As Ron Friedman, my guest on this week's episode, explains, we have been taught for generations that there are two ways to succeed either from talent or practice, the latter popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers.

In his new book, Decoding Greatness, Ron describes a third path. One that has quietly launched icons in a wide range of fields from artists, writers and chefs to athletes, inventors and entrepreneurs and one that would be applied widely to learning in the workplace, the path of reverse engineering. Ron is a social psychologist whose main focus is on helping people succeed faster. He is a frequent contributor to publications like Harvard Business Review, Psychology Today and Forbes. Ron’s first book, The Best Place To Work, The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace, which we also discuss in our conversation, was named a Business Book Of The Year by Inc.

You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.

In our conversation, Ron and I discuss:

• The differences between learning through talent practice and reverse engineering

• How to harness the power of reverse engineering and boost your career

• Why the three key psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness are at the heart of employee engagement and performance

• How to learn and acquire new skills

• How to optimise for workplace relationships and work environments in a hybrid future

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in creating a culture of performance and continuous learning. So that is Business Leaders, CHROs and anyone in a people analytics, culture, learning, employee experience or HR Business Partner role.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by AG5. To learn more, visit www.ag5.com.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Ron Friedman to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast, it is great to have you on the show Rob. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you?

Ron Friedman: Sure. I am a Social Psychologist and I study top performance. My first book was called The Best Place To Work, The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace and my new book is called Decoding Greatness, How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success. And when I am not writing, I lead a company called Ignite80. It is called Ignite80 because over, as you know well David, over 80% of employees are not fully engaged at work. The mission of Ignite80 is to reverse that trend by teaching leaders, science-based strategies for elevating performance and improving people's health, happiness and engagement.

David Green: That is great because I looked it up before we spoke, why it was called Ignite80 and it piqued my interest when I saw that number. And actually our company, Insight222, also has a reason for the 222, which is it is the average number of working days across the top 25 OECD countries a year and we help, similar to you, organisations provide more insight from using data for the 222 days a year that people work. So a nice bit of synergy to start our conversation off there. We are going to certainly dig in, not only, to the work around Decoding Greatness, which I know has just come out. I think towards the end of the conversation, we will touch on maybe looking at The Best Place to Work, in the current context around the hybrid workplaces as well. It would be great to get your thoughts around that. So, let's start with Decoding Greatness, it has just come out. Can you give our listeners a brief introduction to the book?

Ron Friedman: Certainly. Well, I will start by telling you a little bit about my first book because it connects. So the first book, The Best Place to Work, took over a thousand academic studies and translated them into plain English so that regardless of whether you are an executive, an HR leader, or just someone starting out, you have access to the latest science and have it translated into plain English so that you know how to apply it to either developing a great workplace or to elevating your performance at work. But there was something missing from that book. And what was missing is that even within the best workplaces, there is a range of performance levels. Some people are top performers, others are not and I was curious about that. So what I decided to do for this book was to delve into some of the biographies of genuine top performers, people like our groundbreaking artists and amazing writers and business titans, to look at what is it that they are doing differently. What I discovered in doing that research is that the stories that we have been told about success are wrong. There are two basic stories that we have been told over the years. The first is that greatness, or high level performance, or success comes from talent. And so from that perspective, we are all born with certain innate strengths and the key to finding your greatness, is just finding a field that allows your innate strengths to shine.

The second story is that greatness comes from practice and this is the, Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours idea, the notion that if you just practice hard enough and you have enough discipline to do this for 10 years, eventually you will become great.

There is a third story about success and greatness and it is one that people don't often talk about, yet it is the path by which a remarkable number of high performers achieve their greatness and that path is mastering a skill that few people have heard of and yet it is one that is absolutely vital, particularly in today's economy. And that is reverse engineering. Reverse engineering simply means finding the best examples in a field and then working backwards to identify how they were created and how they can be recreated in a novel contexts. I can give you examples of how to apply reverse engineering, but that is the general idea, which is that rather than looking for your talent or practicing for far longer than is reasonable, I would argue and also risky because by the time you have mastered the thing you have been practicing for 10,000 hours, the economy has moved on to something else. Reverse engineering, incorporating learning into everyday life by taking outstanding examples, working backwards, to figure out what is it that makes this unique.

David Green: Okay. So let's dig into reverse engineering, I am going to move away from the script straight away, but we will come back to it. So can we talk a bit more in detail about reverse engineering and then maybe some examples, I think that would be great because that brings it to life straight away.

Ron Friedman: Okay. So just to reiterate, reverse engineering is just finding examples of the best in the field and working backwards to figure out how they did it. So in Silicon Valley, this idea of reverse engineering is very well known. People like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, this is how they established their organisations. There is a tremendously long history of coders identifying winning products and then working backwards to identify how they work. So this is how we got the laptop and the mouse and even the iPhone, it is all about reverse engineering. What is less well known is that reverse engineering also explains how people like Malcolm Gladwell and Stephen King learned to write. How Claude Monet became a groundbreaking artist and even how Judd Apatow became one of the most successful comedy minds of our generation. Studying the best in the field, turns out to be a lot more common than anyone realised. There are a range of strategies for how to apply this, it really depends on your particular field. I will give you some examples. So you are a non-fiction writer, you probably know this, non-fiction writers will often flip right to the back of the book to look at the end note section to figure out what are the sources that went into creating this. There are examples of chefs who, I talk about this in Decoding Greatness, will order food to go and place a complex sauce on a white plate and spread it out to identify the ingredients. And sometimes there is a magnifying glass involved. Photographers will look at images in a very particular way. Most people who are photography novices, like me, will look at the object when they look at the photo but a photographer, a trained photographer, will be looking at lots of other things like the shadows, which tell you where the light source was placed. The reflection in the subject's eyes, which can tell you the location of the light source.

The critical thing really is not to passively enjoy experiences, but to consistently think, how was this created? What could I learn from this? How can I apply this to a project that I am working?

David Green: I suppose it is like breaking down the constituent elements. The example you gave there in the photograph about the light, the shadow and everything else and it is thinking about how someone that is best in class or a leader in their field has actually done that and put those pieces together into that jigsaw and learning from that, rather than trying to master something for 10,000 hours. Which sounds like an inordinate amount of time.

Ron Friedman: I was just giving you a range of examples of all these diverse fields, but just to make this concrete for the digital HR leader, this applies to how a well-written memo is constructed. It applies to how a deck is constructed. It applies to how you write a TedTalk. All of these things are examples that I talk about in my book, deconstructing, what are the constituent parts? And then how do you apply those to whatever it is you are working on?

We are going to, I am sure, touch on is this copying? Because I am happy to have that debate, but I just think that it is so long overdue for people to realise that this is how those at the top are figuring things out. They are not waiting to be taught by an instructor. They are not taking courses. They are not going to conferences necessarily, they are probably doing all those things as well, but they are actively learning every step of the way.

David Green: Which is obviously so relevant in today's workplace where lifelong learning, up-skilling are hugely popular topics for organisations and not just for people in my field in HR, but CEOs as well. They are constantly thinking about this constant challenge around skills. Why do you think skills and lifelong learning have become so important and urgent for organisations and how can people use reverse engineering in that context?

Ron Friedman: So I am a big fan of learning and this has been the driving force behind everything that I do, it is why I have changed jobs. I used to be a professor and then I realised when you are a professor, your job is to teach the same thing over and over again and that is not why I got into education. I got in to education because I enjoy learning new things and that is what led me to leave academia to go in to polling. So my job was to figure out, what is it that the public feels and how do we shift those opinions by using psychological principles? Now, one of the things that is critical and that, by the way was the impetus for writing The Best Place To Work, is my experience of being in the workplace after having studied what it means to become a top performer. What I noticed is that all of the insights that psychologists know about, how people become motivated and productive and engaged and creative, all those were being ignored by most workplaces and learning is one of the most critical pieces because it's a basic human psychological need. So we are three basic human psychological needs, we have decades of research supporting this. Those three needs are number one, competence, feeling like you are good at what you do, but also having the ability to grow your competence on a regular basis. If you don't have that ability, you are not going to be fully engaged. So from a psychological perspective, having your need for growth fulfilled, is crucial. Just to round out that answer, the other two psychological needs are relatedness, of feeling connected to other people. And the third is autonomy, feeling like you have some say in what you do at work. From a psychological perspective, learning is crucial, but there is more to it than that because there is actually research showing that one of the things that we can do to mitigate the effect of burnout and burnout is at an all time high right now, particularly as we are coming out from this pandemic, is to learn new things. What most people assume is that if I work less, I will eventually get rid of my burnout, but that tends not to work. The reason it tends not to work is because when you commit to working less, you actually put more pressure on yourself to get more done in less time and that actually counteracts the very thing you are trying to solve for.

But learning new things tends to elevate your sense of energy because learning new things also raises your competence. It provides an immediate emotional boost. And so providing people with learning opportunities is crucial if you are trying to get them engaged and also preventing burnout.

David Green: I was looking at some of the endorsers on the book, Daniel Pink, Adam Grant, Marshall Goldsmith, Dorie Clark, these are leaders in their respective fields. I don't know if you have studied any of them as individuals and what makes them successful using the reverse engineering, but I bet there are some commonalities between them.

Ron Friedman: Oh, without question and in fact, you mentioned Dorie Clark, Dorie has a course on reverse engineering HBR articles, because this is how she got into HBR. There are patterns hidden in these articles and in Decoding Greatness, I talk about patterns within articles, patterns within TedTalks and patterns within novels. We have this idea that we need to get struck by a bolt of inspiration and insight and that is how creativity happens. But creativity is a lot easier when you have a roadmap to get started and that roadmap is hidden in the examples that you find impactful.

David Green: It is like when people do things in threes, you did it then with the three psychological needs, I am not sure it was deliberate. But whether it is politics, whether it is business, whether it is good storytellers, they usually start with three things. If you say I have got 10 things, immediately people think, oh God that is a lot, and you have got to remember them as well. But three things is quite a simple thing. I am pretty sure there is a psychology thing behind that.

Ron Friedman: I think three is easier to remember, it is memorable and it is also, I don't know the exact study behind this, but there is no question that that is the magic number particularly with insights or whenever you want people to be in some way moved. That seems to be the pattern.

David Green: It is interesting. Certainly the more speeches I have done, the more I have learnt. Sometimes you are at a conference and you think, that person was really good. Why were they good? And then you think, the topic was great, they were a great speaker, but then actually it was quite simple. It was memorable because they didn't try and do too many slides. It is that mixture of different things.

Ron Friedman: And I want to applaud you for asking that question, if there is one thing I hope people take away from this it is to consistently pause when they encounter great examples and ask themselves, why was this impactful? If you can do that on a regular basis, you are incorporating learning into your everyday life. You are getting that boost that prevents burnout, but also up-levelling your skills on a regular basis and not just treating learning as something that happens in cycles when I have some downtime to read books, or when I take a course. It really needs to be part of your everyday approach to work because it is the only path to succeed, at this point. Something I discuss in the book which is, we are entering a phase of winner take all markets, where technology has made it a lot easier to find the best in the field and ask them to collaborate. And because we are in that state, that is great if you are a top performer, if you are the best in your field people are going to be coming to you all the time and asking to work with you. But if you are not a top performer, the only way to get there is to up-level your skills on a consistent basis.

David Green: Yeah, it is pretty important. So why has learning through reverse engineering flown relatively under the radar until now?

Ron Friedman: Well you know, it is not a strategy that is often shared. But is interesting though as I discussed this with podcasters and interviewers and as I was writing the book and sharing the idea with friends, the reaction I would get consistently was, I do that all the time, but I have never read a book about it. I think it is a strategy that people kind of stumble on themselves without ever having been taught to do it and I think part of it has to do with the fact that we have this pervasive view that copying is wrong. To a certain extent, obviously it is, but when you work in a creative field the last thing you want to be viewed as is un-original. And since the goal of reverse engineering is to uncover hidden patterns inside the work of others, there is a very genuine concern that if I do this, I am going to be reduced to replicating someone else's work and becoming a hack. But this is why I think it is so valuable to have the research, because when you look at the research on what happens when people study someone else's work very carefully and even copy it, it turns out it makes them more creative, not less. There is a study I talk about in Decoding Greatness, that was done at the University of Tokyo, where they had amateur artists come into the lab, they divided them into two groups. The first group was asked to create original art over three consecutive days. The second group was asked to create original art on the first day, on the second day, they were asked to copy the work of an established painter. Then on the third day, they were asked once again to produce original art and then they had evaluators come in and assess who was the most creative on the final day of the program, the experiment. What they found is that those who were tasked to copy the work of an established artist were more creative than the other group. It wasn't by simply replicating the style of the established painter whose work they copied, it was going off on a completely different direction. What I find fascinating about that is the reason that the group that had copied became more creative is because when you are forced to slow down and to evaluate the choices of a master against your own inclinations, your own instincts, just that very process of comparing ideas, opens your eyes up to new possibilities in your own work that you have been ignoring.

There is so much interesting value in that perspective, which is if I pause to look at the person who is the best in my field and evaluate what is happening in their emails, what is happening in their memos, what is happening in their articles, that is not going to reduce me into becoming a hack. That is actually going to elevate my performance by opening my eyes up to new opportunities in my own work.

David Green: I suppose in reality you will probably likely to study several people in the field, maybe there is three leaders in the field and you might take inspiration from all three, but add a little mix of yourself and then you get that creativity come in as well. And as you said, compare that to the example of 10,000 hours, without making it simplistic, it is a much quicker way of doing it and probably a more fun way of learning as well.

Ron Friedman: That is how creativity happens. The last thing you want when you are aiming to be creative, is to operate with intellectual blinders and shut yourself off in a dark room and hope that the creative idea happens. Creativity is about blending ideas. I will give you an example from the book that I think you will appreciate, which has to do with Barack Obama. So Barack Obama, people don't realise this, when he first entered politics he was not a winner right out of the gate. In fact, he got trounced in his first race for Congress. He lost by a margin of more than two to one and it was because, if you can believe it, he was a terrible speaker. He was a law school professor and he was used to lecturing students and voters didn't appreciate being lectured to and they let him know at the ballot box. He was taken aback, for a long time considered leaving politics, until one of his advisors suggested that he noticed what pastors are doing in church and so he started studying that process. What he found is that there was a lot they were doing, that he could incorporate into politics. He went into a completely different field and incorporated some of the techniques and when he came back and ran again, he was now using repetition, he was telling stories, he was modulating his tone, he was pausing in certain places for emphasis and it transformed his speaking and elevated him into the man we know today. What I love about that story is that it illustrates that he didn’t find his talent, he didn't practice for 10,000 hours, he opened his eyes up to what was happening in a different field, found something impactful that he could incorporate into his own field and became a superstar. Obviously there is more to Barack Obama’s story than just going to church, but there is something really powerful about opening your eyes up and questioning what is it that makes us impactful, even when it is something that is happening outside your field, because it's in doing that that you identify ingredients you can incorporate into your own field.

David Green: Obviously he became one of the greatest political orators of our time. Whatever your opinion of Barack Obama's policies are, as a speaker, he was exceptional.

Ron Friedman: Yeah, exactly. And there is a structure to his speeches that you can break down if you apply this approach. One way of doing it and I do this with fiction in Decoding Greatness, is you could take the speech and you can look at the emotional trajectory by simply labelling each paragraph, is it a positive emotion, a negative emotion or a neutral emotion. There is a pattern in his speeches that is repeated and it is one that you could apply to your next speech, if you just have this approach.

David Green: I suppose if you look at something like music, one of my musical heroes is David Bowie, who was always considered very original and like a chameleon he moved on to different things. But actually you could tell that he took inspirations from others each time he reinvented himself in the 1970’s. He was the star of glam rock and then he took the inspiration from the Philly sound, I think it was and reinvented himself as a solo artist. He didn't do anything massively original but it was the style that he took to that, which became very popular and he had credibility, even though he was a British guy singing Philadelphia soul. Obviously he took inspiration from us and applied a formula that they had done, but maybe he had his own formula as well that he mixed in with that, so it was original.

Ron Friedman: And that evolution is itself formulaic, because if you look at people like Elton John or Beyoncé or even Billy Eilish over the last year, she has completely transformed in to a completely different act right now. It is by noticing what makes other musical acts successful and applying that approach to their own work.

 It is the bands that don't evolve that disappear like, I will give you an example, The Killers, they are stagnant. They are not moving and they need to, if you look at them playing live now and they have done a couple of shows over the pandemic, they are still playing the songs they wrote 15 years ago. They need a kick in the pants, that's all.

Just your typical digital HR topic.

David Green: Yeah, we don’t usually end up talking about the Killers, we could go into their new order and cure pastiches, but I expect we are on common ground there.

Let’s look at new skills and I would be interested to get your view on this. So let's look at organisations, who do you think is responsible for the development of new skills?

Ron Friedman: I don't like that word responsible, honestly, because it is almost like it is a problem that needs to be solved, but the truth is it is an untapped opportunity for both sides. So from an organisational perspective, if your folks are not learning, they are not going to be as fully engaged as they otherwise might be. If they are not as fully engaged as they otherwise might be, there will be looking for a new job. So it is a tool for retention more than anything else and obviously higher productivity, because the more skills your employees have, the better prepared they will be to contribute.

From an individual perspective, if you are not learning, you are not as productive as you could be or not as happy as you could be. So I think we need to stop viewing and, not accusing you of this, but I have done interviews where they are like, learning sounds hard. That is the wrong perspective because yeah, learning can be hard but it is a source of vitality. When we feel like we are reaching our potential that is when we are growing new skills, building our confidence and so I think that if you want to use the word responsibility, I guess I place it on both sides, but I view it as really an opportunity more than anything else.

David Green: Yeah, I agree. Personally, I like to learn at least one new thing every day, which is useful for work but also for home and home life. If you are not learning, then you are standing still, that is my personal view. So I agree with you I don’t think it is just the organisation's responsibility or the learning department's responsibility,

I think it is the responsibility for every individual to learn and the organisation needs to create the environment for people to learn.

Ron Friedman: Right and if you are listening to this podcast, then you probably appreciate that because hopefully what you get out of this experience is something new that you can apply in your own work.

You know that that feeling is what makes this worthwhile.

David Green: I guess, with the reverse engineering piece, don't just look at people in your own field. You gave the example with Barack Obama there, look at people in other fields and take what they know and then apply it to your own field.

Ron Friedman: Without question, yes. One of the things I love about that approach is that it gives you license to just enjoy that guilty pleasure. Rather than feeling bad about the fact that you enjoy watching foreign films or listening to comedy shows, ask yourself, what makes this powerful? And then how do I apply this to what I am working on? Invariably you will come up with more creative ideas than you would have, had you just been focused on your own industry.

David Green: A little known story for me, I learned how to use social media by having a cricket blog. We are not going to talk about cricket, don't worry, but I learned the skills from that and then applied it to what I do now.

Ron Friedman: I don’t even know what that is, what is cricket?

David Green: It is like baseball but slightly more sophisticated.

Ron Friedman: Oh, that cricket. So you had a cricket blog, that is fascinating.

David Green: Yes, so you can take inspiration from all different places. I am going to get definitely onto the engagement piece in a minute, but another side of the skills coin is often considered to be performance.

What is your view on how we measure and understand performance and success today? Is there a better way?

Ron Friedman: I think that we under utilise metrics, if you can believe it. I dunno if that is heretical to say on this podcast, but in the book I talk about something called the scoreboard principle. The scoreboard principle simply comes down to, if you want to get better at anything, the first step is to figure out the points you are trying to score and monitor them regularly. So we know from the research that simply keeping track of your performance is going to lead to improvement. Do you want to drink more water, monitor your water intake every day. You want to lose weight, keep track of your calorie consumption. If you want to focus more at work, monitor how many minutes you spend of uninterrupted work. It is an incredibly powerful tool and there is an evolutionary reason for why we are drawn to numbers, in the past being fixated on numbers actually helped us survive. So if you were sensitive to size, for example, then you pursued food sources that were larger than those that weren’t. You had an assessment of competing tribes and whether you should mess with them or ally with them or run away. That information was vital and so we are naturally drawn to metrics and you can harness them in a way that actually helps you elevate your performance. The first step is to figure out what is it that makes me successful on an everyday level? What goals am I trying to achieve? And then working backwards, reverse engineering your future self, to keep track of those crucial metrics. Within most organisations the average employee has no idea what points they are even trying to score, let alone how well they are doing at them. So in the book I talk about; if you compare your performance on the average pitch meeting this year versus last year, are you doing better or worse? Most people have no idea. How effective were your emails compared to last year? Genuinely people have no idea and I think if we all had our individualised scoreboards that we crafted on our own, so we feel like there is a sense of autonomy there, we would be a lot more effective at work. A great example of how we are solving for the wrong problem, that don't actually help us score any points, is meetings. I think meetings are a crutch in a lot of organisations, not all organisations, and certainly meetings have their value when done correctly. But I think, what happens in a lot of organisations is meetings are an excuse for not reaching a decision and so if I feel like there is a meeting on the calendar, I don't have to actually take responsibility for reaching a decision. Among the newly minted entrepreneurs, there is a real hatred of meetings, it is really kind of physical, it is a revulsion and it is because they realise that meetings don't contribute to their bottom line. Among employees, it is a way of taking cover and I think if there was more clarity on what it is that is required to achieve your next raise or your next promotion, I bet we would see far fewer meetings.

David Green: Yeah, I am not fond of too many meetings and I think one of the challenges organisations have had, in the last 18 months in the pandemic, is the number of meetings seems to have gone up and the amount of focus time has gone down. There are enough studies out there telling us about the importance of focus time for actually getting things done and achieving, both on an individual level but also at an organisational level as well, as a way of getting to decisions and getting the work done.

Particularly when we think about the context of the last 18 months, obviously The Best Place To Work was about creating an extraordinary workplace. The concept of an extraordinary workplace in terms of a physical perspective has changed since 2014 and because of the last 18 months, will likely change moving forward. I think it is interesting the number of companies who still seem stuck in the old world, when it comes to putting down these announcements saying, we are going to go back to the office four days a week and on these three days or four days, everyone needs to be in the office. I think the world has changed, I might be wrong. So I would be interested to get your perspectives on how do you create an extraordinary workplace in a hybrid world, for example?

Ron Friedman: It has been a dreadful time, obviously for so many. But if there is one positive outcome that has come out of the last 18 months I think there is a far greater realisation about the value of flexibility.

For managers, I think in part because they have noticed it for themselves. I saw a study recently that said 33% of workers have been consistently taking naps every day, they are now taking walks, they are going out for runs. I think there is really two things that are happening here, when I say flexibility there is freedom of location. What I think is there has been a realisation among many that productivity doesn't tank when you let people choose where they are working from, in fact in many cases, it goes up and it is because of that sense of autonomy. So when I feel like I am working how I best work, I can do a better job for you. That was a tough argument to make before the pandemic, before everyone was forced into it but I think right now there is a little bit more openness to that perspective. The other thing is that in terms of the connection between the physiological and the mental is also something that people are more aware of. If you allow your body to operate at its best, your mental performance will skyrocket and so napping is crucial to that, movement is crucial to that. I had an article when my first book came out called, Regular Exercise Is Part of Your Job and that ran in the Harvard Business Review. It was one of those articles that went viral and it really is something that I incorporate into my perspective where if I don't exercise, I'm not going to sleep as well and if I'm not going to sleep as well, tomorrow's performance will not be as great. So I don't feel guilty when it is time for me to leave the office to go to the gym or go for a swim or play pickleball. Do you know pickleball?

David Green: I do not know about pickleball.

Ron Friedman: You'll teach me about cricket and I'll teach you pickleball. Pickleball is like ping pong and tennis had a baby playing with a wiffle ball and a paddle and it is played on a smaller court, but anyway, it is big in America right now.

When it is time for me to go and meet my friends at the end of the day and there are a few more emails to write, I used to just stay in the office and get my inbox to zero, I don't do that anymore because I realise that exercise is an investment in my future performance.

And to the point about meeting friends, relationships are also a vital factor that contributes to building a great place to work and that is another element that I think has been highlighted over the course of this pandemic. Sometimes you need something that you love to go away for a little while before you realise what you had and that is the case with relationships. People don't often realise this is but the reason relatedness is so vital to being a better performer at work, it’s that in those connections you actually have greater focus. For example, if you don’t know that you are fitting in with other people in your office, you are going to be paying more attention to does this person like me? Does this person respect me? Why do they leave me off that email? But if you feel valued and appreciated, you actually have more bandwidth for doing your job than worrying about those relationships. You also get more honest feedback and you get better support from those around you and so those relationships are really crucial. So I think as we are going back to, I don't know if we are going to ever go back to what we had before, where we were at the office in some cases for 60 hours a week but I do think that there are those two takeaways I am heartened by. I think more and more leaders are starting to recognise the importance of giving people some freedom, allowing them to exercise over the course of the workday and investing in those relationships because really those are the tools that are vital to retention and top performance.

David Green: It is interesting that we have been in this pandemic for 18 months, hopefully not for too much longer, and some of the studies that have been done are showing that those organisations that care about their employees, ask them how they are feeling and the respond to that are seeing that trust, autonomy and productivity is going up. They are also seeing engagement going up, I am concerned that you might have to rename your company at some point, we have seen engagement going up during the pandemic and I am hoping now that less than 80% are disengaged and the number getting engaged is higher.

Obviously you have talked about some of the ways in which companies can actually address that. Autonomy, obviously being one of them, relatedness being another and the competence around the whole learning piece. What are the other areas you feel that organisations could do to really improve engagement in their companies?

Ron Friedman: Well, we talked about the scoreboard principle and I think that that is a component that allows people to both monitor their progress, but also invest in the right things. Often, it is just the exercise of taking a couple of hours and thinking about, in order for me to have a great year, what would I need to achieve?

And then how do I score that on a daily basis? Learning, obviously, is another component. It really comes down to the three basic psychological needs, autonomy, competence and relatedness. The scoreboard principle comes down to competence and then when we talked about the physiological, that also contributes to the autonomy and the competence and if you are doing it correctly, with the engagement. I think ultimately we don't have to reinvent the wheel, we just have to make sure that we are providing for the basic human psychological needs because nothing is going to happen that is going to completely render any of them obsolete.

It is just a matter of how we feed those basic human psychological needs.

David Green: We have got to the last question and this is one we are asking everyone on the show. You might end up summarising some of the stuff you have already said. What is the value of measuring skills data and how should companies approach it?

Ron Friedman: Well, we talked about the scoreboard principle. I want to give you a story that I think really illuminates some of the value here. So again, the scoreboard principles, measuring the factors on which you are trying to improve on and then keeping track of those on a daily basis. One company that has done that extraordinarily well is the Ritz Carlton, hotel chain. In the book I talk about how it is that they got to where they are. One of the metrics that they are fanatical about is net promoter scores. I'm sure everyone listening to this, if you are in the podcast you know what that is, but just to illuminate it for those who are not familiar I just want to refresh. Net promoter is the likelihood of a guest recommending your hotel to a friend or a colleague. The reason they are so gung-ho about that metric is because they realise that it is not just about having customer satisfaction, what you really want is you want people raving about your hotel to their friends and colleagues, because that is what is going to lead to more bookings in the future. In collecting net promoter scores as soon as customers leave the hotel and keeping the entire team monitoring those numbers on a daily basis, one of the things that the Ritz Carlton has discovered is that what really drives that metric is solving for employees, not just their expressed requests, but their unexpressed needs. What I mean by that is, I give a variety of examples based my kids experience at the hotel. An expressed request is, does the hotel have a cafe? And the answer to that is technically, the answer is yes. But if you are solving for an unexpressed need, what you might say is, would you like me to make you a reservation? Or would you like me to text you a menu? That is solving for something I haven't asked for, but it addresses an underlying concern. In the case of my kids, my son lost his goggles at the pool and he went up to the person working there and he said, Hey, have you seen my goggles? And they said no, I haven't. Would you like me to get you a new pair? He was, I think five at the time, they took him to the store and they bought him new goggles. And it is because every employee at the hotel has a tiny budget that they don't have to ask for permission for, that they can just address a customer concern. All of that came from understanding and valuing the metrics and the metrics of net promoter score. To the extent that you are monitoring metrics, you are able to identify drivers that may not be obvious, but that you can control and so those are leading indicators that you can then start to tinker with in order to drive your ultimate outcome.

I can't say enough about the value of metrics. There is an entire chapter on it in Decoding Greatness, because the first step to getting better at anything is identifying your metrics.

David Green: Metrics is certainly something that will appeal to a lot of the listeners of this podcast, given that a lot of them are from the field of people analytics and HR, where obviously we have a lot of metrics. I love that example because it is a great example of autonomy as well, by giving employees that autonomy to make those decisions by giving them that budget to delight guests.

Ron Friedman: Exactly and how many conversations are you saving? If you think about that within your own company, if you just allowed people a tiny budget to solve problems. If you are a manager, how many times are people emailing you saying, can I purchase this transcript? Can I get this course? Can I download this book? Just give them a tiny budget, it empowers them, feeds their autonomy and improves their care.

David Green: And I bet they will be careful about spending it as well, so they will make the decision that they think is right for them and right for the company.

Ron Friedman: Absolutely and if you are not confident about that, then set aside half an hour, every quarter to review spending. If someone is not doing it correctly, you can solve for it then. But for the first three months, I think it is worth taking that risk.

David Green: Ron, it has been fantastic to have you on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. How can listeners stay in touch with you, follow you on social media and find out more your work.

Ron Friedman: Well, if you are interested in Decoding Greatness, the best place to get it is www.decodinggreatnessbook.com. It will enable you to get the book, but also get a bunch of free resources, including a course that comes free with the book.

If you are interested in learning more about Ignite80, it is ignite80.com and you can also find me online ronfriedmanphd.com.

David Green: Ron, it has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. I am going to go off and do some reverse engineering now to improve my skill-set. Thank you very much.

Ron Friedman: My pleasure, David. Thanks for having me.