Almost ten years ago, our CEO, Bob Chapman’s book, Everybody Matters was released. It is a documentation of the lessons Bob and Barry-Wehmiller have learned along our journey. Among the most important insights we gained: Everybody wants to know that who they are and what they do matters.
Mattering is a term that is getting more and more attention lately. A while back, you may remember episodes of our podcast that featured our friend Jennifer Wallace, who has written a book on mattering and children and separately, Professor Isaac Prilleltensky, who has done a lot of research on the subject. On his episode, Dr. Prilleltensky said that mattering consists of feeling valued and adding value.
On today’s podcast, we’re going to have a discussion about mattering with Zach Mercurio, a researcher, author, and speaker specializing in purposeful leadership, mattering, meaningful work, and positive organizational psychology. He has a new book titled: The Power of Mattering, How Leaders Can Create a Culture of Significance.
Barry-Wehmiller and Bob Chapman are featured in a chapter in Zach’s book, who made this observation based on his research that included BW: How people make meaning in their jobs inevitably affects how they make meaning in life.
It’s an observation that aligns alongside what we say at the top of the podcast: the way we lead impacts the way people live.
Zach and I talk about a number of mattering-related things on this episode. Including how mattering relates to recognition and celebration. That the skills of helping people feel like they matter can be taught. We talk about mattering as it relates to leadership. And we talk about how mattering can be a solution to the crisises of our time.
But we start out talking about how conversation about mattering has come to the forefront, specifically as people start to realize they don’t feel like they matter.
Transcript
Zach Mercurio: Well, this experience of mattering, right? A feeling significant to the individuals around you is much different than other feelings that we have named in the past pretty explicitly. For example, belonging is feeling welcomed, accepted and connected to a group.
I have two elementary school kids, so recess drama is top of mind. So, I'll give a recess example. Belonging is like being picked for the team. It's feeling connected. It's feeling welcomed. We've heard a lot about belonging.
But I can feel like I belong in a group, but not feel significant to members of that group, not feel seen, heard and valued by individuals in that group. Now inclusion is like being asked to play in the game. So, you got picked for the team, but inclusion is being asked to play in the game. It's being invited and able to take an equal, active role in a group. But again, I can feel included and not feel like you notice that I have a parent in the hospital, and I'm a caretaker or not have, you see, a unique gift or strength that I bring to the table.
So, you know, I can feel like I'm included and not feel like I matter. And then mattering is feeling like the team wouldn't be complete without you. So, mattering is feeling significant to individuals in the group and what it requires is it requires interpersonal skills.
It requires someone else to show us how we matter. We can come to believe that we matter on our own, but it takes someone else to show us how we matter.
How we're significant. And so, I think that when I say that it's naming something, it's naming that experience. I have a friend who just moved abroad, and I asked her how it was going, and she says great. You know, I'm like in this club. We play soccer, or football, soccer after work.
I get invited to all these parties. I have a lot of friends, but I feel completely invisible.
And that's that experience of feeling that you don't matter. And that's what data is showing is that our loneliness epidemic, our disengagement crisis is really the result of these feelings of not mattering versus feelings of isolation or not being around people. It's not feeling that we are significant to the people around us.
Brent Stewart: For something to be named for people who didn't know what it was, that they were feeling or not feeling as the case may be. What are the factors that have created this moment where there is this mattering deficit and it's a moment where people need or people are feeling validated when they hear that named.
Zach: Well, there's a couple of things. I mean, one, I think that we've been able to use these to communicate with one another for 25 years now. So, 25 years of being able to evade the social situations that actually build in us the skills to see, hear, value and show the person across from us how they're needed.
Brent: For our audio listeners, you held up your phone.
Zach: I held up my phone. I'm sorry. Yes. So, think about it. If you give me some good news, you know, good news on a project, let's use a work example. I can now go on some platform, whether it's the 38 million users on Slack now, whether it's a Microsoft Teams chat, whether it's my phone, whether it's some kudos platform, I can go online and give you like a thumbs up emoji and say, hey, great job, Brent. Like, I don't have to sit with you anymore and actually say, hey, Brent, I've noticed that over the last five years you've been persevering on this. You've sacrificed a lot for this.
I saw that in you. I'm really proud of you, right? That's a skill. Or say you give me some bad news via text message. I can just give you like a sad-faced emoji. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Let's catch up next week. I don't actually have to sit with you in real time and seek understanding.
And demonstrate compassion for you. And so, what's been happening is the more we've been using these short digital transactions with one another, something nefarious has happened beneath the surface. We've actually lost these social repetitions that build in us the skills to see hear, value and need others.
And so, the less we use a skill, the less proficient we get at it. And I think that's one reason that we're here right now. The other reason is that our attention is fracked in so many different places. I could be on a meeting with you and be solving 13 other problems on a variety of other apps that are pinging me.
Right? So, you know, Gloria Mark, she's a psychologist. She found that our ability to pay attention, the span in which we can pay attention to the one thing about 10 years ago was about 2 1/2 minutes. She replicated these studies recently, a couple years ago, and it's about 43 seconds now.
So, our ability to pay attention to the person across from us is withering. And I would say this, I would say that we've called these things soft for the last 50 years, soft skills, right? There was a military psychologist that was trying to understand high-performing military teams.
And he couldn't name the skills that were separating these high performing teams from the rest because they weren't tactical. They weren't operational. They weren't equipment related. They were things like making sure my people feel heard. They feel connected to a bigger purpose. They feel seen by me. I'm showing compassion. I'm supporting them. And so, he called them soft. And anytime we call something soft or simple, we're susceptible to an overconfidence bias. So, we think we're better at it than we are, and we approach it with less rigor. So, I think all of these things are conspiring for this moment where you see, you know, Work Human finding that 30 percent of people feel quote unquote, ‘invisible in work.’
Gallup can release data showing that our engagement rates are the lowest they've been in 10 years, despite employee engagement services becoming a $1 billion industry, well-being programs, DEI programs. And if you look at a key data point there, just 39 percent of people in that survey strongly agreed someone cared for them as a person.
Just 30 percent strongly agreed that someone saw and invested in their unique potential. So, this is not a disengagement crisis. It's a mattering deficit, and I think it comes from a lack of development of these human skills.
And that are withering and our inability to pay attention to the people across from us. But the good news is we can relearn them. We can relearn these skills.
Brent: Well, you work in education. One of the things that you do, one of the many things you do, you do some teaching and work in education. Why don't you think these skills are taught? Why are they just seen as soft skills?
Zach: We're very good at teaching people what to do as human beings, especially in our educational system. We're not very good at teaching people how to be a human being. And what I mean by that is our curriculum tends to teach people what to acquire and achieve. You know, we educate people for success to quote, unquote, ‘get a job.’
To get some certain starting salary, and we tend to have people develop the form of their life. What are they going to do before they understand their function? What is the impact they make on other people?
What are the strengths they have? What does it mean to be human? And you know, if you look at like how we develop careers, if you were to think of a building, right, an architectural design, form follows function. We need to understand why the why the person is, you know, what makes them tick, what their strengths are before we form the career that they have. But in our educational system, we tend to do it backwards. We design backwards. We help people determine the form of their life, their job, their career, what they should do, what they should get for what they do, without helping them understand why they're doing it, helping them understand what their strengths are, helping them understand how to be a person with other people. There's research that shows that less than 2 percent of the world gets formal education on how to listen well.
Now this was OK. This was OK 30-40 years ago when a lot of people got, well, some people got these skills through families, through community groups, through these analog experiences, one another. But if you layer that on to what I just talked about, how these skills, we're losing the opportunity to see, hear, value one another and build those skills and you layer onto that. We're educating people more on what to do, how to do it versus why they are and how to be a person.
You get people who are quote unquote, ‘labeled by their people who follow them’ as quote unquote, ‘uncaring leaders.’ I don't think anybody like wakes up and says I want to be an uncaring leader today. I think a lot of people are in leadership positions, and they're not trained on these essential human skills.
Brent: And then we don't realize how serious that is, what the downhill effect of that is. I mean, that's, you know, one thing with this podcast starts with this line and something that Bob says a lot. The way we lead impacts the way people live.
And when leaders don't have the skills to help people know that they matter, then there's a downhill effect of all of that. What was your, I guess it wouldn't be your mattering moment, but when did this become something that you thought needed to be explored and wanted to do research on?
Zach: Well, I mean, it really started for me when I was a PhD student. I was looking for a research interest, and I was in and out of academic buildings a lot. And the group of people that I interacted with the most were the custodians, the people that made sure the building like functioned for everyone else.
And I remember I passed a custodian that I had come to know, and she asked me, you know, what are you doing today? And I was on my way to this professional development training, and it was free. It was offered by the university. Any employee could go.
And it was a leadership development training. And I said I was going to this free training. And she said, how did you hear about it? And I said, well, you know, I got an e-mail, and she just looked destroyed and deflated. And she goes, I've been here for a decade, and no one's ever shown me how to get my e-mail up and running.
And so, what I did was I decided to embed myself with this group of janitors for a year and a half, and this was going to be my study. I was trying to understand what made work meaningful for these cleaners who are often in invisible jobs. But the absence of their work would be incredibly visible. They make everything happen.
And so, we cleaned with them. We sat in break groups with them. We interviewed them. And we asked them when they most felt like their work was meaningful. And all of them, when they thought of the moment, they thought of small moments in which someone saw them as a person.
One person said to me, in 20 years, the moment where I most felt that my work mattered was when a student came into one of the buildings, looked me in the eye and said, hey Susan, it's good to see you today. And she remembered that line, like being called her name, being looked in the eye.
And it was these small moments of mattering, and they could be incredibly powerful. I write about one custodian named Jane, who was near homelessness before she got this job as a custodian.
And all her friends said, “Why couldn't you have done something more with your life? You know, why are you just a janitor?” And she internalized that. For the first month on the job, she said she would just go in. She would clock in. She would clock out. Nothing more. She was miserable. She had a lot of negative internal narrative.
And she said one supervisor noticed that she was struggling, and he brought her into this break room, and he gave her this dictionary and he said, I want you to read the definition of the word custodian, Jane. Now, custodian was defined as a person responsible for a building and everyone in it.
And she goes, I want you to read that to me again. Just read it out loud. And he said, that's who you are. Every one of these children, every one of these kids here is someone's kid that they love, and they're trusting us.
We're trusting us to care for them, and they need you. And she said it was the first moment in her life that someone made her feel worthy.
And she's been at the university for over 30 years. She's one of the most sought-after custodians. And those moments, what we've come to call moments of mattering, very small moments in which someone notices us, like that supervisor noticed that she was struggling, affirms us, shows us how our uniqueness makes a unique difference.
He's showed her that you are needed here, and remind us that we're essential. Those moments we've found can alter people's careers, trajectories, days. And like you said, how people make meaning in work affects how they make meaning in life.
When people feel that they matter in work, they act like they matter in life, and that's that cascading effect. But what's powerful is it happens in moments, very small interactions in which people feel seen, heard, valued and needed.
Brent: You know, in the middle of what you were saying there, you echoed Bob's wedding story. You know, where he was at the wedding of a friend's children, and he realized that everyone is someone's precious child. And it's the turning of that lens that's sometimes hard for leaders to do.
Why do you think that's the case often in workplaces that it's hard for people to see people that way?
Zach: I have a lot of empathy for leaders who, especially leaders of large teams whose worth has been hinged on things like a quarterly earnings report or some lagging indicator. I think it's very difficult for human beings to, when they're measured by, when they're judged by lagging indicators like profit or performance or productivity to separate their worth from that. So, if your worth is tied to that as a leader, it becomes very easy to see everything else as something that needs to be manipulated to get that, so you can survive.
So, it's human nature in that way. But where I see the opportunity is that when you, when you think of those things like productivity, profit, any financial metric and you really think like, which one of those is not mediated through a human being, living a life as vivid and complex and as important as your own? When you ask that question to somebody, which of these lagging indicators that you care about is not mediated through a human being? All of a sudden you get this realization.
All of a sudden the lagging indicator becomes a byproduct of a human. And then you think, well, what's the ideal state of that human being who's producing these lagging indicators, and people will say things like motivated. They feel like they're significant. They feel like their work matters. And then you start bringing people away from this lagging indicator and to the leading indicator, right? Those are all effects. You know, people are always the cause, but I think you have to create space for leaders to detach their worth from those things, to start seeing those things as byproducts of human beings, and then starting to think about the human as the leading indicator.
And it takes some effort to not think in the short term. You know, like it's like the leader who tries to get innovation by telling their people to be more innovative instead of creating psychological safety, so people can experiment, take risks and learn, right, first. It's like the leader who says, oh, why are my people disengaged, when they haven't shown them exactly how they and what they're doing matters every day. So, I think once people can see that, it becomes easier. But I think we're obsessed with these lagging indicators, and I think it's very hard for leaders who are in a system. It's very hard for leaders to be morally good in a system that incentivizes them not to be.
Brent: Well, and that's what, basically you said, you know, it's hard for leaders to not see people as functions for their success, which was not necessarily another one of Bob's revelations, but another one of the things that he learned. He never learned that in business school, you know. That he always learned that people were means to an end, you know. You have accountants, You have engineers. You have custodians. And they do the thing. They're not necessarily people. They just do a thing. And you made another good point, too, that when you are judged by financial metrics, it's really hard to judge or it's really hard to consider the deeper parts of people when you need those function to achieve those goals.
Zach: Yeah. And that's why I think it's a broader systems perspective because the environment either makes behaviors possible or makes behaviors impossible or makes them harder, right? So, the good news, though, is that, you know, when we look at what creates these moments of mattering, it happens in very small interactions.
And you don't need your organization's permission or approval to show up in your next interaction and make the choice to care. That's what's pretty beautiful about the opportunity of leadership. Leadership is interactions. Leadership is relationships.
And there's also some freedom. And once you realize as a leader, yes, you may be accountable to these lagging indicators, but you can make the choice of how you show up in every interaction. You may not have positional power in an organization, but you always have interactional power.
And some of the leaders that have done this, who cultivate matter and tend to take captive each interaction and make sure that they can leave that person better than they found them by helping them feel seen and heard and valued and needed.
But it's important not to ignore the larger system. You know, that often incentivizes leaders to do the opposite of what you and I are talking about, to produce at all costs, to perform at all costs. Obviously, you and I know that the costs over time compound when you don't focus on the human first. But human beings are the leading indicator of everything else an organization says they want, and you cannot extract the human energy needed to perform those things and expect to be a sustainable organization in the long term.
Brent: Well, there's a section of your book called “Why Mattering Matters,” and let's talk about that for a second. For those who might be result-oriented, why does mattering matter in an organization?
Zach: Yeah, well, there's two sides of mattering. And I think, have you you've talked, talked to Isaac Prilleltensky here?
Brent: Yeah, yeah. He’s been on the podcast.
Zach: So. Isaac was a, you know, helped me on my book a lot. And he really conceptualized mattering as coming from two different areas: feeling valued but then knowing how you add value. And when I asked him, I said which one comes first? You know, I kind of knew based on my research, but I wanted him to say, and he says feeling valued. It's very difficult for someone to add value until they feel valued. It's very difficult for a human being to care until they feel cared for.
If you want anything to matter to someone, they first have to believe that they matter to you. Nothing matters to someone who doesn't first believe that they matter. It's very difficult for anything to matter to someone who doesn't first believe that they matter. So, when people feel valued, when you see them, when you hear them, when you see them as someone's precious child, sibling, friend, someone living a life as vivid and complex as your own, they develop two beliefs that give them the confidence needed to add value: self-esteem, which is the belief that I'm worthy, and self-efficacy, which is the belief that I'm capable. Self-esteem and self-efficacy have been found to be the two most significant drivers of individual performance.
I have to believe that I'm worthy. I have to believe that I'm capable. But to believe those two things, I have to believe that I matter to somebody. And when I have the confidence needed to add value, I see how I'm contributing. And the more I see the evidence of my significance, the more I feel valued. And this is the virtuous cycle we get when we cultivate mattering for people.
And I think it's important to think about it in the sense of, for so long the way we've operated in business is that people should be valued once they add value.
So we should, and it's often very subliminal, but people should be valued once they add value. So, we have high potential employees. We have growth plans for people who have identified as being high performers. The high performers get awards, and they get recognition. But it's important to understand psychologically, people first need to be valued to add value.
And I think that that’s why, you know, the original title of my book was called Mattering Comes First. And the reason why was because the first thing we do when we open our eyes, actually, as human beings, you and I and everybody listening is we have a reflex where we we reach out our arms in a hugging motion. This is before we search for food. It's called our grasp reflex, and we literally grasp to be significant to somebody, to hold on to somebody. We search to matter to someone else before we search for food. It's the first thing we do.
In fact, think about this. No one would be here right now, listening, if at some point we all hadn't mattered enough to another human being to keep us alive.
So, to matter to another person is first and foremost survival instinct. And knowing that as a leader, that that instinct, everybody was born with that instinct and it turns into this frantic attempt to feel seen, heard, valued and needed that persists throughout our life.
And that when we can meet that most basic need, when people feel that they matter, they act like they matter. And that's why mattering is linked to performance. That's why mattering is linked to motivation. That's why mattering is linked to engagement. It's actually, it's common sense.
The problem is, and the reason why there's a book on it, multiple books on it, I guess, is that it's not common practice for all the reasons we talked about at the beginning.
Brent: Yeah, yeah. There's one of the lines that I wrote down when I was going through your book and looking at some of the articles that you've been featured in and written, and you said it just a bit ago, was to someone who doesn't believe they matter, it's hard for anything to matter. And for some reason that just really hit me a lot because I think we leave that out of the discussion a lot when we talk about mattering. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
Zach: Yeah, there's two things that happen when we feel that we don't matter. I mean, because mattering is a survival instinct, if you think about it like that, because mattering is a survival instinct, just like when any other instinct is violated, our bodies and our minds shut down.
There's two things that happen: We either withdraw, so we isolate. We stay silent. We withhold. We withhold our energy because, you know, to do anything on any given day, we must believe that our lives are worthy of our unrelenting energy. We quiet quit. You know, quiet quitting, for example, is this trend. But it's really the inevitable withdrawal response to people who feel insignificant.
So. we lose the energy. We lose the will to carry on. If we don't feel that we matter, why bother? That's what I hear a lot from people who don't feel that they matter, when I ask them about what experiences of not mattering feel like. They say things like, why do I bother? Why does it matter?
There were studies done on a Reddit sub forum on people who are considering self-harm, people who are in severe emotional distress, and one of the most common lines was, ‘nobody would miss me if I was gone.’
And I think that that's really important because we withdraw or we act out in desperation for the attention we're not getting, gossip, blaming, complaining. All of these things are usually acts of desperation to get the attention and the validation that we're not getting. We scratch and claw for it, so mattering to matter is fundamental to any positive human behavior, and when we don't have that, it's very difficult to care. Think about the last time you were motivated and energized to do something when you felt like you or it didn't matter.
Think about the last time you were committed to someone else when they didn't care for you. And it's obvious, like there's nothing that drains our energy faster than feeling insignificant. And that's why researchers, some amazing researchers, have found that in jobs like healthcare or education, in which burnout rates are much higher, small moments in which people feel significant are a huge protective factor against burnout because you can have a job that matters but not experience mattering in your job. And that lack of experiencing mattering, again to other people, can drain our energy, drain the resources we need to get through life and work.
Brent: Yeah, you know, I know that you do a lot of speaking, and you do a lot of work with companies. When you're talking about these things with people who may not have realized that this is an issue in their leadership, what's usually the aha moment for them? What turns it around for them when they when it finally clicks and they're like, oh man, I really need to think differently.
Zach: I had a recent one. This is actually not. I was working with a large investment bank, actually recently, a week ago, and there was an aha moment that I'll tell you about. And I asked everybody to write down what they thought the first interaction reaction would be of their employees if they called them out of, if they called them out of the blue during the day with no advanced warning. And 80 percent of the audience said fear.
And I said, tell me one relationship, one human relationship in which this would be healthy. And the group was like, oh. They got it. And one of the reasons why they got it was that they understood that the majority of their interactions had been transactional. They had spent so much time, so much time, with their people asking them for status updates, asking them for things from them instead of investing in them as people, really slowing down and checking in on how they are.
And so that was one for me. I mean, that's a good litmus test for everybody. If you called an employee out of the blue, and they saw your name on their phone, what would their initial reaction be? And if it's fear, that is a major signal that there is a relationship issue. But another one is when I ask them to think about someone in their life, at work, who most help them feel that they matter and have them really think about what that person did and what skills that they used.
And when they realize that no one in these groups, no one has ever told me, we've interviewed thousands of people. No one's ever said I really felt that my I mattered when my manager gave me more money. I really felt significant when I got Employee of the Month award. I really felt that I was important and seen and valued when I got promoted.
People always talk about small interactions. Little things, little things like after a meeting, someone says, hey, I really noticed that you were energized about that project. Let's talk more about that, how we can get you to do more of that or when somebody wasn't in a meeting having a leader say to them, we really missed you yesterday in that meeting. I wrote down some things I could use your perspective on, right? Feeling missed. And once they realize it's these small interactions that matter, and not these big moments as a leader, people really start to think about what those interactions look like from their end and what they're doing for the people around you. Because then I often ask how many of you are doing the things that you talked about on a daily basis for your people. And oftentimes, you know, people can't answer the question, or I'll ask, think about someone you rely on, in your work, on your team. Now, think about the last time you explicitly told them, right? And that shows them the gap between this common-sense idea, I know my people matter with the gap in the practicing it. So ,I mean two things like reflecting on your relationships, reflecting on whether they're transactional or transformational, and then really thinking about when you must feel that you matter and what others do for you and asking the questions, am I doing it for my people?
Brent: There's one thing that I was reading in the book, and I think it's pretty important for you to kind of explain the differences between these things. But you talk a little bit about the difference between recognition, appreciation and affirmation.
Let's talk about why. Let's talk about that and why it's important to recognize the differences in all those things.
Zach: Yes. So, recognition is showing gratitude for what someone does. Like it's elevating someone's work and efforts. Appreciation is generally showing gratitude for who someone is. Like that's why the Employee Appreciation Day is you're appreciating the general presence of somebody. It's general gratitude, but affirmation is showing somebody the specific evidence of their specific impact. This is something that we found in our interviews, that it wasn't recognition, it wasn't appreciation that people were sensing when they felt that they matter. It was that someone could name their unique gifts, could name their strengths, could name the impact they have, could name their perspective, could name the wisdom that they brought. And then they showed them how they made some downstream impact on something else. And the reason why we called it affirmation is cause the Latin root word affirmare means to firm up or make stronger.
And so, when someone shows the evidence, the real evidence of your significance, they're actually making your beliefs in your significance stronger. So, like, for example, Jane's supervisor who showed her the indisputable evidence in the form of the dictionary definition, right? That she mattered. That is affirmation. It's not just saying we're glad you're here. It's saying you're specifically needed here, and you specifically add value here because you're here. I had a, I worked with, an example of affirmation in action, one side of it showing people the difference that they make very clearly, is I had a National Park Service facilities maintenance worker that I worked with. He had like the highest morale, lowest turnover for all the maintenance workers in his parks in the West. And I wanted to know what he did because this is a very difficult occupation, often in very remote, inhospitable locations, often doing really difficult work in very difficult environments, and it was very hard to keep people. And he had one practice. On Friday mornings, he would send an e-mail, and the title of the e-mail, the subject line was ‘Look What You Did.’
But what he would do is over the course of the week, he would go and take pictures of visitors walking over a bridge his crew repaired, or take a picture of a shorter line for a bathroom because they repaired something in another bathroom and opened it up, or a group of visitors using a trail. And he would just send this e-mail. Look what you did.
And all he would do is attach the photos. And what I loved about that is his team loved it because he showed them the indisputable evidence of their impact. There's none of his team members, he told me, Zach, none of my team members can say to me, I don't really matter. He goes, no, I have photographic evidence that you matter. But that's what affirmation really is, is giving people the indisputable evidence of their significance. You can't do that through general appreciation. You can't do that through general recognition. You can only do that through actually showing somebody.
Brent: Yeah, we teach it here at Barry-Wehmiller as recognition and celebration. So, recognizing people for their gifts, yeah, and then celebrating for who they are.
Zach: Yeah. Oh, they're important. No. Yeah. Yep. So, I love that. I love celebrating gifts. I mean, that's a form of affirmation, like when you're celebrating specific gifts. I think the key point is that I don't really care what you call it, but as long as it's specific, right?
And it's, you know, humans have the inherent need to feel unique and to see their uniqueness observed in others. And as long as it's tied to some impact like this, this is why and how you matter. Like I said, like this is why just doing the self-work. People always say to me, Zach, like isn't it enough for me to cultivate my own sense of worth, my own sense of mattering? And I say, yeah, you can, you can come to believe that you matter, but it takes other people to show you how.
Brent: You know, one of the things that I thought was really interesting that you've done in the book is that you connected mattering to kind of what's being called the loneliness epidemic out in the world right now. Talk about how those things are connected, if you would, and how one relates to the other.
Zach: That's a great question. So, you know, I've mentioned that my friend who moved abroad and I asked her, you know, how's it going? And she said some version of, you know, I'm in a room full of people that, you know, I'm friends with, but I feel completely invisible, right?
Loneliness is not the outcome of having too few social interactions. Loneliness is an outcome of feeling that you don't matter to the people around you.
So, the opposite of loneliness isn't having more people around you. The opposite of loneliness is feeling significant to the people around you. For example, a researcher, Alexander Danvers, studied what predicts loneliness, and he found it's not the quantity of connections, it's the quality of connections. And what makes a quality connection? Researchers call it companionate love. Not passionate love, but companionate love, experiencing the behaviors of attention, of care, of compassion. And as you're connecting the dots, as a listener right now, it's about feeling significant, feeling that we matter. We are more connected than ever. The average U.S. adult sends 30 to 40 text-based messages to peers or colleagues at work a day. We are on more platforms than ever. We're in more meetings than ever. Our time spent in meetings has nearly tripled since 2020. This typically happens when organizations hear the word loneliness or disconnection. They always say connect more.
But the solution? The solution isn't to connect more. The solution is to rebuild and commit to the skills to connect better.
So, what we're really seeing is not again, it's not a loneliness epidemic. It's a mattering deficit. People have social contact. People are more connected than ever. The problem is they don't feel seen, heard, valued and needed in those connections. And that's why it's also not just incumbent upon the individual who's lonely to heal their own loneliness.
If you look at a lot of the books and the articles on loneliness, it's connect more, like reach out, put yourself out there, engage in your community, join a community group.
It is very hard for someone to connect more if they don't first believe they're worthy of connecting. It's very hard for people to put themselves out there if they don't believe they're important or significant. And that's why what's liberating about that, I think, is that that means that we all can do something about the loneliness epidemic in our next interaction, by committing to noticing people. When you go to the grocery store and you're checking out, looking the clerk in the eye and saying their name and then saying, hey, you know, I know life is really hard, just in general, but I just want to let you know I'm glad you're here for me today, like, I'm glad you're here right now, and I love seeing you here. Just those little things that can end that person's loneliness in that moment, more so than telling that person to go connect, join a club, whatever. Those things are important, but it's the quality of connection that matters, and we're all responsible for that with each other. And that's why one of the findings that I love that we found was how powerful the microinteraction is, in terms of someone's sense of mattering, because those are accessible all the time. You know, when you're I was just having this moment where I was driving to a meeting and there was a construction site and you know the construction, it was a one lane road, and the person holding the sign. And nobody likes that person. Everybody's like, oh, that person's slowing me down, right? And you know what I'm talking about. But that person's like, that's their job for eight hours. He's standing in this heat, and I rolled down my window and I just said to him, I was like, hey, I just, I don't like being stopped here, but I want to thank you for what you're doing because, you know, if you weren't here, all of these people would be unsafe getting in car accidents. So, I just want to thank you for that. And I said it to him really, like, honestly like that. Biggest smile, right? Just like he was almost startled to be seen. So, these small moments matter.
Brent: And you know, that's why, you know, that's why this podcast exists. That's why Everybody Matters was written. That's why your book was written, is that this message is so important and we see, you know, the workplace touches so many people's lives every day. It's so much a part of people's lives. So, helping people feel like they matter in the workplace extends so much further out because it's those micro instances that you were talking about.
If you're getting those at work too, then you can go home and feel empowered to do that at home or feel capable of doing that at home. It's kind of the power of, well, it's like we said before, the way we lead impacts the way people live. And this just all kind of rolls out. What are you hoping to see? What impact are you hoping to see from your book and as you're talking about this message?
Zach: Like I said at the beginning, you know, when we can name something, we can do it. And I think too often we've left some of these skills to intuition, especially when it comes to leadership that, you know, we hire people, we promote them, we trust they'll just be a good person. But intuition doesn't scale very well across communities, you know, practices, skills and habits scale. And oftentimes what I've been finding is that some of what we've been able to name in terms of the skills needed to do these things have not been named by people before. We can do things to help people feel significant by noticing them, affirming them, showing them how they're needed.
And even that question at the end of each day can be powerful. Did I show people how they're noticed, affirmed and needed today? In my next interaction, what am I doing to see this person, to hear this person, to affirm this person, to remind them that how I need them? That can go a long way. So, when being able to name that these are skills that we can relearn and that we can commit to.
But the second thing, and someone was like, if you could summarize your book in one sentence, how would you summarize it? And I'd say I'd summarize it in a question or a charge to everybody. I think the most powerful question right now we can ask anybody in any relationship in our lives is this, when you feel that you matter to me, what am I doing?
When you feel that you matter to me, what am I doing? And really sit and listen and be with that person and write down what they say and then do more of those things. I think that that's the best way to start if you don't want to read the book.
Ask that question of people, write down what they say, and do more of those things, and ask yourself, do I know how to do these things? Am I improving and crafting the skill to do these things?
And then the third thing I would say is to have people take their interactions back, have people take their interactional power back. And I think we mentioned this earlier, you don't need anyone's permission to make sure the next person you interact with today feels seen, heard, valued and needed by you.
And I believe that when people feel that they matter, they act like they matter. And I imagine a world in which everybody, every person, can you imagine if every person felt valued by the people around them every day and knew how they added value every single day and what our world would look like? I think it's a solution to the crises of our time.