Jon Clifton

CEO, Gallup

What all great leaders have in common is that they did not strive to be someone who they are not. What they were all striving to be is the greatest version of themselves. They were in touch with their strengths.

Summary

On this week’s episode of “Leadership Matters,” Alan is joined by Jon Clifton, CEO of the esteemed global analytics and advice firm Gallup. For nearly half a century, Jon’s family has played a major role in Gallup’s leadership — since taking the reins as CEO himself this year, Jon has continued to strengthen the company’s work to empower decisionmakers by tracking and analyzing the most important trends shaping the future of our planet.

In their conversation, Jon and Alan discuss the history of Gallup and its fascinating areas of research over the past several years. Jon has compiled some of the organization’s most meaningful findings into his recent book Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It. In it, Jon argues that policymakers around the world have failed to address a startling drop in global wellbeing whose roots go far deeper than the coronavirus pandemic. In Jon’s view, meeting this challenge means re-thinking our preconceived notions about policy outcomes and re-evaluate what counts as a successful policy intervention.

Mentions & Resources in this Episode

• CliftonStrengths

• Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow, by Don Clifton

• 2022 World Happiness Report

• Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It, by Jon Clifton

Guest Bio

Jon Clifton is CEO of Gallup, a global analytics and advice firm. Mr. Clifton's mission is to build the world's official statistics for everything related to work and life, to put people worldwide in touch with their strengths and to help organizations create thriving workplaces.

Mr. Clifton is a nonresident senior fellow at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. He serves on the boards of directors for Gallup and Young Professionals in Foreign Policy, and has also served on the boards of Meridian International Center, StreetWise Partners, Chess Challenge in DC and Findyr.

Because of his expertise, Mr. Clifton is often called on to speak about Gallup's research to international associations including the United Nations, the International Association for Official Statistics and the World Bank.

He has also been interviewed on BBC News, C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" and Al-Jazeera, and he has testified in front of the U.S. Congress on the state of American small business and entrepreneurship.

Mr. Clifton received a bachelor's degree in political science and history from the University of Michigan and a Juris Doctor in international law from the University of Nebraska. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Midland University.

Clips from this Episode

• Jon details Gallup’s work beyond its political polling

• Jon relates Gallup’s research on happiness in the workplace and why policymakers need new solutions

• On the future of Gallup and how it will grow and expand

Episode Transcription

Alan Fleischmann

My guest today is a thoughtful leader who sits at the helm of one of the world’s most renowned research companies.

John Clifton is CEO of Gallup, a global analytics and advice firm. Founded in 1935, the company is well known for producing the opinion polls that drive the decisions of policymakers, C-suites, and thought leaders around the world. From the popularity of American presidents to public confidence in financial institutions, Gallup tracks and analyzes the most important trends shaping the future of our planet.

A familiar face on newscasts in America and abroad, John has spent much of the last five years as Gallup’s global managing partner. Since taking the reins as CEO of Gallup earlier this year, he has continued to strengthen the company’s research and help decisionmakers understand their own stakeholders and constituents.

Just last week, John’s book Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It was published. In it, John explains the origins of a worrying rise in global unhappiness and the metrics we must improve going forward to better the lives of people everywhere.

I’m thrilled to welcome John onto the show today to discuss his career, his fascinating book, and the remarkable work being done in his firm. I should say — John is a good friend, and I’m really glad that he’s joining us here on “Leadership Matters.”

John, it’s a pleasure to have you join us today.

John Clifton

Alan, thanks for having me.

Alan Fleischmann

It’s really, really fun to have you on here.

Let’s start with a little bit about Gallup. People really don’t know much about Gallup and how it’s been around for generations. As well as your family’s deep involvement — I know your dad, Jim, and it’s really been a labor of love. Your late grandfather is someone who, I think, has a big presence even today in a lot of what you do. It was your grandfather’s research company that merged with Gallup in the 1980s, and your father served as its longtime CEO, so you kind of grew up with this all around you. I’m curious about that.

What did your mom do? What was like around the house? And tell us a little bit of the early Gallup story.

John Clifton

Well, the Gallup organization, as many know, was founded in the early ’30s. The reason that George Gallup came to fame is because of his correct prediction in the election with Alf Landon and FDR. A lot of people kind of remember the fact that Literary Digest said that Alf Landon would win. Literary Digest did their methodology by sending out a massive mailer to all their subscribers, and they said, “Who do you plan to vote for?” I think they had a million people respond, that was the size of their database. George Gallup said, “It isn’t really the size of the survey that matters. It’s how you select the individuals.” So he used a random, probability-based procedure in order to select the respondents. And he said, “No, in fact, that won’t be Alf Landon that will win, it will be FDR.” He was right, and that kind of catapulted him into a new fame in the United States. One year, he was actually on the cover of Time magazine. So that was what George Gallup did in order to propel him to the fame that he had throughout his life.

But interestingly enough, that’s not what interested George Gallup the most. What interested him the most was understanding how people’s lives were going. So, to understand how these two organizations came together: George Gallup was studying human behavior at a macro level. In the 1970s and 1980s, Don Clifton — also in partnership with his son, Jim Clifton, who’s my dad — was studying human behavior at the individual and organizational level. Don Clifton was a bomber in World War II. When he came back from war, he was very concerned about all the destruction that took place and he wanted to do something positive for the world. He was at the University of Nebraska, and there, he sort of had this epiphany, if you will. He was studying in a psychology department, and he noticed that every single book on the bookshelves was on what’s wrong with people. He noticed there weren’t any books on what’s right with people. So he dedicated his life to writing the book on what’s right with people.

That’s ultimately what created StrengthsFinder, which we’ve renamed to CliftonStrengths. That’s studying people at the individual level, and he was also understanding people at the organizational level. What he wanted to know was: Are there work environments where the behavioral aspects of life increased productivity, but also positively impacted people’s wellbeing? What came about was his work that’s now known as the Q12. These are sort of wellbeing-at-work items that we’ve now been asking for almost 40 years within the United States. Now we’ve been doing it in almost 150 countries, understanding what percent of workers globally are thriving.

So in the 1980s, those two organizations came together. It was 1988. It was great, because now we study people at the individual, at the organizational, and at the macro level.

Alan Fleischmann

So when you grew up, the Cliftons and the Gallup organization were already together.

John Clifton

That’s right. This took place after I was alive, when those two organizations merged. So my first job at Gallup was with our maintenance team, and then I moved into text analytics after that.

Alan Fleischmann

And what did your mom do throughout this period?

John Clifton

Mom is somebody that’s been incredibly supportive of all of us. Mom was a homemaker, she started in sales at Polaroid for the longest time. But she was somebody that kind of just helped us get involved in whatever drove us. She knew that at a young age, I was interested in countries in numbers. So her entire intent was to get me exposed to whatever possible that would help me grow in that aspect.

Alan Fleischmann

And you have how many siblings? You have a sister, right?

John Clifton

I have two sisters, actually. One in Omaha and one right here in Virginia.

Alan Fleischmann

Very nice. And what do they do today?

John Clifton

Both are homemakers. My big sister graduated from the University of Nebraska and my little sister, before taking on a role as a homemaker, got her master’s degree at Hopkins in teaching and did teaching in the Virginia area, both with kindergarten and special needs.

We come from a long history of teachers. My grandfather was a teacher. Of course, George Gallup, who inspires us all, was a teacher. So, we as a family are really inspired by the teaching profession.

Alan Fleischmann

And you went on to the University of Michigan, where you studied political science and history. Then you went on to get your JD at the University of Nebraska, right? Which is your dad’s alma mater, too.

John Clifton

That’s correct.

Alan Fleischmann

It all worked out.

Did you know you wanted to go into Gallup at that point?

John Clifton

No, I didn’t. So I applied at the University of Michigan as a math major, and I switched to political science and history because I got really interested in international issues. So both had a focus on international history, international political science. I also studied abroad.

When I went to law school, I studied abroad again, also focused on international law. Again, I always just wanted to focus on some way to understand the world internationally or through numbers. It wasn’t until the Gallup World Poll at Gallup kicked off that I said, “I want to be a part of this, potentially for the rest of my life.” Because I thought it was one of the simplest ways to communicate to leaders how people’s lives are going, whether or not progress existed in these countries. So it’s been a heck of a ride ever since.

Alan Fleischmann

At what point did you decide you were going to join Gallup? You joined in 2008, right? At some point, did it become clear that you were going to join? Was it the appeal of the family business? Because you definitely have, beyond you, your dad, and others in your family, a familial culture. When you walk in the doors of Gallup, you do feel like you’re walking into a rather extensive and scaled organization, but also a very intimate and familial business.

John Clifton

Well today, I think I have only five family members, including a cousin, that work at Gallup. We have 1,200 employees globally, not including all the wonderful interviewers that we work with. So when we say that it’s a family business… We have a massive part of our company that’s owned by our colleagues. So oftentimes, when you use the term family, it extends not just to those that are related by blood, but you know, to those with whom we feel a close connection, I think, to all of us within the company. So sometimes we say the Gallup family when we actually mean the 1,200 people that work at Gallup.

Alan Fleischmann

You do feel that when you walked in the door there as well, there’s a very close connection. I’ve seen people over many years who are still there, so they definitely want to be part of the journey with you.

When did you decide you wanted to join Gallup? And then, were there other careers you were considering before you actually made that decision?

John Clifton

There were. I interned three times on the Hill; I was lucky enough to work with some of Nebraska’s representatives, including Secretary Hagel at the time he was Senator Hagel. I had a lot of interest in doing something also for the state of Nebraska. I was really interested in Senator Hagel’s work, because he was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time. So I thought maybe there could be a chance that I pursue something like that.

But when the Gallup World Poll was born, Dr. Gale Muller, who got his PhD in mathematics, became a mentor of mine. I had the opportunity to do a brief internship with Gallup in one of those summers when the Gallup poll was born, and I just thought that this is one of the most powerful ways to listen to people all over the world. To just simply go out into the field and ask them how their life is going, how they feel about the political climate in their countries, how they feel about the economic climate in the countries. If there was any way I could be a part of that, I felt like I could make a great contribution to it.

Alan Fleischmann

And really, there’s no poll like the World Poll.

John Clifton

You’re right. That’s certainly how we feel. There are other sort of global polls, but they’re not always… They don’t span as many countries as we do.

I think the other thing that we’re really proud of at Gallup is this methodology that we deploy. Because, when we go to 140 to 150 countries every single year, a third of them we do phone, but the other two thirds we do face to face. They are not just in capital cities. They are truly nationally random surveys, meaning sometimes, we’re negotiating with our colleagues or interviewers that they need to drive nine hours to a community. We’re negotiating gas prices, we’re negotiating the hourly rate, because we want to make sure everyone has an equal chance of being selected. Sometimes, that means that we have to go to the furthest, far-off places within countries. It’s also what makes it so expensive.

Alan Fleischmann

Tell us a little bit about the business itself. Because I know people think of the Gallup polls, but a big part of your business is also research and consulting.

John Clifton

That’s right. There are three aspects of our business, and it falls right along the lines of human behavior. So we study human behavior at the macro level. We work with organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank, and we quantify concepts like hunger and financial inclusion. If you look at the Sustainable Development Goals or the SDG Report that the Secretary General puts out, you’ll see that those two indicators— on hunger, 2.1.2, and also in financial inclusion, which I believe is in either SDG 8 or 10 — are Gallup statistics that we put out. So we’re really proud of the fact that we work with organizations like the United Nations, but also in the private sector. Take Hologic, for example. The purpose of their organization is to improve women’s health globally. So we set out on a project to effectively create the world’s official statistics for women’s health. So that’s what we do on the macro level.

At the organizational level, we help organizations do two things. Number one: increase their productivity through human behavior. Number two: improve worker and employee lives. Because if you feel good at work, it ultimately impacts your overall life. Why? Because of two estimates. One says that we spent 115,000 hours of our life at work. I did my own estimate, it’s about 85,000 on the low end. That means that the only thing we do more of in life, other than work, is sleep. So if what’s happening at work isn’t going well, it dominates how the rest of your life is going. So we help advise companies in terms of, how is it that you can look to human behavior to increase productivity, but also, how can you improve people’s lives? We think, ultimately, the greatest gains in terms of making a better life are right there in the workplace.

The other aspect of it is this individual aspect, through CliftonStrengths. How do you accelerate a human being’s development? It has to be done individually, because all of us are so, so unique. It’s not just in our fingerprints. For example, how we’re driven is also as unique as our fingerprints. Oftentimes, people will take development assessments and they find that they’re very similar to three other people that they have nothing in common with. But through what Don Clifton created through CliftonStrengths, you have a one-in-fifty-million chance, I think, of looking exactly like the person sitting next to you. That makes more sense.

So now, about half a million young people that go into colleges and universities use CliftonStrengths, and so do some of the biggest companies in the world. Accenture has talked about this publicly, so has Southwest Airlines. All of their employees now go through CliftonStrengths, and it’s a way to help accelerate their development. But the other thing is, it helps them understand each other better. Because a lot of times, when humans interact with each other, we understand each other through our weaknesses. We try to explain what someone did as some sort of negative behavior. But oftentimes, human beings are doing it through positive behavior. They’re trying to be helpful, and they’re doing it through their strengths. So this gives us a taxonomy to truly and better understand each other throughout the workplace.

Those are our three business lines.

Alan Fleischmann

And when you do CliftonStrengths how do you describe or distinguish this from other things out there, like Myers-Briggs?

John Clifton

That’s a great question, because a lot of times the other assessments — and we’re not competing with those assessments, if somebody wants to see multiple views of themselves, they should. But the difference is, a lot of times you’re looking at a personality assessment. That’s not what this is. This is a development assessment. This is an assessment to help better understand each other in a work and life context.

So when somebody goes through this, you have 34 potential themes that we’ve identified through decades of research and millions of interviews. The output of it says, you have the combination of one of these five strengths. For example, somebody might lead with competition: they see the world through comparison. And no matter what takes place, if you want to encourage their development, show them how they compare to their peers. Show them how they compare to the national benchmark. Because no matter what happens, it will inspire and drive them to work harder than ever, precisely because that’s how they see the world.

Another one of our themes is harmony. I think maybe if there’s anything that we mislabeled, it would be harmony, because harmony would be synonymous with diplomacy. People who excel at harmony are some of the greatest diplomats in the world. I guarantee you, if we could go back in time and have Ben Franklin take CliftonStrengths, harmony would be in his top five. Why? Because when he helped close the deal on the Constitution that we have today in the United States, he basically gave in on everything that he wanted. He said, “I’m doing this for the Union.” And people with harmony excel in that. They can bring warring factions together and create agreement, because that’s how they see the world. So again, people go through this assessment because it’s what accelerates their development, and also, because it helps people understand each other.

I’ll throw in one more thing: when Don Clifton created this and was researching through all of history, what he found was that basically every philosopher — from Aristotle to modern business thinkers like Peter Drucker — wrote and said that a key to a successful career or a great life is done through your strengths. The problem is, every time a student or anyone reads that information, no one ever says, “Where do you start?” Don Clifton said, “Let me figure out an answer to that.”

So what differentiates CliftonStrengths from anything else is that this gives people a place to start in their journey in order to become the greatest version of themselves. So that’s what CliftonStrengths is all about.

Alan Fleischmann

That’s amazing. And have you seen transformations in work teams, internally and externally, that have come from it?

John Clifton

Without question. We now have so many studies on managers who work with people on their strengths. It improves retention, it increases productivity.

I think one of the most profound things, though — and Dr. Ella Washington at Georgetown has looked at a lot of this with Strengths — is that it also helps from a DEI perspective, because it helps us understand each other. One of the single best ways to just get to know each other is, what is it that makes all of us great? So we’ve done, and she has led, a number of projects that allow us to say what is it that makes the greatest teams in the world. It’s not some sort of unique strengths make-up: What makes the greatest teams is whether or not they understand each other. That’s what really creates that flow within a team. If I know what Alan does well, and Alan knows what I do well, it takes us to a higher level in terms of operating as a team.

So yeah, we’ve seen a lot of amazing results, not just at the team level, but even at the organizational level. Organizations that embrace a strengths-based philosophy — again, it’s not just reducing turnover, it’s not just increasing productivity — increase their employee wellbeing, because people feel better understood. They have the opportunity to do best. If we’re getting into Aristotle… Everyone always tells me I say this word wrong, but it’s eudaimonia. If we are able to serve our purpose — and oftentimes, our purpose is within our strengths — then it tremendously helps lead to a better life. So those are the outcomes that we’ve seen, at least from a statistical perspective.

Alan Fleischmann

And there are a bunch of books written about the Don Clifton way. Is there one book in particular that you would recommend to our listeners here?

John Clifton

I think the one that’s been most impactful for me is Strengths Based Leadership. The book opens and says that a manager goes to a conference about Abraham Lincoln’s leadership strengths. He comes back when he’s done and has a whole bunch of notes about what it was that caused Abraham Lincoln to be so successful in life. He says to his office, “I went to this conference, the company paid for it. And now I’m going to lead like Abraham Lincoln.” He leaves the room and his employees laugh at him— the joke is that, we know you, and you are no Abraham Lincoln.

Because the reality is, nobody is ever going to be another Abraham Lincoln. What Don Clifton found out, in studying as many leaders as he studied, is that what all great leaders have in common is that they did not strive to be someone who they are not. What they were all striving to be is the greatest version of themselves. They were in touch with their strengths.

So that’s ultimately the philosophy of that book. It says, “Look, here’s some other great leaders that we’ve studied. If you aspire to be a great leader yourself, how can you get more in touch with the things that make you unique? And how can you become the greatest version of you?”

Alan Fleischmann

That’s great. So I’m going to recommend people actually get that book.

Let’s also talk a little bit about yours for a moment here. You came out with a book now called Blind Spot: the Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It. I had the pleasure of reading it early on before it was published. It’s an amazing book: what inspired you to write it? I can imagine, the last few years, obviously, people got it wrong as you said. You wanted to make sure that not only people understood why, but how they could actually correct it. But where did the topic come from? Tell us a little bit about that journey that led to the book.

John Clifton

So in 2005, we made this decision that we were going to start quantifying how people’s lives are going in every single country in the world. Oftentimes, when we look at human development, we look at it through indicators like GDP per capita. We look at it through indicators like unemployment, or we capture indicators like the amount of carbon emissions that have been emitted into the environment. All those are very important, but they don’t explain how people feel. And that’s a problem.

So in 2005, we just started asking people: Do you experience a lot of stress in your life? Do you have a lot of anger? The questions that we were asking around these emotions were actually inspired by Danny Kahneman. Danny Kahneman even said as much at a conference about five weeks ago, where he said, “A lesser-known fact about me is that I’m the one that told Gallup to ask these questions.” It’s true; we even have the emails. And of course, as you saw in the book, I shared one of the emails that he sent us about 20 years ago, encouraging us to look at these particular topics.

When we first started measuring it, there wasn’t really anything too surprising. We found that in countries like Iraq and Iran, people expressed the most stress, sadness, anger, physical pain, and worry. About kind of 20% of people, on average, said yes to each of those items. So it wasn’t a massive, a massive finding. But in 2011, things started to change. From 2011 on to 2015, each year, more negative emotions were getting expressed. We first launched a report around 2020 and warned the world that there was this rise in negative emotions.

The challenge was in 2020, everybody heard the message. And they said, “Well gee, Gallup, why is this a surprise? We are now suffering from a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. We are all collectively miserable. So aren’t you pointing out the obvious?” And we said back to them, “If you think that, it’s because you missed what we’re trying to communicate.” This rise is happening before COVID. Now, in the subsequent years, we continued to measure this, and we did find rising unhappiness two more years. And again, that’s not a surprise, because the pandemic, rising inflation, and the war in Ukraine or Ethiopia is indeed making everyone’s lives worse.

The reason we’re concerned that everyone missed this is because they think that the record high stress, sadness, physical pain, worry, and anger is attributed to COVID. While that did indeed cause a massive amount of pain for the world, this global rise of unhappiness has been happening for a decade, and we’re really concerned about it. So we thought, “This is the right time to come out with a book, because maybe a book will help leaders pay attention to this really concerning issue.”

Alan Fleischmann

On the key drivers behind the rise of global unhappiness: are there trends that are significant across different global contexts and circumstances? Are there positive trends in the midst of all the negative? Are there negative trends that are getting worse, getting stronger?

John Clifton

If I were to isolate it, I’d isolate it to three. I think what this book is showing is that we have had a large failure to appreciate the very multidimensionality of a great life. A lot of times, national indicators focus on the rational thought of human beings — treating people as if we are automatons. When in reality, most of our decision making is emotional. This is why behavioral economics has had such a massive influence in workplaces, in government policy, even in pop culture. Because what we’ve learned is that, overwhelmingly, people are making decisions with their emotions, not with their rational thought.

Mark Manson, that popular author of Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope, says it best. He says our brains are driven by basically two people in the front seat: our emotional mind, and our rational thought. He poses the question, which one is driving? The one behind the wheel is not our rational mind. The one behind the wheel is our emotional mind. And interestingly enough, the rational mind is giving the emotional mind justifications on why the decisions that we’re making are right.

Now, if you think about that, in terms of national indicators, all we’re watching is the rational thought. What we spend, what we buy, whether or not we have jobs, how much we make. But nothing is based on how we feel. What happens when a collective group of people start to get angrier? What happens when a collective group of people starts to get sad? Honestly, we don’t know; we have so few indicators at a macro level on how people feel.

So what’s driving this: there are, again, kind of three things. One is loneliness. Loneliness is a massive problem around the world, and just now it’s getting some attention in richer countries. In our global survey, we asked people: “Over a two-week time, how much time do you spend with friends or family?” Or, “Do you have any family and friends that you spend any time with?” We find that 300 million adults globally say they don’t have a single friend or a family member that they spend time with over a two-week period of time. They don’t have any friends at all. Now there’s a meta-analysis that just came out from a professor at BYU. She found that if you are truly lonely, it increases your chances of death by 50%. One article even drew a parallel and said, it’s no longer an exaggeration to say that loneliness is the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Why? Because you don’t have anyone to talk to when things are tough, and it’s hard when you don’t have that outlet to talk to anyone. The other thing is, you don’t have anyone that’s looking out for you.

The bigger problem, though, is not just the 300 million, even though that’s the equivalent of the size the United States. The bigger problem is not just total loneliness, but also quality of friends. We find that over 20% of adults everywhere do not have a single friend that they can count on in times of need. So this problem of loneliness is massive. On the other two problems, I would say one is hunger, it’s a rising issue that many aren’t as familiar with…

Alan Fleischmann

Could you say that number again, John?

John Clifton

20% of adults globally don’t have anyone they can count on.

The other issue has to do with hunger. Of course, for 40 years, the world was winning the war against hunger. But in 2014, that number changed, and the world started losing the war against hunger. These are statistics that Gallup works on with the Food and Agriculture Organization out of Rome, and we find that 20% of people were either moderately or severely food insecure in 2014. Today, that figure is 30%. The rise was happening before COVID, and it was happening before the war in Ukraine. So for those that think that the global hunger crisis was kicked off by either of those two, it’s because they haven’t been paying attention to this global rise, over the past almost decade now, of global hunger.

Alan Fleischmann

How should policymakers be approaching this challenge? I mean, you don’t really hear — certainly not in the US — a lot of policymakers talking about unhappiness and what we need to do. You do hear a little bit in Europe, where policymakers do address the fact that we’ve got to make our communities and societies happy, or they’re proud that they’re considered to be among the happiest communities. What do you think policymakers should do or need to do?

John Clifton

I think one of the greatest accomplishments of this country is on a bipartisan issue, mental health. It’s the creation of the hotline of 988. Because before that hotline was created, people were calling in on more local suicide hotlines, and they found that one out of six people that were calling in, looking for help on the suicide hotlines — they made phone calls and they never were answered. Imagine that sort of emotional hell that someone would be experiencing. They’re reaching out to somebody, saying, “I’m on the brink of potentially committing suicide,” and no one answers. People will wait up to two minutes on hold before someone answers. So the fact that there has become this national collective effort, I think, is really incredible on behalf of the United States.

Of course, there are other initiatives: Japan is a place a lot of countries should pay attention to, because they’ve largely helped address the suicide issue that’s been going on in Japan. It’s been declining for many years. I can’t, I wouldn’t say that it was attributable to the Ministry of Loneliness that they’ve recently opened —they’ve done it twice now, and I think this is more of a reaction to what’s happening in COVID. Because, of course, loneliness spiked everywhere due to COVID. But the UK is looking at this too, because the UK is seeing it impact elderly populations. So they too, after the unfortunate assassination of Joe Cox, created this Joe Cox Commission to focus on loneliness. So I think there are some governments that are that are continuing to pay more attention to this multi-dimensionality of a great life.

But Alan, there’s one other one. I didn’t mention this in the three, but workplaces have a massive contribution that they can make here, given, as I mentioned before, the amount of hours we spend at work. The other thing is how miserable people are at work. We find that 20% of workers everywhere are completely miserable. If you look at the amount of stress, sadness, pain, and worry that they experience, they look more like the unemployed than they do their peers in the workplace. So the private sector has a massive role that they can play in order to curb the rise of global unhappiness, if they would just help create better workplaces.

Alan Fleischmann

Are there different generational parts of this here, where you’ve got certain demographics that are different when you’re looking at what makes someone happy or not happy in the office or in the work environment?

John Clifton

Yes, and no. I think a lot of a lot of people believe that millennials and Gen-Zers are creating a new kind of pressure within the workplace, in terms of communication, because many of them are communicating and getting feedback so quickly on their phones. And it’s not the case. Employees all over the world need communication. They need communication from their managers, they need communication from their senior executives, and they’re largely not getting it.

We can see it very clearly in our database. The single worst state of mind in the workplace, when you’re talking about feedback, is not negative feedback. It’s no feedback at all. Even if you get negative feedback, you feel more of an emotional attachment at work than if you, as I mentioned, get no feedback at all. So what we’re seeing is a crisis of not listening in workplaces. It’s creating a massive problem everywhere, and it will be exacerbated by this shift in terms of working from home, because people are less connected, they’re operating in more of an asynchronous environment. When it comes to an asynchronous environment — Microsoft even did a study on this — a lot of communication gets lost, because people struggle in terms of effective, good communication on email. But the other thing is, is that it’s hard for us to read each other’s tone on email. It’s hard for us to read each other’s tone on Slack or on Teams. That can cause negative emotions to rise, because you might think somebody’s mad at you and they’re not. We’re just not as great of communicators through the written word as we are when we are talking to each other, either on Zoom or — especially the best nothing will ever replace it — if we’re in person.

Alan Fleischmann

You’re listening to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM and leadershipmattersshow.com. I’m your host, Alan Fleischmann. I’m here with John Clifton, CEO of Gallup, and we’re discussing the work that he and Gallup does around the world, and also his recent book that he just published. An amazing book, actually, called Blind Spot: the Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It.

In societal conversations about the war for talent and quiet quitting, they all talk about how employers are thinking about and related to their employees. What insights from your book and from your research should business leaders be applying to their own companies?

John Clifton

Well, the first thing, and it has to do with quiet quitting, is that it’s actually not a new phenomenon; we’ve just given a new term to an old phenomenon. The old phenomenon is people who are just not engaged. This concept, that you just do the work to get by and treat a job as a job, is actually what 60% of the world of full-time workers are currently experiencing. They were experiencing it before the pandemic, and they’re experiencing it now. In fact, those that are taking the TikTok to encourage others to do what’s called quiet quitting, they actually aren’t being very quiet about it at all. When you post something on TikTok, you’re doing it for others, hoping to engage in it. So we actually call that group actively disengaged — they’re the ones that are trying to promote exactly how frustrated they are with the workplace. This is why humanity has spent decades if not hundreds of years, trying to figure out how to get away from work. It’s why we have these new concepts like four-day workweeks. It’s why we have concepts like work-life balance.

What we fail to realize is that the fix is not from getting away from work. The fix is having better work. The reason I pick on work-life balance… I agree with it in concept. But remember this: we assume that human beings excel in compartmentalization, and it’s not true. It’s really hard to compartmentalize in life. We assume that, whatever happens at work, if your boss can’t email you after five o’clock, you therefore won’t continue to be upset about whatever took place. We did a survey where it said, “Has the stress of work followed you home, where it’s caused you to have a bad relationship with your family and friends?” We found that, of those who are truly miserable at work, 75% of them said yes in many contexts, or well over that, depending on the country — Germany or the United States, where we led these studies. But think about that: they are open about the fact that, no matter how much balance that we can try to create, it’s still causing a misery.

So the solution is not to get away from work. The solution is to create better work. Largely this comes from whoever your manager is. Oftentimes, if your manager ignores you or treat you with disrespect, it is actually what will more likely cause burnout than working too many hours. We did one of the largest studies on burnout in the United States, and we found the single biggest driver of burnout is not hours worked. The single biggest driver is being treated unfairly or treated with disrespect. So these are the fundamental human issues that need fixed in workplaces all over the world, because that is what will curb the global rise of burnout or the global rise of misery at work. Not trying to concoct new ways to get as far away from work as possible.

Alan Fleischmann

That’s actually brilliant — the whole idea that it’s not about getting away, but actually making it better, making it more meaningful.

Unhappiness is a meaningful challenge. It’s a big problem. But it’s hard to wrap yourself around it. Tell us a little bit more about the methodology behind your research. How do you measure happiness? What are those different measurements that you look for? And what insights that you uncovered through these metrics?

John Clifton

Well Alan, I know on your show that you do real talk, so let me do real talk about measuring happiness. One of the single biggest critiques is with the word happiness, because people say back to us, “Well, how can you measure this? It’s ephemeral, it’s fleeting.” Or, maybe we can use a word from the Fed — it’s transitory. How can you actually measure this? The reality is you can’t. Because happiness is a term that… I don’t mean to sound like a bumper sticker on a car, but you can’t translate happiness. So we actually don’t ask about happiness. We ask about something completely different.

So in order to understand a human’s wellbeing — to understand how their life is going — we look at two different concepts. One is what we call evaluative wellbeing. This is how people see their lives. The other one is what we call experiential wellbeing. These are the concepts on, how much stress is somebody experiencing? Do they laugh and smile a lot? We tried to find concepts, which we believe we have done successfully, that actually do translate across cultures. Because even concepts like love, they don’t translate; we actually tested it. We went in and asked people whether or not they had a lot of love the day before. If an American hears that, they think about whether or not their mom called them and said, “I love you.” What they don’t realize is that, when we translated in some places, they meant a physical aspect of love. So while you can ask anything in survey research, it doesn’t mean that it’s equally comparable. So we needed something that would allow cross-cultural comparisons.

So these are the two concepts again. Number one is evaluative, how people see their life. Number two is this concept of an affect. So when we asked about how people see life, we ask them to rate your life on a scale of zero to ten. Ten is the best imaginable life; zero is the worst. Where do you stand today?

If you’ve ever heard of the World Happiness rankings that come out, it’s actually Gallup that’s behind it, but it comes out from SDSN and the United Nations.

Alan Fleischmann

It’s always Copenhagen.

John Clifton

Exactly. Denmark and Finland rate their lives the highest, and Haiti and the Palestinian Territories rate their lives the worst.

This part is the reason I say it’s real talk: The reason it’s called happiness, in the subtitle of the book and in that report that we were talking about, is because if we called it what it truly was, which is contentment, no one would read it. The World Contentment Report sounds like the most boring thing on the planet. It’s called happiness because it gets people more interested. And then we’re very clear about it in the footnotes. They were explicit about it in their report in 2011. I’m explicit about it in the book. You have to get people’s attention, or they won’t read your material. So ultimately, you could call that the global contentment rating, because Danes and Finns are the most content in the world. And understandably so, people who live in Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the Palestinian Territories are the least content.

Now when it comes to affect — people who know how to have fun, people who have a lot of stress, sadness, and anger —these are the different concepts. And the stress, sadness, and anger aspect, these sorts of daily emotions, this is where we see the world growing at a very fast pace. Now, when you look at negative emotions and the countries who are top in the world, Afghanistan hit the highest we’ve ever seen in the 15 years of our tracking. Not just for Afghanistan, but for the entire world and 2021. We did face-to-face interviews when the US forces were leaving. The Taliban gave us approval to interview women. We’ve never seen anger, stress, sadness, pain, and worry like we’ve seen in Afghanistan in that particular year.

When it comes to positive emotion, the part of the world that says that they laugh and smile a lot, that experienced the most enjoyment, with no one close, is Latin America. And if there is anything truly close to happiness that we measure, I would argue that it’s probably that. Because Latin Americans, despite it being home to some of the poorest countries in the world, they still know how to have fun, potentially more than any other culture in the world. I think the world has a lot to learn from whatever it is that people throughout Latin America figured out. Because it’s a joy that would be amazing to replicate in every single country in the world.

So those are the two concepts that we’re capturing. You have to measure them separately, because they all measure separate things. And just like GDP, when Simon Kuznets went to Congress in 1937 and said, “We should capture an indicator to measure the health of the economy,” we’re still almost 100 years in grappling with whether or not we’ve done it perfectly. We’re only 15 years in to understanding how to measure how people’s lives are going and looking at these unique constructs, like evaluative wellbeing an experiential wellbeing. So while we think we’re close, what we’ve done may not be perfect. So we are still working in order to improve these to ultimately help policymakers. Because the goal of it is, of course, to make people’s lives better in every single country in the world.

Alan Fleischmann

That’s amazing. One of the things about Latin America which has struck me is that there’s such a strong sense of family. You were talking a minute ago about loneliness, and if you’re surrounded by family — whether it’s adopted family or your blood relatives — it may actually make you happier as well.

John Clifton

Well, you’re right. Yes, I think family ties are strong throughout Latin America. But Latin America even has places where it needs to improve, in terms of the family unit. And I say that because, one of the questions that we ask globally is, “Are the children in this country treated with respect or not?” Latin America gets one of the lowest marks in the world. The Economist even did a piece on this not too long ago, that there are still some concerns throughout Latin America about how parents are toward their children, including issues that are of massive concern, like abuse, that still take place. So while there are many strong connections that are taking place, especially among family and friends, from a qualitative perspective… You know, we interviewed a woman in Colombia who was struggling financially, but when we asked her about whether or not she smiled and laughed a lot, she responded with extreme enthusiasm. We couldn’t get the interview to end because she wanted to continue to talk about how much fun she has with all of her friends and all the good times that she had. She even thanked the interviewer, saying, “Thank you for reminding me about all the fun I have in life.”

So while that is still excelling, there are still some improvements. Again, it’s true for every aspect of the planet, but there are some elements that we see in our data in Latin America within the family unit where massive improvements can be made.

Alan Fleischmann

I’m sure you know it quite well, but there’s this wonderful quote by Robert Kennedy about how GDP counts air pollution, cigarette advertising, and an ambulance to clear our highways of carnage. He goes on and talks about how it counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them; it counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm, nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight riots in our cities. It counts rifles and knives and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. But what it doesn’t do is count the most important things in our lives.

What you’re kind of talking about is making sure that we’re asking the right questions and then coming up with policies and initiatives that actually drive those right answers. So that we’re not just looking at all the things that count towards the negative, but actually, create the environment for the positive.

John Clifton

I think what’s amazing about Gallup — and I say this as a credit to many of the colleagues that have come before me, too — is that when Kennedy made that remark at the University of Kansas, he didn’t suggest an alternative. And what Gallup has done is attempt to create the alternative, and say, here are the metrics on how people feel.

It’s not unlike what Don Clifton did. When so many philosophers said, “A great life and excelling in your purpose in the world is to do it with your strengths,” many people read that and they go, “Where do I start?” His attempt was to say, here’s the place to start. Again, we probably still have miles to go before we continue to perfect that. But the aim of it was to actually create an answer. So that’s what the point of the Gallup World Poll is: to create an answer to exactly what it is that Bobby Kennedy said on the footsteps of the University of Kansas. Because the world needs that. And quite frankly, the people who are feeling worse today than they were 10 years ago, their voices and their feelings need heard. Because the fixes aren’t always rocket science. The fix is, oftentimes, when you just keep listening.

I told this to a group recently, Alan, but I did some of the interviews in Mongolia in 2019. Again, these interviews aren’t kept, it’s just for qualitative purposes. But one of the women that we asked… and I’ll never forget this, because it helps me think more about our leadership questionnaires. But we said, “Do you feel safe walking alone at night?” And she said, “No.” Now, when I hear that somebody doesn’t feel safe walking alone at night, I think — and a lot of times when we talk to leaders, they think the same thing — that what makes people afraid is crime. So if we had stopped listening at that moment and we build policies to improve the crime situation in her community on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, we wouldn’t have fixed your problem. So I asked her at the very end, what is it you’re afraid of? What she said back to me are rabid dogs. So her problem was not crime; her problem was rabid dogs. So to make a better, safer community for her, we had to keep listening, because she hadn’t fully told us the answer yet. And I think one of the biggest things that we need more from leaders today is for them to just keep listening.

Alan Fleischmann

And then turn that listening into action.

John Clifton

Exactly.

Alan Fleischmann

Because what you’ve managed to do is pull together extraordinary data. I know you’re the first one to say it’s the questions, not always the answers, that can define what needs to be done. But obviously, when you get the right questions, and they’re coupled with the right answers, it can turn into a great blueprint for how to do things together.

If you had a list of priorities coming out of the work you did for the book, what would you say are the first, second, or third things that you think we need to get done? From policymakers, but also from those of us who are business leaders and community leaders. Then, do you have some prescriptions here, that you would advise just around the kitchen table?

John Clifton

The silver bullet to a better world is more great jobs. And when I say great jobs, that means a steady paycheck; it means getting your basics met, in terms of your healthcare needs, et cetera; and steady work, depending on the country if that’s 30 or 40 hours a week. But the big one is that, when you are at that workplace, that you are thriving in that particular workplace. I think that is the silver bullet to a better life for everyone.

Right now, the unemployment figures that we look at globally do a complete injustice to what the current jobs market looks like. Why? Because if you look at the ILO, it says that global unemployment is about 6.3%. Before COVID, it was about 5.5%. As we know, economists kind of agree that the natural rate of unemployment is 5%. It suggests there is no jobs problem.

The problem with it is how it’s measured. Right now, we hold leaders accountable to the lowest common denominator of the job situation. Unemployment is a measure of many people have no work whatsoever, not even an hour, and want work. What we need is a better metric that says, let’s look at the percent of people who have great jobs. Who has full-time work? Who has a steady paycheck? And also, who has that subjective component: where they feel like their basic needs at work are getting met, they know what’s expected of them, they have the materials and resources they need to do their jobs effectively, and they have the opportunity to do what they do best? If we were able to meet those needs of the world, I will guarantee you that it will curb the global rise of unhappiness and it will help create a much higher thriving population throughout the entire world.

Alan Fleischmann

That’s amazing. Now, you also have this Great Workplace Award at Gallup. What are the key traits of those workplaces?

John Clifton

Yeah. So, one of the projects that we do at Gallup is work with a number of organizations to help them create thriving workplaces. What we do is, we go in and do a diagnostic to assess how many people are thriving within your workplace and how many aren’t. The reason that this has kind of taken off is because, when we create thriving workplaces, it doesn’t just serve stakeholder capitalists. So stakeholder capitalists are the ones that are most interested in improving worker wellbeing. But we also work with those traditional Friedmanites, the traditional shareholder capitalists. Because when employees are thriving, it’s not only good for their wellbeing: it also increases their productivity. So after we do that diagnostic, we can tell organizations exactly, from a human behavior perspective, where they need to make improvements.

We worked with one organization and, basically, their failure was that they didn’t recognize anyone. Now, this seems like something that’s super obvious from an employment perspective. Or, if you’re an executive and you don’t think that human beings are actually people, that they’re automatons, you would think, “Well, why do they need to be recognized for the work that they’re doing? Can’t they just take their paycheck and basically shut up?” The reason is that we’re humans. We need somebody to say, “Look, what you’ve done is awesome. This is an outsized contribution.” Organizations and academics have proved everywhere that meaningful recognition drives productivity.

So we worked with this organization. We went and just did a very rudimentary consulting thing where we said, “Well, let’s go see in the locations where you’re excelling.” We found that this organization was doing this very unique aspect of recognition, where they were actually doing cardboard cutouts of their teachers. Now, Alan, for you and I putting a cardboard cutout of the stars within your organization seems… We would probably be embarrassed. I would; if someone did a cardboard cutout of me I would probably turn around and not go back in. But for this place, it was meaningful. So they nationalized and it boosted recognition everywhere. We can actually see the gains that they made in terms of productivity and reduced turnover, because it became something that the community found meaningful.

So these are the types of activities and aspects — whether it’s strengthening recognition, strengthening the relationships in the workplace, strengthening development opportunities, or getting people the opportunity to do what they do best — that many employers are not fully appreciating, because all they care about ultimately is things like the bottom line.

The last thing is, Alan… I’m actually neither a shareholder capitalist nor a stakeholder capitalist. I’m a customer capitalist. I believe that companies exist to serve a customer, kind of the Peter Drucker philosophy. Strengthening the customer interaction starts with strengthening the employee interaction. If your employees are miserable, they often pass that misery to your customers. And that’s where businesses break down and fail. This is one of the things that we’re trying to drive with companies everywhere: if, they too, are customer capitalists, then we need to strengthen how workers and employees are doing, because that ultimately strengthens the bond with our customers.

Alan Fleischmann

I liked the way he described it, being a Peter Drucker capitalist.

As CEO of Gallup, you’ve done a wonderful job already charting the road ahead for Gallup. You’ve been preparing for this for a while. But 10 years from now, a decade from now, where do you hope to see the business?

John Clifton

There are three things that we as a company — and I don’t like to use the word I — are hoping to achieve as a company.

The first has to do with this Strengths Assessment. Before Don Clifton passed away, he had a dream that a million people would go through it and get in touch with what makes them great. This year, we crossed 28 million. Now we have a new vision: We’d like to see a billion people get in touch with what makes them great. So we’re trying to accelerate that as fast as we can.

The second one is, we hit a milestone as a company. Because 20% of the world’s workplace is now engaged. As we continue to see a growing population over the next couple of years, until it hits a peak, there are going to be more people that get into the global workforce. That means our jobs are cut out for us, because we’d like to see that number increase. We’d love to see engagement double from 20% to 40%. If 40% of the world’s workers were thriving, Gallup will have done its job effectively.

And the last one is, as we continue to partner with organizations like FAO and the World Bank — we also are releasing massive report with ILO and Walk Free on the world’s official statistics for slavery — we’d like to help be responsible for 50 of the world’s indicators on work and life. If we could accomplish that as an organization, then we all believe that we would truly help make our mark in the world.

Alan Fleischmann

That’s amazing.

Anything that you’d want to, as a parting words, share with our listeners here about leadership? These are CEOs, up-and-coming leaders, and those who are interested in leadership issues. Really, the people that you speak to or are thinking about all the time. Any parting words for them?

John Clifton

If there’s one thing that I’d have to recommend to your audience, Alan, is that we need to have leaders everywhere pay more attention to the emotional side of human behavior. Again, I think because so many executives are completely focused on the transactions of life — how can we squeeze more margins out of what it is that we’re doing? — I think we failed to appreciate that one of the biggest reasons we lose customers is not because our products aren’t great enough, for example. It’s because one of our customers was treated with disrespect. If we don’t quantify that, we won’t know the impact of human behavior on our customer interactions.

Take, for example, a bakery that we’re aware of. There’s a bakery where one of their best customers spent $100 a month with them. They didn’t change their products. They didn’t change anything about their business. But they treated that client with disrespect, and she never came back. So they lost probably $1,200 a year: not because of the ingredients, not because of the price that they charged, the rational aspects of the customer, but because of the emotional aspect. Because they treated her with disrespect. So whether you are a public-sector leader or a private-sector leader, leaders everywhere need to continue to think about this emotional side of how you run a business, how you run a community, or how you run a country. Because it’s the emotional side where we’re going to make the next big gains for humanity.

Alan Fleischmann

That’s amazing. It’s emotional side. It’s understanding behavior. It’s respecting one another. And it’s understanding that culture matters. All the things that you touched on here today very deeply, with great detail, and with a great sense of guidance in your book. I really appreciate you.

You’ve been listening to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I’m your host, Alan Fleischmann. We’ve been with John Clifton, a brilliant CEO of an amazing organization in Gallup. We’ve been discussing both the insights that he gets from being the CEO of Gallup and also those he’s gathered from his recent book, which is also an amazing book that I hope each one of you will buy.

Thank you, John, for being with us today.

John Clifton

Alan, thank you for having me, great to be here. Your show is doing an incredible thing, so I hope we can have this discussion again some time.