Buckingham

“The uncomfortable truth is that, more than likely, no one is worrying about what makes you unique. Nobody is dedicated to introducing you to yourself, to helping you get curious about and build a really deep relationship with you at your best. School doesn’t do it: schools want to make sure that everybody learns what everybody is supposed to learn. Work doesn’t do it: work is most concerned about performance, about what needs to get done. Everybody in your life, since childhood, has had expectations and demands that don’t necessarily have any direct connection to you discovering the unique things you love and building a life around them.

Of course, your parents want you to be happy. But if you told them that living in your van and selling burritos to hungry surfers is what makes you happy, I think they’d start pointing to alternative, more “successful” paths.

What no one is doing is starting with you, listening to you, paying attention to what you instinctively pay attention to, and giving you methods and techniques to then apply these unique gifts in the world. Which is a problem for you since, as Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford commencement address, “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.

To do anything great in your life, you will have to take seriously what you love and express it in some sort of productive way. We know this because when we survey a group of people who are highly successful, resilient, and engaged and a contrast group of people who are less so, the two best questions to separate them are these:

• Do you have a chance to play to your strengths every day?

• Were you excited to go to work every day last week?

Those people who are thriving answer “strongly agree” to both of these.

Each morning many of us wake up and put our amor on. We come to see life as something to be withstood, something to get through, unscathed. We block out the noise, march on with our head down, surviving—as an employee, a parent, a student, a partner. The risk in all this, of course, is that we get to the end never really hearing what our life was telling us all along. Never really seeing ourselves for all that we are.

With this book, my hope is that you can change all of this. You can change your relationship with life and your relationship with yourself. Because, in truth, your life is not the clamor to be shut out. It is instead the source of all joy, passion, power, and contribution. Each day, life is sending you thousands of signals revealing where you are at your best, where you’re strongest, most creative, most attractive, most special. Each day your life is speaking to you in a language only you can understand.

2. WHERE DID THE LOVE GO?

“At work, according to the most recent data, less than 16 percent of us are fully engaged, with the rest of us just selling our time and our talent and getting compensated for our trouble. In the worst extremes of always-on, high-stress jobs, such as distribution centers, emergency room nursing, and teaching, incidences of PTSD are higher than they are for veterans returning from war zones. Imagine that. We’ve created work conditions that are so blind to the needs of each human being that they wind up experiencing more soul-destroying distress than soldiers who’ve witnessed the killing and harming of other human beings.

To find our way back to those parts of us that get buried beneath the world and all the other people within it, we need to lay bare what’s causing so many of us to get lost in the first place. Because this mass losing of self, this epidemic of alienation, isn’t happening by accident. It’s the inevitable outcome of a system actively designed to separate you from you.

None of the above has anything to do with who you are on the inside. The uniqueness of what you love or loathe is beside the point. Instead, you are—from school on into the world of work—assessed against a set of models. You are judged not by how intelligently you’ve cultivated your unique loves, but by how closely you’ve matched the models. So, in truth, you won’t just get lost. You’ll get hidden—and by the very institutions that are supposed to reveal you. Little wonder we’re facing such an epidemic of lost people.

Our institutions are not doing it maliciously; schools don’t actively want their students to be alienated and stressed, just as companies don’t want their employees to be lost and inauthentic.

They do it—this building of loveless schools and workplaces—because they think they’re being pragmatic. Schools are designed to produce students who can perform well on standardized tests. Workplaces are designed to ensure that everyone in the same role performs it in the same way, so that products and service experiences are all delivered at the same level of quality.

What value does your unique pattern of loves have in a world where the project of school and work is to create uniform outcomes? To the pragmatist, it has zero value. More accurately, it has negative value. Your unique loves are seen as an obstacle to what schools and workplaces are trying to produce. Success, for them, is tightly linked to when they’ve ground your loves out of you—hence the standardized testing at school, and the prescribed goals, skills, attributes, and career paths at work.

“As we’ll see in the next few chapters, your loves are so strong, so specific, and so wise that only they can show you your right way to overcome your life’s challenges.

Think back for a moment on that someone you know who lived a full life. You get the sense, don’t you, that they were on to something. That they had somehow cut through all the noise, and tuned themselves into a signal only they could hear. And they didn’t do this in spite of their work. Rather, they seemed to be doing it through their work. Their loves and their work were inextricably linked.

In their telling, “work” does not simply mean “job.” It is not merely manual or knowledge labor. Instead, “work” is anything of value they created for someone else.

You register other people’s emotions more intensely. You remember details more vividly. You perform cognitive tasks faster and better. You are more optimistic, more loyal, more forgiving, and more open to new information and experiences.1 Research by neurobiologists suggests that these “love chemicals” dysregulate your neocortex, which widens your perspective on yourself and liberates your mind to accept new thoughts and feelings. The work of psychologists such as Barbara Fredrickson, author of Love 2.0, shows that, while the evolutionary purpose of fear is to narrow your focus to a few clear choices—fight or flight—the point of love is to create in you such feelings of safety and connection that you broaden your outlook and build your strengths.

Your fullest life, then, is one where your loves and your work flow in an infinite loop. The energy of the one fuels the energy of the other. Thus, the only way you’ll make a lasting contribution in life is to deeply understand what it is that you love. And the inverse: you’ll never live a life you love unless you deeply understand how to contribute to others.

“At its simplest this means start paying attention to what you find yourself paying attention to. Yes, school and work are going to force you to focus on certain subjects and classes, but can you find a way to filter out some of their noise? Can you, instead, catch sight of yourself catching sight of something? Something unprompted by anyone else. Something that you see, that makes you laugh or intrigues you. Something that others, when you describe it to them, may not quite understand. Something that, when you’re alone—late at night, early in the morning, walking someplace—you find popping unbidden into your mind.

Pay attention to what you pay attention to, with confidence and without apology.

And then, to dive deeper into the detail of your loves, look carefully for three signs of love. We’ll explore them in the next few chapters.

“So ask yourself, “What do I find myself instinctively raising my hand for?” Left entirely to your own devices, which activities or situations seem to pull you toward them? Block out all the other voices and demands in your world, and see what your answers are. No matter the answers, they’ll be meaningful.

Honor yourself by listening to them.

“So, no, your red threads won’t tell you in which particular job you will be successful.

Instead, they’ll reveal how you—one particular individual—will be most successful in whatever job you happen to choose.

... importantly, the data reveals something different: your frequent past behavior is the best predictor of your frequent future behavior.

The Red Thread Questionnaire

When was the last time …

… you lost track of time?

… you instinctively volunteered for something?

… someone had to tear you away from what you were doing?

… you felt completely in control of what you were doing?

… you surprised yourself by how well you did?

… you were singled out for praise?

… you were the only person to notice something?

… you found yourself actively looking forward to work?

… you came up with a new way of doing things?

… you wanted the activity to never end?

Use your emotional reaction to the raw material of your life to pinpoint which activities have these red-thread qualities.

Once you identify these red threads, your challenge will be to weave them into the fabric of your life, both at home and at work. We’ll get into how to do that later in the book, but for now please know that you do not need an entire quilt made up of only red threads. You don’t need to “do only what you love.”

Instead, you need only to find specific loves—red threads—within what you do. Recent research by the Mayo Clinic into the well-being of doctors and nurses reveals that 20 percent is the threshold level: spend at least 20 percent of your time at work doing specific activities you love and you are far less likely to experience burnout. Research by colleagues at the ADP Research Institute reinforces this finding. According to their recent global study of twenty-five thousand workers, if you have a chance to do something you love each and every day (even if you aren’t good at it yet), you are 3.6 times more likely to be highly resilient.

So, yes, love matters, but you don’t need to love all you do. You just need to find the love in what you do. And as the Mayo Clinic research reveals, even a little love goes a long, long way

“Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can’t get better with practice. It just means that along the way you will happen upon some activities that come so easily to you, it’s as if you’ve found a shortcut. You pick them up so fast, they feel so natural, that you don’t need the steps and the sequence and all those mechanics. You need just one exposure to the skill, and wham, you’re off to the races. It just clicks.

This “clicking” may happen very early in life, or further along in your career. Hopefully, you’ll try many different activities and roles during the course of your life, but whatever you try, keep your feelings alert for when everything just clicks, when you pick up the new skill faster than you should. It’s a sign you’ve found love. Rapid learning and love, they’re linked.

My hope for you is that you take your loves seriously. That during your journey you keep your senses alert for the three signs of love—instinct, flow, rapid learning—and that you surround yourself with others who believe in what you love. Because when you do, great things will happen for you.

“Everybody knows that love lies in the little things.

You don’t love “books”—you love this kind of book, written by this specific author.

So why the heck do we forget this when it comes to which activities or situations or behaviors we love? Why do we make do with generalizations?

“She just loves a challenge!” someone’s parents say proudly.

Really? Does it matter what sort of challenge? Does she love all challenges, or only those where she feels super-prepared? Or maybe it’s the opposite—maybe she loves only challenges where she has to react instinctively, and where, if she fails, she can console herself with the fact that she wasn’t actually expected to prevail.

Which is it? They’re totally different, and would lead her and her parents to set her up in completely different ways.

“He’s so good with people!” a boss writes in someone’s performance review.

Really? Which kind of people? Is he “so good” with people he doesn’t know yet and has to win over? Or “so good” at building deep trust with those he’s already acquainted with?

And how about a verb? What precisely is he doing with these people he’s so good with? Is he so good at selling to them, or teaching them, or calming them, or making them laugh, or remembering their names, or inspiring them? Each of these is starkly different from the others. Which is it with him?

One of the chief causes of our epidemic of anxiety and alienation is that both schools and workplaces appear impatient with, and deeply uninterested in, these sorts of details. They rely instead on the comfort of generalizations.

Begin with the phrase “I love it when … ” and then complete the sentence. The key to doing this effectively, with detail, is to ask yourself five “Does it matter?” questions.

For example, if your sentence is “I love it when I am helping people,” then ask yourself:

Does it matter who the people are?

Does it matter when you help them?

Does it matter why you’re helping them?

Does it matter what you’re helping them with?

Does it matter how you’re helping them?

… Because there, in the detail, lives agency. There, in the detail, you can find yourself.

The devil’s greatest power—according to the author Catherine Goldstein— is not his evil intent and forked tongue. It is instead that he doesn’t know he’s the devil. He is, she tells us, so powerful and persuasive precisely because he believes he is a force for good.

“If you don’t learn the language of your loves, as so many of us do not, then you may well find yourself reaching toward broad symbols—such as race and religion—to define who you are. And when you do that, you may gain strength from what you share with folks of the same race and religion, but if you stop there, you may cut yourself off from the strength that comes from within. The strength of knowing who you uniquely are, where you find love in the world, and how to turn love into contribution.

This love-strength has more power than group-strength.

Love-strength is self-reliant. No one can threaten this strength, because it is always and only derived from who you are, and there is no one else like you. What someone else loves, and how they turn it into contribution, is interesting and cool and charming and useful, but it has no bearing on what you love. It cannot threaten you.

This love-strength leads to openness and curiosity. Group-strength, by its very definition, banishes others outside the group. While you may remain tolerant of these outsiders, tolerance implies distance, separateness, not empathy or intimacy.

Love-strength begins with you taking your own loves seriously, and being deeply curious about how these loves can be channeled in some helpful or productive way. Of course, the more curious you are about your own loves, the more curious—and respectful—you will be about the loves of others. Since your loves are so interesting and so subtle and so specific, so must the loves of others be.

So be cautious about relying on group-strength as the primary source of your identity. While you may be of a certain race and gender, and have a certain religion, and be from a certain place, and support a certain team, you, yourself, are not any of these things. You are you, and the only you there is.

Find interesting what is most interesting about you.

“Properly defined, a “weakness” is any activity that weakens you, even if you’re amazing at it.

Practice is not a conscious discipline, demanding grit and stick-to-itiveness. Instead, seen through the lens of love, practice is an obsession.

... excellence is revealed to be simply a product of you taking your loves seriously. Passion fuels practice fuels performance.

When it comes to your loves, you have all the answers. No one else has any. When it comes to your loves, you are the only genius.

“For your loves to turn into contribution, pay attention only to the specific activities you love, not the outcomes of those activities. Pay attention to what you are going to be doing, rather than why. “What,” in the end, always trumps the “why.”

Ask yourself: In this role, what precisely will I be paid to do?

Ask yourself: What will a regular week in this new role look like?

Ask yourself: What will I be doing at 9 a.m. on a normal Wednesday morning, or 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon?

And what if I pay super-close attention to the activities I love, and I try to do them, I really try, and I discover that I’m still not very good at them?

Yes, that does occur. To a lot of people who enjoy singing, playing basketball, painting. You love the activity, you feel uplifted when doing it, but you just don’t seem to have the capacity to excel at it.

Well, in the world we all live in, we have a word for activities such as this: we call them hobbies.

Your life should be an ongoing search for love. Sometimes high performance will flow from your love, and sometimes it won’t. But in all cases, more love in your life means a fuller life.

“So, yes, pay close attention to other people’s reactions. These reactions will be excellent raw material to help you understand the dent you are making in the world. When someone’s reaction wasn’t quite what you wanted, honor their reaction and then think through which actions of yours they were reacting to.

Even more important, when someone’s reaction was exactly what you wanted—they loved your call, your email, your presentation, your singing voice—spend a ton of time being curious with them about their reaction. Ask them why they felt the way they did, what worked for them, when they leaned in, what grabbed their attention. You’re doing this not to fish for praise, but to learn more and more about who you are when you are at your best. You are using their reaction to what worked to become ever more expert at turning your loves into contribution.

You will always be your most productive and attractive when you’re inside your own skin. When you squeeze yourself inside someone else’s, you’re just plain scary.

“And yet I find I can’t banish fear. It’s a part of being a human in the world. Feeling fear is as natural to me as feeling empathy, or joy, or anger. To pretend that it isn’t, to try to live without fear, is fakery. Real humans can’t do this.

With fear as our life’s companion, the best thing to do is what you would do with any companion: turn and look at them, ask them loads of questions, get curious, get intimate with them, and, in so doing, let them reveal you.

The first thing you may learn is that lots of your fears are focused on other people, and in particular what those other people think of you. This is not a problem. This is as it should be. When someone tells you that you should ignore what other people think of you, that others’ opinions of you are none of your business, please push back. You are designed to be concerned about what other people think of you. It’s part of what makes you human. The only people who are not concerned about what other people think of them are sociopaths.

So yes, it is wise and good to care about what other people think of you. As we talked about in chapter 12, their reactions to you are an important sign of how your loves are playing out in the world. You need to pay attention to their reactions—at least, if you’re interested in turning your loves into contribution.

… The second thing you’ll discover is that fear itself is not the thing to be afraid of. It’s not fear that causes the problems in your life. It’s what fear degrades into when you shun it.

Fear that’s shunned metastasizes into feelings that are deeply damaging.

By contrast, fear that’s examined yields powerful discoveries about you at your best. When you get curious and let fear in, what you realize is that your fears are yet one more sign of what you love. I am afraid to write this piece on fear precisely because I love writing things that can help you, and I so desperately want to be helpful. I am fearful of my mom being able to take care of my brother because I love them both so bloody much. My fears pinpoint my loves.

Fear is pain for the psyche. Feel fear and follow it, and it will lead you straight to something or someone you love, to what you are passionate about, to who you care for so very deeply. In this sense, your fear is your wisest and most loving companion. It knows who and what you love—knows it without judgment, without conscious curation, yet so precisely and so urgently that your loves are revealed before you’re aware of them, or even before you’re prepared to admit them.

Try to change your relationship to your fears. Don’t banish them. Don’t fight them. Don’t turn and face them down. Instead, see whether you can learn to honor your fears—which means listening to them, being curious about them, and admiring them as part of the real you. Do this—gently, generously, kindly—and they will show you what you truly love.

On your journey, you’re told to dismiss your fears, to confront your fears, to step outside of your comfort zone. Yet this is all so misleading. Your big choice in life is not “comfort or no comfort.” It is “love or no love.” When you step into things you love, you will feel fear. That’s not just OK, it’s fundamental. So fundamental, in fact, that if you’re doing something and you feel no fear, then you’ve lost your love.

So, take the path of fear, because the path of fear is the path of love.

“I find no characters popping into my head, and when I try to fabricate them, I get bored of them before I can even begin to describe them on paper. Fictional worlds and people are created by artists who believe passionately in the need for these worlds and people to come into existence. While I can appreciate such artists, I am not one of them.

“But what we can say is that virtually any job is awful and soul-destroying if it is being done by a person who doesn’t find love in it.

Design a job as though there’s no love in it, and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy—you wind up designing loveless jobs in which the best have to actually break the rules and regulations in order to find love in what they do. As far as we can, it’s up to us to try to persuade our leaders that this is wrong. That if we can define jobs through the lens of those who love them then higher performance, higher quality, and less burnout are the happy result.

Instead, a healthy life is one where you are in motion, where you are moving through life—all aspects of your life—in such a way that you draw strength and love from it, and this then gives you the energy you need to keep moving.

This means to live happily and fully, you have to express your loves. Yes, they spring from within you, but then they demand expression. You’ve got to get them out somewhere, somehow, turn them from loves into actions, from passions into contributions. And when you do, your life feels coherent and authentic, and you know, you just know, in every fiber of your being, that you are on your path.

16. I SEE YOU, I LOVE YOU

“I’m still trying to make my peace with what I did. If you’ve been through divorce, you’ll know what I mean. It is an overwhelming experience, and takes years before you gain any sort of perspective. Please don’t listen to anyone telling you how to get through a divorce until they are at least three years into it. Things change. Wisdom comes slowly. I can’t even scratch the surface of the emotions I’ve felt—so much guilt wrapped in shame, some happiness, so much pain. All I can say now is that though I am proud of my life choices, I will never be proud to be divorced. I know it was the right decision, and, still, it will always feel like a failure.

There’s a wealth of recent data revealing how wrongheaded this all is— from brain science to rigorous studies of high performers—but the Aztecs knew centuries ago how enduringly unique we all are, and therefore how much we need one another. Their concept of virtue and goodness was not centered on the individual. Instead, it was relational, as in no person is perfect and so none of us should strive to be. In their telling, virtue—and contribution, and creativity, and resilience, and altruism, and all things good —come about only when two people connect with each other.

What I missed, and what got me so lost in my personal life, was the emotional power of being seen for who I truly am. Love, in any relationship, is not protection—it is not someone reaching in and saving you from yourself.

Love is not diversity—it is not someone complementing your personality with different strengths.

Love is not similarity—it is not someone sharing your interests, or values, or dreams.

Love is someone seeing the fullness of you and wanting you to be the best possible version of you. This is what a relationship is for—any relationship, whether friend, business partner, sibling, or lover. It is for each person to do all they can to help the other express their uniqueness as powerfully as possible. Love’s goal is to make the other person bigger.

Seeing someone with love means keeping your rose-tinted glasses on. The researchers called this your benevolent distortion. Thus your partner isn’t disorganized, they’re spontaneous. Not willful, but self-assured. Not flirtatious, but charming. If you see your partner through the lens of benevolent distortions, then you become more confident in your decision to tie your life to your partner’s. This confidence breeds intimacy, and this intimacy strengthens your love, which leads to yet more benevolent distortions, and so to more confidence, to more intimacy, in an ongoing upward spiral of love.

The data recommends that when you see a failing in your partner, you should recast it in your mind as an aspect of something they love.

“How do you know if you’ve started out right?

You don’t. Just start. A career is not a ladder, nor a lattice, nor a jungle gym. A career is a scavenger hunt for love.

Be generous with yourself. Don’t look for a sign to the perfect opening. Don’t wait until all the paths have been cut and freed from thick undergrowth and fallen trees. Just start moving. Listen to your instincts, try to find a role in which you might catch a glimpse of a red thread or two, then, as you move down the path, keep your eyes peeled for more red threads.

When you find one, grab hold and follow where it leads.

In all of my research, it has been crashingly obvious that the most successful people found roles that a) fulfilled their sense of purpose—they believed in the “why” of the role, b) allied them with colleagues they trusted and admired—they connected to the “who” of the role, and c) contained activities they loved—they enjoyed the role’s “what.”

Happy indeed is the person who finds the beautiful intersection of all three.

No, you won’t ever find the perfect job, a job you love 100 percent of the time. You won’t ever “do only what you love.” But you can —every single day—find some activity or situation or moment or event that you love. It might be the thinnest of red threads, but you can find it.

Do as my dear friend does, and ignore the list. Instead, focus on what at work you can control. Seventy-three percent of workers say they have the chance to modify their role to fit their strengths better. So start here. Once you’ve identified one or two red threads, figure out how you can use them to get your work done.

Use the phrase “I am at my best when … ” And then describe in detail the sorts of activities, situations, contexts, and moments that bring out your very best.

Here are a few more ways you can describe the detail of your Wyrd without bragging:

Over the years, I’ve found that I …

Other people tell me that I …

I get a thrill from …

I find I learn best when …

Some of my best times are when I …

But you should also learn a technique for describing your threads that aren’t red. Here, these sorts of phrases can be helpful:

I’m not at my best when …

I find I procrastinate when …

I seem to struggle with …

I’m drained when …

This kind of follower-driven opining may have value in the world of social media, but it’s far less likely to serve you in the world of work. Here you will build the greatest value if you can show yourself to be someone who has stayed focused enough in their field to know all the details, and which details truly matter. Regardless of your field, this sort of expertise is always valued on a team. It has heft. It is rare. It is recognized even if other folks on the team don’t understand the details themselves. It is intimidating, which is no bad thing. And it leads to you being deeply trusted.

Contrary to what you may have heard or read, being focused in this way doesn’t make you narrow, or less open to novelty and innovation. The opposite is true. It is only when you know so well the existing ways of doing things—which ones work, which don’t, and when and why—that you are able to imagine what a more effective way might look like. Focus such as this not only helps you anticipate the future—you are deeper into the forest, further ahead than anyone else, and so can see round more corners— but also helps you create the future. This focus prepares your mind with actions, experiences, and results played out over many years, and as all innovators know, creativity comes only to the prepared mind.

This is because people follow a leader only when they see something that will turn anxiety about the future into confidence. Your mastery is, to other people, confidence-inducing. It shows them something specific and tangible about you, something vivid, not vague. It shows them that you are both an expert in who you are—and therefore who you will be no matter what situations you all encounter—and an expert in your chosen craft—and therefore are more likely to see around corners and be ready for whatever the future might hold for them. Both of these inspire confidence.

18. LOVE @ WORK

“Back in 2019, as I and my ADP Research Institute team were analyzing the data from our global study of the world’s workers, we discovered just how pervasive and powerful “work is teamwork” remains today. Workers who reported that they felt part of a team were not only 2.7 times more likely to be fully engaged, they were three times more likely to be highly resilient and two times more likely to report a strong sense of belonging to their organization.

As Pak’s painting reveals, this is a complete misunderstanding of the point of a team. We did not invent teams to remind individuals that they are not as important as the group. We created teams precisely because it was the best mechanism for maximizing the unique qualities of each individual. We sat around the fire, pondering how the heck we were going to solve our problems—building shelter, finding our way, taking down animals far bigger than each of us—and we peered through the smoke at our uniquely gifted brothers and our sisters.

Organizations have created such disengaging places to work precisely because they haven’t understood the power of teams. If you are not part of a team, our data shows, less than 10 percent of you feel engaged, resilient, and connected. This goes some way to explaining why we learned that health care workers and educators are the two least engaged and least resilient professions: neither hospitals nor schools have been organized around teams.

As I described at the beginning of the book, many organizations impose on you processes and tools that appear to have been designed to deliberately distance you from who you really are. Your unique loves, your uniqueness in general, runs counter to the organization’s need for uniformity—of products, services, even values—and so the goal of work is experienced by you as an ongoing effort to make you as much as possible like every other salesperson, housekeeper, teacher, manager, nurse, machinist, or whatever your role might be.

Wrongheaded though this is, you’re not going to be able to recreate your organization’s talent management practices all by yourself. Yes, folks like me and others are trying to influence your leaders to throw out these uniformity-focused talent practices in favor of more individualized ones, but this will take a few years. What can you do in the meanwhile? You want to find love in your work, you want to be seen for your whole, authentic self at work, and for the very best of you. How can you pull this off, when so many of the tools and technologies and processes at work are trying—well intendedly—to smother you?

A check-in is a fifteen-minute conversation that you have with your team leader each week about your upcoming week. This conversation is built on your answers to four short questions, two about last week, two about this week:

What activities did I love last week?

What activities did I loathe last week?

What are my priorities this week?

What help do I need from you, my team leader?

In trying to persuade your team leader to establish a check-in routine with you, here’s some data that’ll help:

• Those team leaders who check in every week drive their team members’ engagement scores up 77 percent, and their team members’ voluntary turnover in the next six months down 67 percent.

• It doesn’t matter whether the check-in happens in person, by phone, by email, or in an app. What matters is simply that it happens.

• Leaders who wind up actually having this interaction with the team member about the four questions/answers drive statistically higher levels of performance and engagement in their team members. Here, too, it doesn’t matter if the interaction is voice to voice or text to text.

• Ratings of quality don’t seem to matter: even if you and your team leader don’t have a genius coaching moment during one check-in, don’t worry about it. You’re going to check in again next week, and maybe something will strike both of you then. What matters with a check-in is that it happens frequently, not necessarily that it happens brilliantly. When it comes to leading, frequency trumps quality.

If you are yourself a team leader, it will serve you well to establish the check-in as one of your core rituals, what General Electric calls your standard leader behaviors.

It’s a function of how many people you can pay attention to each week. Span of control should be renamed span of attention.

If you are a team leader, try to become known for being really curious about what your people love. You might start with recognition by saying, “Hey, well done on that project last week,” but you won’t stop there. You’ll keep asking questions:

Was that fun for you?

What did you love most about it?

Did you learn anything new, any flashes of insight?

We’ve got another similar project coming up. Anything you want to tweak or change this time around?

To love someone is to see them, all of them, the best of them, to accept what you see, and then to do everything in your power to help them be the biggest version of themselves.

Your love will challenge them, and cajole them, and never leave them be, and if, at some point, you see them heading in a direction that will hurt them, or shrink them, you will push them out of harm’s way, even if they themselves can’t yet see the love in what you’re doing. If you love someone, you do for them what is right for them, not necessarily what they want. You are demanding, your expectations are the highest of the high.

We asked people if they trusted their teammates, their team leader, and their senior leaders. Those who strongly agreed that they trusted two of these three groups were three times more likely to be fully engaged and highly resilient. Those who strongly agreed that they completely trusted all three groups were fifteen times more likely to be fully engaged and forty-two times more likely to be highly resilient.

If you are a team leader, you too must be a bringer of trust into your team. Do your check-ins each week; make few and small commitments and keep them all; never talk negatively about one team member to another; always do for people what is right for them even if that is not always what they want; share in detail with each one what you have come to see and learn about them. These are the sorts of actions that, little by little, build trust on your team and bring love in.