Knowledge is power and enthusiasm pulls the switch.

—Steve Droke

Several years ago I was asked to work with a toxic and high-conflict leadership team ranked at the bottom of an organization's metrics for engagement. We used the Clifton Strengthsfinder assessment and CoreClarity¹ to provide a framework for the team to better understand themselves and one another and to identify the natural areas of friction.

I would be doing all of that over a four-day workshop, and I only had two days of material. This looked like it would be a tough and hostile group. I barely finished my introduction when a hard-nosed engineer to my left said, “So they think we need someone like you to fix us? Good luck.”

This group was not eager, willing, or cooperative when I opened the session. I knew the aggregate talents of the individuals and understood where the group drew both positive and negative energy. Their top two Strengthsfinder talents were Deliberative and Analytical. Both talents are energized by questioning and often killing new ideas. They saw new and untested ideas as risky. And to them “team building” was anecdotal at best, and manipulation at worst.

I asked, “How many of you think we are about to engage in fuzzy-wuzzy, horoscopy, psychobabble BS?” Twelve out of 19 participants raised their hands. I promised them, “If I don't have your attention by noon, then I will shut this down.” By mid-morning we had reset expectations and created interest.

Except for Bob.

The team sat around a large U-shaped table in the center of the room. I like that configuration because it allows me to engage them from the middle of the U, getting up close to everyone. Bob sat at my far right-hand corner, arms folded and head down. He struck me as a “C.A.V.E. Dweller: Consistently Against Virtually Everything” (see Figure 15.1).

I tried every trick I knew to engage Bob, including walking right up to him and getting inside his personal space. He did not budge and he was not asleep. Although the morning went fairly well, Bob's disengagement frustrated me.

When we broke for lunch, Jim Osterhaus, a colleague and a clinical psychologist, and I invited Bob to go to lunch with us. He accepted. I had one agenda and that was to find out what might unlock Bob's participation.

When we sat down, I said, “Bob, what do you get to do during the week that taps into your talents and energizes you?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay, what do you do after work that taps your talents? What do you enjoy?”

“Nothing.”

“Wow, Bob, how long has this been going on?”

“Twenty-five years. I hate my job and I hate the people I work with!”

I was definitely in over my head at this point and a bit desperate to find a way out; we still had forty-five minutes of lunchtime.

“Bob, I have just one question. What does this look like in five years if nothing changes? Health? Happiness? Career?”

Bob dropped his head and shook it as if saying, “I don't know.”

Fortunately Jim was able to rescue me and shift our conversation.

When we got back to the workshop I was still a bit shell-shocked. We didn't see much of a change in Bob's demeanor over the next three days.

Three months later I returned for a second phase of the training. Bob was one of the first people I saw. He smiled and said, “Good to see you.” During the training he was active and engaged. On the second day, Bob stood up after one of the exercises and blurted out, in tears, “This is the best place I've ever worked, I love you guys!” About half the people in the room and I all lost our composure. At the break I went over to his supervisor and asked, “Dave, what just happened?”

Dave told the story, “After you and Jim had lunch with Bob three months ago he asked if he could talk. He said he finally understood why every day was so hard, why he always felt like he was always swimming against the current. He saw that his talents were completely constrained in his role. He could just barely make it through a day. I was able to see it, too, after the training. So we redesigned his role to tap into his strong analytical and creative talents. He's like a new guy.”

Ninety days from being a C.A.V.E. dweller to an engaged, happy, considerate, and productive team member. Most C.A.V.E dwellers are good people, but locked into roles that do not tap into their strengths.

Imagine something you just hate to do; in fact, just the thought of it drains your energy. Now imagine that you are stuck in a job that has you doing what you hate all day, every day.

At first it would feel difficult and frustrating. You would be emotionally drained by the end of the day. Your work would never receive any recognition at all. Finally, you would work under great stress and pressure. In order to cope, you would mentally check out and survive by simply going through the motions. Over time your attitude would go from disengaged to angry. Finally, you reach the C.A.V.E. dweller stage and rage against the machine.

Now, imagine your favorite activity, relationship, place, or topic. Remember a time when you were so absorbed that you lost track of time. That experience was an example of flow.² Imagine having the opportunity to do what you naturally do best, and to do that every day.

The Gallup Organization's Brandon Busteed wonders why “. . . instead of using a strengths-based approach in education, we have created a system that approaches everything through a deficit-based lens: what's wrong with students, what they don't know, and how ineffective teachers are, for example.”

I wonder that too.

Do you think that utilizing strengths might have application in learning? What would happen if we unlocked the natural curiosity of students? What if we could determine each student's strengths and release him or her to do that every day? What if teachers and students could develop life and learning skills through these unique abilities? To look further into these questions, let's look at the story of Del Norte (Colorado) Middle School.

“Mrs. B! I Have Talents!”

Candace Fitzpatrick is the founder of CoreClarity, the system I used for Bob's team. Her sister Terry was the Bully Prevention Coordinator for the Colorado Trust (a foundation dedicated to the health of Coloradoans). She was naturally familiar with Candace's program and wanted to test it with one of the state's at-risk schools. Terry picked Del Norte Middle School, in a low-income community. The school was also on academic watch and in jeopardy of being taken over by the state.

All of the teachers were interviewed for the pilot project. And they all took Gallup's Strengthsfinder assessment. Candace and her team provided a two-day summer workshop with the whole staff and teachers. Denise Benevides, a sixth-grade teacher, was selected as the school's lead for the experiment. The teachers held a parents' night to explain the vision and process. The parents were told that the experiment would focus on their child's strengths and talents, on what is already right about them, not what needs to be fixed. These parents usually heard the opposite about their kids. The proposed pilot received 100 percent buy-in from the parents.

All of the kids took Gallup's Strengths Explorer assessment, specially designed for 11- to 14-year-olds (the same assessment Lisa and I used with Caleb in our decision to homeschool him). Denise said it was an eye-opener.

“When Nicholas came to school after taking the assessment he could hardly wait to tell me the news. ‘Mrs. B, Mrs. B, I have talents, it's not blank!’ ”

While Denise rejoiced for Nicholas, she also knew the harsh reality of the world that he and the other kids go home to. It's the same story so often repeated, “. . . stuck in what they know, experience, and are surrounded by . . . These kids have grown up with a victim mindset. They are told over and over they don't have a chance. We send a message that they are less and so we expect them to do less.”

The class went through team-building and personal growth training for 40 minutes at the end of each day. Teachers experimented with different groupings. They discovered that putting kids together with others with the same or similar talents was not as effective as putting them together with students with different and even colliding talents.

The kids quickly incorporated the language into their everyday work. “Mrs. B, I forgot my homework, I need an Organizer, I'm not an Organizer.” And so this student was paired up with another who had the Organizer talent.

They also found that the new language, the different kinds of groupings, and the active learning model broke down cliques. Instead, these practices created a common, inclusive foundation where everyone fit it.

The experiment produced successful results and exceeded expectations. The school had the best attendance in the district, bullying dropped dramatically, and test scores improved to a level that Governor Ritter recognized the class publically. In one year, Del Norte Middle School went from academic watch to recognition for achievement.

Denise's biggest surprise was how the community bonded through a common language, common mission, and common journey. They became Mrs. B's tribe. But, despite the success, after three years the funding was discontinued.

Positive Psychology

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.

—Bertolt Brecht

According to Dr. Amit Sood, Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Chair of the Mayo Mind-Body Initiative, our minds have a negativity bias. The police car we drive by catches our attention and raises our pulse but the red Toyota is invisible. This conditioning, however, is reversible and part of the path to building emotional health.

Dr. Sood's research at the Mayo clinic found (among other things) that the brain is restless. It easily gets bored; the mind wanders. We all know the experience of doing a simple chore as our mind drifts away from the task at hand. While trying to read a book, especially in the evening, I can “read” several pages before I stop, realizing I cannot remember what I had just read. I developed my hobby of simple cartooning during boring classes in school. Mind wandering also happens after something we learn becomes habit, like driving a car. This is the brain's default mode; it's a little scary to know that it makes up from 50 to 80 percent of our thoughts!

Two-thirds of this kind of mind wandering travels into emotionally negative territory. Excessive mind wandering is often related to depression. It is easy to see how kids can mentally check out of a class that is content heavy unless they are kept engaged through active learning.

That is why more schools are moving to active learning models like Project-Based Learning, EdTech, and Expeditionary Learning. They can see the difference in engagement levels and how that leads to mastering the material. These approaches are physically and socially engaging whereas lectures quickly become routine, boring, and fatiguing.

Traditional classroom lecture-style teaching (see Figure 15.2) also falls victim to what Dr. Sood calls hedonic habituation. This is the experience, for example, of being served your favorite dessert. The first bite is wonderful, the second is good, the third is okay, and by the fourth and fifth bites the magic is gone. Kids experience the same habituation in schools that follow a structured routine. The first week of school is fresh, novel, and engaging. By the second and third week the combination of routine, sitting in rows of desks, in the same seat, and attempting to absorb lectures of content-heavy material sends the brain into unproductive mind-wandering.

Focused attention, engagement, takes place when a person is confronted with novelty, a topic of high interest, or is in a changing dynamic social setting. Even in an engaged mode, and especially in an engaged mode, the brain requires brief periods of rest every hour to 90 minutes. That is because it has no pain fibers and won't send a signal when you are overworking it. These rest habits can be learned just like practicing a backhand in tennis, learning arpeggios in music, or following the breath in Yoga. The operating principle is intentionality versus default mode. As we saw in Chapter 11, the Momentous Institute provides an example of integrated intentionality throughout the school schedule, building design, the instruction, child and staff interactions, and is extended to families. Their holistic approach is the result of applying 90 years of therapy and brain science. They recognize that every moment and interaction through the child's day is a learning experience. The more those encounters can happen with intentionality, the deeper and more permanent is their learning.

This means that rest must also be done with intentionality. Dr. Sood recommends that a break can be from 10 to 15 minutes in a relaxed posture and by shifting the mind to positive and motivating thoughts.

“What Do Successful and Happy People Do Differently?”

Dr. Donald Clifton developed the Strengthsfinder assessment, a tool for identifying your strongest natural talents and areas of interest. It was the fruit of over 50 years of research.

Positive psychology is the scientific study of human flourishing, and an applied approach to optimal functioning. It has also been defined as the study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals, communities, and organizations to thrive.³

While in college during the 1950s he asked a different question. “What do successful and happy people do differently?” After 50 years of research and more than 2 million interviews, in 1989 he and a team of Gallup scientists created an assessment that identified 34 talent themes that consistently surfaced in happy and successful people.

The research also found that these people focused more of their energy on “playing to their strengths.” This strategy yields much greater growth, satisfaction, and success than attempting to fix areas of weakness. Conversely, they found that people who put great effort into trying to improve secondary talents found it difficult and stressful to make marginal improvements, especially ones that could not be sustained. This is a profound insight that seems to go counter to our practice and experience with others.

While he was with Gallup, Marcus Buckingham used to ask parents if their child brought home grades with three “A's” a “C,” and an “F,” which grades they would focus on. Seventy-six percent picked the “F.” Six percent claimed they would focus on the “A's.” I've asked the same question in my workshops. From 4,000 people I've met only two who said they would focus on the “A.”

When I grew up it did not take an “F” to get a third-degree interrogation from my six-foot-two, World War II veteran father. When I was in eighth grade I was all of four-foot-eight, 83 pounds, and still had a high squeaky voice. The eighth grade was my bonehead year of growing up. I can remember my dad standing over me in the kitchen with my opened report card; he pressed his finger on one of the grades and asked, “What happened here?”

Of course, I froze. I mumbled the universal deer in the headlights answer, “I don't know.”

During a workshop in Atlanta I shared the research and my story. The next day Pete, one of the directors asked to share. He said, “I'm that dad who gives his child the third degree. I got a call from my 17-year-old son yesterday afternoon during the workshop. We've been having a tough time. So when he said, ‘Dad, when you get home we need to talk,’ I knew what that meant, because semester grades were just issued.”

Pete went on to say that when his son began to share the grades he went right to one of the low grades and began to apologize.

“I stopped my son and asked if I could see the card. He had several A's, so I asked about those. I know it surprised him. We then talked about all kinds of stuff for close to two hours.”

Then, in tears, Pete told all of us, “I can't remember the last time I had a two-hour conversation with my son.”

Three Stanford researchers looked at group hedonic balance and at team performance.⁴ Hedonic balance is the ratio of positive to negative interactions. They found that a ratio of five positive to one negative produced superior performance and that a single factor could explain a 35 percent variance in performance. This, coincidentally, is the same ratio recommended for healthy marriages.

The NIH conducted research in 2014 on the long-term health effects of a positive hedonic balance in marriage. They concluded, “Evidence is accruing that positive emotions play a crucial role in shaping a healthy interpersonal climate.”⁵

The research is clear. By focusing on what people do naturally well, they flourish and perform. However, that is not our natural tendency. Remember Dr. Sood's statement that our brains have a built-in negativity bias. Our institutional structures reinforce finding the flaw, fixing the weakness. And, of course, high-stakes testing and punitive accountability push the problem into the zone of emotional stress, anxiety, and even depression. And, according to Dr. Cozolino, “The brain shuts down neural plasticity at very low levels of arousal to conserve energy and at high levels of arousal to divert energy toward immediate survival.”⁶

The work in the field of positive psychology has reached a critical mass of both depth, breadth, and accessibility.

Posttraumatic Strength Syndrome

Dr. Seligman has picked up the mantle from Dr. Clifton as the “father” of positive psychology. His several books and array of free online assessments provide a comprehensive and accessible resource. His particular work with the U.S. Army stands out in our research. The Army contracted Dr. Seligman to tackle the problem of veterans returning from war with Posttraumatic Stress Syndrome. In the tradition of Dr. Clifton he looked for those who actually became stronger through the trauma. He called this ability, “Posttraumatic Strength Syndrome.” In his book Flourish, Seligman recaps their research and the intervention training they implemented with the acronym PERMA: purpose, engagement, relationship, meaning, and achievement.

My firm has been working with these tools and integrating them into organizations since 2006. We have trained more than 8,000 people during that time and used the tool for personal development and coaching, team building, crises resolution, high-stakes negotiations, role development, team design, and shaping or shifting culture.

The ability to shift or shape culture in positive ways and create tribal identity such as Mrs. B and Linda Anderson have accomplished using the tool is a large untapped opportunity that is within anyone's reach.

The Cost of Disengaged Teachers

According to Brandon Busteed at Gallup, “Teachers are dead last among all professions Gallup studied in saying their ‘opinions count’ at work and their ‘supervisors create an open and trusting environment.’”

Gallup's 2015 survey on teacher engagement shows that 7 out of 10 teachers are disengaged.⁷ If you had an average sampling of 10 teachers rowing in a boat together you would find 3 at the front actively rowing, in harmony, and happy in their work. There would be 5 in the middle of the boat, also happy, but for different reasons. They are watching, not rowing. They will row, with a good attitude, if someone tells them what to do, how to do it, and follows up to make sure they actually did it. I've come to call the middle-of-the-boat teachers The Managed. In the back of the boat there are 2 teachers that I've labeled the Toxic 20 Percent. They are drilling a hole in the boat and draining the motivation out of those around them (Figure 15.3).

The Toxic 20 Percent—remember, the C.A.V.E. Dweller, “Consistently against Virtually Everything?—are often burned-out teachers who are simply not able to do what they do best. Dr. Cozolino notes that, “Teachers don't burn out from working hard; they burn out because they are frustrated, unappreciated, or hopeless about making a difference.”

Sandcastles

One of the major engagement killers develops when detached leadership makes decisions without understanding who is affected and how. I call this the Undercover Boss dilemma. Undercover Boss is a reality television show that sends the boss out in disguise to do frontline work. The storyline typically depicts a boss who thinks they are making good decisions for their employees, but once they are in the field, he or she discovers that they had little or no awareness of how tough the job actually is and how difficult many of those detached decisions are for their frontline employees.

So many of the innovative, caring, committed, engaging teachers who are working heroically on the front lines feel like they get the rug pulled out from them when promising programs are killed before they can be fully implemented. One reason these programs succeed is because of the blood, sweat, and tears willingly offered by administrators and teachers. Many go to sacrificial lengths just to have the opportunity to make a difference.

These often-heroic efforts end up as “Sandcastles”: they take a lot of effort and look wonderful until the tide of new leadership, new agendas, and new budgets washes them away.

For example, when a chronically low-performing school was reconstituted in Texas, its principal and at least half of its teachers were reassigned to other schools. Of course, that meant a new principal and new teachers were brought in from other schools throughout the district. You can imagine the damage to the culture and continuity. But teachers and principals had no voice in the matter. The Education Machine only operates with a mandate and a formula; it cannot care or even think.

Of course, such a structure and approach increases disengagement and burn-out. Could that be why 70 percent of teachers and administrators would rather be anywhere but in their school? And why are so few even asking about the effects of disengagement and burn-out on the students they are supposed to help? Dr. Cozolino emphasizes, “A demoralized or burned-out teacher cannot be a positive guide or a model of heroism.”⁸

Disengaged Teachers Reproduce

The drop in student engagement for each year students are in school is our monumental, collective national failure.

—Gallup

In his book Out of Our Minds, Sir Ken Robinson passionately argues that schools are killing the creativity in our kids at a time when creativity and innovation are crucial for business and society. He cites a famous NASA study on creativity that revealed:

• At five years of age, 98 percent of the kids tested at genius levels.
• By age 10 it had dropped to 32 percent.
• The genius level dropped to 12 percent by age 15.
• By the time we get through school and into work there is virtually no creativity left in us. Adults tested at genius levels of 2 percent.

Gallup's annual 2013 engagement survey tracks the steep decline in levels of student engagement as they progress through the Education Machine. In the fifth grade 80 percent of students are engaged. By eighth grade it is 60 percent; by graduation it has dropped to 40 percent.⁹

Common Traits of Engaged Learning Environments

In our work across the nation, we identified eight common traits evident in highly engaged learning environments.

1. They created close-knit tribal communities, thereby providing a safe, positive, and personalized learning environment.
2. They provided hands-on active learning activities and environments.
3. Teachers embraced their new roles as learning experience designers and learning facilitators.
4. Several of the schools include multiage classrooms and kids with learning differences within an atmosphere of acceptance and mutual support. It was marvelous to see and hear directly from the kids what they valued from an inclusive classroom experience.
5. Each school had a central philosophy that built on kid's strengths. Teachers were trained to focus on bright spots instead of an emphasis on where their students fall short. Two schools, Birdville and Del Norte, took this to the next level, using assessment tools to better understand each child's unique mix of talents.
6. The curriculum was designed to use relevant and often local topics and issues.
7. All used a variation of a “maker” approach to learning. They required students to design and produce content integrating several modes of learning; research, team dynamics, prototyping, testing, analysis, complex problem solving, script writing, videography, design, lab testing, production, and presentation.
8. The Momentous Institute, Joy School, Shelton, and DaVerse Lounge succeed by creating a holistic experience of social and emotional learning: they apply brain science in practical and accessible ways to the teaching of at-risk and traumatized kids.

The common threads in all of these approaches include student-centered, active social learning in tribal classrooms, affirming environments, and a culture of engagement.

In the past two decades leading change has gone from a specialized course in management to a necessary skill for a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. The successful change leaders we met all focus on the power of the positive as their starting point. In the next chapter you will see why they also take a very intentional approach to building a positive and healthy culture. They know that this is what empowers new strategies and supports deep changes. The fact that most leaders still don't approach change in this manner explains why more than 80 percent of change initiatives fail. It also explains why this next chapter may be the most important one that you will read.