145. Why Your Best Employees Stop Believing You (And How to Close the Gap) with Henna Pryor

Transcript – Episode 145: Why Your Best Employees Stop Believing You (And How to Close the Gap) with Henna Pryor

Joe: Influence will live or die on one hinge right now, and that is believability. We are living in a more skeptical world than ever before, and this shakes out in the data. 44% of US workers do not trust other people by default. That is almost half. That should be enough to make everyone sit up.

Joe: Welcome back, friends, to the show that is food for the boss’s soul. Here on Boss Better Now, we talk with leaders, experts, and change makers about their experiences in the workplace — all in the name of helping you understand how to create the conditions at work for people to thrive. Today, I’m joined by my brilliant friend and colleague, Henna Pryor. Henna is a workplace performance expert who speaks and writes about performance, mindset, interpersonal dynamics, high-impact communication, and embracing bumps in a world that keeps optimizing for smoothness. She is a regular expert columnist for Inc. magazine, a two-time TEDx speaker, and her book Good Awkward won 18 awards and was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. Her next book, The Signal Gap — a book about building influence through believability in a world shaped by doubt — is scheduled for release in November. We got to have a really fascinating conversation about the misalignment that occurs when many of us as leaders try to signal trust and caring in the workplace but don’t always land there because of a signal gap. This interview is packed with advice and tips for making sure you are showing up as a leader with your folks in the way that gives you the most trust and influence possible. Have a listen. Here’s our conversation.

Joe: Henna, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for doing this, my friend.

Henna: Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Joe: I know that you have had an interesting career journey and I want to talk about some of the stops you’ve had along the way. Why don’t you start by telling us about your first job? What do you remember most vividly about it?

Henna: My very first job was at a restaurant local to Delaware called the Charcoal Pit. It’s a diner-style restaurant known for its kitchen sink ice cream dish — essentially anything you could possibly imagine, different flavors of ice cream, different toppings. I signed up to be a server. What I remember most vividly is that in Delaware especially, you could not get a server job without food service experience, which is just the biggest chicken-and-egg situation on earth. But the Charcoal Pit was one of the very few restaurants known to hire just about anyone. So take that for the compliment and hiring standard that it was. I had no service experience. I was friendly and I had a smile on my face, so they hired me. But I remember going into that experience thinking: okay, I feel like I was hired because the standards are low, but it is up to me to make this an experience that I maximize and learn from. I really tried to talk to all of my tables, make conversation, learn as much as I could. But I remember most vividly just having a resolute mindset: it doesn’t matter if I’m really developed here or trained well here. Any opportunity in any workplace is a chance to learn something and maximize it. I went looking for that development everywhere I went.

Joe: Even at that young age, that was your mindset.

Henna: Yeah, I was always sort of star student mentality. I’m a firstborn of immigrant parents and I think it’s ingrained from a young age. I was always looking for — not to quote Hamilton early here — but I didn’t want to throw away my shot. Any time I was spending significant hours somewhere, I’m like: okay, where’s the learning in this? We’re going to find it. I know it exists somewhere. So even at the Charcoal Pit, we’re going to find it.

Joe: I love it. And saying you didn’t want to quote Hamilton too early here implies that you may do so more than once, which I’m excited about. All right — true or false? My first job was in food service as well. True or false: former servers are some of the most forgiving customers in restaurants.

Henna: 100%. My husband and I actually have a philosophy that everyone should work in food service at least once in their life. Our daughter is currently 16 and she’s a server at a retirement community, and it is the best and greatest first job. She had an opportunity to work back of the house, and the interviewer said there was one position as a server that pays a little less — 50 cents an hour less. She came home and asked us what she should do, and for the reason you just said — we want you to be a better patron of restaurants going forward — that was the direction we encouraged her to go. It is the best job to learn how to communicate.

Joe: I’ve always said not only should everybody work in food service at one point in their life, but everybody should have to work retail during the holiday season at one point in their life — because you find that people are either really great or really not, and you have to learn how to navigate all of that. So I think the next stop for you on the checklist of jobs most people never want was a telemarketing job. You went from food service, and you told me in an email that you actually loved your telemarketing job. Is that right?

Henna: I think everyone dogs telemarketing because it sounds cheesy and salesy. But it’s funny — when you had me reflect on this, I realized how much of my thinking was shaped quite early. I could go into that telemarketing job — it was at MBNA, which then got bought by Bank of America — I could go in with the story I was given that telemarketing is sleazy and salesy and people just want to hang up on you. Or my wiring has always been: tell me it can’t be done and I will prove you wrong. I went into it going, you know what? They say everybody gets hung up on and people think this is sleazy, but I don’t think that has to be the case. I’m going to show people it doesn’t have to be that way. I brought a lot of joy and personality and warmth into it. Did I get hung up on a handful of times? Sure. There are some people who as soon as they hear who you are are just going to do that. But I don’t think I got hung up on as much as others. I earned a decent hourly rate and had some opportunity for commission — and that was my first taste of what later became a sales career: oh, you do good work, you get paid well. I loved a job where I got to talk to people all day. Unpopular opinion that that was.

Joe: We have this in common too, because I did this job for a short while in college and I feel like I went in with a similar mindset — I’m a friendly person, let’s see. And it was like, when you imagine what a soul-suckingly awful telemarketing call center experience looks like in the most clichéd ways possible, that is what my experience was like. Giant DOS terminal, a script you could not deviate from. I got hung up on and cussed out a lot, and it did sort of pull the joy and warmth and enthusiasm out of me. But you’re right — there’s some sort of self-management skill you have to bring to that in order to navigate those kinds of experiences. Okay, so then you went to college, and then I think you joined one of the Big Four public accounting firms right out of college?

Henna: Right out of college, I was hired by EY. I was a finance major, not an accounting major — they’re a large accounting firm, but they had a few seats available for finance majors. I had missed the interview window somehow, and I guess Henna was always wired for some sort of sales, because I begged them. I said, “Listen, you won’t regret it. Please interview me.” They did, and long story short, I was offered the job. Big Four public accounting is not that dissimilar to working at the Charcoal Pit in that it is extremely character-building. Long hours, billable hours — similar to a law firm, you are appraised for the amount of time that you work. I joined during the first rollout of Sarbanes-Oxley, so every large public company had to be compliant in a new set of regulations, and I worked year-round busy season for a few years. Could I have done it for more than the three years that I did? No. On pure stamina. But am I glad that was my first experience out of college? Oh my god, yes. I can’t imagine having built a better work ethic. Learning how to talk to people, learning how to do hard things — that job was brutal, grueling, and probably the very best start I could have had as a young person.

Joe: When you think about what you needed in particular from your boss, from the leaders you worked with at that early stage in your career — what were some of those things, and did you or did you not get them when you joined that organization?

Henna: For me in particular — and I think every boss is differently wired and every new person in the workforce is differently wired — I am by default a squeaky wheel. I know not everyone is wired that way, but I am. So what I really loved and respected from the bosses in that early job was availability. But not just performed availability — actual availability. I have worked with many leaders who say, “My door is always open,” but it wasn’t open often at all, or metaphorically wasn’t open. Every time I went to ask a question it was, “Hey, can you ask somebody else?” or “Can you figure that out?” I was lucky that early on there were a few senior managers and partners who, when they said, “Hey, you can come to me anytime with questions — I do ask that you try to figure it out yourself first and give me what you’ve already tried, but if you’ve done that, my door is actually open” — they meant it. They lived by that. That genuine availability was something I really valued as a young worker.

Joe: When you think back over your career — you’ve moved from working in organizations with traditional hierarchical leadership structures to now being an entrepreneur yourself. But before you entered the entrepreneurial space, tell me about the worst boss you’ve ever had. You don’t need to name names, but what did he or she do or not do that made them a not-so-great boss?

Henna: I’m going to answer this in a way that is a little unique. I can handle a rough boss. I can handle a boss that communicates poorly. I don’t love that, but I can handle it because I will essentially chalk it up to a lack of knowing how to do it better. I am — and I’m going to sound obnoxious for a second — a high achiever. I don’t need a lot of hand-holding. I’m very self-motivated, very intrinsically motivated. So the worst bosses I’ve ever had frankly ignored me because I didn’t need as much development. That slowly broke me of any loyalty to the team, of feeling seen, of feeling recognized. This dynamic probably plays out in families too: the problem child gets attention, and the one who is doing what they’re supposed to do, getting good grades, doing a great job, can feel overlooked. There were a few bosses I worked for — especially in my executive search career — who were like, “Henna gets it done. Everyone can go ask Henna questions.” And therefore I got zero attention. That is a really dangerous place for a leader to land when they put all their energy towards the people who need help and all but ignore those who are lifting things up and doing great work. That hurt a lot.

Joe: I’m sorry you had that experience. And it’s so valuable for so many folks who are listening, because I think we’ve all had high achievers on our team. It’s easy to slip into a place of comfort — “They’ve got it, they’re so great, I’m so lucky to have them.” But what would you have liked to have experienced that you weren’t? What advice would you give to leaders right now who have high achievers on their team and maybe catch themselves falling into that pattern?

Henna: I think it’s common. People are juggling a lot. I don’t think leaders who do this are low intent — I think they’re high-intent people being pulled in a lot of directions, and the people who need their attention are understandably pulling that attention. So it’s not a matter of intent. I’ll name something very specific that feels top of mind lately. There is a difference between gratitude and appreciation. There is, in my opinion, nothing worse than a leader who preaches about expressing gratitude to the team — “I’m so grateful, I’m so thankful” — over and over. Great. Those are words. They cost you very little to say them. Saying you’re grateful for me really doesn’t make me feel any sort of way because they’re a bit cheap. Appreciation is actually noticing. “Henna, that deck — I can tell you spent extra time customizing it for that client. I imagine that took you extra time you probably didn’t have. I just want you to know I noticed that. I see you. You went above and beyond for the client.” Those are two different things. And I fear that leaders who have been told to express gratitude out loud can allow that to become what I call a cheap signal. It doesn’t cost you anything to say, “Team, I’m grateful for you.” Big whoop. What are you grateful for? Be specific. Stop long enough to notice a few things. It’s not that hard, it doesn’t take that much time, but it has an exponential, outsized impact. Saying I’m grateful doesn’t do anything until you provide proof.

Joe: We talk about that a lot on this show — recognition has to be something that you notice and something that you name. The more specific and granular you can get about the difference that someone made, or even if the outcome wasn’t ideal, naming the effort, naming the progress on the journey — that’s such an important component of helping people feel seen and supported. Is there anything else you would advise leaders to keep in mind when working with high achievers?

Henna: Yeah, and there’s an opportunity to raise the stakes one more level. I think this one is uniquely modern-day. If you wanted to, you could notice something your high achiever did, put something into ChatGPT, and have it spit out a recognition email and send it to them. That is technically better than doing nothing. But that effort doesn’t take much anymore. So we talk about cheap signals versus costly signals — I would love leaders to pay more attention than ever before to choosing your channel. An email today is a cheap signal. An email you’ve thrown through ChatGPT to express appreciation doesn’t cost much either. Versus picking up the phone and calling each person to say, “Hey, I saw what you did. Thank you so much.” Or even leaving a voice note if you want to be asynchronous. The channel holds much more weight and value about what a signal actually represents than the words themselves. It’s always mattered, but today more than ever, the amount of effort it used to take to write a thoughtful thank-you email has reduced to practically zero. So the channel matters in an exponential and outsized way that it didn’t before, and a lot of leaders don’t quite realize that. If you want to retain and attract and keep your high achievers sitting where they are, change your channel occasionally as well.

Joe: I love it. We talk a lot in Boss Hero School about the difference between sending a thank-you email versus coming into your workspace the next day after a big project and finding a handwritten card from your boss with your favorite candy or a plant your boss heard you talking about. There is no questioning in that version that your boss noticed something about you and remembered it and took the time to go the extra mile. They didn’t choose the path of least resistance. And if the sentiment inside the card also has all of that specificity — not just “I’m grateful” — you get this double whammy of noticing and caring and effort combined with the sentiment. That ends up giving us the most bang for our buck in terms of recognition.

Henna: Yes. And I think leaders worry it sounds like a lot of remembering and thoughtfulness. But I disagree. You can systemize. Make yourself a calendar reminder once a week: have you appreciated someone with a little gesture this week? Who is that person? You don’t need to rely on being spontaneous or in the moment. You just need to do it. We stop ourselves because we make it seem more complicated than it is.

Joe: 100%. All right. So you went from the big accounting firm, then you said like 14 years at an executive search firm, and now you’re a workplace performance expert. How does someone start out in an accounting firm and become a workplace performance expert? What were the milestone stops or moments that brought you to where you are today?

Henna: I like to think of my career trajectory as one of pivots. There was no 180-degree about-face. It was always building on a skill that was already there and expanding on it. I was in finance and accounting, then I started in staffing as a finance and accounting direct-hire recruiter — so there was a pivot using the industry I came from. In my executive search career I had a front-row seat to what made teams successful, what made them leave in droves. When I decided to become an entrepreneur, I went and got my executive coaching certification, which organically morphed into speaking. The takeaway is: pivots can happen when you closely examine where you had success and added value, and ask what from this can I take to the next level. And those pivots can also exist for a leader managing a person whose ambition has outgrown their existing role — how can they support that person’s internal pivot? I don’t know many high achievers who are happy staying in the status quo for a long time.

Joe: I’m kind of dying to get into the new book. I mean, we could talk about Good Awkward, which is an incredible book, but you’ve just written a very timely book coming out in a few months that I think is going to get a lot of attention. Tell us about The Signal Gap.

Henna: So it’s called The Signal Gap: How to Boost Believability and Influence in the Age of Doubt. Influence — let’s talk about it in the lens of being a better boss — is really communicating in a way where you are trying to get someone to do something, to affect an outcome in some way. Everybody who is a leader or an emerging leader is an influencer. Not the Instagram variety, but someone trying to create influence to create better outcomes. What I could not shake was this idea that the old influence playbook has changed — and I go so far as to say it has expired — because the environment around us has shifted so dramatically. The thesis of the book is that influence will live or die on one hinge right now, and that is believability. We are living in a more skeptical world than ever before. Pew Research data that came out recently: 44% of US workers do not trust other people by default. That is almost half. That should be enough to make everyone sit up. So the other 56% are still assuming good faith — but almost half do not trust you by default. Skepticism is now increasingly a default posture. We now live in the verification era, which essentially means what used to be trust-then-verify has increasingly flipped to verify-then-trust.

Henna: Let me run a quick experiment on you, Joe. Let’s say one of your best clients has a speaker referred in and you have to put your name and reputation on this speaker and you don’t know anything about them. Would you just blindly say, “I endorse them”?

Joe: No. I would probably do some homework and look around before I’d even be willing to suggest them. I’d watch videos, read, look for reviews or testimonials, try to get a snapshot of how they show up and the nature of their work. And the second thing I would probably do when making that recommendation, if I made it, is include a caveat that I haven’t necessarily worked directly with this person and so I’m suggesting them based on limited information.

Henna: Right. And that part is not necessarily uniquely new. What’s uniquely new is the ease with which we can run to verify. Ten or twenty years ago, if one person said they were good, we’d just trust that. Today we can look at their videos, go online, text a friend, ask Claude what you know about Henna Pryor. Exactly. And so the verification instinct is instant now. What does this mean for leaders? With all of that plus AI and deep fakes and us being cognitively overwhelmed by what’s real anymore — did you write this, or did AI write this? — we are relying much more deeply on our sensing mechanism. We used to just check and rely on what people told us. But now because there’s so much overload, we’re relying more on this mechanism that most of us haven’t even had language for: something about this person and what he’s saying feels off. Something about the way she said that — I feel like she’s not giving us the whole story. Our sensing is hyper-tuned because our checking is overloaded. What I call this is: humans are displaying signal gaps. These are moments where the signals we mean to send have a distance between that and what a verifying audience actually receives. We need to pay a lot more attention to what I describe as four layers of congruence. Clarity is now table stakes — everybody needs to be clear. Now we need to focus on congruence: aligning these signals so that no matter what you do or say, you’re not immediately losing people at the level of believability.

Joe: Give us an example of that for leaders working on the front lines or in the middle of their organizations. What’s an example of congruence — and of a signal gap — in their leadership style?

Henna: I’ll give you a very specific example. This actually happened with someone recently. An employee was having a really tough time with a key enterprise client — the relationship was starting to feel really fractured, strained. She felt like the client wasn’t behaving well and it was causing her a lot of stress. So she sent a very long, thoughtful email to her leader — a step level above her direct manager — to say: here’s what’s going on, I don’t feel like it’s getting addressed in the way I want it to, and I’d really like to bring it to your attention. Six minutes later, she gets a really long, personalized response from her leader. Now think about that for a second. Six minutes later, she gets a long personalized response. And of course, immediately she’s like: he didn’t even write this. He threw this into AI and sent me what is disguised as a thoughtful, personalized, attentive email — in six minutes. I know how many competing priorities are on your plate. Was this leader low intent? Absolutely not. But what this leader was doing is what I refer to in the book as intent smuggling: smuggling the intent of “I want to give you thoughtful personalized attention” when the true priority in that moment was speed — I don’t want to leave you hanging, so I’m just going to get this out. That is a signal gap. Someone disguising care under what realistically the person can feel is not there. What he could have done instead is either a quick response that says, “Hey, this sounds important. I’ll get back to you when I have a little more free time” — or, “This seems like a lot. I’m using AI to formulate my thoughts quickly, and this truly represents how I feel about it, but in the spirit of getting back to you quickly I used AI. Let’s chat when my schedule lightens up.” It was the lack of transparency around the tool, combined with the timing, combined with what she knows his schedule normally looks like — all of these things together are now killing people’s believability. And they are new workplace problems that we’ve never had to think about before.

Joe: What a terrific example that I think so many folks can relate to. When we encounter that friction — when our senses or our intuition says something feels off — people on the other side want to defend their intent. In this case, that leader is saying: I really do care about my people and I wanted to get back to her as quickly as possible. But intent alone doesn’t absolve us of the missteps made along the way in earning trust, or acknowledge what the experience is for the person on the other side. Are there other patterns or ingrained behaviors — things that many of us have been taught for years are best practices — that are actually creating signal gaps?

Henna: So the one we just talked about is an example of communication congruence. I’ll give you an example that speaks to character congruence. Leaders are often encouraged to share platitudes like, “We put our people first.” That’s not new — but add to it the digital world we now live in where it’s easier than ever to throw up a LinkedIn post about putting people first, or to comment on a post and say, “You’re right, that should be the first thing we prioritize.” And on a platform like LinkedIn, your comment is visible for all to see. What leaders now need to be aware of is that every micro claim you make is now public. It’s in a permanent, frozen, searchable record and is slowly over time becoming a standard that you’ve set for yourself. We as pattern-seeking human beings are holding you to that — sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. So if you are the person who says, “I always make time for my people” on a LinkedIn post and then cancels the one-on-one for the third week in a row, your character signal gap is taking a nosedive. This is a uniquely modern-day problem. This could be the way you show up in your Slack channel, the things you say in your reply-all on Teams. But these are now permanent, frozen, searchable records where if somebody wanted to, they can take a screenshot and say, “Remember, leader, how you said we would never do layoffs?” Twenty years ago, we didn’t have a screenshot to hold up. So really quick, tactical things for leaders: rarely speak in absolutes if you can help it. Do not say “we never lay off people” unless you can back that up with 100% conviction. Be aware that your public claims are searchable, screenshotable, forwardable, and know that quietly, whether you realize it or not, you are being audited against those public claims. Leaders never had to think about this stuff. You do now.

Joe: I love it. Shining a light on the ways we consciously or unconsciously experience misalignment between what our leaders say and what we actually experience in the workplace is really what this is all about. When I wrote Employalty, in the very last chapter I talked about how culture is a collection of experiences. You can say we have a service excellence culture and put customers first, but if customers wait on hold for 35 minutes before talking to a not-very-good chatbot, that’s not your culture. There’s a misalignment there. And you call that a signal gap.

Henna: Yes, that is a signal gap. And I think the big modern-day difference — and this is not intended to strike fear, just the reality — is that the blast radius of missing is much bigger now. Before, if you missed a one-on-one with one person, maybe they’d complain to their cube-mate about it. Now that thing can go into the group chat, the private Slack channel with a few teammates. Things have a life beyond that moment that creates a disconnection and a sense of disloyalty because of the story that can get spun. This isn’t to say CYA on everything. What it is meant to say is: leaders more than ever need to slow down, choose their words, analyze the large claims they’re making, and start to pay much closer attention to those low-stakes, everyday claims, because your people are watching.

Joe: Blast radius. That gave me tingles. You’re really good with words, friend. You should be a speaker — I don’t know if you ever thought about that. [Laughter] All right, we have a couple of signature questions we like to ask on our show. I’m going to throw a couple of these at you rapid fire. What was the most absurd or unnecessary rule you ever encountered in a workplace?

Henna: Oh gosh. When I first started at Kforce, which was my staffing career, they were very guarded at first about us sharing our numbers — and this was very opposite of most sales cultures where it’s usually on the wall, competitive, everyone knows everyone’s results. For some reason they were very guarded about sharing how many interviews we did in a week, how many calls we made. I think they were just testing whether that could be more effective at motivating. But what it did is create this very secretive culture where we stopped talking to each other for a while. They did reverse it eventually. But I think any rule where you’re essentially saying “don’t talk to each other” is never one I would advise from a workplace perspective.

Joe: That is interesting, especially in a sales organization.

Henna: Very backwards. There’s a reason people don’t do it that way.

Joe: All right. If you could ban one workplace phrase forever, what would it be?

Henna: In the spirit of the book I just wrote — any version of “my door is always open” or “we take care of our people” or anything that is a sweeping platitude that doesn’t actually cost you anything to say and doesn’t mean anything. There are plenty of those. If you can’t in the same breath tell me the five specific behaviors that show me you are this, then just don’t say it. Just don’t say it at all.

Joe: What is one piece of professional advice or wisdom that has stayed with you throughout your career?

Henna: People aren’t watching you as closely as you think they are. Now, this seems very counterintuitive to what I just said. People are noticing your patterns, but they’re not watching your every move with the level of intensity that you think they are. Why is this good news? Because when you’re closing your signal gaps in general, you’re creating a new operating model of behavior where you’re just generally showing up better. And when you do that over time, you build trust and believability. So that one time that you do screw up and you think everyone is staring at you with a spotlight on you, you already have a cushion to fall on. So just work on the stuff holistically. Work on the patterns. Because those one-offs? People aren’t watching you that closely.

Joe: I have a speaker friend who preaches “nobody cares” — the things we think are going to come under scrutiny, like changing a program description on your website or whether these shoes were the right choice for the stage. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, nobody cares. And if they do care, they’re already over it because the world is spinning too fast.

Henna: That’s right. Exactly.

Joe: All right. Last question, Henna. Many of the bosses listening to this show are at this moment stretched thin. They’re doing their best in systems that don’t always make it easy. We have all the data in the world telling us that burnout and exhaustion and even loneliness are more persistent for leaders than ever before. Knowing that, and knowing that you’re a workplace performance expert, what advice or words of encouragement would you give to a friend who was leading in this kind of environment and feeling worn down?

Henna: The things that have an outsized impact are truly the ones that take very little time, energy, or resources. They just require attention and intention. I truly believe — having spent years in this work — that it is those micro tweaks and micro shifts that do the majority of the heavy lifting. If you tell me you have my back and I can really tell through your patterns of behavior, through the signals you send, through the things you write consistently — if all of that tells me that is true — then your little day-to-day stuff honestly matters so much less. It lives in the micro shifts. Which, for a busy leader, I hope is great news. You don’t need to create big sweeping gestures. You don’t need to go out of your way to take 20, 30, 45 minutes that you don’t have. Just work on the little stuff.

Joe: I love it. Thank you for that. Where can people go to learn more about you and your work, and where can they get your books?

Henna: Hennapryor.com will take you to my website, which has all the stuff. I’m Henna Pryor on LinkedIn and Instagram — those are my two primary playgrounds. And both books are on Amazon. The Signal Gap is available for pre-order, and Good Awkward is always there as well. And for those who are listening, Pryor is P-R-Y-O-R.

Joe: Henna, thank you so much for doing this, my friend. When you have really smart friends, you just want to sit and talk to them and ask them questions. Thank you for being here today. I really appreciate it.

Henna: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Joe: Well, there you have it, folks. My sincerest thanks to Henna for this great conversation and for spending this time with us. If you like this conversation, be sure to hit that subscribe button so that you don’t miss an episode of our show. And of course, I am always grateful for your reviews, your shares, and your feedback. Tell me what you thought of this conversation by dropping a comment in the box below our episode here on YouTube, or you can email me anytime for any reason at bossbetternow@gmail.com. In the meantime, don’t forget: commitment comes from better bosses. Visit joemull.com for more information. See you next time.

Joe: It’s rooms like this one — where we gather together for a couple of days at a time to really understand what it takes to activate employee commitment in the workplace — that leaders experience profound transformation. If you’ve been wondering how to take your leadership knowledge and skills to the next level, if you want to go deeper on what it takes to be successful at leading people in today’s ever-changing workplace, then you should check out Boss Hero School. Over three days, I’m going to teach you both the methods and the mindset for activating employee commitment in the workplace. This is not theory. We are getting into the weeds, upleveling your skills, giving you scripts, blueprints, and frameworks that you can take back to your workplaces to meet people where they are and propel them forward. For more information, visit bossheroschool.com.