The 5 Languages of Appreciation to Build A High-Performing Team

We wrote another book that came out of this lecture. It's called Making Things Right at Work, and it's about conflict at work.

One of the concepts about trust and rebuilding trust is it's three Cs. First of all, it's situation-specific.
You don't just trust people who don't. I mean, you can trust me to take you to the airport, but you shouldn't trust me to fix your car because I can't do that, right? So three Cs.
One is competence. You have the ability to do stuff.
Secondly is consistency.

You show up.

Is your quality of the work the same or does it vary a lot? Do you get your work done on time? All that. And the third is character.
And that has to do with taking into consideration the other person's needs and desires, that you're not just totally self-focused, right? And it takes all three. It's sort of like a three-legged stool.
If you only have two, it falls apart. But you're right.
I mean, people need to know that you're

thinking about them as well as the company. It's not instead of, but it's as well as the company

and your own needs too. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week,

Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing,

sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.
All right, let's go. Dr.
Paul White, he's the author of Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, which I really love this book. He's an expert in human resources, management, work culture, and coaching.
He's based out of Wichita, Kansas. And Dr.
Paul White is a psychologist and a bestselling author, selling around more than 600,000 copies. He is the president of Appreciation at Work.
He's also the author of The Vibrant Workplace and co-author of The Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace with Dr. Gary Chapman.
Dr. White, it's a pleasure to have you here today.
Sure, that's fine. You can call me Paul.
Paul, how's your day going? Good. Been a good day.
Got a lot done. So, you know, there's appreciation, quality time, acts of service, tangible gifts, physical touch.
And I've always loved just the concept of how people like to be appreciated. And as we were talking before we got started, it's a weird workforce out there.
A lot of people are remote, really just showing people that you still care. You can never do it too much and growing culture.
And some people think culture is a bad word, but I think it's so important to keep people happy because turnover costs a lot and then helping them help their dreams come true is so important. You know, why don't you tell us, you've been working in this industry for a long time, helping countless businesses, agencies, families, leaders have more positive and healthy relationships.
Can you just tell us a little bit about you, your history, and what you're experiencing in this new workforce? Sure. Yeah.
So probably the most direct relevance is I grew up in the context of a family-owned business outside of Kansas City. And that's sort of how I got back into sort of the world of work.
I'm a psychologist. I was trained to work with kids and adolescents and families, which I did.
Midway through my career, some friends that were business consultants contacted me because they kept running into family issues because 85% of all the companies in the U.S. are family-owned, as are, I'm sure, most of your audience.
And so I actually traveled around the country and worked with family businesses, dealing with the family side of things, especially around working together and then business succession planning. Who's going to manage this? Who's going to own it and all that? And so in the midst of that, I was working with a big highway construction company in North Carolina and talking to the dad.
I said, you know, how's your plan going? He said, it's going fine. My son's stepping up.
I think it's going to work. I walked across the hall and asked the son the same question.
He says, this is a disaster. It's never going to work.
I can't ever please my dad. And so my wife and I were reading The Five Love Languages by Dr.
Chapman, which is a great book for any kind of personal relationship. And I thought, you know, I wonder if this could work in work-based relationships.
So I pursued Dr. Chapman for a year, finally got through to him and pitched the idea and developed our online assessment, which 350,000 people have taken now and developed some training materials for companies to be able to use internally so you don't have to pay somebody coming to do it and then wrote the book together and it's sort of gone from there.
And so I'm thankful that it seems like we're meeting the need in a helpful way. You know, I read a crazy stat that 83% of the workforce would accept another opportunity.
It doesn't mean they're actively looking, but they're not exactly the happiest at their current environment.

And I think it has a lot to do with how they're treated. It's not the same as it used to be with my grandpa and my dad of just, I work hard and you pay me more over the years.
Now I want to feel appreciated. I want to feel part of the big picture.
I need to know what my career path lies ahead. Some interesting research just came out.
MIT Sloan School of Business came out and found that a company's culture was three times more accurate in predicting whether somebody was going to leave than compensation. And you and I were talking, culture sort of has a bad taste for some people.
I understand culture is just the accumulation of hundreds and thousands of individual interactions. It's how people treat one another, both individually and in groups.
And you can have a sort of an outgoing culture. You can have a quiet culture.
You can have assertive culture, really competitive, more passive, all different kinds of things. And in fact, I mean, one study showed that 79% of the people who leave a job voluntarily cite a lack of appreciation as one of the key factors for them leaving more than money.
And I'm a business guy. I got a staff.
And when I first saw them, I'm like, is this, could this be true? And I mean, the research just keeps showing. And it's not like you have to pat everybody on the back every day or, you know, through a party because somebody showed up.
I mean, that's not the deal. But what we found is that, you know, people feel appreciated and valued in different ways.
And if you communicate it in the way that's meaningful to them, it doesn't take a whole lot, you know, whether it's a little bit of time, if if somebody values catching their supervisor and asking some questions or getting input, five, 10 minutes, and boom, they feel like, okay, time is a valuable resource and they invested that means, so then they're good to go. For other people, it's words.
One of the things I tell leaders is of the 350,000 people have taken it, less than half choose words as their main language of appreciation. So if you only use words, you're missing at least half of your team from the get go.
And so you've got to learn these, you know, how other people desire to feel appreciated. Yeah, it's interesting that some people bring people to the top of the, you know, front of the room and acknowledge them and give them a trophy.
Other people, just a hug or just how are you doing? It's just a nice letter. And understanding how people like to be communicated.
I think the hard part for a lot of us is we've heard about this, then we've heard about all kinds of personality profiling and never really do we discuss though how people like to be acknowledged. And I think understanding some people are very assertive and some people are not.
And how you deal with them might not be the same way another person. And usually in home service, especially where it's one size fits all.
So your leaders need to know that 40 percent of the population don't like to be recognized in front of a big group.

So if you have a big annual meeting and say, hey, Bob, come up and we want to tell you,

four out of 10 people are going to not like that.

It's not that big a deal.

It's like actively don't want to go there.

So you're not really hitting the mark and create some negative.

I think those are crazy stats.

And it's interesting to know this. You does the workplace become toxic overall? So when this first came, it's been about 12 years ago when this came out and I was going out speaking and training and breaks.
And afterwards, people come up and tell me stories about how nasty the workplace was or what a jerk their boss was. And so I wound up doing research on toxic workplaces and found that really there's sort of three main parts of a toxic workplace.

First of all, it's got a sick system, meaning communication sucks.

It's not direct.

People aren't honest.

They go around their supervisor to ask somebody to think they're going to get the answer they

want, that there's not really accountability for getting work done. And so you can slide.
Secondly, you got a toxic leader and a toxic leader. I mean, there's, you know, not good leaders and there's sort of incompetent, but toxic leaders are people that they're all about themselves.
Everything feeds them. And so they use people, They manipulate people.
You use them and throw them away. I mean, they withhold information.
And toxic leaders, they don't have to be at the top. I mean, you can have a toxic supervisor, right, or a manager, a director, whatever.
So they make lots of problems because people don't want to work for them. And then the third part is a dysfunctional colleague.
And a dysfunctional colleague,al colleague, there's different characteristics, but basically, they're really good at making excuses and blaming, not falling through on stuff, creating conflicts between other people, and feel entitled like they've been there for six months, so they should be promoted to supervisor even though they don't do anything. all of us organizations have some part of this, but if you have those combined band, it's going to be a nasty place to work because you're not going to get the truth.
You're going to feel like you've always got to watch your back and or rescue other people all the time. And it just doesn't work well.
Yeah, I think there's at a certain size company, you're going to fill some of that no matter what. I mean, there's some dysfunctions of a team that just are inevitable.
Some people care about their team within the company more than they care about the whole of the company. And it's a blame game.
Right. And especially when you include family, because then it's like, oh, wow.
That's tricky. Yeah.
What are some systems that home service business owners can do to just ensure that they're in a healthy working environment? So as far as systems, I mean, one is, man, I just tell people, you've got to set up direct communication that don't let somebody go around or send sort of a hidden message or whatever, and just set up that, you know, you say what you mean and you can disagree, that's fine. But if people are sort of always going around, it just creates craziness.
That plus, if you just set up a system where people have clear roles and responsibilities, they report to a singular person. The systems that are the worst, hospitals, colleges, government agencies, public schools, the team members are reporting to multiple people.
So if you're in, you know, I don't know, you're a nurse and you got a charge nurse, but you're in the cancer ward and you work with kids and you got three, it's just crazy making. So one of the best things you can do is make sure that each person has an individual.
They're going to have interactions with others, but as far as really reporting to and being responsible to one person, that will help a whole bunch. If you start with those two, you're on a healthy path.
A long time ago, I was reading this book by Darren Hardy about basically he was looking for the perfect female partner. And he wrote down a hundred attributes that he would want in this woman.
And he read the list and he said, holy crap, there's no way I could get this woman. So exactly.
He wrote down a hundred attributes that he would need to become to deserve someone like this. And when I read that, I wrote down, I didn't get to a hundred, but I wrote down a lot of things that I needed to become that I'm never going to hit the place that I'm comfortable.
I don't think it's always trying to become better, but a lot of it is communication and just knowing that we have their back and we're, we're looking after their goals and their dreams. I want the company to do better.
You know, it's like, look, how could I help your dreams come true? And what's in it for you when we work together? And I think there needs to be a lot more of that in the workforce. Yeah, you're actually talking about, and we wrote another book that came out of this lecture.
It's called Making Things Right at Work. And it's about conflict at work.
And one of the concepts about trust and rebuilding trust is it's three C's. First of all, it's situation specific.
You don't just trust people or don't. I mean, you can trust me to take you to the airport, but you shouldn't trust me to fix your car because I can't do that.
Right. So three C's.
One is competence. You have the ability to do stuff.
Secondly is consistency. You show up.
Is your quality of the work the same or does it vary a lot? Do you get your work done on time? All that. And the third is character.
And that has to do with taking into consideration the other person's needs and desires that you're not just totally self-focused, right? And it takes all three. It's sort of like a three-legged stool.
If you only have two, it falls apart. But you're right.
I mean, people need to know that you're thinking about them as well as the company. It's not instead of, but it's as well as the company and your own needs too.
So you said that in the order here, and we have the words of affirmation are probably the most, but physical touch, tangible gifts, access, service, quality time. Where's the pecking order of what you guys have seen? So words of affirmation, which is just using words, whether it's written or spoken, that affirm the value of the person, what they're doing that's good, characteristics that you see, they're dependable, they're cheerful, whatever.
It's 46% of the population. So it's a big group.
I mean, if you don't know, that's the best guess, right? Quality time is the second one that's 26%, so about one out of four people.. And quality time breaks into two groups.
There's some people, sort of the mid to older employees, it was like time with your supervisor. For younger employees, they don't give a rip about that, really.
It's about colleagues. They want to do stuff with their peers and stuff.
So the type of time is important. Acts of service is about 21%, one of that every five.

And that's not rescuing a low-performing colleague.

It's more when you're jammed and you're working hard to get something done on time,

what's something you can do to help out, right?

It's like either you can delegate part of it to them or they can do some clerical work

so you can keep focused on the big deal or they manage your emails and calls for a while so you can stay focused. And for these people, I mean, I had one CEO, he said, my language is get her done.
You know, don't tell me stuff. Don't give me stuff if I know you're helping me out.
And so words don't get it for active service people. You can waste your time on that.
Tangible gifts, it's not raises, bonuses. That's between employer and employee.
It's really just small things that show you're going to know your colleague, your team member. So it could be their favorite cup of coffee, a snack that they like.
It could be a magazine about their favorite sports team or if they're going to do a garden or coach soccer for their kids and stuff that shows that you're getting to know them. Because our deal is appreciation is about the person.
We believe that employees, team members are people. And I think COVID and the pandemic pointed this out, when our lives are screwed up, it affects work.
And so if we understand that people are not just production units, but they're people too, they have needs, they have relationship. Maybe, you know, like a family member that's sick or a teenager that's sort of struggling in school, paying attention to that.
I mean, from a leadership point of view, our culture is really struggling with this of understanding that because big business is really screwed up. People are not just widgets that you put into a formula to figure out how much you can crank out.
And so we just did research with a group of remote employees asking them what they mainly like, what they don't like. Big issue, 56% said they're lonely and miss seeing team members when they work remotely a lot.
And so being able to facilitate relationships, and it's not all about for the supervisor and manager, because that's too heavy a load. I mean, we can't carry all that, but you want to train your team members how to support one another and how to encourage one another.
So the training process that we put together with videos and stuff, it's to teach the team. So it's not just all on the supervisor.
Yeah, that's really interesting. I think COVID caused a lot of us to just close our doors.
We realized that if you're on performance pace, and particularly, you don't really lose a beat, but also you get fatigued, you get lonely, you probably get burnt out when you don't see people in your house all day. A lot of people loved it in the beginning.
And I don't know if they still love it because they miss that getaway time to just drive. And where do you think the future holds as far as remote versus getting people back to work? I think we're settling into an in-between.
Early on, some people were saying, oh, we're going all remote. And people said, no, we're all going back.
And it's in between. I mean, that's where the hybrid thing is because there's some roles that you can do part of your job at home, but part of it, you need to be in the office.
Also, I mean, I've worked with some major corporations, Microsoft and PepsiCo and all that, that they have international virtual teams that have never met each other. And it's not going to work if they don't ever get together in person.
People have, not to get over technical, but there's some new neuroscience coming out that shows what we are. The quality of interaction differs when you're in person versus even video on screen.
There's just an understanding that happens. And so even just like once every six months or whatever it might be to get your team together or at least part of the team together in person and have a meal together, do something together.
It can be a team discussion, but it's going to be critical to continue to do that. The companies that want to just go totally remote, 100%,

they're going to have such,

they might as well just put a revolving door

at the front doors,

what's going to happen,

and which already happened.

There's a lot of buildings here in Phoenix.

There's one with ZipRecruiter.

It's massive, 90,000 square feet.

Two employees are working in there.

Oh, God.

Because they said,

we're having just as good a performance,

but I don't think we've seen the time where this might fizzle out. Yeah, there are a lot of strategies that can work short term.
You can whip people into producing, and it works for three months, six months. But long term, they're not sticking around, or they're going to do some other stuff that gets in the way.

Do you recommend when planning your day that you carve out time for appreciation?

Do you build that into your schedule?

And how do you build that in, especially if you're, well, let's do a leader of a small company, medium and large company.

How much is enough and how do you balance that?

Yeah.

So, again, part of it is that you're not responsible to do it all yourself. Because if you take that on, unless you're really small, it's not going to happen.
And I don't think it's daily. I think within a week, you should do something, whether that's spend some time or help somebody out or get them a little something.
And after a while, it's maybe

every couple of weeks. But the key is to sort of keep your pulse on how people are feeling about communication and responsibility and that they feel valued.
And so I think part of it is like we have on our website, appreciationatwork.com, and it's the word at, not the at sign, but appreciationatwork.com. We have some free things where you can create a poster for your team members who have taken the inventory.
And then we have it in our hallway where you can look and see what people's languages and actions are. So that if you think about it, or even and reminds you, then you can do something.
So part of culture is visual, you know,

our general culture in the US is pretty verbal, but we get reminded by what we see. And so having some posters or symbols or whatever, we even have little symbols that can go on people's emails that says, you know, what their language is.
So it's just having visual reminders are important. And the other part that's easy, if you do it, is to take existing meetings or structure and just add it to it.
You don't need to create another meeting. Just take 10 or 15 minutes of a team meeting and say, hey, what's going well this week? Do you see anything or hear anything positive from somebody? And you just add that to the structure because culture is both structured and spontaneous.
If you just have one, it doesn't work. One of the questions here was some people are in home service.
They're taking Sundays and just saying that's a family day. Some people are switching to a four-day work week versus five.
You know, I have people that prefer working weekends and nights. I think it depends on your size and what you hire for, but what is your thought on that? Yeah.
So interesting. In the survey we did with remote employees, one of the upsides was work-life balance, that they were able to sort of schedule things, you know, maybe lunch with a friend or take their dog for a walk in the middle of the day.
They had that flexibility because they were working from home. The flip side of it is the downside of remote work is that you can work longer hours.
I mean, that was the number four downside that people mentioned. And so it's about life.
You can push hard, you know, career-wise for while I did, I worked too hard, I think. And it, it damaged my physical health.
Some have damaged my family relationships. I'm going to try to rebuild that part of it is just, I'll be straight.
I'm from the Midwest. I just say the way it is.
You know, I think our culture at times has unrealistic expectations about work, that work is supposed to be fun and fulfilling and all this. And hey, I don't know of an entry-level job that is.
They either have bad hours, bad pay, bad circumstances. I mean, you got to pay your dues at some point.
It's not fun. And you try to serve people, and it'll work out over time.
But yeah, I think in our culture more and more, you got to pay attention to who you listen to because there's voices out there that are going to send you a bad direction. Yeah.
I mean, listen, I read the four-hour work week and I don't think it's realistic unless you want this really, I enjoy work as long as I hire for my weaknesses. And I felt like if I hate Mondays, and I don't hate Mondays, I will say that.
I actually enjoy Monday. It's not as great as Saturday.
But I think a lot of people just expect it to be all fun and games. And gamification is a great thing.
But I feel like there's this stigma out there about millennials. Oh, those people will never work as hard.
They always, to be involved. And I've had a very huge success with millennials.

They just, for me, it's way different than baby boomers.

Baby boomers are like, I'll work hard.

And I don't expect to love it.

And this is, hand me more over time.

And see me once a year for my, whatever it might be, my annual review.

And millennials want a lot more feedback.

And I think it's important to give it to them. But if you notice generationally speaking, and there's a lot of baby boomers getting out of the home service in the next couple of years.
Like I guess there's, Oh man, it's a crazy stat. Like 3000 baby boomers retiring each day.
9% of them own a business. So.
Yeah. It's great that you you're having success with millennials.
I think the issue is you talk to and listen to the people that work for you and try to hear what they need and want and do your best to meet that. I think you're successful because you're talking to them, you hear what they want.
You try to be flexible with it. I mean, my team members that are all sort of like Gen X mainly, you know, flexible schedule is huge to them because they've got kids in school and some of them are going to take them to the doctor, yada, yada.
And so we can work around that as long as the work gets done, you know, in a timely way. And so it's really about communication.
It's about treating people as people that they have lives and figuring out how you can meld meeting your customers' needs because that's what a business does in combination with what they desire. So as far as appreciation goes, younger workers value quality time with their peers far more than older employees do.
Interestingly, the oldest, like 16 and above, tangible gifts is the lowest. Generally, it's low in the population, 7%.
For them, it's only 2%. But what do we do with older workers for a number of years served in retirement? We get them some.
They don't want the stuff. They don't need stuff.
They're trying to get rid of stuff. What they want to hear is how their life and effort has made an impact on other people.
So it's not just sort of platitude, you're a good person, but I learned this from you. You demonstrated this and being able to really, most of them, to some degree, at least within a, in front of a team, maybe not big group, but they would like that in front of their colleagues.
Yeah. I had this recruiter that had been around since the early eighties on the podcast.
And she said over 80% of people stay because they made true friends at their workplace outside of doing work. So those are meetups and those are getting to know the families.
And I think that's a huge important part that a lot of us forget, especially in home service. When are you going to go play volleyball and have hot dogs? I mean, we work a lot in home service because garages and plumbing and HVAC and roofing, they all break at the most unexpected times.
How do you create that balance? I mean, it's so hard because we tell people, make sure you pay attention to the numbers, KPIs, important meetings, work on what matters. And then at the same time, try to make it interesting and be good communicators.
Well, it's interesting that the number one pushback when I talk to leaders and managers and even employees about appreciation and say, well, I'm too busy. I don't have enough time to do what I need to do now.
But what we found is that when team members feel valued and appreciated, a lot of the stuff that you're busy with now sort of melts away because when team members feel valued, tardiness goes down, absenteeism goes down, conflict between team members goes down. Customer ratings go up because the team member is talking politely and also getting things done.
And so the things that you have to manage lots of times as a supervisor that really are just crap that you've got to deal with versus helping you deal with your mission, those melt away. And so you're able to focus on your mission.
And if you have good communication and direct communication and following up, then people know they're accountable and they get things done. You don't have to scramble around the last minute because somebody didn't do the job.
So it actually helps the company work well. I sort of use it as an example, like oil in a machine.
A machine without oil, friction, heat, sparks get stuck, right? Appreciation is like the oil that helps make the machine work well and it's effective. I think a lot of times business owners, and you know, not every business owner, but they start out in a small business.
They're able to show up. They're able to be there.
They're able to sometimes go to just a ballgame with people. And things start to change.
I can't imagine like Jack Welch or Elon Musk trying to show people. But that's when you said the supervisor's got to have it too.
But what's the best way to build the foundation from the get-go of a smaller company to be able to get to that point? You know, we work with everything from small to huge, all different kinds of industries, John Deere, Caterpillar, ExxonMobil, you know, schools, medical. And what we found is that you start small with somebody that's sort of interested.
I mean, you find sort of like a little bit of a cheerleader or a champion that sort of likes this stuff and is willing to do it with their team. We did this with Miller Course.
We found one, one did a thing for like 35 young managers that were from across the country. And I don't know, four or five of them sort of interested in it.
They started doing with their team. And it wound up going across the whole organization because you start small, you learn about it, figure out, okay, how's this work in our culture? And then sort of like peer, positive peer pressure.
It's like, well, hey, why do they get to do that? And we don't get to do that. And so then it grows that way.
But if rarely, I only think one time where we've gone in and tried to just do it top down, because if you say you got to do it, then that undermines the perceived authenticity. It's like, well, you got to write a note or whatever.
So start either with yourself. And lots of times it's in the middle.
I mean, it's rarely at the top. It's like somebody that's a department, you know, supervisor or head, they want to try it.
And we start there and go and let them run with it, provide, you know, the resources they need. When we talk about groups of a company, a lot of times you'll have your CSR customer help.
You have your technicians out in the field. You've got these different divisions.
have you ever seen a company where it's way more divisional? Like it's just one section of the company. I'm sure with like Pepsi and Google and crazy and even a mid-sized company.
Yeah. I mean, partly out of leadership and that the leader gets it, right? Or somebody in leadership gets it.
Whereas in another part, they don't give a rip. What's sort of interesting about that is, let's say you work under somebody and they don't care about this at all.
You can still start and do it. You don't have to wait for somebody else because it's really inexpensive.
You get a book or you get a code, it costs $10 to $15 for each person to take the inventory and you find out the results and you meet together and there's questions in the back of the book or we've got training stuff because I wanted to create low cost training materials for HR people. And you just, you run with it the best way you can.
You know, it's like sort of anything you think about it, you find somebody that's interested in and you team up and you just do it, but you do it over time, you know, it's like sort of anything you think about it, you find somebody that's interested and you team up and you just do it, but you do it over time. You know, if you do a one and done where it's flavor of the month kind of thing for culture, you know, it won't stick.
I think it's kind of fun to acknowledge when somebody's winning or just doing something great or they had their best day or just an anniversary. It's actually a really good thing.
And a lot of people just, we don't make the time. There's no easy way to see those.
Like if you don't have good KPIs and can't recognize, you could recognize small things like, Hey, thanks for taking that extra call for me or picking up that shift or whatever. But I think it needs to be a leadership thing for sure is acknowledging the big wins.
Well, I'll tell you what, not only the big wins, the one action that people repeatedly say that they want to be appreciated for is when they handle a difficult situation or client well. If that is a golden opportunity to support and encourage somebody, when they've dealt with a really nasty client and they calmed them down and, you know, got it, the job done and all that.
You got to call that out because if you don't, man, you're just missing, you know, it's like winning a divisional championship or something. I mean, it's like it does not come along very often and you did it well.
Yeah, I think as home service, we get our fair share of those clients. I bet you do.
What is the most common management mistake home service business or business owners in general make? And how can we avoid this? I would say the biggest mistake I see across the board is that people get into the productivity mode. I mean, we need to produce and our culture focuses on sort of quick growth and profits versus understanding this is a long game.
This is a marathon. And if you serve your people well, charge a reasonable fee that you can make a profit at and treat your people well, you're going to do it over time.
But you get into these get rich quick kinds of things or super productivity. And it's all about producing versus understanding that this is a person.
And yeah, we want them to work harder than they can. But most people can't work at 100% for very long.
I mean, you got 90%

is good. So I just think we get sucked into some of these things that sound good on the short term,

but it's like, okay, can we do this for five years? Can we do this for 10 years? Probably not

because we forget that employees are people and people are social. We're emotional.
We're physical. We're not just a machine that cranks stuff.
So do you think having someone at the workplace that's scheduling these things, because I love getting together with people that I get to call my coworkers. I mean, do you think it's important to really make it like a company newsletter and a certain amount of events each month, even if it's, hey, so-and-so's kids having a t-ball game? Do you think that it's nice to dedicate a person to doing that? Or do you think that that's overkill? I think naturally in small to medium, so you have people that sort of do that naturally.
I mean, they sort of help gather people and you want to support them. But you've got to remember that there are introverts and extroverts, right? And we've done studies around the holidays.
There's some people that just they hate going to holiday parties or the meals or whatever. They say, just give me a gift card to the bookstore and let me go read.
And so part of it is giving people opportunities. But I think a key issue is choice.
It's always a choice. And maybe the choice is, hey, just want you to come for the meal and then you can go.
I mean, I think gathering together, at least occasionally, is good. And again, it's a feedback loop.
I mean, you talk to your team and find out what would be encouraging to you or what feel rewarding versus just getting the formula and cranking it. Business owners and a lot of leaders, we tend to really look at numbers.
And the culture is so important that just having a culture of authenticity and just understanding where you're going. And I think Simon Sinek wrote a book, the game of business, or I forget the name of the book, but he explains, you know, business is not, it's not like this thing.
You make a bunch of money and get out like you talked about it's, it's ongoing. And if you take the shortcuts in the beginning, you'll pay for it in the long run.

So it's literally, and it does, I think it's not completely top down, but it definitely

starts from some of the top people and how they treat people and how they communicate.

Right.

Because if you're angry with your boss, sometimes you walk in and it's, it's turns hostile.

Sure.

I mean, there needs to be, if you will, processes to deal with that.

It's like, if you're upset with me, this is how to deal with it.

Don't come blow up at me.

Try to cool off and either write it to me or set up a time and talk.

Or if you're discouraged, I think that's as big an issue now is discouragement of, you

think you're doing the right thing and the results aren't happening.

So you got to help people understand. It's all about expectations.
I mean, anger is about expectations. Frustration is that I got this expectation and they should have done this and they didn't, or they shouldn't have done this and they did.
And so you got to clarify, okay, what's realistic, you know, for your clientele. Okay.
How many sort of jerk kind of clients should I have per 10? Okay. You know, if it's eight or nine, this is not sustainable emotionally.
But if it's two, you know, it's like, welcome to life, right? Or if it's five, you try to find some better referrals to get you further down. But it's like, it's not going to go smooth all the time.
It's just not. So, you know, you help your team members build a reasonable expectation.

Leadership is not a skill.

Really, a lot of us that started a business, we never were trained in how to be a great

leader.

We never really had a formal training.

There's leadership courses out there.

Most of them are team events and working with your team.

But a lot of the leadership, what's a tool or training or assessment that you'd recommend? There's a great set of books. It's called Habitudes.
It's actually for young people. I mean, teenagers through young adults on habits and attitudes to grow in that help you become a healthy individual and leader.

Because a lot of leadership stuff, to be honest,

is high in the sky kind of stuff that they talk concepts

and they don't really teach you how to practically do it.

But that's a good set.

It says Dr. Tim Elmore.

Yeah, Tim Elmore.

Yeah, good guy out of Atlanta.

Habitudes, one of the books is The art of self-leadership. Yeah.
Form leadership habits and attitudes. Yeah.
Listen, I think anybody should reach out, get the resources. This is an amazing book.
I'm just curious. So the five love languages of appreciation in the workplace, there's a quick quiz at the back.
You get the code. I believe the book comes with, at least at one point, it came with the free code to take the test.
Yep, that does still. But I'm glad you mentioned that.
So along the way, we've created an expanded version, partly because we've created versions for specific industries. Because you can get the language right, but if you get the action wrong, you still miss the boat.
So like an act of service in trades, which is one of our versions, is like, you know, help clean up the job site at the end of the day or the week or whatever. You know, somebody would appreciate that if it's hot out, you know, in Phoenix, you know, bring them some water or a drink or something.
And so for your listeners, if they write me, you can use the email, yes, drpaul at gmail.com. Yes, drpaul at gmail.com.
I'll send them a code to take this trade version so they can see it. And it's a longer version.
It's called our expanded version. It identifies how people, they can tell how they don't want to be shown appreciation so you don't miss it or whatever.
But I'll give everybody a one code and they can take a look at it. Cause I think it's fair.
You don't know if you want to buy something unless you try it out. Yeah, no, it's a great book.
I think we're bombarded with information. And I think a lot of people are like, what do I do next? Especially in a small business, you're already burning the candle on both ends you're working 70 hours a week i remember i just there was two people smoking outside my mom was answering two phones to her ears this was years well over a decade ago and i just thought why doesn't anybody care like i do but they're not the business owner and you know we expect people to work hard for dreams.
But what if we work hard to accomplish their dreams as well? Yep. And it could be both and it's not an either or for sure.
So you recommended Habitudes. I recommend five languages of appreciation in the workplace.
We're going to email you. Is that the best email for a question? Yeah.
Someone wants to reach out to you. Yeah.
And just put it because because i do a lot of different just put like home service entrepreneur in the in the subject line so i know

what group or what they listen to then i can uh get them what they need and our website

appreciation at work.com the website's got all the books the inventories training stuff stuff

about toxic workplaces all that so that's sort of the best mothership to land on. Is there any other books that you think are amazing books that people should be looking out for? I'm a fan of books that have been around a while and have proven this.
There's a great book called Integrity by Henry Cloud. He's a psychologist.
He's out of California. It it's not about being honest it's not that kind of integrity but it's about like in machines if something has integrity it has the ability to do what it's supposed to do consistently and that's what this is about it's how you develop patterns that help you accomplish what you want there's a story in the introduction, it's worth the price of the book.
It's about a boat driving. And if you go one way towards performance, you can run over people and you reach the goal, but you've damaged all your relationships.
And then you can go the other way and focus on relationships, but never reach your goal. And you go out of business and it's how to stay in the middle there and pay attention to both.
So Integrity by Henry Cloud. I love it.
You know what the good classic that we hear a lot is the e-myth by Michael Gerber is working on the business. And I think a lot of times that's a cliche statement and it's an older book, but ultimately when you're so busy putting out fires all day and you're the best firefighter in the company, you need to look at your culture.
And you need my buddy walked into my shop and said, man, this is not lit up right. You don't have a coffee maker.
This was years and years and years ago. It doesn't feel like a fun place.
And I walked into his place and it was completely opposite. I mean, he had a buffet out.
He was doing cool things. So I learned a lot from him, but I think success leaves clues.
And when you're a big organization, what are some of the companies that are doing it right that you know of? I'm just curious from your perspective, like the companies that have really embraced this mentality, probably not home service that have come to mind. Yeah.
Yeah. Thank you.
I mean, in and out, I think in California and the West does a good job. I mean, they have fun, they treat their employees.
Well, they serve their customers. Well, they make money.
I mean, what else do you want? Whether you agree with sort of religious kind of stuff. I mean, Chick-fil-A is another one where, I mean, their customer loyalty is out of this world because the customers are treated well, you know? So those are two.
PepsiCo is coming up. I mean, I'm working both with US and the global part, and they're embracing this.
They're not so much retail. And actually, if you remind me, if you send me an email, I'll send you an article.
The New York Times did an article on our work last year, and it was with a group of miners and commercial chemical processors out of South Dakota and Wyoming and Colorado. And these guys, they took our concepts and they, you know, we had these symbols for the languages.
They got stickers and put on their hard hats. And it's like a badge of honor.
They can't go through our process until they've completed probation for six months. And from the leadership point of view, it's turned them around as far as turnover and that kind of stuff.
So when you go to a big company or a small, you start out with taking the tests. What are some of the ways that you get people involved and you recognize that it's starting to shift? You said Pepsi and you obviously In-N-Out and Chick-fil-A.
Yeah, so I mean, usually the process for a company, regardless of size, is I'll do either a virtual or a live, or maybe they'll do a videotape of sort of the big picture. What are we talking about here? How's appreciation different than recognition? It's not just words.
It's not just for the leaders. And sort of cast a vision for the leadership.
And it can be down to supervisor or whatever. And then we find somebody that's interested in two or three people, maybe that interested in running this with a group.
Get the resources to them. That could include, we've got an online train-to-trainer course.
It takes two hours to go through, and then people can run it with different groups within their company. And then help them learn how to sort of tweak it for their culture.
And just do that time and time again. And, you know, we've got over 1,200 facilitators have gone through our course.
Most of them are internal HR people and companies. I want to hit one more thing personally that you discussed.
You said this personally, you said, look, you were guilty of too much work. There's probably some relationships that we've all severed.
I was with five amazing leaders in the home service space. They're the godfathers, or six of them.
And each one of them said, yes, I wish I had more time with family. But one of the guys was really interesting to me.
He said, I don't know if I'd have the freedom for me and my entire family, my niece and nephews and my grandchildren and my children, if I didn't work. What's the alternative? Yes, I could look back and say, I wish I had all this more time at home.
But if I was at home, I wouldn't have been building the business. And I'm just, from your perspective, this is a Dr.
Paul White question. Hindsight, you're very successful, obviously.
You've sold 600 plus thousand books. What would you have done differently?

Would you be where you're at today? Yeah. I think there's a difference between working hard and having a good work ethic and working on the business for me with skill sets, right? And doing a good job versus that extra point let's call call it up to 90%.
And then beyond that, being driven by anxiety to do more and more and more, that probably doesn't add that much value. If I could take that 5% to 10% of just sort of frantic thinking, okay, how else can I market, yada, yada, yada, and dial that back, I think I would have gotten pretty much the same results, but not as much damage around.
Does that make sense? Yeah. So you take care of the people, but believe it or not, your internal clients could be your best marketers instead of finding a new marketing source.
Give them the ability to reach out to people and just, they post on social media and they attract clients. I think it's the most kept secret of all time is that your employees and my internal customers and my coworkers could turn into marketers and they can share the love and make it easier to recruit A players and also get A plus clients that are loyal.
I think we forget about that. And I think in a way you had a different spin on it, but that's what you're saying.
I mean, I believe I, cause I have done career coaching over the years. Work is about providing goods or services that people either need or want, and they're willing to pay for.
And a job is the same thing. It's just for the employer, right? And so it's all about identifying needs or desires, figuring out a way that you can meet those.
Maybe you have to get trained to do it and charging a reasonable price. And over time, you're going to make money and you're going to get referrals.
I mean, if you promise the moon, I mean, I worked with billionaires, business leaders, and $500 million worth, I mean, personal net worth people. And when you're in that sphere, man, you almost can't meet the expectations.
But if you just do a decent job with everybody that's out there and respond to them, you're going to do okay. I think sometimes you got to ask for help.
You got to have great executive assistants. You've got to have order in your life when you're that size, because you got to have systems, because if you're just waiting for communication and it's not planned communication and there's not a rhyme and rhythm to it.
And I always say Elon Musk has the same amount in his day as we all have. And time is precious.
So he figured out how to delegate. And I think some of the people that probably worked for him hated it.
But I can tell you this, Jeff Bathos is also doing very well. And I don't meet a lot of people that work for Amazon that are super excited about every day.
He grew really, really fast. We talked about a lot of things.
If someone wants to reach there's yes dr paul at gmail what's the best website to look you up on appreciation at work dot com yes appreciation at at work dot com we talked about a lot of stuff paul and this was an amazing podcast i love learning these things and i think is where I want to double down. It's just the people aspect that we are all human beings and we do have emotions and we do have needs and we have wants.
We had a lot of different concepts. I'm sure there's something we left out, something that might be a good way for you to close and spend a couple of minutes with us of whatever you think you want the audience to hear.
You know, on all of this stuff, businesses are groups of people, teams of people, and how you treat your team matters. And with appreciation or encouragement, appreciation is sort of like about the past.
You appreciate when somebody did or demonstrated encouragement is about the present, the future. They're maybe struggling.
It's the same kind of messages, same languages, but for the present. And I just say, start somewhere with somebody.
Don't sit down and try to figure out a Gantt chart or a spreadsheet to plan it out. I mean, eventually, but just start with the person that, you know, if they didn't do what they did, your day would be a lot tougher.
And then learn, grow, but you got to start and it can go well from there. Well, you heard from the man himself, go tell people that you appreciate them, but don't just use words of affirmation.
There you go. You got to figure out how do they want to be treated and what's going to motivate them.
So Mr. Paul White, Dr.
White, not a lot of doctors come on the podcast. I really appreciate your time.
This is very, very important that we heard this message and I'm definitely going to be emailing you today. Okay.
All right. Take care.
Appreciate you very much. You have a great day.
All right. Bye-bye.
See you later. business or organization.
It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets to

help me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees growing in

the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book.