Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Hosts Spencer Horn and Christian Napier discuss a better way to build and strengthen teams in any organization.
Christian
00:12 - 00:24
Well, happy Friday, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Teamwork, A Better Way. I'm Christian Apier, and I am joined by my incredible, incomparable co-host, Spencer Horn. Spencer, how you doing?
Spencer
00:25 - 00:35
I am fantastic. I'm so happy to be with you, Christian. Just bring a smile to my face. Had a great morning this morning.
00:35 - 00:52
Went out hiking, and it's been a while to get my body moving more. Well, it's a gorgeous day. I mean, it's a beautiful, beautiful spring day. So I can't think of a better thing to do on a very beautiful spring morning than go for a hike and experience nature.
Christian
00:53 - 01:03
You're much better than I am though. I got up and just tethered myself to my computer and started working. Well, I've been doing that way too much. That's why I had to escape.
Spencer
01:03 - 01:11
I don't blame you. I'm hopefully we'll get to do a little bit of something this weekend. I hope you do. I hope you do.
Christian
01:12 - 01:20
All right. Well, we can sit here and catch up and we probably should do that over some mullet at some point. Absolutely. Yes.
Christian
01:22 - 01:52
In the meantime, we have teed up an incredible show with an amazing, amazing guest. So Spencer, why don't you do the honors and introduce them to us? I am so excited, Christian, for our guest today. It's Dr. Ben Grainger, who is really the chief workplace psychologist at Qualtrics, a company just down the road here to Utahns and 19,000 companies around the world.
Spencer
01:52 - 02:30
amazing company, which we'll hear a little bit about, I'm sure, but he has spent over 15 years building, running, and optimizing experience management, XM, let's call that. These XM programs across hundreds of global organizations, including numerous Fortune 500 companies. Dr. Ben leverages original research to offer insights into macro workplace trends. As a matter of fact, I heard he just gave a big speech about that in Seattle and perceptions about AI, which you have no interest in at all.
Spencer
02:30 - 02:55
Absolutely none. And employee and customer experience and the future of how we work. So he's an internationally recognized thought leader and speaker and has keynoted at numerous international conferences and global industry events. Dr. Ben earned his BS in psychology from the University of Louisiana.
Christian
02:56 - 03:01
I love how they spell Go. You know how they do that in Louisiana? Like Go Tigers? Yeah.
Spencer
03:01 - 03:15
Yeah. G-E-A-U-X. And his PhD in industrial organizational psychology from The University of South Florida. So, uh, except for they not go tigers.
Spencer
03:15 - 03:21
He's going to correct you on that. It's the raging Cajuns, of course. Right. Dr. Ben.
Spencer
03:22 - 03:26
So we are so glad. Let me get you up on the screen. We are so glad to have you. Welcome.
Dr. Ben
03:29 - 03:34
Great. Thanks for having me, guys. I'm really looking forward to this. And go Cajuns, by the way.
Spencer
03:34 - 03:39
Right? That's it. Go Cajuns. Well, thank you for coming and your interest.
Spencer
03:39 - 03:50
I mean, there's so much to talk about. You know, this is a show about team performance. I know that's a big focus of Qualtrics. Your mission is really to bring humanity connection.
Spencer
03:50 - 04:17
empathy back to business, and you do that in many different ways. But specifically, your role within that organization, as the chief workplace psychologist, I'm just so anxious to listen to so much of what you have to say. But in your book, you've written a book, A Leader Worth Following, and we want to talk a lot about that. It's all focused on the science of earning trust and team performance.
Spencer
04:17 - 04:35
So, you know, a leader by definition is not someone that forces people to follow them. I mean, a leader is someone that people choose to follow. So what does it truly mean to be a leader worth following in today's workplace, Dr. Ben? I think you nailed it, Spencer.
Dr. Ben
04:36 - 05:07
It's, it's really, this was a big part of my learning journey. Naturally, as part of my job, I'm fascinated by what gets organizations to tick. And looking at it from the perspective of what drives employees to be engaged in their work, to want to work together, to what drives consumer behavior, what makes consumers happy, what are they expecting? And in my learning journey, it all goes back to leadership.
Dr. Ben
05:07 - 05:45
That, to me, is the common denominator between what drives good employee experience, what drives good consumer experience, and by the way, what drives sustained financial performance. Those things are highly related to each other, as you guys know. And it's all about honestly being a leader, leader showing up in a way that drives people to want to follow them versus being the leader that they just feel stuck with or they have to. the, the whole book and really my entire mission and in my role at Qualtrics is to look for those specific behaviors.
Spencer
05:45 - 06:27
So probably too many to unpack and in a opening point, but I think maybe throughout the conversation, we can unpack some specifics. But, but yeah, you nailed it, Spencer. It's really about the organizations who sustain performance, who sustain good, strong customer experience, who sustain good, strong employee experience, show up as leaders that others just say, yeah, I want to follow that person. Well, we know how important it is, Dr. Ben, and you just described how financials and people's really happiness and well-being all emanate from having a leader that is that great leader.
Spencer
06:27 - 06:58
But why then do so many, in your experience, so many leaders struggle to kind of earn that genuine followership? I think there's a couple of reasons and I'm sure you guys have some perspectives on this too, but. I think a lot of it is learned behavior. One of the things I have learned in my own learning journey is how important the environment is to directing our behavior, human behavior.
Dr. Ben
06:58 - 07:18
Humans adapt to their environments. And so let's take, let's say you have a, you know, really a truly good leader with good intentions, who's got the skill sets, and then you plop them into a culture where it's cutthroat. And What are they going to do? Well, most people are going to adapt.
Dr. Ben
07:18 - 07:36
And a lot of the adaptation is going to be very micro. It's going to happen gradually over time until one day, you know, you hear those stories of people who look in the mirror and they're like, I don't even recognize the person I see. I think there's a lot of truth to that. So it's not to say that all these leaders who, you know, who struggle with this are bad people.
Dr. Ben
07:36 - 08:04
I honestly don't believe that. I actually think it's a lot of people who are adapting to their environment. But the other part of it is, too, that the way the human brain works, and this has been a big part of my learning journey, too, of looking at, I'm a psychologist by education, as you noted, but I'm also fascinated by neuroscience and looking at, well, what's going on in the brain that directs what's happening, manifesting itself in our minds.
Dr. Ben
08:04 - 08:32
And then I'm also a student of evolutionary psychology. So I find it really fascinating to look back in time and the conditions under which that incredible organic machine in between our ears, how, what condition shaped the way it operates. And so unfortunately, and fortunately is both good and bad. The way that our brains work is a lot of times it responds automatically to cues in the environment.
Dr. Ben
08:32 - 09:04
And sometimes those cues, especially during times of high stress, high change, which I think everybody's going through right now, we're more likely to default to our baser part of our brain. It's kind of on autopilot. And so I do think a lot of people that struggle with being that leader others want to follow, not just about the environment, but it's also kind of inherent to where the brain works. And what I'm really passionate about is helping, you know, both myself, because I need constant reminders of this.
Dr. Ben
09:05 - 09:25
But I think a lot of leaders out there need some practical guidance around, well, how do you override that more primitive part of your brain when you know you need to? and to be that leader that's worth following. And so that's a lot of what I cover in the book. So this is super fascinating for me.
Christian
09:25 - 10:24
I'm just saying right now, I'm really, really interested in this idea or notion of the wiring of the brain and being able to overcome how that wiring would normally react Because it parallels in a lot of the work that I do in technology. We look at large language models today, and they have wiring that prompts them to behave in certain ways. And sometimes that's amazing, and sometimes it's opposite of what the behavior is that we're looking to achieve. Coming back to your point about rewiring our default behavior, it sounds to me like probably one of the first things that a person needs to be able to overcome that is awareness.
Christian
10:25 - 10:55
How do I know that I need to overcome my default programming? Because a lot of people, we don't even know what we're doing. We're just doing the thing. So I'm curious, Dr. Ben, in your experience, how do you work with people, with organizations to help them recognize what the default wiring is doing so that they can then learn to overcome it?
Dr. Ben
10:56 - 11:42
I love that Tia, love the connection to the technology too, because I think you're exactly right. To start maybe a little further back, I find it really helpful the way that, you know, Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues, you know, Amos Traversky is his famous colleague that he did so much work on on prospect theory. But one of the things that Kahneman talks a lot about or talked a lot about, you know, rest his soul, is that the brain, or I should say the difference between the brain and the mind, let's start there. Brain, of course, that physical structure made of matter sitting in our head and our skull.
Dr. Ben
11:43 - 12:08
The mind is in corporal. It doesn't, it's not referring to a physical structure, but it's sort of how our brain manifests or how we experience what our brain does. Our minds, we imagine, we think, we we talk, we listen, those are capabilities. And so we often talk about the brain and the mind, you know, the brain is to neuroscience as the mind is to psychology, I think is a good way to put it.
Dr. Ben
12:09 - 12:33
And so what essentially we know about the physical structure of the brain is that there's obviously different regions. We all know that now, but it's pretty interesting. Like if you just go back a hundred years, that wasn't, you know, or 150 years, that's not how people viewed the brain. that had these specific regions with specific neurons that were designed for certain purposes.
Dr. Ben
12:34 - 12:48
But now we know that. And now we know that there's a part of the brain that regulates emotion. There's a part of the brain, a physical part of the brain that helps us to talk, helps us to listen, helps us to imagine, processes emotions, directs our personality. We now know that.
Dr. Ben
12:48 - 13:04
Well, that also correlates with how our minds work. And that's where things get really interesting. And it kind of goes to what you're saying is how do you rewire that? Or how do you identify those moments when I know I need to like, OK, I need to override?
Dr. Ben
13:04 - 13:22
Well, the way Kahneman describes it is there's two systems of the mind. There's the what they call the reflective system, or System 1. That's kind of our base model. That's like V1 of the car, the engine, basically.
Dr. Ben
13:23 - 13:34
It's the thing that controls our breathing. Now, we don't have to consciously think about taking 20,000 breaths. We don't have to consciously think about making our heartbeat. That happens automatically.
Dr. Ben
13:35 - 13:57
So that's taken care of by the baser part of our brain. The baser part of our brain, that system one, that automatic system, responds to cues in the environment. Let's say you go into a business meeting and you see somebody with clenched fists. Well, your unconscious brain is going to start firing danger, alert, That's evolutionary.
Dr. Ben
13:58 - 14:14
Well, if somebody's hands are closed, something could be in there that you can't see. There's no transparency there. Is it a weapon? So our brains automatically start to assign value to that or start to create a story about that.
Dr. Ben
14:14 - 14:49
So that's, I think, one of the things you said, Christian, is so important is the first step is being aware of what our minds are likely to do. And so a couple of things that I think are really important that I remind leaders is, one, when you meet somebody for the first time, or you're early in your, your relationship, your mind is going to automatically start to build the first impression. And we all sort of know that from our personal experience. But that first impression is based on a very, very, very limited set of factors.
Spencer
14:50 - 15:06
So that's kind of our automatic unconscious brain building a story about survival. It's a survival mechanism. Exactly. And it's important to remember, That emerged for a very good reason, right?
Dr. Ben
15:06 - 15:20
It helped our ancestors survive, to your point, Spencer. But in those moments, those are the times when we need to remind ourselves, that's what my brain's going to do naturally. Don't beat yourself up over that. That's what your brain's supposed to do.
Dr. Ben
15:21 - 15:36
But also, what I tell leaders, don't believe the first story that emerges in your mind about why somebody did something, or why somebody said something out of character, or why somebody made a mistake. You're going to create a story. That's going to happen. Don't believe it.
Dr. Ben
15:37 - 15:48
You can hold it in your mind and not believe it. And in fact, I think that's a sign of great wisdom. Because that story might be connected to another story that has nothing to do with this current story. Precisely.
Dr. Ben
15:49 - 16:06
And again, to quote Kahneman, I mean, obviously I'm a huge fan, but he talks about the, he uses this line. I can't even remember the acronym. It's funny because the words are easier to remember than the acronym, but it's what you see is all there is. is sort of how our brain operates by default.
Dr. Ben
16:07 - 16:27
And so we create that story about somebody or something, and it's based on everything that we can see and have experienced, not on what's actually objectively happening. Not on reality, exactly. That's right. Man, I love how you made that so clear and simple.
Spencer
16:27 - 16:58
And I want to go back to my earlier question, and your response was, to me was bang on, the importance of the environment. It's not everything, but the environment is huge. So I think it was the late Harvard psychologist David McClellan said that organizational results in his experiments, he could tie one-third of financial results to just the climate alone. and fascinating research.
Spencer
16:59 - 17:26
But I want to apply that to what you said about the environment impacting us. So often we think it's our thoughts that, you know, we create our environment by the thoughts that we have. But so often the environment, we even know the music we listen to, the clothes that we wear. It's a psychosomatic experience that we have interacting with our environment that impacts our thoughts about how we, show up.
Spencer
17:28 - 18:06
And so just think about walking into a stressful environment. We've all felt it. So if you walk into that stressful environment, you're immediately potentially hijacked and are literally thinking with what you called your baser brain or what I call it, you become stupid because you're thinking with your amygdala, your reactionary brain instead of your thinking brain, right? And so we're basically, our higher functions are automatically being pushed down and we're not thinking with our highest functioning abilities.
Spencer
18:07 - 18:32
And so we're in that stress, that environment is causing us to behave in ways that are supposedly supposed to help us survive, but in many cases that are contrary to our ability to lead people, to motivate people. And I love that you brought that up, I'm monologuing here because I'm just excited about that. And I'd love to hear anything else that you have in your experience about that. I love your take there.
Dr. Ben
18:32 - 18:47
And might I also say, huge fan of Dave McClelland over here. A lot of people remember Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Get me Dave McClelland's Theory of Motivation all day, every day. Affiliation, achievement, and power.
Spencer
18:48 - 18:58
That's where it's at right there. Eat those three meats, you're cooking with gas. Cooking with gas, yeah. Well, and then that's great for a crawfish boil.
Speaker 1
18:58 - 19:03
You got some of those, right? That's right. Which I heard you just had recently. We did.
Dr. Ben
19:03 - 19:39
We had our very first crawfish boil this spring and, you know, knock on wood, we're going to have another one tomorrow for my wife's birthday. But back to what you were saying, Spencer, the there's a great line in an organizational change book I ran across recently, actually cited in my in my book, because I just thought it was so powerful by the organizational change expert Hillary Scarlett. And she points out that the our brains aren't wired for 21st century living. They still think they're out on the savanna.
Dr. Ben
19:39 - 20:10
And I think that's just such a powerful point of reminding ourselves that our brains are working precisely the way that they were designed. They helped our ancestors survive. But think about how relatively fast, I mean, Christian, you're knee-deep in this in your work, but like how relatively exponentially faster our environment is changing in front of our eyes compared to our ancestors. That's why I think it's so important.
Dr. Ben
20:10 - 20:35
There's so much we now know about the human brain, the human mind, and yet we don't practice it. It hasn't made itself into our mainstream understanding and actions. And I think it's high time we do that. Because while we talked about that system one, as you point out, Spencer, We also have this incredible prefrontal cortex, and that powers, that allows us to think in abstractions.
Dr. Ben
20:35 - 20:59
It allows us to literally travel into the future and plan what we're going to do. And one of the unfortunate realities of that system too, is that it's relatively lazy and it takes effort and it takes energy for us to engage it. And there's a very good evolutionary reason for that. Think about people 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 years ago.
Dr. Ben
20:59 - 21:18
One of the first things we have to acknowledge about the brain is that it's the most metabolically greedy organ in our body. So we often don't think of like, you know, you went for a hike this morning, Spencer, you burned a lot of calories, but we're burning a lot of calories right here. Cause we're thinking really good. I'm exhausted at the end of the day, just sitting in my desk.
Dr. Ben
21:19 - 21:32
There you go. So we burn so many calories, our brains, and what were our brains wired to do? Keep us alive and thriving. And food wasn't all that easy to come by when we were out on the savannah, so to speak.
Spencer
21:33 - 21:45
So now it's easy. I heard it's 25% of all energy is burned in our brains, basically, of our body. Is that about right? That, I don't know the exact percentage.
Spencer
21:45 - 22:00
8% of our body mass and 25% of all energy is what I heard. That, generally speaking, that jives with what I'm aware of. I don't know the exact percentage, but that sounds right. But it's disproportionately large.
Spencer
22:00 - 22:15
And so when you say we're lazy, we're basically doing our best to conserve that energy. Correct. Correct. And to your point, though, Spencer, we're now in an environment where we don't necessarily need to conserve that energy.
Dr. Ben
22:16 - 22:40
And so, because most of us that are fortunate enough to, if we need some energy, just go to the pantry or go to the cabinet, right, or go to the store. We're not in those conditions our brains were formed in. So that's the good news here is that we have to be aware, to your point, Christian, that that's what our brains are gonna do by default. But the good news is we can overcome that.
Dr. Ben
22:40 - 23:07
System two can override system one. And I like the way the great psychologist Viktor Frankl calls it. He said, one of the best things you can do is create space in between the stimulus and your response. Meaning, if you're a leader in a high-pressure environment, firstly, know that your brain is going to default to a gut reaction to create a story, and you're going to want to believe that story.
Dr. Ben
23:08 - 23:26
Create space. Don't just knee-jerk into a response. Pause, engage your higher-order part of your brain, And one really effective way I like to do that is literally to broaden your perspective. And I call that opening your peripheral vision.
Dr. Ben
23:26 - 23:56
And I steal that from Ram Charan's book, Talent Wins. But opening your peripheral vision to look at what's going on within a broader landscape. Um, really helps me to automatically engage another quick tip and I'll, I'll be quiet for a minute, but another quick tip is whenever that first story emerges in your mind, especially about somebody you're leading, you know, man, they're really abrasive today or wow, they, they really made a bad mistake.
Dr. Ben
23:57 - 24:11
Your brain's going to create a story as to why that's true. Force yourself to create three more stories as to why that happened. And the challenge here is not to get the right answer, because you have to realize you don't. You don't know.
Dr. Ben
24:11 - 24:38
There's so much you don't see about this scenario. But when you create three stories, you're necessarily engaging your higher part of your brain. And then taken together, you start to realize, you know, I really don't know much about this person at all, or the environment they're in, to your point. And actually, curiosity is one of the ways that is great to override system one, get you back into system two.
Spencer
24:38 - 24:48
But I know Christian's got a question. I just want to say something. Viktor Frankl said, between stimulus and response is the space that you talked about. And let's just define it.
Spencer
24:48 - 25:00
It's like hundreds of a second. I mean, it's not a lot of space. Yet in that space is where our freedom lies, freedom controlled. And that's Viktor Frankl.
Spencer
25:00 - 25:20
And he's like, that's where our freedom to, to not be controlled by our environment, by, by the tyranny of our circumstances, by the tyranny of the, of the nightly news, by the tyranny of, of social media. Yes. Great ad. Okay.
Christian
25:20 - 25:52
I'm coming back to my AI thing. and large language models specifically because I believe that in many respects, large language models are a reflection of humanity because they've been trained on human language, right? So the sum total of our own expression is embodied there and they reflect back to us certain things. One of the things that resonates with me that you said these various strategies.
Christian
25:53 - 26:34
And we talked about a little bit earlier about overcoming our default programming. LLMs, generally speaking, are instructed through their system prompts to be verbose. So they output a certain amount of text, depending on what modality, you use a hey, I want to use deep research, it may give me a 50 page report. But generally speaking, if I'm just having a chat conversation with chat GPT, or Gemini, or Claude or something like that, it'll give me, you know, roughly 400 words of text or something like this and its response.
Christian
26:36 - 26:50
And sometimes that's great. And sometimes I don't want it. So I created a gem. I use Gemini, but custom GPT, if you want, to give me very short responses when I need information very quickly.
Christian
26:50 - 27:15
Like if I'm having a conversation and I want to know, oh, what did this person say about this? I can ask it. And the instructions that I've given my gem is to give me no more than four bullets and a total of 50 words. And it works great, maybe the first time, maybe the second time.
Christian
27:17 - 27:35
But if I keep the conversation going, when it starts getting to the third, fourth, fifth, sixth time in this conversation, it starts violating my instruction. Because it wants to go back to its core behavior. So I start seeing more bullets. It's longer than 50 words.
Christian
27:36 - 27:50
And you're like, why is this happening? Right? But I feel like human beings, we're kind of like that too, where we know we got to do something better. We apply a fix.
Christian
27:50 - 28:20
It works once, twice, but over the course of time, it becomes difficult to say, oh, I to reject my kind of core programming, it becomes hard. And I start to slip into old behaviors. And one of the things that I liked about what you were talking about, especially under pressure, strategies like, hey, tell yourself three stories, is what happens in my work with, you know, large language models. If it starts going a little wonky, what do I do?
Christian
28:20 - 28:41
I close that conversation, I start a new one, it starts behaving properly again. So I have these, I have these ways of resetting and getting it to work properly. And a lot of that just becomes, the context becomes really big, it starts getting lost. Its instructions get lost because there's too much context to absorb.
Spencer
28:41 - 29:04
I get frustrated, Christian, and I leave and go to another AI and start over again. Yeah, exactly. So now I'm the one that's monologuing about AI, and I've gone on too long. But, but I'm curious, you know, aside from the things that you told us about, like, Hey, you know, share three stories, separate yourself, get into a new space, do these resets, these kinds of strategies are really important for us.
Spencer
29:04 - 29:18
Because if we don't Pull back if we don't reset ourselves. It becomes more and more difficult to reject our Our innate programming system what he did there. He's pretty smart. Isn't he?
Dr. Ben
29:18 - 29:47
Dr. Ben? I was clever on that Well, firstly that is fascinating. I actually did not know that about the behavior of large large language models but now that you said that I that resonates with my experience using them because I use them all the time and Uhm, one of the things that this makes me think about Christian is, and this was a big part of the book itself, was the the importance of body language.
Dr. Ben
29:48 - 30:08
And one of the things that I find so fascinating is there's this. Well, let me start with. I think most of us have this very comforting thought that our conscious brain and mind controls us. which is not true.
Dr. Ben
30:09 - 30:43
Very uncomfortable thought. Our unconscious brain does far more of our thinking than our conscious brain. And one of the things we now know is that there's this feedback loop between our brain and our body. So, you know, most of us operate under the assumption that if I'm confident here, then that's gonna flow naturally through my body language, which is true, but it's also true that it works the other way.
Spencer
30:44 - 31:05
So- Baby Cudi power pose, man. Exactly. Now you can overdo it like what I'm not a fan of, like you can that, you know, and you guys know this one cognitive dissonance, right? Are you or even when you were looking at it, I'm curious your perspective on this, Christian, especially is the the uncanny valley.
Dr. Ben
31:05 - 31:33
you know, that uncomfortable psychological state when we see somebody or see like an avatar or a machine that mimics humans, but doesn't quite get it right. And when it gets too close to humans, it turns people off. Very similar to that like icky feeling we get when we're meeting with somebody and we're like, something's just not right about that. Like I can't put my finger on it, but something's not right about that.
Dr. Ben
31:33 - 32:03
Well, oftentimes that's due to our unconscious brain telling us something that our conscious brain can't pick up on. And it might be somebody's going over the top trying to disguise their true emotions. But you know, so there is danger in that. But one of the hacks that I've learned, and I use this daily, and it really works very well, is, OK, when I'm in an environment, maybe I'm not feeling all that confident.
Dr. Ben
32:04 - 32:33
To your point, Spencer, put yourself in a confident position. Put your body in a position. You know, if I got my arms crossed or I'm shoulders down, my chin's down, well, That might be because I'm not confident or I feel submissive, but it's also going to tell my brain, you're not confident and you're submissive. Versus if you act as if, as a social worker tells me all the time, act as if you're confident, your mindset's going to come along.
Dr. Ben
32:33 - 32:56
And there's this fascinating series of research, and I'll quick hit a few of these. You know, if you were to put a pen in your mouth like that, and it kind of mimics artificial smile. When people mimic artificial smile, they become more open to suggestion, not the other way around. When they take people with their hands, right?
Dr. Ben
32:56 - 33:22
And they'll say, all right, press down on the table with your palms facing down versus they had some people in a controlled study put their palms underneath the table as if to pull toward you. So you're in like a, give me more of that versus I don't want that. your brain responds to that. And so people who are pushing down were more likely to be closed off to a suggestion versus those pulling up were more likely to be open to a suggestion.
Dr. Ben
33:22 - 33:48
So this reminds us that there is a lot of power, especially in those moments when we know like, OK, I got to change my mindset here. Change your body first and your mindset will come along. Hold on. There it is, there it is.
Spencer
33:48 - 34:12
I was waiting for that. How does doing simple things like breathing, practicing breathing, I mean, you know, because you talked about three stories, you talked about, you know, body language, putting yourself into a positive state. But you know, there's also asking questions, right? Instead of, you talked about pausing and waiting.
Spencer
34:13 - 34:24
Curiosity is super powerful. So again, thinking of a question forces you to go into your, you know, system two, your thinking mind. But how about breathing? What is it?
Spencer
34:24 - 35:02
I mean, is that just, is that, I mean, I know the answer, but some people think, well, that's just some yoga, you know, positivity kind of thing. How does breathing impact our brain? You know, I'm not I'm no expert in this, but I am loosely aware of some of the work on meditation and the effects of prayer, deep breathing, and everything I've read on on those techniques is that they have a actual they create physical changes in your brain. which when physical changes happen in our brain, they manifest themselves psychologically.
Spencer
35:02 - 35:17
So everything we experience psychologically is rooted in something chemical or physical that is happening inside of our physical brain. So deep breathing does work. It calms you down. It tells the brain you're calm.
Dr. Ben
35:18 - 35:29
Another good example to go to of subject. But, you know, like you ever heard the advice for young athletes like chew gum. Well, wow. Yes.
Dr. Ben
35:29 - 35:42
What's the purpose of that? Well, I don't know. The human brain, you know, when you're under threat, you don't stop and have a snack. So if you chew gum, it signals to the brain that you're safe.
Spencer
35:43 - 36:09
And so you it manifests itself. And I think the same is true for breathing. Deep breathing does work. I have never heard that about the gum, but there's one other chemical thing that happens when we breathe, and that is those basically adrenaline and cortisol that are released when we're stressed are apparently oxygen helps remove those from the bloodstream.
Spencer
36:09 - 36:34
And so a chemical reaction happens when you talk about it calming down, it's not just the slowing of down, it's literally ridding our bodies of the chemicals that the brain has released that says we need to run away. And so that- Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, and so it's a chemical reaction that I think is super powerful, but we don't always think about it. I mean, think about before you go on the stage to give a keynote.
Spencer
36:34 - 36:46
deep breaths and all of a sudden that clarity comes back and you push those chemicals away. Well, let's get back to your, there's so much that we can talk about. Time is going way too fast, Christian. I know, man.
Dr. Ben
36:46 - 36:58
I can't believe it. It's crazy. In my research, there's a Harvard study that came out that corroborated this. I work with teams to create high performance.
Spencer
36:58 - 37:16
You know, like Qualtrics, that's a huge part of your mission. But yet, our research shows that only around 10% of teams worldwide are high performing. It's part of what you're doing is to create an environment where teams can thrive. And that usually starts at the leader, right?
Spencer
37:16 - 37:38
I mean, it almost always starts at the leader. So, you know, as a workplace psychologist, you know, what does the research tell us about employees, what they need from their leaders? Yeah, we we do. And so like you were talking about, Spencer, we do very similar work at the at the unit level of the organization.
Dr. Ben
37:38 - 38:06
And so there's a in fact, I was literally on a call this morning going through the results of this study. But every year we take our big normative database that at this point has about 32 million employee responses from over 140 countries, all major industries. We're about to refresh it. It's going to have about 38 million data points in it from the last three years.
Dr. Ben
38:06 - 38:31
So it's a massive database. And what we do every year is we go into that database and we look for, well, who are the organizations who are really just killing it? And we define that by looking at this Venn diagram between companies that create a really strong employee experience and perform well financially. So they have to hit both of those.
Dr. Ben
38:31 - 38:58
And they have to have sustained performance in financial performance and employee experience over the course of three years. So it's a very, very high bar to hit. And so a very small number of companies that are part of our data hit that. So in the most recent study we did, which was conducted in 2025, just a few, maybe about nine months ago, there were 47 companies that hit that benchmark.
Spencer
38:59 - 39:13
Out of 19,000? Well, I think in our database it's closer to 1,100 enterprises make part of it. Still 47 out of 1,100? Very elite group, right?
Dr. Ben
39:13 - 39:33
So it's, it's actually quite similar percentage-wise to what you were describing, Spencer, like it's a, it's a very, very small percent. And when we looked at the bit, the big question we want to know in that study is, well, what's different about the high-performing organizations? What do they do culturally? What do they do behaviorally?
Dr. Ben
39:33 - 39:42
What do their leaders do differently? than the middling majority. And by the way, we don't compare the high-performing to like the bottom quartile. That would be too easy.
Dr. Ben
39:43 - 40:12
We, we compare to the average of the benchmark. And so the thing that shows up every year is basically trust in leadership. The, in fact, when we looked at the high-performing organizations last year, when we compared them to the average, the single biggest difference was employees evaluations of whether their senior leaders are trustworthy. There was a 19 point difference in that item.
Spencer
40:13 - 40:28
That is a massive difference. Okay, so then the question is, how do you build that trust? That's 4.3% of your clients meet that criteria that you just described. Yep.
Dr. Ben
40:28 - 40:35
Oh, yeah. So you did the math on it. So it's a- Yeah, 4.27. Yeah.
Spencer
40:35 - 40:58
So how do you, I mean, I have my perspective, but I want our listeners to hear, at any level of an organization that is in a leadership position, and even if you're not, and aspire to lead, I mean, leaders are the ones that people are coming to, even without titles, that are helping, whatever. How do you create that trust? What's the process?
Dr. Ben
40:58 - 41:23
We do. I'll start by saying we do a lot of work on trust, both from a consumer perspective and also on the employee perspective. And one of the models that we found very useful is the model by. Shoreman, Mayer and Davis, which essentially looks at when people evaluate the trustworthiness of their leader, they evaluate it through three different lenses, basically.
Dr. Ben
41:23 - 41:33
Is my leader competent? Do they have the skills and the knowledge to do what they need to do? Two, do they have integrity? Or do they do what they say they're going to do, and are they consistent?
Dr. Ben
41:33 - 41:52
And then the third is benevolence. And essentially, the way we operationalize that in our measures is we ask employees and consumers, when your leaders or people you do business with make decisions, what's the implied motive? Do they do it for themselves? Are they chasing the next dollar?
Dr. Ben
41:52 - 42:23
Or are they doing it for the betterment of the group? That benevolence category is the sore thumb of trust and leadership, of trustworthiness. And so to answer your question, Spencer, I mean, there's innumerable answers, but I'll give a couple of high-level ones that we've seen in our work. One is, and this is hard to do, but one of the biggest drivers of whether employees trust their leaders is whether they have a personal intimate relationship with that leader.
Dr. Ben
42:23 - 43:01
This was a great lesson. And you guys may work with these folks or know them well, Jack Zanger, Joe Folkman, right there in Utah. They did an awesome study a few years ago that they published in HBR that looked at the 80,000 assessments of leaders, 360 assessments, and basically found that the number one factor that drove employees to trust their leader was whether they had a personal intimate relationship with them. John and Julie Gottman of the Gottman Institute talk about this all the time.
Dr. Ben
43:01 - 43:26
John Gottman talks about these sliding door moments. How do you show people you care? Through little micro decisions that you make every day to show somebody that you care about them. That benevolence piece, when people believe or perceive that you as a leader are making decisions for the betterment of them and the group, they're going to be much more likely to forgive your mistakes because you will make them.
Dr. Ben
43:26 - 43:44
They're going to be much more likely to want to follow you. But that right now, as it stands of the global workforce, only about half of the global workforce feels that way about their leaders. Yeah. Please forgive me.
Spencer
43:44 - 43:49
I'll keep going. I have so much because I didn't want to hijack. I have so many things to ask. Go, Christian.
Spencer
43:50 - 44:32
I will be benevolent and let you go. I just, there's not enough time for this conversation because we could go on for hours here, but I'm curious what the research is showing about why this benevolence is lacking. If trust is the driving factor, I mean, it really is an indictment on organizations that such a small percentage actually, you know, are in the Venn diagram, that little piece in the middle, right, where employee experience and financial performance are overlapping. And if lack of trust is so pervasive, and it's primarily due to a lack of benevolence, why is this happening?
Dr. Ben
44:33 - 45:06
What is going on? I think part of it is environmental and that a lot of I'm gonna give kind of a generous kind of benefit of the doubt for the leaders and then I'll give kind of a more critical point for the more benefit of the doubt. I do think part of it is because of the environment that leaders are in right now, where most leaders, and you guys know this so well, most leaders that we're working with and consulting with right now are under extreme amounts of pressure to produce more and to save more money.
Dr. Ben
45:06 - 45:26
That's a hard place to be, especially when they're being sold these promises about what AI can do. And a lot of that has to work through people. And a lot of times companies forget that part of the equation. So they're holding themselves, their boards are holding them accountable to these really, really, really difficult.
Dr. Ben
45:27 - 46:04
And so employees feel that, they're recognizing that, and they attribute that to their leaders. So I do think there's a bit of that there. But I also think that what is happening a lot right now, with big implementations of AI, with after reductions in force, after major acquisitions or divestitures, which there's tons right now, What a lot of leaders do is they give an overly optimistic view of the future. Hey, we, and also they, they talk about what's in it for the company.
Dr. Ben
46:04 - 46:39
And they forget that when people are going through times of change and uncertainty, they don't really care about the group, what they care about is numero uno. And so there's some really simple ways that I think leaders can tackle this. And this has been some work we've done a lot of work with leaders on is, hey, look, when you are making a tough decision that people don't like, You can soften the blow by explaining why in a way that speaks to them directly and acknowledges the brutal reality of what they're going through.
Dr. Ben
46:39 - 46:53
I love Jim Collins' outline of the Stockdale paradox in Good to Great, right? Like that, hey, it stinks right now. It is tough. We understand it's tough, but we will get through this together.
Dr. Ben
46:53 - 47:02
That's very different than saying, hey, we had to make this decision. It's right for the company. So get on board. And by the way, we're going to be fine.
Spencer
47:02 - 47:43
That's not going to resonate with anybody. When you're in that, you know, Tuckman's storming stage, that what you need is more reassurance, more communication, that we will get the right kind of communication, we will get through this. What you just described about environment, I'm right in the middle of a major engagement with one of the number one airlines, well, the number one in the world right now, but based in the Middle East. And think about what's going on with the disruption In the Middle East, our engagement has really been interrupted because their whole business model has been interrupted.
Spencer
47:43 - 48:22
The airline business is already hugely at the mercy of, I mean, you can't get shipments if one country holds, you know, They just shut down their, we're not going to allow the shipping to go through because we have to go through customs and supply chain issues and managing fleets and the demands of the public and the, I mean, keeping them safe at the same time. I mean, the stress coming from above and below and then geopolitical issues, it's just crushing. Brutal.
Spencer
48:22 - 48:51
And brutal, the amount of stress and anxiety that these amazing people are dealing with. And our goal is to give them as many tools as possible to have those types of communication. But before, I have to just—I've heard so much. information and seen research that said the number one indicator of trust is this idea of authenticity.
Spencer
48:52 - 49:10
And you're saying it's, and I believe, I mean, I look at my relationship, I talk about my mentor all the time on this podcast. If you haven't heard it, I talk about him all the time and it's because of that personal relationship I have. I talk about him in my keynote. I just shared a segment of the video with him and he was so, you know, he was so humble.
Spencer
49:10 - 49:32
He's like, oh no. But he made such an impact in my life. But this idea of authenticity is, how does that square with what you're, is it, are there elements of it that's just being used, maybe using a different word in some of this research, or is that research flawed? The authenticity, because they say even more important than competence.
Dr. Ben
49:33 - 49:48
Yeah, no, no, I think these are highly related. In fact, just to go back, I didn't explain all the detail here, but as you know, there's so many models of trust out there. You know, there's Brene Brown's braving model. There's the Francis Frye.
Dr. Ben
49:48 - 49:56
You have, right, the Sherman Meyer Davis model. You have Zenger Folkman. I'm gonna have to look all this stuff up, Christian. Oh my gosh.
Dr. Ben
49:58 - 50:05
Don't worry, I did the work for you. Thank you. I can spit it out for you for your AI. to feed you.
Dr. Ben
50:05 - 50:26
But anyway, they're all highly related to each other. And so the authenticity, for example, the way I would kind of fit that in is both. I think that's highly related to benevolence, but also to integrity. And that if if you are showing up in a way that's consistent with your values, you got to know what they are and you have to actually live them.
Dr. Ben
50:26 - 50:37
To me, that's authenticity. Okay. So that, so this is, this is what I talk about alignment with your values, not your natural behavioral tendencies. Cause that's what I call the authenticity paradox.
Spencer
50:37 - 50:44
Cause people say, well, this is who I am. I need to be this. I'm, I'm naturally an authoritative leader. And so being authentic means I need to be that way all the time.
Dr. Ben
50:44 - 50:54
That's a mistake. Great point. That is such a good point. In fact, I haven't read it yet, but that seems to be the crux of Tomas Pramusic's new book.
Spencer
50:54 - 51:09
Don't be yourself. Oh my gosh, I actually, yes, I use him in my, because I talk about him. This is the focus of everything I do. Sorry Christian, I'm just getting all excited.
Spencer
51:09 - 51:23
Keep going, I'll shut up. No, but, but, you know, I need her. That's one of the next books on my list. But I think the gist of it, from what I've seen on social is, is like, Look, if you, if you're a jerk, don't be a jerk.
Spencer
51:24 - 51:39
Like, that's your natural inclination. That's not what you should be doing. My keynote is called Stronger Than Your Strengths. because we've been told our whole lives, just be, you know, just focus on your strengths and it will pull up all your weaknesses.
Dr. Ben
51:40 - 51:48
No, because Tomas Premuzic says the exact same thing. Don't be yourself. That's what I'm trying to say. Don't just focus on your strengths.
Dr. Ben
51:48 - 51:59
Yeah, if I'm a jerk, boy, that working out great for me. All right. Oh, my gosh. Well, listen, have we covered everything we need to cover about your book?
Dr. Ben
51:59 - 52:14
I think we have. What else do we need to cover? Well, one plug I do want to make is the final chapter, chapter nine, was my absolute favorite to write. And it's all about what you were talking about of curiosity and humility.
Dr. Ben
52:15 - 52:36
And I think this goes right in line with authenticity is I think is so important. And I try to remind myself of all this all the time of like, just remember, Ben, you don't know anything, right? It's like that line in Game of Thrones, like, you know nothing, Jon Snow. It's like, I just got to repeat that to myself all the time.
Dr. Ben
52:36 - 53:04
But just remembering that, you know, as much as we're learning and as even as we become really good at understanding ourselves and our tendencies and what our brains are going to naturally do and mastering our body. Even as we learn all that stuff, we start to master it. To your earlier point, Christian, like getting in those habits that help us override consistently those automatic processing, even as we do all that. we still only know a fraction of all there is to know.
Dr. Ben
53:05 - 53:22
And I often pose this like fields of science have always believed they were this close to figuring it out. Which one of them was correct? Definitively none. So what makes us think that we got all the answers today?
Dr. Ben
53:22 - 53:50
That's absurd. And also remembering, and there's a nice plug in the book for the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is my absolute favorite cognitive bias of all time, and quick rundown of that. When we are early in our learning journey about something or about a person, our natural inclination is to be overconfident about it. And the way I like to think about it is when we're early in our learning journey, it's like reading a children's book on a topic.
Dr. Ben
53:50 - 54:03
You read the children's book, you're like, oh, this is simple. Yeah, there's a couple of characters. I got this. And then the more you learn, once you start getting into it, you don't realize there's graduate level texts in this.
Dr. Ben
54:03 - 54:18
And there's plenty of open questions in this whole realm of unknowns, known unknowns, not to mention the unknown unknowns. So there's this whole realm that we're not aware of. So we get super confident of what we know. this is a huge problem for leaders.
Dr. Ben
54:18 - 54:45
And so back to your question, did we tackle everything in the book? No, but we touched on a lot of it on a lot of the different chapters. And hopefully this gives people a little bit of teaser of what they're going to get when they jump in. Well, It's so good to know so much when I know so little.
Christian
54:45 - 54:52
I mean, the fact that I know so little, I feel like I know a lot. Spencer, we got like five minutes left. We gotta get the lightning round. Yeah.
Spencer
54:53 - 55:01
Okay, super fast. One word that defines great leadership. Communication. IQ or EQ, which matters more?
Spencer
55:02 - 55:09
EQ. Most underrated leadership skill? Curiosity. A leadership myth you'd eliminate?
Dr. Ben
55:12 - 55:24
Dominance is the way to go. Best leadership book besides yours? Dare to Lead by Brené Brown. One behavior that builds trust instantly?
Spencer
55:26 - 55:34
Sliding door moments. Do something proactively nice for somebody. Love that. Biggest mistake leaders make today?
Spencer
55:37 - 55:46
Reducing communication during times of pressure. High performance starts with? Leadership. Your leadership style in one word?
Dr. Ben
55:55 - 56:02
Remember, your team's listening. Challenger. Good. Finish this.
Spencer
56:02 - 56:12
People follow leaders who? Care about them. Thank you. All right, what a fascinating conversation.
Christian
56:12 - 56:32
I want to come back and do a whole other episode just talking about communication. I think it's so important. But this has been awesome. So Dr. Ben, if people want to get your book, if they want to connect with you, learn more about the work that you're doing, what's the best way for them to reach out?
Dr. Ben
56:33 - 56:48
great place would be benjamingranger.com. You know, I say granger because we're in Louisiana, right? We got church it up with the French bit Benjamin. Yeah, go Cajuns go granger.
Dr.Ben
56:48 - 57:08
But uh, One quick fun one for the listeners here. So I'm a first-time author. So a lot of the naive stuff that a first-time authors do, I had like 30 song quotes nested into my first manuscript. You know where this is going, right?
Dr. Ben
57:09 - 57:25
I sent it to the publisher and they were like, man, this is great, but you got permissions for all these quotes? And I'm like, Well, what's a permission? So I learned to learn some art lessons about copyright law. But the good news was that, well, I had to pull all those song quotes out.
Dr. Ben
57:25 - 57:34
But I'm a music nut. I'm a music nerd. And I find it deeply inspiring. So what I did instead was on that website, there's a little page, which you're going to love.
Dr. Ben
57:34 - 58:05
The page is called Lanyap, which is Cajun for a little something extra. So what it has there is a playlist, songs organized by chapter that help to memorialize those, solidify those lessons we talk about in the book. And it's also a nice little Easter egg hunt for the reader to go hunt for the connection between that particular song and the lessons in each chapter. So hopefully folks enjoy that.
Spencer
58:05 - 58:20
Yeah. Any Zydeco in there? You know, I was actually thinking of putting some Keith Frank and because I'm a big I'm a big Keith Frank fan. Couldn't find a spot for it, but maybe in the next one.
Christian
58:22 - 58:40
Well, Alpha, we were talking about something that I was doing with another podcast. Well, one of the questions I would ask all my guests on that podcast is, if you were stranded on a desert island, what's the one album you'd want to have with you? So yeah, think about that one. I got it.
Dr. Ben
58:40 - 58:45
It's down here. I have to hunt for it. But Led Zeppelin IV. Oh, there you go.
Dr. Ben
58:46 - 58:59
I mean, there's some bangers on that thing. And then the Dark Side of the Moon, Apache, you know. I went to Pink Floyd right away. Yeah, you can't go wrong with some Pink Floyd.
Christian
59:00 - 59:09
I'll take Rush Exit Stage Left. Oh, that would be my album. Ooh, that's a good one. I do have all three of those bands in the playlist for what it's worth.
Spencer
59:09 - 59:21
Beautiful, OK. And Christian, I'm not going to spoil it for you. But if you're rush fan, I got a I have a what I thought was a clever. Subtle.
Speaker 1
Dr, Ben
Chapter section that only a true rush fan will see. I'm gonna have to check it out. Now you got me intrigued. So go to benjamingranger.com, connect with Dr. Ben.
Christian
59:38 - 59:47
Spencer, you've been helping teams for decades. Organizations build high-performing teams. How can people connect with you? Just chat with me on LinkedIn and Christian.
Spencer
59:47 - 59:54
Isn't he great, Dr. Ben? I just love my friend Christian. He's so brilliant. And how can our friends find you?
Spencer
59:55 - 1:00:07
LinkedIn as well. Just look up Christian if you're happy to connect with anybody and we're at the top of the hour already. Can't believe it So dr. Ben, thank you so much Spencer great to see you once again listeners of viewers.
Christian
1:00:07 - 1:00:13
We're so grateful for you Thank you for joining us today. Please like and subscribe to our podcast. We'll catch you again soon. See ya