What Companies Can Learn from Their Biggest Fans

The goal of any corporate leader is to effect behavioral change: to move people to achieve certain outcomes. For employees, those outcomes might include high engagement and performance; for customers, purchasing decisions; and for both, loyalty and advocacy (being willing to recommend working for or doing business with the organization). By those standards, leaders today are struggling. 

Faced with this landscape, what can leaders do to generate sustainable high performance, loyalty, and resilience from their people and genuine commitment from their customers? And what critical capability must leaders develop to stop the drift and instead lift their teams and their customers up into a world that’s more productive for all?

Most leaders, the author believes, are looking for answers in the wrong place. There’s a deeply held management belief that the key to growth is fixing what’s broken. But for more than 25 years my research has found that the opposite is true: Focusing on improving deficiencies produces compliance at best—and disengagement at worst. In reality, people and organizations grow by building on their strengths.

To truly move people toward positive outcomes, leaders must pay attention to what the author calls “extreme positive experiences”—which make employees speak with genuine passion about their work and customers not just prefer but love a product or service—and then operationalize what’s working in those experiences.

The Power of Extreme Positives.  Decades of research show that extreme positive experiences are very different from mediocre ones. That’s why you can’t achieve them by fixing what’s broken. You must figure out what’s already pulling a small number of people to the very top of the positive-feeling meter—and then design for that deliberately and at scale.  Extreme positives are different.

The author has identified five conditions that give rise to extremely positive feelings. As a leader looking to change behavior, you must figure out how to create experiences that meet these conditions.

1. Control.  Research on perceived control and self-efficacy shows that without clarity and choice, people will not love an experience—even if the other four conditions are met. Many leaders miss this. They try to build connection or personalization without first answering the unspoken question that every person brings to a new experience: “What is this, and how should I engage with it?”
2. Harmony.  According to research on psychological safety, people will not take interpersonal risks or challenge themselves unless they first feel emotionally secure. Experiences that people love meet them where they are before asking them to move somewhere else. Creating a feeling of harmony requires answering each person’s unspoken question,“Do you know what I am feeling, and do you care?”
3. Significance.  Significance is the feeling that our own preferences, talents, histories, and quirks—our stories—matter. Research on personalization by Axel Honneth and on what Morris Rosenberg and B.C. McCullough first labeled “mattering” finds that people engage with experiences more deeply when they feel known. To design for significance you must address the question, “Do you know my story, and do you care?”
4. Warmth.  Humans perform best when they feel supported; not lonely. (Dare I say it? When they feel loved.) So to design love in, you must answer your employee’s or customer’s question: “Who is with me, and how can they help?”
5. Growth.  Finally, humans bond to experiences that make them bigger—more skilled, more elevated. When people feel more capable at the end of an experience than at the start, they remain connected to the people or organization that helped them get there.

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