The Mattering Effect: Success and Mattering Are Not the Same Thing - John R. Miles

Charles Schwartz (0:00)

Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where we don't care what you think, only what you can prove.

John Miles led teams that supported Navy Seals, then ran tech teams at Dell and Lowe's. When he took over a group at Lowe's, it ranked dead last in employee engagement out of 350,000 people. Today, he explains how he turned it around, and the six signals that tell you whether your people feel like they matter. The show starts now.

John Miles (0:25)

But giving as much resources as I possibly could within the financial constraints that I had. Right. So what did that ended up doing is as the team delivered major wins, I wanted to continually giving back to them.

And so I was reinforcing, it's not only what I can get from you, but it's what can I give back to you. And then the other thing I did was, I really spent time understanding what was going on with them outside of work. Did they have a sick family member? Did they have other aspirations? Did they love music? Did they have a kid who was on a traveling baseball team? Because when you connect with people both inside and outside of work and you see them as a whole person, it really becomes, how do we both become better because we're doing this together? And it's no longer just me.

So this whole reciprocity angle was one of the most important components because, yeah.

Charles Schwartz (1:31)

Yeah, I think people have this term that happens in business all the time, like, oh, we're a family, but you're not actually caring about their actual family. So as you said, is the kid on a traveling baseball team? So when someone comes in, like, hey, I got to go. It's Tuesday. My little girl's got ballet. I'm like, go. Don't even ask. Just go. And then we'll just figure out cover. I also think when you're talking about showing visibility and say, hey, these people did great. It's important that I got taught very early on.

If you want them to bleed for you, you must bleed for them, which means very simple. Simply, if anything goes right, they get the credit. If anything goes wrong, you take the credit immediately. And even if you're not, I remember this one situation happened where XYZ happened. And they're like, why did this? And then our senior came in and said, why did this happen? I was like, that was, that was me. It's like you weren't even in the same state. I was like, doesn't matter, it was me. And they're like, who did it? I'm like, it was me. And he's like, Jesus. And I was like, uh-uh, it's me. And he's like, no, I really need to figure out who did it. I'm like, no, you don't. Me. I do it. Punish me. And we fixed it down range and we never ridicule people in public. We always do that in private. We celebrate them in public. But we, we sit there and when they saw that you will need to bleed for them, that sort of reciprocity matters. And knowing that when team member four has a ballet thing that he's got to go to and the rest of the team covers means that when team member two saw that, they're like, oh, wait, I have the ability to do this. Are you guys going to cover for me too? And then all of a sudden this covers and now you're creating unit cohesion and people are doing this for us. And people think, oh, it's just, I'm going to use some sort of tactic. I'm just going to address them when they're in the office.

You have to address the entire thing as a whole because what motivates Susie might not be the what motivates Jane. And you have to understand there's different human needs and the psychology that comes into it to understand that every single person matters is important. And they just don't do this. They don't go through the line of this. And they're always looking for this proven little hack.

It's not one, it's stacking the entire thing so that you can have this matter in effect across them.

There's so much here that needs to be broken down on how to teach people to matter, and how to teach people to connect, and to learn these things. We're not going to be able to cover an hour of a show.

If someone wanted to learn more about this, and someone wanted to get more access to you and have more of these concrete examples of like, listen, I did this during special operations. I did this in the NSA. I did this for Fortune 500 companies. I've done this, you had this love of experience. How does someone track down you? How do they get more of these examples? Because they're dealing with fires right now. And yeah, maybe they're fires, they're not going to hit their numbers and their sales numbers versus the stuff you've been in where people don't come home. How do people track you down? How do they get a hold of you? How do they bring this into their world?