By Sarah Nicastro, Founder and Editor in Chief, Future of Field Service
In today’s talent landscape, employee engagement and experience get plenty of attention. Yet, all too often, it seems that attention isn’t translating into action that is having the intended impact. Where are efforts falling short?
Last week’s podcast guest has opinions, and they’re ones well worth your consideration. Zach Mercurio is a researcher with a Ph.D. in organizational learning, performance, and change and author of The Power of Mattering. He advises leaders in organizations worldwide on practices for building cultures that promote well-being, motivation, and performance and has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Psychology Today, The Denver Post, and ABC News.
The failure of employee engagement efforts is rooted in a desire to accomplish programmatically what can only be done interpersonally. In other words, the determining factor is leadership skills. “For the last 20 years, we've tried to tackle this employee engagement problem through programs and initiatives. Yet, employee engagement is at the lowest it's been in 10 years – despite the employee engagement services industry being a $1,000,000,000 market. Despite 100 validated assessments to measure engagement, countless well-being programs, DEI programs, perks, wage increases of 42% in eight years. Nothing's moved the needle,” urges Zach. “One data point that's really important in the latest Gallup survey was that amongst 15,000 people, just 39% could strongly agree that someone at work cared for them as a person. Just 30% could strongly agree that someone invested in their unique potential.”
The premise of Zach’s latest book is that mattering is what’s missing. “We can only solve this at the interactional level, which is very scary and exciting. It's scary because it means that all of your leaders have to show up in their daily interactions and make sure people feel seen, heard, valued, and needed, and they need the skills to do that,” he says. “It's hopeful because nobody can take away the power that you have to show up in your next interaction and do this. There's no red tape to caring. You don't need your organization's permission or your board permission or your shareholders' permission to show up in your next interaction and show someone they're cared for. So, it's completely accessible.”
The Power of Mattering
To understand why the power of mattering has such a pivotal impact, it’s important to understand that it is instinctual for us as humans – and to distinguish mattering from belonging and inclusion. “It's critical for organizations wanting to do anything about this, and really just in life, to understand is that mattering is first and foremost a survival instinct. It is our most primal survival instinct,” explains Zach. “If you want someone to contribute, they first have to believe they're worthy of contributing. If you want someone to share their voice, they first have to believe their voice is significant. If you want someone to use their strengths, they first have to believe that they have them. If you want something to matter to someone, they first have to believe that they matter. If you want someone to care, they first have to feel cared for. So, it's really the prerequisite to motivation, performance, and productivity. A lot of times, we've thought that people needed to add value to be valued. But psychologically, biologically, it's the opposite. People need to feel valued to add value.
And mattering is different than feeling one belongs, or even that one is included. To illustrate the distinction, Zach uses a team sports analogy. “Belonging is being picked for the team. Belonging is feeling welcomed, accepted, and connected in a group. Inclusion is being able and invited to play in the game,” he explains. “But mattering is feeling that the team wouldn't be complete without you. Why this is important is because mattering happens at the interpersonal level. You can't program your way out of it. There's no initiative or perk that can show someone how they matter. Only people can show people how they matter.”
Why Command and Control Leadership Will Never Cut it
When you consider the power of mattering, it becomes clear how command-and-control leadership is fundamentally incompatible with the innovation and loyalty leaders claim to want. Rather than putting in the effort necessary to yield employees who feel a strong sense of ownership and are empowered, many leaders simply pursue compliance.
“Despite what's on display today, command and control leadership doesn't work. A review of 43 studies from 1966 to 2021 revealed that authoritarian leadership styles are associated with reduced motivation, stifled creativity and innovation, lower job and task performance, higher turnover rates, and more dysfunctional team climates,” explains Zach. “A key contributor to these outcomes is the erosion of both interpersonal and organizational trust resulting from a lack of care and psychological safety. True sustained loyalty and performance emerge when leaders build trust, demonstrate care, and cultivate a sense of safety, not insight fear.”
So, then, the “wave of change” in leadership I refer to often on the podcast isn’t so much a movement away from an outdated style that doesn’t work anymore – but a reconciliation that it never actually did. “What it has done is incite short-term financial gain or shareholder value. If you look at the fallout of organizations that have had tyrannical leaders, there's usually a cycle of two or three years of increased shareholder value and then a massive rebuild,” says Zach. “It doesn't work in the long term. Fear incites short term bursts of energy; it doesn't work to motivate people. And one of the reasons why is you can’t think of the last time you were energized, in flow, creative, innovative, while simultaneously in a survival state of fear. They're fundamentally at odds. And so, it doesn't work for many of the outcomes we say we want.”
The Forces Fighting Against More Enlightened Leadership
If the science is clear, why is more enlightened, intentional leadership not yet the norm? Zach outlined numerous factors at play that. The first is that we’re in a period of significant geopolitical and economic uncertainty, and uncertainty tends to fuel more authoritarian approaches.
“We find that a rise of authoritarian leadership styles actually correlates with complexity,” notes Zach. “When something's complex or uncertain, we seek to control it. If you consider the different political variables going on right now, the societal variables, the technological uncertainty with regard to artificial intelligence, and hybrid work arrangements. When a leader can't get a grasp on something, they usually revert to control through fear. Leaders also aim to control what they don’t understand. Leaders who can't connect with people, they can't do the hard work to develop care and safety, or they don't know how to, or they don't want to take the time to, they usually try to control when they can't connect.”
Zach also discusses the issues of social decay and significantly reduced attention spans and speaks to how both play a role in eroding leadership focus and skill. However, with the rise of AI, it is more important than ever to be aware of these factors and protect against further erosion of crucial human skills. “Yes, AI can do our tasks. It can't take moral responsibility for them. Artificial intelligence can do things for you. It can't care for you. More people than ever are realizing that. And I think the most in demand commodity is going to be human trust,” he says.
In fact, he points out that for the first time, five of the 10 most in-demand skills for the future of work, by the World Economic Forum, are nontechnical such as curiosity, understanding, active listening and compassion. “If you cannot cultivate caring and trusting relationships,” says Zach. “I believe that in the next 50 years, you’ll have a nonviable organization when it comes to a sustainable labor force and sustainable output.”
While it’s hard to dispute the fact that these human skills will become even more crucial than they are today, honing them requires effort and applying them requires a view beyond the immediate. “I want to run a marathon, but it's really freaking hard to get up at four in the morning to run. I want financial security, but it’s really hard to stick to a budget every month,” says Zach. “We want all of these lagging indicators; we want the effects. But it takes consistent, disciplined work to invest in the leading indicator. We don’t approach developing meaningful, high-quality relationships through our interactions with the same rigor as we approach the outcomes.”
We’ve also done these skills a tremendous disservice by referring to them as “soft” for so long. “Anytime you see something as soft or simple, you're susceptible to an overconfidence bias,” Zach cautions. “This is emblematic of what we see across the landscape of human interactions; we think we're better at these things than we are.”
3 Skills That Create a Culture of Significance
Zach has created a framework in the The Power of Mattering to help leaders build skills that will close the gap between employee engagement intentions and impact. After asking thousands of people when they felt they mattered at work and to a leader, he landed on three major experiences leaders should build skills to create:
- Feeling noticed. “They feel seen and heard. Someone actually remembered and checked in on the details of their life and of their work. Their voices were heard. The meaning behind their words, the feelings behind their words were addressed, and they had somebody that was checking in and not waiting for something to go wrong to hear from them,” describes Zach. “If you feel your direct report would react with fear and anxiety if you called them out of the blue, it's not that you're a bad leader. It's that too many of your interactions have been transactional.”
- Being affirmed. “The recognition platform market is now a $19,000,000,000 market and is projected to be a $50,000,000,000 market in 2030. We have more employee appreciation weeks, peer kudos platforms and values-based awards, and yet people feel more overlooked than ever according to recent surveys,” explains Zach. “One of the reasons is that recognition is different than the interpersonal experience of being affirmed by another person. Appreciation is general gratitude for who someone is, their presence, their role. Recognition shows gratitude for what someone does, celebrating the wins. Affirmation is showing somebody how their specific, unique gifts make a specific, unique impact.”
- Feeling needed. “When people feel replaceable, they'll act that way. When they feel irreplaceable, they'll act that way,” notes Zach. “One of the best ways to do this is to make sure people can see exactly how they and their unique perspectives, strengths, purpose, and impact are needed. You know, saying things like ‘if it wasn't for you’ and making sure people can see and walk the ladder all the way up to how they and their inputs are indispensable to something bigger.”
There’s nothing wrong with the creation of programs and the investment in platforms – it’s just important to understand that those things alone won’t get the job done. “An award, a certificate, a raise, a promotion – these are all symbols; they're all inanimate objects. An award cannot value somebody. A perk cannot value somebody. They can be symbols of value, but only people can value people,” explains Zach. “We only truly feel valued when other people value us. And that's why you cannot program perk your way out of an employee disengagement crisis. You can only reengineer how you and everybody in the organization shows up in daily interactions.”
And that work is simple, but not easy. The psychology behind this, the reality that there are no shortcuts to nurturing these very human needs – it makes perfect sense. It’s fairly straightforward to understand. But the bridge between understanding and impact takes attention, attention, and skill. To hear two practices to incorporate to build positive momentum, Zach’s advice on how all of this applies to “difficult” employees, and what to do when no one is making you feel like you matter, listen to the full podcast.