Desire-based leadership; Three-Mile Restart; Audio comic books: Newsletter 25 September 2024
Newsletter 63: A revolutionary new take on management; the lie that Harris and Trump agree on; five ways to write a book. Plus three people to follow and three books to read.
What if you actually asked your people what they wanted?
Today’s newsletter is a little different. It’s dedicated to my review of a forthcoming book, Desire-Based Leadership: A Manager’s Unexpected Key to Driving Top Performance by Phil Putnam (Bookshop.org, Amazon). If you manage people, this may be the most insightful, surprising, and significant book you read this year.
Before I go on, let me make it clear that I have no financial stake in the success of this book. I first encountered it when Phil hired me to edit his manuscript. The manuscript stood out to me because Phil’s idea of what managers should do is completely different from everything I’ve ever read on the topic. If his groundbreaking ideas were to take hold, they would completely remake the landscape of work. (It also stood out because his personal and seductive writing style charmed the pants off me.)
The message of Desire-Based Leadership is simple but undeniable: Each of us loves ourselves more than we love our employer. We love life more than we love our careers. So managers should understand that and act on it.
Of course, you think. Phil is just stating the obvious. We don’t work because we have an unbounded love for our companies. We work because work allows us to accomplish our goals. And most of the goals are lifestyle and quality-of-life goals, like the freedom to enjoy weekends, the ability to spend time with our families, or the money and benefits to feel secure in our lives.
As the book describes, workers are “spending a huge chunk of their waking hours every week on the needs of your business so that they can get closer to having the life they want. They’re not there for the sheer joy of it, even when they do find their job enjoyable. The success of your business is not their ‘why.’ Their desires are their ‘why.’ “
And yet, every leadership and management book ignores this obvious truth in favor of attempting to get people to feel invested (the current buzzword is “engaged”) in the company and the work they do. We all go to pep rallies, learn the company strategy, develop skills, attempt to deal with politics, and get along, pretending while at work that team and the company are more important than the rest of our lives. But they aren’t.
What would happen, this book asks, if managers actually worked to figure out what people wanted to get from their lives, and then attempted to motivate them by helping them to fulfill those desires? Impossible, you think? Well, Desire-Based Leadership is a complete manual on how to do that supposedly impossible task.
Phil describes a set of four elements in what he calls the “Life Motivation Discovery Model.” This is a method for conducting interviews with your workers to find out what they really want and need, what matters to them. (And no, it’s not usually just “more money.”)
First, lifestyle. How do they live? Who do they love? Desire-Based Leadership suggests exploring this through the metaphor of “the couch.” Everyone has a couch. Where is it? Who cuddles up on it? When? What do they do? Is it spotless and neat and ready to appear in Architectural Digest or sloppy and relaxing and stained and lived-in? Is it usually occupied by a needy toddler or a slobbering dog? A lot of life happens on that couch, so if you understand the couch, you are a long way to understanding the human who owns it. Understanding that couch — and the lifestyle that it fits into — tells you a lot about what your worker is trying to get out of life.
Second, money. Not just the amount. What is that money doing for the person who is earning it? Are they saving to buy a house? Trying to get secure for retirement? Attempting to make enough to prove to their parents that they’ve “made it?” Would they prioritize the chance to earn a big bonus, or the security of knowing exactly what will be in the bank at the end of the year?
Third, feelings. As Phil describes, “Feelings are not facts, but it sure feels like they are.” Shockingly, he suggests you ask your team members questions like “What makes you feel respected? Disrespected? Trusted? What work/life boundaries are sacred to you?” Even though we all know that each worker has a different psychology and personality, we never seem to take the time to ask questions like these — and to act on them.
Finally, employment. How do they like to be managed? How do they want to grow in their job? How do they like to communicate? This isn’t far from conventional management theory, but it’s not a coincidence that it is the last of Phil’s four dimensions of the exploration of an employee’s motivation. We tend to think that work is about work, but it’s more about how work fits into life. So what happens in a person’s job is a key element of the puzzle of motivation, but not the only element, nor even the most important element.
All these interviews generate a “Life Motivation Analysis,” which creates the basis for managing the team member. The manager’s job is identify what the company and the team can offer and how it matches up to worker’s desires, then seek opportunities to align what they want with what they can get.
This is inherently inefficient. It goes completely against the way that companies (especially big companies) run, where people have titles like “Engineer 2” or “Business Development Manager,” are paid based on salary ranges, and are treated like nice neat cogs that fit with all the other similar cogs in the machine. But that model has gotten us super-stressed, disengaged job-hoppers who can only be motivated by money. That “efficiency” turns out to be pretty damned expensive, because paying more costs money, while attrition and training and replacement for people who quit costs even more money. And that doesn’t even count the squishy but very real cost of people who just go to work and don’t give a crap about what they’re doing.
Desire-based leadership flies in the face of HR policies that say you shouldn’t ask these personal questions of people. It’s doesn’t make leader’s jobs easier, because they need to spend the time to figure out what their people want, and that answer is different for each person. It won’t seem “fair” because some people will get rewards in the form of job flexibility or work-from-home and others will be expected to work 80 hours a week and make more pay because that’s the lifestyle they prefer.
It would take an incredible storyteller and an engaging and startling text to get a manager to even consider a change this radical. Fortunately, Phil Putnam is that storyteller, and Desire-Based Leadership is the seductive and logical and ultimately undeniable book that could persuade people to adopt this new way of managing and leading.
I’m sure many of you reading this will think about what I’ve described and want to pigeonhole it as more touchy-feely hug-your-team softhearted bullshit. But if you want to reject it on that basis, you’re inherently defending a status quo where most workers are unhappy and disengaged and a lot of them thinking about leaving, which is an enormous cost for companies. That isn’t really working out so well. So why not give a different way of thinking about work a chance?
My fervent hope is that managers everywhere will read this and think, “Why the hell not. What I’m doing now is frustrating and difficult and stressful and my best people are quitting because they think I don’t listen enough. Now I have a way to listen. So let’s do this.” They should then buy a copy for every member of their team, and then they should follow through and do exactly what the book says.
Teams like that are going to generate standout performance. Maybe their leaders will notice. And maybe we can start a revolution in corporate America where listening is commonplace and workers stick around because they’re getting what they need from their work, their bosses, and their lives.
This is a groundbreaking book. Read it. You’ll never think about work the same way again.
News for writers and others who think
There are a lot of ways to write a book. Kate O’Neill shares some of her favorites.
Microsoft is making a deal to open the shuttered and nearly melted-down Three Mile Island power plant and buy all of its output for 20 years to power a data center. This is reality, not the plot of a book by William Gibson, but you’d be forgiven if you go the two confused.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump disagree on nearly everything, but they do agree on one thing. Kamala Harris is raising money by claiming that Nate Silver predicts she will not win. Donald Trump is also claiming the polls showing him behind are wrong. So they both agree that Trump is ahead. Of course that’s completely at odds with the majority of actual polls.
The American Library Association says the pace of book bans is slowing in 2024. But it still tracked 414 attempts to ban books in the first eight months of the year.
How would you turn a graphic novel into an audiobook? Think “radio play” and you’re on the right track. Publishers’ Weekly explains how Nick Long adapted Darren Bell’s popular graphic memoir (subscriber link).
Three people to follow
Liz Boehm operating at the forefront of customer experience in healthcare.
Steven Van Belleghem , global keynote speaker who shares startling revelations about the world and how we interact with it.
Vince Molinaro Ph.D. bestsellling author and leadership expert.
Three books to read
The Frugal Economy: Building a Better World with Less by Navi Radjou நவி ராஜூ 🇮🇳 🇫🇷 🇺🇸 (Wiley 2024). Infinite opportunity in a world with finite resources.
On Truth by Harry Frankfurt (Knopf, 2006). Another little book of wisdom from the late author of On Bullshit.
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari (Random House, 2024). Epic historical perspective on what’s happening right now on information networks at breakneck speed.
When I managed others, I always asked them what they envisioned as their next job. The idea was, and the commitment I eventually made to them was, to understand their goals so that I could work to help them have experiences that would build their potential to reach those goals. (Of course, things didn’t always go as planned. I remember asking one young woman what she wanted her next job to be, only to have her burst into tears because she thought I was telling her she was being let go.) While my management philosophy clearly wasn’t as fully developed as the one you indicate Putnam outlines, I think I was on the right track. The employment relationship must be symbiotic: the employer AND the employees BOTH need to be benefiting from the relationship, and the employer will never need an “employee retention” program as long as that is the case. I’ll have to read this book.
And now I want to read a book about leadership, even though that’s not where I’m at. Excellent book review!