The Fallacy of Feedback: A Conversation with Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall

Michael Rivo: Welcome back to Blazing Trails. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios. Today, I'm joined by my podcast partner, Rachel Levin. Hi, Rachel.

Rachel Levin: Hey, Michael. Good to be here.

Michael Rivo: Good to be here. Back from the Memorial Day weekend. Did you have a good time?

Rachel Levin: Oh, I had a great time. Lots of people out. The weather was incredible. It really felt reminiscent of kind of pre- pandemic time, so that was really nice. How about you?

Michael Rivo: It did. I was on a beach packed with people. It was fantastic.

Rachel Levin: Right, something that's inconceivable three months ago, right?

Michael Rivo: I know. I know. And I wasn't thinking a whole lot about work, but now that we're back into it, we've got a super interesting episode today about feedback and about relationships at work around feedback. Tell us a little bit about it, Rachel.

Rachel Levin: Yeah, well, I mean, we got the pleasure... Well, you did, really, to talk to the experts on this, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, and they wrote the New York Times bestselling book Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader's Guide to the Real World. And in it, they explore that question, and I love that. How valuable is feedback? Right? We're kind of conditioned to believe that the more feedback you give, the better performance you're going to get out of your coworkers, and they kind of challenge that idea, don't they?

Michael Rivo: They do. It's a controversial idea, and of course, it's appealing to think that anything negative people say is wrong and anything positive is true.

Rachel Levin: Yes. Guilty, guilty.

Michael Rivo: Sometimes we all like to look at feedback that way. Yes, absolutely. But it's really more nuanced than that, and that's what we're going to hear about today, about how to use feedback to identify and amplify the unique talents of each person on a team and how this allows for risk and for failure and to really focus on people's strengths. But it requires thinking about feedback in a much different way, because so often, we think about feedback in a uniform context of looking at everybody in the same way. So, it allows for taking risk and for failure and for focusing on people's strengths.

Rachel Levin: Yeah. I'm hoping you'll be putting that to the test the next time I get some feedback from you, Michael.

Michael Rivo: Absolutely. I'm listening, paying very close attention to you as an individual, Rachel.

Rachel Levin: That sounds good.

Michael Rivo: It does. And they talk about how the small team experience, and I think we've all experienced this, where you work on a small team, and it's really fluid, and it's easy, and feedback is just kind of happening naturally, how to take that and scale that into a larger organization. Because I think once you start working in bigger groups, you don't have as much contact. It's much harder to keep that going.

Rachel Levin: Yeah, and it kind of becomes this very formalized process that can be quite intimidating and maybe not as constructive and easy to accept. So, yeah, good stuff.

Michael Rivo: So, some great takeaways today in this conversation, and let's get to it. Here's my conversation with Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall. Ashley and Marcus, welcome to the show. One of the first questions that I wanted to ask is how you guys came to work together. What's the origin story of your working relationship?

Ashley Goodall: I think it was in 2011. I might be off by a year either way, but it was a time that now seems like a very, very, very long time ago. And I was running a leadership development at Deloitte at the time, and someone on my team said," We need to bring somebody in to do a speech at one of our leadership events. Here is the shortlist of three speakers." And the shortlist had a name on it, and then another name on it, and then Marcus's name on it. A few years previously, I had read First, Break All the Rules and felt my life to be transformed, because here was all the stuff about how you actually measure this stuff and how you begin to understand quantitatively what works in the world of work. And so, I saw Marcus Buckingham on the list. I hit" reply all" to the email and said," Choice number one, Marcus. Choice number two, Marcus. Choice number three, Marcus," because I just wanted to understand all of the things that Marcus had discovered in his career up to that point. The night before the event, we sat down to know one another, and we thought that we would have a half- hour conversation. It turned into four hours, and I think it's probably never even stopped.

Michael Rivo: And so, tell me a little bit about the origin of the feedback fallacy article. I know you guys have been working together, you've been working on books and other ventures. So how did this article come about? And Marcus, maybe you can chime in on that.

Marcus Buckingham: When you have a research background like mine, what you're always looking for is somebody who's got a huge playground of the real world to go and actually do real world experiments within. You're doing a thing about the future of work. The future of work is ongoing, real world, real time experiments about what works and what doesn't in the real world. So you need to be in the real world. Ashley's living, breathing, moving, shaking in the real world. And so, we came together around that combination of credibility, I suppose, of mine that comes from research and credibility that comes from him from the world of the practitioner with real people. And the focus became, how do you actually engage with the real world? We live in a world today where everyone has an opinion. The barrier to making any kind of content is really low, so there's a lot of," I think this, I think that, I think this, I think that." And I think our hope in writing the first book... Well, actually, the hope in writing the first article we did on performance management for HBR became a similar hope for the book, which was, let's engage with the real world. There's a lot of theory out there. There's a lot of," I believe this, and I believe that." Let's try and engage with the world as it actually is, because what it actually is is really messy, but also really beautiful. And we didn't feel as though there was anything out there that wasn't either just abstract or conceptual or was just pure autobiography. And so, we came together to try and write a book that was like," Look, the world is complicated. The world is messy. The world is moving really quickly, but the world is understandable. And can we expose what some of the lies have been that have obscured the real world, and can we write something that reveals the truths that are inherent in the real world? Because whatever it's going to happen next, it's probably going to have to start with where we are now." And so, that was the attempt with Nine Lies About Work, and of course, one of the lies was about feedback. We live in a world that's feedback- rich right now, and we're going to get more of it, because the technology will enable us to get more of it. And the question is, just because we can, should we? Does feedback actually help us or anyone get any better? And the answer to that question is unequivocally no. So we thought, let's take that chapter and turn it into an article that we hope was measured and thoughtful and very real- worldy.

Michael Rivo: So, let's break that down a little bit, because it's a strong statement that feedback isn't effective. Let's talk a little bit about some of the detail around that. What are some of the failings around feedback, as you see it?

Ashley Goodall: One of the things that I've learned in the last little while of talking about all of this is that we have to be very precise. So Marcus said... Marcus, what did you say? You said," Feedback doesn't create growth." Yes?

Marcus Buckingham: Yes.

Ashley Goodall: Those were your exact words, right? And then, Michael, what you heard Marcus say was," Feedback is ineffective." Those are not the same statement. Those are different statements. So, the first thing that we have to do is to say, look, there is in the world a thing that we could call a failure- prevention technology, if you like, that boils down to roughly going," Oh, don't do that." And if you see somebody about to fail, and you go," Oh, don't do that," then they might not fail. You might be able to stop them from touching the burning pan or whatever on the stove. That's an effective thing for preventing failure. When you lean in and say,"Here's my feedback for you. You shouldn't do it that way," that prevents failure. Preventing failure is not the same as making growth. And if you want people to grow and develop, then telling them how not to do something through your eyes is a bizarrely odd and inefficient way of doing that, and it's very hard to prove that it actually succeeds in any way. On the other hand, if you want somebody to magnify their impact in the world, you have to begin by locating that impact. You have to actually find out where they are good at something, where they have advantage, where they have presence, where they have flow, where they have natural ability, where they have energy. You've got to locate that if your task is to turn it up to 11, and growth is surely taking what is inherent in each of us and turning it up 11. That's the thing that every business in the world is trying to do. So, we confuse these two different things, and when we say giving negative or... we're scared of the word negative, so we have to call it constructive. So when we... Giving constructive feedback leads to growth, we're wrong. When you say," Giving constructive feedback prevents failure," yeah. Okay. It does in certain limited conditions, by the way, where we know what success looks like, and we can write it down. If you remove all the failure from the world, you don't get beauty. You don't get impact. You don't get performance. You get average, you get adequate, you get things... the trains run on time, but it's not particularly enjoyable to sit in them. And that's the difference.

Michael Rivo: And I think so many of us think about feedback in the way of, these are things that need to be improved. These are the opportunities for growth. There are other euphemisms for that. And we just naturally default to that. What's some of the history of that? What's behind that in terms of how you think we've developed how we think about feedback?

Marcus Buckingham: Probably comes from original sin, right? The idea that we're all born broken and that the goal of life is to perfect ourselves, and that's what leads to spirituality and grace? It's that old sort of Catholic idea of original sin. And it's just become more pragmatic in the form of... And this is well- intended, by the way. I don't think people are being mean about it, but like," Look, I've watched you now for a while, and in my goal to perfect you, I've seen some things, and now it's my job to deliver the things that I've seen to you so that you can take my feedback and become ever more perfect." And we then institutionalized it in the form of competency models, which have defined what perfect looks like. And then, we've told managers that they need to become better at telling people which are the competencies that they don't possess or which of the skills they don't possess. And then, when the managers rightfully balk at doing so, because telling somebody how they should become more perfect, on some deep level, just doesn't feel real. It just feels inappropriate and not connected to the real world. When managers balk at delivering this constructive feedback, we then write books and write articles and so forth that say," Here's how you should give constructive feedback." And so, we've created this weird cycle where, because we appear to believe the uniqueness of each person is a bug that we need to fix, as opposed to, as Ashley was describing, if you locate the unique power of a person, that's not a bug, that's a feature, and that growth and development and success is a function of maximizing or amplifying that unique feature. We've really done the opposite of that, and we've said," Your uniqueness is annoying, and it's inefficient, and we've actually defined a priori, before we saw you, we've defined what perfect in this job looks like. It doesn't look like you, sadly for you. It looks like this model. So, we're going to overlay the model onto you and then identify your gaps, which we could call areas of opportunity. And then, we will build systems and tools and training and classes to plug the gaps, and we'll call that feedback. And then, we'll try to make it noble and aspirational, and the harder you find it to do, the more that confirms just how important it is to do." And so, we've created this really pathological, weird, when you actually look at it, approach to the development of people that basically says," The uniqueness of you, we will grind it out." And it probably does go all the way back to the perfectibility of man.

Ashley Goodall: Even the bits of you that aren't like me. A lot of this well-intentioned feedback is me talking about me in the presence of you in the hoping that you will somehow manage to follow along, but I'm not talking about how you might thrive. I'm talking about how I have found my way in the world, and very often in the sincere hope that you'll learn something from it, but that's to locate the expertise in the conversation in the wrong place, because actually, what we're trying to discover is what's special about you. And again, how do we magnify, amplify that? And you never end there if you start by talking about me. So, in a conversation about your growth, I should be interrogating as much as I can you and your performance, not explaining as much as I can me and my performance. So, there is a complete flip there.

Michael Rivo: Yeah, one thing I was thinking as we were talking about it is it's so important for companies to institutionalize culture and ideas and get everybody working together, and you can see how this culture of feedback fits into that. But then, as you're describing it, we need to look at each individual and be able to harness that, which, if you look at it from a big, corporate perspective, could be chaos. How do you bring those things together, where you can do this as an organization and still be able to look at the individual?

Marcus Buckingham: When Ashley took over his role at Cisco, his whole function became leadership and team intelligence. And actually, the first thing that we got connected around, I think it was an article that Ashley had written internally for Deloitte called Little Platoons, where, certainly independent of me, he was talking about the fact that really we understand society at large through our little, local world. One of the most important ways of dealing with the real world is to realize that all work is teamwork. As part of the ADP Research Institute, which I run, we've done this global study of work, and 85% of people said they do most of their work on teams. 74%, I believe, of those say they work on more than one team, and 65% of the 74% say that that additional team or teams is not reflected in the org chart. So, the bottom line is that we've long known as humans that we can do in small teams much more than we can do by ourselves. The earliest human art that's ever been found is about 50,000 years old in Indonesia, and it's a painting of a team, a small team. We have always understood that teams are what make each one of us better together. We don't organize our companies around teams. You go to a hospital, you go to a school, these are not organized around teams. They're organized around boxes on org charts and parallel process flows. But if you actually look at the way the real work is done on teams, and of course, the value of a team is that each individual on that team is unique, and the team is useful because it brings together differently talented people. It makes weirdness, each one of our own unique weirdness... It makes weirdness wonderful. That's what teams do. They engage beautifully with the real world, and the real world is filled with unique people. Even if the seven people are all in sales at Cisco or something, they're all actually paid to do the same outcome, but they're actually going to be doing it in really unique ways. They're driven by different things. They build relationships in different ways. They close the deal in different ways. They learn in different ways. And the best team leaders don't try to eradicate that. They try to engage with that so that that sales team can actually deliver the outcomes that are expected of them. The sad thing about almost all big companies is they say the word teamwork frequently, but they do not understand, and they do not begin by investigating," What do our best teams look like, and how do we build more like them?" If we were to do that, then there's no chaos. There's no everyone flying off in different directions. The place in which everything comes together in terms of purpose, in terms of performance, is the team. And if we built our organizations around," How do we build more teams like our best teams," then so much of what we wrote about in Nine Lies... I mean, the first lie of the book is that people care which company they work for. They don't. They care which team they're on. You start through that door, you walk through the team door, and suddenly, human uniqueness is automatically transformed from a bug into a feature. But if you miss the team door, you end up where we are today, where we are fighting against the idiosyncrasy of people and trying to grind it down, which is just devastating.

Michael Rivo: And so, if you are a manager of a team, and you're... Instead of approaching feedback as," This is what I think, and here's what you should be doing," what do those conversations look like?

Ashley Goodall: Yeah. So, if you look at data science and you look at psychometrics, what you can measure about a human being, what you can reliably measure about a human being, you find out that when we are assessing ourselves, we are poor witnesses to most things. If you ask somebody to evaluate their own ability at something, they will evaluate it higher if they understand the thing and lower if they don't understand the thing, irrespective of their actual level of ability, right? So, we're poor evaluators of ourselves. We're massively poor evaluators of other people. And there's all sorts of investigations of this, going back 20, 30 years now. What you find is that where we are good evaluators are where we have complete data, and we have complete data, not about our own abilities, because we don't know the thing we're evaluating against, but in terms of our own intent and our own emotional state, if you like, what we feel and where we're heading. And if I ask you, Michael," How do you feel right now," whatever you say is actually a true statement of how you feel right now. And I can't go... I can go," I wish you didn't feel like that," or I can go," Gosh, it's annoying that you feel like that," but I can't go," No you don't," because you are sovereign over your own emotional state. You are also sovereign about your experience of me. You're sovereign about your intent. So there are a few things where you're a reliable source of data. So, the first thing to understand is that when we are talking to one another about performance, we need to start with a whole bunch of I- statements." Here is my experience of you." Not," Here's you."" Here's my experience of you." So to go on the negative side," I didn't understand a word you said just then" is fine. I'm not saying you have poor communication skills, and I really wouldn't be. So, it's just a little nuance that keeps the experience where it is reliably captured. My experience, your performance, not my judgment of your performance. And of course, that applies whether you're doing really well or whether you're doing less well than I hoped you would be doing. So, that's the first thing, is just to share with people your reaction to them, your experience, what you saw, how that landed on you, rather than trying to explain who they are and how they are wired. Stay on your side of the net, if you like. The second thing is to realize that the words" good job" are not the end of a conversation, but are rather the beginning of the most important conversation if you want to help people grow on your team. Now, we tend to think that when somebody is failing, that's the nine- alarm fire, I've got to jump in there and fix it and use all my energy. And when somebody's done a good job, I just sort of get to go," Good job. Well done," and then I wander off back to finding more people who are failing and explaining to them how they should be more like me. It's the wrong way round." Good job" is the beginning of a conversation. What follows the words" good job" is," This is what I saw you do. This was my experience of that." So, a shared experience of you doing something beautifully well or really impactfully. And then," How did you make sense of that? Why did you decide to do it that way? Are there other areas where you could apply that sort of pattern of thought or behavior that you just manifested? Could you expand that? Could you build on that? Could you do that more?" That's how you have the conversation. You don't let" good job" be the end. Now, most of us haven't been trained or haven't spent a lot of time practicing what questions come after the word," Good job." We've been taught that the manager's role is praise, and then the manager is done. You're meant to praise the good work, interrogate the hell out of the bad work, and that's it. In fact, what we need to do is arrest, if you like, the things which aren't working well, and goodness me, figure out how to not make those part of somebody's job as fast as we can, and then interrogate as much as we can, as consistently as we can, as frequently as we can, the stuff that's really working for somebody so that they can understand where their advantage is to be had in the world, in the team, and so that they can offer more of that, because we all come to the office every day wanting to do a good job. It's not a problem of motivation. It's a problem of focus and insight into our own performance, and that's what we need to help people with.

Marcus Buckingham: I think it's inaudible one of the lines you wrote in the book, which I will take credit for, but I believe is actually Ashley's line, which is so right on, that" The raw material of your future greatness is your current goodness." So, we should interrogate the current goodness, because that's the stuff you're going to use to take your performance to 11, to go all the way back to This is Spinal Tap. If you miss the team door, all of this falls apart, because then everybody just becomes individualistic, but if you go through the team door, all this stuff that we wrote about becomes... it all becomes super pragmatic, practical, and intriguing, because you are trying to help someone figure out the ways to make their best and greatest contribution. And, gosh, if the future of work is about anything, it's got to be about that.

Michael Rivo: Right. Right. And so, do you see this as more real time reaction, as part of our daily work? Because I know that's often suggested. There's the side that this is just hard to do. People don't necessarily like to do it, and we have these times where," Okay, it's time for your review," and everybody puts their stuff together, and there's that moment that neither side particularly enjoys.

Ashley Goodall: Yes, it's like... It's dentistry, isn't it, really? That's what we've done. We've made the most important process in work emotionally like dentistry. You don't look forward to it, and you're glad when it's over. Great. And then you avoid it again for as long as possible. One of the things that we've discovered very, very clearly that is most effective, or one of the tricks... You were asking," How do you build a strengths- based world, if you like? How do you pull out the best of performance in people?" You have to get the frequency right. You have to get the frequency right of interaction, of conversation. And the weird thing that we found out is that frequency is more important than quality in terms of these interactions between team leader, team member, about the work. If you do it lots, the tolerance for a low conversation is actually fairly broad. And you have to talk frequently. It seems that somewhere between weekly and biweekly about the work that somebody is doing is about right. This is because, of course, work changes the whole time, and so if I am going to help you apply your strengths to the work in front of you, I can't show up every six months and go," Well, how did that go, then, the last six months?" Because you'll say," Well, goodness me, where am I going to start? And actually, I could have used some guidance three and a half months ago." And so, of course, what happens is when the conversation is infrequent, you talk in abstractions and generalities, and you say things like, if you're a team leader," You need to have more executive presence," and the team member goes," I don't know what that is, and I don't know which instance you're referring to." And you are lost when the frequency is wrong, when the frequency is too slow. When the frequency is high, when you're talking every week... And by the way, what you're talking about is not," Here's what I want. Here's what I, the team leader, want you, the team member to do." What you're doing is saying," What's in front of you this week?" You're using curiosity." What matters most to you? Share what worked and didn't work last week. How can I help? How can I help? How can I help?" What you're doing is zooming in on the work. You're getting microscopically close to the work and helping somebody thrive in their work. Isn't that what the whole feedback thing was meant to be doing in the first place? It's interesting. When you clear away the brush, and you clear away the ill- conceived models and things that don't actually exist in any of the evidence, and when you get down to brass tacks, what you want is people talking about the work that they are doing and helping one another. The best way to do that, funnily enough, is to talk about the work that you're doing and help one another. If you want to do that once a year, best of luck. It's not going to get you very far, because work changes the whole time. People change the whole time. You got to talk frequently.

Michael Rivo: Right? And that's where you see the power of these small teams. If you have a small team that is tackling projects together and collaborating and working, then those conversations happen frequently, and they're just going to naturally. And I think that's part of the challenge, is that these conversations happen in these kind of unnatural ways, where... My own experience working in smaller companies and bigger companies, with a smaller team, you're just much more naturally going to have conversations about how to work on the work and help each other in some situations.

Marcus Buckingham: Yeah. Two quick things on that. One is, funnily enough, there is a ritual. It's the weekly check- in. Even on a small team, it's funny how quickly we can sort of slip back into team, team, team stuff. Weirdly, what the most powerful team ritual is actually an individual one, and if you can do the short, 15- minute check- in, doesn't matter if it's in person. Obviously, this day and age, it isn't in- person. But it seems from a data standpoint, the modality doesn't matter. It could be on text. It could be on the phone. It could be an app, but what you're doing... if every week, you're going," What is your focus for the next week? How can I help? What is your focus?" So, it's future- focused, the work and you, the work and you, future- focused, 52 times a year. If Ashley and I could wave a magic wand, I think we would just go," Every team leader does that with every individual." Now, if you push on that, you've just made leadership development so wickedly simple, because it's around one ritual, which is... Yes, frequency trumps quality, but by the way, if you're doing it 52 weeks a year, you're going to get better at it. The other thing, of course, is that raises the question, and people go... and they do say this all the time. They say," Well, I'd love to do that, but I can't, because I've got too many people." And then, you bump into," Well, then you've got too many people." Because... Span of control. What's the perfect span of control? In big hospitals, you've got nurse supervisor to nurse of one to 40, one to 50, because some CFO somewhere has decided that that actually makes good financial sense. The problem is that a span of control should really be thought of as span of attention. Humans need attention, and we have a bucket with a hole in it, an attention bucket with a hole in it. If you give us attention on our work and our strengths and how you can help every week, and then you stop for five weeks, then very quickly, that bucket drains out. And humans, it's like... I'm sorry, people. Humans need, thrive on individualized, light- touch, individualized attention. We do. And if we've built org structures in companies like call centers or whatever, even at Salesforce, call centers of one to 70, okay, that's inhuman. It's inhuman. It is the stupidest org structure if you're going to employ humans, which many of us do. If you take that one ritual, and you start looking at things like span of control through the doorway of that ritual, you start to realize," Gosh, we can't do one to 40. It will break." And of course, when you see levels of PTSD for nurses and doctors twice as high as veterans, you can see what breaking actually looks like. We're just destroying humans' lives, but in a banal kind of way, but we've built org structures where that kind of individualized attention that Ashley was talking about, that weekly check- in, is just physically not possible, because we've got one to 40. Well, you can't do one to 40. That won't work. For long.

Michael Rivo: Have you seen structures where it doesn't necessarily have to be hierarchical with a manager? So, let's say you have a one to 40 situation, but then within that team of 40, you could have one- on- one meetings and people could help each other. That seems like an interesting way to also take some of the hierarchical challenges out of those conversations and make them really more about work and helping each other and more neutral. Have you seen that implemented?

Ashley Goodall: There's a lot of that in the world of work right now. We very often refer to that as a dynamic team, if you like. In other words, a team that you wouldn't find on the org chart if you looked at it. There's a lot of work that goes like that, and it exists very happily, as long as there's a team leader, as long as people are talking frequently about the work they're going to do. All the other conditions still apply, and there is something different about talking to somebody about your work when you know that that person holds the keys to your success, your career advancement, your promotion, your compensation. That conversation is, if you like, privileged over many of the other conversations at work, and attention from that person matters a lot. So, yes, you can get attention in all sorts of different ways. You can create sub- teams. You can create dynamic teams. They're all really good ways of exposing, if you like, and harnessing the uniqueness that each of us has. And at the same time, if you know that the person who is going to put their thumb on the scales in terms of your professional success is trying to remember your name from the other 38 people who report to them, that's not massively confidence- inspiring.

Michael Rivo: So, as a final takeaway, everything has changed so much with work over these past months with the pandemic, and how we communicate with each other, how work is done." Are we productive? Are we not?" Et cetera. How should we be thinking about continuing to have these kind of conversations and relationships as the work has changed so much and our feelings have changed so much about work over this time? And Ashley, I'll ask you first.

Ashley Goodall: Humans haven't changed. So, one of the marvelously reassuring things about the work that Marcus and I have done and the things that we're seeing this year is, look, humans haven't changed. The conditions of the world delivering to us the things that we need now and have needed since time immemorial, chief among them attention and the care of others and a space to express ourselves, okay, the way that that has to be delivered when we're all working from our home offices or our couches or whatever, the way has to change. But the thing that we're solving for is, thank goodness, enduring and strong and reliable. So, we have to get a little bit creative about," How do I talk to all of the people on my team every week, and make sure I do that, because that's super important right now?" We have to get a little bit creative about," How do I manage to connect with my team as a whole without overwhelming people's calendars with back- to- back- to- back- to- back- to- back- to- back video calls when they're dealing with the kids?" And okay, so the world got massively more complex this year in terms of how we execute. Humans didn't. Humans still need the things that we need to thrive. We want to be seen for who we are. We want who we are to be made useful. We want an opportunity to express that through the work that we do every day.

Marcus Buckingham: I will say this, to piggyback on that, Michael. So, this ADP Research Institute study, this was pre- pandemic, we just measured engagement around the world, and we looked at the work status of people and where did they do most of their work, and the most engaged work status of all in any country around the world was people who worked from home four days a week and in the office one day a week. So, all this talk these days about like," We need to get back to the office, and we're all lonely," and it's like, no, actually the most engaged work status pre- pandemic was people working from home four days a week and then the office one day a week. And so what that suggests is, to Ashley's point, that humans, we do want to feel... Yes, we want to feel seen. We want to feel as though people are trying to help us be productive and our best selves. That's a state of mind. That's not a place. That feeling of team is something that I feel inside of me as a human, and it's conjured or created by the way in which I am spoken to and connected with by my team leader, and whether it's a dynamic team, an ephemeral team, a static team, I still want somebody to go," Who the heck are you, what the heck are you working on this week, and how can I help you?" And if we keep doing that, I am so golden. I'm actually more engaged when I can choose my own schedule. I've got more agency about how I do my work. So there's a weird way in which, despite all the horrors and the difficulty and the challenges of this global pandemic, we've actually moved most of our workers closer to the most engaging work state as possible pre- pandemic. Now, no one's saying that, but that's actually what the data show. And so, if we could just stop pushing against the real world for a minute and go," Wait a minute. In the real world, do people want agency? Do they want choice about how and where and when and with whom they do their work?" Yes, they do." Okay. Well, given that, how then do we set up dynamic teams, static teams, ephemeral teams? How then do we communicate team leader to team member frequently? How then do we see the uniqueness of people?" Those are really interesting questions, and they take us up different trees pursued by different dogs, but they are... That was a joke. They are the real world. And I think for me, that's actually quite hopeful and encouraging. My last thought on this, I suppose, would be if there's one big change that has to happen, it's in education. We have got to make sure that we are teaching our children about how to understand and inventory their own uniqueness and that that's precious. And I don't mean for race, gender, age. I mean, just regardless of race, gender, age, who the heck are you? How do you think? How do you build relationships? What drives you? How do you make sense of things? All of those unique things that at nine, 10, 11, 12 years old, we could get you to start engaging with, we don't. And yet, those are the things that will wake you up at 31 years old as you wonder what contribution you're supposed to be making in your life. We don't do any of that. We must do that.

Michael Rivo: Okay. Well, this has been a wonderful conversation. Marcus and Ashley, thank you so much for joining us today on Blazing Trails. We appreciate all the work you're doing and the insights, so thanks again for joining.

Ashley Goodall: Thanks very much.

Marcus Buckingham: No worries.

Michael Rivo: That was Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall talking about the fallacy of feedback. For more, check out their book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader's Guide to the Real World. Thanks for listening today. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios.