How To Ignite Commitment And Keep Top Talent: With Joe Mull [Podcast]

In this episode of The Compassionate Accountability Podcast, engagement expert and author Joe Mull shares his simple and powerful formula for creating a workplace where people come, stay, care, and try.

I met Joe Mull when we were both presenting at a healthcare conference in Florida. I was so impressed with his deep knowledge and down-to-earth style. A lot of keynote speakers are all style, with little substance. Joe is both. 

When it comes to developing leaders and building healthy work teams and cultures, Joe knows his stuff. And, he has a lot to say that might challenge what we think we know and how we are approaching the challenges of attracting and retaining top talent.

Watch the video, listen to the audio, or read the transcript for this episode of The Compassionate Accountability Podcast with Nate Regier.

What’s In This Episode

• What’s behind the title of your book, Employalty?
• What is the new age of work, and what are the biggest challenges facing employers?
• Why has labor force participation dropped?
• What are the three keys to igniting commitment and keeping great talent?
• What is a destination workplace and why does it matter?
• Why does Joe believe there is no staffing shortage?
• What is the business case for creating a more humane employee experience?
• What is the essential obligation of employees to their people?

Watch The Video

Listen To The Audio

Read The Transcript

Nathan Regier: Hello, I’m Nathan Regier, founder and CEO of Next Element, a global consulting and training firm helping organizations transform their cultures with Compassionate Accountability®. Thanks for joining me on the Compassionate Accountability Podcast, where we get to meet amazing people who are bringing more compassion to the world. I hope you’ll find something useful in this episode. And if you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, and review to help us reach more listeners. Be sure to visit our website at next-element.com, where you can learn more about our work and check out all of our previous episodes.

Although I get a lot of referrals for guests on my podcast, it’s especially meaningful when I know the person, we’ve met and we’ve had other interactions. I met Joe Mull when we were both presenting at a healthcare conference in Florida. I was so impressed with his deep knowledge on the topic and down to earth style. A lot of keynote speakers have a lot of style, but not so much substance, but Joe has both. I spoke to him afterwards and I just loved his approachability, his curiosity, his generosity and authenticity as a human being.

When it comes to developing leaders and building healthy work teams and cultures, Joe knows his stuff. And he has a lot to say that might challenge what we think we know and how we’re approaching the challenges of attracting and retaining top talent. Joe’s background includes teaching leadership courses at two major universities and serving as head of learning and development for physician services at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center where he directed learning strategy and implementation for one of the largest physician groups in the US.

Joe is author of three books including No More Team Drama, which I sure like that name, and his latest, Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work. He’s founder of the BossBetter Leadership Academy and hosts the globally popular BossBetter Now podcast ranked in the top 100 of all management podcasts on Apple. Joe has appeared as an expert in multiple media outlets, including Forbes, International Business Times, and on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and on Good Morning America. Joe is on a mission to fill workplaces with better bosses and make work work for all.

Joe, welcome to the Compassionate Accountability Podcast.

Joe Mull: Nate, I am so glad to be here. Thank you for the lovely introduction. I am looking forward to this conversation.

Nathan Regier: You’ve dedicated your entire professional career to helping leaders be great bosses so that they can support thriving work cultures. And I want to focus our conversation today on your newest book, Employalty, and see where it takes us. Let’s start with the title. Employalty is not even a real word. Come on now. But I’m intrigued. So what is up with the title?

Joe Mull: Yes, it is a word I made up, and I made it up in an effort to translate the complex into the simple. And obviously when you see or hear the word employalty, for most people, the first blush reaction is that it’s a mashup of the words employee and loyalty. And that’s actually not what the word means. Employalty is a portmanteau of the words employer loyalty and humanity. So we wrote a book about finding and keeping devoted employees that argues that at a time when people are seeking more quality of life than ever before, the secret to getting great people who will do a great job is to create a more humane employee experience.

Nathan Regier: Oh, I love that. I love that. I’m so excited to dive into what you mean by that and a framework you’ve developed, some simple ways for us to understand that better. So the subtitle. I’ve written a couple books and everyone says, “Don’t fret about the subtitle,” and I think it’s kind of important. I like your subtitle. It says, How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work. And so I’m curious what you would say is the new age of work. What is that?

Joe Mull: Well, so much of the dialogue around the turmoil in the labor market in recent years gets tied back to Covid. There’s this sort of before and after for much of us in society around pre-Covid and post-Covid. And we assign so much of the struggles we have with staffing and motivating people to kind of this post-Covid world. But the reality is that we have seen a slower value shift amongst the workforce for a number of years, even leading up to Covid.

We know that after the Great Recession in 2008, we saw more people voluntarily quit their jobs every year than the prior year before because we know that people were looking for an improvement to their quality of life. And so, really for the better part of the last 12 years, we have seen employees from all walks of life making choices about their employment and about how work fits into their lives based on the degree to which that job creates or alleviates suffering in their life. And so the new age of work is really this sort of values reshuffling that has taken place over the last decade or so.

Nathan Regier: Okay. So employees are making different decisions, they have new choices, they’re acting on this, and it’s a whole different world that we’re living in. So in this context, what are some of the biggest challenges that we are facing around leadership, around the workforce and employee engagement? What are the new things we have to be thinking about?

Joe Mull: Yeah. That new age of work really also alludes to all of that, right? It’s the reality of hybrid work or remote work. It’s the rise of technology. It’s, how does AI factor in? It’s the loneliness and the connection crisis that we’re seeing across so many teams. It’s figuring out how to onboard and compensate and support employees who themselves are struggling as the primary caregiver for an elderly parent or in a country where there’s a childcare crisis and we can’t afford or find capable childcare. So there’s a range of challenges that we face as employees that leaders, like it or not, have to be tuned into create the kind of environment where people are going to join and stay and care and try.

Nathan Regier: Man, I was reading a statistic the other day, maybe it was from your book or somewhere else, about the number of people that chose to try their own thing, become an entrepreneur or start their own business, do something different. Do you have a sense for what those numbers are now?

Joe Mull: Well, in the last few years, you’ve heard a lot about the labor force participation rate, which is the number of prime age workers who are actively participating in employment. There are some news outlets and some clickbait articles out there that have been trying to scare up this idea that the labor force participation rate has dropped because people are lazy and no one wants to work and everybody’s… There’s a whole chunk of society who’s just sitting on the sidelines. But that’s actually not the reality. We’ve seen a dip in the labor force in large part because we have people aging out that are not being replaced by younger workers because we have more people retiring than joining the labor force. We lost a handful of folks to Covid deaths and crackdowns on illegal immigration.

But the biggest dip in the labor force participation rate in the last 10 years has been driven by people starting their own businesses or people doing freelance work. It’s the gig economy, because they’re not counted the same way in some of those numbers. And if you look at what’s driving people to go out and do their own thing, it’s that quality of life argument. It’s, “Oh, I can set my own hours. I can be my own boss. I can do the kind of work I want to do. I can take the ceiling off of what I could potentially earn. I can give myself a raise,” so to speak. And so that has been a huge driver of what’s been happening in the labor market as well.

Nathan Regier: Wow. If we go back in time, the number of entrepreneurs were so small that when a company was thinking, “Who are we competing against?”, it was the other employers, but now it’s ourselves as self-employers. Everybody’s trying to figure out what’s happening. You’ve listed a variety of factors that we should be considering to deal with staffing shortages. But what I appreciate about your message when I heard you speak is you have a different view on this. You believe there are some things we’re missing that we should be focusing on. What are we not talking about?

Joe Mull: Well, as it relates to finding employees, it’s recognizing that we have added jobs to the US economy at such a breakneck pace over the last 10 years that if you want to fill a role or replace someone who has left, you are going to have to hire somebody away from somebody else. And so how do you become the destination workplace? How do you turn the other employer into the departure organization and your job into the destination workplace for them? And as it relates to keeping employees, we realize or we understand that most leaders and business owners still don’t know or engineer the conditions at work that lead people to want to be a part of what you’re doing and give it all they’ve got. And so we wrote this book really to translate more than 200 studies and articles that we analyzed on why people quit a job or take a new job or decide to stay long-term with an employer into a simple framework for what really leads someone to see their employer as a destination workplace.

Nathan Regier: Well, I love a good model. And when we talked last time, I remember telling you what I loved about your model is it fits some of… We kind of have a litmus test for good models, and it really fit that philosophy. In your model, you outlined the ingredients for commitment and you make it so simple and so powerful. So will you describe it for us?

Joe Mull: Sure. Well, let’s start with the one sentence answer to the question, “Where does commitment come from at work?” I argue that commitment and retention appear when employees are in their ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss. These are the three primary factors that determines whether someone will join and stay and whether they care and try around what they’re doing at work.

Ideal job is about how that job fits into my life. So things like compensation and workload and flexibility make up, whether that fits into my life, and it’s about what I get in exchange for what I do. The meaningful work factor is about what I spend my time doing and who I’m doing it with. And so things like believing I have purpose, getting to use my strengths, experiencing belonging, have everything to do with whether or not I find my work meaningful. And if I do experience those things, I move from, “I have to do this” to, “I want to do this.” And then that great boss factor really comes down to the quality of the relationship I have with the person who oversees my work and whether they’re coaching me, whether they trust me, whether they advocate for me. You get all three of those factors in place, ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss, and we know consistently that people will join, stay, care, and try.

Nathan Regier: Join, stay, care, and try, those are pretty important words. You’ve used them several times.

Joe Mull: Because we tend to bifurcate the ideas of commitment and retention, right? We’re having conversations over here about retention. How do we get people to stay? How do we keep our positions filled? And then over here we have sort of separate conversations about employee engagement. How do you activate someone’s emotional and psychological commitment at work? But the reality is, there is considerable overlap in the conditions that lead to both. So one of the things that I do often in keynotes and workshops is I use some of that interactive polling technology where I’ll put a question on the screen of what motivates employees to care and try and work. And I’ll set it up like a word cloud. You know what a word cloud is, Nate?

Nathan Regier: Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Mull: And so everybody in the audience will start typing in their answers. And inevitably, every single time, the most popular answer has to do with money. People will say money, pay, wages, bonuses, et cetera. What we know is that money has very little to do with care and try at work. It has very little to do with our effort. Money has everything to do with whether we join and stay, right? Money gets us through the door. “Do I feel like that my wages, my benefits are going to be enough for me to not experience economic suffering? Are they going to be enough for me to provide the kind of quality of life for my family that I aspire to provide?” Once that’s right, those things, like money, wages, benefits, bonuses are off the table as a factor in motivation at work. What we tend to get wrong is that we think money and benefits increase motivation. They don’t, but they do impact it. Because if I perceive that my wages are unfair or inadequate, what happens is that my disengagement increases and I become a flight risk.

Nathan Regier: I’ve heard people say, I hear this all the time, “I’m not getting paid enough for this.” It’s very easy to think that they’re talking about pay when they say that, and they’re not. They’re talking about, “Because of my relationship with my boss” or, “Because of my purpose.” When those things aren’t right, then it’s like, “Well, you’d have to pay me more to put up with this.” But what I hear you saying is, “Or if we get that right, then pay doesn’t always have to be the thing we go to solve the problem, and we can get off track there.”

Joe Mull: Yeah. Well, and it’s a mix. So on one hand we do have some employees that if you go to them and say, “Hey, what would motivate you to do more or try more at work?” We do have some folks who would say, “Well, pay me more.” But think about the absurdity of that answer. What that person is telling you is, “I have another gear. You haven’t seen it yet, but it’s for sale.” And what we know about the psychology of motivation and specifically intrinsic motivation is that it’s just not true. Because what’s going to happen if you turn around and give that person a pay increase? You might get the best version of them for a short period of time, but they are eventually going to revert back to their baseline.

And what you need, it’s like a shot of caffeine. You need another shot to keep boosting it because it’s not an intrinsic motivator, money and benefits and whatnot. It’s an extrinsic force. We need those other things like meaningful work, a great boss, flexibility. Because what ends up happening is people who were previously saying, “I don’t get paid enough to deal with this,” actually look around and say, “Well, my pay and benefits are fair and adequate and I’m getting all these other things. And so I really care about the work here. And so there’s a problem, there’s an issue, there’s a hardship, I’m going to attack it. I’m going to deal with it.” Except when, except when it’s hard all the time.

So sometimes when people say, “I don’t get paid enough to deal with this,” this has been a persistent level of stress and burnout and being overwhelmed that has been persistent for years. And so what they’re withdrawing from isn’t that work is hard, it’s that it’s so hard all of the time. Which brings us back to the conversation about a more humane employee experience being a central ingredient in activating people at work.

Nathan Regier: I would love to focus in on your word “boss.” So we know that relationship with leaders is a huge driver of these things. And in our company we focus a lot on the quality of that relationship, how we do communication conflict. But you’re talking about the new age of work by using this old school word like boss. And I asked you about it. You said, “No, no, no, this is the right word.” So will you tell us why you stuck with that word?

Joe Mull: Because it’s a word that your employees use conversationally, and they don’t do it in a way that’s pejorative. And I get it. We’ve seen a lot of arguments everywhere from LinkedIn and in leadership development workshops about what the right language is. And don’t get me wrong, I am a person that believes language matters, inclusive language matters. It’s so important. But I don’t get tripped up by the word boss because it’s a word that your employees use.

Nate, if you hire a new employee and he or she starts to work for you and three weeks into their new job with you, they’re sitting on their deck and a neighbor comes over to catch up and they share a glass of wine, at some point, the neighbor’s going to say to your new hire, “Hey, how’s the new job going? Do you like your new boss?” And at that moment, your new hire is not going to go, “Whoa, Sailor, we don’t use salty language like that around here. That’s not my boss. You need to call her my chief motivation officer.” Right? That’s not how we deal with that.

If somebody walks into the front desk of a dental practice or a doctor’s office, walks up to the front window and says, “Excuse me, I need to speak to your boss,” that person is not going to get offended in that moment about that word, right? They’re going to be wondering, “What’s going on? What’s happening with this customer? Did somebody mess up? Let me go get Mary because that’s who this person is looking for.” So I get that when we encounter that word in the wild, so to speak, it sort of means act like a boss, to dominate or to overwhelm. But the reality is I think that the time we spend debating which of those words are right is a waste of time. I don’t want to decry that the word boss is a dirty word. I’d rather spend that time figuring out how to not be a bad boss.

Nathan Regier: Thanks for explaining that. That’s helpful. I wonder if a lot of authors, a lot of leaders, thought leaders, words matter, phrases matter, and they have a lot of meaning in them. Sometimes we can spend energy trying to redefine a word that everybody uses, or sometimes we can just move on and talk about what really matters and appreciate that. So your book is full….

Joe Mull: And because the truth is, if you say to somebody, “Do you like your boss?”, there’s really only one right answer that we’re going for. You want that person to say, “Yeah, I’ve got a great boss.”

Nathan Regier: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Gosh, you have so many compelling new perspectives, different ways of looking at things, invitations for leaders that think differently, challenging some of our myths and assumptions. And you work with a lot of audiences, a lot of clients around the world and organizations. What have you found to be some of the most eye-opening or empowering new concepts of yours that leaders are embracing?

Joe Mull: Well, in terms of concepts of mine, one of the things that I argue in the book and that I mentioned when I’m doing keynotes and workshops is that there’s a mindset shift that is required to truly become a destination workplace. One of those mindset shifts is that there is no staffing shortage. There’s a great job shortage.

We know that what’s happening out there right now is that people aren’t quitting, they’re upgrading. They’re looking for upgrades to their quality of life. And for some people, that’s an upgrade in commute or in pay or in work culture or a better boss or more fulfilling work. But across the board, when you ask people, “Hey, why’d you change jobs?” They describe looking for an upgrade, and they’ll tell you specifically what kind of upgrade they were looking for.

And so when you tell people there is no staffing shortage, there’s a great job shortage, we’re turning the mirror inward because we really want that to be the story, right? When we have a hard time finding people to do our jobs, we want to blame people, when what we really have to look at are the jobs. And so when you shift that mindset around it being a great job shortage, you turn the mirror inwards. And as an employer or a leader, you can start solving for the internal deficits that might prevent you from being a destination workplace.

The other sort of powerful question that I ask during some of my keynotes and workshops is that creating a more humane workplace really starts with a simple question, “What would make this place the very best place to a ______?” So if you’re running a restaurant and you have a hard time keeping servers, “What would make this place the very best place to be a server? What can we do differently? Where can we innovate? What can we offer or add or trumpet or tweak to stand out?” Once we start, again, looking internally at the employee experience through that lens, we start solving for what might be pushing people away or not attracting people to us in the first place.

Nathan Regier: I love that. Thanks for sharing those two great examples. And speaking of mindset shifts, Compassionate Accountability is kind of our schtick, is our thing, but it’s also a very similar concept because we’re talking about two words that most people wouldn’t think would go together. That you can care deeply about people. You can really think about what is it like to be you, how do we honor and affirm you, and also, we have lots to get done, that those two go hand in hand, and that it’s not just, “Hey, what do you want? What do you need?” We’re doing this for a critical business purpose.

What I like about holding the mirror up is, so often as leaders, we can start thinking it’s everyone else’s problem. We’re working our butts off, we’re doing everything we can, and we don’t really ever ask those tough questions about what do we have, what are we accountable for, and what are our responsibilities to, like you said, create the best possible place for this person to be able to do their job. So I think we’re aligned there. And I’m curious, where are you seeing the business case for these mindset shifts, these different ways of looking at things?

Joe Mull: Well, the business case really begins with understanding that if you create these conditions that we’re talking about here, you create a pretty extraordinary competitive advantage as an employer.

For one thing, we know that you become almost impenetrable to poaching. If you give someone their ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss, it’s not likely that another employer is going to be able to swoop in and offer something that you are not already providing.

The second thing that happens is that your employees become your best recruiters. Because as we hear so many folks out there in the world complain about how unhappy they are at their job, we go, “Hey, this is a pretty great place to work. I’ve got some decent compensation, some flexibility, the workload’s manageable, the work’s meaningful. My boss is pretty great. You should come work for us.” And then when you get into that environment and you look around and you realize you’re sort of checking all of these boxes on this internal psychological scorecard that we all have, our effort goes up. And when commitment and effort go up across your employee experience in any organization, every single metric you care about, as a business owner or as a leader, positively benefits, whether it’s customer experience, it’s sales, it’s revenue, it’s safety, it’s quality, it’s all of it.

And so when we talk about a more humane employee experience, that sounds soft, but it’s really not. This is the entry fee for success. This is a business imperative in today’s workplace.

Nathan Regier: So to become impenetrable to poaching, it’s so powerful, impenetrable to poaching and to have a business advantage, we have to shift our mindset. So what are you finding as the biggest barriers or the biggest things that get in people’s way of really making that shift, making that leap, making an investment?

Joe Mull: Well, there’s a money factor. I mean, obviously when we’re talking about things like wages and benefits and more flexibility and more evenly distributed workloads, which often require organizations to staff up, those cost money. And at a time right now, there are so many organizations who are struggling with inflation and figuring out how to write a check, to use an old term, to pay for more staff, better salaries, et cetera. And the truth is, the organizations who are innovating in these areas are finding ways to create new or expanded revenue streams. That’s really all that they can do or cut costs in other places. And so that is sort of an obstacle and a barrier, no question. And so we really have to be innovative in those areas.

Nathan Regier: Right.

Joe Mull: Another obstacle tends to be long-established belief systems. We have a lot of myths and misperceptions about people and the labor market. The idea that no one wants to work anymore, that younger workers are lazy and unprepared, that everyone is quitting, that people are lazy. And most of these just tend to be the persistent generational tropes that show up year over year.

One of my favorite little data points that we found in the book, Nate, was we found a researcher in Canada who found an instance of that exact phrase “no one wants to work” showing up in North American newspapers every year going back 120 years. So I don’t care how old you are, but every complaint you have about the people coming into the workplace behind you are the same complaints that people had about you when you got here. But we make up a story about people’s motivation and their commitment that is often based on the sins of a few projected onto the many.

Nathan Regier: Well, whatever the skill is, I see, I’m just flabbergasted at the creativity and the ability of younger generations to master things. I may complain that, “This kid’s lazy,” and yet this person has mastered social media to an extent that I’m not willing to invest the time in. So who’s the lazy one, right?

Joe Mull: Right.

Nathan Regier: So maybe it’s just intrinsic motivation, like you said, we tap into that. So shifting gears a little bit, I heard there’s a bit of a funny story about how this book came to be. Will you share that?

Joe Mull: Sure. Sure. This book really was born during a podcast interview gone wrong, which will be… It hits a little close to home because we’re doing a podcast interview right now.

Nathan Regier: Right.

Joe Mull: But a couple years ago, I was invited on a podcast, I do this fairly often. The host and I had a really rich 30-minute conversation about commitment in the workplace, that’s the work I’ve been doing for 20 years, and where it comes from and sort of all the things that leaders have to pay attention to and get right, whether you’re a frontline supervisor or a CEO or somewhere in between, to get people to care and try it at work.

At the end of that interview, he said this, he said, “All right, Joe, let’s get you out of here on this. Put a nice bow on it for everyone. Give it to us in one sentence. Where does commitment come from at work?” And I went, “Well, I don’t know if I can give it to you in just one sentence. I mean, as we just talked about, there’s a whole lot of things you got to get right.” And Nate, I should have stopped there, but I did not. I kept talking.

Nathan Regier: Kept going.

Joe Mull: And I proceeded to recap the entire 30-minute interview in the world’s longest run-on sentence.

Nathan Regier: Oh no.

Joe Mull: When I finished, I remember going into my office and just feeling like, “Oh, man, you did not stick the landing on that one.” But I kept thinking about his question. In one sentence, where does commitment come from at work? I remember thinking, “I’ve been doing this work for 20 years. And by any measure, I’m an expert in this sort of thing. And if I can’t answer that question in one sentence, then it’s nearly impossible for leaders who have so many things to pay attention to to answer it in one sentence.” And no wonder leadership is so hard because there are so many buttons and levers we have to pay attention to.

And I thought, “The world really needs a one-sentence answer to that question so that we know what to pay attention to, what we’re going for, and so that we can teach other leaders who are stepping into leadership roles about what matters most.” And that was really the genesis of that framework.

Nathan Regier: Wow.

Joe Mull: And that one sentence I gave you before. So if I could get into a time machine and go back to that podcast when he said, “In one sentence, where does commitment come from at work?”, I would’ve said, “Commitment and retention appear when employees are in their ideal job, doing meaningful work for a great boss.”

Nathan Regier: Wonderful. Wonderful. Love it. So to wrap this up, one of the things that I’ve sensed about you from the very beginning is your genuineness, your authenticity. It’s not just a shtick that you have, it’s not just a slick model, it’s not just a great sentence, but you really deeply care about finding these answers. I’m curious if we shifted the mirror a little bit, how do these principles that you write about and that you teach, how do they show up in your life that’s outside of work?

Joe Mull: Wow. Well, first of all, thank you for those incredibly kind words. Having gotten to know you a bit since we were at a conference together and some chats we’ve had since then, your work is so heart-centered and so humane that it speaks to me in so many ways.

I think at the center of what I wrote about in Employalty is it’s not just about creating someone’s ideal job, doing meaningful work for a great boss. I think in order to become a destination workplace, you have to come to believe that the absence of those factors is inhumane. You have to come to believe that if I’ve got people on my team who aren’t getting adequate compensation or a manageable workload, who don’t find their work meaningful, who aren’t coached and trusted by their bosses, that that’s a violation of our fundamental obligation to take care of the people who choose to share their time and effort with us.

And so at the heart of that, for me, Nate, is that more than anything else, I think leaders need to have a commitment to making sure that their employees experience a joyous, prosperous life. I have to want that for them, right? Anyone who’s going to come share their time and talents with me, I have to want for them that in some way, this job is a means to that end, to a joyous, prosperous life. And so this work shows up for me in that way, right? This work actually allows me to live a joyous, prosperous life.

I actually started out with a background in music and theater, and so it’s kind of not surprising that I’ve gravitated towards speaking because I love the craft of trying to… I take all this stuff that I nerd out about and translate it into a delivery, a presentation that’s really compelling and that’s filled with captivating stories and that inspires people to show up as better bosses. And because I’ve started my own business around that, I have a lot more influence on where I go and when I go and when I can be home with my three kids. And so this work about helping people experience a more joyous, prosperous life has led to me in enjoying a more joyous and prosperous life.

Nathan Regier: Oh, that’s great. What would be an example of where you have found yourself or you’ve been able to apply the principles you teach to leaders in your family or in a personal situation you thought, “Wow, this translates way beyond the workplace”?

Joe Mull: It’s just probably in encountering folks around me who are not as fulfilled as they want to be. So whether it’s a niece or nephew who is graduating from school and trying to figure out what to look for in a job, being able to give them this vocabulary and say, “Ideal job, meaningful work, great boss.” And then they look at it and they go, “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m looking for.” And that’s really powerful.

It’s giving people permission to not work themselves to death, right? I have always told my wife, “I loathe and steadfastly reject this notion that we should work our rear ends off 51 weeks a year so that we can have a one-week vacation somewhere with our kids where we get to slow down.” I hate everything about that that’s the reality for so many people. And I recognize there’s a lot of economic privilege in that statement, right? There are a lot of folks who will maybe never get to a place where they can have a family vacation more than one week a year, but I don’t think it should be that way. And I know that if I’m running a company and I have people working for me, if I want them to join and stay and care and try, I make darn sure that it’s not that way for them.

Nathan Regier: Thank you. That’s wonderful. Joe, thank you. We’ve barely scratched the surface, and yet you’ve shared some really amazing rich things. And I think that’s a testament to the effort that you put into making things succinct and making things powerful. To be able to say things in long run-on sentences is a lot easier than being able to say it in one sentence.

Joe Mull: Sure. No question.

Nathan Regier: And it really shows how far you’ve come in your passion and your craft. Thank you for doing that. For people that want to get a hold of you and learn more about your work, and we will put this information in the show notes, where would you direct people?

Joe Mull: Oh, thank you for that. I am online at joemull.com, J-O-E-M-U-L-L.com. And the book Employalty is available anywhere you like to get your books, and it’s in all the formats. It’s in audiobook, ebook, paperback. It’s everywhere.

Nathan Regier: Folks, that’s Joe Mull. If you ever get a chance to hear him speak, absolutely take it. It’s fantastic. And if you get a chance to go talk to him afterwards, do that too. And so you can meet the real guy, the real deal. More than show, totally a lot of substance, and an incredible presenter. Check out the book, listen to him speak. Joe Mull, thank you so much for being here.

Joe Mull: Oh, thank you, man. I appreciate you so much. Thanks again.

Nathan Regier: Thanks for joining me, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Compassionate Accountability Podcast. What’s struck you? What can you take and use today? I’d love to hear from you. And if you haven’t already, pick up a copy of my new book, Compassionate Accountability: How Leaders Build Connection and Get Results. If you’ve already read the book, I’d appreciate your review on Amazon. Contact us today to learn more about how Next Element helps companies transform their cultures with Compassionate Accountability. And remember, embracing both compassion and accountability is the secret to great leadership and the roadmap for thriving cultures and strong brands.