Dr. Randy Ross is the CEO of Remarkable and a bestselling author of multiple books, including “Remarkable!,” “Roadmap to Remarkable!,” “Relationomics,” “Fireproof Happiness,” and his latest book entitled, “Make Life Good.”
Working with brands like Delta, Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, GE Appliances, McDonald’s, Panasonic, Cox Communications, Keller Williams, Compass Group, Chick-fil-A, and the Intercontinental Hotel Group, he has inspired and enabled countless people to find new passion and purpose in their work, to work better together in teams, and have greater influence and impact.
Dr. Ross, a former Chief People Officer says, when people like what they do, they do it better. Today, he speaks with Dr. Karen about how to live a “conspicuously extraordinary” life, how to create a Remarkable corporate culture, the connection between employee experience and customer experience, the role of hope in creating a happy culture and profitable business, the four maxims of value creation, and more. Listen for practical wisdom you can apply in your business today.
Reach Dr. Randy Ross at www.drRandyRoss.com; rr@drRandyRoss.com
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Listen to the podcast here
Dr. Randy Ross: How to Create a Remarkable Life and Business (Episode # 473)
We are talking about how to create a remarkable life and business. A remarkable life goes beyond world-class service to make a profound difference in people’s lives. When you live a remarkable life, you are conspicuously extraordinary. How do you create such a life? Our special guest knows what it takes and also knows the benefits of living a remarkable life.
Dr. Randy Ross is the CEO of Remarkable and a bestselling author of multiple books, including Remarkable!, Roadmap to Remarkable, Relationomics, Fireproof Happiness, and his latest book entitled Make Life Good. Working with brands like Delta, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, GE Appliances, McDonald’s, Panasonic, Cox Communications, Keller Williams, Compass Group, Chick-fil-A, and the international InterContinental Hotel Group, he has inspired and enabled countless people to find new passion and purpose in their work, to work better together in teams and have greater influence and impact.
Dr. Ross, a former chief people officer, says, “When people like what they do, they do it better. When people like those, they do it with, they work better together. When they like the impact they are having, they find meaning and fulfillment in what they do.” Dr. Ross helps them find what they like while building healthier relationships and pursuing a passion beyond self. A messenger of practical wisdom and needed hope. Dr. Ross untangles the biggest challenges facing today’s business leaders, tomorrow’s workforce, and the future marketplace. He lives with his wife, LuAnne, and four children in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome, Dr. Randy, to the show.
Thank you. It is a pleasure to be with you and thank you so much for your time.
Understanding The Concept Of Being Remarkable
It’s a pleasure to be with you as well. I want to hear about this remarkable life and I know that my community would love to hear about it too. First off, what is the definition of Remarkable and how did you conceive that concept?
That’s a word that’s near and dear to my heart. It’s the name of our company for one, and it’s also the name of the book as you alluded to earlier, but remarkable for me means that you live life and you do business in such a way that you blow people away. You go the second mile, you deliver world-class service, you provide the unexpected, and you mark people’s lives for good, even if just for a moment to such a degree that when they leave your presence, they have this irrepressible desire to talk about and the good that you brought into their life.
When people are remarking about you, then you indeed have become remarkable. That’s what businesses strive to do. You’ve heard the term raving fans. Remarkable is the same thing. Interesting. Robert Stephens the Founder of Geek Squad, several years ago in an Inc. Magazine article was quoted as having said this. He said, “Advertising is a tax you pay for being unremarkable,” and I like that because if you think about it makes perfect sense. The best form of advertising is word of mouth. When you leave an indelible impression, when you mark someone’s life for good to such a degree that they can’t help but go out and tell other people about it, then you become remarkable.
Overcoming Barriers To Achieving Remarkability In Business
I would imagine that most businesses would love to be remarkable. Let me ask this, what are some of the barriers that stand in the way of businesses achieving this remarkable state where others remark about them? There must be some barriers that prevent people from getting there, otherwise we’d all be there.
Let me give you a definition of what we consider to be a remarkable culture, and then we can talk about culture for a little while if you’d like, but culture happens wherever people get together. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in your business or whether it’s in the church, synagogue, or mosque where you attend worship. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the philanthropic organization where you volunteer your time or the gym where you go to workout.
Everywhere people get together, there’s a culture. We define a remarkable culture as a place where people believe the best in each other, they want the best for each other, and so therefore they expect the best from each other. I like that three-pong trilogy because the first talks about trust, the second talks about connection and compassion, and the third talks about accountability.
You are talking about barriers to creating that organizational culture, or think about it this way. You have a culture in your home. When there’s no trust, what happens to relationships? They fall apart because where trust is low, resistance is high. It’s very difficult to make forward progress or bring about change. The second thing is compassion and connection, which are essential for team dynamics, collaboration, and wanting the best for each other.
The third one is accountability. We have to call the best out of each other, which is about healthy coaching within organizations, and mentorship. The things that are barriers are lack of mentorship, lack of accountability, no connection and compassion, and low levels of trust. Those are all barriers that impede being able to create this remarkable culture where people thrive in a relationally rich environment.
I love those three items. Would you state those one more time?
It’s what we call the Remarkable Cultural Trilogy, where people believe the best in one another, they want the best for one another, and so therefore they expect the best from one another.
Role Of Values, Beliefs, And Behaviors In Corporate Culture
When you are talking about corporate culture, which is the ether in which everyone lives in the organization, tell us a little bit about the role of values, beliefs, and behavior as part of that culture.
A remarkable culture is a place where people believe the best in each other. They want the best for each other and expect the best from each other. Click To TweetYou almost gave the exact definition that we use for culture because culture is talked about quite frequently. Everybody is beginning to understand now that healthy cultures create happiness, health, and productivity. They lead to the longevity of the tenure of their team members. Everybody is beginning to talk a lot about culture, but how we define culture is different.
We like to define culture as the collective expression of the values, beliefs, and behaviors that individuals bring to the endeavor. It’s not about their behavior, which is a big part. Some people say tongue in cheek that culture is how we play in the sandbox together, or it’s how things are done around here. It does speak a lot to behaviors, but underneath every behavior is a belief system.
It’s the way that you perceive the world. It’s the way that you see yourself. It’s the way that you see yourself interacting in your world, but beneath that fundamentally and foundationally behind the belief system is a value construct. The value construct plays into your personal beliefs, which could be faith. A big part of that is your personal faith. A big part of that is your worldview.
A big part of it is both the aspirational, the inspirational part of what you want to become, but also reflective of who you naturally are. That all creates that value construct that we as individuals hold to be near and dear. This will be fun to talk about. There’s a whole philosophy called axiology. Axiology and theology are kissing cousins because axiology posits this belief that in the universe there’s infinite good to infinite bad. Axiology is the study of good. It’s trying to define and measure good in the world, but at its very core, it’s about creating movements of good.
The way axiology defines good is to say axiologically good is having been designed for a purpose. You fulfill the purpose for which you are designed. Now in theology, we would call that sanctification, but in philosophy we call that axiology, fulfilling your purpose. A lot of what we do is bring principles of axiology into the corporate realm.
Challenges In Company Values And Behavior
If a company is struggling and they are having challenges and difficulties, and maybe their culture is not quite on point, what are some of the issues that you might diagnose there? What’s going on with values, beliefs, behavior, or that focus on the ultimate good? What might be standing in the way?
Honestly, a lot of times in corporate circles, there’s a tremendous amount of toxic behavior. We see this in a lot of organizations. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a nonprofit organization or a large multinational corporation, but sometimes even in church life, we see this, where people are about self-promotion and self-protection.
It’s all about trying to push or promote an agenda as opposed to trying to create a movement of good that’s beneficial for everybody concerned. That’s one of the things that a lot of organizations struggle with. It is to create a relationally rich environment where people can flourish. You said at the top of the show describing our work. It’s so true that happy people do good work. They do. Happy people do their work better. When you enjoy doing the work with the people that you do it with, you are more productive because you may be able to go faster alone, but you can go farther together.
Creating a relationally rich environment where people can thrive, they can collaborate, bring creativity, sharpen each other, and encourage each other, that’s what we are trying to create within corporate life. All of those are elements that can be addressed with applied axiology, the principles that can help an organization move things in a positive direction. We want to eliminate the negative or toxic behavior, and then we want to equip leaders to be strong in being able to create an environment where people are inspired to bring the best of who they are to work every day.
I know that this is much easier said than done. I have seen a lot of companies and cultures where the toxic behavior is going on, the self-promotion and the self-protection that you talked about, where it’s difficult for them to even imagine creating an agenda together that’s a good direction or a good agenda or something positive in its focus because there’s not the trust that’s there very often. When you think about ways to intervene when the culture’s already toxic, how do you help to move people who are very entrenched where they are?
One of the first things you have to do is you have to create what we call value-centricity. Don’t go look that up because that’s a word that we made up. That’s one of the prerogatives of being an author. You can make things up, but value-centricity means that the values within the organization are all aligned. First, an organization has to decide who they are, what they stand for, and what they want to accomplish. That’s what we call our vision, our values, and our mission statement, but then people who choose to be a part of that organization, their values have to align with the values of the organization. When they do, then they can create value centricity, which is an alignment of values, creating a circuit through which energy can flow to light up the world and do good.
The first thing that has to happen is there has to be an alignment of values. My personal values have to match the values of the organization. If not, then it’s not going to be too terribly long until I’m going to be experiencing cognitive dissonance. In other words, they are going to be expecting me to do things that I don’t morally or ethically feel like I should do, or they are going to be requiring things of me that go against the grain of my personal commitment and value construct.
That’s when organizations have a hard time coalescing because the values of the individuals are not shared by the organization, and vice versa. When we are all on the same page, we all have a common vision, we all have a common commitment on how we are going to get there, and we are not going to compromise our values. We know what our values are.
By that, they are not subtle plaques in the lobby, but everybody has embraced them, they have embodied them, and they imbue them, and all three of those are important that they have to personally own them, they have to manifest them, and they also have to be evangelists for them. When that takes place, then what happens is that culture becomes magnetic. It both attracts the right people and begins to repel the wrong people.
The challenge for most organizations is they don’t have values that are strong enough to be repulsive. An organization that has a culture worth its salt, its values, should be so strong that it repels people who don’t align with those values. The problem with most organizations is they are so intent on filling a seat with the most talented or most competent person, and the thing that they overlook is, does this person shares the values that we possess as an organization because culture is nothing less than the character of the organization? That’s very critical because then you begin to realize that every addition to the team is either going to codify a great culture or they are going to compromise our culture. You can’t afford to have your culture compromised by people coming into the organization who don’t share your values.
Happy people do good work. When you truly enjoy working with the people you are with, you become more productive. Click To TweetThis is such an important conversation that we are having. I see this every day. What you are talking about is the impact on organizational culture by people who may be the wrong fit. What’s fascinating to me is that even though a culture may be strong and you would think it would repel the wrong people, sometimes people are in there and they have their own reasons for not wanting to leave. Very often the organization itself, the top leadership, is not as willing to get rid of people they need to get rid of because they are never going to share the values of the corporation. It’s always going to be a friction point, and they are always going to have somebody working against them in the organization, no matter how talented that person may be. Speak a little bit about those issues.
You are right. You do see this quite frequently. Unfortunately, in a lot of corporate situations where we reward the wrong behavior, you will get more of what you reward. To your point, I have worked with a lot of organizations who may have an extremely talented team member, let’s say, a great salesperson who brings in a tremendous amount of revenue into the life of the organization, but at the very same time, he or she behaves in such a way that it demoralizes other team members.
Maybe they are in sales and they are bringing in a lot of volume in terms of closed deals, but the pressure that they are putting on the ops team, the people who have to come behind and deliver the service that’s been promised, may be devastating them with expectations that are unrealistic or poor relational activity. I see a lot of times when organizations are afraid to step up and intervene in situations like that and go, “That doesn’t align with our values. That behavior either needs to change or you need to shift out of the organization.”
Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen. What happens over the long haul is it may serve the organization in the short run, but they compromise what they could have had in the long run, and they exchange a short-term benefit, money through closed deals, for the long-term loss of morale, or other people exiting the organization because they have gotten burned, discouraged, or disillusioned because no one will step up and address the bad behavior. It’s all this matter of interchange between whether we are willing to take a short-term loss for a long-term gain, or do we want the short-term gain, not realizing what the long-term loss will be.
That’s a tension particularly in publicly traded organizations because there’s this dynamic tension when you have to have quarterly returns where “Who do we serve first? Do we serve our shareholders who are looking to get a benefit from their investment, or do we take care of our stakeholders first?” Our stakeholders, our employees, our supply chain, and our vendors. In other words, that whole ecosystem that provides our service or our product.
I have seen time and time again, decisions made in corporate life where the shareholders are put first at the expense of the stakeholders. That may drive a great quarterly return, but in the long run, it’s damaging for the organization. We have to get back to putting our people first and making sure that the employee experience is robust and that it’s dynamic, and then we create a place where people love to come to work.
They wake up in the morning and they don’t have the attitude, “I have to go to work,” but they want to go to work, and then that’s when great things begin to happen in organizational life. In the long run, if the shareholder is patient, it’s much better for them as well. They may not see the immediate return, but the long-term return can be 10, 20, or 30 times what it would have been had they settled for the short term.
Connection Between Employee And Customer Experience
This is hugely relevant and very important to talk about. What seems like a short-term cost is less a cost than it is an investment in the future. When you think about it that way, and you are investing the resources for a larger return on the back end is what you are referring to. People have to think about it that way, look more holistically, not at this moment only, and then in essence, you are selling the company off and it could be a whole lot more. You mentioned something else that I want you to comment on and double down on a little bit. You were talking about the employee experience and we know that you know that there’s a connection between the employee experience and also the customer experience and what happens. Talk about that and why it’s important for companies to double down on that.
There’s no question that the customer experience is going to be a direct reflection of the employee experience. The question is, if we want to have a stellar customer experience, how do we make the employee experience better? It all gets back to this idea of putting your people before profit. A lot of organizations are still struggling with that idea. They want to do what’s going to drive results. They want to do what’s going to drive more money to the bottom line, but they don’t think about the fact that without your people, nothing is going to happen. If we don’t take care of our people in the right way, then sooner or later the business is going to suffer. That can take on a myriad of different forms.
We have one organization that we have done work with. The one that you may be familiar with, it’s a little chicken sandwich shop in our backyard here in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s called Chick-fil-A, and they have done arguably a phenomenal job when it comes to creating a culture about taking care of people because they put making a difference above making a dollar.
Here’s the point. It started with the Founder, Truett Cathy, way back in 1946. This is interesting information for those who want to see the business case for it. In 2022, Chick-fil-A was about ready to break through the $19 billion mark, $18.8 billion in gross revenue. That was more revenue than their top five competitors combined, more than Popeyes, Cane’s Chicken, Zaxby’s, and Wingstop combined. Here’s what’s fascinating. They generated more gross revenue than their top five competitors with almost a third of the number of retail outlets. Their five competitors had 10,600 outlets, while Chick-fil-A had under 3,000. Think about that. Chick-fil-A does several things to take care of their people if you know much about them. Number one, they give them a day off. They give them Sunday off.
They are not even open on Sundays. They are working one less day.
Arguably, in the quick service restaurant space, that’s one of the busiest days of the week for most organizations, but they said, “No. Our values dictate that we are going to be closed one day a week.” Part of that was a commitment to faith. Part of that is a commitment to their people. They said, “We are going to be closed.”
I can’t even begin to tell you how many people-centric programs Chick-fil-A has. This says it all. Their motto, their mission statement are very simple, and it’s this, “To be the world’s most caring company.” Now, what does that have to do with chicken sales? Nothing, but it’s about taking care of people, and you see this in their Red Couch commercials because the Red Couch commercials are about acts of kindness. How do we take care of our people, not just internally, but externally as well? That’s the whole focus.
The point is that when organizations deeply invest in taking care of their people, their people appreciate that. Their people feel affirmed, acknowledged, and respected. They in turn bring the best of who they are to the equation, and then they provide the same stellar service to the customer base that they have received as the employee, and it makes perfect sense, but why do so many organizations fail to recognize that simple idea that simply taking care of your people is the best thing that you can do to drive business. It seems like common sense, but unfortunately, it’s not common practice.
One of the things that you were talking about, they sometimes think that there is no connection between creating the most caring company in the world or the planet, and the results of the business. When in fact, your results do depend on that. You get the best results by caring for your people. A lot of businesses don’t believe that. They don’t know that and they haven’t seen it because they haven’t tried it. Here’s a business that doesn’t even work on Sundays, the busiest day in the fast food industry, and yet they are outpacing their nearest five competitors. That says something about the value of caring for people, and so we have to talk about it differently. We have to connect those two. It does make a difference. They are deeply connected.
A lot of organizations strive to be the best. Here’s a great question. A friend of mine by the name of Jeff Henderson has an organization called The FOR Company. He wrote a book titled FOR, and he made this challenge. He says, “There are a lot of organizations that try to be the best in the world, but we need to be the best for the world.” There’s a big difference between the two.
The way that we like to say it in our organization is there are two kinds of organizations. There are organizations that use people to grow the business, and there are a lot of organizations that do that, but the best organizations in the world use the business to grow the people who then grow the business. When your focus is on using the business to grow the people, helping the people aspire, helping the people attain their goals, dreams, hopes, and aspirations, equipping them to become leaders worth following, and providing for them the resources they need to excel, not just at work, but at home as well.
When you have that focus on helping people grow, then the dividends are hard to describe because they are exponential. Because you’ve marked their life for good, they then want to turn around and mark other people’s lives for good, and that’s the whole idea of creating a movement of good, which brings us back to the principles of axiology.
Four Maxims Of Value Creation In Business
I think that the work that the employees then do is done with much greater ease. It’s not work. It comes naturally. It springs out of what’s been invested in them, and therefore they naturally show that to the customers and also their fellow employees that the other people they are working with inside the organization as well. I know there’s a concept that’s related to this that you talk about, which is this whole notion of value creation. You have four maxims value creation, creativity, positivity, sustainability, and responsibility. Tell us how this ties into what we have been talking about so far.
Those four maxims are at the very heart of axiology. Those are the principles that we help organizations not only begin to understand but be able to put into practice to create and crystallize a very compelling culture. The first one that you mentioned, the maximum of creativity simply says this, we are all designed to create value in life, which means that we feel good when we do good. That’s the way that God made us. He created us to give back to the world, not just to be consumers, but to be creators of good. That’s where it all begins, and then the question tied to that is, do you create on a daily basis more value than you take? In other words, do you bring more to the table for others than you expect others to give you in return?
There are two types of people in the world. There are value creators and their value extractors. A value creator lives by what I call an abundance mentality, and they say, “If we all bring more to the table than we take away, then at the end of the day, there will be a surplus on the table that can be shared by everybody who helped to create that value, and that’s a win for everybody.”
On the other hand, there are value extractors, and we all have had experience with value extractors. Some people are very myopic. It’s all about them, “What’s in it for me?” They live by a scarcity mentality. They believe, “There’s not enough to go around in the world, so therefore, I have to get to the table to get as much for myself as I possibly can,” and often that’s with blatant disregard for anybody else but the challenge is if everybody has the attitude of being a value extractor, it won’t be too long until there’s nothing left on the table. When there’s nothing left on the table, go home.
This whole idea of do you bring more to the table than you take away, that’s the principle of creativity, the maxim of creativity. The more value you create, the more invaluable you become. I don’t care if that’s in my organizational life or personal life. The same thing applies to my wife and our relationship at home.
My wife has what I call an emotional piggy bank. If I make more deposits into her emotional piggy bank than I make withdrawals, if I’m more interested in her good than my own good, if I’m bringing more to her than I’m expecting from her, if I’m striving to make her world better where she can thrive, then her emotional piggy bank is full and life is good. If I’m making more demands on her than I’m giving to her, if I expect more from her than I’m creating for her, I’m going to drain that reservoir pretty quickly. When I do, mama ain’t happy, and if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.
There’s nothing else to draw out of the bank either.
She’s depleted, and our relationship is bankrupt. The same thing happens personally, and it can happen professionally as well because we have to consciously keep our hand on the helm of culture, and we do that by value creation because we are going to have a culture. Anywhere people get together, you are going to have a culture. The question will be by design, meaning you give a thoughtful reflection and intentionality, move it in a constructive way, or are you going to have it by default? You are not thinking about it and one day you wake up and you don’t like it. You often hear couples talking about, “I don’t know, we drifted apart.” That’s a culture by default because you didn’t focus on making it better.
The first and most important is the maxim of creativity, and then the second one is positivity. Positivity says, do you leave a positive wake in the world? It’s a great question. Do you leave a positive? All of us sometimes move through life in such a way that we don’t slow down long enough to smell our own exhaust, but we leave a ripple impact on the shore, and we need to know what that is. We need to stop and think about whether we are leaving a positive wake in all that we do.
The third is sustainability, which simply says to continuously create value, and leverage your passion and your strengths to solve problems. I love this one because there’s a lot of talk in our world about passion. There’s a lot of talk in our world about strengths, but the key is we have to leverage both of those to solve problems. The bigger problem you solve, the more value you create, the more value you create, the more invaluable you become.
The last one is the principle or the maxim of responsibility, which simply says to have the biggest impact, determine what those elements are over which you do have control because there are a lot of elements over which you don’t have control, and apply your energy to move those forward in a positive direction. Take responsibility for those things that you can change and move in a positive way. There are so many more nuances to that and how we apply that across the board and organizational life, but that’s the essence, and that’s what we unpack in the book Remarkable!.
The customer experience is a direct reflection of employee experience. Click To TweetThat sounds phenomenal and wonderful information for people to absorb and apply. What is the connection between what we are talking about now, this value creation process and people living for the purpose for which they are created, and also the impact that they are having in the company? There’s some connection between all of those. How do you see those going together?
They are intricately intertwined because passion comes as a result of pursuing your purpose in life, and purpose in life is exactly what we are talking about. Everyone’s purpose in life is the same or should be the same, and that’s to bring value to other people. The scripture is clear, “God so loved the world that he gave.” God was a giver. To be a part of his greater purpose, we are givers as well as we reflect his likeness to the world.
As we create good for others, that’s what brings meaning, fulfillment, and joy to life. From a psychological standpoint, people are depressed when they are anxious. It’s all because their focus is on themselves. They have turned internally and they are concerned about what’s going to happen with me, what’s going to happen to me, why is this happening against me? Their focus is on trying to get through that particular circumstance but it’s all myopically driven.
We know psychologically the antidote to depression and anxiety is to turn your focus outward, either through appreciation for others or in helping others, but put your focus on helping other people and it will begin to eliminate the anxiety, the stress, and the depression as you focus on doing good for others. It’s profound, and then when you talk about organizationally. When an organization is on a mission together, they don’t have a mission, they are on a mission together. That’s where the real cohesiveness is. The team dynamics begin to gel, and you can begin to move things forward at lightning speed sometimes because you’ve got this value-centricity that we are talking about.
Fulfilling Your Purpose In The Marketplace
Let me ask you a more personal question. How did you come to do this work that you are doing in the marketplace? How are you fulfilling your purpose and your unique design in living like this?
I appreciate you asking the question. For me, this is so much fun because I look at the research that’s available especially from organizations like Gallup on employee engagement, and you would know that less than a third of the American workforce is what Gallup describes as actively engaged. Meaning that they bring passion, enthusiasm, and excitement to the work experience.
Think about that. Only a third of the American workforce. Pragmatically, that translates into $1.9 trillion of lost opportunity costs. That’s the economic impact, but let’s talk about the emotional impact. People don’t like what they do. For a long time, I have sat back and I have said, “That has to change. The most time that any of us spend is in our work, and if we don’t enjoy our work, then what’s life about?” For me, the passion is to be able to go in and help individuals and organizations begin to understand life is too short not to enjoy what you are doing.
Where this came from or the genesis of all of it was that I spent the first almost two decades of my career in the not-for-profit space. I worked with some phenomenal organizations that did great, good in the community and had a high impact on making life better for a lot of people, but I learned through that how you motivate volunteers. In a nonprofit, it’s driven by voluntary time, energy, and resources.
The only way that you can create a movement among volunteers is to tap into their passion to have a cause, purpose, or mission that they believe in, and then honor and recognize them and fuel their energy by appreciation, and this rally cry to do something worthwhile. Take that. I took those lessons learned in the space of philanthropy and moved those over into the for-profit space. It’s the same because people are not primarily driven by financial gain. They are not.
If they are paid a fair wage in a fair market for fair work, that’s great, but what drives people, what people want to be a part of is a mission that’s larger than themselves, and they want to do it with people they enjoy doing it with and beyond that, they want to have fun doing what they are doing because they feel like they are making a difference in the world.
By taking those ideas, concepts, and principles from the not-for-profit world, and translating them over into the for-profit space, the results are amazing. Think about it from the standpoint of a leader. The greatest resource that you have is the untapped laden energy that lies within the margins of life, the discretionary effort that your people have that you’ve not yet tapped into.
If you could get that 30% or 33% that are actively engaged, if you could get that number up to 40%, 45%, or 50%, the impact on the organization would be extraordinary, and that’s what we are talking about. We are talking about creating a culture that’s inspirational to tap into that discretionary effort in the margins of life.
Connection Between Hope And Happiness At Work
It is true that in the nonprofit sector, they are very tuned into what they believe in terms of the mission that they are going after, why they exist, and who it is that they intend to impact on the back end of what they are set up to do. It’s great to bring that same spirit to the for-profit world as well. I find that there’s a lot of cross-pollination that can happen in both directions for different purposes, for both what the nonprofits can learn from the for-profit and vice versa. Let me ask this. We haven’t used these words exactly, although when people are fulfilled at work, there’s this happiness component that’s a part of it, and there’s hope that is a very important concept for you. How are those two connected, hope and happiness?
I wrote a book during COVID, entitled Fireproof Happiness. A friend of mine challenged me to write it because we looked at what was taking place in the world around us with COVID and all the challenges and the anxiety. He said, “You need to write a book on hope that will give people an optimistic view.” I said, “That’s, that’s interesting,” and so I took up the challenge.
My audience predominantly, while I do enjoy speaking for not-for-profit, and particularly in the church realm, the vast majority of the work I do is in Corporate America, Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies. I can’t always lead with chapter and verse. I wanted to write a book on hope that was not heavily faith-based because I knew that would be something my audience in the corporate world may not immediately embrace.
People are not primarily driven by financial gain. What people want to be a part of is a mission larger than themselves. Click To TweetI wanted to take it from a scientific standpoint, and I did a great amount of research. I gathered over 250 scientifically validated peer-reviewed research papers on the power of the efficacy of hope. I synthesized it, crystallized it, and put it in a form that everyone can pick up, read, easily understand, and apply. The link between hope and happiness is irrefutable. Everybody in the world is searching for happiness, but very few people attain it or know how to attain it, and the secret element is hope.
You have to first of all understand what hope is. You have to define it properly, then you have to know how to pursue it, and it’s not what most people think, and that’s what I write about in Fireproof Happiness. Let’s define hope. Hope is a dynamic motivational system that’s tied to inspirational goal setting. Happiness does not come in attaining the goal that you desire. Happiness comes in the challenge of the pursuit.
That is interesting because John Templeton, a wise man, once said, “Happiness pursues eludes, but happiness gives returns.” What he was saying is that everything good in life that you want, you can’t get by saying there’s a goal and trying to attain it. It comes by creating value for other people. In other words, I’m the happiest as a husband when my wife is happy. I’m the happiest as a father and as a parent when my kids are happy. I’m the happiest as a team leader when my teams are happy. Therefore, happiness comes by providing those things that create an atmosphere of happiness for others, which comes full circle back to what we were talking about before.
Maybe you’ve heard the statement before, “Hope is not a strategy.” Everybody has heard that in corporate circles, but I would suggest that hope is the best strategy if you understand what hope is. If you are pursuing any endeavor and the people who are involved in that endeavor are hopeless about it, it’s never going to become a reality. Hope is your best strategy and hope is the basis for happiness, but it’s also the basis for health, productivity, and longevity. We go into great detail pulling that apart, unpacking it, and talking about it as we deconstruct hope and then put hope back together again.
I know that you and I both have a deep love and respect for Viktor Frankl who certainly is one of the luminaries out there on this whole notion of hope. Maybe say a word or two about that.
Viktor Frankl is the author of a book that is a classic called Man’s Search for Meaning. He was an Austrian neuroscientist, a psychiatrist, and a philosopher who was a Jewish taking prisoner and a Nazi prisoner of war camp. All of his worldly possessions were taken away. All of his family members were exterminated or executed in the Nazi gas chambers, and it was a horrific period of time for him as he endured four different concentration camps, but he came out on the other side of that. He wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. It talks about the eternal struggle, about the common thread in humanity, which is suffering, that all of us have disappointment, disillusionment, dreams that are dashed, loved ones that are lost, and challenges in life that are difficult to face. That’s the common bond that ties us all together in humanity.
He talks about the importance of both being able to have the hope to persevere in the end while combining it with the discipline to embrace the difficult truth of the reality of your situation. He writes this masterful piece and essentially says, “Everything in life can be stripped away from you except for one thing, and that one thing is your choice.”
The power to choose your attitude. The power to choose how you’ll respond to life circumstances. The power to choose how you’ll respond even to those who perpetrate the greatest atrocities that mankind has ever seen against you. It’s a great story. It’s a great book. It’s a great lesson in life when we are down, we are depressed, and we wonder why is this happening. It’s good to learn lessons from other people who’ve walked roads that are even more challenging than our own.
I believe that his philosophy is exactly how I would say that my African-descent ancestors got through slavery. They had to think every day about the choices that they could make, which would seem from the outside to be very few, and yet every minute, they are making a choice. You could do this or you could do that, and those choices have different consequences.
Just knowing that even in a small way, you have some agency, makes a difference in terms of the outcomes because you can make the choice for hope and to see optimism on the other side of the fence, which brings me to the next thing I want to say and ask you about. We have been talking about hope and there are other words like optimism. There are other words like positivity. We mentioned that. I know that each one is a little bit different. Maybe unpack that for us a little bit too.
I love the idea of positivity. There’s a great amount of research coming out of The School of Positive Psychology, Dr. Martin Seligman, and others. Valuable work. I am a big believer in positivity, but positivity serves as the foundation of hope. Positivity alone will not get you through the most challenging issues of life, but it forms the foundation upon which you can then build the skyscraper of hope. After positivity, the next thing we call buoyancy belief is responsibility, and then there’s agility and then there’s reality, and all of those are buoyancy beliefs of hope. It begins with positivity, but hope brings more to the equation than just mere positivity.
That’s awesome because, in other words, you are saying you need all of those building blocks, not just one of them. If you apply that to what Viktor Frankl was doing, how did those other pieces look in his world? How did you see him having something that was beyond positivity?
The first point, the buoyancy belief of positivity says, “I believe that tomorrow can be brighter than today no matter how dark today may be.” The second buoyancy belief we talked about is responsibility, which says, “I’m not a victim of circumstance. I have a say in how my life unfolds. There may be a thousand things over which I don’t have control. I don’t have control over the weather, I don’t have control over the economy. I don’t have control over what might happen to me. I don’t even have control over other people, but I do have control over my own internal response. I do have control over my attitude, and so that’s where responsibility comes in.”
The third principle is agility. Agility says, “There’s not one single way for me to get to any desired destination. If one way is blocked, I can work to remove the blockage or I can choose an alternate route, and, if necessary, I can even choose a different destination. I have the freedom to demonstrate agility and I can morph, change, and be creative to face whatever life throws my way.”
Lastly, your reality. You have to embrace your reality, which simply says that I need to combine my perseverance and the belief that I will be able to persevere and come through victorious on the other side with the discipline of accepting reality no matter how harsh it may be. When you have positivity, responsibility, agility, and reality all together, that forms the foundation for what we call the core of buoyancy beliefs that will keep your head above water when the storm surge rises.
Joy is the emotional response of hope. Peace is the emotional response of faith. Love is the expression of both. Click To TweetMake Life Good: A Book On Legacy And Purpose
Thank you for breaking it down with that example because it makes it more tangible and more visible in a lot of ways. I appreciate you taking the time to do that. I know you’ve got your latest book, which is Make Life Good. Tell us a little bit more about what that book is about and what its connection to legacy.
Make Life Good is the one I have enjoyed writing the most. All of my books I have thoroughly enjoyed and hope that they are beneficial to the audience that receives them, but the full title of this book is You’ve Made a Good Living, Now Make Life Good. Make Life Good is about, beyond making money and taking care of your own, how you turn around and give back to the world. That happiness does not come from titles and trinkets that we attain from the world, but it’s in what we bring to the world. It’s about what we do for others that they are incapable of doing for themselves. It’s about altering our lifestyle so that we can alter the lives of others.
It’s about doing for one what you wish you could do for everyone and thereby changing the whole world for that someone and maybe in the process changing your whole world too. It’s about generosity, legacy, and philanthropy. I wrote the book twofold to encourage corporate responsibility, but then also I wrote it so that it would be a tool that nonprofit groups could use to inspire their donor base to do more than give their money, more than their treasures, but give their time and their talent as well.
It’s a fun narrative. It’s a parable of sorts that talks about this man in midlife who sees a lot of what he’s pursued in life, the futility of it all. He’s beginning to ask the question, there has to be more to life than dying in a lake house. There has to be more to life than taking care of my own, and he’s challenged with a simple question. The question comes to him by a very unexpected character. It’s a homeless person on the street who comes up to him and says, “Why do you do what you do?” He goes, “You mean what do I do?”
He goes, “No. What you do is not as important as why you do it. Why do you do what you do?” It brings us all the way back around to the purpose that we have talked about in our conversation. Finding your purpose in life is what fuels happiness. It’s what creates movements of good. It’s what brings value to the workforce. It’s what ties people together with common values and a purposeful mission. It’s at the heart of everything we teach and do.
You have brought it full circle in terms of the new book that’s coming out and it gives people a bit of something to think about when we have a lot of Baby Boomers who are retiring right now and we have a lot of other people who are mid-career and thinking about what’s the legacy they want to leave and are the financial results enough. Usually, there’s something else they want to make a mark on on this earth and this gives them an opportunity to think about what that is. How can people get a hold of you? How can they reach you? How can they get your books? How can they book you for keynote speeches or anything else they want to connect with you about?
I appreciate you asking that. Our books are available wherever fine books are sold. You can get them on Amazon, Books-A-Million, and Barnes & Noble. They are all available there. As far as reaching me personally, our website is Dr. Randy Ross. If you want to reach me personally, it’s very simple, rr@drRandyRoss.com. I would love to assist or complement any leadership development initiatives that organizations may have or help them apply these principles to move their culture in a more positive affirmative direction.
Words Of Wisdom For Corporate Business Leaders
They can have results all the way around, not just on one end. What additional words of wisdom do you want to leave for my community of corporate executive business leaders?
In the front of Fireproof Happiness, there’s a trilogy statement that maybe would be a great thing to leave your readers with. It goes like this, “Joy is the emotional response of hope. Peace is the emotional response of faith, and love is the expression of them both.” Loving people, taking care of people, putting people first in organizational life. It’s what we started off talking about when we were talking about culture, and now we have concluded in talking about hope. The power of hope is that it’s the foundational fundamental building block for happiness, health, productivity, and longevity. If we can build resilient teams that understand the power of hope, then business and life will be much better.
Amen to that. I can see it already. What you said about business and life, every principle that you’ve talked about is relevant beyond business as well. If we live like this, we will have better lives. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your wisdom with the audience.
My pleasure. It’s great hanging out with you and having this conversation, and I want to thank you again for your time.
You are welcome. We are going to close the show with a verse, Proverbs 16:16. It says, “How much better to get wisdom than gold and to get understanding is to be chosen rather than silver?” We have learned from Dr. Randy that those building blocks of wisdom and understanding as he’s unpacked them in the package of hope that if we have that, that’s what generates the gold that lasts in all different directions in our lives. If you just get the gold without the wisdom and the understanding, you’ll probably lose on all fronts. Win today. Go for wisdom, go for understanding, spread hope, and add value to others in your life and your workplace. We’ll see you next time.
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I’m here to celebrate the work of the Bible League, which is a global ministry that provides Bibles and ministry study materials, and through activities like Project Philip also teaches and trains local people and how to share the word of God. The President and CEO of the Bible League, Jos Snoep is with me to share a little bit more about what the Bible League is doing.
The beauty of the local church is that it is the body of Christ and it is the Holy Spirit that is calling the local church to be engaged in the Great Commission. As Bible League, we come alongside those local pastors. I met a pastor, his name is Rolando, in the Amazon, and he has this great vision to reach 200 communities with the word of God. We were able to come alongside them and help them with bibles and resources.
Thank you so much, Jos. We are all partners together. You and the Bible League are the hands and feet to the local people on the ground, and there are partners and donors out there who can be hands and feet to you as you also share with others. Those of you who want to be part of this ministry and I invite you to be a part of it, I’m a part of it, go to Bible League. See more about the ministry and see how you can participate and donate.
Important Links
- Remarkable!
- Relationomics
- Fireproof Happiness
- Make Life Good
- FOR
- Man’s Search for Meaning
- Dr. Randy Ross
- Dr. Randy Ross’ Email Address
- Bible League
About Dr. Randy Ross
Randy is Anchored by Hope and the belief that tomorrow can hold bigger and brighter possibilities than today. Most importantly, he’s a messenger of practical wisdom to help untangle the biggest challenges facing today’s business leader, tomorrow’s workforce and the future marketplace. He engages audiences worldwide, creating value for leaders and teams alike. His keynotes and workshops resonate with transformational truths that inspire elevated performance.
In 2008, Randy founded Remarkable! – a consulting and advisory firm specializing in team development and organizational health. Spending time in both the for-profit and not-for-profit worlds, Randy has traveled throughout the United States and internationally as a speaker, consultant and coach, building teams and developing leaders. A compelling communicator, Randy has the keen sensitivity to speak to the heart of leaders and inspires elevated performance among teams. Randy’s unique understanding of employee engagement allows him to offer practical solutions for increasing both the morale and performance of your teams.
A graduate of Baylor University, Randy also holds two advanced degrees from Southwestern. Randy is the co-author of Remarkable!, a leadership parable that illustrates the power of applied axiology to guide organizations toward the creation of a more compelling and collaborative culture, based upon Value Creation. Randy’s latest book, Relationomics: Business Powered by Relationships, provides powerful insights and practical principles to create relationally rich environments.
Before founding Remarkable!, Randy led several not-for-profit entities in Texas and Florida and served as VP of Recruiting for a large regional mortgage corporation, based in Atlanta. Later, he became the Chief People Officer of North American Automotive Group. He and his wife, LuAnne have four children and live in Atlanta, Georgia.
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