies where he had people write little notes of gratitude to recipients. And then he had them rate how beneficial and impactful that would be on the recipient. And then he measured the recipients of those gratitude notes.

how much it affected their life, their emotional state. And every time, in every one of his experiments, the people writing the notes severely underestimated their impact.

And we’ve done this with strangers too. He’s had people go talk to strangers and measured the strangers feelings, like their emotional reaction. And then they measured the person who went and talked to a stranger, how much that interaction meant to the stranger. Every time the person felt that that person didn’t want to talk to them and the conversation didn’t mean as much to them. So we severely underestimate our influence on others lives.

More people than ever feel unseen, unheard and lonely. You have an evidence-based pass to assume that. The people around you probably do feel unseen, unheard and lonely, but then you also have an evidence-based pass to overestimate your impact.

Bruce Daisley 

And so probably if we were going to try to make this feel contemporary, the thing that we would then layer over the top is the complexity that a lot of us now do some of our work remotely or in a hybrid capacity. And so we might feel literally unseen other than through our devices. We might feel literally unseen. And what I read from what you’re saying is that innately, just because you’re doing your work remotely, it doesn’t mean that there’s an inevitability about feeling unseen, but it just means that the skills of a manager, the skills of a colleague, the skills of any of us, we need to be honed to that slight difference in medium. That we need to be in an environment where we’re not seeing people every day. We need to be thinking about how we can be focused on the things that matter or observing people in a sort of benign way. It strikes me there’s not something innately worse about working in a remote or hybrid capacity, but it just means we need to attune our skills for that difference.

Zach Mercurio

Yeah, mean, a lot of times what we’ve done is we’ve used technology remotely for efficiency. Our connections are shorter, our meetings are shorter, and we’ve communicated with one another through more platforms. So for the last 20 years, I mean, the average US adult sends about 30 to 40 text-based messages a day to colleagues at work. We’re more connected than ever, actually, but we’re lonelier than ever.

And why is that? It’s because it’s not the quantity of interaction that matters, it’s the quality of interaction. So oftentimes with remote people are like, well, we don’t see each other as much, but seeing someone more doesn’t cure loneliness. Feeling that you matter to the people you see cures loneliness. And what that means is that we need to optimize the interactions we do have virtually so people feel seen instead of using your technology for efficiency.

What if as a leadership team, said, how can we use our technology to connect remotely to ensure people feel seen, heard, valued and needed? The design of how you use that will look a lot differently. You know, one simple practice, if you have remote employees that has been found to be incredibly valuable is to simply call people up and check in on how they’re doing and don’t talk about what they’re doing. Call them up because right now most people, if their boss called them in the middle of the day, they’d be terrified.

And that should signal a problem because what if, what if someone just called you up and says, I was looking at my calendar and I know you had that big meeting with sales this week and I was thinking about you. How did it go? Man, I mean, those little things can be, can be so powerful and you can do that in any medium.

Bruce Daisley

And it probably does make us think we could use the face-to-face time that we maybe do have a bit more intentionally to try and double down on this as well.

Zach Mercurio

Yeah. I mean, most meetings I see in organizations are what I call update fests. Still, I mean, we go around and we have people do updates. They’re transactional. We send little packets of information to someone one way. know, that the reason why that adage most meetings could be emails resonates so much is because most meetings could be emails. Transacting information in a one way medium should be an email.

What can’t be an email is checking in on how you’re doing, checking in on how you’re doing because I know you were having a conflict with a client and we need to resolve it together. Checking in on how we’re doing because we had a conflict and the ways of working together we need to resolve. Looking you in the eye and asking you how your parent is that you’re a caregiver for cannot be an email. Now some of the…

Some of the strongest teams that I work with don’t spend their time in meetings on what they’re doing with one another. They spend their time on how they’re being with one another. And so I think you’re a hundred percent right is if your meeting is transacting one way information, it probably could be an email. If it’s working on ways of working together, that’s where people start feeling connected.

Bruce Daisley

It was, read a lot of these things. I read a lot of workbooks and genuinely without exaggeration, it was the best thing I’ve read in the last couple of years. was by far the most cohesive, powerful and I think applicable insight into how to build good cultures where people feel valued. thought it was outstanding.

Congratulations on the book. I genuinely, and don’t give that praise lightly, I genuinely thought it was outstanding.

Zach Mercurio (44:55.0)

Thank you. And I think that you mentioned it earlier, way at the beginning with the David White quote, right? That leadership is relationships. We don’t, our brains and hearts don’t stop because we clock in. We like to think that way because it’s easier, actually, it’s more efficient to operate an organization if we assume work and life are separate. That’s why we’ve said that, right? But life occurs wherever a human being is alive.

And that includes at work. You could apply the, could have called this book, The Power of Mattering, how parents can create a culture of significance, how friends can create a culture of significance, how political leaders can create a culture of significance, how kindergartners can create a culture of significance. And the same prac, the practices would be the same. Cause everybody wants to feel seen. Everybody wants to feel heard. Everybody wants to feel affirmed. Everybody wants to feel needed by the people around. That’s why this stuff is really, it’s about as touchy feely as feeding someone who’s hungry.

Bruce Daisley 

I love it, love it. Zach, thank you so much for your generosity of time. I’ve really enjoyed reading the book and chatting to you today. 

Zach Mercurio 

Thank you, Bruce.