When productivity spiked during 2020 many thought that this trend would continue once life returned to a sense of normalcy. However, since returning to the office many businesses are seeing lower levels of productivity and profitability from their employees who are no longer have any happiness in their lives. So how do we combat this problem?

The first solution we tend to leap towards is higher pay brackets. But after a certain level of income, this simply doesn’t work anymore. We have to look deeper. Once we look past the paycheck we see engagement in work. Highly engaged employees record 23% higher profitability than those with low levels of engagement. Highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their organization and we are all aware that staff turnover not only kills profits, it erodes team cohesion and therefore results.

In today’s competitive job market, it’s more important than ever for leaders to focus on employee engagement and retention. CEO’s it’s time to prioritize job satisfaction in the workplace, but the question is, how? By focusing on the 7 human needs of peak performance, we can help create an engaged workforce where employees feel supported and have higher levels of job satisfaction.

Internationally award-winning entrepreneur, rule breaker, and Reverse Engineering strategist. Jade supports business owners to have teams that are productive and profitable. At some stage a paycheck was enough to motivate people but in today’s market you need to serve the seven human needs of your employees if you want them to be productive and profitable. When you understand these needs you can hack your company culture and elevate your success indicators across all metrics.

Timestamped overview for The Power of Happiness

  • [00:04:56] Jade’s personal journey to entrepreneurship and advocating for employee happiness.
  • [00:11:17] Founding a business on personal reputation and the importance of organizational bonds.
  • [00:18:08] Building well-being and social connections as foundational elements for peak performance.
  • [00:24:14] Tim Clark’s four stages of psychological safety and the importance of connection and wellness.
  • [00:32:25] Motivating personnel through significance and future vision.
  • [00:35:44] Aligning departments towards a common future vision.
  • [00:45:02] Building connection and understanding employee needs through effective communication.
  • [00:49:39] Prioritizing employee well-being through coaching, redesigning work, and meaningful connections.
  • [00:53:39] The importance of understanding and appreciating others with Five Love Languages.

Guest Resources

If you are interested in learning more about Jade’s resources be sure to check out the following links:

Related Articles and Podcasts

Join Our Elite Mastermind Community

Join Scott and our dynamic Mastermind Community! 🚀

 

Unlock the power of growth-focused leadership with a group of like-minded individuals who are passionate about taking their leadership skills to the next level. 🌟

 

Ready to transform your leadership journey? Click here for more information! 👉📈

Leave an iTunes Review

Get a FREE membership!

If you’re enjoying the show, leave us a review on your favorite podcast appIf your review is chosen as the Review-of-the Week, we’ll get a free month to the Leader Growth Mastermind!

What do: Write a review, send an email to scott@movingforwardleadership.com with a screen capture of the review, and wait to hear it read out on the show! 

Thanks for the amazing support!  

 

Write your review or rating here:

Unlock Your Peak Leadership Potential with Personalized 1-to-1 Coaching

Elevate your leadership to its highest potential with personalized 1-to-1 coaching from Scott. Discover the path to peak performance and achieve unparalleled success in your leadership journey. Ready to unlock your leadership’s full potential?

Subscribe to the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast

Join thousands of leaders worldwide who are transforming their leadership skills with the Peak Performance Leadership podcast. Unleash your full potential and stay at the forefront of leadership trends. Subscribe now and embark on your leadership journey of excellence!

Follow us on Your Favorite Social Media

Share now!


Transcript

The following is an AI generated transcript which should be used for reference purposes only. It has not been verified or edited to reflect what was actually said in the podcast episode. 


 

Scott McCarthy [00:00:00]:

It. Jade, welcome to the show. So good to have you here today.

Jade Green [00:00:05]:

I am really excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Scott.

Scott McCarthy [00:00:09]:

So, second show in a row where I do this, but I don’t normally do it. And let’s kind of dive into the guest background because normally I’m like, I don’t care about how the sausage is made, I just want a sausage. Give me sausage. But rather your background, I feel like, ties into the topic of the day as I was poking around your website. So why don’t you go a little bit of your background for the audience so they have an understanding who Jay Green is and where she came from and how she got to where she is today, and we’ll go from there.

Jade Green [00:00:45]:

Okay. Firstly, it is my real name because that’s the first thing I usually get asked, like, did I change it? Was I formerly a dancer or something? No, my parents think they’re hilarious. J grade is my real name. I am the typical story from trailer and trauma to triumph. So, yes, I grew up in one of those trailer parks until I was about nine. So we went through all of the interesting childhood things and really learned along the way from my dad of how to not take no for an answer and to really live life to the fullest and on your own terms. So it was a really colorful background leading to, at the age of 21, thinking, you know what, small town, it’s time to get out of the small town, time to get out of the caravan. I’m going to travel to the Big Smoke and go traveling around Australia. And I went to what we call the top end of Australia, Darwin, which, if anyone that knows Australia, that’s not really the Big Smoke. But I thought at 21, I’d give that a crack. And that’s where my real entrepreneurial career began. I fell into having literally I fell into accidentally having two companies, one with 52 contractors at 21 years old and started modeling and promotional agency and a dressmaking business. And kind of everything changed for me at that point. I was like, wow, I can literally just be my own boss and do my own thing and have my own rules. And it was kind of this reinforcement of I don’t need to conform to the general rules of society. From there, Frank got eaten by a crocodile, decided we don’t need to live in the wild west anymore, moved to the Real Big Smoke and the city and fell into recruitment. And so I spent 13 years in headhunting and recruitment across all different industries, everything from the handles sold to coffin manufacturers to Google. And to show my age, I shared a regis, a serviced office with Google when I still was dialing from the yellow Pages. And Google didn’t even have their own offices. And that was really what formed my knowledge and background of company cultures and what makes employees happy and unhappy, why they leave, why they stay, and what we can do, what organizations do to put them into peak performance. So utilizing all of those sort of understandings and knowledge, I got to a stage in my life that it was like midlife crisis. I’m happy, but am I really happy? I’ve achieved all these amazing things. I’ve won all, like, won the awards, and I’ve got the best investors in town, and I drive the glitter orange sports car and I wear the pinstripe suit like a real executive, right? Like a real successful person. But each day I was feeling unfulfilled, and it made me start to really question, what was this life really about? What do I really want? And I found that at a soul level, I’m a surfer. So I read Oprah’s what I know for sure and what I knew for sure was I was a surfer and I hadn’t been a surfer for 17 years, so I went and burnt all the bridges and changed all the things. And if you could see the video right now, you can see a surfboard behind me. I live at one of the world’s best surfing spaces in Australia or in the world, and I no longer wear a pinstripe suit. And I went about going, what really makes me happy? What lights me up, and what really takes me to the next level? And how can I share that with other people? And how can I help businesses realize that the fate of humanity rests on the shoulders of these business leaders? And it’s really our responsibility as leaders to help our humans that work for us to be happier in life. And I say it’s a bait and switch, right? Because happiness is the greatest hack to productivity and profitability. So you as a leader, if you can make your people just that little bit happier in all of their life, you’re going to have more productive and profitable people. So I think it’s a win win for everyone. Is that enough background?

Scott McCarthy [00:05:02]:

That’s fantastic. And I love the surfboard. I’m not a surfer, by the way, but I love how you’re just living the life you want to live. A little bit jealous. I will get there one day. It’s coming for sure. And I love how your mission just oozes out of you. And we’re definitely going to talk about your points on our seven human needs to be happy and how to be peak performing at the workplace. We’re going to definitely dive into that. But you sparked my attention about three minutes and 28 seconds ago with something, and it would be remiss to skip over it for the audience out there. Because no doubt there are some people who are in this situation, I guess to kind of set the tone is I experienced something similar, not exactly the same, but we’ll get to it. But what I want to talk about is 21 years old, owner of two companies. The struggles, the trials, the tribulations. Go to it. And I can relate to you similarly because at let me think here. I got to do the math, carry to one, blah, blah, blah. I was around 23 years old, and by background, I’m a Canadian Army officer. Still am, still served today. So 23, I was leading a platoon of troops, some of which have served more time in the army at that time than what I had been alive, but I was still in charge of them. And that platoon ended up being around 85 people. So very similar, but super young, in charge of a lot of basically in charge of a lot of people. So I would love to hear your story there. But being 21, a young woman in charge of two companies, 50 odd people under her trials, tribulations, some hard lessons learned, whatever you got from that one.

Jade Green [00:07:06]:

Yeah, beautiful. So I’d been blessed that I had been working since I was 14 at that stage, or 13, nine months when it was legal. So I’d had lots of experience of actually working in places. I’d been a short order cook, so I’d been in charge of a kitchen. So I’d had a little bit of experience having to have leadership responsibilities at school. I’d been on the student council and worked through that and captains of football teams and things. So I’d had a little bit of leadership, but it really was an accident for me. Like, I was working in a bar one day and someone came in and said, do you want to work at the Supercars as an umbrella girl? And I was like, that sounds super fun. I love cars. And she’s like, Got any friends? I’m like, I only just got to this town three days ago, but I’m pretty sure I can work the rest of this street just like you just did, and ask every other bar mate if they want to be an umbrella girl. So literally, I then took a brief from her. I was like, okay, what are you looking for? And she’s like, energy and personality. And they’ve got to be willing to talk, but they’ve got to have this sort of certain look because this is the brand that we’re representing. And so I was like, okay, take a brief. Go find the humans to match. And so that really has carried me for the last oh, dare I say it, 24 years. Jesus Christ, let’s not put that on air. Take that one off. Right? But taking a brief, what is the brief? What is the person we need? What’s the avatar of the person that’s going to be the right fit for this duty that you need them to perform? And then going out and screening and finding the right fit and building relationships. And what I found was this was also my biggest downfall in that business. I built it on reputation, and I built my team on me. And so when it came to me deciding I was going to leave that town and that state, I went to sell the business. Well, I got approached for someone to buy the business, and I was like, oh, this sounds awesome. But then I spoke to my team, and I was like, will you work for this person that wants to buy it? Because I didn’t have them locked in on hard contracts because they were contractors, and they’re all like, no, we work for you. And so if it’s not you, then we might go to this other agency that was a competitor, because they’d been trying to headhunt them and trying to poach them for years at a time, and they already had a reputation, and they were going to transition some of my other clients. So they were like, no, our loyalty lies with you. So that was a big lesson for me, moving into other organizations and thinking about how do we when I was running other companies that other people owned, how do we derisk the organization so it doesn’t just linchpin on them working for one manager, right? It’s a great strength to have for an organization as well. You often hear people don’t leave companies, they leave leaders. But how do you build stronger bonds that isn’t just hinged on one predominant person, so that if that person moves on, the business still stays strong and you don’t hemorrhage your people.

Scott McCarthy [00:10:17]:

It’s interesting, when I started all this over five years ago, it was during the whole chris Ducker’s, ducker. Sorry, you printer rage. Where everyone had their website with their name, right? Everyone. And it still goes on a bit today. But I didn’t do that. I owned the domain. Still have it, but I didn’t do it. I got asked that one time. They’re like, Why is this not Scott McCarthy leadership or whatever? I’m like, well, because this is how it is. If you are, as you said, the linchpin, if you’re the main reason that everyone sticks around, if you are, it well, one of the big one of the big things in leading is leaving. We all stay. We all we all leave at some point. So, sure, I could have made it Scott McCarthy, but the day I decided, because it will happen, this is done. I’m tapping out, folks. I’m calling it quits and pack my bags and go and try to surfboard. Maybe I’ll get some lessons from Jade down in Australia. But the day that happens, everything that I had spent all this time creating goes up in smoke, because it is all hinged on me. And that is not that’s not, you know, it’s not a principle of leadership that I embrace. So that’s why the business is called Moving Forward Leadership, because it’s all about progressing and moving forward. And then, of course, the podcast here is peak performance because we want to achieve peak performance and move forward with it. So it kind of goes hand in hand. So it’s a bit of a story there of how it’s very similar. We have parallels going on here.

Jade Green [00:12:06]:

Yeah, I love that. I think you saw one of my landing pages, which is my speaker page, which is in my name, so jgreen.com au. But that’s just for me as a speaker. Our company is Vara Effect, and for the similar reason, right, I don’t want clients to think they’re only getting me either, that it is something that’s bigger than us. I find that I don’t know, I think it’s weird for employees to really buy into working for somebody else’s name. And I think it doesn’t give as much ownership and camaraderie and loyalty to a brand when it’s just somebody’s name. It kind of seems a bit ego. So we use it for the speaking, but definitely for the consulting and for the work that we do. It’s a team, and the team love wearing their company shirts and having their company water bottles with the logo and it means something to them. And there’s a story behind that as well and it’s its own entity. And I love that everyone that works in the team can make it their own and they’re like, why do they love it and how do they embody that for them rather than trying to emulate and be a mini me?

Scott McCarthy [00:13:24]:

No, I couldn’t agree with you more. Absolutely. Now, you talk a lot about the seven needs for peak performing employees, so let’s dive into that because I can feel how one, you ooze that out, and two, no doubt your company embraces, obviously that whole ideology. So can we dive into those? And one, what are they? And two, how do they actually achieve the effect of peak performing? Because obviously I’m very interested in peak performance and here at the podcast. So just to give you an idea, or actually here, moving Forward leadership complete, I focus on what I call my three domains of leadership. And that is, one, leading yourself. I e you to leader and how you achieve peak performance, how you continuously try to grow, how you take care of even your health, mental health, so on and so forth, all those things. Two, how do you take care sorry, leading your team, I e how you take care of the individuals within the team. So the Scots, the jades, the Janes, the Joe’s, et cetera. And then finally, the third domain is leading your organization. I e the institution. So for me, it’s moving forward. Leadership. So how do I lead that? How do I make that girl? How do I make that better, more efficient, more effective, so on and so forth. So if we look at it through that context, we’re really focusing on the individuals leading your team. But of course, no doubt yourself is involved in there too. So I would love to know how these seven really help us achieve those levels.

Jade Green [00:14:57]:

Yeah, amazing. So I found over the last two and a bit decades looking at and studying culture and studying human behavior. And I do a lot of work, I study under the Flow Research Collective and do high flow leadership to really look at how do we unlock peak performance, not only in ourselves, but in our team members and anyone else around us as well. And I was really leaning on Maslow’s hierarchy for a lot of the psychology behind the behind behavior of people. And then I was leaning on Tony Robbins human needs as well. I was like, okay, cool, it’s all there and thereabouts. But if I look at the organizations I’ve worked with, I look at the cultures that I’ve helped to build and the ones that we’ve studied that I really want to emulate, I go, what is it that really makes a difference? How do we really unlock the potential of our people and ourselves? And I always reference Ben Horace’s book. What you do is who you are. Because if you are not it as the leader, if you are not embodying everything you want to see in your team, then it doesn’t matter what words on a wall that you have in terms of your vision, mission, values. If the leaders are not embodying it, then your people are not going to reflect it. So everything I talk about starts with you individually first, but we’ll talk today about how a leader can put that into their team. So if we go you’ve touched on a few of these things, the foundational levels. There’s like a big talk out there at the moment about psychological safety, right? If we think about the well being. So my core foundational, bottom of the pyramid, as you would say, seven human need for peak performance employees is well being. And that firstly starts with psychological safety and mental well being. Because think of this. If you have, like, your cognitive load is being chewed up about how you’re going to pay rent, how you’re going to feed your kids, like, the fight that you’ve just had with your partner, something that’s going on bad with your children, all of those things that are going on outside, how can you be fully focused inside? Like the thought process of being able to slam down the roller door of disassociation the minute you punch the clock and walk in and sit at your industrialized desk, days are done, right? That’s just not how we get peak performance employees because we are not machines and we’re not doing just machine work now. We need to be able to bring our brains online and use our cognitive resources to problem solve. And we can’t do that to the best of our ability. When our brains are run off into the past depression or ruminating on what was or fast forwarding around anxiety about what’s going to happen at the end of the day or in the future or how I’m going to do this, that and the other thing. So if we can work with people on their mental well being and their psychological safety, that is like the foundation. But also think of this energy, right? If we’re unwell full of disease, like whether it’s not easy to move our frames around and we got pain and it’s awkward or we’re big or lethargic do you mean if we don’t have the well being physically, how can we perform mentally? How can we do the best of our job when that’s chewing up our energy stores and our resources and stopping us from being able to shine or you’re constantly taking medication that might be dulling you down? Or do you know? I what mean the food that you’re consuming is making you sleepy. Like you go and eat a bunch of garbage at lunchtime and the thing that gets me with running seminars and that and I go to people’s seminars and they everyone was really sleepy after lunch was like, you fed them bacon, cabanara and fries and fried food and soda and they peaked and then they crashed. Like what did you expect, right? So really looking at the well being of our people, if you can get that foundation right, you’re helping them to be able to step up with full focus and full energy, right? The next thing is connection. As human beings, we’re wired for social connection. That’s what makes us human, right? That’s what brings us to life. Even the introverts need connection. They just need more help doing it. And they need to be met on their level. So we know the studies are showing that people that feel like they have a friend, like relationship work or a best work friend stay, they are seven times more engaged and they stay seven times longer. Imagine what that does for you as a leader, for the performance of your team. If you don’t have retention problems and people are engaged and doing better work, you don’t want to let down the people next to you. This also layers into the psychological safety as well because when you have true connection and you feel safe to be able to share or to ask questions, your problem solving and your ability to unlock is far greater.

Scott McCarthy [00:20:11]:

Can I jump in for a minute?

Jade Green [00:20:13]:

Yeah. I don’t want to keep talking.

Scott McCarthy [00:20:17]:

No, I didn’t want to interrupt you actually until it was a good point. This is actually very timely. So I run a mastermind community called the Leader Growth Mastermind. We get together weekly. I provide them content every each week. Each month we focus on a theme of one of those three domains. So this month currently, we’re focusing on leading your teams and we’re talking about creating peak performing teams. And this is not a lie. I’ll bring it up on my screen and show you if I need to, if you don’t believe me. But literally the first two weeks of this month, what were we talking about? Psychological safety.

Jade Green [00:21:00]:

It’s a trending topic, right?

Scott McCarthy [00:21:03]:

Right. So that’s based off the work of Tim Clark. And for the listener out there, if you want to check out that episode, just go to leaddomboss.com. One, two, eight. That interview is there, but it’s all about Tim Clark’s. Four stages. Inclusion, inclusion, safety, being able to be feeling included, kind of what you’ve already talked about. Next one is let me make sure I get two and three mixed up. Next one is learner. Next one is learner safety. So be able to make mistakes after that is to I can’t remember the exact term he puts it, but basically provide input into safe to be able to input. And then the final one is feedback and stuff like this. And then the final one is the challenge. So not just beyond just say hey, here’s ideas, but rather, hey, this is messed up, we’re doing things wrong, so on and so forth. So I’m hearing a very similar theme from you so far, and it’s great because you mentioned connection. And I was, like, thinking we literally in a group chat after one of our group calls. We were chatting and when he was like, this is a tribe, I feel like I finally found my tribe. I was like, yeah. I was like, oh, my heart just blew up. But it’s great. It all just kind of flows together. So really enjoy it. So first off, we got wellness. And I liked what you talked about there. And then we got connection. Let’s carry on with the next two, I guess.

Jade Green [00:22:50]:

So the next one, clarity and certainty is number three. So I lean a lot on Brene Brown for this. In terms of being clear is kind. Being unclear is unkind. And really, if we want people to be peak performance, you know, this for any peak performance, even athletes, we need to have the boundaries and the bumpers. We need to know what the rules of the game are. When we know and we feel safe and certain of what we’re aiming for, we know how we can step forward or we know what questions we need to ask to be able to get there. Right. But also this comes down to like, if there’s have you heard of the term VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, right?

Scott McCarthy [00:23:33]:

When there’s a military eager, we use it all the time.

Jade Green [00:23:38]:

Excellent. Right. So if there’s too much VUCA, how can anyone feel safe? How can anyone do the right thing? Right. So giving them clarity and certainty allows them to be safe. Ben going back to the psychological safety, but it also gives them the parameters of what we’re working for, working towards. In terms of projects, if you can really paint what done looks like and give them clarity and certainty of this is where we’re going. You don’t need to give the micromanaging steps. You can allow your people to go and problem solve because they know the direction that they’re going without kind of guessing. So clarity and certainty, the next one is significant.

Scott McCarthy [00:24:18]:

Can I jump in for a second there? Clarity and certainty what you talk about there, that’s what we refer to as desired in state. Where do you want to end up in the end, right? When we talk about mission planning and all that stuff, we use the term desired end state. Now, that being said, if you think about those words desired end state, it doesn’t mean exactly that too, right? Because guess what? As we say in military, the enemy gets a vote. Now, your enemy could be market conditions, it could be the weather, it could be the Internet, it could be anything, right? Or it can be a competitor, but that is what you desire. So along the way, you need to make those micro adjustments to get towards as close as possible you get to that desired end state. But what I like what you said, though, is you give your team that desired insight. This is where I want us to end up. And then like, oh, okay, from my standpoint, I need to do this, that this here, and I need to have that achieved by then. And your other team member goes, yeah, you need to achieve that by then. So I can go ahead and take it from here and move there and do this and sprinkle on this on top of it and all suddenly like, oh, okay, rent the desired insight. What the boss wanted from us.

Jade Green [00:25:39]:

Yeah. It really allows the teams to collaborate better together, especially with doing handoffs with projects and knowing things like clarity over. When do you need this particular part done? By this milestone, this handoff and who’s responsible for what? Okay, this is going to sit in your responsibility. This is going to sit in my responsibility. This is where the handoff point is. When we have that mapped out for people, it just makes everything flow so much easier. And it gives people that at the right level of accountability and enrollment over how they push something forward as well.

Scott McCarthy [00:26:17]:

Awesome. Love it.

Jade Green [00:26:18]:

Okay, play significance, right? So this is leaning on all the human needs that everyone puts out, but significance now, it’s really easy to if we talk retention for employees, it’s really easy to relieve a job if you don’t feel like your job really matters or that you don’t matter to the team. It’s pretty easy when I feel I don’t know if you’ve ever been in this spot. Like, when I was working for an organization, I stayed a bit longer than I probably wanted to because I knew my team needed me. I knew if I left that I was going to be letting down my team. I knew that the project that we were working on would fall behind if I wasn’t there because I was so invested in it. And so I stayed. Right. I felt significance. I felt that usual powers for good, not evil people, but do you know what I mean? I felt like I would be doing a disservice because my role was significant. Who I was was significant to pushing this mission forward. Right? So if you just look at it from a retention point of view but again, if you want to unlock people’s performance, if you look at what we just talked about with whose role is what, if you know that the thing you’re working on plays a significant piece in pushing that project forward. You’re way less likely to drop the ball on it, right? You’re more engaged in it. You’ve got more pride in it. So how do you give significance? One of the really easy things I think you can do is just catch people doing the right thing. Because what gets recognized gets repeated. And just build a habit as a leader of going, hey, do you know what? By you getting that to me a day earlier really helped the team. Or by you doing this, it really pushed the project forward. By you just adding your energy in a meeting because you come in smiling, that just raises the energy for everyone else. I just love that you do that for us. Thank you.

Scott McCarthy [00:28:14]:

I love it. I spent two years as a squadron commander, so I was in trip, basically. Think of a CEO of a 200 person company, and Fridays, most Fridays, me and my right hand man, we would what we call walk the lines, get out of our offices and go see the people on the ground level. Pretty much literally. We were spread out across nine buildings. We were across the base. We had people everywhere. And I spent most of the time talking to people and seeing what they were up to. But I would put things relate to what their job was in terms of the overarching mission that we were achieving. Because it’s super easy for someone who’s simply taking stock taking of boxes of supplies that come in for them to be like, well, whatever, stock taking, stock taking. No, this is super crucial equipment that is needed to do this. That the other thing. It goes up. It’s supporting these other units that are going to go ahead and go overseas and do these other missions, so on and so forth. So I literally took so much my time for people to understand that their job was significant. It mattered. And probably one of the biggest ones that I did was that with our contracting cell one year, I grabbed all of our numbers. What was the value of the contracts that we did this past year? People like, what the hell do you want to know? That just. Tell me, get the numbers for me. I want to know how many contracts did we did we go ahead and get finalized? What was the total value of it? God, the boss is off his rocker. So, I got the number, and before Christmas break, we had everyone together, and I was talking, and I started running off all the KPIs that all the different sections did. I had transport people. So how many kilometers did they do the past year? What did that equate to maintenance guys? How much equipment did they fix? What did that equate to and said, for the contracts, guys? And I said, you did I forget how much? Millions of dollars worth of contracts. X millions of dollars worth of contracts that equates to y number family incomes in the local area.

Jade Green [00:30:37]:

Yes.

Scott McCarthy [00:30:38]:

Right. So adding that significance immediately to just them, as far as they’re concerned, just kind of churning paper, per se. And people came up to me and like, wow, I never looked at it that way before. I’m like, well, this is what you do.

Jade Green [00:30:55]:

This is the difference you make.

Scott McCarthy [00:30:57]:

Yeah. 100%.

Jade Green [00:30:58]:

Yeah. I love that. I love that. So, if we move on to number five you touched on this a second ago challenge. If we look at peak performers, any peak performers, no one is a peak performer that doesn’t like a bit of challenge. Right. If we don’t have challenge, we get bored, we check out, we go complacent, we get beige, and we bounce. Right? It’s about how do we keep them engaged? Have you studied flow much at all, Scott? Do you know any of the behind flow state?

Scott McCarthy [00:31:32]:

A bit. I wouldn’t say I know a lot, but I know a bit. Yeah, for sure.

Jade Green [00:31:36]:

Say we get two gold stars in a beer. If you can tell me the percentage for the challenge skills ratio that unlocks flow state.

Scott McCarthy [00:31:48]:

Oh, 68. Comes to my head, but I can’t remember.

Jade Green [00:31:57]:

Everybody thinks it’s a really high number. Guess what? No, it’s itty bitty teeny weeny 4%.

Scott McCarthy [00:32:06]:

Okay.

Jade Green [00:32:09]:

To unlock flow state, it’s a 4% challenge to skills ratio. If it’s too big a challenge, we can grind, and we kind of get there, but it’s a lot harder, and it takes a lot longer. Right. Because we can get into fear and procrastination and questioning and overthinking, and you don’t get in that zone of where the ego melts. The flow state is when we’re at one right. With consciousness and we’re in the zone and everything, like, times, it’s either slowing down or speeding up, depending on what suits us in that moment to get into that sweet spot. And we can’t do that if we’re too concerned about whether we’ve got the right skills. Like, our ego kicks in, and we’re kind of, like, starting to rationalize and freak out. So it’s a real challenge for leaders to figure out what’s the 4% and the way you do it. You’re like, no, but I need them like over a six month project. Like, this challenge is massive. We just need it to be 4% stacking, whether that’s every task or every project or every day, every hour, every flow block. If you can break the tasks down and just challenge, that just enough. And then we stack each of those. You’ve heard about the 1% increments of if we can just change things and stack them 1%. So if we dial that up to four, we hit the flow state. And it’s about how do we chunk down tasks into those levels so that we can get that right? Sweet spot. Because we know in flow the studies by who was it? By McKinsey, I think it was, or Gallup, I can get that for us is that it’s a 500% increase in productivity and performance when we’re in flow. So think about that. Like, think about what that can do for your team if you can get that right. The challenge is when we go too far and we overlight our people, they go into overwhelm, they cognitive freak out and they shut down or they don’t feel like they’re able to make the right decisions and it’s not coming from the right energy. If we don’t give them enough challenge, they get bored, they get complacent, they check out and they bounce. So challenge is one I really love and it’s one of the things that I study the most around, finding that how do we get this balance and how do we break up those projects and paint what done looks like into milestones so that we can do that? Because we know when we win, like and you break it down and you win, that momentum of ticking something off and getting to the next stage helps keep us going that forward and going faster.

Scott McCarthy [00:34:47]:

Yeah, I remember the 500 number. Obviously I didn’t remember the 4%. I must be thinking of something else. But it’s interesting though, it kind of goes back to what I was saying talking about earlier, but in a little bit of a different lens than that. You really need to know your people because 4% for me is different from 4% to you. That’s different than 4% to Jim and 4% to Jane. So that is the challenge per se. Mind, the pun of challenging people, right, is that you got to really understand at what point do they actually feel the overwhelm, what point do they feel the underwhelm and try to gauge their kind of range per se. But I love the whole ideology, breaking big problems down into small problems. I talk about preach that all the time. We do it all the time. It’s literally ingrained into us in military culture because that’s how we operate. So we just take a really big problem. We literally break it down into very small problems.

Jade Green [00:35:50]:

First step, what’s the next step?

Scott McCarthy [00:35:53]:

And start hammering at them. So no I really like it. For sure.

Jade Green [00:36:00]:

Awesome.

Scott McCarthy [00:36:00]:

All right, let’s move on.

Jade Green [00:36:02]:

Number six, future vision. We know that if we run out of future, we run out of hope, right? If we’re not pulled forward by something that’s like in the future, then we just get stuck and we get complacent or we get stuck thinking about the past. So there’s two things I talk about with future vision. And if you really want to unlock the potential of your team, this again goes back to knowing them individually. When you can help coach them on something that’s important to them in their lives, you’re going to turn up the dial of intrinsic motivation, right? So when you can link how what they do every day at work helps them be better in their own lives as well, that’s where you really take things to the next level. And for some people it’s just realizing that, hey, this paycheck is going to help you to pay off your house. And if you do this, then maybe your bonus, what do you want to do with it? But maybe you’re coaching them on their financial management and how to budget or the knowledge that you have over getting a home loan or reducing debt or something. And then you can link that to what they do, but your coaching is helping them to achieve that future vision as well. Then you’ve got them more bought in because again, significance you are showing to them that they as a human and their true happiness is actually significant as well and it means something to you. We need to have a common future vision for the team because they need to know what the North Star is that they’re working towards. How many leadership teams have you come into? And the company’s got a mission, but Division over here thinks they’re working towards one thing. I had this not long ago. One team thought that they were responsible for like it was just for driving revenue. And so all of the marketing efforts was around driving revenue. I’m like, cool, but you’re causing by driving more revenue, we’re actually causing more trouble because we don’t have the boots on the ground to actually service the customers. And now we’ve got unhappy customers and we’re causing a bigger problem. We don’t have enough staff. We’re putting all the other stuff under under pressure and we’re burning them out. And then so I went to the owner, I was like, what are we really trying to do here? He’s like, I need the profit level to increase to here. I need this level of GP so that I can fund the next, the next location that we need to open. I’m like, right, so it’s not revenue. I need cash in the bank for you. Yeah. Excellent. Everyone back in the room. What do we need to do to increase profitability? Oh, actually we don’t need to be hiring more people. Oh, we don’t need to be pushing more traffic through the door. What we need to be doing is increasing every cart and every sale. What can we do with that? How can we do that? Completely changes the whole marketing campaigns and everything that they were doing towards a different metric. Right? So we need to get really again, it comes back to clarity and certainty, though. But they need to know what that future vision is so they can all get rowing in the right direction. Otherwise you got some people rolling over here and some people rolling over there and some people rolling backwards, right? But when they feel like they can and again, all of the things stack, right? When they know that what they do matters to helping push that future vision forward, that’s driving their motivation as well. They’re pulled forward by that.

Scott McCarthy [00:39:33]:

Yeah, definitely. It kind of goes back again to what I said earlier, but desired and state again, that’s a future vision. Okay, where do we want to end up? I enjoyed your example just then because I had a very similar experience. Imagine that. I had a one on one coaching client. He was a sales vice president, sales for his corporation. And he had this number, he had the number, he had the drive for the number. They weren’t necessarily getting the number. And it was a really wonky I was trying to wrap my head. I’m like, Right, but your sales got it. And it’s a software company, so the developers were in charge of the actual product. I’m like, okay, so you hook the client, developers come in that showcase it, and then you guys finalize it. And he’s like, yes. And he’s like, okay, cool. And then the operations folks are the ones who actually implement and manage it day to day. I’m like, great. Long story short, it took us a while to figure this out, but long story short, do you know what would have happened if he had met his number? The operations team would have crashed, literally crashed, because they could not handle the amount of throughput that equated to the sales goal that the company was pushing on him. I’m like, this is what we refer to as misalignment. The company is not aligned, right? It needs to be aligned. Like, if you go meet your goal of sales, the operations guys need to be able to handle that because if not, well, you’re going to lose all your sales in the way because you can’t deliver on your promise and your customers are going to go elsewhere. And oh, by the way, your R and D, your developers need to be glued between both of you because your sales guys are going to be telling you features that your customers want or saying, oh, this is lacking, or this is good, or I really like this. You want to double down, pick up the operations guy? Well, this is what’s actually being used so on and so forth. So they need to be the glue between the two. But none of that was happening. Each one of them were kind of in their stylos stove pipes, walking at their own areas. And I was like, you got to bring this up to your CEO, man. You have to push this because no matter what, stop focusing on your number, because it will kill. If you achieve what you’re told to achieve, it will be the death of your company.

Jade Green [00:42:02]:

Yeah. And this is how we see really successful businesses gone to. I had a client a couple of years ago, and they were doubling every month. Doubling revenue. Doubling, doubling, doubling. But it was in an area that really struggled to get talent because it was in a remote area, not a lot of talent pool. The problem also being that you couldn’t even get any rentals in. So even if you were enticing people to move in from interstate, they had nowhere to live, so they couldn’t actually even take the job. So you could sell the dream. It’s like, guys, we need to stop. And then we’re getting a bad reputation because the delivery is not there, customers are unhappy, the reputation is getting burnt. It’s like, you need to stop and look at how you’re going to structure this. And why is this an ego number again? And it came back to for that it was just someone who got attached to their salesperson constantly, like, by nature, getting the numbers and the ego of double and double and double and with this side and had lost the long term vision and the profitability. And really, how do you sustain it? And it meant that they imploded for a while and that’s why we came in and had to restructure everything. Now they’re building from a sustainable base and they’re making more money out of less delivery.

Scott McCarthy [00:43:27]:

Awesome. Your final one you have here of the seven yes. Happiness.

Jade Green [00:43:35]:

Happiness? Yes.

Scott McCarthy [00:43:38]:

Happiness has no place in the workplace. Come on.

Jade Green [00:43:41]:

I know. I actually had an old client that that I dropped like a hotcake. Said I pay them to work, not be happy. And I’m like, you’re missing everything. Right? So I talk about the state of happiness. If you think of the state of happiness, how can you be happy when you’re off in the past, ruminating about things that were even like you’re over here worrying or again, anxiety land rushed off into the future. You’re not present here in the now. Happiness is the state of being here now, content. When you’re present and you’re focused, like when you’re present and you’re happy, you can be focused on the task at hand. When you have that energy of happiness, you can be your fullest self. You can bring that energy, you feel safe and happiness spreads. And the radiation of that energy, it goes out to everybody else. Right? So all of these things stack to making happier humans happier employees. This is why happiness is the greatest hack to productivity and profitability. And there’s a study by the University of Warwick that happy employees, the state ones that state they are happy, are 12% more productive than their unhappy counterparts. Right. And we also know from the studies that that starts to radiate and spread to the other people. Right. Then happiness starts to link to engagement. And then when we start unlocking the numbers of engagement, we’re seeing like, exponential growth within the team’s, productivity and profitability. So I call it the bait and switch in terms of I just want to make humans be happier. Because I’ve interviewed so many people from being a headhunter and recruiter of what the effects of unhappy employees have on their family, on their lives that cause divorces, that cause problems with their kids and unhealthy bodies and beings and mental health from being severely unhappy at work. So it feels like my calling to do something about that. But the benefit to the leaders is when you get your people in that state, then they can be focused, they can be present, they can do their best work. They’re completely unlocked to use all of their faculties and resources to push your mission forward. I get real excited about that.

Scott McCarthy [00:46:08]:

Sorry. So it’s funny you mentioned the statistic 12% more productive. I was like, that seems low. But then you said engagement like, oh, here we go. And then exponentially higher. I’m like, yeah, okay, that makes a lot more sense now. So with that, just think about every.

Jade Green [00:46:28]:

Single person on your team being 12% more productive every single day. And stacking and stacking and stacking. We say that the engaged employees are 23% higher profitability. If you have a team of 100 people that are 23% more profitable per person, what does that do to your bottom line? Oh, yeah, when we take that number and we go 87% less likely to leave, what does it do to your brain not having to replace with your retention, but your long term profitability and your reputation with clients if your people are 87% less likely to leave you?

Scott McCarthy [00:47:17]:

Yeah, no, your bottom line definitely skyrockets, for sure. Absolutely. As you were talking about, I have a mastermind member in my mind who’s going through a certain situation with one of their team members and but her, her boss, the company owners, and letting her deal with it, per se. And I was just like, these numbers absolutely make sense for this situation. Unfortunately, in the inverse way, hopefully she.

Jade Green [00:47:49]:

Got to look at what’s the opportunity cost. What’s the cost? Like, hypothetically, you give someone a few days to deal with something, you coach them through it and you lose a couple of days, maybe you lose a week. I challenge people to think about, what if you lose that person? How long does it take you to recruit it, to train it, to upskill what impact are they like? What’s their relationships with the rest of the team? What’s the impact with the clients? If they’re dealing with clients, what’s it really going to cost you? Is it going to cost you the five days of downtime? It’s most likely going to cost you three to six months before you’ve got someone back up to the same level. So can you really afford to not work on this?

Scott McCarthy [00:48:33]:

Yeah. Question for you. Along the lines of happiness, what are some of the tactics that you’ve seen or you advise leaders that to implement to increase happiness within their teams if it’s so important?

Jade Green [00:48:51]:

Yeah. So where people go wrong, they think, we’ll put in a ping pong table and a couple of bean bags and we’ll have pizza and beer night. Especially if you got a team of introverts, none of them want any of that shit and they’re just going to oops. They don’t want to participate in that. Do you know, I what mean or if they’ve got families like, this is not meeting them where they’re at. You do need to know your people and you’ve got to meet them where they’re at. If you just look at the foundations of those things that we talked about, one of the main things that underpins all of that is communication. Start with communicating, start with connecting with who they are as a real human. So I don’t have them on my desk right now, but this is another deck by Best Self Company. Sometimes I use this one, but we use Icebreaker cards or we use any conversation starter to start any meeting, especially one on ones. And we just get people to share and share back as a leader. Start to get to know the real human, to build that connection, to build that safety, to understand what their Motivators are. Think about how you can layer in some of this stuff. Like, okay, how do we actually reduce stress? How can we maybe redesign the way that we work? People used to like, oh, we don’t want people working from home. They’ll never do any work. Then we had the pandemic and everyone started working from home and all of a sudden productivity spiked and then we’re forcing people to go back and productivity’s dropped. Or they’re still working from home, but now they’re disconnected because it’s gone too long. Right. You need to look at how like, if you want true happiness, look at how you can just look after the well being of your people and create that connection. It’s so easy conversations, it doesn’t cost anything. It takes a bit of your time and genuine care. And then just coach your people.

Scott McCarthy [00:50:49]:

The power of questions. Hey, what would make you guys happy? What would you like? What would you like to celebrate this win?

Jade Green [00:50:59]:

Yeah. So I say the quality of your life is a direct reflection of the quality of the questions you ask. Ask yourself and ask of others, right? If you want to take that to another level, if you understood the Five Love Languages and what the love language of your actual team members are, then you can show them your gratitude. You can help them celebrate their wins in a language that they receive and are like the salesperson that you think should be motivated by the big commission check. But you don’t understand, why are they not like they can make so much money, but actually gifts is not their number one language. It’s not their driver. Significance is and actually physical touch and walking up and patting them on the actual back, giving them a real pat on the back and telling them what a great job they did, could send them soaring and working overtime to get that pat on the back. Again, again. Use your powers for good, not evil, but meet our people where they’re at. But you don’t know this. If you don’t connect with them, this is where we get I see leaders getting complaining, like, I give them all this stuff. We give them great bonuses. No one’s grateful. We give them these prizes. Well, if gifts are not their love language, they don’t care. Maybe they just want you to have a coffee with them because quality time is more important and then you’re going to get more buy in.

Scott McCarthy [00:52:28]:

I did not expect that we would go down the route of the Five Love Languages in this show today. I will tell you, this is the first time I’ve really been on this. Definitely the first time in the history of this podcast. 262 episodes, plus all the other individual ones I’ve recorded myself. So probably into the I’ve never talked about the Five Love Languages. Congratulations. That was great. But it makes sense. It’s all about understanding your people, beating the murder they’re at and appreciating them how they want to be appreciated, not how you think they ought to be.

Jade Green [00:53:13]:

Yes. This is why we see rewards and recognition programs fall flat on their face, because we didn’t meet our people where they’re at.

Scott McCarthy [00:53:22]:

Right? It’s not rocket science. Jade, this has been a fantastic conversation. I knew it was going to be a good one as soon as I got pitched. You and you definitely did not disappoint today. So lots of fun, amazing, all kinds of amazing information. Probably have to be a relisten for the audience, but all good things come to an end. Before we hit stop here, I got two last questions for you. First being a question ask all the guests here at the Peak Performance Leadership podcast. And as according to you, Jade Green, what makes a great leader?

Jade Green [00:54:02]:

Oh, wonderful. I would say the words that are coming to mind is genuine care. And that’s around that connection piece, they actually take the time to connect and see the human in their human resources.

Scott McCarthy [00:54:24]:

That’s a great answer, for sure. Final question of the show. How can people find you, follow you, be part of your journey? Shameless Plug. Have at it.

Jade Green [00:54:32]:

Shameless plug. You can find me on all social media. My handle on all social media is at Jade Green au. Meaning? Jade Green from Australia. So at Jade Green Au, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, all the things, and my speaker page, jgreen.com au for the listener.

Scott McCarthy [00:54:53]:

You know what? Don’t even worry about it. Just go to Lead dopeboss.com two six 2262. And the links are there in the description for this show. So, again, thank you for taking time. Thank you for torturing me with the view behind you this past hour. Yeah, I’ve just been looking at she’s Panning the camera.

Jade Green [00:55:19]:

Now I’m panning the camera to one of the world’s best surf spots.

Scott McCarthy [00:55:23]:

Yeah, there we go. I’m not a surfer, however. Grew up on an island. The water is close to my soul, so it’s been fantastic. But surfboard in the background is definitely a nice touch. I enjoy it, but thank you.

Jade Green [00:55:35]:

Jason low to go on it, too.

Scott McCarthy [00:55:40]:

Awesome.

Jade Green [00:55:41]:

Thanks, Scott.