The Future Of Work Is Now With Seth Mattison

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Our marketplaces are shifting faster than ever, simultaneously with talent, expectations, wants, needs, and values. Today’s guest is Seth Mattison, the founder of FutureSight Labs, who shares how successful leaders become the beacon to top talent to navigate these shifts. To have an internal shift in 60 minutes can be challenging because it’s deep work to create a long-lasting transformation. Seth dives deeper into the conversation with his 90-day-rule. Find out what the 90-day-rule is as you discover how to face the changing faces of the future of work! Enjoy this episode.

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Listen to the podcast here

The Future Of Work Is Now With Seth Mattison

Our guest is Seth Mattison, who is an expert on the future of work. He said, “Culture is not in the building but it is in the heart of the people who work there. You can’t be a successful leader unless you love people. Find out what he means. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Seth Mattison, who is an internationally recognized thought leader, author, advisor, and top-rated keynote speaker on change and transformation, leadership, and the future of work. His ideas have been featured in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Entrepreneur. His diverse client portfolio spans industries ranging from Lockheed Martin and NASA to Microsoft and IBM.

In addition to leading his own research organization and future site labs, Seth is the Cofounder of ImpactEleven, a speaking training development and accelerator community that I am a member of, which supports both emerging and established thought leaders and bringing their message to the world. Seth, welcome to the show.

It’s great to be here. It’s great to get to spend a little bit of time with you. Thanks for the opportunity.

You have such a compelling story and a message. You are traveling around the world. It’s very fortuitous for all the readers to be able to get to know your story. Before we get into that, would you mind sharing your own story of origin? You can take us back to childhood, school or wherever you want to start. When you started thinking, “This whole concept of speaking and being in touch with what’s going on in the world is something that lights me up?”

[bctt tweet=”Culture is not in the building, but in the heart of the people who work there and that you can’t be a successful leader today unless you love people.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I think of my story as almost like a three-part saga. Part one is I grew up on a fourth-generation farm in Minnesota, father, grandfather, great grandfather, mother, grandmother, great grandmother but on my father’s side, I’m watching four generations of men approach work and life. The farm was a business. It was a remarkable way to get to grow up.

I was watching at a very young age this idea of how each generation has its own unique story and history. I was fascinated with that and had close exposure to it early, having lived through the Great Depression, the characteristics and behaviors that manifested out of that having come through the 1960s and ‘70s in Vietnam.

Without understanding or even knowing that generational theory was a thing, I was exposed to it naturally and learned how to connect across those generational divides. Coming out of University Act 2, I go into Management Consulting. I worked for a boutique firm in Minnesota, and the firm specialized in executive alignment and culture change work like the people part of the transformation. I came in as a very junior account executive. The role was more of sales and relationship development, calling in at a C-Suite level to $100 million to $1 billion businesses, mid-size or mid-cap.

At the time, I’m 24 or 25 years old. I’m calling on CEOs that if I could get through or I was chatting with people, these 25 or 30 years younger than they are. They are looking at me like, “What are you going to tell us about transformation and alignment?” They weren’t wrong. I tried to communicate. I’m not there to bring the solutions. I’m there to bring the right resources and play matchmaker with this incredible bench that we had.

To build a better connection, I started asking him a different set of questions. As an aspect of a lot of what you talk about like the power of asking great questions and what that opens up, I started asking them more specific questions about the younger workforce. It was unbelievable. This is in the mid-2000s. The conversation around Millennials and Gen Y at the time were new. We weren’t inundated with it like we are now with social media, articles, and all the coverage.

As I’m asking this question, I could see all of this pain and frustration come pouring out of these leaders who are like, “Tell me what it is that you all want?” To these kids, “What do you want? I don’t what to do. You are driving me nuts.” It is a little light bulb that went off in my head of like, “For the first time in this world, my age is a benefit. Instead of holding me back and being perceived as negative, this could be positive. I could be their inside guy to this world.”

I started studying and researching the topic, having my own point of view and perspective as a member of the generation but wanting to understand the theory. I naturally gravitated towards it because of my upbringing. I got lucky. I found the serendipity of life. I found that there were two best-selling authors who were also based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I was as well. It’s a niche. In all of the places in Minneapolis, there are these two HarperCollins-published best-selling authors. I knew that I wanted to speak to teach. I didn’t exactly know what or how but I felt that calling.

All of a sudden, I was like maybe this is a path. I used my network and my relationship building to find someone who knew someone who got me to David Stillman and Lynne Lancaster. I was able to convince David’s executive assistant to be on his calendar, which was not easy. I will never forget sitting down and having coffee with him. All that youthful enthusiasm and vibrance of like, “I’m the next generation. Lynne is a Baby Boomer. You are a Gen X-er. I’m a Millennial. We can do this together. Here’s what I think.” God bless him.

He let me talk and smiled. He’s like, “I love the enthusiasm. We are not looking to hire anyone now. If you want to speak, I will help you. I will give you some insight and show you the landscape.” He was the first one to encourage me to what I needed to put together to start reaching out. I’m talking about Chambers of Commerce, local rotaries, and the entry-level where you got to go because the barriers to entry are very low. They are always looking for people. There’s not a big budget. I started speaking for free wherever I could. I started introducing myself as a generation’s expert.

I read a couple of books. I met one actual expert and just claimed it. Sometimes, on our entrepreneurial journeys, even in the journey as a speaker, there comes a point when you have to claim that identity. Before anyone else is going to give it to you, you have to do it that become claim the identity before you feel you are it or before you feel ready. I started to do a study to get the reps. We stayed in touch, and it took about a year.

A year later, David reaches back out and he’s like, “We got the green light to write a book about your generation, the Millennials. We think it’s a perfect time for you to come onboard.” I did. I got to help them in the writing of their second book, which was called The M-Factor: How the Millennial Generation Is Rocking the Workplace in 2010. We had an unbelievable ride together, and it’s where I got my speaking chops. I started to speak with them. They were working with all the bureaus. It gave me an entry point. I was speaking on their IP and learned their content.

It taught me stagecraft, communication skills, and influence skills. They sell the platform and the brand. When they did, it gave me a beautiful opportunity to launch on my own. In 2013, I launched on my own and pivoted my research and focus from thinking exclusively about generations to thinking, researching, and talking about the future of work, which is Act 3 in this story.

The M-Factor: How the Millennial Generation Is Rocking the Workplace

I lunched on my own. I had just enough momentum and credibility in the marketplace with clients and more specifically, with speaking bureaus as I worked my way up that fee structure that when I launched on my own, they were like, “We’ll see what you got.” They were willing to take a shot at me. We were celebrating a decade in April of 2023, which is wild to think about.

We can talk about that journey and where the research landed. That’s a little bit of the background of the fourth-generation farm in Minnesota. I played college football, came up through the ranks and management consulting, stumbled into this cottage industry, this interesting profession, and got paid to speak for a living, and we are having a blast.

You co-authored another book, The Future of Leadership. I’m curious about that one because one of your key takeaways in that book is navigating disruption. Everyone’s experienced disruption. You wrote about navigating disruption before the pandemic. You have always had your zeitgeist.

We wrote it with my co-author in 2017, and then it came out in 2018. We took this fundamental shift happening in the world of work, this big trend, and we brought it to life through a parable. I had never written a business book like that before. It was a little bit of a leap of faith. I had so much fun. It was much joy to give myself permission to create characters and write fiction to bring these lessons through the feedback we’ve gotten from that has been remarkable over the years of a surprising way to bring these insights to life. That has been fun.

I can certainly relate to that journey with my book, Being A Parable Business Fable, a story about storytelling. You get into the descriptions of someone’s life. You want to paint that picture of that character in a situation. You’ve nailed it when someone says, “I thought so and so would get together at the end of the story.”

Their imagination is taking those characters and bringing out their storylines 1,000%.

What is the other thing that distinguishes you, in my opinion, is the research that you have. The thing that jumps out at me is going beyond this agreement of, “I’m going to be your leader. That’s the table stakes.” How do you work with C-level executives? This is applicable to whether you are Fortune 500 or running a small company of 50 people that they need regardless of their age from their leaders.

It’s an interesting and exciting yet challenging time for leaders. They’re more confronting, and external change and transformation on marketplaces are shifting faster than ever. At the same time, the people talent that we need to help us deliver value and create exceptional experiences for clients, and their expectations, wants, needs, and values are shifting at a speed we’ve never seen before. COVID fundamentally changed us. We all collectively went through a collective existential experience.

[bctt tweet=”Claim your identity before you are ready.” username=”John_Livesay”]

When we say collective existential experience, it means at some point over the last now almost three years, in a moment of pause, joy, and frustration in the silence when everything was closed and locked down, we all paused and asked ourselves the big questions, “Who am I? What do I want? How do I want to design my life? What are the experiences? Who do I want to be doing life with?” We all reevaluated.

When you talk about the research, whether we are conducting primary research or working hard to identify great secondary research, this theme of an existential experience showed up in the data. Oracle released interesting global data pointing to the fact that 88% of people said that they had evaluated their values over the past years. We are all looking at the 93% of people who said they had a new definition of what success was for them in their life. That is an unheard-of shift. For leaders, it’s like, “How do we work with them? What are we trying to do?”

It’s a good example. One of the things we are trying to do is to tease out the non-obvious counterintuitive data points of how the world and people are changing to create a-ha moments for them of like, “I hadn’t thought about that before. What are the implications if, across an organization of 10, 100 or 10,000 people, their values are shifting, and their definitions of success, all of our rewards, incentives, and things that we use as levers to get their juice, are being called into question? ‘Maybe they’re not going to work, and if those don’t work, what will work?’”

We saw that the traditional methodologies of trying to activate, engage, and drive performance no longer worked. We watched close to 50 million people voluntarily quit their jobs. It’s a mass exodus. Another thing I thought was interesting when we looked at the data of over 50 million people voluntarily leaving, 65% of those people left the industry with their field completely. The whole industries getting hollowed out. The other big ones like hospitality, you can’t go to a hotel and don’t have the staff, retail, healthcare, huge shortages, and nurses and nurse practitioners are exhausted from this.

A big part of the work that we are doing with leaders is helping them spot, “We got through all of that.” Whether it’s a recession or the next big internal, people are exhausted, and you have more open positions than ever before. You are trying to figure out how to create a compelling offer to bring people in to get them to want to join you.

How do you unlock high performance in and amongst the teams in your organization to create great experiences for clients? For me personally, number one, it’s an exciting and interesting time because there’s so much transformation that’s occurring in us as human beings, and then it’s ripe for reflection and perspective shifting with leaders as they try to get their arms around what’s happening.

What I’ve seen when I’m talking to architects or even law firms is this shortage of qualified top talent, a real estate also trying to get the top producers from one brokerage to come to their firm. It’s all the same. You bring your own business, “Why should I bring you versus somebody else?” Leaders have always needed to attract and keep top talent.

With this big shift in people’s values, you describe it as the need to be a beacon. I love that because that’s the lighthouse image of, “Here’s a safe place to land that’s going to see you as a human and not a cog in a wheel.” I can’t have you on my show without talking about your production skills, where you have a whole thing about stories changing the world.

The Future of Leadership: Elevate your influence. Navigate disruption. Bring out their best.

Speaking your language.

Tell us a little bit about how you’ve worked with some of these big companies on helping these leaders become authentic so that they can, in fact, become a beacon to top talent.

One of the challenges that we confront with speaking business is usually 30 or 90 minutes. Otto Scharmer from MIT quoted this saying, and this quote stuck with me. We also intuitively know this, “We cannot create an external shift in our organizations until an internal transformation happens within.” You can’t create an external shift until an internal transformation occurs within leadership.

Trying to help people drop into a deep self-reflective place and answering some of those big questions like, “Who am I? What are the beliefs and values that I hold? How am I showing up to get someone to be self-reflective?” To have an internal shift in 60 minutes is challenging because it’s deep work. To create real, lasting long-term transformation, that’s where your coaching comes, and you are working with someone.

What I’m hoping to do is to cut through the noise so that maybe they can hear it for the first time or more specifically, maybe it reminds them of who they are and that idea of being a beacon because a lot of times, the leaders we are working with are trying to lead a transformation journey internally. At the 2 or 3-day event that they are at, the leadership team has gathered. They are talking about strategy for the next year and how they are going to communicate that. Usually, they have to go back to their people and convince them to change their behavior and go in this new direction to get them to buy into the new strategy and the new vision.

I will have leaders say to me a lot of the times and stuff like, “How do you get them to believe in this thing?” I asked a mentor of mine once. The feedback I got, which has stuck with me ever since, is, “You can’t make anyone believe anything.” I can’t make you believe anything. The same goes for our audiences. I can’t make them believe it. All we can do is communicate what we believe with enough clarity and conviction that it creates space for someone to stand up and say, “I believe what you believe. I’m coming with you.” It’s like, “What does that mean?” Number one, you have to know what you believe.

It has to be very clear. It can’t be vague at all. It’s a Jerry Maguire thing as well. People know that reference of, “It’s coming with me.”

It seems simple but sometimes it shocked leaders and ended up like, “What do you believe?” Not just what you think. Especially for non-senior executive leaders, who are tasked with going back and communicating the vision and the strategies that their teams like, “If you don’t believe it and you are not bought in, no one is going to buy.”

[bctt tweet=”There is no external shift until there is an internal shift.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Certainly, not buyers if you are a seller. I see this across industries. That’s why I know you are in such demand as a speaker. Everything from real estate dramatically changes with interest rates going. It was very easy if you got a listing to get multiple offers at a low-interest rate, and now you have to change. The same thing. I’m working with a company that makes electric motors. They have been selling because there has been such a shortage of inventory. They happen to have it. They didn’t have to sell that hard. There’s only one place to get it. That’s not going to last forever, either.

The supply chain will eventually open up again. Everything keeps shifting. The future is different. You have to change and get the leaders to convince people that, “We can’t keep doing what we have been doing. It’s not going to keep working.” I saw it when print sales went away and it became digital. There are many examples of that.

You’ve got this incredible career and friendships with the cofounders of ImpactEleven. One of the things that you do so well is your authenticity comes through in your videos, in person or when you are on stage. You look at the world from a place of abundance and the people that you could be perceiving as your competitors. You make them your allies. You have this wonderful 90-Day Rule that I want you to share because I love it so much that you’ve got your core people. Tell us what you guys have agreed to do with each other and how ImpactEleven came about.

You are spot on about trying to operate in this state of abundance. It’s easy to talk about that and talk about when things are good and flowing. It’s another to be able to stay in that when you might be momentarily in a state of scarcity. My three Cofounders of ImpactEleven are Peter Sheahan, Josh Linkner, and Ryan Estis, did you have them all on the show? At least you had Josh.

I’ve had Josh, you are up, Ryan is following, and I still have yet to get Peter.

If you are only going to get Pete to be in the same state because he’s traveling all over the world. We will get him locked in. Technically from the outside, you could say that the four of us have been competitors for the better part of a decade. We have been in the same proposals up for the same opportunities forever. Ryan will go for one year. I will go next year. I beat Pete. Pete would beat me out but we were always very collegial.

Ryan and I were very dear friends. We live right next door to each other in Minneapolis. He was at my wedding. We had a strong anchor point. We had leaned on each other as we were building our businesses but you need somebody to run ideas through like, “How are you breaking in with this bureau?” We started to develop deeper relationships with Peter and Josh.

When we went through COVID, remember what I said when we’ve all gone through this collective existential experience. We did as well. Part of what came out of that was this idea of, “I don’t want to do this by myself anymore.” As entrepreneurs, depending upon the business that you are building, it can be a lonely road. Speaking in particular, you get to be in front of big audiences but you spend an enormous amount of time alone.

Future Of Work: It’s right for reflection and perspective shifting with leaders if they try to get their arms around what’s happening.

You are more often alone in hotels, airports, and traveling. You are sitting in front of your computer, cranking out content. That’s like, “I don’t want to do this by myself anymore.”It feels like there’s an opportunity to number 1) Do something together. Number 2) We all had people in our life that were there to help us break into this business each in our own way, I, David, and Lynne.

You’ve got all the raw materials and all the makings to be able to break in but it’s understanding of the formula. Maybe it was understanding how the bureau channel works. It’s getting a couple of your assets squared away so that it helps buyers as they are thinking through the buying decision. We could help the next “generation” of speakers, this whole tribe of speakers that are ascending in their own careers that you can see there add a great deal, a great volume but they a little tweak that takes them to the next level.

The idea was that there was more than enough for all of us to go around. There’s so much speaking opportunity out there, and then expanding that partner group out to a larger partner group. We can help other people do this well, and it’s not going to take anything away from us. I’m not trying to do 200 or 100 events a year. I want to do 60 to 65 events in my niche of future work.

I want to be focusing on building out this community. There are hundreds of thousands of speaking slots around the world for the opportunity. We came together and were like, “Let’s build this thing out.” You nailed it at the top of the show. Its development, training, live events, it is anybody who has a message on their heart that they want to bring to the world. Certainly, we have a number of phenomenal professionals like you that are in this community.

We also have people who have just sold their businesses they are writing a book. They’ve got to make the shift from, “I’m an executive,” into, “I’m going to take this to the street now.” It turned into this beautiful community that is expanding way beyond the four of us. We are seeing it happen in real time. Relationships are being developed, communications, and meet-ups which is what the hope always was. The community would be able to support one another in a way that the four of us long wouldn’t.

You have this 90-day agreement.

The 90-day agreement sparks specifically with Ryan. I moved to chase my wife out to California in 2011, from Minnesota. Ryan and I haven’t lived in the same city for over ten years. A part of what kept us close and committed because we get turned into adults, we have families, and we get busy. It’s about time. Time creeps in, and you lose touch. We’ve created this 90-day rule. Every 90 days, 1 of us gets on a plane or we are coordinating our travel schedules. We travel a lot and say, “Maybe it’s a layover. Maybe it’s a meeting at the airport. I will come up to Minnesota.”

We don’t go more than 90 days without seeing each other. It has sustained a beautiful friendship. There is some of that ethos that is carrying over into the ImpactEleven community. Now we have at least quarterly in-person experiences, and part of it is selfishly because we want to be together. Part of it is the learning magic and the deep bonds that are getting formed across the community by being able to spend time together in learning and leveling ourselves up and then doing a lot of fun stuff.

It has been one of the best experiences I have ever been a part of. A friend of mine who’s a mentor for me, Tim Sanders is one that told me about it years ago. He’s friends with Josh. It’s grown into all of this incredible skillset of understanding that it’s a business. It needs a structure, and your talk needs a structure. All of the different things of, “If you are not giving a talk that generates additional interest. There’s something wrong with your talk,” that a-ha moment for many people of, “I need to be constantly working on this craft like an actor or singer.”

You have all the nuances to do all that and see it in person. Also, this huge commitment to diversity of the kinds of people and mentors in the community. It’s a very special place. If anyone is interested in taking their speaking business to the next level and/or getting into the speaking business, I’m constantly telling people that this is the best investment you could ever make.

It was not lost on us. Four of us are sitting around a dinner table and it’s like, “We are four straight, cisgender White men. This is not reflective of the industry and our clients. At the same time, we can’t change who we are. What we can do is be intentional, bake it into our values, our behaviors, and who we encircle ourselves with to expand this reach.” It was important to us right away to build out what we called our extended partner group and bringing on people like Cassandra Worthy or Erica Dhawan.

[bctt tweet=”We can’t change who we are, but we can be very intentional and bake it into our values and behaviors and who we encircle ourselves with to expand this reach.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Alison Levine is one of my favorites.

Alison is a phenomenal veteran. She’s a great example of something that you said of, “Thinking about this like a business but this idea.” It’s applicable no matter what your profession is. If you are reading this and you are not a professional speaker, it still applies. In our business, this idea of going out and delivering with such excellence at such a high level that it transcends more than just a, “Thank you. That was a great job,” email.

That is nice, and it feels great but that has to be table stakes. What we are after is we need people coming out of our time with them, and they’ve got to tell people about what they experienced or are a part of an association they see John speak, and they were like, “I have to get John into my company.” They leave needing and feeling compelled to get you back or to tell someone about that experience. That is a very high bar for all of us that I’m constantly in pursuit of. It’s challenging because you can feel like, “That was pretty good.” People seemed happy they were nice afterward.

“Did I wow them?”

It’s true in every entrepreneur’s business, especially as you are growing it off like the satisfied customer versus a raving fan, that their business and life have been deeply moved by interacting with you. That’s what we are after.

Future Of Work: It’s easy to talk about abundance when things are good and flowing. It’s another to be able to stay in a state of scarcity when you might be momentarily in.

If they can quote something from your talk years later, I heard Alison speak in Los Angeles several years ago. I got her to be a guest on the show. We became friends from that. She has this wonderful line about, “Backing up is not backing down,” as she’s talking about climbing Mount Everest. I will always remember that. When you have that soundbite hook that people go, “That made me rethink things even if I’m not climbing Mount Everest,” then you see why she’s successful. Speaking of success, how can people reach out to you for speaking and find out more about ImpactEleven? Give us the websites if you would.

I’m easy to find. My website is SethMattison.com. There’s a big contact page there. When you reach out there, you will connect with our Head of Sales and Relationship Development, Jenny DeRosse, and across social channels. I’m probably most active on Instagram and LinkedIn. That’s @SethMattison. I’m pretty easy to find there too. Although I have friends who have told me that there’s a number of fake accounts, unfortunately, that using my name, so you have to give it double-check.

Any last thought or a quote you want to leave us with?

I will leave you with two. You teach us well by helping leaders try to navigate this environment that we are in now. Two big things that we have been trying to anchor into leaders’ minds as we have been doing this work, especially as organizations are trying to find their footing with, like, “What do we do with our physical real estate? Do we make this shift to remote? How do we do hybrid?” The number one reason why leaders tell me that they want their people back in the office is culture. It always comes back to this conversation, “I’m worried about a culture.” Culture is hugely important, and the physical environment can certainly facilitate that and holding that together.

What I try to remind them is that culture doesn’t live in the walls of your building. Culture lives in the heart of your people, and getting them to make this shift, doesn’t live in the building. It’s in your people. The walls can support it but that means in this new environment, your culture has to manifest and come to life across all digital channels. Your culture comes to life in the work itself in every text message, Slack, channel, and email. All become reflective. It’s not just the building. The building can help and support. That’s one.

Number two, you can’t be a leader in this coming decade unless you love people. Sometimes I have audiences that roll their eyes a little bit and are like, “I barely love my family. You are asking me to love my staff or my people?” The answer is yes. Love means wanting goodness for them in their life and calling them up to their place of high service. I always love to ask people to reflect and like, “If you have ever been lucky enough to work for a leader that you knew loved people, you were around them, almost every hand will go up in a room because someone can remember.

Think about how they showed up. They cared about you as a human being. They wanted good things. They had your back. They would tell you the truth. Loving might mean the leader that loved me let me go. He fired me, and it was an act of love. It doesn’t mean we lower our standards or don’t have high expectations, but you have to care deeply about people in this world and in this environment. Love your people.

What a great way to end. Thank you, Seth. You’ve inspired me every time. It’s great, and I’m sure you will have done the same for the readers.

Thanks, john. Take care.

Important Links

• ImpactEleven
• The M-Factor: How the Millennial Generation Is Rocking the Workplace
• The Future of Leadership
• MIT
• Josh Linkner – Past Episode
• Alison Levine– Past Episode
• SethMattison.com
• @SethMattison – LinkedIn
• Instagram – Seth Mattison
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

About Seth Mattison

Seth Mattison is an internationally recognized thought leader, author, advisor, and top-rated keynote speaker on change and transformation, leadership, and the future of work.

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