77. The secret sauce to marketers' mojo?

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes.
00:03
Dom Hawes
You're listening to Unicorny, and I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Welcome, Unicorners, to part two of our dive into happiness at work. We are with psychologist Simon Hartley, and we're asking, has marketing lost its mojo? And if so, how do we get it back? In part one, we looked at Simon's brilliantly simple framework for building happy teams. It's the central thesis of his book, motivation is pear shaped. And by Pearland, there he is referring to his acronym, P E A R, which stands for purpose, enjoyment, achievement and reward. His work with high performing teams has taught him that the motivations we need to satisfy to be happy all fall into these four categories, and his view is that we need all four to feel satisfied. Now, some of us are going to index higher on purpose. Someone like me, for example.

00:57
Dom Hawes
Some of us might put more emphasis on achievement, but we all need all four of these motivations in our lives to be happy at work. Next up, I want to learn how we go about building this kind of environment. What are some practical examples? What advice can Simon give us as leaders at work in marketing? Now, to answer this, Simon has written another book called two Lengths of the Pool, and I think it's a perfect place to start in our search for practical help. So, two lengths of the pool, let's dive in at the end of is motivation pear shaped. You very cleverly trail another book which I had to go and buy straight away called two Lengths of the Pool, which is just the most extraordinary and amazingly powerful thing. I'm not going to try and do a spoiler on it.

01:44
Dom Hawes
Talk to me about where it comes from. I'd love you to tell the story of how you came to write the book.

01:50
Simon Hartley
The first thing probably to explain is how focus, which is what two lengths of the pool is all about, and motivational, fit together. When I started working with athletes, I noticed that when they performed at their best, all of the athletes I was working with were focused, confident and motivated, and that when they had those three component parts, their mental game pretty much sorted itself out. Those are a trio that live together. Those three focus, confidence, motivation, and you're unlikely to get motivation without confidence and focus if you have to start somewhere. I usually start with focus, being focused on the right thing at the right time, because when you are focused on the right thing at the right time, the chances are you perform well.

02:29
Simon Hartley
When you perform well, you want to go and do it again, and that's what gives you the motivation. I was looking at how you get people focused on the right thing at the right time. And one of the athletes I was working with right at the start of my career was a swimmer, a guy called Chris. And it took Chris and I, an embarrassingly long time, approximately three and a bit years, to finally understand what his job was. And it sounds stupid because he was 100 metre swimmer in a 50 meters pool, but we got confused because we thought his job was to win, because he was pulling on a GB hat and, you know, swimming competitively. We thought his job was to win, but it was never to win.

03:05
Simon Hartley
It wasn't to break records or make the british team or get on the funding pathway or sponsored or whatever. None of those things were his job. His job was to swim 100 metres or two lengths of the pool as fast as he possibly could. And that was it. And it was a revelation from our point of view, because it completely switched our thinking. Instead of trying to figure out how to achieve the impossible. And winning is not under your control. You can't control whether you win or lose, other people are going to swim as well. So one of the simple understandings is that if you swim quicker than everybody else today, you're going to win, and if somebody else swims quicker, they're going to win. Your job is to swim as fast as you can. And that's what we began to focus on.

03:42
Simon Hartley
How do we help you swim quicker? And the thought process then led us to asking, well, how much of what we do right now contributes. Chris started to really analyze everything that he did in his training program. Should he be lifting those weights? Should he be eating that food? Should he be walking around the shops? Or should he get his food delivered? Should he go to the awards dinner? You know, everything. After analyzing everything, he decided that two thirds of it didn't fit. Two thirds did not contribute to swimming two lengths of the pool as fast as possible. So he started to ditch those things and ask, well, what would help then?

04:19
Simon Hartley
So one of the things that we started to ditch, he went into the strength and conditioning room one day and he asked the coach, why do I lie on my back on a bench and push a bar outwards when swimming? I pull the water towards me. And he said, well, everybody does bench press. It's on everybody's training program. He said, yeah, but does it help me swim breaststroke quicker? He said, no, I don't think it does. Right. So shall I do it or not do it? Probably not. Then what should I do instead? Then we started to ask, well, what about using a climbing wall? That's pretty similar. What about going into the gymnastics centre. And you pull yourself up on the rings. Yeah, we could do that.

04:54
Simon Hartley
We actually built him a sort of a very rudimentary machine where we put a sliding pad on a gradient, and he used to use some pulleys to pull himself up, so he could use the breaststroke motion to pull himself up on this gradient. So he used gravity against breaststroke. That will work. Our thinking changed massively, and we started to really hone down on the things that would absolutely make a difference. We learned that there was a degree in his hips that we had to take out so that he would be streamlined. How do you do that? Not more swimming, stretching, yoga, physio work that takes out the degree. When you streamlined, you go quicker through the water. So it revolutionized our thinking.

05:32
Dom Hawes
That's extraordinary. I love the simplicity of it. This is why I wanted you to. Why I wanted you to tell the story that we all, in our business lives, do an awful lot of stuff that I think instinctively we know doesn't help us swim our metaphorical two lengths of the pool faster. And so I think this approach of really understanding what our role is, and on this podcast, we would say a marketer's role probably is to create value, to really understanding that's what we're there to do. And then reinvestigating all of the things that we do day in, day out, and saying, does this help or does this not help?

06:05
Simon Hartley
And just asking the question is valuable. Now, there is a trap within this. I usually ask people to write three columns on a page. I'll say, in the first column, write down everything that you know contributes positively. In the other column, so far left, write everything you know. Far right, write everything that you know doesn't contribute. And in the middle, write down all the stuff that might. Okay, that's the biggest column, actually. I was talking to a friend of mine who's a marketing director, and he said, I can categorically tell you that 50% of everything we do is a waste of time, but I don't know which 50%. That's the problem with the might column. In the middle, we keep hold of it because we hope it will contribute. Think maybe it might contribute, but we don't know.

06:47
Simon Hartley
What I then tend to do with that column is say we've got to interrogate it. We've got to shift everything either into the it definitely does or it definitely doesn't column. And usually, if you're saying you don't know whether it does, it's because we're missing some information. So we need to find out whether it does or doesn't.

07:02
Dom Hawes
Well, you've got your homework. Three columns. Dear Unicorners, we're here today ostensibly to talk about motivation. Here we're talking about the simplicity, though, which can be an important element of it. How else have you seen people applying some of the concepts in two lengths of the pool to improve, like their motivation or happiness at work?

07:23
Simon Hartley
If we go back to the conversation we've had about motivation, what demotivates people? Feeling overwhelmed, just having too many things to do, not really knowing that the thing I'm doing actually makes a difference or not. You know, all of those things are demotivating. Not really seeing my progress, just feeling like I'm forever wading through treacle. You know, all of those things are demotivating. So two lengths of the pool helps us to strip back, to simplify and clarify, to focus on the right things, and then to be able to see that actually when we focus on the right things, we can perform really well. In theme, when we perform really well, we want to keep doing it. Confidence and motivation are very closely tied. So understanding that I'm doing a great job and I'm making a difference, has a huge impact on motivation.

08:08
Simon Hartley
Knowing that I'm actually moving forward, not just wading through yet more treacle, is a huge motivational feeling. And to also start when we do this as a team, we can also start to understand that what I do makes a difference to my team. You know, I understand my job in the simplest possible terms. I understand how that fits into my team's role. I can understand how I contribute to the organization. Now we can draw what I call the straight lines or join the dots between my job and our job, how my contribution fits into the whole. And that in itself, again, is incredibly motivating.

08:38
Dom Hawes
I can see that. And that's not something that just exists at a leadership level. Every member of the team, if they have that clarity, I guess, will be a happier. But the team's going to function a lot better.

08:49
Simon Hartley
Absolutely. I can remember a conversation years ago with a chief executive, a big charity organization in the northeast. I think they were two and a half thousand in headcount, something like that. Their job, the organization existed to help people who were right on the fringe of society get back into society. So usually these people were homeless, jobless substance abusers, many of them, and the charity was going to try and help reintegrate them into society. And the chief exec phoned me and said, can you come and deliver an inspirational speech at our annual conference. And being the awkward individual I am, I said, why do you need me to motivate your people? And he said, well, because they're not motivated. I said, so is it everybody that's unmotivated, or have you got some who aren't?

09:28
Simon Hartley
And he said, honestly, the people on the front line who are actually out there helping those on the streets, no problem at all, they are motivated. It's the people in the back office functions that struggle. So I went to talk to a few, and I can remember a lady. Her name was Betty. She worked in a back office function. She filled in spreadsheets, and she did paperwork and filed stuff. And she didn't really understand how her day to day contribution actually helped people on the street. And I asked her one day, I said, what would happen if you weren't here, Betty? She said, nothing. Probably somebody else would cover. Now there's somebody who really doesn't feel valued or valuable. Even if we pat her on the back and say, thank you for being here, she's still not going to feel valuable.

10:09
Simon Hartley
That's what you feel when you understand why your contribution makes a difference. I actually created this image of a house of cards, two and a half thousand cards, one for every person in the organization. I said, that one's yours down there, Betty, what are you thinking? And she said, it was just one of two and a half thousand. I said, okay. What happens if we take that one away, though? Oh, the whole lot falls down. We had to help her understand that when she did a great job in her team, then the fundraising team could do a great job. And when that happened, the support team could do a great job. And when that happened, the guys on the front line could do a great job. So her bit really did make a difference.

10:44
Simon Hartley
When she got that understanding now, she felt like she was a part of a whole and two lengths of the pool, you know, simplifying and clarifying what we do, what you do, what I do, how it all fits together. That can be really powerful.

10:57
Dom Hawes
Yeah, that really resonates with me. I think in the second half of today's part, we're going to come and try and pull all this together. But if you think about marketers in many big organizations, they're like, Betty, they don't get much customer contact. The salespeople get that. They don't get much interaction with product these days. The product team do that. They don't have an influence on pricing, so they exist in this environment where they're trying to drive leads and or you know, potential for a business, but they're not getting much immediate feedback. Is there an overlap here? I'm thinking that two lengths of pool maybe is a way of crystallizing purpose.

11:31
Simon Hartley
I think it reinforces all of the. All of the elements of PEAR. Yes, it can help us with purpose. It can also help us to do less and therefore do it better and enjoy it more, get a far greater sense of achievement, because we can also start working on how we improve these critical elements. Not just do them day after day, but make sure we improve them on a daily basis, and that we can start to understand which metrics actually show us that we're improving so we can get a sense of real recognition and reward.

12:00
Dom Hawes
We're not talking about attribution here, Unicornists, we're talking about recognition for individuals.

12:05
Simon Hartley
Yes.

12:06
Dom Hawes
Not attribution of marketing spend. That's a really important question for any of us in any walk of life. What is my actual role? I know a creative director who spent a lot of his time trying to figure this out. He worked in an ad agency where there was a huge emphasis on getting the best ad out of the door every time. So when he became the creative director, he assumed he was now responsible for all of that, and the role became incredibly stressful. Like, he got into the business to be creative, but now supposedly at the top of his game. Like, the whole experience had become a nightmare of logistics and scheduling and meetings and administration. But then he realized that getting the best out of the door wasn't his role at all. His role was much simpler.

12:55
Dom Hawes
His role was to get the best ad out of his people. Now, in terms of quality, he ended up in the same place. Big tick in the job goal column. But his journey to that goal was remarkably different, and it changed his approach each day. Instead of trying to operate the entire machinery of the department, he just focused on what would help his people, that self selected, the meetings he attended, and those he didnt. Of course, he prioritised things like making briefs clearer, spending more time working with his creative teams, simple things like eating lunch with them. And did this revelation make him happy? No, course not. He was still a creative complaining about working in bloody advertising. But he did enjoy his job a lot more because he could actually see he was making a difference.

13:40
Dom Hawes
And for me, I think that is what Simon's foremotivations add up to. It's a brilliant exercise to do for yourself and for your team, and it's the right action to start with. Next, I would like to push Simon more on what else we can do to create more happiness at work. Let's hear how he puts this stuff into action, how he brings the sports playbook into the marketing office. Let's go back, please, Simon, to the PEAR framework and look at how a marketing leader or leader of any team might think about tailoring that to help their specific use.

14:16
Simon Hartley
Case the two things that we can start doing, firstly, trying to understand our people. Just by watching and listening, you can get a feel for whether somebody's really purpose driven, whether they're driven by enjoyment, whether they're driven by achievement and ambition, or whether they're recognition and reward orientated, which two or three seem to be strongest in them. And without being becoming a psychologist or a specialist, we can just start talking to them slightly differently. If you know somebody's really purpose driven, don't just keep banging on about the commission check, because it's probably going to miss them understanding that if we stop talking about purpose, they're going to think, why am I here? What's the point in all of this? If it becomes too bottom line orientated, they're just going to lose their mojo.

15:04
Simon Hartley
So understanding, that's really key, just being able to tap into that and talking to individuals differently. But more importantly, just have a look at our environment that we've created, our motivational environment, and ask ourselves, which of these pillars are probably underdeveloped? Which ones do we need to give a bit more time, energy and focus to? Which ones do we need to think about more? And it probably won't surprise you that if we looked at the environment within many organizations and we looked at the individual motivators for the leader, there's a quite a clear match, usually between them and the things that leaders don't tend to be that bothered about tend to be things that are neglected within the environment.

15:44
Simon Hartley
So just to sort of put the focus back on those slightly weaker pillars, because as well as developing four strong pillars, there's another dimension that unlocks. When we create a four strong pillars of PEAR, when we've got a place that, you know, we understand why we do what we do, it matters, it's important, it makes a difference, and we really enjoy what we do. We enjoy the people we work with, the challenges we take on, and we're really good at this stuff and we're always improving. And when we do it well, we get recognized and rewarded once we've got those four, as well as not needing very much else. The other dimension that we unlock is that we create a place where people are proud to belong. They are proud to be here doing this stuff with us, because what we do is important.

16:25
Simon Hartley
We're really good at it. We enjoy what we do, and we get recognized and rewarded. When we do it well, that becomes really not just motivational, it becomes magnetic. So that when we're trying to recruit, we're likely to recruit better and higher quality people, and we're also likely to retain them longer. And I've seen organizations where and businesses where bigger companies have come in to try and poach their people. And honestly, if you waive sort of twice the size of the paycheck in front of them, they'll probably go, but it becomes stickier. And rather than looking for other opportunities, they don't look. When they're offered them two, three, four grand more a year, they'll probably stay five or six, maybe not 20 or 30, they've probably gone. But it helps you to keep hold of really good people for longer.

17:12
Dom Hawes
If you're in leadership position now and you're trying to understand how your team indexes on those four columns. I mean, obviously everyone should buy and read the book, but have you got some quick tips that people could use to try and understand how they should be structuring their own mix?

17:29
Simon Hartley
Yeah, I mean, very simply, and you probably saw this when you were reading the book. I use this quick test of use ten blocks, ten Lego bricks or whatever. And if you wanted to either depict your own motivation or try and depict somebody else's, you can use ten blocks as long as you've got one in each column. So one for P, one for e, one for a, one for R. You can put the others wherever you like, as long as it's a good reflection, an accurate reflection of that person's motivation, yours or somebody else's. Now, there's a very good reason it's ten, because you can't have an equal spread with ten blocks across four elements. So it really forces us to think, okay, some have got to be more powerful than the others. Which ones are more powerful? How much more powerful are they?

18:16
Simon Hartley
So that exercise alone gets you to understand and think about it. You could also look at the environment and think, okay, so if I arrange these ten blocks to describe our motivation environment, how would that look? And which ones do we need to pay attention to? Because probably they're a little bit underdeveloped at the moment.

18:33
Dom Hawes
Okay, I did do that exercise, and it slightly scared me. Good, because I realized I was way over indexing on a couple. And actually, I need to take the medicine myself. That's why I said, I think this is a bit of a therapy session for me, too. I need to take about the environment that I'm creating in my day job. Have you got some examples of where PEAR framework is being implemented and is changing team dynamics or is changing results for people?

18:58
Simon Hartley
One of them is a sales team, and about a year or so, just over a year ago, they approached me and said, we need some help with our salespeople, partly because traditionally their salespeople aren't salespeople by trade, they're in medical devices and medical nutrition industry. So they've worked in the field of medicine, and of course, because they may have been clinical nutritionists or something like that in the past, they're not always motivated by the commission check. They're not typical salespeople. Lots of them are purpose driven. That's why they went into the field of healthcare in the first place. If you go into teaching, you won't find many people who are driven by money. If they were, they wouldn't be in teaching. It's the same in nursing and lots of other sectors.

19:42
Simon Hartley
So they were struggling to motivate their people because they were kind of one dimensionally saying, all right, well, wave a bigger commission check in front of your nose. Maybe that will motivate you. Of course, the senior people in that organization had a sales background. They'd always been motivated by finishing top of the table, the leaderboard, whatever it was, and a bigger commission check. And so they had this huge mismatch between the leaders in the organisation and the people. So we used this to try and help them create a more motivational environment, one that pretty much ticked everybody's box. They've seen their results steadily climbing over the course of the year or so since we introduced this, rebalancing the emphasis.

20:21
Dom Hawes
And when we first met, when I was sitting in the audience there, you had a really neat framework, 3d incentive framework, I think it was called, that brings all of these things together. Talk to me about that.

20:30
Simon Hartley
When I look at most incentive programs, they are also fairly one dimensional. They're usually based on just cash rewards. But if we think about it, there are a few spectrums that we can work on. One is to recognize that, yes, cash rewards can be part of one of those dimensions, and they're probably at one end, at the other end, recognition, a pat on the back, is part of that dimension as well. And there are lots of things that fall in between, little prizes, little thank yous, all those sorts of things. Sometimes it can be a couple of tickets to the cinema or whatever, that's part of it. There's another one, another dimension that starts with individuals and ends up with the whole organization. So we can just thank or congratulate or reward an individual.

21:17
Simon Hartley
We could do it with a team, we could do it with a department, we could do it with the whole organization. And again, if you think about the way that this is done, often we reward everybody on the annual profit share bonus and we can reward individuals on their KPI's. But what do we do in between? Do we do anything for a team? If we've got a project team working on something together, do we congratulate the team at any point? Do we reward the team at any point for working together? Well on that project? There's an opportunity to if we want to, but most people don't explore that. And the final one is a timeline so we can do things immediately.

21:55
Simon Hartley
We could say thank you to somebody right now, or we could say thank you at the end of a year and say there's your annual bonus, but what do we do on a weekly basis? Or what do we do on a monthly basis, quarterly basis? So when we look at three dimensions, we can start to find again where we've got gaps. And I'm a big fan of having a spread across all of them. So it's not just now or end of year. There's some stuff in the middle. It's not just pat on the back or cash, there's some stuff in the middle. And it's not just an individual or the whole organization, there's some stuff in the middle as well. So it's about utilizing more of the three dimensions when we incentivize people.

22:30
Dom Hawes
Well, there you go. I think that's one of the most powerful bits for me, certainly for looking at how we run our business. And I believe that's in motivations pear shape. It is finally just to wind up on what steps do you think a marketing leader could take right now to improve short term? Do something immediately to help them kick off implementing the PEAR framework in their team?

22:53
Simon Hartley
The very first step, I would say, is to understand your own motivation so that you as a leader have stable, enduring motivation because it's contagious. I mean, I'm sure you've seen lots of leaders, if they are motivated, if they're energized, if they're enthusiastic, there's a very good chance that will become contagious and the rest of the team will start to follow suit if they come in under a dark cloud like eeyore, wasn't it in there? There's a very good chance that will also become contagious. If they're feeling pressure, if they're stressed, that's going to become contagious, too. A friend of mine who was a yacht skipper said my mood equals the team's mood, and the team's mood equals the speed of the boat. So I think if we get ourselves right first, we can have a huge impact on our team.

23:37
Dom Hawes
Simon, if our listeners want to interact with you, how do they get hold of you?

23:40
Simon Hartley
Probably link in with me on LinkedIn, and then we can pick up a conversation.

23:45
Dom Hawes
And apart from going to Amazon and ordering your books, which sensible listeners will do, is there anywhere else they can find your material?

23:52
Simon Hartley
Yeah, we have a YouTube channel, and there's a lot on the YouTube channel, lots of little clips that we put together. There's some stuff on pear shaped motivation. You'll find bits from the Fiji rugby team, all sorts in there. So dive in and fill your boots.

24:10
Dom Hawes
Wow. I don't know about you. That was a really good one for me, Unicorners. Now, before I go on to do my normal wrap up, I would just like to ask you, please, before you head off to create endless happiness at work, do me one small favour. Please subscribe to the show, because the bigger we get, the better we become. Anyway, look, today's show. Wow. I don't know about you. I realized I suffer from a lack of balance in my motivations, and Simon has forced me to think about how that might be, throwing my whole team out of whack. If I'm really focused around just one of the core four motivators, then I think I'm probably sending a very clear signal to everyone around me, like, this is what I value. And if you want to get on here, you better value it, too.

24:54
Dom Hawes
I talk about in to out. What I'm seeing as a result of this podcast is how many of the business lessons that we've drawn from this series are also true to us as people. Yeah, okay. Those lessons were observations about business functionality. But because businesses are just groups of people, they're equally true for us as individual human beings. In part one, this struck home when Simon was talking about metrics and personal KPI's. His point was, if we put too much emphasis on personal KPI's, we can promote a fear of failure, and in a creative company, that is a disaster. Now, I've been waging a war on metric obsession for ages. It's a distraction from the main goal of the business, which should be to create a happy customer.

25:42
Dom Hawes
But until I encountered Simon's framework, I'm not sure I saw the connection between how we treat the business and how we treat its people like it is really obvious. Same goes with the into out observation I just made about myself. By ignoring the motivations of my team and focusing on my own, I'm effectively creating an in to out firm. One dominated by a singular internal belief, one that doesn't bake in what makes my whole team happy. And like Simon's sailing mate, I'm affecting the speed of the whole boat. So the two big lessons I'm taking from this number one, understand your role. What are you and your team really here to achieve that helps simplify things and keeps you and your team focused on what's going to move the needle and of course by default, then what isn't?

26:31
Dom Hawes
Number two, understand your team and what's motivating them. If you like, think of your team as your customer, what makes them happy? Put that into place and you will be well on the way to building a thriving out to in culture. And that will lead to happy people. Because as we've seen, what is true for people is therefore true for their business. You have been listening to Unicorny. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nichola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor and Peter Powell is our scriptwriter.