Zach Mercurio
Mattering is a basic survival instinct, instinct. So I have a 10 and a seven year old when my first son was born, my searing memory of meeting him was when I reached my hand down and he was in this bassinet, and he reached his hand back, and he grabbed my index finger really tightly, his he was crying and he was squirming, and right when he found my index finger and grasped on, his whole body calmed, and it was miraculous. And I didn’t realize it then, but I was experiencing about 6 million years of fine tuned programming that first grip I felt. Scientists call that the Grasp reflex. So it’s one of several reflexes we take right after we’re born to secure our first caring relationship.

Keith Edwards
Welcome to Student Affairs NOW I’m your host. Keith Edwards, today, I’m joined by Dr Zach Mercurio to discuss his new book, The Power of mattering, how leaders can create a culture of significance. This book presents a practical framework for cultivating this experience mattering through three actionable practices, noticing, affirming and needing. This book has endorsements from Simon Sinek and Seth Godin, plus a whole bunch of others. Zach is also a Colorado State student affairs and higher education grad, which we at the Student Affairs now. Podcast always love is this connection many of us have. Student Affairs now is the premier podcast and online learning community for many of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs, we release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or explore our archives at studentaffairsnow.com This episode is sponsored by Evolve. Evolve helps higher ed senior leaders release fear, gain courage and take transformative action for transformational leadership through a personalized cohort based virtual executive leadership development experience and Huron. Huron Education and Research, research experts help institutions transform their strategy, operations, technology and culture to foster innovation, financial health and student success. As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he, him,his. I’m a speaker, author and coach, and I help leaders Empower transformation for better tomorrows through better leadership, learning and equity. You can find out more about me at keithedwards.com and I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the current and ancestral homelands of both the Dakota in the Ojibwe peoples. Let’s get to our guest and our topic today, Zach, welcome. Tell us a little bit about you and how this kind of book came to be. Thanks,

Zach Mercurio
Keith. It’s great to be here. Well, I’m Zach. I’m actually in Fort Collins, Colorado, and I have two lives right now. I mean, one life is I’m a senior research and teaching fellow in a place called the Center for meaning and purpose in the Department of Psychology at Colorado State University. It sounds like we just walk around contemplating life, the Center for meaning and purpose, but we actually study the psychology of what makes work and life meaningful. And the rest of my time is I am out working with leaders in all sorts of industries, including higher ed, including the nonprofit realm on the skills to cultivate environments where people can experience meaningfulness and experience themselves and what they’re doing as significant. And that is really how this book came about. We’ve been researching the experience of meaningfulness in work, really, for the past decade, and one of the things that has come out is that it is almost impossible for anything to matter to someone who doesn’t first believe that they matter. And when we ask people, 1000s of people, when you most feel that your work has meaning, when you most feel alive and motivated what is going on, and we typically found that people are the recipients of regular moments of mattering, where they feel seen, heard, valued and understood by others. And in the same 10 years, in the same decade that we’ve been researching this, more people than people than ever are reporting that they’re feeling invisible in work, especially work human found that 30% of people feel flat out ignored in their jobs every day, almost eight out of 10 people feel repeatedly lonely disengagement, both in public and private. The private sector has remained flat lined at around, you know, seven out of 10 people are emotionally uninvested in what they’re doing, and so our research and the time sort of hit, right? People have asked me, why did I want to write this book? Then I frequently say I didn’t want to write this book, you know, I felt that I had to write this book, you know, because there’s a name for this experience, and that name is that people aren’t experiencing that they matter, that they’re valued, and that they they truly add value. And so here we are and and it’s been an exciting journey launching the book, because I really feel like when you name you can name something, you can change it. And being able to name what many people are either experiencing or not experiencing has been very eye opening for a lot of people.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, such a great intro. It really reflects the book, which is very simple to understand, very accessible, sort of like a lot of workplace books, but. It’s also got that scholarly foundation and research, and so I think that that introduction is a great sort of foreshadowing for the book, before we get into the content of the book, though, why don’t you tell folks about your student affairs roots and the Student Affairs roots of the story? That sort of is the creation story for this book.

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, I’ll actually go back to pre student affairs before, because, you know, again, when you’re an undergraduate, there’s nothing in the course catalog that says Student Affairs right now. There may be, but there wasn’t for me, and I actually found myself as an undergraduate, educated for success, so I had all of the extracurriculars, and I was really interested in leadership and how people worked. But again, there was no that wasn’t a viable career option, leading and influencing other people. So I became a lured by success, that I would get a job with a good starting salary, and that’s what success would be. And I got that, I actually ended up going into advertising in my first job out of college. And I was all the objective indicators were there that I was quote, unquote successful, but I was, I was pretty miserable, and the people around me would come in on Monday and they would talk about what they were doing the last weekend, what they were doing the weekend coming up, and I was sort of just astounded how many people were living for two sevenths of their lives, right? The days that became with the letter S. And as I was in this company, I started noticing that I became more interested in how the people were working and what they were thinking and what made them tick versus the actual work itself. And what I noticed was nobody talked about why they did what they did, right? They talked about what they did and how they did it and how they could get more out of people. People didn’t talk about why they did what they did, their their purpose, their function. So I actually had this realization that, gosh, I’ve never really asked that question of myself. And I realized this when looking back at my educational experience, that I was taught to form my life before I understood the function of my life. And what I mean by that is like in good architecture, form follows function. If you’re going to design a good building, you should understand what the purpose of it is, so you can design it accordingly. And I was looking back at my educational experience, and also, I think the large, dominant Western educational experience, and I realized that we tell people how to form their lives without them understanding their function, why they are. And I became obsessed with this question of, Why am I doing what I was doing? I ended up leaving that first job because I wanted to make sure no one ended up like me. And I went back into Student Affairs, and I did my first work in orientation and New Student Programs, because I was like, what a better environment to reach people than when they first are entering into something new. And through that experience, and through training and leading teams within that experience, within that environment, for almost eight years, I became really obsessive about making sure people understood their unique gifts, why they were, before we told them what to do, help them under understand and uncover their purpose, and that was my ethos as I trained students. For example, we had a group of orientation leaders. We spent we did a 13 week class. We spent the first six weeks simply focused on why the job existed and why they existed in the job. So what were the what was the reason for being of this job? Who are the human beings that it impacted? But then what are the unique gifts and strengths that they brought to this job? And that was sort of revelatory to a lot of students. Now, what happened is those students graduated, and they went into companies, and they said, Zach, hey, we need you. Can you help us out here? Can you help this company? I’m working with this organization. And again, I started becoming more interested in how people were working, how people were ticking. And I realized you could study this stuff. You could study organizations. You could study how people worked. Ended up getting my PhD in organizational learning, performance and change, and studying meaningful work, and now I’ve devoted my career to that, but it was going back to that first job out of college. I couldn’t see my purpose. I wanted to come back in higher ed to help students to see their purpose first, so then they could form their lives. And then that led me to bringing this to organizations. So it was sort of like this interesting journey that I was out in private sector, came back in helping people develop. Develop themselves. Those people came out, back into the private sector, and then I went back into that realm, and really all, all realms of organizational life right now.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, so from higher ed to advertising to higher ed to private sector, back to higher ed, right? There’s, there’s a there’s a theme here. There’s the theme. There’s a pattern. Tell us about what I’m going to call the Student Affairs roots of this book.

Zach Mercurio
Yeah. So when I was doing my PhD, I was still working at this at the same time. So during that first year, and I was struggling to find a research interest, and I knew I wanted to study the experience of meaningful work, work that is experienced as positive, purposeful and significant. And I remember there was a free professional development training on campus, and I was going to that training. And I remember I was in an academic building that I’d spent a lot of late nights in in the past, doing programming, and I went past a custodian who I’d seen very, very often. And I just said, Hey, how’s it going? And she said, Hey, good, you know, where are you going? And I said, Oh, I’m going to a free training, you know, person, Professional Development Conference. She said, How did you hear about that? I said, Oh, I got an email. And I remember her shoulders really fell forward, and she sighed, and she said, I’ve been here for 10 years, and no one’s shown me how to get my email up and running. And I couldn’t believe it, because, you know, here I was in a place that really valued education, and this woman was looked over, and you could tell she just felt passed over by the system. And I found my research interest because I said this, this isn’t right, you know, I have to understand this experience of the people who make sure that everything else happens and this university, what do they experience? So I actually we started doing a research study where we embedded ourselves with a group of custodians for a year and a half, and we were trying to understand what made work meaningful for them. And the first story in the book is a story of Jane, who I met right before an overnight shift at a university library. She was coming in to clean the library before it reopens the next day. It’s a very lonely place, and she was just very, just a naturally, like joyful person. I mean, she was so happy to be there. And I remember sitting down, I said, Jane, how did you develop this perspective? And she said that she was near homelessness before she had gotten this job, because she had been a caretaker for a family member who passed away, and she said she felt purposeless. She felt that she wished she could have done something more with her life. She couldn’t get hired for any other job, but this one, and she said it was in her first month where a supervisor noticed that she was struggling, brought her into a break room and open up a dictionary for her and defined the word custodian for her, as a person responsible for a building and everyone in it. And he read it out loud to her, and he said, Jane, I want, I want you to know that no matter how you got to this job, that’s why you’re here. Everybody in this building depends on you. She said it was the first time her life that someone showed her she was worthy of responsibility, and it went on to change her belief systems about herself and her job. She’s been at the University for over 30 years, and is one of the most sought and is one of the most sought after janitors and cleaners at the university, and it was moments like that for these custodians, moments where someone saw them, affirmed them, showed them that they were needed, that dramatically shaped how they saw themselves and their jobs. And we’ve, we’ve come to now call those moments of mattering, and we spent the whole book really talking about the architecture of moments of mattering, where we can see people, hear them, Truly, show them that they’re valued, and exactly how they add value. But it was that first study that really solidified those moments for us and how powerful they can be.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, yeah, beautiful. And thanks for the humanizing that with a couple of really great stories. I think so many of us know some of those people, and know some of those people in those roles, or experience some of the similar things ourselves, or see that kind of every day. There really is this pattern that I’m seeing that you’re you’re about significance, meaning, purpose and mattering and work, we’re going to sort of zero in on the mattering, and we’ll talk about some of the strategies to help people feel like they matter, because that’s really important. But why does mattering matter?

Zach Mercurio
Well, I mean, first and foremost, I. Mattering is a basic survival instinct, instinct. So I have a 10 and a seven year old when my first son was born, my searing memory of meeting him was when I reached my hand down and he was in this bassinet, and he reached his hand back, and he grabbed my index finger really tightly, his he was crying and he was squirming, and right when he found my index finger and grasped on, his whole body calmed, and it was miraculous. And I didn’t realize it then, but I was experiencing about 6 million years of fine tuned programming that first grip I felt. Scientists call that the Grasp reflex. So it’s one of several reflexes we take right after we’re born to secure our first caring relationship. So think about this, none of us would be here right now. Nobody would be listening to this right now, if at some point we hadn’t mattered enough to someone else to keep us alive, right to matter, to be of importance to someone else is our first act as a human being, and as we grow up, that act turns into that fundamental need and instinct turns into the fundamental need to feel seen, heard, valued and needed by those around us, and it never goes away. And when that need is met, that’s when we experience what psychologists call mattering, feeling seen, heard, valued and needed by those around us. And because it’s a survival instinct and it’s a basic need, it comes before many of the things we say we want, right in our organizations and in our lives. For example, if we want people to contribute, they must first believe they’re worthy of contributing. If we want people to use their strengths, they must first believe that they have them. If we want people to share their voice, they must first believe their voice is significant. If we want anything to matter to someone, they must first believe they matter to us. If we want people to care, they must first feel cared for. And so mattering comes first. It is a primal instinct that turns into a fundamental human need that is the prerequisite for human action.

Keith Edwards
Okay? So it’s just the prerequisite for human action. So that’s no big deal, right?

Zach Mercurio
No big deal, I mean, but think about it really this way, most of us would not have done anything today if we didn’t believe at some small level that our lives and our energy were worthy of our finite energy, right, our lives were somehow mattered, and that’s why mattering is really the animating force of life and work.

Keith Edwards
Right, that we matter to the people we love and care about, that what we’re going to do is going to help and provide for them, or that we matter to our colleagues and friends at work, that they’re relying on us, or that our work is going to make a difference in our organization or out in the world, or that people will miss us or ask how we’re doing right all sorts of different ways.

Zach Mercurio
And it’s, I think it’s important here to understand how this is different than belonging or inclusion. Yeah, because, you know, I again, I have recess, I have kids, so my recess drama has been very high, you know, at the end of the year, I have elementary school kids. So I’ll use a recess analogy. Belonging is feeling welcomed, accepted and connected to a group. It’s like being picked for the team. Inclusion is being invited and able to take an active role in that group. Inclusion is like being asked to play in the game, but mattering is feeling significant to members of that group. It is feeling that the team wouldn’t be complete without you. And what’s really important about that distinction is that if I’m doing a belonging or inclusion intervention, I’m focusing broadly, first on making sure people feel welcomed and connected. I’m making sure that barriers to and opportunities to take an active role in that group are eliminated for the people that I need to be included and who need to be included. But if I’m doing a mattering intervention, I’m making sure that people in the group have the interpersonal skills to make sure the next person they interact with feels seen, heard, valued and needed. That’s why mattering is interpersonally derived, and it’s very important to understand. I think those distinctives, because when you’re trying to cultivate mattering. It is, it is something that resides in the interpersonal human relationship. You can’t program mattering, and I know we’re in student affairs, but a you can’t do a program and expect people to feel that they matter. You can’t have a symbol. You know, whether it’s a pre. Principles of community or values you put on the wall and expect people to feel that they matter because of that. People feel that they matter because of what they experience in their next interaction with somebody. And that, I think is so

Keith Edwards
important, yeah, and I think the mattering is this interpersonal thing, and it sits as you pointed to in these larger systems and structures where people don’t feel like they can be included for these reasons. But it’s sort of an interaction at the interpersonal level with these larger things. And it was really about how the coworker, the other people in the meeting, the people I supervise, the admin, who I pass by every day the custodian, right? Yeah, people feel seen and heard and that they’re cared about and what they’re doing and who they are matters.

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, because I can feel like I belong on the team. I can feel like I am included, that I have an opportunity to contribute, and that the barriers to that opportunity to contribute have been eliminated. But I could also still feel that you don’t notice that my parent is in the hospital and I’m a caretaker and I’m struggling, or you could not see and notice that I’m feeling left out of discussions. Or I could still not feel that, you know, and name my unique gifts and strengths and show me the difference that they make. I could know that you rely on me, but have you never told me so we can feel like we belong and that we’re included and still feel unseen, unheard and unvalued? And so that’s why this experience of mattering, I believe, is really the flywheel for making things like belonging and inclusion actually come to life in daily experience. Yeah,

Keith Edwards
beautiful, beautiful. And you’ve already shared with us some of the statistics about how invisible so many people feel, the impact that has on productivity and attrition and things like that. You have this nice little recipe for helping people feel mattered. I’m wondering if you could walk us through, and they’re kind of approaches, but also strategies for noticing, affirming and needing.

Zach Mercurio
Let me. Can I take us back just a minute? Because you said some of the data there’s, there’s a couple things I wanted to point out there. One is regard to employee engagement. And I know, like on campuses, we have campus climate surveys, engagement surveys, but it’s really important to understand. In January of 2025 Gallup released their latest employee engagement data, and in the public educational field, it was about the same. So as we mentioned, about seven out of 10 people are emotionally uninvested in their work. It’s the lowest rate it’s been in a decade. That’s despite all the measurement, all the surveys, Engagement Services and consulting services, has become a $1 billion industry. We’re doing more surveying than ever and developing more well being programs, dei programs than ever. Yet people are still disengaged. There’s a data point, though, in that in that January 2025, release, that’s really important to understand, just 39% of people said that they could strongly agree that someone at work cared for them as a person. Just 30% said that a manager could point out their unique gifts and invested in their unique potential. Same thing when we look at loneliness, you know, we’ve called what’s going on in our world right now a loneliness epidemic, and we’ve told people to connect more. So, you know, people are on more platforms than ever. They send more emails than ever. We’re in more meetings than ever. The average US adult sends about 30 to 40 text based messages to colleagues a day. So we’re more connected than ever, but we’re still lonely. And why is that? Well, one of the things we’ve missed is that it is the quality of interactions, not the quantity of interactions, that matter when it comes to reducing loneliness, and when you look at the research on what makes a quality interaction, researchers call it experiencing companionate love, which is experiencing attention, care, compassion and affirmation from another person. So the opposite of loneliness is not having more people around you, but it’s feeling that you matter to the people around you. And I think this is so important because it goes to the fact that the solution to our crises right now is not programmatic, it’s interactional. We have to create systems and redevelop the skills for people in our universities to develop and deploy the skills to have higher quality interactions on a daily basis. That’s the only thing that’s going to change climate and culture on a campus. And so when we’ve asked people, we’ve asked people the question, when you most feel that you met. Matter. Three behaviors that they experienced from others kept coming up. So I could ask you all right now think about a time when you’ve most felt that you mattered in your work to someone else. What was happening? Most people would not say when I got my direct deposit, when I won an award, when I when I had this big programmatic accomplishment. They will talk about, they will talk about very small interactions in which they felt three, one of three things noticed. They felt seen or heard affirmed. They felt that someone named their unique strengths and showed them the difference that they made, or showed them very vividly how they and what they were doing added value to someone else’s life. Or three, they were needed. They were called on to help in a problem. They were relied on. Someone said to them, if it wasn’t for you, and show them that they were needed. So that’s that framework that creates a quality interaction, making sure people feel noticed, affirmed and needed you mentioned.

Keith Edwards
You know, as we want to foster belonging and inclusion and mattering and connection and engagement for college students, that it’s not going to be the sort of one on many programmatic interventions, but really individual interactions, and that might be a staff member to a student, or we can also, I think, facilitate this among students right with orientation leaders to their new student, To RAS peer mentors in a culture center with their mentees, and it seems like by by teaching staff and other students to do this with each other, not only will that benefit the campus community, but if they have these skills to do this as part of my job as a peer mentor, then I Have them when I work in an advertising agency, or Absolutely I run a daycare, and I’m talking with the parents real briefly, and and with kids, or, or when I’m a physician, and before I get to the diagnosis, Hey, how are you doing? You look tired. Are you okay? You know, little things like that. And so it feels like something that is useful for the outcomes we want in higher education, but is also a useful outcome for the learning we want to create that students will take with them for the rest of their life to make their work, their lives, society, better.

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, and I think for especially the people listening here in higher education, I think higher education has a responsibility to reteach the skills to see, hear, value and understand the next person we interact with. And the reason why I say that is because one of the things that came out when we were researching the book as to why these common sense ideas are not common practice is that for the last 25 years, we’ve actually been able to get out of the social situations in which we were otherwise normally learned how to see, hear value and understand one another, and it’s because of our phones. So we have been able to send short digital transactions to one another in lieu of actual dynamic communication. And so we’ve been actually losing the skills to do this. For example, Keith, if you send me some good news, I can just send you a thumbs up emoji and say, hey, great job. If you give me some bad news, I can say, Oh, I’m really sorry to hear that. I don’t have to sit with you anymore and seek understanding and show compassion. So we have to understand how technology has actually allowed us to neglect the social learning that we need to learn these skills. The less we use a skill, the less proficient that we get at it. So I think it’s absolutely essential that we give students and give our staff member the social repetitions again, to demonstrate learn these skills, because too often, especially in virtual work and hybrid work, when you end a meeting, you can just click off of your platform. If someone was frustrated, you don’t have to think about that person until next week, right? That’s not normal. That’s not That’s not a normal way of interacting with human beings that you’re actually detached from the consequences of the conversation you just had. Yeah, it seems like

Keith Edwards
it’s an opportunity. You know, the rarity makes it hard, and we don’t get the reps, and there’s fewer opportunities, it also seems like there’s an opportunity, because those interactions are so rare that if you could nail them, it can make a huge absolutely right. So, you know, I’m in interactions with people virtually a lot, and. And there are people who can, over a zoom call make you feel like you’re really

Zach Mercurio
special, absolutely, absolutely. One of the things you know, the first area, the practice area, that in the noticed, affirmed and needed model, is making sure people feel noticed. And you know you can know a person but not notice them. You can know your coworker. You can know a team member. You’ve worked with them for 10 years, but not notice that they’re struggling, not notice that they’ve been a little less energized on a project recently. But one of the things we found that great notices do is that they tend to optimize the in between moments. There’s a composer, Claude Debussy, and he said music is the space between the notes. And what I love about that is that he said the music is the notes, but where it’s heard and felt is in the in between. I also believe that that’s where culture is built, is in those in between spaces. So the two or three minutes that someone comes on a meeting and they’re early, instead of that awkward time, you know, opening up some more tabs and answering another email. The best leaders that I’ve worked with check in, they use that transition point as a check in. Hey, I remembered last week you were nervous about that meeting. How did it go after a meeting ends? For example, some of the best leaders that I’ve observed who are great noticers tend to have a practice of making a phone call. Hey, just want to check in on how you thought that went right. It extends the interaction time, the moments when you’re passing someone in a hall. These are all opportunities for connection. So one way to be a great noticer is to optimize the in between, like you said, optimize the interactions you already have, to make sure the person across from you feel seen.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, and I think that I love the point that you’re making about technology and social media. It is quite the paradox that we are more connected than ever before and feeling more lonely than ever before. And your point is that while we have a lot more connections, you know, I see people I haven’t I haven’t seen in person in 10 years. I see them every day and what they’re doing, how their kids are growing. And it’s really great in so many ways, but it’s not that meaningful interaction. And where do we build that in? It seems like something that, when it’s so sparse, little moments can be so valuable, so meaningful, so powerful,

Zach Mercurio
yeah, and then, you know, remembering somebody, yeah, you know, there’s really magic and being remembered like and one of the things that we’ve also got to contend with is our attention is more fracked than ever, so we’ve actually become worse at paying attention to people. GLORIA mark is a psychologist. She’s brilliant, and she did some research on attention span. About 10 years ago, we could spend about two and a half minutes on any one task before we get distracted. She repeated those studies and found that right now it’s about 47 seconds. What does this do for the people in front of us? Right? It means we have to relearn how to pay attention. You know, one great skill for people who want to be better noticers Again, which is that first skill area in that noticing, affirming and needing model is to use a noting practice to actually write down the details about people you want to remember. My favorite example was a leader that I was working with in a distribution center. She had a team that was highly engaged, while the rest of her center was was relatively disengaged. And I asked her as what do you do? How do you do this? And her her team just loved her, but she would say, she said that three years ago, she noticed that she was having a tough time keeping track of the details on people’s lives. She had 27 team members, and she started on Friday taking a notebook out. She would write down the names of her team members, one thing that she heard them talk about the last week, so whether there was a piece of equipment they were struggling with, if they were nervous about a meeting, if their kid was starting a new sport. And then on Monday morning, she said she looked at that notebook and she scheduled a three minute check in with each of them, and she would say, Hey, I remembered last week you were nervous about that meeting. How did it go? I remembered your kid was starting baseball for the first time this weekend. What was that like? And she said she realized that once she started doing this, her people just in she, quote, unquote, came alive to her, because, imagine if someone’s struggling with this piece of equipment or struggling with a system in your organization, your student affairs organization, struggling with a piece of technology, and you say, Hey, I remember last week you were struggling with that. I wanted to check in if we got that fixed for you before that person has to come to you again. I. There’s magic in that. So that noticing notebook, idea that practice of noting, that practice of scheduling, checking in on specific details of people’s lives. I hammer this home because it’s a skill, and it’s a practice that we can do and get better at.

Keith Edwards
And I’m thinking about just how busyness and then so many tasks and so many projects and so many to do’s is a nice excuse not to tend to these little things. But you’re pointing out how it can be small chunks of time, just little things of significance. I’m also thinking about how people were in long term relationships, right? You can, you can see them every day, but not notice them, right? And not really pay attention, because you take them for granted. Or we can take people for granted. You know, one of the things I notice in the world is that we kind of take people for granted until they leave, right? You know, in the culture, it’s when they pass, then everybody’s like, Oh my gosh, I just love this person. When we haven’t heard about them, or someone leaves the organization, and there’s this big outpouring of support, and they go, Well, if I would have felt this way earlier, maybe I wouldn’t have left. It’s a little, little too late. You’ve given us some really a great point around noticing, I’m reminded one of the things I’m talking with senior leaders who are sort of in the CEO or C suite and have tons of responsibility, and maybe have 50 100 people them, is they often complain that I hear from my team that they they don’t feel like I’m listening, I’m listening, and they can tell me all the things that these people are saying and and I say, Yeah, I know, but they don’t feel it right. And some of these people are so smart and so quick that they are listening, they are recording all of the data and then immediately jumping to fixing, problem solving, processing, what’s the next step? And they’re not taking that time to communicate. That sounds really frustrating, yeah. How did we get that problem solved. For you, they’re just skipping to, you know, the next widget, or, you know, yeah, process. And so for me, the noticing is really about making sure people feel seen and heard. Not seeing and hearing people, but making sure they feel that way.

Zach Mercurio
It’s a great point. You know you can physically listen to somebody, you can do all the right things, and someone could still not feel heard. You know that voice, our voice? There’s a sociologist named Nick cauldry, and he studies voice. A voice is different than using your speaking voice. Voice is your inner experience, your inner feelings the meaning behind the words. So what I love about what you just said is that leaders who truly listen tend to obsessively seek to understand the meaning and feeling behind the words. What is that story like? For example, if you have a meeting with somebody, and you come out and I say, how did that go? And you said, you know, I’m just glad that’s over with. And I don’t say, I don’t pick up on that little cue, and say I noticed there’s some exasperation there. Frustration is that right? What’s going on? And then give that person the opportunity to dig into that underlying experience, that underlying feeling, and and talk about that, then that person, if that person never gets that opportunity, and I think there are hundreds 1000s of people every day who they don’t have someone that goes a little bit deeper to try to seek, to seek to understand that underlying meaning, then that person can walk away feeling unheard, even if You have the best response, the best support, the best the best nods. But that that idea of really digging in and digging into the feeling behind the words is so important, and then taking action and then following up on how the person felt about the action. So if you take action and you say, Oh, well, we did something about that. Hey, I know you were really feeling frustrated, and I could feel that with you did what we do alleviate that feeling at all for you. And it’s it helps again, bring that inner voice into the outer world.

Keith Edwards
What’s really coming up for me, Zach is you’re giving us all the right things to say, and do you’re giving us so many examples, but it’ll be hollow if you say all the same words that Zach is saying, and you don’t mean it right, if you’re not genuine and you’re not sincere, and people who are listening, I think can hear your genuineness, even in made up examples, right? You’re slowing down. You’re connecting, yeah, watching or seeing you lean in and and your facial expressions change. So it’s not just following a script, it’s also like caring and, yeah, and being invested in these. People and doing it in that way, rather than just as we talked about, some of these active listening are just it’s very performative, right,

Zach Mercurio
right, right? And I think that that, I think that one of the things that’s important is to always remind yourself this person across from you is a human being living a life as vivid, complex and as important as your own. You know, one of the things that we get into is what’s called automaticity. It is a automatic it’s automatic attention. So it allows us to brush our teeth without thinking. It allows us to drive to work or wherever without thinking. But it takes hold of our relationships all the time. So our one on one start the same. The term meeting starts the same. The weekly meeting starts the same. All of a sudden, we start approaching our relationships in an automatic way, just going through the motions, one way to get out of that, and one way to actually care again in a very difficult time where it’s hard, there’s a lot going on, is what’s called articulated intention. So the way to get out of automaticity is to actually say to yourself, I am going to fully hear this person right now in this conversation. I’m going to make sure this person goes home today feeling heard. I am going to ask a curiosity driven question in this next interaction, and you have to say that to yourself to break you out of the automatic The other thing you notice that you noted is that we tend to interact with the same people a lot. There’s this concept called closeness, communication bias. Researchers did numerous studies. It’s been replicated, where, if I had you listen to a stranger’s directions, it’s how to get somewhere. And then I had you listen to like a close partners directions, almost every time you would listen more closely and attentively and with more interest to the stranger. Yeah. So the people that we work with all the time, the people that are coming to us all the time, you have to remember that your brain you is thinking that you’re listening to them, you’re thinking that you’re making them feel heard, but you’re probably not taking action as much as you think to do those things.

Keith Edwards
Well, I talk a lot about the Zen Buddhism principle of beginner’s mind. And yeah, what if you what if your partner came home and you asked how their day was, and you actually listened like you didn’t know what they were about to say, right, right? And that’s intimacy, that’s connection, but a lot of us say, you know, how’d your day go? And, yeah, I know what this is going to be. And then we’re kind of listening for anything that doesn’t follow the script we know and are familiar with, right? But if it follows that script, then we’re not really listening to me just kind of going on. I want to ask you particularly about needing, because the noticing we’ve we’ve talked a lot about the affirming. I get right, like that, people want to be affirmed. I know what? If what being affirmed? I know, but needing, I think, could have a negative connotation. So, so help us understand the needing?

Zach Mercurio
Yeah, I’ll start with a scientific experiment. In 1913 there was this scientist, agricultural engineer. His name is Max ringelman. He had students. He had his students get together, and they individually pulled on a rope as hard as they could, and he attached it to this device called a dynanometer that measures force, and he had them pull on it as hard as they could, and he added up the force readings for all the individuals. And then what he did is he had them get into groups, so groups of 567, and he had them pull on the ropes as hard as they could, got the same force readings and added them up. And who do you think exhibited the most total force? Was it the individuals or the group members? A lot of people say it was the groups. Obviously, there’s more people. It was the individuals, every single time, and one of the reasons why is because they knew their effort was indispensable. They knew that they were needed. It’s called perceived dispensability of effort, when we feel that we or what we’re doing are replaceable, that it is dispensable, that it’s futile, that it’s not going to make much of a difference, that we’re not needed or relied on, we will show up less fully as human beings. It’s a psychological fact. When people feel irreplaceable, they act replaceable. When they feel irreplaceable, they tend to act irreplaceable. So when we when it comes to feeling needed, this is not about feeling guilted. That’s co dependence. It’s a whole that’s that’s the under the dark side. This is about making sure that every single person knows that they and their efforts are indispensable and non disposable, that what they’re doing on a day to day basis is necessary for some real human outcome. And as human beings, I mean, we are interdependent. There’s no way to anyway. I think everybody listening would say that. Do you know what dependence means? Dependence. Dependence means that we need other people. Yeah? So interdependent is that is the process of being needed and needing others. That’s what it means to be human. Yeah.

Keith Edwards
I we want to move to our last question, but before we do it, any you’ve talked about why mattering matters, and you’ve talked about this recipe of noticing, affirming and needing any other tips or suggestions about how to do that before we wrapping up?

Zach Mercurio
Yeah. I mean, I would say that the most powerful question you could ask anybody, pretty much in any relationship. And I’ve learned this through my research, is when you feel that you matter to me, what am I doing? Then do more of that. So just if you’re if, yeah, if you’re an administrator, and you have a team that oversees a team that oversees the team, asking your direct team this question. In the next week, I just listened to this great podcast of guy, Keith and Zach, when you feel that you matter to me, what am I doing? Yeah, really, what am I doing? What do I do? And write those things down for yourself and do more of those things, and have your people go ask their people that question, and have their people go ask their people that question and and have them write it down, have them catalog it and do more of those things. That’s some of the most valuable data you would get, because you’ll be getting data on the driver of everything else that happens in your organization, right?

Keith Edwards
And it’s not going to be universal. What might really exactly matter to this person, and what might might be off putting to the next person or intrusive to the next person. And so tailoring that, it sounds like I love that you sort of said, you know when it works, right? When you have a great meal, just give me the recipe, right? You’re asking people when this works. Give me the recipe. I’ll write the recipe and I’ll do more of

Zach Mercurio
that Yeah. And when in doubt, overestimate your impact. Yeah, you know. Because, for example, you know. Think about someone you rely on right now. Think about the last time you explicitly told them. Oftentimes, there’s a gap between our feelings of how much someone matters to us and the actions we take to show them. So find somebody you rely on, and just say these five words, if it wasn’t for you, and show them how they’re needed, and you will see right in front of you the power, power of mattering.

Keith Edwards
Beautiful. I was recently talking with someone who does consulting, and he was telling the story about connecting with a leader of a very large, very important nonprofit doing incredible, incredible work. And he said to this leader, he said, you know, how’s it going? And and the leader was sort of talking about some of the challenges, some of the successes, and he said, you know what’s, what’s the biggest problem? And the leader said, oh, you know what it is people, and you’re kind of giving us the recipe where, where, how we can make people feel mattered. Ways to go about doing that, and so that, that people are oftentimes our biggest challenge or biggest problem in organizations that are also our biggest asset and our biggest strength, and you’re, you’re talking, you’re, I’m hearing lots of ways that we can move people from being a problem and a challenge to an asset, a strength, something rewarding and contributing. Yeah, and that’s what we all went

Zach Mercurio
and when people feel like they matter, when people feel that they matter, they act like they matter, yeah.

Keith Edwards
Well, we are running out of time. Zach and as you know, this podcast is called Student Affairs now. We always like to end by asking our guests, what are you thinking, troubling or pondering now? And also, folks want to connect with you. Where might they be able to do that?

Zach Mercurio
Well, I think you all know what I’m pondering right now. I mean, I think that’s how we can trans, how we can scale quality, daily interactions. And I think that how we can redevelop these skills, and see the need to redevelop these skills. But where people can reach me is, I’m at you can also go to powerofmattering.com there’s a resource on that page which has all sorts of free things you can you can get it. You can get a self assessment. There’s a template of how to give better gratitude to people. There’s an if it wasn’t for you, card that you can print off and give to somebody. So go there, and then I’m also on LinkedIn and Zach Mercurio, if you want to connect there, I have a really good community of practitioners there.

Keith Edwards
Yes, yeah, awesome. And we got all that in the show notes for folks. Thanks so much, Zach, I really appreciated reading the book and hearing your stories and making this powerful but also just very accessible. I feel like I’ve gotten so many different tools, so many different strategies I can put into work so. Thank you. Thanks, Keith. Thanks. Keith and I also want to thank our sponsors, Evolve and Huron. Evolve helps senior leaders who value aspire to lean on and want to unleash their potential for transformational leadership. This is a program I lead, along with doctors, Brian rau and Don Lee. We offer a personalized experience with high impact value the asynchronous content and six individual and six group coaching sessions, maximize your learning and growth with a focused time investment, greatly enhancing your ability to lead powerfully for social change and Huron. Huron collaborates with colleges and universities to create sound strategies, optimize operations and accelerate digital transformation by embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas and challenging the status quo, Huron promotes institutional resilience in higher ed. For more information, visit go.hcg.com/now. As always, a huge shout out to our producer, Natalie Ambrosey, who does all the behind the scenes work to make us look and sound good. And thanks to all of you our audience for making these conversations possible. You can help us reach even more folks by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube and to our weekly newsletter where we share each episode each Wednesday morning. We’d love a five star review so these conversations reach even more folks. I’m Keith Edwards, thanks to our fabulous guest today, Zach, and to everyone who’s watching and listening, make it a great week.

The Power of Mattering at Work from Harvard Business Review
The Power of Mattering: How Leaders Can Create a Culture of Significance

The Psychology of Mattering by Gordon Flett
How People Matter by Isaac Prilleltensky