#74

Solving the riddle to achieve engagement at work and life with Joe Mechlinski

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Joe Mechlinski is a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and social entrepreneur who believes that an engaged workforce is the key to unlocking human potential. Driven by his deep-rooted passion for building mission-driven cultures, Joe founded SHIFT, a collective of businesses spanning consulting, executive membership, and venture capitalism united by their common mission to revolutionize workforce engagement  His latest book, ‘Shift The Work’, focuses on this very idea. Filled with actionable strategies and inspiring true stories, the book reveals the revolutionary science behind employee engagement and how readers can     transform their workplaces and lives, for the better.

Summary

03:05 Influences from Joe’s upbringing

• The mother of Joe’s dad married five times – twice to the same man Mechlinski
• Joe’s family is originally from Kildare, Ireland
• Brought up in a blue-collar, tough neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, USA

08:10 Why Joe turned down a job offer at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) straight after college

• Joe took inspiration from the book ‘The Road Not Taken’ by David Orr, which is about Robert Frost’s poem, on the possibilities that lie between all of our choices
• He couldn’t ‘fit’ into the traditional narrative of society
• Through Joe’s experiences of grief and loss, he felt like he owed the people he knew

14:01 The mission behind his company SHIFT

• Joe received a flyer during his freshman year at Hopkins
• He wasn’t making enough during the summer, and the flyer advertised that you could make $10,000 over the summer and receive college credits – it was to learn how to run a small contracting company
• Joe had equated from his childhood that money equals choice
• Emotional Intelligence was just starting to hit the marketplace
• “If you can transform your way of work, you can transform your life”

22:02 What stops people from following through their innate pull towards something?

• The will to change and the fear of change are pretty constant for all of us
• Leaving the status quo is tough
• The average child asks 125 questions a day and the average adult asks six
• It’s not about teaching people to do things, it’s about modeling what you do

26:32 The effect each of our three ‘brains’ has on us

• According to Joe, our three brains are head, heart and gut
• Our brain is the biggest neuronetwork influenced by our perception of reality
• Our heart has 40 million neurons and generates our emotional responses
• The gut has a hundred million neurons – which tells your body to fight or fly
• We often sedate and numb ourselves through distractions, ignoring what our three brains are telling us

32:05 The vagus nerve

• Dr Douglas Brackmann talks about the vagus nerve, specifically the dorsal vagal nerve, which responds to cues of danger
• You can retrain the parasympathetic nervous system through this nerve

35:09 How Joe first reacted to the stats that 70% of American think they aren’t good at their jobs

• It was one of his motivations to run SHIFT
• You can’t force people to do what they don’t want to do
• “You want your team to care about your business”

39:00 How to find meaning in your work if you feel something is lacking

• Ask yourself the reset question “was that worth my life?”
• The 25 Reasons Why exercise: “why are you doing what you want/ don’t want to do?”

46:20 How improving your work life can improve your entire life

• “The way we do anything is the way we do everything”
• Like our phones, we are always in need of upgrades and updates, so make time for this

52:16 Why are not all companies following the lead of companies like Google that are willing to give their employees greater autonomy?

• The Big Tech companies did this to attract great talent
• Trust the consumer
• How you treat your clients is how you should treat your employees
• Not all organizations have changed because they are used to their old habits, e.g. “we’ve always done it this way”

59:47 The state of work in 2023/ 2024

• Stop listening to people’s predictions of the future
• We need to acknowledge some macro trends
• Ownership will be reevaluated (e.g. ownership of homes, cars, etc.)
• There is a greater need for upskilling

01:04:55 Could a decrease in profits impact the level of autonomy a company gives to its employees?

• There will be a new overall perspective as the boomer generation are retiring from work

01:07:51 Why Joe is so curiously-minded

• Joe has always believed that you can find an answer to anything
• He is a voracious reader

Links Mentioned:

• ‘Shift The Work’ by Joe Mechlinski
• ‘The Road Not Taken’ by David Orr
• The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
• ‘Driven’ by by Douglas Brackmann and Randy Kelley
• ‘Start With Why’ by Simon Sinek
• ‘The Top Five Regrets of the Dying’ by Bronnie Ware
• ‘Reinventing Organizations’ by Frédéric Laloux
• ‘The Second Mountain’ by David Brooks