Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Independence by Design podcast where we discuss what it means to be a business owner and ways to get unstuck from the day to day so we can design a business that gives us a life of independence.
I think the C Suite leadership team, where you have a strategic leadership team that can own the outcomes of sales, margins and cash, is one of the game changers for anybody truly trying to step back, get the monkeys off your back. And it's not only mental real estate, but it's also time back and then eventually at some point the CEO spot. And the challenge is do we go internal and do we promote and develop someone internally? Do we go external?
What's an actual roadmap for this that's practical and tangible? And I stumbled across Cindy Graves, my friend in Client Bill gave me her referral because she was a visit speaker. And Cindy and I walked through for an hour and a half her hiring coach process. It is unbelievable. She has scorecards that we walk through. She talks about different assessment tests and why one assessment or personality test is. Doesn't do it justice. We talk about critical thinking and intrinsic motivation.
I was so impressed because she put tangible concepts and tools and processes around. I think a topic that a lot of us get wrapped around the axel on because we want to believe in our internal people and we want to have these people on our leadership team that can really take us to the next level. But we want to believe so many so hard that sometimes we lie to ourselves or we have so much loyalty to our current people and we are afraid of bringing people externally in. It just becomes a. An emotional mess, honestly. And Cindy and I walked through this topic and it was a lot of fun and I think you're going to get a lot out of it. We screen share so you can actually see a lot of her stuff on her website. So I really recommend going and checking out. Cindy's been in this space for decades. Got ton of processes that she's put to this complicated topic to the point where she, she knows Gina Wickman. And there's a argument that everybody in the accountability chart should be using some of the tools that Cindy's walking through. So thanks everybody for tuning in. I know you're going to like this. If you're interested in figuring out how to actually get a C suite that is strategic and offloading a lot of the stuff that you're responsible for. And by the way, if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, yes, I'm wearing a gray shirt and a hat. I forgot My intro, and I'm about to head out of town, so I had to get it done.
Everybody, you're going to love this episode. If you're looking for a way to manage and promote and elevate yourself and the leadership team. Thanks, everybody for tuning in, and I hope you enjoy this conversation with Cindy. Well, Cindy, I am excited to have you on. This is going to be fun. I was introduced to you by my client and friend, Bill Devore. He was invested, saw you present, and he was like, oh, my God, you have to meet Cindy. And our first conversation, I think, went way over because we both were really kind of syncing up how you and your practice and your expertise fit in. And so I'll put a container on it for us because I'm very excited to explore for the audience what you do. And when I look at the owner's operating system, this playbook that I created that hovers on top of eos for the owner to extract themselves from the operations to the boardroom.
There's a lot of these components, Cindy, of like, you know, getting their owner's plan. There's this whole phase one of getting their plan together. Understand evaluations. Phase two is about building up the financials, connecting the financials to revenue, revenue and to margins into cash. And then this last phase is elevate. It's all about the people part and getting a executive to be sitting over revenue margins and then finance and then tying them compensation, all this stuff together. But, like, like, I got a bunch of clients that are, like, elevating and like, really rocking a lot of the stuff that we've been doing to the point where a lot of some of them are not even sitting in the operations anymore. And when even that happens, it comes down to how do I have a people roadmap that is tangible and not just loose, but, like, people that are owning outcomes. I have a tangible way to, like, figure out role, job descriptions, outcomes, development, succession.
And there's been this. And I keep saying to my group, I will constantly be looking for solutions for this for my group.
And Bill was like, you got to talk to Cindy, because he knows that I've been looking for it. And from our conversations, you were, you're wildly different than a recruiter because you're actually going through and you have actual frameworks on how to assess people, develop people, hold people accountable. So that's kind of the big container. Why? For why I'm super pumped to have this conversation thanks to Bill. You want to just maybe give us a little bit of Your background, and then we can just jump in. You know, I'll steer us to make sure that we're unpacking it the right way.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Sure. I always describe myself as a recovering HR person, and in hindsight, I think I was a consultant all along. I would go into an organization that was a mess.
I would put processes and systems in place, then I'd get bored and I'd go on to the next mess. And so many of my jobs lasted a year, year and a half. The longest one was three years.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Must have been a big mess.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: It was. And ironically, I left that one. I loved that one, but I left that one because I got engaged to my now husband and I decided that two incomes from the same place wasn't a good idea.
By the way, he's my integrator.
So both of.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: So it really works.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Yeah, from the same place, but I worked in just about every imaginable industry even then, and now we have exponentially more industries. But I was in. I cut my teeth in HR at Johnson and Johnson in New Jersey. And then I ran a staffing service and worked for a publishing company, a distribution company, robotics company, worked in the automotive industry, property management industry.
The last real job, as my husband calls it, was the. Was the robotics industry.
And so when we started with this, the one thing we were not going to touch or have anything to do with was selection.
I hated the recruiter process. I hated the search firm business model for a zillion different reasons. And it's a thankless job. Even if you're extraordinary, you can never find somebody fast enough, tall enough, big enough, not doing it. And I always relished the position of trusted advisor when I went into organizations. And I wanted to continue being that trusted advisor for clients.
And there was always an adversarial feeling whenever, even in house HR was producing was acquiring talent.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: What was adversarial about?
[00:07:03] Speaker B: Always felt like hiring managers thought you had a drawer full of humans behind you and you could just pull one out and give it to them when they came in. Your, hey, can I have one? Actually, that's not how it freaking works. Right.
And they took no ownership in sourcing. And I would try to explain, like, I can go try to find the location, but if we're in the robotics company, they want to talk to one of the scientists. They don't want to talk to one of the generalists or one of the recruiters.
They want to talk to one of the scientists about what the heck we're doing. Right. This is ages before AI so we were on the cutting edge of everything. And. And so I was trying to explain to them that they needed to really help in the sourcing. And they're like, no, that's your job. And then, you know, two weeks later, they're like, yeah, that didn't work. I need. I need a new guy.
And it was. And I'm like, you have to take some ownership and you have to provide decent leadership. So if I'm bringing you a superstar, you can't just go plug and play, walk away. That's not how it works. And, you know, I always tell people it's a lot like having a baby.
So if you've ever had. Has. Are you dad?
[00:08:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I got. We have twins. And I just gotta like, oh, that's. That's. I don't know how. I don't know what to think about that.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Think about this.
I bet the eight or nine months it took for those twins to arrive was crazy. You were on pins and needles watching what your wife was eating.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: Nesting is a thing.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: Yeah. It's like you're like, hyper, you know, alert and diligent about everything. Right.
And then the baby comes in, you're like, damn, that was a lot of work.
And everybody.
[00:08:45] Speaker A: And then it begins.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: That was the easy part. Because it takes a lot of time, money, and effort to make sure those children become significant, independent contributors to society.
Similar to acquiring talent in your organization, it takes a lot of time, money, and effort to make sure they're a significant contributor in the culture and production in your business.
And it's not just, oh, I hired them today and it's over. That's the. That as hard as that is in today's market, that's the easy part.
So.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I.
Yeah. And I think, you know what's so fascinating about people? Like what? I've.
I've hired some horrific hires and some fantastic hires and like, the way I think about people, or like, even with me building my coaching groups, it's just this chemistry that has to exist. And like, one person's vibe can throw the whole thing off.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:45] Speaker A: And whether it's, you know, people that are envisage, know, you know, or CEO, peer group, know what I'm talking about. But even like a person integrating them into a friend group, it just that that person's chemistry throws everything off. And you know, in a business, we have a unified mission. There's a lot of people that are working together. So there. There's so much to be said about, like, I think the most important, like, I Don't know if you heard those. This saying, but like the saying where you. I mean, I. I do believe that I could find.
If I go get my group of people that I've worked with in the trenches, you name the business, and we could go figure out how to tackle it together.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: Yep. For sure.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: Because of how important it is. So I think it's the most important investment that people can make.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: And we find that organizations you hire exclusively for hard skills will fire for soft skills every time.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: Ooh, fascinating. Yep. Yep.
[00:10:34] Speaker B: So giving them the roadmap on and holding their hand through the selection process to make sure they're hiring. Cause to your point, one bad egg or one person who doesn't quite fit.
It's like one tiny little cancer cell in a body.
Doesn't take long for it to spread and contaminate the rest. And then you gotta take out clean margins to make sure it's all gone.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: So. Well put. Yeah, that's. Yeah. I. Visceral reaction and invisible imagery. There.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: There were people coming to mind when I said that.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
And it's. And it's the.
The damage that's done in the ripple effect in the culture that is the margins that has to be cleaned up. Whether it's the, you know, 10xing your communication on the vision, which is exhausting, or getting people who rot again because you broke their trust in hiring someone bad. I mean, like, all that, which is really emotionally exhausting, let alone the financial implications of that. And what I. What I was excited when I met you was I think that there's, you know, the people listening in generally agree with us, but then there's the, like. Got it. How. And I've interviewed people in the past, but integrating C Suite and all, like, and I hadn't seen anybody that had, like, an actual process that's tangible and quantifiable. Like, you have. So, like, how did you go about, like, what were some of the challenges that you saw? So maybe, I mean, you did just explain some of them, but, like, coming up with, like, what was your maybe contrarian view of, like, okay, how do I tackle this in a way that's repeatable and quantifiable versus just like kind of the feel goods.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: So my first job out of college was running a temporary service, and we were number two in the world behind Kelly Services and our branch because of the adjustments I made in the selection.
And like, I was 22 years old winging it. So they say necessity is the mother of invention, and that's what.
But we became Profit center of the year worldwide.
So what happened was we ran a temporary service and I would get a call for receptionist and I need a receptionist who can type 45 words a minute, answer a PBX switchboard with 10 incoming lines, do some data entry.
Okay, fine.
Sure enough, I find that I'd send them on their way.
And we had to pay the temp at least for four hours of working if they got brought in, no matter how long they stayed.
So an hour or two after they get hired, I'd get a call. Yeah, she's not it.
I'm. I'm so. I'm sorry.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: Is it the I gave you what you wanted?
[00:13:18] Speaker B: Is it the no, she's a little rough. So I got all this soft skill stuff. They were telling me the hard skills they wanted, but they got all the soft skills stuff.
So after a while this was getting exhausting and we were losing money because I can't keep paying more than I'm right.
So I said, I started, I'd get the call, I need a receptionist, yada yada. Tell me about some of the people you love working with.
Tell me about some of the people who make you insane, who are the best, you know. And I would just pump them for this kind of stuff. And then I started. This was long before they called it behavior based interviewing.
And I just started interviewing for all of those traits.
So I realized that that required. So we, we want. We went to profit center of the year. It was amazing. That and changing a little bit of our what was long term contracts versus the short term. Like somebody no shows for their 4 o' clock shift and they need somebody to work till midnight. You can't get them there till 30. It was useful, useless anyway.
So over time I used that in any other HR department that I went into.
I found it was very difficult to teach recruiters who work for me how to interview that way. How to interview the hiring manager.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: Why, why, why did you find that so difficult?
[00:14:44] Speaker B: You know how sometimes you assume that the things that come easy to you should come easy to everybody else?
It doesn't.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: It's like, it's just like the emotional intelligence EQ which you think would be common sense is actually not very common.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: Which is what a lot of people.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: Listening in Journey that we offer is so popular because it is not common.
So that was interesting. And it was almost harder to interview the hiring manager to get what they really wanted because you get the. I'm telling you, just get me somebody who can program an AS400. I'll be fine. Nobody wants to program an AS400 anymore. So even if they can, they don't want to. So that isn't going to like. So trying to get to them. But if I found the right program or you fired other programmers before who were competent, why. Why did you fire them? And like pushing back on the hiring managers. And most of recruiters didn't really want to. I don't want to say they didn't want to work that hard, but they didn't have the ear for it. They didn't know how to ask. They didn't know what they were listening for. I don't know.
So fast forward. I wound up having to try to teach all of this, but it was almost on the fly. Like, I had to have most of the interviews with the hiring managers, with my recruiter there to say, okay, now this is what you need to go find. And then this is. That was why eventually when I started this business.
So my husband and I met in a different business and we got married, and I started the business a month before we got married.
And then three and a half years later, he joined me because I needed to start putting processes and systems around. I needed an integrator, right?
And we knew we could work together because we had before. And he said, cindy, the first thing we have to do is take that stuff that's between your ears and put it into replicable processes, because we can't scale this way. And by the way, I still wanted nothing to. When I started the business, there was nothing we were going to do in selection because to me, there wasn't a difference between selection and recruiting.
And it was a friend of mine who was a CFO that I worked with in property management.
And when I started the business, called me. She said, cindy, I need your help. I need to hire a controller. I'm like, I don't do that. She goes, yeah, but I really need your help. And I'm like, I'm not doing any recruiting. She goes, no, no, no, I'll find the human. I just need you to get in their head and figure them out for me.
I'm like, oh, I can do that.
So my husband started on a path of looking for assessments that could help discern somebody's profile without having Cindy's brain in the room.
So we found a way to use a suite of assessments. Most people who even use assessments in selection will use a single science, which is a problem.
Most of the single science assessments out there are behaviors. Are you an extrovert or an Introvert. Are you an analytic or creative? We're all more than one dimensional.
And it's about as negligent as going to a doctor with a really sore arm. And he takes your temperature and says, oh, you have a broken arm, you need surgery. And you're like, you can't tell that from a thermometer. Like, you can't.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: Like you can. Maybe I've got an infection because I've got an elevated temp, but until you do X rays and an mri, like, maybe I just need to rest the arm. Maybe we don't need surgery. Right. So there's so many other things that could be going on, and that's why we recommend multiple sciences. So there are. So we look at behaviors because we know behaviors are important. If it's a job that requires very introverted skills, putting an extrovert in there is going to drain the life out of them and vice versa. But workplace motivators help us understand what motivates somebody, what gives somebody gratification in their work and what's going to inspire them. And that's going to be more of the culture fit piece.
We have something on personal skills. How do they view the world in which they operate? How do they view themselves?
And then we use a critical thinking test.
So think of the first three. We call them the trimetrics is telling us how many lanes on the expressway are open. And the critical thinking test is telling us what the speed limit is.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: I like it a lot.
So you combine like Colby plus culture index plus like a dis plus a discovery, insights or like varying degrees. I mean, there's so many of these ones out there.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: Culture index, predictive index, OAD, McQuaig hag. Most of them are all.
They're all behaviors.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Colby gets misused a lot.
They say it's conative.
It's really evaluating how someone processes information when they are in problem solving mode.
Not all the time.
So most of the time, if you're a Colby person, most of the time I am a quintessential quick start.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: Me too.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: The proverbial hits the fan and I'm in problem solving mode. Like when Covid hit. I am the deepest fact finder you're ever going to find. But that never shows up when I take. So it. You have to take it with that problem. So it works well in an executive team when they have to problem solve together to have that. But that's. I would not use it in selection. There isn't a job profile component to it.
Like in These other things.
So. So we use this for the behaviors. We use workplace motivators. So as an. Let me give you. There's six motivators. This comes from Marston's work that he did in the 40s or 20, 20 long ago, a hundred years ago. And let's say somebody is a high utilitarian. They want a good return on investment. Not just money, but time, effort, resources, talent.
Probably a lot of your clients are going to have a high utilitarian. So they don't like wasting time, they don't like wasting stuff. They want to be efficient and they don't have a lot of tolerance. But there's also a high sense of urgency.
Somebody who has a high social. Think of this as society not socializing. The altruistic motivator. It's self sacrifice for others. In extremes. You'll have people who will give their lives for other people, like missionaries or fire.
So think of the high social being drawn to the not for profits and the utilitarians being drawn to do the for profits.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: Private equity.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: If somebody inadvertently gets in the other spot.
Right.
Or you get high socials are sweet people and everybody loves them. So somebody said they're so nice, we should put them in sales.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm tracking.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: Right. And then there's high theoreticals that love to learn. They might be really good in some environments, not in others. Some we have one client who's very clear, high theoretical with the utilitarian governor saying, that's enough. We got to get into production. We can't make this perfect.
But if you're in an operating room, high theoretical, no governor on the right might be good. So there's that. And then the Hartman profile helps us understand a lot about eq, a lot about how one views themselves.
There's different components I'm just gonna like. It measures so many different personal skills. But let me isolate a couple of them real quick. There's something called freedom from prejudices isn't just race, creed and religion, but it's also status.
So if someone has a high freedom from prejudice, I can talk to anybody, a CEO, frontliner, whatever, with comfort and make that person feel comfortable. If somebody has a low freedom from prejudice, say they're a salesperson.
They are never calling on the decision maker. It's too terrifying.
We can also see what someone's personal accountability is.
What is their ability to take responsibility for their own actions and not blame.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: I want to see that test.
[00:22:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll give. I'll give you a complimentary one. Yeah.
[00:22:41] Speaker A: Because so all of these are triangles.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: Into the trimetrics and then the critical thinking test. Now all of all four of those can be taken by the candidates in an hour or less.
Once you tip over that hour line, we send a candidate into assessment fatigue and they get cranky and you know, you know, anyway, we use, we use assessments, but it really all starts with the definition phase. So. So John was the one who.
John is my husband is very, very, very process oriented in system or like I can tell when something needs a process, you don't want me designing it. Right. And so I'm like, no, it needs another step here. Or we used to do a core values email exercise towards the end of the process. And then we're finding out that we were knocking out 30 to 40% of our clients, candidates. I'm like, we gotta move that upfront. Like before anybody goes in for an interview. Let's not waste the client's time interviewing. So right after the phone screen, they get the core values email exercise. And let me just, let me share my screen with you. Yeah.
[00:23:44] Speaker A: And maybe before you, before you do, Cindy, maybe we can orient ourselves again because like when I think about.
And I'll make sure to pull this up in the intro too, is like what you guys are doing maybe kind of just snapshot of like what you're doing and how that compares to recruiting, all that stuff just in the high level. Because then as we're going through these different components, I think it'll have a lot of context.
[00:24:04] Speaker B: Yep. Okay.
So we consider ourselves behavior experts at work. You can see the sign. What that means is like we get humans in the workplace, but we believe we can put processes in to give our clients more predictable results.
Most of our work is housed under the leadership academy. The idea is everything starts with self discovery. Where are we now?
And then through instructional learning, coaching, practical application, doing it themselves. We teach clients how to make sure they're hiring superstars and how to get superstar performance out of them. So the superstar performance comes down to leadership. Right.
So if you really hired a superstar and they're not performing well, it's because of something else other than them.
[00:24:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:24:53] Speaker B: I always go to the first round NFL draft pick.
How many first round, first picks fan got the pup first round first picks. How many of them have been superstars their first year in the NFL?
[00:25:10] Speaker A: I'm not a big sports guy, so I, I know it's probably not as many as people want.
[00:25:15] Speaker B: I've yet to have anybody. Name one. When I've asked that There you go.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: Well, so I'm just. I'm a normie, finally.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: But think about what we do to this kid.
We change his boss. We change his co workers. We change the rules of the game. We change his playbook. We change his conditioning, his nutrition. We may relocate him away from family. And when, three months after he graduates from college, he does not take the worst team in the league out of the ashes like a Phoenix and say, yeah, he must.
Yeah, maybe. Maybe it's all that other stuff we did.
[00:25:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I love it so much.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: So first, hire the superstar. And then. So then we have leadership essentials. We have a strategic leadership alignment. We have visionaries bringing on integrators without making a mistake. There's a lot around succession planning there and the emotional intelligence journey, which. That's the only one that can be used whether you're in leadership or not. And it's really amazing. So it's really about getting the right people and aligning the talent to accomplish the goals the organization's going towards. That's always been my passion. I still remember going to work in this one. It was one of the robotics companies, and I was there for a couple of days, and I asked somebody, how do we make money?
What?
I said, how do we make money?
What department are you in?
I'm in human resources. Then why do you want to know? I'm like, how can I help you align the talent to accomplish the goals if I don't even understand how this company makes money?
So eventually somebody said, go talk to the paint guys. So I went down to the paint department, and that's the only department that made money for us and paint. So you can think of painting cars, but it's the same robot that's used in car washes. It's the same process, and they made money so the rest of us could work every department.
And so one December, there were two openings that my recruiter was dealing with. And I'm like, great, you can handle that. You know, we came back after the holidays. Nobody told us on January 2, we were getting 92 more openings. I had 94 openings. I had one recruiter working for me.
And I went to my boss and said, I need more recruiters. And he said, you're not going to get any more. And I'm like, come on. How am I going to. It's like, don't worry about it. Just do them as you can figure it out.
So I went and I got these giant whiteboards, and I listed by department every job and called up A hiring manager. And I said, that's your department.
Pick the first one you want us to work on.
I need them all.
I understand that we got to prioritize because I got 94.
And so I called the paint guys up, and about 20 of those were service technicians. So they were going out to install the robots.
And he said, cindy, if I don't have these service technicians, we can't install. Install the robotic systems, which means we can't invoice.
So I'm thinking, how the hell are we going to get these?
So I kept thinking. I went back to them, and I'm like, all right. Because I already knew. Now, this was the department that made us money. They didn't even. I figured that out.
So I got a deal because nobody could tell them no, because they made the money.
I said, we got to hire three recruiters.
They all come out of your budget.
They won't work on anybody else's stuff but yours.
I'll direct them. I'll supervise them. But they gotta. I don't care if they work in your department. Up in my department, but they gotta come out of your budget because I'm not allowed any. He's like, done. I'll give you four.
All right. Because he knew after these 20, there were gonna be more.
[00:29:04] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:29:04] Speaker B: My boss lost his on, but we need to make money.
Like, so to me, that was. I always wanted to make that. I had a passion around the talent and the business. I didn't care about the compliance stuff, the benefit stuff.
I didn't. I. All that transactional stuff just didn't jazz me. So I had always been passionate around that, and that probably why my husband and I hit it off when we met, because he was an ops guy, and so he used to refer to it as like, did you open that envelope that came into your office, that HR junk? I'm like, no.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: Well, what I think about what you just said is the people that are going through the ownership operating system and tying the operations to their goals of cash flow and value and time by doing all the work that I mentioned that my clients are doing, they have a fully articulated goal and plan for someone to fit into. So I think there's a lot of. A lot of misfiring that happens because they. People think that that's going to happen afterwards, and then everybody's trying to figure something out. And so we're trying to eliminate a lot of that ambiguity ahead of time. So that way, then to your. To your example, the people have a clear understanding of what they're looking for. But then the question is, how do I assess my internal team?
How do I know how to. Are they capable of getting built up? Getting like, how do we transition them to have new accountabilities? So it's kind of this like leveling up of the current team, assessing them over time, and then trying to slot people in when the internal people aren't able to, to then get the thinkers, people that own their outcomes. And it's just this, like, I can say this, like I have for a long time, but then there's like, how do we actually approach this in a systematic way that's not just guessing and just throwing against the wall? So the goal is like, how do we actually take this in a. So when the recruiting outside happens, it's like, very understandable. This is why we're doing this. We tried all these other things. When we hire the person, this is the type of behavior skill set.
Some of those might be weaknesses, but we know exactly how we're going to accomplish those weaknesses and how we're going to integrate them. I think was it. I think it was Bill when he said, like, you have something because he's got his GM that he wants to elevate to the point where he, like, he can actually, like he just took a month sabbatical, he wants to keep doing that. So he's like, but how do. What am I supposed to do with Tina, right? Like, what am I. Like what do I. What is the process of management and development that, that I thought was very, like your system was very attractive to him about that. So I don't know if that helped because I heard your story and I was like, okay, I can see how the business alignment with. Then the people alignment becomes kind of the container that you're trying to fit everything into.
[00:31:54] Speaker B: Right? And it is because when the business alignment exists first, then it's a lot easier to get the people aligned. It's a little bit harder in my mind to get the people aligned when you're building a team of strangers.
So to point, you have your.
I call them my island. Like, if I were stranded on an island, who would be the people I'd want with me? My eyes.
Like we could take on anything, right?
But if you don't know that you're bringing on strangers, you got to start with, what are we ultimately, what are we doing?
Yeah, right. I know Jim Collins says, first who, then what.
And to a certain extent I agree. But if you are in rapid growth mode, that's a different type of person.
Than once you come through serious growth. And now you got to take a step back and put some processes and systems together to make sure you're not held together with bubblegum and band aids. So it's a different type of skill set.
And if you hire the wrong skill set at the same time or you get through this.
So this is what our strategic alignment leadership program does. If you, if you've come through this rapid growth and you got to put the processes and systems in place and you still have everybody just hitting the gas, that's going to be a problem. We worked with one client, started off at 250 million, got up to 750 million. They were dying, to use the B word. I mean, dying. And we're like, oh, man. Like, we could see bubble gum and band aids. It was, it was ready to implode. It was one of those Jenga things that got way too high for its own right. And they, they just wanted to be a billion dollars. So they made this deal with this private equity company that inserted a bunch of money to help them get there fast, and they imploded.
[00:33:51] Speaker A: There was put in rocket fuel on a trike.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Just couldn't. Couldn't handle it. So. So I can show you some of our process.
[00:34:00] Speaker A: Yeah, let's do it.
[00:34:01] Speaker B: They'll really enjoyed.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: Yeah, because you get. That's what, you know, I kept finding. You have like sheets and strategies and all these like, ways of actually. And for the people listening in, we'll. We'll talk through it so you can hear it. And then if otherwise, you can always go to the YouTube or Spotify.
[00:34:16] Speaker B: Right.
So in solutions, I'm going to go to the hiring process coach. But in the leadership academy, just to give you the context for all of this.
So the outer ring, we have the hiring process coach that's getting the right people on board.
The next ring is the accountability system. How to hold them accountable to perform the things you hired them to do. And then the other things, the emotional intelligence journey, leadership essentials, strategic leadership, visionary, integrator, catalyst. Really just addresses the people who are in place.
So we're going to go back to solutions and I'm going to go down to the hiring process coach and there's videos explaining things for everybody in here.
There's process maps.
So when we're in our process map. So one of the things that Bill's group, Bill and his group really enjoyed was the scorecard.
And in this scorecard, when we're creating it for clients, it takes 2, 2 hour ish sessions to create, sometimes 90 minutes to create the scorecard, bring everybody together, the stakeholders. So if Bill wanted to take more of a sabbatical, more sabbaticals, and he had. Did you say Tina or Lena?
[00:35:33] Speaker A: Yeah, Tina.
[00:35:34] Speaker B: Tina. And he wants to get crystal clear. He wants Tina to be crystal clear on the job that she's going to do. We would have Bill in the room, we'd have Tina in the room and everybody else who has been reporting to Bill and Tina who understands what it will take to do the job well and who understands or be impacted jobs done poorly. So we facilitate debate in these to two hour sessions. We start with the reporting structure and we get into laundry list of all the tasks and activities we want somebody to do. It does not work well to take an existing job description and Jerry rig it into this format.
[00:36:07] Speaker A: Well, I think it even applies more so for the owner operator who is a jack of all trades. When you're like you're probably going to have a lot of that to do list probably allocated into various roles instead of just one.
[00:36:20] Speaker B: Right.
So we, in between the two sessions, the two of us facilitating, we'll take the laundry list and break that ideation into the three to five accountability systems that they see here on the left.
[00:36:31] Speaker A: When you're doing this, Cindy, do you do it from current state or a point in time in the future that you're striving for?
[00:36:38] Speaker B: Point in time in the future that we're striving for.
[00:36:40] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:36:40] Speaker B: Usually after somebody's passed the learning curve and it's up and running, which is a really good point, Remind me if I forget to tell you what happens the first week they're on board. Yep. Okay.
So never more than five categories. The average brain can't remember five things, more than five things at any given time. And you know this, if you've ever gone to the grocery store without a shopping list.
So we come bring everybody back together. And neurologically the brain processes things differently when it sees like items chunked together. So as soon as they see it broken up like this, they go, oh, I can't believe we forgot. Whatever. Okay, let's add it in, move it around, whatever we. But everybody, believe it or not, everybody will agree with what's here on the left hand side.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: So what we've got here is for an executive assistant president support team, future 10x company special projects, HR activities. You're just trying to chunk out like all of the activities in bigger buckets, regardless the position, what it might be, where they're going to be interacting and what departments and activities.
[00:37:45] Speaker B: And these are chunked.
This is a Cindy word. I don't know how else to explain it by what brain space is needed to do that job.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: I like it. Yep.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: Sales jobs are easier to, to explain. If somebody has to do some prospecting, like go out and find leads. So that's cold calling, it's networking, it's all this outward facing, go find them.
That's very different than the nurturing of the existing clients.
Right.
[00:38:17] Speaker A: The difference I even think about, like, I got a client right now. We're in the market for a sales director and it's like it's going to be, you know, leadership and accountability to the team. We need someone to actually develop some processes and procedures and do some data management, do some planning, report to the board and come to the board meetings with us. So there's different mental spaces and, you know, categories that you're saying that they're going to have to do and they have to be able to do all of them. We can't not have some of those.
[00:38:44] Speaker B: Right.
So the three jobs that are the toughest to do across to hire. Right. The three jobs that are hardest to hire. Right. For across organizations, sales, HR and executive assistant.
[00:39:03] Speaker A: Why is that, do you think?
[00:39:04] Speaker B: Everybody thinks, oh, I just need a sales guy. Oh, he was a great sales guy over there. Oh, they do the same stuff we are. Let's bring them over here. You have no idea if this is because it was an easy thing to sell, if it was the rest of the team that carried this person's weight, or if they really were awesome.
[00:39:23] Speaker A: And you don't business to consumer, business to business, is it rep, manufacturing versus direct to. I mean, all the nuances.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: And remember, you can only have five categories. So think about, is it prospecting, is it customer service, is it project engineering, is it project management, is it collections, is it education, is it training? Is like, what all is going into this sales case. At public speaking, there's so many different components that go into sales and if you aren't clear on that, so similar to the role your client has. We were helping with one of our clients who had already hired a search firm. And I remember walking in and I'm like, that's okay. We work with search firms so long as it is an X company. And they're like, oh, it is X company. I'm like, oh.
I'm like, all right, we'll try. All I'm saying is we'll try. And if we run into roadblocks, you tell Me how you want to handle it. Okay.
So we got the whole team together, and we built out this vice president of sales.
And they knew they had some pretty good salespeople, but they needed direction for them. They needed processes and systems. They needed more out of the people they had. They did not need this person. In fact, if you see we go through and we go through priorities and percentage of time.
There was only 5% of the time that this VP of Sales was supposed to be client facing. And that was.
[00:40:47] Speaker A: So you're taking the five categories. You're prioritizing each one of the categories and putting a percent of time spent in each category.
[00:40:54] Speaker B: Correct. Love it. There was only 5% of the time spent client facing between managing the team, which was about 30%, because there are a lot of systems and processes that needed to be put in place, and 20% mentoring and coaching and developing them, which is a different skill set than managing them. Right.
There was 50% of the time working with the team. And then there was some executive stuff. Right.
The search firm kept sending rainmakers, and couple of things happened. One, the executive team never got seduced by hiring these rainmakers because they had already agreed on what role.
But finally, my team, who was helping with the interviewing, was getting frustrated. I'm like, can I talk to one of the candidates? They said, this one guy was just as frustrated as you are. You might as well talk to him. So I asked him, like, did anybody show you this job scorecard? And he said, no.
And I said, well, if you look at it, what are you thinking about the job? And he said, that's over 50% of my time dealing with people. I don't like people that much.
That's a problem.
[00:42:10] Speaker A: Well, at least he was able to say, because otherwise, if someone doesn't articulate it, you're having to take those behavioral science and all those tests to at least reconcile the truth of what they're saying or displaying versus the, you know, the scorecard that you got here. You're trying to triangulate everything.
[00:42:26] Speaker B: Correct. So what was interesting is he. Then I said, well, why do you think they sent him out? Sent you out to us? Because we don't need a rain. He's like, I'm a rainmaker. That's what I do. That's my superpower. And I'm like, but they don't need a rainmaker. And he said, they told me this team didn't really know what they needed, and he knew better.
Okay, then. So we got back to the drawing board.
[00:42:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I got Egos involved. There are people trying to make a commission. Yep.
[00:42:53] Speaker B: Right. So in this case, what's interesting is percentage of time and priorities have no correlation.
If you think about that sales role, Sometimes the number one priority is about 10% of the time, which is putting the sales plan together.
What market do we want to go after? Which product is our loss leader?
You gotta lay out the plan or a salesperson will look like a water bug.
Maybe the number one priority, even though it's the smallest percentage of time. But if you don't do that well, it throws everything else off. Yep.
[00:43:26] Speaker A: I love it so much. Yep.
[00:43:28] Speaker B: And then we create the success factors. How will we know if this individual has done their job well enough to keep it? These are not the holiday wish list. This is the minimum threshold to keep your job. This earns you your salary. So all of these have to be met. Okay, so I'm going to click back here and I'm not going to go. You got anybody?
[00:43:44] Speaker A: How many people, when they're, when they're doing their, their success outcomes, are doing tasks instead of outcomes. Like you have to help people, like force them to get to outcomes or.
[00:43:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:43:54] Speaker A: How do you, how do people attack that? You see?
[00:43:57] Speaker B: Well, we're coaching them through this as part of the four sessions. And we tell them like, every one of these has to start with a verb. Action verb.
Each one of these has to be worded in past tense because then I'm going to show you how this turns into a quarterly performance review.
[00:44:12] Speaker A: Love it.
[00:44:13] Speaker B: One has to be answered. Are we on track or off track? Yes.
Yeah.
[00:44:18] Speaker A: As you're, as you're, as you're moving away from this too, for, for you and for the audience. The way I see that the puzzle piece fitting together is if an owner knows what they want for their time, their owner's distributions and their valuation, if they have then a financial model tied together and then they have their revenue, their margins, their overhead, and tied everything tied together, then it's the KPIs of the people should be tied to these KPIs that you're talking about and visible in the financial. Isn't it? You and I have talked in our last call that, you know, Gino, and you know, we're both very familiar with eos and I think both of our systems have figured out a way to be complimentary to that where like, then you look at the scorecard and now we have context and a goal pegged to that scorecard. So the five KPIs and the accountability that you're doing have a reason behind them. They're not subjective.
[00:45:09] Speaker B: Right. And each of these category titles will simply move into the accountability chart.
[00:45:16] Speaker A: Got it?
[00:45:17] Speaker B: Yep. Gino actually used this process with us to bring on his very first implementers.
Love it. So it works hand in glove with that. So we're going to go back here and I'm not going to anything that has an underlined, has a sample. So if somebody wants to look in and deeper, you just go to the website, you can check it out and.
[00:45:37] Speaker A: I'll put the link in. And what we're looking at is a process chart and the define. Then the second part is screen and then analyze and accelerate. So there's just a bunch of activities and details in each of those. But you know, within the hiring process, coach, you're just, you're doing this first. So that way the momentum towards the right.
[00:45:55] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:45:56] Speaker A: Starts self reinforcing.
[00:45:57] Speaker B: Yes.
We're actually hearing one of the complaints we're hearing from people who are not implementing this process and we're seeing in glassdoor comments is candidates complaining that they're feeling like they got a bait and switch on the jobs.
They went in to talk about one job, it turned into something else. Well, part of what happens is in the absence of this much clarity up front, I think I know what I want in this controller role. And then they talk to a controller and they're like, oh, that's pretty cool, I should add that in. And then they talk to another candidate and like, oh man, that would be cool. Let me add that in. Right. And so it just morphs. These people aren't trying to do a bait and switch. They have no clue what they want. If there isn't somebody facilitating that conversation to get that. Yeah.
[00:46:44] Speaker A: And I also think, you know, what contributes to that, Cindy, is, you know, as I, you and I have, we talked about a couple of recruiters that we both know as well that some of them, I think that do a pretty good job is you or people that are in that space doing the. A good job.
Had the like the advantage of large numbers. The law of large numbers. Where when you look at an org chart and you stack up an org chart against the size of a company and the growth rate of a company, you have an understanding. I believe. And I have, I've learned this the hard way too, just from sheer volume of exposure. When with the turnaround I went through with the family business and some of the other companies that I had that people became until that level of exposure, it was all made up for myself versus saying, hey, these positions have just like a sports team, you'll say, this player does these things at this size company with this growth rate in this industry.
And so many of us that are founder, owner, operators have not had that level of exposure. So you don't understand how to reconcile against the, the truth of what the, the average is. And I think that's what you bring to the table. And then you throw a process on it like this and it becomes, you know, rocket fuel. But it just, I just think, you know, when you, you have the ability to discern things that are, that are standards versus not.
[00:48:11] Speaker B: Yes. The advantage is because so many business owners have felt betrayed isn't the right word, misled by somebody else's experiences before, they're still a little gun shy. So the fact that we can show them with a process how to do it and take their input into the process just. I can't tell you how many business owners, after the definition phase, call me the next day and say, that was the best night's sleep I've had in a long time.
[00:48:43] Speaker A: Yeah, you're taking ambiguity out of it. And like, I think you're right. It's not necessarily betrayal, but it's like I've done it where it's just the sheer level of exhaustion of like, it's emotional exhaustion of like getting a new friend and introduced to the friend group. And then like all of a sudden everybody hates that person. Now you have to like recalibrate expectations and, and it's just, and then it's the time and it's like the in back to your profile of the people listening is urgent. Wasting time. And that's like all the things that we hate because we don't have enough of it. And so just spending the time clarifying all of the stuff. And that's why it syncs up with my material. Because, you know, the Abraham Lincoln thing, if we have four hours to get down a tree, you're going to spend the first three and a half sharpening it. So it's not a sledgehammer, it's actually an ax and.
[00:49:26] Speaker B: Right.
[00:49:27] Speaker A: It's just so much.
The return on investment is unquantifiable mentally and financially, I think.
[00:49:34] Speaker B: Right. And it's not just to our point, it's not just getting the hire, it's making sure this perform, this person performs extraordinarily well afterwards.
[00:49:41] Speaker A: Generate more cash. That's the whole point.
[00:49:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
So the other thing that then once that's done, we then create the avatar is what we Call it, we build out what would the ideal human look like to do this job in their culture using these three assessments. Behaviors is disc, the culture, fit is the workplace motivators, and then the personal skills. So if you click on this just to show people real quickly, there are the personal skills that we talked about. That includes the personal accountability and stuff like this. I really will give you that complimentary assessment. I cannot debrief you on it, but there's.
[00:50:18] Speaker A: I need it on our assessment.
[00:50:20] Speaker B: Any, anything that's labeled very important or critical to the job, I'm going to scroll real fast. So if you're seasick, close your eyes. Then we provide behavior based interview questions that tie to those characteristics. So this goes back to what I did in my very first job running that temporary service. But we were able to create these behavior based interviewing questions once we knew which characteristics are we screening for. Right. And so it goes through the same with the disc and the workplace motivators.
Only then do we let our clients start talking about hard skills.
In the absence of having a process like this, most people start with, oh, we need somebody who's had, give you an example. We had a client headquartered in Milwaukee. They had a second location in Texas and they needed a new gm.
This is before they met us and they said, oh wow, he's all the way across the country. There's nobody else from the executive team there. We need somebody with at least 25 years experience running a manufacturing plant and they need this much and they're going through this whole thing.
So we show up and we go through this whole process only to find they were already hosting for this job with 25 years running a plant.
And I said, we learned that first of all, it is a 25 person plant, 25 humans. So that means you have a level of supervisors and all the worker bees. That's it. That's your hierarchy.
How bored is a senior plant manager who's used to 25 years of increasing responsibility going to running a plant this size?
So once we got through building out the job scorecard and building out the human, then we said, okay, if they've had three to five years of manufacturing experience and at least five years experience managing people who led others, that's enough permission to play. We'll at least talk to them.
[00:52:26] Speaker A: I think that this is going to be even more important. And I'm curious in your take on this because this whole hard versus soft skills and all the work that you're doing to quantify the soft skills, I, I believe with AI this is going to be 10 times more important because we're. I'm personally seeing that soft skills are way more rare than people have thought. And like me, like I was on that call with. We were talking to the recruiter for the sales director and they're. Because they're in a technical space and they're like, how much is the technical knowledge? I'm like, I don't know. Like, God, if people can learn, I mean, like you have freaking AI. I mean, not to say that they can't know any, but like people can. The right person with all of the intrinsic motivation, the right skill set, the right cultural fit, it's like the ability to learn. Now technical skills, it is democratized like it's never been before.
[00:53:25] Speaker B: Right, Right. Yes.
So. And imagine how much more they were going to pay for somebody with 25.
[00:53:32] Speaker A: Yeah, right.
[00:53:33] Speaker B: Versus what we needed. Right.
[00:53:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Doesn't that also apply then to the internal people? And maybe as you get to like whether it's internal versus external. Because like, I mean, your internal people.
If it's the right person too. You there. I think that there's probably more internal candidates than most people think because they're.
[00:53:52] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:53:52] Speaker A: You know, they're biased towards this. Oh, I need this technical resume. Even though, like, it's not going to actually get them what they want, they might have that someone sitting right there with them.
[00:54:01] Speaker B: Right. So typically at this point. So we just finished this up with a client yesterday. Last week. Last week. And when we went in, they said, we don't know if we have an internal candidate or not.
So they said we might now that we've got done with this. And so the first step is show the internal candidates the job scorecard.
This is what the job is. Are you even interested?
Sometimes they look at this and it's like, wait, 25 of the time is special projects. I want more predictability than that. Or 40% of the time I get a babysit. Cindy.
Right. So when you can get clarity around what the job is, there are some people who will deselect themselves. Same is true.
[00:54:48] Speaker A: With no resentment that they didn't get the job. And they can. Yeah, right, Right.
[00:54:52] Speaker B: So we even tried to. The biggest argument we get with search firms is, please show them the job scorecard before you waste anybody's time at the client company, show the candidate the scorecard to see if they're even interested. Because I'm telling you, when the resumes come in, we teach our clients to send the job scorecard out to say we'd like to schedule a phone conversation with you. It's going to last 20 to 30 minutes. To discuss the job scorecard.
Sometimes those people just ghost the client.
Fine. And some people will say, oh, I'm sorry, that's not what I thought the job was going to be. Also fine. Right.
But the sourcing is interesting. Even most of the search firms that you and I talked about the other day exclusively, proudly and exclusively use LinkedIn for searching for even executive roles. But what we have found, when our process teaches the clients, remember we coach them all the way through all of this and hold their hand how to create a job posting that describes more the human we're looking for and less about the job. It lures the right type of person forward.
And then the phone screen, the core values, email screen is really wild. I told you we moved this up front. Everybody who's listening to this can start using this for free.
Just download the sample, pull out our core values, put ears in. It asks people to describe a specific situation in which they have demonstrated these core values.
[00:56:21] Speaker A: I like that, I like that you.
[00:56:23] Speaker B: Think you're giving them the answers, Ryan.
People who cannot internalize the core value can't make up details. They start generalizing and yeah, totally.
[00:56:35] Speaker A: I, I was in an interview process.
[00:56:37] Speaker B: They can't ask chat to come up with something because you still need an example, right?
[00:56:41] Speaker A: Yeah, you need, you need to have actually lived experience for that. And I, yeah, I've seen that unfold.
[00:56:46] Speaker B: Or even executives who can't get their point across in an email. Still a problem because I'm not a.
[00:56:55] Speaker A: Quick question on the screening and the attracting people.
I've had this belief for quite some time now and I know a lot of my clients are too busy for us to really explore this at scale. But I believe that, you know, when we look at some of the companies that are thriving where the, the visionary has become a content machine.
[00:57:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:57:17] Speaker A: I mean if we would just want to use Elon, who's the most dramatic example? Like people are like saying no to billion dollar packages from Zuckerberg to go work for someone with a mission because they, they, they get to know someone online. And I, I mean if you just took the pool company or the landscape company, the H Vac company, the commercial cleaning, whatever it is, people having content out there. When I think that we are going into a labor crisis for the next five plus years, if we were both following like ITRs and the demographics, having an outbound or like it's not just for marketing to attract prospects, but to actually get People to see themselves inside your organization, I think is something that I. I think is way underlooked at this point.
[00:57:59] Speaker B: So it's funny you bring that up. I was talking to someone earlier this morning who is a brand guy about something else. We weren't talking about our business. It was just a colleague. And I said, I remember when I was in house HR and I worked for a company that was publicly traded and was having a hell of a time recruiting. I didn't understand what was going on, but we had a problem that we should not have had.
So I went to the marketing department and I said, I need help. And they're like, why? I said, sales guys are selling to people who need to buy from the company.
HR is selling to people who need to buy into the company.
[00:58:42] Speaker A: Love it.
[00:58:42] Speaker B: Yep, both of us need marketing help. And they looked at me, and I became best buds with VP of marketing. We created more cool stuff. But you know those people who don't have something as simple as a careers page. I don't care if you just pull out your iPhone and videotape some of the people who, you know, love working for you to ask them what they really love.
And you know, and don't you think.
[00:59:05] Speaker A: It'S like, like, it's not just that professional photography bullshit. It's like, actually, like, people can snuff out the, like, the real authentic stuff versus not so, like, don't overthink it. Have someone pull out their phone like you said, and, like, talk like, like. And I like. There are people that I know, the podcast editing company that I work with, they do a lot of internal podcasts for companies where it's like a great way to communicate the vision. It's like, yeah, people are just looking to share what's going on, like, to people's spouses to the market to, like, I mean, it's. Yeah, it's for sure.
[00:59:38] Speaker B: And then the interview is when people are going to use one or two questions from each of the categories here.
Once the candidate gets assessed, you'll see there are the same bullet points here. The first three match these, plus we add a critical thinking test.
Now, I'm not expecting any of you guys to test your vision on this or become expert graph readers, but that allows us. Now, mind you, when you're using four sciences, nobody, but nobody is going to match it perfectly, which is okay because none of us are actually perfect. Right? So our goal is to help you figure out the imperfections so you can decide if it's a deal breaker. You can create A workaround like any other gap analysis. So on the left, we have the. What was needed in the job and then we can.
[01:00:23] Speaker A: So on the left you've got the very important. The important.
[01:00:27] Speaker B: Yep. And then the scores for that.
[01:00:29] Speaker A: Yeah, motivators.
[01:00:30] Speaker B: The disc score. So this allows us to compare candidates against each other against the job and against the national mean. The reason this is so critical is if we are starting with what's needed in the job.
We understand with John, goal achievement and personal accountability are off.
Well, go back if you asked one or two questions in each category from the beginning. Now, in the secondary interviews and the reference checks, you are going to ask every one of those questions in that category. So one of my favorite personal accountability questions, because that's a biggie for me. If you don't have personal accountability, you come to work for the Metis group.
It will end quickly and poorly. So.
[01:01:13] Speaker A: I think. I don't know. I don't know when that doesn't apply, but I'm trying.
[01:01:19] Speaker B: So one of my favorite questions is give me an example of a time you had to admit you made a mistake and how did you handle it?
I can just as easily use that in a reference by saying, ryan, can you give me an example of a time Bill had to admit he made a mistake and how did he handle it? So once you got the questions, you can tweak it real easily.
So if the first candidate turns out to be a fantastic match and our coach is coaching you through this, ask these questions, listen for these answers. You come back going, this is amazing.
The coach is probably going to tell you, pull the trigger and make the hire. Do not wait to find two other mediocre people against which to measure this person. You're starting with the ideal in the job.
Historically, you've needed three or four candidates.
[01:02:05] Speaker A: To compare just to get a feel, because you're object. You're not objectively doing it. Yep.
[01:02:09] Speaker B: And to make matters worse, if you are fishing in a contaminated pool, you may pick the least sick fish.
[01:02:16] Speaker A: But if so, God, I've done that right. This is okay. We're just going to justify it because.
[01:02:23] Speaker B: Everybody else sucks better than the rest. It's better than the rest. I can't tell you how many times I heard that when I was in hr.
So it allows you to figure out then where to do performance checks, the additional interviews, and then we have a whole onboarding process. Now let me go back for a second and talk about the internal candidates.
Let's say you have an internal candidate who says once they look at the scorecard. Oh, yeah, baby. This is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're a little spooked about how they would handle one of those categories.
[01:02:54] Speaker A: Okay. Yep.
[01:02:55] Speaker B: So perfect time to have a conversation. Ryan, I'm fired up. You're interested. I'd like to see you continue with the organization.
I'm a little spooked about how you're going to handle this one category. Tell me why you're not bothered by that or what support you're going to need to be prepared for that. So now it's a different conversation, totally.
[01:03:15] Speaker A: Framed up the right way.
[01:03:16] Speaker B: You're not going to need to do the phone screen, you know their background. You're not going to need to do a core values email exercise. God knows you ought to know if this person. Person demonstrates your values.
But I would give them an assessment because nobody's perfect.
And then you can still go in then and put a development plan together if both of you agree this is where you want to go. Okay. This is where you're going to have to commit to some development if we're moving forward.
Now, what we find, and this is the part Bill Devours Vistage Group really loved, is we were talking about succession planning.
And the problem with succession planning is if I say, okay, Ryan's getting ready to retire, we gotta find Ryan 2.0. Where are we going to find the next Ryan? All right, let's send a search firm to out to go hire us our next Ryan. First thing that happens is the person comes in and what does everybody say?
[01:04:18] Speaker A: They're not Ryan.
[01:04:20] Speaker B: Right. We've just set that person up for failure.
The real question we want to ask is when Ryan isn't here any longer, what's the work we need done at to your point? Some point in the future.
At some point in the future. So there may be a lot of things. The odds are good. There's a lot of things.
[01:04:39] Speaker A: You, you're probably shuffling around a bunch of different position scorecards too, because some other scorecards are going to get a new priority or a new bucket that they hadn't had before because the owner was probably. Or the owner operator is probably doing that.
[01:04:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Or maybe we go, okay, Susie can do this part, but I don't think she can do the other part. So maybe Joe can do those parts. And then we take this part away from Susie's and put it up so now you can mix and match and give people new opportunities for growth, new challenges. Everybody's excited about this. They all have something to say about the Future.
And they're all not terrified to that trust piece that you're going to bring somebody in who doesn't stand a prayer of being the next Ryan.
[01:05:19] Speaker A: Oh my God. My, my client Ryan needs this because he's out of the business. But his wife Robin is head of HR and she's like the cultural fabric and glue. So they're trying to figure out how to get her out of the business.
[01:05:36] Speaker B: And they're terrified.
[01:05:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And they keep. Yeah, they, I mean, there was a really good candidate. There's a lot of.
They're more process driven than most because of how long he's been at a lot of this stuff. But I mean, I think doing what you're saying, it would, it would demystify that anxiety of like, where is that anxiety placed? It's probably, there's probably one bucket out of the five that is probably some of the time but high priority. And they don't, you know, there's probably some, you know, some good use case to like quantify it.
[01:06:06] Speaker B: And there may be, if they're not selling the business, there may be a piece of it. She's like, I can still keep this piece.
[01:06:13] Speaker A: Very, very, very well said. And like, and actually that is, you know, 2/3 of my clients, they actually just want to run the company from the boardroom. And like, I think it has a lot of flexibility to say, what do you want to keep? Like, this is the highest importance, lowest time. Because a lot of it's strategic thinking, which I think then we can map then to like, what I do is sending in my. Some of my owner's roadmap and owner scorecard is map out your time and your operator role and then where are you spending it and then what do you want to get rid of? And that's why I was so excited when you started pulling that stuff out because we can start to quantify, like we can start shoveling off this stuff in the whole buy our time back. But then I think what, what I've watched with some of my higher or the more elevated people, it's not a lot of time investment, but it's very important.
[01:07:02] Speaker B: Right.
[01:07:03] Speaker A: And then when they get rid of the other shit, it's like, oh, I wouldn't mind keeping this because I got no reason to get rid. Which then impacts the candidates that they're trying to recruit.
[01:07:13] Speaker B: Yes, for sure. So when we are helping a visionary find an integrator, we will not do it without first building out the future job. Scorecard of the visionary.
It's part of our Visionary, integrator, catalyst. If you went here, it's in that.
[01:07:31] Speaker A: Are you figuring out how to reshuffle that other stuff to other people then too? Because you're probably looking at them like multiple jobs to figure out how to, how to catch all those balls.
[01:07:40] Speaker B: Well, usually if they figure whether it's an internal person or not, who's coming into the integrator role, but getting clarity around what that visionary is going to be. Because every visionary is different.
So if every visionary is different, then to your point, you have to compliment it. Some visionaries came up through sales, some came up through engineering, some through finance. So the last thing you want to do is duplicate that strength. And the other person you want to complement. Right?
[01:08:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:08:01] Speaker B: But the other challenge you have is if the visionary is not fired up about what they're going to do in the future.
[01:08:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:08:09] Speaker B: Letting go.
So you'll get 12, 18 months in. And the new integrator feels like they're a substitute teacher. They still don't have anybody reporting to them.
[01:08:19] Speaker A: That's a good analogy.
[01:08:21] Speaker B: And so they're like. Yeah.
So having. When, when that person who's been stung by thinking they were going to get to run the company goes for the next job when they see one of our clients has the visionary scorecard or sandbox defined and he's fired up about and can't wait to get to it. But you got to take this other stuff on that's pretty cool.
[01:08:43] Speaker A: And, and I will actually add to the good people that I'm watching that the C suite people that I'm watching get hired are actually mandating that. So like I, I think it's actually so self reinforcing where if someone doesn't have this stuff done.
[01:08:58] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:08:58] Speaker A: They're not even gonna find the right people because the right people are gonna out them without them even knowing it. So it's like, it's almost like, you know, just doing this stuff will start. It's like the whole energy, like you start attracting the things in the universe that are. That you want.
[01:09:12] Speaker B: Yes.
So one of the things I told you earlier is about what we do in the first quarter.
So in the first quarter we will take the job scorecard and modify it to what has to be done that first quarter when they're learning the business. So we'll lock this the first thing in so it doesn't get changed. And then we say, okay, let's agree with what now that we know the person and what they're bringing with what has to be done. And our coach Will go through with them and make sure any updates. Are there updates. Percentage of time priorities. Is there an apple?
[01:09:50] Speaker A: So for the people listening, we're looking at the scorecard again. It's just modified. So we've got the five buckets. We got the priorities for each bucket, the percentage for each bucket, the success factors for each bucket, and then we now have new columns. That's on track. Yes.
[01:10:04] Speaker B: Yes. This is inc. It's a horrible color, which either means incomplete or inconsistent.
[01:10:10] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:10:10] Speaker B: So sometimes the first time somebody's doing something, they just. They need more. More time to.
[01:10:15] Speaker A: Yeah, they need another wrap or two.
[01:10:17] Speaker B: Yep.
Sometimes when we have some of our clients who will move it from a quarterly review to a monthly review if they're in a very dynamic situation. So we have one client who is expanding to another.
They have two brewery locations, they're adding a third. And so they got to work with architects and zoning boards, and they have to bring on 120 team members and all this other kind of stuff. So between the visionary and the integrator, they're updating their cards every month to make sure there's no duplication of efforts and nothing slips between the.
[01:10:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I like that. Ooh, that duplication of efforts. That's a good use of this. Yeah, I like that.
[01:10:52] Speaker B: And there might be some things that we just got to say, look, this is not applicable for this next quarter. While we're focused on that. Okay. It also allows you to put notes in as the quarter is progressing.
Because how long do you think the average supervisor remembers their direct reports performance?
Looking backwards?
[01:11:15] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, it's not much.
[01:11:17] Speaker B: Six weeks.
[01:11:18] Speaker A: Six weeks.
[01:11:19] Speaker B: Unless there was something dramatic. So if, you know, you can be making notes, and so can they.
So you guys don't forget important things. And then at the bottom, what did you accomplish last quarter? What are you going to accomplish next quarter? Often rocks relative to EOs.
What did you do for personal development and how did you demonstrate our core values? So we've got the. You're. You're doing the stuff to keep your job, and you're the right type of human. So we're looking at both.
[01:11:45] Speaker A: It's awesome.
[01:11:46] Speaker B: It clicks, it updates, saves that and creates another clean one. So it really makes the difference when we can now focus. Okay. Now the person's here, they can't do the whole job right now. They have to learn a lot. So what. What's success gonna look like at the end of the first quarter?
So trying to remember, what do you.
[01:12:06] Speaker A: What are some of your thoughts around Coaching and development around weaknesses and like what, like, what can be coached around? How do you approach coaching around, whether it's soft skills or hard skills, like, and the reason I think about this, Cindy, is like, so many people that I work with and myself included have a.
They lean towards loyalty to their internal people.
Even if they hire someone, they lean towards keeping them longer than they should for all the, all the values, which is why I like working with my clients.
And having this objective way, I think is a good start. I mean, it's like it's probably 80, 70, 80% of the equation is now it's objective, but where to focus on the development of how to do that. I think there's a lot of times a lot like the good leaders don't necessarily know what they're doing to do that. But then it's like, so what are your thoughts about coaching, developing up and how to.
How to identify that and work through it?
[01:13:10] Speaker B: So the first thing is I don't think it's a good use of anybody's time to take something that's a true weakness and try to make it a strength.
I do think if it's a liability, you got to stop it from being a liability. I don't know if that's isolating it. Just increased awareness, surrounding yourself with others who can make up for that, whatever.
Oftentimes we find that if an employer has someone who had been a good employee at some point and they are no longer performing at the same level, but, gosh, they bleed the core values, then oftentimes what we'll suggest is, let's define the job scorecard for what needs to be done in the future.
And we say to the person, this does not take away from anything you've done for us for all these years, but it's only fair for you because we think most people's mind reading skills are not great to define what we're going to need in the future and then decide whether or not that's something you're even interested in and whether or not you can be developed for that or if there's some other role here you might be interested in. If somebody.
So I've spoken to so many groups throughout the US and every now and again, I don't care if there's 25 people in the room or 150 people in the room. If I say, raise your hand if you got up thinking, how can I be a loser today?
No, but maybe there's a wise guy, but nobody else will raise their hand. So let's pretend. Most humans want to feel like they're making a contribution, like they want to be successful, they want to please, they want to do well. Who wants to come into a job where, you know, you're disappointing people day in and day out?
You're not doing them any favors keeping them in that role. It's almost cruel.
So let's let them understand what's needed in the future. Let them have some say in it. And if they say, I think it's time for me to retire, or maybe it's time for me to go someplace else now we can work out a transition point plan. Let's figure out how to keep you here while you're looking for a new job and while we're looking for somebody to replace this. And you may need to teach them how to do some of the things you've been doing that are going to stay with the job. A lot of times we found that if somebody had been a good performer in the past, what usually happens is they came in and they were so good, they're like, oh, my gosh, Ryan, you're amazing. Hey, can you do this, too? And can you do this? And how about this? Oh, yeah. So now it looks like this old banana split they used to have at Dairy Queen. Nobody in their right mind would take that job on from the outside.
And, oh, by the way, you haven't been giving them compliments since they first came on board, so they're still doing those things, hoping they're going to get compliments again. And it's impossible to do all this stuff. They don't know what to do, stop doing, much less what to start doing.
So sometimes just getting clarity around the role is kind of like, oh, I didn't know.
[01:16:16] Speaker A: What I like about what you said, too, is instead of creating all those scorecards for the company right now, which provides a lot of opportunity for conflict of, like, you did this or you didn't do this, or what about all the past and all that kind of crap?
It's reframing it to say, here's where the company's going.
So you're taking it away from me versus Cindy versus. Right, us versus the future, and then coming up with a plan together. What about. What about, like, maybe I'm searching for something I don't know exactly how to articulate it is like, there are quite a few of my clients where we have a high guess that they could do something.
So let's say we, you know, we have to clarify the scorecard. Let's say we do all this work and then people are weak in certain areas. But if the timeline is appropriate, we feel like we could put some building blocks in place to have it like, as a mutual test of like. And I don't know what it is. If there's like, are there certain like soft skill coaching that you like or like, ways to go find the hard skill coaching? Like, because if it's really just the two buckets of the soft skill and the hard and the hard skill and we feel like the person's got the internal goods to lean in, what's an objective way, or different resources that you've come across that are capable of filling that void.
[01:17:43] Speaker B: So the hard skills usually would mean experience in the role, leading some projects. Things like this. They can, they can, the organization can usually train those things and, or go.
[01:17:53] Speaker A: To find like whether it's their product or their service or like their industry stuff or like there's certain, certain schooling or certain things to. I don't know, like, I think that. Yeah, that makes sense.
[01:18:02] Speaker B: Yeah. You're really not going to change somebody's workplace motivators.
So if someone does not have a high utilitarian and they're in a high utilitarian environment, you can heighten their awareness.
We've got one woman who works for us, really, really sharp, great contributor, compassionate as hell. When it comes to the coaching, she's got a lower utilitarian. I said, okay, there's two times this is going to become a problem.
I have a huge sense of urgency, both from behaviorally and because of my high utilitarian.
So there's a good chance I'm going to want something faster than you think. You need to turn it around.
If I am not clear on due date or how many hours dedicated to this project, you need to ask me. Because if you don't ask me, it's your fault.
So that was one. And then there was also because we have to be efficient with time that we use with our clients.
But we, and if I have a new person coming on board, we don't charge clients more because it takes them longer. That's an investment that we're making in their training.
But at some point you can't be compassionate and go, I'm going to just do this work for the client and not charge them because then I can't charge.
So I'm paying you and not charging them. So that doesn't apply.
So. And they're like, well, I didn't charge you either. I'm like, yeah, but I still didn't make the money off of that, no problem.
So I think there's some cases where you can just heighten awareness and usually that's around motivators or behaviors. There's other times and we use both of those when we're helping a team understand how to work together better. Because understanding both of those is critical behaviors alone is not enough.
You can absolutely develop the personal skills from the Hartman profile. You can absolutely develop leadership skills. There's a lot of things that can be developed, but not everything you're not going to.
[01:20:10] Speaker A: I think you did a good job answering because if I can regurgitate where it's like it's the internal things that are fundamental to that human being that have to match up with the role, the size of the company, the tasks and the outcomes and that whole scorecard that you just talked about. So you're, you're mapping and like if there are certain of those foundational personality things I don't know whatever word to use because I know there's, it's all that multi. It's very dynamic.
Those are the gotchas where if it's hey, you've never led a bigger team before.
Maybe there's like so there's things that can be let that can be developed over time and hard skills being very obvious. One of the, you know, finance, you can go to finance, you can go to a lot of different trainings but it's really the gotchas to watch out for are those mismatches of the internal motivation, the workplace motivators that I'm hearing.
If the person is locked in their scorecard and you can map it again against what someone so therefore doing the internal assessments of all the turn internal people.
[01:21:10] Speaker B: Right. Critical thinking can also be developed but it takes a lot of time.
So if someone is dumb as a pet rock.
[01:21:23] Speaker A: Get them out shoveling snow.
[01:21:25] Speaker B: Or something, you're gonna have a heck of a time really grooming them to develop that.
[01:21:31] Speaker A: Critical thinking is that an output of one of the assessments is like you are a pet rock.
[01:21:36] Speaker B: It's the Watson Glacier critical thinking process.
Welcome.
[01:21:39] Speaker A: You are a chia pet. Thank you very much.
[01:21:42] Speaker B: 40 question test and it's a test. There's right and wrong answers and you can't find the answers online. You can find a way to. If you Want to spend 2 to 3 hours learning how to improve your critical thinking chat GPT can help you learn how to perform better on it but it's not going to give you the answers. You can't find it.
[01:22:01] Speaker A: So yeah Keep going into this. I got. I can talk.
[01:22:05] Speaker B: So what's interesting, it's a 40 question test. We've never seen a 40 out of 40.
Maybe we saw two 39s. Like anything over a 28 tells us this individual can contribute to initiate strategic conversations in an executive team. We're good to go.
[01:22:20] Speaker A: That's fantastic.
[01:22:21] Speaker B: 25, 26, 27. There's something magical about hitting 20 that they can follow along but they're not necessarily going to initiate.
[01:22:31] Speaker A: Which test is this?
[01:22:32] Speaker B: The Watson Glacier critical thinking test.
[01:22:35] Speaker A: This is so huge, what you just said. I think right there is like the one thing that we're all trying to figure out, which is that 28. It sounds like 28 on this test. Because what I was gonna say a.
[01:22:50] Speaker B: Little bit ago, it depends on the role.
[01:22:52] Speaker A: Yeah, but I'm. I'm fair. I'm thinking, I'm thinking about. Because I like the, you know, there I have people where they've got skill, labor shortage or they got, you know, rank and file. But like the. In the elevate phase for the owner's operating system is the C suite and then eventually CEO replacement.
[01:23:09] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:23:10] Speaker A: All of this stuff is appropriate for everybody. But like, when I look at.
And this is more just like we can riff off this because I'm really curious on your thoughts. Is AI has been just such a.
There was like the before and the after moment for me. And for me, what has been like crazy apparent. That was unique for me as an observation I didn't see coming is like I didn't really understand what critical thinking was, to be honest, prior to all of this. And it was like so obvious to me what I should be using GPT for with it, which is everything.
[01:23:50] Speaker B: It's everything.
[01:23:51] Speaker A: And then I sit there and go, I cannot believe there are people not using this from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep. Outside of.
[01:23:59] Speaker B: There are some people terrified of it.
[01:24:00] Speaker A: Well, most people. And like I heard someone say, like, it was so I. The my go to for watching AI and the conversations on AI is Peter Diamantes on Moonshots, where he wrote the book Bold and Abundance. And like, it's amazing. And he said something like, if you use AI, the hell was it? It wasn't. These stats were insane. It was all of these, all of this research that in these surveys they did.
If it's like more than two hours a day and you're in the 2% and if you use it like five hours a week or something like that, you're 5% or something like, so here's where I'm going with this, Cindy. Is that what my clients are like when I think about building out the C suite, it's this ability to think into the future, be okay with ambiguity, but like having like it's first principles thinking like here's where we're trying to go for our revenue, our, you know, our strategy. How the hell are we gonna get there? And like the GPT or Grok or Gemini helps us with the how like and like, and we just know how to like just constantly just ping it and refine and refine and. And on that podcast, Cindy, they were talking about how human beings. This is fat. This is fascinating to me, I listened over the weekend is human beings are end to end, from idea down to execution GPT and AI is middle to middle.
And I was just like that is freaking brilliant how they frame that up because. But the middle to middle is only possible if you've got the, the, the critical thinking up top because otherwise you're just output. And so this, this also lends into the, you know, Eric Schmidt from Google and then Henry, Henry Kissinger wrote this book about AI which is, I don't know, there's a lot to be said about it, but that there will be like 2% of the population controlling the AI and everybody else is working for the AI. That's that the 2% develop. But like we're looking for these people at the C suite to think.
[01:25:57] Speaker B: So let me. Because this is a big rift, it's a loaded topic. Is this okay? Do we have more time?
[01:26:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm good.
[01:26:04] Speaker B: Okay. Actually, can we take a two minute break?
[01:26:06] Speaker A: Yeah, just. Yeah, we can do that. And just as a heads up, I got a call at four, so yeah, let's take a two minute break and then we'll come back.
[01:26:13] Speaker B: I'll be right back.
[01:26:14] Speaker A: All right, there you go.
[01:26:15] Speaker B: All right, so I'm going to show you something in the assessments that helps you see how I can measure this.
But what you also have to understand is while we are huge proponents of leveraging AI, there are two issues we have in the average person's ability to critically think.
The first is Covid and the second is AI.
So let me, let me share my screen for a sec for anybody who wants.
[01:26:55] Speaker A: I'm so fascinated in this topic because it's.
[01:26:59] Speaker B: So if we click on Assess soft skills, you're going to actually see sample assessments here.
So this is the critical thinking test. Ignore. If there's one thing I could do, I would white out all this blue stuff. Do not pay attention to the continuums. You want to pay attention to the raw score that we talked about earlier.
[01:27:16] Speaker A: This is the Watson one.
[01:27:18] Speaker B: Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Test.
So we want to pay attention to the raw score. This person's a 32 out of 40, which is really strong. And this is the subscale performance. So 8 out of 12 times he reads between the lines. Well, he understands what's meant, just not. Which is just said. Evaluating arguments he can understand, looking at a situation which are the most important components without their personal biases coming into Play. Play. And 13 out of 16 times he draws the right conclusions. Great.
[01:27:48] Speaker A: God, this is like I, I've never taken one of these tests. These would be fascinating.
[01:27:52] Speaker B: I'm not giving you this one.
[01:27:55] Speaker A: There's the. There's the callback.
[01:27:58] Speaker B: One thing. One, one. One comical thing, I'll tell you is. So we, we know that 28 or higher, 25, 26, 27, these are people who can follow along, but they won't necessarily initiate strategic thinking. But they can be developed to do that. That's not that far off.
Below a 24. There's at least some times when you're going to have to help them connect the dots.
If it's below a 20, I keep telling people if my dog walked across my keyboard, like, the odds are good he'd score a 20.
So if somebody didn't score 20 because they're dumb as a pet rock, or they didn't care enough to put effort into this, or they allowed for interruptions and coming and going even though they're instructed several times not to do that, any one of those three things is a problem for an employee anyways.
[01:28:51] Speaker A: Yeah. So how is this different than an IQ test?
[01:28:55] Speaker B: There's a lot of arguments about IQ tests.
Technically.
IQ tests, last I heard, were not to be given past second grade. Because you need to understand what someone's raw intelligence is versus what they've learned.
[01:29:15] Speaker A: Memory. Yeah.
[01:29:16] Speaker B: Rote memory. We don't really care. We want to know how do they think? Right.
[01:29:20] Speaker A: That's. Yep.
[01:29:21] Speaker B: All right, so now we're going to go past this and I'm going to blow down to the last page. So just.
[01:29:27] Speaker A: There's all good.
So fascinating.
[01:29:34] Speaker B: So this is the Hartman profile. It looks at the worldview. It is the only assessment that I know out there that's based on a deductive science, which means they most. Most assessments are based on an inductive science, meaning they ask about your preferences and using inductive reasoning. Try to figure out how you think this one actually looks at. How do you think about this statement relative to this one? And they ask you to rank order 2 sets of statements from good to bad. How do you view the world and how do you view yourself?
And there are a third of them that are people related, there's a third of them that are task related, and there's a third of them that are systemic.
[01:30:12] Speaker A: Okay, super fascinating.
[01:30:14] Speaker B: So when it comes to C suite especially, I'd like them to have some people awareness and we can get into an emotional intelligence conversation. Another podcast, because that's as own.
[01:30:27] Speaker A: Well, there we go. We'll have to do round two.
[01:30:30] Speaker B: We look for, if someone's in a leadership role, for the system's judgment and the practical thinking to be above 80 and to be within 10 points of each other. What that actually within five points of each other. They consider that well developed and well balanced. Meaning that when something happens, I can see the big picture and I understand which buttons and levers to push and pull in order to get the desired results simultaneously.
Oh, I love that one of these is higher than the other.
Pretend you were going to pretend the practical thinking was higher and you draw a little stick figure on there.
They're perceiving the other dimensions from that paradigm.
So if the task piece is higher, they have to line up all the. Okay, there's an oak tree, there's a maple, there's some shrub. Oh, it's a forest.
Okay.
If the system's judgment is higher than the tasks, by law, you can have someone who gets the big picture, who can talk a great story, no clue how to get there.
So when it came to Covid and people were working remotely. Not business owners, I'll explain that in a minute. But people who are working remotely for long periods of times, they became very focused on the tasks. And the brain is like any other muscle. If it's not used, it'll atrophy. So that when the systemic part of the brain starts to atrophy, all I'm focused on is the task. And that's why, oh, to the point where it would send me crazy.
I would go nuts when I'd hear somebody say, I'm so more productive when I'm home.
I'm calling bullshit.
Because what you're telling me is you have a list, and as soon as you can get stuff done off your list, you can golfing, you can take the dog for a walk and go shopping, but all I got to do is get my stuff done off my list.
There's no systemic stuff. Nobody who was doing that for a year or more ever looked at their list and said, why do the same three things keep coming up on my list? I need to do root cause analysis. Maybe I'll call Ryan, see if we can work on this together, maybe pilot a solution, see if we can, and then release it to the rest of the organization.
That doesn't happen.
So that whole systemic piece is dropping.
And so that's going to affect the critical thinking and that.
[01:33:03] Speaker A: And that really comes into light at the coffee and cooler conversations and the hallway and all that stuff because it, and that's quantifying where that systemic thinking actually happens.
[01:33:16] Speaker B: Yes.
The other thing with AI is we all do it.
You know, something comes up, well, let me ask chat. And I go and ask chat. I don't bother thinking about it. I'm asking Chat.
So at what point am I sacrificing the speed of a quick answer from AI versus deducing something I think that.
[01:33:39] Speaker A: Is so well framed, Cindy. And I'm learning a lot more about myself as I am going on this AI journey, building out the ownership operating system and doing all this stuff because like, what I've learned about myself and I inherently don't believe things and I, and I inherently have an insect insatiable thirst for first principles.
So when I say first principles, like, like I have to understand what is the root cause. I like my brain cannot function if I don't understand how it all ties together, which, not shockingly, everything is time and cash. We have time and we drop dead and everything is more cash.
It's like that's how the world works. And so therefore every single thing ties to predicting cash by the end of 2026. And so I say that because when I'm using AI, I never believe it because I'm taking my knowledge of first principle for sure. Yeah. And the only way we can see if it hallucinates is if we understand the first principles. And a couple examples of this and is like when Elon talks about physics, it's like there's like a closed system there. Like you can't get around the laws of physics and you can't get around the laws of finance. Like, you will have to either have cash or not. You know, the derivatives market and the whole financial engineering of America, guess what? We're still bankrupt and we still are, you know, printing 8% a year. So they're, we're eroding our value. And so my point is when I go into a company and I'M looking at all of their strategies or financials, their comp plans, their client acquisition costs, their customer marketing, their. I think everything has to tie to more cash. So if it doesn't have that through line, I'm providing AI with the first principle, understanding. Say this is where we're going, this is the closed loop, this has to be true. Then all of the what ifs in between that, middle to middle become the ideas that I wouldn't have been able to come up with. And then what's the pros and cons of the risk of each of those and then the like the path and the, all that stuff. But what There was an article this morning in one of the AI newsletters that I follow and they call it like, I don't know if you saw it, they call it work workplace slop.
No, so AI slop is what they're calling it. And like VCs are seeing it with their pitch decks because the people that like they don't know what the hell they're talking about. So when I say that like the big, it's almost the K shaped economy with AI where like it's now more apparent to me than ever the people that actually can think because they understand first principles and that like you're quantifying it for me right now with this chart to say like there's a way to measure that because then you can use AI, but like if you don't know what you're using it for, it's like going into your car and saying I want to go to a hotel, but not specifying the destination, the timeline, the budget and all that stuff. And then just hoping that you just get in the car and get there and you're quantifying through this critical thinking test ways to measure what I'm trying.
[01:36:47] Speaker B: To explore and the reason we use multiple sciences so there's, there's different nuances. So to your point, your passion around understanding the first principles is this up arrow.
So when there is a positive bias on the system's judgment, it's somebody who really likes it when everything fits together.
[01:37:07] Speaker A: Sums me up.
[01:37:09] Speaker B: Let me warn you about your clients. Some of your clients, not all of them.
When there is a down arrow, it is somebody who is suffocated by having everything fit together and they have to stir stuff up just to make it more interesting. We call them chaos creators.
Where do most.
[01:37:29] Speaker A: That's my father.
[01:37:30] Speaker B: Where are most, where are most chaos creators able to work?
[01:37:36] Speaker A: What do you mean? Like, as in like they're their own Entrepreneur. And they're just.
[01:37:38] Speaker B: Yes, employ them.
[01:37:42] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I'm tracking it.
[01:37:43] Speaker B: Yeah, they do outside sales where nobody sees the chaos. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:37:48] Speaker A: Well, okay, so. Because I, I, okay, this is super fascinating to me. And time check. I've got eight minutes, so everybody will be wrapped up here shortly. But I, here's what. Okay, so here's the belief that I have. And because this is the world I want to live in, so I'm trying to engineer it.
So I was never like this because I grew up with my father, who is absolutely like light shit on fire. There was no org chart for 115 people. I mean, like, it was just fly by the seat of our pants, build $20 million business out of the back of our van. And I like that, actually. Like, I'm a very, I'm very comfortable in chaos and I absolutely love it.
But what I learned through my family business experience is the negative consequences of that. And I was like, f this, I never.
Because eventually that chaos was going to swallow me up and spit me out, and it sucked. So then what I did is I figured out. So here's, here's. Okay, here's my analogy is I spent a disproportionate amount of time clarifying the puzzle picture, flipping all the puzzle pieces up, putting the framework together so I can put all the pieces together in a messy fashion. And so it's like, it's like this. The order is the system around it.
So I can be a crazy person inside of it.
[01:39:07] Speaker B: So you can be creative within it. That's creative.
Creativity is coming from a different science. Once you have. But the, the other thing is, is when you take this, it is likely this is going to be a mixed bias, which is going to look like this. And mixed bias usually happens one of two ways. Either somebody is humming along fine, everything's fine, and every now and again they have to go off the reservation, or they have been raised in chaos and they are a chaos survivor, having a preference for structure and order.
[01:39:40] Speaker A: And it, like, because, like, yeah, it's so fascinating you say that because, like, I, and I think there is a lot to be said about the people you and I work with who are listening to this podcast, who are also that which is like, I was in rigidity or I was something where I had to. I'm professionally unemployable. And then because I'm professionally employable, I went and did this.
But I believe, and I'm watching this unfold in real time, that as people put these, these, it's the. And that's what I think EOS was missing is the wrapper around it, which is the ownership operating system. Say, hey, here's the actual outline of the puzzle. You can do whatever the hell you want inside of this, but know if you do these things, you have less cash, or if you do these things, you have more time, or if you do these things, it impacts your valuation. So, like, I don't care what you do. But like, there was another guy that said in one of my podcasts, it's a blank canvas, but there's a canvas.
[01:40:33] Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah, I like that.
That's cute.
I like.
[01:40:37] Speaker A: This has been a blast.
[01:40:39] Speaker B: Thanks, Ryan. This time went by really fast. I was wondering what all we were going to talk about, but we didn't run out, did we?
[01:40:45] Speaker A: No, we didn't. I learned a lot. I'm sure people did. I will put the links to your website, which is what we were screen sharing. You have a ton of material out there. Highly recommend people going and reaching out to you. Any other final words or like, best way to get in touch or what's the approach that you take with working with people?
[01:41:01] Speaker B: Best way is, is, you know, figure out everybody's got talent issues. It's either I can't get the right people or I can't get enough out of them. And as you said that we just haven't been producing enough humans for decades. So this isn't going away in five years. Yeah. Unless you believe ITR and it's all going to come crashing. But there, there are ways you can go to our website. We've created a lot of video, a lot of blogs that try to answer the questions you're asking. So go check that out. And then one of the critic. One of the collaboration things that happened here was we realized that one of our one or two of our really silly YouTube videos, I was just talking about how hot it was and everybody playing around with the damn thermostat.
And so I did this thing on Thermostat Wars.
It had more views than I can imagine. And so then our whole marketing team, we're collaborating. We're literally around a table and we're like, why do we get this on this? We don't get it on that. And how do we not take away from our thought leadership? So we have developed. I don't know if you saw it, but now the great Sandini is that.
[01:42:02] Speaker A: Those are the emails that I'm getting.
[01:42:03] Speaker B: Yeah. So there's a bunch of satire shorts on real things that have happened in the workplace place and all the things we wish we could say to those people who did those stupid things.
[01:42:15] Speaker A: That's fantastic.
[01:42:17] Speaker B: That seems to be having quite a. Quite a view. But seriously, we love giving our clients a better night's sleep around the talent issues. There can be more predictability. It doesn't have to be rolling the dice every time.
[01:42:31] Speaker A: So that's a great place to end. Cindy, thank you so much for joining me. This has been a lot of fun.
[01:42:36] Speaker B: Looking forward to it. See you. Thanks.
