Igniting Commitment and Keeping Top Talent with Joe Mull
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts“I believe as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company. So if you don't have that consistent and significant sustainable growth, you've got some work to do.” — Mike Goldman
“The great resignation should be called the great upgrade.”
–Joe Mull
Joe Mull is an author, speaker, and employee engagement expert focused on creating "better bosses" who foster commitment and retain top talent.
Author of No More Team Drama and Employalty, his mission is to develop workplaces that prioritize employee well-being and loyalty.
The Role of Safety in Leadership
Commitment to Safety: Leaders should prioritize both physical and psychological safety to protect team members’ well-being, which includes fostering inclusive environments.
Impact of COVID: COVID-19 amplified the importance of safety, with employees now prioritizing workplaces that protect their quality of life.
The Great Resignation vs. The Great Upgrade
Resignation Misnomer: The so-called "Great Resignation" is better understood as the "Great Upgrade," where workers seek jobs with better quality of life.
Employee Priorities: Workers are increasingly leaving jobs not only for better pay but also for roles that offer improved work-life balance and reduced burnout.
Introducing “Employalty”
Concept: Employalty combines "employer," "loyalty," and "humanity" and represents a commitment to a humane employee experience.
Employee Motivation: Employees are more committed when they feel they have a “great job,” which Mull defines as one with purpose, manageable workload, fair compensation, and autonomy.
Humanizing the Workforce
Avoiding Dehumanization: Workplaces should avoid policies that treat employees as expendable resources (e.g., last-minute scheduling in retail).
Competitive Advantage: Providing a humanized workplace is not only the right thing to do but also a key business advantage.
Three Pillars of a Destination Workplace
Ideal Job: Job satisfaction hinges on fair compensation, manageable workload, and flexibility.
Living Wage: Mull emphasizes the importance of paying a living wage, highlighting disparities in living costs and the need for income that meets basic needs.
Meaningful Work: Employees seek purpose, opportunities to use their strengths, and a sense of belonging.
Belonging: A single instance of exclusion can drastically increase an employee’s likelihood of leaving.
Great Boss: Effective leadership requires trust, coaching, and advocacy.
Coaching Over Micromanaging: Mull encourages a coaching approach that empowers employees to find their own solutions rather than being micromanaged.
The Importance of Trust in Remote Work
Trust Issues: Mull argues that resistance to remote work often stems from a lack of trust, not the nature of remote work itself.
Output Over Hours: Leaders should focus on employees' outputs and goals rather than tracking hours worked.
Implementing the Employalty Framework
Starting Small: Leaders are encouraged to start with one or two areas for improvement and use the Employalty scorecard to assess strengths and weaknesses.
Micro and Macro Strategies: Mull suggests both individual and organizational-level evaluations to continuously improve employee experience.
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Mike Goldman: Joe Mull is a captivating speaker, author and employee engagement expert on a mission to fill workplaces with better bosses who ignite commitment and keep top talent in the new age of work. He's the author of three books. Three books, including no more team drama and his latest employalty, how to ignite commitment and keep top talent in the new age of work.
He's the host of the globally, I could say that globally popular boss better now podcast. Joe, welcome to the show.
Joe Mull: Oh Mike, I am so excited to be with you today. Thanks for the invitation.
Mike Goldman: Yeah, no, this is great. and, Joe and I are both part of the national speakers association. So Joe, I've seen you on stage there and super impressed. And we realized we both have the publisher of his latest book is the publisher of mine coming up. So super excited for this and super excited to dive into employalty, his new book, and I have to make sure I don't say employality, cause I said that first and screwed it up and he corrected me. although we edited that out, so you don't hear it, but he may keep this in,anyway, so, Hey, you know, this is the better leadership team show.
So Joe, I always start with the same question, from all of your experience, what do you believe is the one most important characteristic? Of a great leadership team.
Joe Mull: A commitment to safety. And let me tell you what I mean by that, Mike. so I think above everything else, a leader's job is to keep their people safe. And for years back in the day, that meant safe from injury, right? If you were running a factory, how do we create systems and procedures that keep people from getting hurt?
But in more recent years, it's evolved to include psychological safety, right? It's evolved, to include inclusion, right? How do we make sure that people don't experience exclusion? And I think now it's evolved even more to include quality of life, which is certainly something that we're going to talk a lot about today, as it relates to employalty and to leadership.
but when you encounter a leadership team who has a commitment to safety, to protecting people, not just from becoming injured. But to protect people from being excluded and to create an employee experience that doesn't perpetuate suffering around their quality of life. I think there's nothing that team can accomplish.
Mike Goldman: and have you found related to that?
And I know you talk about this to some degree in your book, that since COVID and you know, the great resignation or whatever we're calling it these days. have you found that, that safety has become more important and more of a,of a necessity and a differentiator for companies, or was it always that way?
Joe Mull: yes and yes. So it has become more important since COVID because COVID took an already exhausted workforce and broke it. Right. we know that covid sparked for a lot of people, a sort of reshuffling of their personal and professional priorities. Boy, that was a lot of alliteration there. I'm sorry about that.
but this was happening before anyone had ever heard of the coronavirus. We can go back to the great recession in 2008 and we can see that. In the years that followed, more and more people were voluntarily quitting their jobs each year after that than in the year before. And when you look at the data, what you figure out is they actually weren't quitting their jobs.
They were upgrading. They were leaving jobs to go take different jobs. and they were doing that because the amount of, stress and burnout and stagnant pay and escalating workloads were driving them to seek out better quality of life.
and so that, that label, the great resignation is actually a misnomer, right?
we tie it to a post COVID phenomenon. But really the great resignation should be called the great upgrade. And it started back in 2009, 2010.
Mike Goldman: let's dig into.
The latest book, employalty, and I know it sounds like that's a combination of two words, right? Employee and loyalty. But I know you mean more than that. So
Joe Mull: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: about employalty and what that means.
Joe Mull: Well, thanks for that. And you know, your work, you've written some books and you're working on another, right? So, you know, the old adage is you title the book for the problem that the reader thinks they have. And then you get into the book and you uncover and unpack and solve the problem that they really have.
And so we're sort of playing a trick on readers intentionally. You see that word, employalty, and you think it's, oh, it's a mashup of employee loyalty, how clever. But it's not. employalty is a portmanteau of the words, employer, loyalty and humanity. Employalty is the commitment that an employer makes to a more humane employee experience, because that's what activates commitment at work.
And this goes to what we were just talking about this recalibration of around how work fits into our lives. That is driving decision making for employees from all walks of life, right? it's a key factor in retention. But it's also a driver of commitment or what we commonly refer to as employee engagement.
it turns out that people generally do a great job when they believe they have a great job. And so when an employer makes a commitment to a more humane employee experience, an employee experience that does not dehumanize them, that does not leverage them as a commodity that does not perpetuate suffering, in their life outside of work.
It turns out that people look around and say, Hey, I want to be a part of this and they part with effort. They stay longer. They try harder.
Mike Goldman: Yeah, and I love that idea. I wrote it down as soon as I read it in the book. The idea that people generally do a great job when they believe they have a great job.
is such an important point and the idea of humanizing the workforce say, I want to dig in deeper to this idea of humanizing the workforce because there are so many leaders that, that I continue to see out there, maybe less than there were. 30 years ago, but so many leaders I continue to see out there who have this attitude of, you know, you, you should be here and you should be loyal because I'm paying you like you shouldn't expect much more than that. So say a little bit more about this idea of humanizing the workforce and what that means.
Joe Mull: Yeah. So it is a bit of an antiquated notion to suggest that people are going to come to work every day and give it all they've got because we pay them period full stop. but that doesn't happen and it's mostly because people aren't robots. Right. We have learned a whole lot in the last couple of decades around what, what motivates people to part with effort.
And you can dive into so much of the psychology around intrinsic motivation, right? How do you get people to move from I have to do it to I want to do it? Well, there are a couple of conditions that you need to create, but at the end of it all, Mike, my argument is That commitment and retention are byproducts of being a part of an organization and working for leaders who want above everything else for their employees to live a joyous, prosperous life when you see that approach, when that's sort of the core set of values that leaders and business owners and executives use.
Operate from, they don't create systems and practices that dehumanize people. So we use that word dehumanization to talk about ignoring the impact that work or employment has on someone's life outside of work. And we have all these examples of. Systems and policies and procedures and workplaces that have existed for years and that are accepted as commonplace, but that they do just that they dehumanize people and they treat them as a commodity to be leveraged.
And I'll give you a couple of examples. You encountered these in the book, not informing people. Of their schedule for next week until the end of this week, which is a common practice in a lot of retail and restaurant environments. How am I supposed to live my life outside of work? If I don't know when I need to be at work?
What if I'm a caregiver to an elderly parent or I've got kids or even pets, right? How do I? Involve myself in other activities or interests or schooling if every week I am dependent on waiting in time from somebody else to figure out where I need to be and when I need to be there. So that's one such example.
Another example is requiring people to ask permission to use the bathroom or stand all day long, in the course of their work. and these are injustices that we tend to reserve for people who are on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, right? Can you imagine asking an accountant?
expecting an accountant to ask permission to go to the bathroom or stand at their desk all day. And that is not to suggest that there aren't some, roles in some kinds of work that require that at times, but we sometimes seem to forget that people aren't a commodity to be leveraged. And we are seeing a rejection of dehumanization in terms of what's leading people to decide to join an employer and stay long term and part with effort because we're also living at a moment where we've been adding jobs to the US economy at a breakneck pace. And so, as people's priorities have shifted, they've never had a greater opportunity to go look for an upgrade to go look for better quality of life. And so what we know is that Re humanizing the workplace that is really zeroing in on the degree to which our employee experience either enhances quality of life or negatively impacts it directly correlates with how easy it is for us to find and keep devoted employees.
Mike Goldman: And what I'm hearing too is that re, re humanizing the workplace is not do it because it's a, it's the right thing to do because it's a good thing to do because we ought to be good to people sounds to me like it's a competitive advantage to do that.
Joe Mull: A hundred percent. And it's all the things you said, right? It is the right thing to do, but it's also a business imperative, right? and that's a really important point to make. And thank you for bringing that up because when we talk about humanizing the workplace, and when we talk about some of the particular aspects of, the employability model that are in the book, like things like coaching and purpose and trust, you know, these are things that sound soft.
But there's nothing soft about this. This is the price of admission in today's business landscape, because you really have to choose your heart, right? You have to choose your difficult path. Difficult path. Number one is. I'm going to staff at the minimum staffing levels possible. I'm going to pay as little as possible, and I'm going to try to maximize my profits.
And so the hard that you've signed up for is constant churn, low effort, retention issues. You've probably got customer service and quality delivery issues. Well, the other hard that you could choose is to do the opposite of all that to say, I'm going to pay people really well. And I'm going to really think about staffing at a level where workloads aren't overwhelming.
And I'm going to think about, benefits packages that are modern and really meet people where they are in this day and age. And I'm going to spend extra time training and investing in my leaders so that they can be the kind of bosses that people love working for. And that's hard too. At the end of that is.
Every metric you've ever cared about in your organization goes up when you're fully staffed with people who love what they do and want to be a part of what you're doing
Mike Goldman: And there's one big metric that goes down is your level of stress
Joe Mull: 100 percent
Mike Goldman: like that
Joe Mull: 100 percent
Mike Goldman: in the book, I want to get to the nuts and bolts of some of this stuff.
And in the book, you've got these three. Primary factors to create what you call a destination workplace. So us, hit me with that.
what are those primary factors? Give it to me at a high level. And then I'd like to dive in kind of one by one and talk about some examples.
Joe Mull: sure. Well, we analyzed more than 200 studies and articles on why people quit a job. Decide to take a new job or decide to stay long term with an employer. And in and amongst all of that was a boatload of research on what activates effort and commitment in the workplace. And a lot of this data was sourced since the global pandemic.
And what we discovered was that it becomes much easier to find and keep devoted employees. If you are winning in three areas of the employee experience, we call them ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss. So Mike, I would challenge you and all of your listeners to think about both the best and the worst jobs that you've ever had in your life.
And I am willing to bet that you will sort your answers into one category or the other. Based mostly on how you respond to three questions. How did that job fit into your life? How meaningful did you find the work? And what was your boss like? It turns out that these three factors together act as a kind of internal psychological scorecard that every person in every job in every company on planet Earth is walking around with.
Every single day. And if you can consistently deliver people's ideal job, doing meaningful work for a great boss, they will join, they will stay and they will care. And they will try. And I know it sounds falsely reductive, right? Really? Is that it? But each of these areas we write about in the book, ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss, as you alluded to have some dimensions to them.
which one do you want to talk about first? My friend.
Mike Goldman: start with ideal job.
Joe Mull: So ideal job is about how your job fits into your life. And it's about what I get in exchange for what I do. And that really comes down to things like compensation, workload, and flexibility. So compensation is about our wages and our benefits. And if my wages and benefits live somewhere between adequate and generous, the degree to which it.
Inflicts minimum economic suffering on my life really starts to determine whether that job fits into my life, right? If I'm struggling to pay my bills or get by in the job that I'm in, I am much more of a flight risk in an organization also as part of ideal job. That idea of workload, is huge right now.
We've watched for years, employers of all shapes and sizes. In an effort to right size in air quotes their organization or create more efficiency in air quotes, we've for years watched them move the work of three people over to two people and then take that work of two people and move it to one person.
And so we know that burnout and stress and overload have been at all time highs in the workplace for years. And if we ask people to constantly operate at the very top of their capacity or above, They're a flight risk too. They can barely keep their head above water. And so we actually need to create environments where workloads are more manageable.
the research we've encountered is that it appears 80 percent of our capacity about 80 percent of our time is kind of a sweet spot because then when something happens and you need to ask people to give a little bit more, there's some pedal left right on the accelerator that you can push down on and you can respond in that way.
And then the third piece of that Mike is flexibility. So compensation, workload, and flexibility. Flexibility is now the number one, most requested workplace benefit in the world. and unfortunately our whole conversation around flexibility these days consistently comes back to the idea of working from home, but that's only one kind of flexibility.
Flexibility is really about autonomy. It's really about giving people some influence over when, where, and how they work. And so there are plenty of jobs that. cannot be work from home jobs, right? Like flight attendant or plumber. We can't do these jobs from home, but maybe we can give the people in those jobs, some more influence over their start time, their end time, their shift length, the days of the week that they work, the locations that they work in, who they work with, how they execute their work product.
It turns out that when you give people some influence, people, You create the psychological foundation for agency and for commitment. So that ideal job factor is about compensation, workload, and flexibility.
Mike Goldman: I want to go back to compensation because you have a tool in there called the living wage worksheet. And as I was going through this, you know, you're thinking about with, I'm thinking about my clients. And, you know, how this impacts my clients, but for the first time in the, but when I started looking at that living wage worksheet, and I want you to tell us a little bit about what that's about, but the reason why I focus on that is because going through that, I thought, wait a minute, this could be a maybe not world changing, but country changing kind of thing. When you think about the number of people that, you know, live below the line and, you know, can't afford. So tell us a little bit about that living wage worksheet and the impact it can have.
Joe Mull: So for anyone who is listening, who is not familiar with the concept of a living wage is not minimum wage. It's not market wage for a position. Living wage is an economic calculation of what someone needs to earn to avoid a substandard of living. And there are a number of living wage calculators out there.
The most famous and the most reliable one I've encountered is hosted over at MIT. And so you can go to living wage.mit.edu and you can see the calculated living wage for every county in the United States. And what you find when you look at this data, Mike, is that the living wage in every county in the United States right now.
Is above 17 an hour, but here's the rub. That's for a household of one. If you add a child, the living wage in nearly every county in the United States is above 30 an hour. So if you have an employee who is a single parent with one child and they are earning less than 30 an hour right now, they will struggle to afford some aspect of food for their family.
clothing, shelter, healthcare, medicine, transportation, childcare, some aspect of it. And so when we talk about compensation and the direct correlation it has to quality of life, there's also a dotted line back to that idea of dehumanization that we were talking about. If we continue to pay people below the living wage, we are perpetuating the material conditions that lead to suffering.
And we are essentially treating them as a commodity to be leveraged. We are ignoring the likelihood that they can't survive financially for what we pay them. And so when we have folks in workplaces these days, now more than ever before, and Asking for raises, asking for more. We have to call this out. We have to talk about this from a living wage perspective, because for too many leaders, what happens is they think, well, these people are greedy or they're entitled, or they must think we're made of money when truly for a lot of folks, it's about survival where we're enduring right now, a wages reckoning here in the United States, because we know that between 1979 and 2020, the median salary for the average U S worker.
Grew only about 10 percent adjusted for cost of living where an actual cost of living has quadrupled during that time. And so there is a recalibration taking place around how work fits into our lives. And it's not just about pay except for those for whom it is right. Pay is not the only thing that matters until it's the only thing that matters.
Mike Goldman: How do you just playing devil's advocate on this? Cause it's such an important concept, but I think it's. It's hard to do right and the reason it's hard to do, you know, be great to say, Oh, you know, I've got all these people making 15 an hour. You know what? Let's starting next week. Let's make them all 30 an hour.
Let's pay him 60 grand a year. And that sounds nice. But we know if. We've got competition that's paying their similar folks 15 an hour. All of a sudden our profits are squeezed and or we've got to raise our prices and or we're losing money. So like, it'd be wonderful if the world could get together and say, Hey, let's all do this together. But
Joe Mull: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: that happening, how is one company, how do you make that decision to significantly increase someone's compensation without it killing your business?
Joe Mull: Yeah. And we have to do this at multiple levels. The first thing you have to understand is the ROI that you get when you dramatically minimize turnover, retraining, search selection, and rehiring costs, and simultaneously increase the quality of the product and service that you're delivering, which then returns that investment through more, better, better customer acquisition, a better customer experience.
So there's this whole sort of invisible set of numbers that doesn't show up on the balance. Sheet when you drive turnover down and you drive quality and customer experience up. And that happens when you have an employee experience that is extraordinary and that includes extraordinary pay. So that's the first part of this that we have, you have to think through and we know that this isn't easy.
I don't mean to suggest for a second that it is because there are some hard choices that often have to be made. For example, I run a small business. I have 14 members. I probably should have six. We work very hard. We take on a lot, but I have a lot of conviction around the baseline that I will pay for anyone who works for me that is tied to that living wage calculator that we talked to.
And it's a values driven choice for me. My team knows, Hey, we're going to get paid well here, but we're also going to take on a lot, right? we work hard, but we also prioritize work life balance. The other part of this too, Mike is we do see organizations who are saying, Hey, we need to get creative, right?
We need to, if we're going to do this, we need to create some new revenue streams and we need to figure out where to find that money to raise the, maybe the, The salary floor for certain position groups, for example, that maybe are under that living wage threshold or are hard to recruit. And so we see organizations doing this in a couple of ways.
Sometimes they're looking at salaries for the people who are highest up, right? We know that executive salaries for years have, have more than quadrupled over the last couple of years by hundreds of percentage while the folks on the lower end of the org chart haven't really moved at all. And so there has to be a kind of recalibration around that.
The second thing that happens is we see organizations who are going to go, okay, well, we need to share profit with our employees. We need to, if we will share our prosperity with them, they will commit to us. and so you do look at, okay, can we trim our profit margins a little bit and push those extra monies down the org chart and in the form of salary, so to speak.
And then the last thing we see organizations doing is how can we Create new and expanded revenue streams, right? How can we bring in more revenue from customers so that we can elevate the employee experience and the quality of life? And that was one of my favorite things about the book, Mike, is that we went out and we found organizations in a variety of industries that were doing this.
We found organizations and found. Fast food. We found organizations in healthcare. We found organizations in nonprofits, for example, who took a step back and said, Hey, you shouldn't have to take a vow of poverty to do work for a nonprofit here in the United States. we should be able to find a way. And so we share some really interesting case studies around organizations who were able to do just that.
Mike Goldman: Let's move. So we talked about ideal job.
Let's go to a meaningful work next.
Joe Mull: Meaningful work is really about what I do and who I do it with and the degree to which I find that fulfilling. And, you know, this is a concept that has been studied from social science researchers really since the seventies. And obviously what I find meaningful about my work is going to differ from what you find meaningful about your work, Mike, even if we have the same job.
but we know that when you give people purpose strengths and belonging, They move from, I have to do it to, I want to do it. And that's where commitment comes from. So purpose, do I believe my work matters? Do I feel like I am making a difference in some way or to someone because of what I do every day, when you give people purpose or when they believe their company has a powerful purpose, energy, effort, energy commitment, all go up.
Strengths is about the talents and gifts and skills that I innately have and the degree to which I am able to use those over the course of my work. It turns out when you tap into people's gifts, to their creativity, to their Interests, and you can tweak their job role around that. They stay longer and they try harder.
And then the third dimension of that is belonging, which, you know, for years, we've thought about belonging predominantly around a notion of camaraderie, right? I like the people that I work with and they like me and we have fun together. And that matters. And we know that it matters because we consistently see people who.
Choose not to move on for a new opportunity at times, just because they like the people that they work with. And they don't want to leave them, but it doesn't stop with camaraderie because belonging is also about inclusion, right?
It's also about creating an environment. It's goes back to the safety that we talked about at the top of the show, creating an environment where it is safe to be who I am, even if who I am is different from you.
And an environment where we help each other understand the experiences and the differences that sort of naturally occur in our lives. And this is so important, not just because inclusion is important, but because exclusion is so cancerous. We know that when employees experience just one incident of exclusion in the workplace, they are dramatically more likely to leave that workplace in the next 90 days after just one incident.
And so we do need to spend time having conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion. We do need to spend time teaching teams and leaders, how to have a better, deeper understanding of many of these, differences that occur between people, across the scope of humanity. But when you get those things, right, purpose, strengths, and belonging, people find their work meaningful.
And they want to be good at it.
Mike Goldman: One of the tools you talk about is the stay interview. And when I read that, I went, Oh my, cause I've been talking, I don't remember where I first heard that term, but wherever I heard it, I grabbed it. And I've been talking to my clients about it ever since. So I'd love to hear kind of your, share your version of it.
And what are, what is it for? What are some of the questions you ask?
Joe Mull: Yeah. So, you know, we all have heard of exit interviews and I've kind of argued for years that exit interviews are stupid. Stop doing them. apologies to all of our, HR business partners and friends who are listening. I am a recovering HR professional. And so I understand, I really do,the draw and the, effort and the resources that go into exit interviews, but exit interviews are a waste of time.
And it's predominantly because. Employees don't tell us the real reasons that they want to leave. The other reason that they are a waste of time is because they're absurd. Think about it. You've decided to take a new job, Mike, you're done. You've got one foot out the door. You've got no more investment here whatsoever.
Hey, now seems like a great time to ask you, how are we doing? What do you think we should change around here to be better for employees like you? It's bananas. Stay interviews. It's interviewing people who are gonna stay. Why are you here? What do you like about your work? What energizes you about your work?
If you could change something about the company, about your employment, about your boss, what would it be? If you were going to leave our organization in the next six months or the next 12 months, what would be the reason? These questions tap us into what people really need to be at their best every day, and they help us spot trends and patterns that may actually be preventing us from becoming a destination workplace for others.
Mike Goldman: Yeah. I mean, why would you want to wait for an exit interview to find out why someone left? Let alone the fact that you're not really going to find out why to
Joe Mull: That's right.
Mike Goldman: And even if you hear, well, well, this person left for more money. did they, well,
Joe Mull: Right?
Mike Goldman: why did they first start looking? Why did they talk to that recruiter? It wasn't maybe it wasn't about money. It was about a bad boss, which we're going to talk about next
Joe Mull: Yeah.
Mike Goldman: not an ideal job. It was about something else. Then they happened to get offered more money. So they went, so
Joe Mull: I got recruited to, speak for the leadership development, quarterly meeting for a rural healthcare system recently. And I was talking with the chief HR officer, about some of their retention data and turnover and things of that nature. And I said, what do you know about why people leave?
And she says, Oh, we're really good at this. We collect a lot of data. And I said, how do you do it? And she talked about exit interviews. And I said, okay, so what are you doing with that data? And she said. Well, the manager enters the reason that the employee left into our system. So I immediately know that it's worthless.
It's worthless data because we have a loads of social science research that tell us that when you ask bosses to identify the reason that their employees left 80 percent of the time, they say it's about money and it 20 percent of the time. And so there's this massive bias, this sort of skewing of perception that exists when you don't.
Actually get the reason from employees. And even if we thought that they would be honest with us in an exit interview, which is what they thought they were doing, exit interviews, asking the manager to input the reason as opposed to the employee themselves, completely skews the data.
Mike Goldman: yeah, I'm not sure I've ever heard. I work with leaders all day, every day. not sure I've ever heard a leader say, Oh, that person quit because I'm a big pain in the ass.
Joe Mull: That's right.
Mike Goldman: that's not a thing that's ever been said, but I'm quite sure that happens fairly often.
Joe Mull: That's right. Because I play favorites or because I've gaslighted my team members and promised them promotions repeatedly and never followed through because our budget here, does not allow for us to be properly staffed. So I've got a team of four doing the work of 11 in a space that's set up for three, you know, and that, that kind of stress and overwhelming burnout or what people are leaving.
It
Mike Goldman: So that leads us to the third factor is great boss.
Joe Mull: was a great transition. Mike, you're good at this. Well done. Yeah. The great boss factor. So this is the third of those three factors on that employability scorecard. the great boss factor is about, who is the person overseeing my work and the quality of the relationship I have with that person.
And anybody listening to this knows that. Boy, there are dozens of things that a leader has to get right in order for any of their employees to point to them and say, man, I've got a great boss. We think the three most important are trust, coaching and advocacy. So trust is a two way street. Do I grant trust to my employees and do I earn their trust back?
when I don't grant trust, I am micromanaging. When I don't grant trust, I'm not mining people for their opinions, their creativity, their insights. When I don't grant trust, I'm not giving people proper training and instruction and setting outcomes and then getting out of the way and letting them do their work.
and when I don't earn trust, it's because I'm not showing up as competent or invested or involved. And when that Trust is absence, whether granting or earning trust is absent, there's very little chance for people to commit or to feel like that environment is safe. The second dimension of the great boss factor is coaching.
and coaching is a very specific kind of interaction. As you know, Mike, it's not giving feedback or advice or telling people what to do. Coaching truly is. Asking open ended questions that help people sort through what they know, think, and feel to determine their next step. And so when people come to us at our office with a question, and they're asking that question for the seventh time, and we really can't believe they're asking us that question.
And we kind of want to go, really, are you asking me that question right now? And because we're busy and there's a lot on our to do list and because we like to help, we. Just give them the answer, but it's a missed opportunity for development and for nurturing their competence when that person comes to your office with the same question for the seventh time and says, Hey, wave in a paper.
Hey, what do you want me to do with this thing when it comes in? Taking that moment to say. Well, what options do you see? What do you remember about the staff meeting last week? When we went last week, when we talked about this, what does your gut tell you? What do you think is a good first step? And notice that in my tone, asking these questions, Mike, I'm not playing gotcha.
There's nothing snarky about how I'm asking them. It's a developmental opportunity. And it turns out that conversation repeatedly is a kind of secret sauce for retention and commitment, because two things happened at the same time. You make that person feel capable. Right. Feel capable and smart, and you're developing as a leader, the critical thinking skills in that person that are going to free you up later to do what only you can do
Mike Goldman: Can I add
Joe Mull: so that you're not constantly
Mike Goldman: a third on to that?
Joe Mull: please
Mike Goldman: And I think there's a good chance you get a better answer because
Joe Mull: a hundred percent.
Mike Goldman: you may not understand the total problem.
Joe Mull: Right.
Mike Goldman: advice, you're giving what would be the right action for you,
Joe Mull: That's right.
Mike Goldman: be the right action for the other person.
Joe Mull: I love that because what you've described is treating that person as an expert. And we know that when you treat that person as an expert. expert in a coaching conversation, you can draw out more sophisticated knowledge and understanding. And, you know, if you believe that every person working for you knows more about something that you do, even if it's just by the nature of the seat that they sit in and what they see and hear every day, then you should want to mind them for that insight and those experiences, because it's going to make you better at your job too.
So you're a hundred percent right. Mike.
Mike Goldman: So we
Joe Mull: Oh, and then we have to talk about advocacy because it's the, yep. you got me, you got there.
Mike Goldman: I knew there
Joe Mull: That's right. Yeah. The third dimension of the great boss factor is advocacy, which is exactly what it sounds like. Do you advocate for the people in your charge? Do you act in their best interest?
Do you care about the person first position second? And so this really starts with just getting to know a little bit about your people, right? I still encounter leaders who walk past people in the hallway, where they work and honestly believe that they don't need to know their names. And it's mind blowing, but do you know something about the people who work for you?
Do you know about their life outside of work? Do you know what they want to do professionally in the coming years? do you just know a little bit about their story? But then advocacy evolves to mean that am I making sure that they have the materials and the information and the equipment that they need to do their job?
Am I protecting and insulating them from the, you know, what that rolls downhill from time to time in organizations, right? Am I serving as a mirror reflecting up to the leaders above me, what these people in my charge face and deal with and need, and am I acting as a kind of barrier from that executive team to any difficulty or politics or negative inertia that could make their existence more difficult in the workplace?
That's advocacy.
Mike Goldman: I want to go back to trust because you made a point in the book that I thought was. Really important because I think it's misunderstood more often than not about remote work. And I hear this all the time with certain leaders that still, you know, are still focused on, you know, one day we're all coming back into the office cause
Joe Mull: Yeah, a
Mike Goldman: work and some are coming back and some might be successful and some won't. But the idea of man remote doesn't work because when I call them, they're not there. How do I know they're really working? I'm not sure what they're really doing. Maybe they're only working three hours a day. So it feels like it's this issue with remote work, but you claim it's not, it's really a trust issue.
So talk
Joe Mull: hundred percent. Yeah. So we're sort of hardwired more to prevent failure than we are to engineer success. And we see employers constantly engineering a prevention of failure and I was speaking at a large health care conference last year in California and talking about some of these ideas, talking about that employability framework.
And afterwards, the CEO of a hospital came up to me and he said, I just can't get behind remote work, right? We don't know what these people are doing. Are they double dipping two jobs? Are they watching Netflix and doing laundry when they're supposed to be working? I just can't get behind it. And what I told him is what you just said, which is that's not an issue of remote work.
It's an issue of trust. It's the belief that left to their own devices. People are going to shirk their duties. they're going to do the minimum to get by. But what happens if you flip that script? What happens if you start with trust? If you decide that most people are ethical, most people have integrity, and most people are so interested.
In and benefit from the idea of remote work that they're actually less likely to jeopardize that arrangement by being underperformers or by getting away with things. So we engineer these systems,to sort of prevent the rare bad apple, right? Because most people are ethical, right? Most people do good work and act in appropriate ways in the workplace.
but we engineer monitoring systems and check in systems that end up sending a really powerful message to even our best employees, which is we don't trust you. And it drives the wrong people out of our organizations. And are you going to have people who from time to time game the system and act inappropriately?
Yes, but you have far more people who are operating ethical ethically. And so design your systems with those ethical people in mind. And believe me, if you have someone who is gaming the system, you're going to find out. Right. People are people who underperform or act in inappropriate ways in the workplace are going to get called out, especially if when you are in a remote work environment, you design that remote work environment, not based on inputs, but outputs.
You make it clear that if we're going to work together in a remote setting, we need to be crystal clear about what the output is expected to be, right? What are the outcomes you're working for toward? What are the projects you're delivering? What are the results you're driving in your role rather than the inputs, which is how much time have you spent on this?
Give me a check in around that. when you lead and evaluate people based on their outputs, those bad apples quickly become apparent. Okay.
Mike Goldman: And I think what that does is it challenges us as leaders to get clear on what outputs we're looking for, what results we're looking for, because I, from. My view, most leaders are incredibly fuzzy on
Joe Mull: Uh huh.
Mike Goldman: outcomes they're looking for. And cause to me, I don't care if you work six hours a day or 10 hours a day.
If these are the results I want, if you're getting me the results. Do I really care if you left at four o'clock today instead of
Joe Mull: five o'clock
Yes, that's right.it's the harder path again. It's sort of that choose your hard piece, right? It takes more time to figure out what those outcomes are. It takes more time to put them down on paper and to have conversations about them. But it's sort of that, you know, give a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats forever.
it's the same thing. If you can get clear on the outputs at the beginning, if you can put that work in early, then you get all sorts of benefits later
Mike Goldman: beautiful. And by the way, back to the coaching piece for a second. and, you know, Joe, I don't know if you've read this book. Actually he uses it again, same publisher as us, Michael Bungay Stanier
Joe Mull: huh. Yep, the coaching habit.
Mike Goldman: Coaching Habit is
Joe Mull: Legendary.
Mike Goldman: best book I've ever read on not how to become a coach like, like, like I am, but the best book I've read on as a leader, what does it mean to not jump in and give advice,
Joe Mull: That's right.
Mike Goldman: curious longer, ask questions and be a real coach.
So
Joe Mull: Yes. In fact, I would tell all of your listeners that if they were only going to read one book this year, it should be mine, but if they're going to read two, okay,
Mike Goldman: say mine next. And
Joe Mull: then they should read yours. And if they're going to read three, go get Michael Bungay Stainer's book because you're right. it's a tool that should be on the bookshelf of every leader, regardless of whether you're a frontline leader, a mid level manager, all the way up to the C suite,it's a book you should spend some time with.
No question.
Mike Goldman: well, I hope Michael appreciates our little commercial for him here.
so we've talked about a lot, you know, ideal job, meaningful work, great boss. There's a lot there. It may differ what you need to do may differ by person, by department. How does somebody take all of this and say, all right, there's a lot here. How does someone not get overwhelmed? Where do they start and how do they start?
Joe Mull: Yeah, that's a great question, Mike. I think one of the reasons that we wrote this book in this way, first and foremost, was just to give people a vocabulary. You know, we've been telling leaders for years. If you want to know what people want or what they need to be successful, just ask. And yeah, we should ask, but there are a lot of places and spaces where people don't necessarily know.
How to articulate what it is that they want or need, or they don't feel comfortable doing it, right? There's a whole power dynamic that's in place too. When we ask employees to come to our, I have an open door policy. Come tell me what you need whenever you want. Well, that's great, but it's a little bit trite because there are some people on our teams who will never overcome the power dynamic that requires them to walk in and speak up to you.
Instead of asking people to come and tell we need to go and ask it's why executive rounding and one on ones are such crucial tools. To use as leaders to, to learn what people need. But even if we're doing those things, we don't always have a simple way to articulate, Hey, this is what makes most people happy at work and what's leads most people to want to join and stay and care and try.
And so this framework of ideal job and meaningful work and great boss. To get started, you can just start using that vocabulary. I was at a workshop recently where, an attendee came up to me afterwards and said, We started using this book three months ago on our team, and we have actually saved ourselves a couple of positions because when we heard people describing that they were unhappy, we just sat down with them and we took out the scorecard and we said, Hey, this is what most people, seem to say is important to them at work.
Can you let us know how we're doing on each of these? And it led to a conversation where they kind of went, Oh, well, no, we do pretty well. Oh, Hey, look at that. Actually. I'm, I get most of what I, what matters to me here and what I want here. And really, if we could tweak this one thing, I think I'd just be thrilled.
and so that vocabulary is really powerful and the vocabulary allows us to do the next thing that's really important, Mike, which is to start to assess what we're already doing well and what we need to improve on, because when you think about some of these dimensions that we rattled off earlier, purpose and compensation and belonging and trust, you know, as a leader and as an organization, we're probably doing some of these things well already.
We're probably just by the nature of what we believe or how we operate getting some of this, right. And so let's figure out what those things are. Like, what do our people, are they going to tell us that we're doing right? And then let's identify the one or two buttons and levers that we can push and pull to get us a little bit closer to being that destination workplace.
Mike Goldman: And I think that's important. The one or two, right? If you've got 15 things you think you need to change and you go after all 15, going to fail. Your heads are going to explode. Fine. Find that one or two. I think that's important.
Joe Mull: 100%. But we can also still use this scorecard as a kind of diagnostic tool and a roadmap for what our priorities are as an organization or as a leader in the years to come. And so I think sort of behind the scenes, I'd love to see a committee in a room somewhere that's kind of constantly evaluating around these dimensions of ideal job, meaningful work, great boss.
Where are we succeeding? Where are there opportunities to improve and drilling down on whether there are differences across certain parts of the organization or certain position groups as well. So we want to have the micro and the macro conversation. We want to do that work at both levels.
Mike Goldman: So if people want to dive into this, absolutely. They ought to go get the book, but how else do you work with organizations?
Joe Mull: Yeah. So I predominantly work as an educator and as a strategist. So, if you have someone who says we need a speaker on, leadership, retention, workforce, staffing, employee engagement, I do a lot of keynotes. I do a lot of workshops, and really focus on bringing an evidence based approach that's also really dynamic and engaging.
and the other way that I work with organizations is as a strategist, right? Right. We want to talk with you about what's working, what's not. We have some data. Let's look at it together. let's apply your framework, Joe, this evidence based scorecard so that we can become a destination workplace.
So, thank you for asking me that question, Mike. That's very generous of you, but, I live online over at joemull.com
Mike Goldman: That you hit my next question is where people can find you. So joemull.com. Well, Joe, this was fantastic. Love the book. Love this conversation. I always say, if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. Thanks for helping us get there today.
Joe Mull: Oh, my pleasure, man. Fun conversation. You do a great job. Thanks for having me.
Mike Goldman: Thank you.