Dr. Zach Mercurio
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And what you're saying is spot on because there are two beliefs that we need to have of ourselves to motivate any action. We need to believe that we're worthy. That's what's called self-esteem. And we need to believe that we're capable, called self-efficacy. Those are actually the two most potent predictors of things like workplace performance or productivity. And why is that?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Because again, we need to feel valued to develop those beliefs so that we have the confidence to go out and add value. And then we know that when we come back after we're adding value, that someone has our back, that someone supports us. So I think you're right on with that model.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And when people feel like a transaction, they usually act like it. When people feel replaceable, people feel like just a cog, just a means to an end, they usually act like that and they don't commit and they don't show up. And I think you're right on. The first skill area that we uncovered in our research was that people who feel that they matter feel noticed.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
they feel that someone sees them as a person before the employee, that someone remembers them, that someone thinks about the details of their lives. I love what you said about seeing the whole person in the sense of all of the experiences that they bring to being in front of you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
One of the things that we tried to do is we tried to understand how employees felt that they mattered to their leaders and what leaders did. And there were four gifts that tended to be affirmed when someone felt that they mattered. One of those was strengths, what you love to do and what you're good at.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
But another one was your impact, the purpose that you had on a team, like how the team is different because of you. But then the third was your perspective. People felt that they mattered when their unique perspective, whether it's a perspective as a
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
a parent, a friend, someone who's involved in the community or in your particular area of expertise or how you see the world, when that perspective was affirmed. And then the last one, which I think you're talking about too in that example, is wisdom. You know, what only you have learned. One of my favorite questions to ask people is what's something only you can teach me?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And that is what it gets at to feel truly noticed and affirmed as a full human being. And so I'm glad you brought that up, but that takes time and that takes attention and that takes intention. And why do many organizations not do that? Well, because many organizations and many leaders focus on the lagging indicators, right? So like engagement is a lagging indicator.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Productivity, performance is a lagging indicator. Those are all lagging indicators of human energy. And the way to regenerate human energy to deliver those lagging indicators is to keep a pulse, as you say, on the leading indicator, which is ensuring people feel seen, heard, valued, and needed and supported.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And I think that's what makes people like Claude and like Vayner and other companies that are doing it well different is they obsessively focus on the leading indicator, which is regenerating the human energy needed to perform and produce and all of the other things we say we want.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
The line I love about that book, and I'm probably going to get it wrong a little bit, but it was, he's talking about honeybees. I don't know if you remember this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Honey is not the purpose of the hive. Honey is the byproduct of a healthy hive. Right. And I think that all of the things that we say we want in organizations, those lagging indicators are byproducts.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Now, the problem in my perspective is that a lot of leaders, their own worth, their own sense of mattering because of the systems they're in have been tied to quarterly earnings reports from what they do and what they acquire. I try to have a lot of empathy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
for leaders in that situation because I don't know who I would become if my worth, my sense of importance was judged every three months by a board on how much I produced. One of the things I think that needs to happen is we need to re-look at systems. We can't rely on people to be morally good in systems that incentivize them not to be.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And so rewards and what we're rewarding and what is considered good leadership is really important because we often promote people who produce and perform, who treat people poorly. But we need to redefine success as people who treat people well, show people how they matter and perform.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And I think that is a very important way that we can send a signal that this is what true leadership is in organizations.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Well, I have a very similar story. I got asked to go work with a group of maintenance workers. And this was a story that really changed a lot for how I look at work. And I write about it in the book, but I went and the supervisor said, these people are unmotivated. Similar to you. And I went down to this group and I just said, what's going on here?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Tell me, if you were running this place, what would you do differently? And this group of maintenance workers, they were also window washers. So in the summer in Colorado, there's a lot of window washers that go on these industrial complex sites and wash the windows because... That's something that a lot of the clients like.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
But I went and I asked this group, I said, if you were running this place, what would you do differently? And I did not see a motivation issue. They had more ideas than I even had time with. And I remember very vividly, one woman followed me out of this conference room. She goes, Zach, I can explain everything to you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
She goes, on my first week on the job, I was responsible for a team that had to go to this industrial complex and wash the windows of this complex every day in the summer, every morning. They would go down there and do this. And she goes, I realized that at 3 p.m. every day, the sprinkler system comes on. And I saw it aimed wrong.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
So it was splashing all the windows and leaving these avoidable watermarks. And so I would get up and go do that every day. And I was so excited. I went to my supervisor and I said, hey, I have an idea. What if we just aim the sprinklers differently so we don't have to spend all of our time doing that? And the supervisor looked at her, she said, and said, that's the sprinkler people's problem.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
I need you to just do your job. That was five years prior. She said that one moment shut her down. She said she just clocked in, clocked out. And guess who she told? She told her team, hey, don't share your voice. Nobody's going to listen to you. And what quickly happened was this small moment, because I think we talked about this, that mattering happens in moments and interactions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
So too does anti-mattering, the feeling that we're insignificant, very small, often routine moments of being looked over, talked over, not listened to, can get that belief that I just don't quite matter. And then you go and tell other people and people say, eh, nothing we say will matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And that devolves into what's called learned helplessness, which is the belief that I won't, can't, and never will matter. And it is such a killer on a team in an organization. It spreads like a brush fire. And one of the reasons why is because when people feel that they don't matter, two behaviors typically follow. They either withdraw.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
they isolate, they stay silent, or the terminal withdrawal response has been branded by organizations as turnover. Usually turnover is the inevitable withdrawal response to feeling insignificant. Quiet quitting. I don't know if you remember that trend, John, but that was a, that quiet quitting again was misdiagnosed as a symptom of people who feel insignificant.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
So they're going to withdraw versus people are saying, oh, this is like a lazy entitled generation. Or It can be much louder. And I think this is important for listeners that people either act in withdrawal when they feel insignificant or they act out in desperation. They're desperate for the attention that they're not getting.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Think about how we behave and our bodies and minds activate when any survival instinct is threatened. Think about how you feel when you don't get sleep. Think about how you feel when you don't eat. How we feel when we don't matter is we scratch and claw. And acts of desperation can be things like complaining, blaming, gossiping, protesting, all of these things that we've termed toxic.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
That's my toxic employee. That's a difficult employee. And in my practice, when I've really dug deep, many of the most quote unquote difficult employees are also the most unseen, unheard, unvalued employees as well.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
So it can be incredibly corrosive in an organization and all it takes is a moment for someone to get evidence that they aren't significant for them to start believing they're not significant.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Belonging is like you're being picked for the team. Belonging is feeling welcomed, accepted, and connected into a group. Something like inclusion is being able to play in the game, being able to play an active role in the group. But mattering is feeling that the team wouldn't be complete without you. mattering is feeling significant to individuals in the group.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
What's interesting about that is that most of the things we talk about in work are actually adult attachment. It's childhood attachment in work, but we don't want to call it that because no one would invite us in to work with them. But childhood attachment, as you're mentioning, is knowing that someone supports you, that you matter to someone as a child.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And when you feel that you matter to someone as a child, you can go out, experiment, take risks, screw up, and do that because you know that someone cares for you no matter what when you return. What do you think psychological safety is? Psychological safety is just childhood attachment in the workplace. It's adult attachment. These attachment needs don't go away.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
So psychological safety is the belief that I can speak up, I can make mistakes, I can be creative without fear. It's mattering in disguise as well because someone can go out, create, take risks, learn, become confident because they know that their leader has their back when they come back. With children, we call that their secure base. Like parents are their secure base.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
One of the most exciting things for me when I go to a friend's house is if I see their kids being loud in front of them. That is a good sign because they know they matter already so they can mess up and someone still loves them. In a workplace, the secure base is a leader. It's the same attachment need. The secure base is the relationship.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And so I'm really glad that you brought that up and brought that tie up. But then if someone doesn't have their adult attachment, secure attachment needs met in work where they spend a third of their lives, do you know what happens? When people don't have that attachment met as they go home, they're more likely to have outbursts of anger. They're more likely to lose their temper.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
They're less likely to show patience. They're more likely to have higher cortisol levels when they're at home. They're more likely to be in fight or flight because they spent all day not having a survival instinct met while they're trying to provide for people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And then we can even cycle this back down into the places in which many people occupy our communities, which one of those places is in schools. There was an Education Week study of students, of 66,000 students from 6th grade through 12th grade. They asked them, do you think someone would notice if you were absent? Over half of the sample said no.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
But what happens is you're talking about this cycle, this vicious cycle of anti-mattering. Many of those same teachers don't feel that they matter. They feel burnt out. They have a job that matters, but they're not experiencing mattering in their job. to other people. And so then their interactions with their students become just routine because they're not seeing how they matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And then administrators aren't seeing how they matter. And the cycle continues. And where it stops is how we show up with one another in our next interaction. I think that's what's really hopeful about mattering as the root cause is that mattering happens through interactions. It's an interactional phenomenon. It's not something you can throw a program at or an initiative or a platform.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
It is something that we can do in interactions and it's teachable and it's scalable.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
But I want to pick up something here because I think it's really important that this is also a skills issue. at a large scale. One of the reasons why it is because we've also been able to evade the social situations that allow us to develop the skills to see, hear, value, and need one another. And the reason why is because of these things, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
I can, we, for the past 25 years, and I'm holding up a phone for those who are listening, but the past 25 years, we have been able to communicate with one another via short transactions, right? short digital communication. So John, if you tell me that you have some bad news, I can just send you a little text with a emoji, a sad faced emoji and say, I'm sorry to hear that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
I actually don't have to sit with you and seek to understand what you've been going through and offer compassion. If you give me some good news, I can just say, hey, happy to hear that. I don't have to sit with you and say, John, I've been noticing how much you've been working on this for five years. I'm really proud of you. I've seen your perseverance. Those are skills.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And what's been happening is over the past 25 years, we have not been getting social reps, social repetitions that we used to get. So those skills are withering. And now what's happening is people who have not had those skills, including myself through using phones and platforms are leading teams. And more than ever, people don't know how to respond to feedback in real time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
They don't know how to affirm a person's gifts. They don't know how to check in with somebody. They don't know how to remember someone's details of their lives and offer an action to show them their thought about. A lot of people don't know how to show compassion when they feel empathy. They don't know how to listen.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
There was a study done that found that less than 2% of the world gets any formal education on how to listen well. So I think we're in this place where we need a massive reskilling. to relearn the skills to see, hear, value, and show the people across from us how they're needed.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Absolutely right. You don't get that evidence that you're important to somebody. The person that influenced me the most is the psychologist, Carl Rogers. He was the father of active listening.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
But what we've gotten wrong though about teaching listening, in my opinion, and is that in leadership programs, we've teach people how to say yes, make eye contact, do all of the things that physically demonstrate that you're listening, not the things that ensure the person feels heard. You can be physically listened to and not feel heard.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And feeling heard comes from knowing that true voice, the meaning behind the words is invited out and explored. And to explore that means that we have to be attuned to people's feelings. We have to name feelings. We have to go beneath the surface. We have to check whether our perceptions are right with the person. And it's both an art. I think Picasso said the true art is loving people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
It's a skill and it's also an art, but it has to be practiced. And what I worry about is that kids in school, for example, aren't getting the social reps, the social repetitions to practice these things. And so when they go into the organizational world, which I work in organizations, because that's where the people are.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
When they go to the organizational world, they're also not getting the skills and yet now add on AI that's eclipsing our operational and technical skills. And what do we have left? We have left the skills to see, hear, value, and understand the people around us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
So I really believe that this requires a re-skilling and I think organizations have to take it seriously and may have to fill the gap in what we're seeing in our educational system.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Yes, that's great. I got to listen to that one.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
I think the Ann Arbor High School River Rats, right, were 0-22. They had not won a game. They were literally ranked in ranking systems as the worst high school hockey team in the country. And John writes in his book, great book, Let Them Lead, he writes that they were so proud of how terrible they were, they printed off 0-20 t-shirts and wore them to the school dance. And
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
He got hired from them after an interesting hiring process. He got hired to go turn them around. And he says that the first thing I knew I needed to do was make sure they knew that they mattered to me as people before players. And the first thing he did when he went into the initial meeting is he sent a questionnaire.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And the questionnaire had questions about their personal lives, their goals, their dreams, their ambitions. And he gave it to them. And he asked them to turn it in at the first meeting. He sent it to them. Well, only a couple of them turned it in at the first meeting. And he realized that they didn't think that he was serious.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And so he went around this room and asked them questions about their personal lives and spent all this time repeating their names back to them, going around, repeating what he heard about their personal lives as they shared. And he said, I'm serious about this. I want to know you as people, not just players.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And he said after he did that, after he said each person's name, after he invested time in each person in one meeting, the next Monday after workouts, everybody turned in their questionnaire. When one of the players was asked why they didn't turn in the questionnaire, they said, we did what was expected of us, which was to fail and fail epically.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And what was amazing is that he saw their potential, invested in their potential, and so they acted as if they had potential. Now, here's some other practices he used. When they went on school buses, he would go sit with the players. A lot of coaches sit up front, but he would go sit with them. He would move down the aisle and talk to them about their lives and what was going on with them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
He would go to their other sports games. He would show up outside the cafeteria. He would become friendly with their friends so he knew them better.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
and he also was a great listener one of the things that happens in hockey is that lines need to be changed lines are the configurations of where hockey players are sent off the bench to to get on the ice together and if someone wanted to change lines he would say okay go talk to all the coaches and let's see if it's a good idea to them if they say it's a good idea let's try it and see how it works and then i'm going to schedule a meeting with you to see how you think it went
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
He would let them try these ideas. I think the next year they lost five games. And then repeatedly they were ranked in the top percentages of high school teams without any major change in talent level. And I think that you see this when you look at studies of athletes, when you look at studies of coaches. The best coaches seem to see the person before the athlete.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
They create what we just called that secure base. I can go out and try and fail because someone has my back and he's has an amazing story. So I highly recommend his book. Let them lead.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Yeah, and seeing them differently too. There's something I write about in our research on why people struggle with this is that we have labels for everything in our organizations, high performers, low performers, high potentials, difficult people, toxic people, introverts, extroverts, right? But the moment you label someone is the moment you're seeking to understand them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And you're susceptible to self-fulfilling prophecy. So if you see someone as a low performer, you tend to treat them as a low performer. And when they see themselves as a low performer, they tend to act like a low performer. And the cycle continues. And what I love about what John Bacon did is he broke the cycle. He saw them all as having potential. He saw them all as unique, important people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And I think that's so important, that seeing people for the full human being that they are before their role is essential for them to perform in that role.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
I mean, I think that first part, right, of noticing people is important. They have to feel seen and heard. I think that's what John Bacon did really well is he came to see them. I worked with that distribution center where they were all very disengaged except for one team. And I love outliers. And I went to the team and I just said, hey, what's going on here?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And they all said, oh, it's our supervisor. She just gets us. We do anything for her. And I asked her, I said, what do you do? And she had this notebook that I write about because I was just astounded by this practice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
A lot of people have asked me, like, Zach, why did you want to write this book? And I say, I did not want to write this book. I felt that I had to write this book. The evidence is so clear as there's a reason why people more than ever right now are talking about mattering. There's a reason why you're writing a book. I'm writing a book. Other people are writing books about mattering.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
She had this notebook that on Friday, she writes down each of her team members' names and one thing she heard them talk about, complain about, one thing that they were struggling with. And on Monday morning, she looks at that list of names and looks at what she wrote down and schedules a three-minute check-in with each of them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And said, Hey, I remember last week that you were struggling with this. How's it going? And I remember she looked at me, she goes, there's magic in being remembered. The reason why I love that story is because it was a practice. That's what she did. And that's what contributed to the engagement. You flash forward to the Japan Airlines story and the Japan Airlines stories a couple of years ago.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
was a japan airlines plane it was about to touch down on the runway and it burst into flames it hit a coast guard other plane on that runway it burst into flames it was a very large plane and it was like a textbook evacuation everybody survived and one pilot that was when talking about this said he's not really surprised that this was japan airlines because in 1985 one of the most deadly disasters in air travel history happened with a japan airlines flight
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And the executives at Japan Airlines in the 90s wanted to make sure nobody forgot about this. So what they did is they created a place in their headquarters that had pictures of all the passengers, all the crew members, and stories of their lives. And they invited all of the employees to go through and look at how the safety procedures mattered through hearing these stories and how they mattered.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And one of the pilots said those safety rules were written in the blood of people who came before us. But the organization invested in making sure nobody ever forgot of the significance. And that's making sure people feel affirmed, right? So making sure people see the difference that they make through what they're doing and never forget that, no matter what it is.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And then that last one is making sure people feel needed, making sure people feel indispensable, irreplaceable to something bigger. But it all happens with interactions and with the Japan Airlines story. It happens with investment. The organization made an investment to make sure nobody forgot that. And the result of that, you know, hopefully they never need it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
But the result of that motivation is that nobody ever forgot they're one of the safest airlines today.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
You matter more than you think. And I would say, focus on the small things today. There's someone who needed you today. One of the lines that other people do for them when they feel that they matter is say these five words if it wasn't for you. Look at your own life though and say, if it wasn't for me. There's someone that relies on you. There's someone you had to take to practice or to school.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
There's someone who needs you at work who wouldn't be able to do their work with you. And think about that, right? Think about these two questions at the end of today. Who did you help today? Who helped you today? Often what we think about is what we look for. What we look for is what we see. I'd also say start small.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
If you just say hi to a grocery store clerk, learn their name, learn something about their life, what research finds is that you will typically then see the reaction that they had, and you will start to see that, whoa, my presence, my inputs into this system around me that I call life, make a difference for someone else. And start doing those actions. I always say mattering begets mattering.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
The more we show other people that they matter, the more we see how we matter, the more we believe how we matter. And then the third thing I would say is think about those people in your life who help you feel that you matter and invest in those relationships. Invest in those relationships. Hold those people close to you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And usually that happens when people experience the opposite of a phenomenon.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Make sure those are the people that you're talking with when you have these feelings. Because I think Gordon Flett says that mattering is modifiable.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
While we experience it from other people, we can also do some things that help to give us the evidence of our significance around us through relationships, through doing this for other people, through seeing how just our absence and our presence means something to just one other person. And I will tell you this, no matter who you are, it does.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And I just want to point out that you can do this when you stop this podcast, you can do it in your next interaction. You can start to address some of the biggest crises of our time in your next interaction.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
I've been calling it our mattering deficit. For example, when you look at employee engagement, Gallup just released their employee engagement data. It's the lowest it's been in a decade. And if you look at the two key drivers of that, one is just 39% of people said that they had someone at work who cared about them as a person.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
just 30 percent of people in that survey said that they had someone at work that knew and invested in their potential so again like this is not a disengagement crisis and it's not something that programs or platforms can solve there are over a hundred different validated surveys to measure engagement there are 1500 certified quote-unquote
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
engagement coaches on linkedin and yet we're still disengaged and why right it's a mattering deficit people don't feel seen they don't feel heard just 30 of the workforce indicates 30 of the workforce says they feel quote unquote invisible in work and this is something that is solved through relationships not through programs and the same is true with loneliness i'm so glad you brought that up loneliness is the most glaring symptom of the mattering deficit
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Because it isn't the quantity of connections that predicts loneliness. It's the quality. There's a great phrase in psychology called companionate love. And it's not passionate love, but it's the feelings of companionate love of having someone pay attention to us, affirm us, show us our uniqueness, show us our significance.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And ironically, researchers find in the workplace, for example, that is the key, the quality of the interactions. is the key to reducing loneliness, not the quantity. So I think you're right on.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
The first memory I have from when my first son was born is I remember him reaching out his hand and grasping onto my index finger really tightly with his tiny little hand. And that was so powerful to me because he immediately calmed down. But I started studying what it means to matter, what it means to experience significance.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And I realized that I was experiencing 6 million years of fine-tuned programming in that grip. Scientists call that grip the grasp reflex. It's one of several reflexes we're born with. Immediately after we open our eyes, we reach out our arms to matter to someone enough to keep us alive.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
a really interesting thought experiment for everybody listening right now is to think none of us would be here right now if at some point in our lives we hadn't mattered enough to another person so they would keep us alive.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And in thinking about mattering as a survival instinct helps us to understand how as we grow up, that instinct turns into the fundamental need to feel seen, heard, valued, and needed. And it gets out of this idea that mattering is a preference. It's not a preference to matter. It's a survival instinct to matter. And it's a fundamental need for almost everything else that we say we want.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Now, the way this has looked for me is that my first research study was with a group of janitors, with cleaners at a university. And we embedded ourselves with them for a year and a half, a very difficult job, often overlooked. And we were trying to study what contributed to meaningful work, which is the experience that your work is significant.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And I quickly realized that these people only experienced their work as significant when they felt significant. And it was in very small moments. I remember one janitor told me that the most meaningful part of her job in a 20-year career was when a student walked into the building, looked her in the eye, said, hey, Susan, and said, hey, it's great to see you today.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
A 20-year career, that is the moment. And then since that, for the last five years, we've been studying what is the architecture of moments of mattering? What are the things people do that create these very small moments that can dramatically alter people's career and their lives?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
I will first say this, that every group I've talked to, I usually start with this question. Raise your hand if you'd prefer to feel insignificant at work. Nobody raises their hand. And most of the time, these audiences are boomers, Gen Xers, Gen Z, millennials. No one raises their hand and said, oh, I'm a boomer or Gen Xer, so I'd prefer to feel unimportant.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Or it's only those Gen Zers or millennials that want to feel things like seen, heard, valued. The uniting need that unites all generations is the need to feel significant. And I've actually haven't found... Any meaningful differences of the three components that we've uncovered create these experiences of mattering, which is we feel seen and heard. People notice us. We feel affirmed.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
People reveal our unique gifts and show us the difference that we make, and we feel needed. And I think that ties back to thinking about mattering as an instinct first that transfers into a fundamental need. That is the essential prerequisite for everything else. I also ask people, tell me about a time something mattered to you when you didn't feel that you mattered.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Tell me a time when you cared about something before you felt cared for. And once people start thinking about it, it's very hard to not see how mattering comes first. It comes before everything else we say we want in our lives and organizations.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
I have two elementary school kids right now, so I'm heavy into the recess drama. And I'll use a recess example. Belonging is like you're being picked for the team. Belonging is feeling welcomed, accepted, and connected into a group. Something like inclusion is being able to play in the game, being able to play an active role in the group.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
But mattering is feeling that the team wouldn't be complete without you. mattering is feeling significant to individuals in the group. That's why what we've seen in terms of the belonging and inclusion interventions and initiatives that haven't worked is they tend to theoretically focus on belonging as making sure people feel welcomed, making sure groups generally feel connected.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
Inclusion initiatives have made sure people have a seat at the table and can take an active role. But I think the evidence shows what those movements have missed is that people don't feel significant to the individuals in the group. And one reason why is that the individuals in the group don't have and haven't developed the interpersonal skills
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
to actually see, hear, value, and show the person across from them how they're needed. So you can feel like you belong in a group. You can feel like you're included in the group, and you can still feel that you don't matter to members of that group.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
I can come on this podcast, feel like I belong with you, but you could not see that I'm struggling, or you could not know my unique gifts, my strengths, and show me how they're needed. And so knowing the difference is vital because If you're doing a belonging intervention, you're focusing on making sure people feel generally connected and welcome.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
If you're doing an inclusion intervention, you're making sure people can play an active role. But if you're doing a mattering intervention, you're making sure people have the skills to make sure the next person they interact with feel seen, heard, valued, and needed. That's my perspective.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Zach Mercurio on How Leaders Can Help People Feel Seen | EP 610
And I like that because what is important about those interactions in which we see our significance is that those interactions give us the evidence of our significance. One of the ways they do that is it's called reflected appraisals. Reflected appraisals are the little components of evidence that are introduced to us that help build our beliefs about ourselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Tiffany Moon on How to Write Yourself a Prescription for Joy | EP 608
Belonging is like you're being picked for the team. Belonging is feeling welcomed, accepted, and connected into a group. Something like inclusion is being able to play in the game, being able to play an active role in the group. But mattering is feeling that the team wouldn't be complete without you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
5 Mental Health Habits That Anchor You in Uncertain Times w/ John R. Miles | EP 609
Belonging is like you're being picked for the team. Belonging is feeling welcomed, accepted, and connected into a group. Something like inclusion is being able to play in the game, being able to play an active role in the group. But mattering is feeling that the team wouldn't be complete without you. Mattering is feeling significant to individuals in the group.