Quinn Harwood on What Google's Project Oxygen Study Really Found
Episode notes
"The worst thing they can do is leave you... but they're still showing up on your payroll." — Quinn Harwood
Corporate trust just hit 17%. Most executives read that number and think about their brand, their PR, their retention numbers. Quinn Harwood thinks about something narrower and more uncomfortable: the specific moment a leader stopped being a coach and started being a scorekeeper — and every disengaged employee still clocking in downstream of it.
Quinn is a professional certified coach, speaker, and author of Growth Time: A Coaching Fable — The Clear Path to Unlock Your Best Life and Leadership. His path runs through professional basketball, two decades in corporate leadership, and thousands of one-on-one coaching sessions — which is where he identified the exact three-part breakdown behind almost every trust failure he's coached leaders through.
In this episode, Quinn breaks down:
- The three components — care, commitment, trust — and which one is missing when a team goes quiet without you noticing
- Why "they might leave if I invest in them" is the wrong fear — and what actually happens when leaders don't invest
- The real story behind Google's decade-long Project Oxygen study: what teams say they want most from a leader, and it isn't results
- A specific leadership shift he made overseeing 11 locations that turned "how are your numbers" into "how are your people" — and why performance went up, not down
- Why the scarcity mindset around developing talent is self-defeating, and what the abundance version actually looks like in practice
#H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #StartupLeadership #CompanyCulture #B2BRelationships
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Website: CoachQharwood.com
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