692: How to Optimize Teams and Drive Engagement Using Data with Mike Zani

Pete Mockaitis
Mike, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Mike Zani
It’s great to be here. I think that’s an important task. Got to be awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think so too. And you’ve really done some homework on how that happens and I’m excited to dig into that wisdom with The Predictive Index and your book The Science of Dream Teams. But, first, let’s hear about you coaching the 1996 U.S. Olympic Sailing Team. How’d that go?

Mike Zani
That was one of the most romantic times of my life where you’re living some bizarre dream with these amazing athletes, and Muhammad Ali lights the torch for the ’96 Olympics in Atlanta.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember that.

Mike Zani
It was pretty awe-inspiring. And you get to work with these amazing talents, coaching these athletes. But I think it was back then when I started down a people path, trying to figure out how to modify myself to get the most out of your athletes because everyone sort of learns differently and has different styles. And when do you use analogies? They work great for some people. When to be super literal with others? Who can handle negative feedback immediately? Some people can’t. And how to weave, come in where it’s not quite as negative, it sounds more like growth feedback? But it was that journey with those athletes that I think started me on this, and I did not know it at the time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. Well, not that it’s all about the gold but I don’t actually recall how the 1996 U.S. Olympic Sailing Team did. How did we do?

Mike Zani
We had two medals out of ten events. It was actually pretty disappointing unfortunately.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool. It was not as many as you hoped before.

Mike Zani
It wasn’t. And my star athletes, Kristina Farrar and Louise Van Voorhis, were in medal contention for nine of the ten days, and finished in fourth which is a very tough place to finish.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, fourth, yeah. I hear you. Well, how did you cope with that?

Mike Zani
I think it’s different for the athletes. It definitely impacts them in different ways but I saw a lot of athletes who fell short of their goals and they never really sailed competitively again. They were doing it for this thing, to do something as unbelievable as the Olympics. They maybe weren’t doing it for the love of sailing. And that’s probably important, to have a love for what you do so that you keep doing it. You see those long-distance runners who, they may not run competitive marathons anymore but they still run 50 miles, 100 miles a week because that’s what they do.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. That’s cool. That’s cool. Well, let’s dig into The Predictive Index. First of all, that’s a great name. I like predictions, I like index, and the name itself has a promise within it. What’s your organization all about?

Mike Zani
The Predictive Index helps companies sort of optimize their talent, and, we do it with a series of algorithms through assessments which feed the data model on the software, which gives companies the information they need, pre and post hire, ideally in their time of need. And we have about 700 certified partners who work with our clients to take that data from the software and from all of the algorithms and the assessments, and help bring it to life within organizations.

And the way I like to say it is every CEO has got a strategy, some good, some bad. Most have a one- to five-year financial plan to support that strategy but tragically few of them have a talent strategy. And strategies do not execute themselves. It’s the people who execute them. And it’s really surprising, most people have just boxes in Excel saying, “Hey, I’m hiring five people in Q1,” and there’s nothing about what type of people they need and what are the gaps, and how they’re going to fit on this team, and how do they change the culture, and are they high performers. And what about the ones who are there? How is it going to impact the ones that are already there? And that’s what talent optimization does.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, what is the impact of using your platform versus just kind of, I guess, winging it or doing what everybody else does?

Mike Zani
Yeah, I think our number one competitor is not some other company. It’s people using the old way of doing things. Things like unstructured interviewing with resumes, which are among the greatest fiction in all of business. And somebody walks in and they have a neck tattoo and you just can’t get used to that or comfortable with that so you don’t hire them. And you hire people who sort of think the way you think or you promote people who think the way you think because you have more comfortable interactions with them as opposed to maybe creating more diverse teams.

So, I think when people aren’t doing this, some people get it right, more often than not, but that’s not very scalable. There are those gifted talent people who really invested in their own tools and frameworks. But this is really trying to make sure that you can bring it to every company, sort of a systems approach to, “How do you hire right? How do you build world-class teams? How do you make sure that the interactions between people are really optimized? How do you make sure you have an engaged and high-performing organization?” And even with all the tools, because people are messy, we still get it wrong 10%, 15%, 20% of the time. But it’s better than the two-thirds of the time that most people get it wrong and doing it the old way.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, those are some interesting figures there in terms of how do we measure right versus wrong? And are those figures fairly accurate in terms of “Yeah, without this stuff, you probably expect to be right only a third of the time versus four-fifths of the time you could be right.”

Mike Zani
Yeah, it is hard to do that. Without really great performance analytics, it’s really hard to take it from the world of qualitative to quantitative. I think we can learn a lot from sports. In sports, 30 years ago, they used to do the same thing we did in business. Scouts used to go look at recruits in baseball stadiums and look for the five tools of, say, baseball: their running ability, throwing ability, hitting for power, hitting for average. And they would look at these tools and sometimes quantitative, most of the time it’s qualitative, and they got it wrong all the time. Five out of 100 players recruited made it to the major leagues.

And then they adopted sabermetrics using stats and analytics to predict, part of the name that you like, predictive index. How do you predict who’s going to be a higher probability to get to the major leagues and contribute? And not just contribute, it’s also contribute for the dollar, because not every team is the New York Yankees that can spend millions of dollars. It’s sort of you need to have performance for the buck.

And that attitude that sport took on, starting in baseball, they’re 30 years ahead of us in this process in terms of business because they’ve got great metrics, they’ve got great performance data. And until you have great metrics and performance data, you’re kind of guessing, “What was right? Is this a good team for this job to be done?” And we’re just starting to be able to get there so that you can have a learning machine so that you can hire, promote, manage, craft teams to super high performance and then track that performance, and, “We didn’t quite get that right. That was a good team but not a great team. Let’s keep working on that.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, so you’re summarizing a lot of your wisdom over the years in your book The Science of Dream Teams. It sounds like we’ve covered it here. But what’s sort of the big idea? Is that it’s all about using science and data to engineer dream teams? Or, how would you summarize your core thesis?

Mike Zani
I think it’s a journey on yourself. There’s really a call to action for each person who manages people, and I don’t just mean managing down. I mean, managing across and managing up, that you have to adopt this discipline to have great relationships, and it actually starts with yourself. You have to know yourself. Be self-aware. Know what the things you’re good at and try and play the game on those terms. But also, just as clearly, know the stuff that you’re not good at and make sure you understand those triggers.

I think once you become that self-aware leader, you can really start attracting talent to you. And even if you’re an individual contributor, the best managers want you on their team, and you can then do that. You’ve got a culture of performance. You’ve got a culture of being engaged. You’re one of those people who always add value when you’re around your team. And you can go on this journey.

And I think the book is really a call to action to change the discipline, to take it out of the old way of subjective, qualitative, and bring it into a newer way where you can start bringing data to the equation, and we’re really in the early steps of this. The data is just starting to come on and we’re just starting to create these learning machines and prediction so that you can articulate whether you’re going to be a good fit for XYZ role on this team, doing this strategy. And it’s great because it’s tantalizingly close and a lot of companies are getting there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so can you walk us through in practice, like we’re thinking, “Okay, we got a role, we got a candidate, or maybe we have many candidates, how do we choose? What are sort of the step-by-step here?”

Mike Zani
Let me give you an example. I know that you’re a former consultant, high-end consulting firm. Am I allowed to mention the name?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. I’ve mentioned it too many times for some of our listeners, according to the surveys. I’m sorry about that, guys.

Mike Zani
Okay. So, Bain & Company. So, at Bain & Company, you’re constantly reassembling teams into work groups based on an engagement. You might have one partner on the project, a couple of managers, half a dozen, dozen consultants and associates, and you’re constantly reassembling these teams every few months depending on the work.

And what you’re trying to do is determine, “What is the work that needs to be done on this engagement?” and then, “Is this team a good fit for that work?” So, in order to do that, we’ve mapped behavioral analytics, psychometric tools, to strategy so that, let’s just say, you’re on that 10-person team. We’ll call it a 10-person team. And you can look at the team, “Are we homogenous behaviorally or are we heterogenous behaviorally? If so, what gaps do we have? Where are we homogenous?”

And then, we can actually find out, “Are we aligned on our strategy? What is our strategy? Are we aligned on it? And is that team, as it’s currently assembled, a good fit? Maybe it’s an okay fit.” And then you’re like, “Well, what are the gaps? Okay, there’s a couple of gaps. Can we stretch to get there? Is it an easy stretch? Is it a hard stretch? Can we augment this team with some other things? Can we actually change out a few players?”

And the reason I’m picking your consulting team, because changing out a player on a consulting team, you just go to another engagement. It’s not you’re getting fired. And it’s in these reassembling teams that you can create super teams for the work to be done because a team is not inherently good or bad, but they might be a good or bad fit.

Now, I use an example. If I took the senior team for Mass General Hospital, center of excellence hospital in Boston, heavy research, they’ve got some of the best doctors, some of the best research, tons of money, and they’re near the cutting edge but they also have The Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm,” so they’re inherently risk-intolerant. They are not going to be a good team to do a startup and they wouldn’t be a good team. If a private equity firm, like Bain Capital bought Mass General, so we’re going to do a rollup of every center of excellence in every major city.

The senior team that might’ve been great at running a single center of excellence is not going to be the team to run that rollup for the private equity firm trying to put together a massive organization because they’re not going to have the risk tolerance. They’re not the right team for that job. So, it’s like assemble the team to do the work they’re supposed to do and unlock that potential and find out where there are gaps. If a strategy changes, you’re like, “We’re going to need to stretch, add someone, take someone away.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so we talked about the fit. I’m thinking, I’ve been playing some Tetris lately, so I see that in my mind’s eye. So, we’ve got what is demanded of the team, certain things are necessary. And then we’ve got what the individual teammates are bringing to the table. But how do we break down the whole universe of work into a manageable set of is it parameters or competencies? I’m thinking about the Korn Ferry list right now. So, how do you break it down? Like, how many parameters or drivers or factors are we looking at? And how do we measure folks on them?

Mike Zani
There are numerous, numerous parameters you could measure, and Korn Ferry’s competencies are a good form of measurement. You’ve got these frameworks that say, “What are the skills? What are the competencies needed?” But more than skills and competencies, one level higher in prediction, the number one predictor of workplace performance is cognitive fit for a role, making sure the person has the cognitive capabilities, the learning capacity, the ability to manage complexity to deal with the requirements of that role.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess with cognitive fit, what is it they call it, G, general intelligence? I mean, are there sort of multiple flavors of cognitive fit? Or is it just all sort of like raw smart that’s going to show up, like on the GRE type cognitive stuff?

Mike Zani
Actually, you bring up a really important element of cognitive science. If you do a short format test, like a 12-minute assessment, you can see the sub-facets of cognitive, sort of linguistic, mathematical, spatial, abstract reasoning. But you have to take a longer format cognitive assessment to be able to have high degrees of validity that those sub-facets, the importance.

But, in an ideal world, if you had the time, and not every organization wants to have their people take a 90-minute cognitive assessment. It might be too much load, but you would have diverse teams. Let’s just say you’re amazing mathematically but I’m really good spatially, and we’d be a great match. And then when we’re going to publish our findings, we’re like, “Well, who’s the person really good linguistically who can write this stuff really well?” and putting together diverse cognitive teams, and you might even have people who have gaps.

And the beautiful part, if you look at the sub-facets, language is the biggest bias in cognitive-based assessments because it picks up socioeconomics, especially in the United States, and it’s a testament of our education systems. But lower socioeconomic categories do worse in cognitive, especially in the verbal part, and that picks up race and ethnicity in the U.S. which needs to be corrected for, so you cannot use cognitive as a single variable disqualifier for a role or you’ll create bias on unfortunate points like race and ethnicity.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we got to make sure we got the cognitive stuff. It’s like your brain can handle what’s going to be thrown at it, and so we might get a quick view in 12 minutes versus 90 minutes. By the way, what are these tools we’re using to assess in 12 minutes and 90 minutes?

Mike Zani
There’s thousands of cognitive assessments. Ours happens to be a short format that is used whether you’re a Subway sandwich artist or whether you’re a Ph.D. in biotech for Moderna. And, actually, it’s important because say, you are a Subway franchisee and you’re hiring temp workers, mostly high school and college kids for the summer, to be sandwich artists, the cognitive requirements for that role are not massively high.

But if you have a choice, you want the higher end of the range because you’re teaching them how to bake bread, how to make sandwiches, rules and processes, maybe it’s procedures for like a pandemic where you have sanitation requirements. But you don’t need the same cognitive requirements of the Ph.D. running a biotech firm. That’s legitimate. You need someone with cognitive requirements that are probably in the top decile, and you’re building those teams.

And this is no different than, “Hey, this person is fast.” You’re like, “They’re fast for a linebacker but they’re not fast for a wide receiver.” You have different requirements for the role.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And now I’m curious, can you have too much of a good thing in terms of if your sandwich artist has too much cognitive power, are they going to be bored and say, “This job is lame. I’m out of here” and bounce kind of quickly? Or, is your view like, “Hey, the more the better”?

Mike Zani
Actually, there was a famous lawsuit with a detective agency where they disqualified a candidate to be a detective because of too high of a cognitive, and it went to the, I think, the State Supreme Court. The police department was saying, “Hey, it takes like three years to make a good detective. There’s a lot of learning and the job is not as exciting as it is on TV. It’s actually a pretty mundane, boring job, high repetition.” And they’re like, “What we found is that high-cognitive people get frustrated at the pace and challenge of this job and move on, so we don’t want to train you for three years for you to leave and not be a productive asset,” if you will.

And so, it’s interesting, the actual scientific data does not say that you can have too high a cognitive that your performance goes down but the curve flattens. So, it’s not like if you’re three times as smart, if you’re 99.9 percentile versus 92, it’s going to be so indiscernibly different that it’s other factors that are predicting success. So, it does flatten out.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. And so then, I guess, it’s really down to personal preferences. First of all, what happened with the State Supreme Court case? How did they rule?

Mike Zani
You’re going to have read it in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Mike Zani
I’m kidding. I’m kidding. No, the police department was exonerated. They had a process. They were looking at the data, and they said that, “In our estimation, people with this criteria will churn more, and we have a high cost of training.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that can happen. And so, generally, it seems like more is better but if it’s oodles and oodles more, you might have a different problem to contend with in terms of churn rate as opposed to performance. So, that’s the number one predictor, is the cognitive fit, “Do they got the mental horsepower to get it done?” And you’re about to tell us number two but then we went deep.

Mike Zani
Well, I think it’s behavioral fit, and some jobs have very tight criteria. You think of sales. The sales role, highly predictive, high dominance, low patience, great risk tolerance is highly predictive of sales success. And what’s interesting, three are subclasses of sales. You might have collaborative sales per big enterprises where one person is starting the sale process but you’re bringing in several other people to support it, like there might be sales engineering, there might be a customer service team that comes in. And that person is going to need more collaboration and more people skills to do that quarterbacking.

There could be highly technical sales which, if you’re selling data security, cutting-edge data security into the C-suite, CIO, and the tech teams, and the really brainiacs on the other side who are all introverted, you’re going to want a very introverted highly technical, high-detail oriented, high formality sales process. So, there’s sub-facets.

But then there are some roles, like product, that are completely open behaviorally. You can have success in product development with almost any behavioral profile but then you want to look at not the fit for the role. You want to look at fit for the team. Because if you already have eight people on this team, and maybe they’re all one profile, you don’t want more of that. You want some diversity, or the manager of that team might be like, “I’ve already got two of those. I can’t handle a third. They’re good but they’re a real handful with my personality, and I’m the manager of the team.” So, you start crafting and architecting.

But the short story is, some positions are really open from a behavioral benchmark and some are much tighter. And we provide companies tools so that they can actually create those benchmarks, as well as we feed them from our data source. We feed them suggestions, “For roles like these, we suggest these behavioral profiles,” but then we let them refine it for their companies.

Pete Mockaitis
And just as we sort of segmented cognitive fit into the four sub-facets, you talked about a behavioral profile. What are the ingredients or sub-facets that we can characterize people on as being high or low and that really matter?

Mike Zani
Each tool is different. Our tool measures four primary factors that are commonly found in the workplace: dominance, extroversion, patience, and formality. And we measure it in high or low on a normalized Bell curve. So, there’s someone who could be four standard deviations high dominance. And while you might want high dominance, you may not want that much.

And then we actually measure combinations of those factors. So, high dominance and low formality make you very risk-tolerant. Whereas, high formality and low dominance makes you highly execution-oriented and risk-intolerant. So, it’s not just the four factors that you measure but the interplay between them that’s really important.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, boy, this is fascinating, and so a lot of juicy conceptual stuff to ponder. I’d love it if we could maybe shift gears a bit, Mike, and hear some just, boom, best practices, whether someone is going to go deep into these fun assessments or they’re not. What are the things that professionals need to start doing and stop doing to have more dream teams according to science?

Mike Zani
I think the number one thing that people need to stop doing is overweighting their own opinion. Human beings are so good at heuristics. So, you can see a dog and, within milliseconds, know, “Is a type of dog that I want to pet? Or, is this a type of dog that I want to pull my hands back, and I’m concerned?” To even the point of, “Is this a dog that I should be running from?”

And so, we’re good at that heuristics, and false negatives are false positives happen all the time. We’re actually, we’re good at the heuristics but our rates of being right and wrong are really bad, so like about 50%. But if you run from a dog you shouldn’t have, then you just look silly, but you’re still safe. So, it’s a good thing and we’ve evolved it through evolution. But those same heuristics will say, “Is Pete giving me eye contact? He looks kind of shifty.” And that’s a false read, “Maybe when Pete is thinking, he’s introverted and looks to the side.” That doesn’t mean it’s good or bad.

So, people bring all of these conscious and unconscious bias to bear. And then, like driving, if you interview drivers, 90% of people think they’re above average at driving, which is impossible. I think the same holds true, 90% of people think they’re a good read of people, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I’m a good read. I would not hire this person. This is not a good idea.” And they’re wrong, and they have these biases. First and foremost, we need to get rid of that. And if you don’t get rid of that, you’re going to continue doing it in the third of the time getting it right.

I think the next thing people need to get rid of is the over-reliance on what we call the briefcase, which is the resume. There’s the head, the heart, and the briefcase. And the briefcase is the book of experience you’ve had, you’re like, “Pete, you’ve had three great jobs in customer service. You’ve had it at companies a lot like ours, and you’ve kept going up the line from individual contributor to manager to director. We want you to be the senior director of customer service at our firm.” And that makes sense. It sounds good but teaching someone customer service, literally if you break it down, takes a month.

And finding someone is a good manager really has nothing to do with their resume. So, you can throw out a lot of that resume because it’s a false reliance, you’re going, “Oh, this person must be great at customer service.” And there are roles that you need a lot of experience, “I want my surgeon to have done this surgery a few times before,” but most of the roles in business are not mission critical like surgeon.

You can train this and companies under-invest in their learning and development, so that you can hire thinner resumes and train, but don’t shortchange the behavior, the cognitive, and the passion, the heart, making sure they’re a good fit for your organization, and they have the type of cultural qualitative stuff that will succeed in your organization, that gets them up in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m intrigued by…so we talked about the cognitive and the behavioral, and so we got assessments for that. How do I get after whether they got the heart?

Mike Zani
It’s difficult. Those tests are really hard to do predictably. I want to pick on grit. I think grit is an amazingly cool sort of metric to try and get your arms around. So, Angela Duckworth wrote the book Grit, and I got to ask Angela, “How do you measure grit in mission-critical situations?” And she goes, “It’s very difficult because the test is easy to game. You ask questions like, ‘When faced with a challenge, do you roll into the fetal position or do you assault the hill?’”

Pete Mockaitis
Never. Always.

Mike Zani
And you’re like, “Hmm, I normally roll in a fetal position but I don’t want to tell you that so I’m going to check the climb the mountain.” Now, there are ways to test for grit. If you look at the Army and bootcamp, you take these rookies through bootcamp, and it’s really hard to fake bootcamp for whatever it is, 12 weeks. So, at the end of bootcamp, they know, they’re like, “This batch of people has a lot of grit. This middle, these, not so much.” But most people don’t have 12 weeks and a bootcamp to measure that factor.

But we coach people to have structured interview processes around their culture. So, you’re trying to get people to test themselves in or out of the culture, that if I realized that, let’s say I’m running a nonprofit mission-driven organization, and speaking with you, I’m realizing, “Pete, you seem pretty financially motivated.”

Pete Mockaitis
Cash is king, Mike.

Mike Zani
I’m like, “We do not pay top 50%.” That’s right. And I’m like, “If you’re not connected to this mission, you’re not going to make it here because you’re going to want to make money and have promotions beyond what social enterprises is willing to do at this time.” So, you need to really send like a beacon, your culture, your cultural mores, your way of working, and get people to be like, “I really want to be part of it,” or, “That scares me. I don’t want to be at all part of this.”

And people can start self-selecting in or out, but you really need to broadcast loudly and have some structured interviewing to help find out what’s at heart, and it’s still difficult. It’s easier with internal hires than with fresh material from the outside world.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that’s handy. Well, lay it on us, any other quick do’s and don’ts that we should keep in mind for getting more dream teams going?

Mike Zani
Yeah, I really think you need to train your managers to be good managers. I think the management construct is a little flawed. So, if you’re a good performer individual contributor, they start giving you resources. You manage a process at first and you hold people accountable to that process. You might manage a project and then you do a good job, and they give you more resources. Soon, you have people reporting to you and a little budget. And then you wake up in the morning, going, “Gosh, I got to manage my people. How do I do that?” So, you look back and you say, “Oh, I had a good manager once. I’m going to manage like them.”

And that just means that that manager managed you the way you wanted to be managed and that’s why you thought they were good. We need to teach managers to modify themselves to be flexible and pliable in their styles so they can actually get the most out of their people. And I go back all the way to the first comment about the Olympics when, even as a coach, even as a teacher, you need to modify yourself to get the most out of your people.

And I think when a manager realizes their job is to leverage their skills to get the most out of their people, that is what managers should do. We have to reinvest in the development of our management corps so they really can be world-class managers of people, so they can get the most out of their dream teams.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. Well, Mike, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mike Zani
No, I would say if you are unhappy with how stuff is being done, talent is being managed in your organization, look at your organization and find out, “Does the head of talent, whatever they’re called, chief people officer, chief human resources officer, are they reporting directly to the CEO or not?” I think that is the number one predictor of whether a company takes talent seriously. Because if you think the two most important assets in a modern business, first, people, 65% of an income statement of your expenses is people or people-related.

So, the new triumvirate is the CEO, the CFO, and the Chief People Officer. And that Chief People Officer better be reporting to the CEO because why wouldn’t the most important asset, 65% of your expenses, be reporting to the Chief Executive Officer? So, you can find out whether your organization is taking it seriously.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mike Zani
Yeah, Sir Francis Drake wrote this prayer when he had to tell his crew they were sailing around the world, and the only one who had ever done that before was Magellan, and most of them died.

I’m not going to quote the whole poem or prayer, but he does say, “Where the storms will show your mastery,” and I always hang onto that because I think when things really start going sideways, like the beginning of the pandemic, that you have to dig deep for the whole team the entirety. Like, the storm is going to show our mastery and we’re going to get through this, and we’re going to prove that all the work and all the talent that we have comes to bear right now.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Mike Zani
I’m going to go back to The Goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Mike Zani
The reason I like The Goal is once you learn that concept of looking for the bottleneck in everything you do, take a systems or operations approach, you actually see it everywhere. I see it with my kids, they’re like, “I need more socks.” I’m like, “No, you don’t. You need to wash your socks more.” I love The Goal. I have two boys; we have a lot of sock problems.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate, it gets quoted back to you often?

Mike Zani
There’s this concept that I mentioned in the book, and you may know the framework creator, Jim Allen. He’s a partner in the UK office of Bain, came up with, “Front of T-shirt, back of T-shirt.” And front of T-shirt is all the things that you’ve been given jobs for, your superlatives. You puff up your chest when you hear them and your mom would probably rattle them off. The back of T-shirt stuff is not as easily identifiable for the wearer of the shirt. But people who know the subject know the back of T-shirt and can say it just as loudly as the front but only when they walk away from you because it’s inappropriate to say it.

So, the really self-aware person looking for what’s on the back of your T-shirt, finding out these things that can manifest themselves at bad times and take you out. The reason Jim Allen brought this up is if you’re about to become a partner at a major consulting firm, the front of T-shirt is clear. You wouldn’t be there if you didn’t have a massive front of T-shirt. But it’s, “Are there things in the back that’s so out of control or egregious or triggered so frequently that we just can’t let you get to that next tenure level?”

And this framework has a lot of legs, and it’s in the book, I mentioned it. I give Jim Allen credit as often as I possibly can. But a lot of people really go on to that because going on a journey to find out, “What’s on your T-shirt? What’s on the front? What’s in the back? What are the triggers? How do they take me out? And how do I live with it because you’re never going to get rid of these things?”

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Mike Zani
For the book, I would point them to DreamTeams.io, that’s the book’s website, and you can take some free assessments there, and read a sample chapter. For more about The Predictive Index, PredictiveIndex.com has a lot of content on talent optimization, all free that you can really start snacking on to start learning about this discipline change that we all need to go through.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Mike Zani
Yeah, create better workplaces. I think if we send home our workers more energized because they enjoy what they do, we’re going to create a better world, create better parents, spouses, homeschooling individuals, community members. So, create better workplaces. We spend too much time working there to let people go home de-energized and unhappy.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Mike, this has been a treat. Thank you and I wish you much luck to be on many dream teams in your future.

Mike Zani
Pete, thank you for having me and I really appreciate the work that you do.