Pete Mockaitis
Keith, welcome back!

Keith Ferrazzi
Pete, I’m excited about the call. And I love the name, that’s my father’s name. So anytime I get a chance to talk to a Peter, a Pete, or a Pietro, it always brings a smile to my face.

Pete Mockaitis
Ah, Pietro. A Pietro Ferrazzi.

Keith Ferrazzi
Si, è vero. È vero.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Oh, we already got some life, some energy in this. That’s good. Well, I’m excited to chat about your book, “Never Lead Alone,” and I am going to accidentally say Never Eat Alone, because I read your book back in the day.

Keith Ferrazzi
That’s okay. That’s what most people know me from 20 years ago. This is the anniversary, 20th year anniversary of Never Eat Alone, the book that redefined “How do you build relationships that open doors of opportunity for yourself?” And now, 20 years later, “How do you build the kind of relationships among the team that you work with that won’t let you fail?”

Pete Mockaitis
And just for funsies, we were talking before we pushed record, I want to know, Keith, are you still a conference commando?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, I just came back from Davos, which is probably the holy grail of conferences, and I had the blessing of facilitating a roundtable of the CEO of two of the largest high-tech companies, the CEO of one of the biggest banks, the head of AI for Salesforce. What an amazing place, and it was all utilizing the simple practices of “How do you deepen and build relationships in this crazy world we’re living in today?”

And that’s what we’ve done. I mean, the book Never Eat Alone was so successful because it was like eating popcorn. “Try this, do this, 15 tips to be a conference commando.” And this new book is the same way, 10 shifts from traditional mediocre leadership to having your team step up in high-performing teamships, and 10 shifts and a bunch of little practices and it’s not that difficult. You just got to pick up and start trying some of the practices.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I know your style, your practices are based on a boatload of underlying research. Can you tell us a little bit about that research and any startling discoveries that made you go, “Whoa!” when you saw it?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, 3,000 teams in our dataset. And what do you think the average team’s courage and candor is among a team on a scale of zero to five? What’s that?

Pete Mockaitis
Two point one.

Keith Ferrazzi
You read the book. Actually, it ranges between 1.8 and 2.2, and that is just shocking. How we could be sitting in collaborative dialogues and people aren’t courageous enough or transparent enough or desirous enough to make each other successful to be telling the truth in the room? That’s just sh**. And the average team is mediocre at best. And what I just kept discovering time and time again was how mediocre the average team was.

Now, there are some teams that crush it. Amazon’s team does an extraordinary job on many of the most important shifts of a high-performing team, and so do a lot of the young unicorns that are coming out of Stanford, disrupting large corporations. These companies are doing incredibly well. But the average entrepreneur and the average big-company executives, pretty mediocre.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, courage and candor at a two-ish level, what does that look, sound, feel like in practice as compared to a dream state of a five?

Keith Ferrazzi
Well, okay, we’re having a conversation about the lagging sales numbers this quarter, and we have a polite dialogue in the room, and then we leave the room, and the real talk happens, and that happens all the time. Or worse, people are DM-ing privately during the meeting, saying the sh** that they won’t say out in the meeting itself.

Keith Ferrazzi
So that’s in the average state. In the powerful state, and I’ll use a company that, really, is a lovely place to work, it’s called e.l.f. Beauty. At e.l.f. Beauty, everybody agrees when they’re hired that “We will have the fastest, most compelling growth as professionals while we’re working here. And a part of that is a commitment that we will always tell each other the truth. We’ll never let each other fail. It’s not throwing each other under the bus. It’s assuring that everybody is successful. We cross the finish line together,” all those kinds of words.

And as a result, in a meeting, somebody will say, “We’re lagging sales numbers,” and the head of sales will say, “You know it’s been very difficult to get the kind of leads we need for marketing because of our lagging competency in digital marketing.” And then the head of marketing will say, “You know, like I appreciate that. We’re down a gal that we used to have in that particular role, and it is an issue. But let’s talk about how we could reallocate resources.” And then the head of HR will pop in and say, “You know what? We’ve got an analytics person over there we could move.”

So, it’s that kind of a collaborative dialogue. Now, all of those one-off conversations would have happened in DMs or behind the scenes, and they wouldn’t have happened from a sense of what I call co-elevation, where people are collaborating in service of a mission, pushing each other higher. Instead, it would have been done in a more eviscerating-ly, kind of passive-aggressive way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, like whiny, defensive, “Can you believe so-and-so?”

Keith Ferrazzi
Pointing fingers, and that just happens. I am so shocked by the most prominent businesses in the world. So, I have another one. I’m not going to say the name of the company, but this is a company I’m coaching right now, Fortune 50 company. And this business has self-professed that their candor levels are at 1.3 on a scale of 0 to 5, 1.3. And in one meeting, we practiced some practices.

So, my practices are researched. That was the original question, 3,000 teams, I’ve observed practices of successful teams. I take them out, dust them off, package them, put them in other teams to a point where I can prove that “If you do this practice, you will move the needle on the diagnostic and likely move the needle on performance.”

And the 1.3 company did this practice called a stress test. So, we had three critical initiatives that were being, or that are absolutely important for this company to thrive. Three critical initiatives presented. The first one presented and said, “Okay,” and they all present in the same way, “Here’s what we’ve achieved. Here’s where we’re struggling. Here’s where we’re going.”

But everybody knew that they had to individually write in a Google Doc what the challenge was. Like, “I listened to you. Here’s what I disagree with. Here’s a risk you’re not seeing, something. Here’s where I might offer an idea. And here’s where I’d be willing to help.” The entire group is writing this in, and then they go into breakout sessions, and they corroborate as small groups in three. Then we come back in and have a conversation.

And then I asked the team, “What’s the degree of candor you just experienced?” They all put into chat fours and fives. So, literally, one practice moved them from a standard of polite, passive-aggressiveness, and political dialogue to full transparency where they got all the stuff on the table and we were at fours and fives levels of candor in less than an hour of the meeting starting. This is what high-return practice is, and what the book can do for any team.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I’m curious, what do we think is underlying the low levels of candor?

Keith Ferrazzi
First of all, there’s a wrongheadedness about feedback and candor that was born within our culture as children. So, when your parents gave you feedback, were they giving you input? They were telling you something. They were giving you a directive, “Sit up straight,” “Don’t eat that way,” whatever. Feedback has always come in the forms of a directive. And when you got it from your teachers, coaches, bosses, it’s always a directive.

Now I’m telling your peers to unleash feedback. But if everybody thinks that what they’re doing is giving each other directives, that is a cluster. But that’s why we don’t do it. Right now, we think that feedback and directive are intertwined. We don’t do it. We don’t like when we receive it because we assume that it’s coming with a directive.

I unbundle that when I’m working with teams. I say, “Listen, what we’re looking for is bold, inclusive, direct, challenging data from all of the points of view. In fact, let’s get more inclusive. Let’s go ask people who actually have a dog in the hunt down at the front lines. Let’s go ask innovators outside. Let’s get insights that just blow us away. And then let’s just treat it all like individual datapoints that we don’t have to do anything with, except use to analyze for better answers.”

So, one of the reasons why I think the feedback is so supercharged and the ability to get it more fluidly is to disaggregate what supercharges it. That’s the connection to directive.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. So, right there, it’s just like, “If you have a different perspective about what we’re doing, what we’re giving, what we’re receiving, that can be big right there,” because some folks might say, “Well, it’s not my place to direct this person because, I mean, I’m their peer, or I’m even at a lower level in the hierarchy of the organization.”

Keith Ferrazzi
That’s right. And instead, now it’s just like, “Oh, I want to give this person my data, my insight. They can do whatever they want to it,” but we start celebrating the desire to be bold and to throw out crazy ideas, and that’s the powerful element. Look, I think the other thing is, you know, in some places, there’s a sense of politicization, “So, hmm, if I make this person successful, do I look less successful?”

And the reality is that’s another reboot, which is the leader needs– and this is, by the way, everything I’m talking about, you can either learn it as a teammate and be the best teammate on the team, or you could read the book and learn it as a leader and get the whole team to behave that way. So, leaders lead differently when they’re asking teams to become high-performing teams.

So, if a good leader gives feedback, a great leader gets the team to give each other feedback. A good leader holds the team accountable; a great leader gets the team to hold each other accountable. A great leader will actually get the team to have each other’s back to the point where they won’t let each other fail.

Now, those are 10 shifts. I just gave you, three of them, you know, a shift from conflict avoidance to candor. The shift from accidental relationships, serendipitous relationships, walking down a hallway, to purposeful, engineered, more powerful relationships. So, there’s a whole series of these shifts. Everyone has simple practices that bring it to life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you share with us another, a couple shifts and practices that you’ve seen be tremendously transformational?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned, so I became a venture partner at a company called Lightspeed. It’s one of the largest VCs in the world, and I coach their portfolio companies. These extraordinary, thoughtful, fast-growth unicorn companies born out of Stanford University or IIT in India. And these companies, they very much collaborate differently than most other teams. They don’t use meetings as the way in which they collaborate.

So, one of the shifts is from collaborating in meetings to collaborating in technology. So, if I said to you, “We’re running slow on the sales this quarter. Let’s have a meeting on it,” we all get in the room and we start having a dialogue. There’s 12 of us, and four of us would think that we’d been hurt. It’s just, you don’t have time to hear everyone’s point of view. Some people aren’t bold and aggressive in meetings, others are more introverted, etc.

But if I said, “Let’s not have a meeting on it. Here’s a Google Sheet, and here’s all 12 people’s names. First column, what do you think the real problem is that has caused the sales to slow down? Second column is what is a bold solution that could get us back on track? Okay, now everybody writes that up and reads it before we show up in the meeting. Now we show up in the meeting, we probably already landed the plane and all we have to do is agree that one of those solutions or a combination of a couple is the way to go, and we’re off and running.”

The old way would have been the meeting, the meeting after the meeting, the meeting we walked down the hallway, the lobbying behind each other’s backs. I mean, meeting shifting is a major shift that these young, hot unicorn companies, they organically know how to collaborate in asynchronous formats, not meetings. That’s another shift.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot because, you mentioned Amazon being high performing, and I understand that Amazon very much has a writing culture in which folks do some writing about some things and they might start a meeting with “We’re just reading the writing.” And to some, that sounds very intimidating, like, “Oh, my gosh, I have to write essays and pages and pages.” But what you’ve described sounds super easy, “I got two cells. I might be generating nine sentences, and we’re off to the races.”

Keith Ferrazzi
I love the purposefulness of the Amazon culture, but I do, on this particular issue, I see the value of it, but I would rather not read in a room. Also, I think that by the time you’re writing up a five-page document, you’re putting a stake in the ground relative to what this thing is. I’m talking about, like, that’s fine if you’re down here on the funnel of collaboration, you’re ready to close something. That’s editing where somebody, where we think we are.

But if you’re up here, and you’re trying to break through a problem, I don’t want you, I don’t want five pages of your opinion. That boxes us all in to your opinion and your solution. I want, “I’m up here. I want to hear what you think the problems are.” Because I’ve seen this where, in a large manufacturer that was retooling a significant part of its product line, they were falling behind, and everyone’s pointing fingers. And I said, “Let’s just do a meeting shift. Let’s everybody go online and we’re going to write ‘We are falling behind. But what do you think the reason is we’re falling behind and what’s a bold solution?’”

And, all of a sudden, we had all of these opinions from different functions. Some people said, “I want to send it down to the plant level and see what they think,” and etc. And, gosh, it just revealed itself. Truth came out of this tapestry of insight. And the person who came up with the boldest idea that worked, that we ended up implementing, was L4 from the people who were actually in the meetings originally, level four underneath the levels one and levels two that were naturally there.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Okay. So, one, we’re exiting the meeting, and we’re getting all the bold thinking, just straight right out there in a Google Sheet or some sort of easy collaboration platform. Lay some more on us, Keith.

Keith Ferrazzi
The word “agile” is a word that came up in the 2000s as a way to re-engineer how you develop software, and it, frankly, was a genius re-engineering of workflow that should be used by all of us in all the projects we do. And, ironically, even companies that develop software don’t practice agile on other project management solutions.

Look, agile can be pretty time-consuming and very in-depth. It can be a bunch of spreadsheets. But here’s what I would say if there’s a critical initiative that you have this year, a wish, a desire, a hope, have your goals for the year around it, but ask yourself very clearly, “What does success look like after month one?”

And after month one, pause and say, “Okay, what have we achieved in month one? Where did we struggle in month one? And what are we planning to do in month two in order to make sure we hit our year goals?” If you work in those short agile sprints, month by month, or if there’s a lot of volatility in what you’re doing, you could do week by week sprints, and at the end of those sprints, utilizing the practice that I’d mentioned earlier called stress testing, where the group of people who are involved in that project, beat it up at the end of every sprint.

They go into breakout rooms and they write, “What risks or challenges do I see that they’re missing? What innovation might I offer? Where would I offer help?” And now, all of a sudden, the whole team is on one page beating this thing up, all full transparency on the table. The person now says, “Thank you. I’ve got all this new information. Here’s how I’m adjusting my next month, and I’m now on track to hit my annual goals.”

Whereas, in the past, we’d wake up at the end of Q1 or Q2 realizing, “There’s no way in hell we’re going to make our one-year goals. We’re already so far off track and we haven’t been listening more and robustly to all of the input.” So, just using simple, agile sprints and adjusting through stress testing at the end of every one is an amazing operating system for the world we’re living in today, the volatility, the need for change, etc.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, lovely. All right. So, we have a big goal, a big timeline, we split it up into segments, so we’re checking in regularly and seeing, “Are we on track and how do we fix it?” getting all the wisdom from the people. Nifty.

Keith Ferrazzi
So, I’m going to harken back to my first book a bit because one of the problems I saw in our coaching of teams is that most teams, do not effectively define what a team is. So, what I mean by that is, in most large companies, the big problem is we think our team is who reports to us, and we’re constantly banging our head against the wall because there are so many other interdependencies that are getting in our way of achieving the things we want to achieve. Well, that is the first shift that I talk about in the book, shifting from hub-and-spoke leadership, where control is what defines a team, to a team being the critical network of people you need to get the job done.

So, as a leader, your team is who you need to get the job done. I don’t work in a big company, I’m an entrepreneur, and my team includes other entrepreneurs, like Peter Diamandis, who’s a good buddy of mine, who’s a futurist in technology. He helped me design an entirely new business at Ferrazzi Greenlight that I hadn’t thought of, that was basically, it’s called Connected Success.

We take learners, you know, entrepreneurs, leaders. etc. who want to live the life of Keith Ferrazzi in terms of great relationships, transforming your life, transforming your career, etc., and we take them through an eight-week program. That is very different than the business model that I’ve always had, which is coaching executive teams. So, this is a very different business model.

And my teammate, Peter, incubated that with me, and he doesn’t work for me. I don’t pay him. I’m a partner of his and I do things for his and his teams, and he does things for me and my teams. All of a sudden, he’s a teammate, and if I didn’t define myself that way, I would have never tapped into his genius.

And in large corporations, you know, the software company that I was talking to you about earlier, the hardware and the software division are the same team in the growth of the business, and yet they think of themselves as other. And so, one team collaborates, and then they go try to get buy-in. Buy-in is BS. Buy-in is you’re trying to sell your ideas to people. You need to configure your team around the people you need to get the job done, independent of work charts.

And once that’s done, then you get that group to adopt what I call the social contract, “We’re going to be candid with each other. We’re going to push each other hard. We’re going to keep each other’s energy strong. We’re going to build strong, trusting relationships. We agree on this stuff, and then you do the practices.” So, just redefining team is such a critical component of high-performing teams and team-ship.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And I’m curious, when you lay out this contract, do you encounter resistance? Or do people sign up readily, and then later on have trouble? Or is it smooth sailing through and through?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, there’s usually, in every third team, there’s one a**hole that is just digging in out of self-preservation, fear, insecurity, selfishness, whatever, and they don’t want to really adjust to become a high-performing team. The reality is, in most teams, once they see, “Oh, wow, our score is 1.3? That’s pathetic. 

So, once you do the diagnostic, people are like, “Wow, that’s not who I want to be.” And now the question is, “It’s fine to be aware, but that doesn’t do anything. What are the practices? So, okay, I’m aware, now you’ve given me a stress test as a practice.” Or another practice is called a candor break, we’re in the middle of a meeting, everybody goes into groups of two, and they say, “Okay, what’s not being said in this meeting that should be said?” What a powerful question. They talk in groups of two, then they come back in the main room and they all share.

That’s turning the culture you wish you had into an assignment. It happens all the time in these practices. So, you become awake, you do the practice, and you’re like, “Wow, that’s a better way to live my life. I’m not banging my head against the wall about my frustration about another peer. I’m able to have a conversation with them about it.”

So, I think that the adoption rate is very high. Very high. Every once in a while, you get one that’s not, but then it also becomes very evident that that guy is the jerk that probably doesn’t last very long in the team.

Pete Mockaitis
I do love that question in the candor break, “What’s something that’s not being said that should be said?” because it kind of reverses the emotional pressure dynamics, you know? Whereas, before, it’s like, “Oh, it’s uncomfortable to say this thing because maybe it’ll hurt someone’s feelings, maybe I’ll look dumb, etc.” Then when you shift it, it then feels like the pressure is reversed. So, now the wrong answer is, “Uh, nothing. We’ve said everything.”

Keith Ferrazzi
Right. That’s the ridiculous answer. All I’ve done in most of these shifts, in the high-return practices, I have seen and curated practices that allow you to turn the kind of culture you dreamed of into simple assignments, and people don’t mind simple assignments, and in fact they’re pent up. You know, most organizations that are so overly polite that they don’t share what they’re thinking are usually highly political and they share behind each other’s back.

If you tell them, “Hey, we’re going to step up to a new standard of courage and transparency. Here’s how you’re going to do it. You’re going to go in small groups of two. You’re going to talk about what’s not being said. I know psychological safety is 85% higher in those small groups. Then we’re going to come into the main room. We’re going to have that discussion because you were assigned to do it so everyone has to have something to say,” and, boom, it’s all of a sudden on the table.

So, it’s actually, there’s a Fortune magazine article I wrote recently that says, you know, I’m tired of hearing people say, “Culture change is tough.” It’s not. Culture change changes when you just adopt simple new practices that change the culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you also talk about the importance of praise, so this stuff isn’t necessarily all like, “Oh, say the hard courageous thing that’s going to upset people.” But also, we’re sharing some happy stuff, too.

Keith Ferrazzi
Praise and relationships, both are very happy. So, praise, there’s, “How do you shift from paltry limited leader-led praise?” which most companies don’t have enough praise. So, limited praise from leaders to abundant praise from peers. How do you create, and what do you do? If you’re a leader, let’s do a practice. Once a month, we’re going to do a gratitude circle where everybody goes around and shares one person on the team that they’re grateful for and why. Really simple practice. And you can do them even more frequently than once a month.

So, there’s a whole set of practices that shift from the leader being responsible for all the praise to the team. You can still do leader-led praise. You want certain behaviors dialed up on your team, you do an award for that kind of behavior, and you call out who that is. Very simple. It’s Pavlovian in nature, actually, right? It’s like the dog rings the bell; they get a treat. So, if you change your behavior, you get a treat, you get praised. So, that’s on the praise side. Very simple practices breed that kind of energy.

And relationships, you know, most teams have mediocre level of connection. I will go into a team, I’m like, I’ll do diagnostic interviews, “How close is your team?” “Oh, we’re so close. We grew up together. This team’s been together forever. Deep relationship. Deep caring relationships.” “Okay.” And we get in the room, and I ask the question, “Does my team have my back? Do I care about my team and what’s going on in their lives? Does my team know what I’m struggling with? And are they there to help lift me up?” “Oh, well. that’s kind of a high standard. That’s low twos, you know?”

And then I do a practice where everybody goes around and says, “What is my energy these days and what’s bringing it down?” And, all of a sudden, people come over to me, like, “Holy sh**, I’ve known this person for 10 years. I had no idea that their mother was suffering Alzheimer’s,” “I had no idea that they had an autistic son,” “I had no idea that they were struggling so much with this business leader that they serve in the business.” It’s amazing. We just don’t curate purposeful relationships.

Now when you have that, then you have a team that has more empathy, has more care, has more commitment. Yeah. So, I think of all of the interviews I’ve done, I think we’ve gotten through, like, more shifts here. Usually, I get to like three shifts. We got through, moving from candor, moving from conflict avoidance to candor, redefining the team itself as not an org chart but a network.

We moved from serendipitous relationships to purposeful relationships. We sort of threw in there the idea of moving from individual, “I got my own back. I’ve got to take care of my own resilience,” to team resilience. We talked about agile. We talked about celebration. We talked a little bit about peer-to-peer growth.

That’s one that I love where teams actually give each other critical feedback on a quarterly basis using an open 360 where everybody goes around, and says, “Pete, what I most respect and admire about you in the last quarter is X. Thank you. And, Pete, because I care about your success going forward, I might suggest,” everybody goes around. And they go, “Keith, same thing.”

That kind of peer-to-peer coaching, I call it an open 360 practice, really starts to prime the pump for a team to become each other’s coaches. Anyway, you’ve been abundant in navigating around the book, so this has been a fun interview.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote?

Keith Ferrazzi
”You don’t think your way to a new way of acting. You act your way to a new way of thinking.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite book?

Keith Ferrazzi
The Great Gatsby.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Keith Ferrazzi
I do a morning ritual, my fiancé and I, and I’ve just gotten engaged and we’re going to be married in June.

Pete Mockaitis
Congratulations.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thank you. The alarm goes off, we push snooze, and over the next 10 minutes, we both lie and meditate on what are three things we’re grateful for at that moment and three things we’re looking forward to in that day. And the three things that we’re grateful for, we’re never allowed to repeat the same one twice, ever in our lives. So, it’s a beautiful way to realize what kind of abundance we have around us.

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

Keith Ferrazzi
Look, this is more of a gift. If you’re excited about using the book, you can go to KeithFerrazzi.com, and we provided a video course around the book that you can certainly buy but you don’t have to. If you’re buying the book for your team, you get the video course for free. So, I think the challenge is just try some of these practices on. They’re so easy.

Can’t afford the book? Just go online and type “Keith Ferrazzi TeamShip.” I’ve published a lot of things on Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, etc., so just try some of the practices. You’ll learn how game-changing they are.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, thank you, Keith. This is fun.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thanks, Pete. I appreciate your time.

Pete Mockaitis
Paula, welcome back.

Paula Davis
Hello, it’s so good to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear you talking about Leading Well, and mindsets for engaging, retaining, and inspiring folks. Could you kick us off with any of the most surprising discoveries you’ve made when it comes to what it really takes to engage, retain, and inspire colleagues these days?

Paula Davis
One of the things that really surprised me was actually seeing the data around when companies take, not only at a performance focus, so looking at numbers and metrics and quarterly earnings and all of that, but also layer on sort of a people focus side, so combining that performance and people focus, the great business outcomes that come from it. So, really amplifying the business case was one of the things that I wanted to do in this book because I think it’s a piece of the puzzle that’s oftentimes left out when we’re talking about some of this human-focused psychology stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what kind of performance boosts are we talking here?

Paula Davis
So, we are talking about much lower attrition rates, sometimes cut in half. We’re talking about higher earnings. We are talking about, 4.3 times more likely than the average company to maintain top-tier financial performance for an extended period of time. And one of the pieces of the puzzle that I think is really important is that, because I hear from a lot of professional services firms, in particular, and other companies who say, “We’re meeting our numbers. We’re doing really, really well. We got lots of money rolling into the company. Like, why should we switch? Why is taking a performance focus so wrong?”

And the answer is it’s not wrong. But what the research talks about is that, in good times, you know, companies that perform financially well, those financial performance-focused companies do great, but when it comes to down times, when it comes to, say, the period of time during the pandemic, what have you, companies that have that balanced approach, that really add that people side to the equation, tend to go through the rough patches in a more smooth way. They take less bumps.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you perhaps paint a picture for what that looks, sounds, feels like in practice in terms of, “All right, this is what being in a company that has the hardcore financial performance focus feels like in terms of the vibe, and the messaging, and the experience, and infrastructure, all the stuff,” versus what a more balanced place feels like? And maybe share a story for how that plays out in practice.

Paula Davis
Sure, yeah. And so, what was interesting is the research that I just talked about found that only 9% of the companies that, this was a McKinsey report, researched actually fell in that balanced approach. So, we’re not talking about a lot of companies here. And one of the companies that I think comes to mind for me is one of the companies that I talked about in Chapter 3 of the book.

It’s a really large healthcare organization that has taken kind of its mindset around recognition and appreciation and has really codified it in some unique ways, not only within the organization but they’ve actually elevated it, that notion that, “This is what we’re going to do. This is one of the values that we’re going to really, really hit hard and kind of walk the talk about.” They’ve elevated it all the way up to the C-suite and board level strategy.

So, very rarely do I hear a company that either read about or that I’ve worked with actually say, you know, like, “Some of this well-being motivational engagement stuff is actually baked into the highest of the highest-level strategies that we’re thinking about.” And so, clearly, looking at this concept from a dollars and cents standpoint, right, because it’s part of the entire financial strategy that we’re looking at for the company, but that it trickles down throughout the organization in a number of different ways.

So, they have a Making Moments Matter platform where they are able to send these recognitions and appreciations to each other via a platform of technology that they have in the organization. They have a yearly event where they actually nominate people at every single level from around the entire system. And they have different categories of folks who are finalists, or what have you, and they pick somebody who, out of the entire organization of 50,000 plus people, most truly espouses these values, and then they honor them at a dinner.

And so, there’s just all these different ways that they have decided to take this one particular piece, this human piece of the puzzle, and actually build it in a number of different ways. And they actually have told me that they see this as their most, from an economic standpoint, valuable retention tool and talent attraction tool. And they can tell that when the people in the organization are truly kind of walking these values, they see better outcomes with their patients in a whole host of ways. So, that’s the best example I can think of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can we zoom in into like a Making Moments Matter type thing? Like, if I were there in that organization, like what would be happening as we do this stuff?

Paula Davis
Say, you had a wonderful interaction or encounter with a colleague, or you noticed somebody who was really walking the values of the organization, you could put a little message into this platform, and that would register and it would go not only to the person, but it would go to the person’s manager, and I think it might even go one level above that as well.

They’ve collected multiple millions of these individual sorts of appreciations and recognitions, and just talking about how that has really just helped to build a really strong cultural fabric.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, I like that so much. It sounds really good. I read the book The Fund by Rob Copeland, which was talking about Bridgewater and their unique computer stuff and culture. And, at least the way he writes it, it sounds like a nightmare, like just a miserable place to be from Rob Copeland’s perspective in the book, because it was sort of doing almost the opposite of that in terms of like everybody was continuously tracking and ranking and rating and scoring everybody on all of these competency dimensions, they called it their baseball cards.

And so, there’s always sort of like this looming threat of, “Oh, someone could ding me for behaving in such a way,” and then others would pile on and you’d see your real-time, I guess, status, score, baseball card figures plummeting relative to the other people in the organization. It sounded horrendous, as Rob Copeland told it. And this is like the opposite. It’s like, “Here are some cool stuff that went down. Hooray! Let’s celebrate you publicly.”

Paula Davis
That does sound horrendous, and I didn’t dig into this, but I think you bring up a really good point, or he brings up a really good point, certainly, is that I think when you’re talking about making moments matter, or taking time to appreciate someone, or highlight something that they’ve done well, or recognize them, whatever word you want to use, I think that really has to be done authentically. And that’s I think one of the things you got to watch out for, I think, with any type of platform like this. It’s not about, like, “Ooh, I’ve got to get to 20 by the end of the week.” It’s about making them the most authentic that you can.

But I think that most of us zoom through work with our heads down, just, you know, we’ve got so much work to do, we’re just trying to get through the day, and so we’re at zero. So, kind of finding that balance between nothing and a race to get to a certain number.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s funny how these things naturally come up in our brains in terms of, “Oh, wow, that was a really cool chat I had with Paula. That was great.” And then they do, they fly right out of our brains as we rush to finish the next thing that needs to be done, oh, so urgently. So, if you have an institutionalized system process methodology by which these things are captured, and you just know, “Oh! I know just the place to park this fun pleasant thought I had. Here we go!”

Paula Davis
And because I think a lot of organizations have, the recognition policies. So, like, “At five years we’re going to send you a something or at 10 years we’re going to send you something.” They have sort of codified ways to express appreciation and thanks but they don’t necessarily support or talk about or think about or highlight, like, everyday day-to-day practices.

And so, I talk about how important it is to start to kind of go in that direction because it kicks the door open to something much more deep, a fundamental human need for us to know that we matter. So, that’s whether we are at, you know, talking about our families, whether we’re talking about work, whether we’re talking about our communities, we want to know that we’re making an impact on some level, right?

And so, mattering is about both those moments of appreciation, but it’s also about those moments of achievement where I also know that I’m contributing something. I’m contributing something and other people are noticing or affirming or telling me that I am having that level of impact.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. So, the research is backing this up and, boy, 9%.

Paula Davis
A lot of room for improvement.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess if we find ourselves in an organization that’s doing some nice stuff this way, I guess we should feel grateful because it’s apparently rare.

Paula Davis
Based on, certainly, that one research report from McKinsey, yes. In fact, I think they found it was 55%, which was the bigger category of the quadrants, so four quadrants. I think it was about 55% who actually didn’t show a high level on either category, not outperforming on the performance side and not outperforming on the people side either. So more than half are just kind of, you know, “Here we go.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s some cool research. And would you say that’s the big idea behind Lead Well? Or how would you articulate the core thesis?

Paula Davis
Well, I think that’s definitely a piece of it. I think the big idea behind it is, I think wanting to let the world of work, and particularly leaders know, that they’re really driving the conversation when it comes to the fact that we’re looking at “Work has changed. And how has work changed? And why has work changed? Because that’s happened, what do we have to, how do they, how do leaders have to be thinking differently about that?”

If we want to continue to have or see good outcomes, if we want to sort of reverse this trend of burnout, if we want to reverse the trend of, we’re at an all-time low level at least for the last 11 years of disengagement, things that we keep seeing come up consistently over and over are taking root. And if we’re going to go in a different direction with that, how do we do it?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when we talk about change, what would you say is the most pronounced change difference that the worker, let’s say the knowledge worker, is experiencing now as compared to, say, 15 years ago?

Paula Davis
So, certainly, I mean, we can’t avoid the conversation about AI, right? I think that the explosion of just new technology and new ways of thinking about doing work and really, honestly, potentially, being at a point where we might see some of those lower-level tasks, eventually at some point, potentially, be consumed by technology and other things, I think is much more realistic than it was 15 years ago.

I think, certainly, the outcomes associated with the pandemic, and I know we’re largely beyond that or however we want to word that, but I think, psychologically, what a lot of people and a lot of leaders don’t understand is that we’ve carried the effects of going through something so traumatic for a lot of people and cataclysmic for a lot of people with us.

And we’ve really, I think, very intentionally, started to look very differently at “How do I want my life to unfold? How do I want my world of work to look? How do I get both of those two things to integrate? And if I am not seeing a workplace that’s going to be supportive of my well-being and supportive of some of the human-centered aspects of work that I feel are much more important now, I may seriously consider going somewhere else.”

So, I don’t think we really– I mean, 15 years ago was when I stopped my law practice and I started down the path toward this work. We weren’t having these conversations at all about wellbeing in work. And so, I think the fact that that’s amplified has been a huge change as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, that’s intriguing, the COVID pandemic impact. It’s so funny, I think back to 2020, it was like another lifetime.

Paula Davis
I know.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d heard that people don’t want to make any movies or TV shows set in that time, it’s like, “We all just want to forget that happened. That’s not entertaining in the least to return to such memories.” And so then, is there any cool research or data saying, “Whoa, here’s something that feels very different in 2025 as compared to even 2019”?

Paula Davis
Well, I think one of the pieces that helps explain why people feel so differently now because of that is something called post-traumatic growth. So, I think a lot of folks are familiar with the term post-traumatic stress disorder. Less people, I find, are familiar with the term post-traumatic growth. So really understanding that when we go through life’s big adversities, when we go through life’s big challenges and traumatic experiences, most of us will take a look and go, “I do not want that to happen again. I wish this thing hadn’t happened because it kind of changed things completely for me.”

But what we oftentimes find is that humans do come out the other side at some point and they share some characteristics. They talk about a renewed sense of connection. They really, really amplify the importance of their relationships. They really want a sense of meaning and some deeper sort of connection involved in their lives, and it’s not something that they can just erase or have go away. It’s sort of like a permanent shift in how their world has changed.

And so, I think that that helps to explain why a lot of people have come out of this now really talking about how “I would like meaning at work, and I would like to have a little bit more indicator of my impact,” or, “I do want a workplace that’s going to support my mental health and well-being. And if I don’t get those things, yeah, I might stay for a while.”

But, I mean, I don’t think our workplaces, our leaders really want to have their teams be thinking about how they’re going to be plotting their next choice of where they’re going to work. We want our workers to feel engaged and motivated and staying. So that has been a big piece for me to think about.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us then, what are some of the top mindsets and practices and cool stories that show them in action, come to life, to give us a picture here?

Paula Davis
Yeah, so the first one, and I sort of alluded to this already in the story that we were just talking about, but it’s called “Prioritizing Sticky Recognition and Mattering.” And so, this chapter honestly really changed how I have looked at my friendships and my relationships with my family, and certainly my relationship with my eight-and-a-half-year-old, “Am I telling her enough?” Because I think a lot of times, we just assume that people know, like, “Hey you’re in my universe and so all is good to go.”

But, like, really amplifying that sense of showing people their impact, and then blooming that fundamental human need to matter, I think is really a cool starting place, and really low-hanging fruit for a lot of organizations. But then I talk about also the need to amplify what I call ABC needs. So that’s a lovely combination of autonomy, belonging, and challenge.

So, we need a sense of, in our lives, in our world of work, we need a combination of “Do I get to choose my own adventure?” That’s how I think about autonomy. “Do I belong? Do I show up to a place where people care about me and my leader has my back, and I know I’m part of a group that is doing something well? And do I feel challenged? Am I able to grow and sort of build my skills within my current world of work?”

And then workload sustainability. So, this was one of the hardest chapters for me to tackle, but I felt like this book would be incomplete unless I did, because unmanageable workloads are one of the, if we’re looking at the root causes or sources of disengagement and stress and burnout, by far and away has been the number one unmanageable workload that I have seen with all of the groups that I have worked with. And so, trying to unpeel all of that, getting into what makes for a more sustainable workload, was a big piece of the puzzle.

The fourth one is building systemic stress resilience. So, to deal with all of the uncertainty, and the challenge, and the change, and the setbacks, and the obstacles, and the stressors, we have to not just be thinking about resilience at the individual level, but how do our teams become more resilient and how can we fortify organizations to become more resilient?

And then lastly, I wanted to talk about values alignment and practices associated with leading in a meaningful way. Certainly, with the generational conversation, I think that notion of values alignment and meaning has been pushed to the forefront. And values misalignment is also another one of the core drivers of chronic stress and burnout and disengagement. And so, it’s that whole kind of piece, puzzle pieces together in terms of the mindsets that I want leaders to be thinking about.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say workload sustainability, I’m curious, what do we know in terms of what makes a workload sustainable or unsustainable?

Paula Davis
Yeah, so basically it comes down to really two big buckets, and I decided to write about one of the buckets, and it’s really about better processes, procedures, and teaming practices. So, if I’m going to get my arms around building more workload sustainability, I got to figure out, like, “Why do we have so many open projects? Why are we doing so many things that are draining money?” and trying to get my arms around just even sort of where all of that is coming from?

And then the other piece of the puzzle, is recovery. Like, “Are we making enough time to really stop and pause? And what does that actually mean and look like in our day-to-day, in our week-to-week, month-to-month?” It’s not just the taking a vacation once every three years, that doesn’t do it.

So that notion, though, of really starting with leaders trying to dig in and just see, like, “What do we have? Why do we have so much? Why are we not focusing on certain things? Do we have Band-Aid initiatives going on where we’ve got so many open projects, but we don’t have the funding or the people or what have you to actually finish things and push them through, but they remain open?” So, there’s a lot of first steps, or kind of digging that leaders really need to engage in.

And then it becomes, “How are your meeting practices? Do you have information that’s located in places where everybody has access to it? Are people really clear about their roles and responsibilities? Do teams understand how we’re supposed to communicate with each other?” So, it gets back to a lot of very basic sort of teaming practices, very basic procedural things that I think when they’re done with more intentionality, can then start to help us understand how we can bring workload back into more of a sustainable realm.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a quantity, a number of hours or projects or something by which we can start to see, “Ah, this is where a workload begins dipping into the unsustainable level”?

Paula Davis
That’s the hard part because it’s so subjective, and I talk about this a lot associated with my burnout work, too, is that when we’re talking about an unsustainable workload, what’s unsustainable for me may be very different for you. What was unsustainable for me when I was 25 looks very different than what it is right now when I have an eight-and-a-half-year-old and a whole host of other just life obligations that I have to attend to at this age.

And so, I think it’s a fluid, subjective thing to be thinking about, and that’s why it can be so hard, I think, for leaders to really wrestle with “What does this mean?” because for one team in one department, it may look one way, and for a different team, it may look completely different. And so, you have to take it on kind of a team-by-team, case-by-case basis. So, there isn’t like a hard and fast metric. Like, I can’t say, “It’s seven projects for you, and three projects for you.” It’s totally like team and industry dependent.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about things in a similar light in terms of if what you’re doing is fascinating, riveting, engaging stuff that lights you up at your core and resembles play, it’s almost like there’s no limit in terms of like, “As long as you can, like, eat and exercise and sleep and see your loved ones, you might be able to bang out a massive number of hours.” And yet, if it feels like drudgery, then maybe even 20 hours a week is too much.

It has been sort of my subjective experience, and as I look at stories of like, I don’t know, I think about like hackers, it’s like, “These folks are just cranking away at their computer for hours upon hours upon hours,” and yet, it’s fun, fascinating, interesting, and juicy for them, because it’s so cool, “I’m learning, I’m exploring, I’m discovering. Oh, my gosh, this thing worked! Wow, I did not expect that to work! Oh, I made a discovery! I should probably share this with the world so that the world becomes safer! And I’m contributing to that and making a little bit of a name for myself.”

And yet, at the end of the day, they’re still seated, tapping on keys, looking at a screen, whereas another person can be doing the same distributed across dozens of inconsistently interrupted projects that they don’t really care that much about how they work out to be, and feel tremendously stressed, burnt out, flustered by the matter.

Paula Davis
Yes. And so, that’s an interesting example, but I think it goes back to the power of knowing and understanding the impact that you’re having and the impact that you’re making. And do you feel that C in the ABCs, right? Do you feel a sense of challenge and growth? Do you feel like you’re able to learn new things? Do you have people who are around you who can show you the ropes and help you get from point A to point B or wherever it is that you want to take in terms of the next step in your career?

And it’s interesting what you were just talking about, and I don’t know that you’ve talked or thought about it through game theory, but one of the small kind of strategies that I talk about in that particular part of the book is sort of adding gamification thinking to some of your work, for leaders to kind of introduce gaming concepts and practices.

So, when you think about playing a game, or like, for me I just inherently go to video games, part of the reason why they’re so consuming and they’re so enticing and you want to stay with them and it’s hard to break away from them is because the objective is really clear, “I have to get to level 20,” or, “I have to rescue this particular person.” So, there’s a clear end point, and there’s clear goals along the way, and while you’re going and trying to achieve that particular goal, or whatever getting to the next level looks like, there’s all sorts of phenomenal feedback cues.

There’s bells and whistles, and the point total gets higher, and you’re getting such immediate feedback that you’re on the right track or that you’re doing the right thing or that you’re not doing the right thing, so you can course correct. So, it’s the same types of concepts that can help leaders think about, like, “How do I build some of that into helping people still stay engaged and have fun with the work that they’re doing?” because a lot of us aren’t.

Pete Mockaitis

And so then, what are some of the coolest ways you’ve seen folks implement some of these principles, these gamifications into normal professional work life that have been fun and effective?

Paula Davis
One of the companies that I talk about, it’s actually a really big law firm that I talk about in the book. I don’t think we oftentimes think of like law firms as being, I certainly don’t, as having been in that world for a long time, as being ultra-forward thinking when it comes to these types of concepts.

But a big law firm that I talk about in the book really has created sort of this, almost like this separate sort of leadership education for their lawyers, and they actually give them titles. So, normally you’re just an associate, and then you’re a partner. But they actually give them new titles as they ascend through different pieces of this leadership academy.

And so, in addition to the titles, they get one-on-one coaching so they’re getting, I think, some of that more strategic feedback about how they’re doing and how they can continue to get better at each level. And there’s also, I believe, like a notification or something that goes out to the clients as well. This is an indicator to their clients that, “Hey, the lawyer who you’re working with is now ascended almost right into the different, the next level of the game of sorts, and here is the wealth of talent that they continue to bring.”

So, again, I don’t know that they or I were looking at that through the gamification lens, but you can see how, when you start to build sort of larger scale intentional programs like that, you can have those types of game theory sort of built in or used as a way to explain some of the beneficial outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I would love to get your viewpoints in terms of, let’s say we’re in an organization where, unfortunately, not a lot of these cool best practices are at work, but we have our little sphere of influence in terms of a team, or even just a couple direct reports, or even ourselves. Any pro tips on how we can take advantage of some of these principles to make some good things happen?

Paula Davis
I think that the best place to start, and certainly where I advocated in my first book too, is with your team, with a team. And even if your team is just you and two other people, that’s a team. I think sometimes we think that teams have to be these really large entities, and that’s certainly not the case.

And so, I think starting with some of the best practices to implement some of that sticky recognition and mattering, just because the outcomes are so strong with that. So, that’s just simply, you know, one of the researchers I interviewed for that chapter said, “Sticky recognition and mattering lives at the day-to-day moments in your interactions.”

So those 10-minute moments when you’re walking down the hallway with someone or you’ve just patched into the Zoom and it’s a few of you just kind of hanging out, what do you say? Like, do you interact with somebody? How’s your day? How’s your family? What’s going on? What has your attention right now? Just sort of, I think, getting back to relearning how to see people when we’re so consumed by our work in technology, I think, is a really important starting point.

And then, one of the things that kept coming up as a thread in a lot of the successful companies and people that I interviewed was this notion of just, like, I call them Seinfeld meetings because Seinfeld was a show about nothing. And so, it’s these one-on-one moments to talk to people really about nothing, purposely without a business outcome associated with it.

So, again, just spending 15 minutes every other week just checking in on someone and asking them, “What has your attention right now?” can be hugely beneficial. Just talking to each other about just best teaming practices, “Are we all aligned together on how we’re communicating with each other, about how we see our team, about what the end result is? Are we all clear? Do we all have clear guardrails about where we’re supposed to start and where we’re supposed to end up?” So, again, I think some of these human practices in combination with some basic teaming practices, I think, is always a winning combination.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And could you share with us a cool story of a team or organization that really just put these principles into practice in a beautiful, illustrative, transformational way?

Paula Davis
One example that I mention is, it’s really a framework, so it’s less, I think, about a company, although there’s a few companies that are implementing this. In the Work Sustainability chapter talking about it’s called the US Bank Guidelines, where US banks’ in-house teams of sorts, have really intentionally thought about, “How do we want to create relationships with our outside vendors, our outside counsel, the outside people who we work with, and our internal folks that’s going to be supportive of intentional delegation; that’s going to try and minimize the fire drills and the urgency; that’s going to honor and respect communication practices and work-life integration boundaries and things of that nature?”

And so, talking about the different sort of principles that they have, that have become these guidelines that do just what I said, talking to them about how they’ve started to implement those, both internally and externally with the people who they work, have certainly been eye-opening. So, I think a lot of where we’re at right now with some of this is we’ve got to just try it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Paula Davis
So, I think, for me, one of the big takeaways from the book is that this comes down to this being leading well. It comes down to what I call tiny noticeable things, or TNTs, that are a combination of a little bit more human stuff and a little bit more team stuff that together, I think, become a really powerful source of motivational fuel for folks.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Paula Davis
One of my favorite quotes is “Between what is said but not meant, and what is meant but not said, a lot of love is lost.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Paula Davis
One of the research papers that I found really fascinating talked about how, and this is just kind of an interesting way that they were able to measure a team’s heart rate synchrony. And when teams’ heart rates were in sync, they, I think it was like more than 75% of the time, made good decisions together.

And so, it was really indicative of psychological safety and trust. So, I thought it was just really interesting look at some of these things from a physiological perspective and see how when heart rates were more in sync, there was more trust and better decision-making among teams.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Paula Davis
I love Brigid Schulte’s latest book is called Overwork, so I’m obviously digging into all of the things work-related about how we can do work better and make work better. I keep coming back to, over and over again, Kelly McGonigal’s book The Upside of Stress.

Because I have spent so much time in the burnout space, I think, really, taking an interesting look at “What is stress meant to help us do?” It’s meant to help us connect. It’s meant to help us find meaning, and that a meaningful life is a stressful life on some level, and so that reminder is helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote back to you often?

Paula Davis
Yes, there’s a skill that I talk about with that sticky recognition and mattering piece called a thank you plus, where so if you don’t say thank you very frequently, this could be at work or outside of work, start there. But the plus piece is to add the behavior or the strength that you saw that led to the good outcome.

So, it can be as simple as saying, “Thank you so much for summarizing the reports. The way that you did that helped me find the key takeaways quickly, and it made my life a lot easier and the conversation with my clients simpler.” Just that extra little smidge of peace really resonates with people. And so, I oftentimes will have people trying to practice a thank you plus to me or emailing me and calling out the fact that they were trying to do a thank you plus or mentioning that to me in some way.

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

Paula Davis
They can go to my website, which is StressAndResilience.com, or they can find me at Paula Davis on LinkedIn.

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

Paula Davis
I would say just don’t forget about the fundamental human need that we all have, to just make sure that we’re making an impact in our world, and just being really keen to share that with people when you notice it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Paula, thank you.

Paula Davis
Thanks so much, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Mike, welcome back.

Mike Michalowicz

Dude, it’s awesome to be back. Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it’s awesome to be chatting. I have enjoyed so many of your books over the years, and I’m excited to hear about your latest All In: How Great Leaders Build Unstoppable Teams. Lay it on us, I know you go deep with your research. So, tell us the tale of how you came to understand the problem and the solutions that you’ve put forward in your book All In.

Mike Michalowicz

So, basically, what I do in my research, I say, “What’s the desired outcome we have in a circumstance?” So, in this case, it was recruiting high-performing employees, people that are super engaged, great people for our company. Then what’s the actual outcome? And most businesses have horrible outcome.

When we have a desired outcome, and the actual outcome is far off, I look in the middle, which is the method we follow, I call the DMO, desire method outcome. And the method we’re using is interviews. So, this is not a shocker but the solution is. It’s no surprise that most people we interview don’t work out for the long term or aren’t high performers. The percentage, which shows about 5% of people we hire are rock star employees for long term in our company.

But what I found is the solution kind of blew my mind. So, I said, “Well, is there any example of any organization that doesn’t use interviews or use a different method, and has a high percentage rate?” Well, sure enough, there’s an industry, it won’t be a surprise in a moment, but they’re over half a trillion dollars in revenue, that does not run a single interview, they only do performance-based and what they call workshops or camps, and the output is like 95% extremely high performers.

So, here’s the industry. Sports. And that’s not the surprise now, it’s like, “Well, of course.” If I’m a football team, I won’t go, “Hey, why don’t you come for an interview? Where is the green light?”

Pete Mockaitis

Actually, throwing balls, catching balls, running with balls?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, you get on the field and do. But there’s two forms of interviews. There’s one where I’m considering a candidate and I want to see your functional skills, but there’s an even greater level, and this is the big opportunity for all of us. There is what’s called potential assessments, and it’s not done in the interview process. It’s through an education process.

So, I’ll give a personal example because I didn’t really appreciate experiences. I played Lacrosse in high school, and, admittedly, I was not such a good athlete but, whatever, I played. I went to Hobart Lacrosse campus, which is in the northeast where kind of where I lived, and this is like the preeminent school in this area, there’s 300 kids there. And while we were practicing over this week’s period, certain students were tapped on the shoulder, brought to another field, and invited to play more advanced skills, whatever.

The people who had potential in the beginning were quickly vetted out to perform on more competitive fields and try new skills. By the end of the camp, I think two or three students were invited to play for Hobart, this elite team. I was not one of them. But here’s what’s cool. I played Lacross in college, and it’s in the big part because of what I learned at Hobart. The lesson is this, that we, as employers, can put on camps, an educational event, where everyone gets elevated and used also as an observational medium to cherry-pick the best candidates.

Now, the last thing I want to share, because I get so excited about this. This is happening in the real business world, just not enough. And for the folks listening, I bet you no one’s doing workshops right now, but I’ll tell you a major company who is, it’s Home Depot. And the next time you hear they’re doing a Build a Birdhouse workshop, that is a recruiting platform, and this is how it works.

You see this ad, Build a Birdhouse, Bring a Kid, whatever, and you go down there, and you have experience. They’re there to educate you, you’re having fun, you get ingratiated at the store, it’s cool, we build a birdhouse. They have an employee there that’s observing participation, and if you’re the parent who is learning quickly, helping other parents, asking good questions, really enthusiastic about it, they will tap you on the shoulder, and say, “You’re the exact candidate we’re looking to work in Home Depot. Have you ever considered us?”

So, here’s the lesson. Don’t setup an interview platform, saying, “We’re interviewing people to build birdhouses.” Simply say, “If you’re curious, you can learn,” because the best candidates are curious. The other thing that’s interesting is it’s a recruiting platform that doesn’t follow where the standard fair is going. Everyone is going to the platform DuJour, or Indeed, or whatever it is nowadays. We go there, and everyone keeps going after the same 2% of unemployed people and a few people that are looking for a job right now.

But in an education format, I can go to my competition. I can go to anyone, and say, “Are you looking to get better at what you currently do?” Because, at the end of the day, top performers are always looking to learn. They’re learners. So, put on a learning environment, now people come, they learn the skills that you are looking to hire for, or they have the prerequisite skills and you’re giving them new education, and now you can observe and cherry-pick the people you want. I mentioned in the book, we were testing this other company, and, sure enough, we had a bookkeeping agency that, to a great effect, they preschool, the last organization is using this now.

Pete Mockaitis

Mike, I love so much of what you’re saying here because, well, I actually own a podcast production company, and that’s how we do hiring, is we just put people through sort of a gauntlet. They’re from all over the world, so it’s hard to get them together physically but we’ll just have a series of things, it’s like, “Okay, show me what you can do here and here,” in terms of one of my favorites is “Tell me what’s wrong with this sentence and write a better one. What’s wrong with this sentence, and write a better one? Summarize this podcast episode, etc.”

And so, then when we get together, it’s like, “Holy schmokes, you really sure know how to write very well. Go figure. And I guess you have to in order to pass this gauntlet of assessments.” And then this is also connecting in that I have coached many, many candidates through what I call case interviews for consulting jobs in which they have to solve real-time, live, a business case in front of the interviewer, like, “Hey, our client is this business, their profits are down, what do we do?” and they have to do this all dance of asking clarifying questions, and doing and putting forth a structure, and doing some calculations, ultimately generating a solution.

And, go figure, the folks they hire at the consulting firms tend to work out and not leave early. But I think the coolest experience of this was with, have you heard of the Fossey Foundation?

Mike Michalowicz

I have not.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, this is a nonprofit and, on their website, they identify and recruit and train individuals with extraordinary leadership potential, and Fossey scholars get full tuition leadership scholarships from their colleges and universities. And so, the idea is they want diverse students in colleges, and their students’ brilliance may not show up on the ACT/SAT GPAs. And so, I volunteered several times. It’s so fascinating.

Mike Michalowicz

That’s cool.

Pete Mockaitis

So, we observe high school students as they engage in these activities and we’re all just watching and writing down who’s impressing us with the leadership things they’re doing and who is not.

Mike Michalowicz

I love it.

Pete Mockaitis

And then when all the students leave, we talk about them. And so, that’s like one way that this talent is surfaced, and it’s like a camper workshop for “How do we find great high school talent that should be going to college who isn’t showing up on the ACT/SAT GPA?”

Mike Michalowicz

And you used that term students, which is perfect. So, when you talked about the gauntlet, that’s what’s called a skill assessment. The challenge of the gauntlet is these are people who are already applying for a job so they know they’re in a test environment, and it is a powerful tool. It’s kind of, like, I’m looking for a football player throw-catch-run, but there’s also camps, and that comes prior to this. This is for students, so this is people that they don’t know they’re being vetted, and that’s not even the primary intention, it’s to educate.

So, I can run a workshop, saying, “Learn to be a podcast editor,” or whatever it may be, and now I can invite in my competition, I can invite all these people, and they learn the experience. A couple keys to running a great workshop. Charge for it because people who are curious will pay, and it is educational. Give a certificate of accomplishment. Now they have a piece of paper, or digital paper, that they can use, if you decide not to employ them, maybe you can benefit them with another employer, but in the process always observe.

And that last example, as we said, they are students. So, they’re going through an education and learning, but we’re cherry-picking. The analogy I use, I put this in the book, is pretend you and I, Pete, we want to start a rock band, and we want just like trashing guitarist, and we’re like, “You know, let’s pick a guy from the ‘80s, let’s pretend Eddie Van Halen is still alive. We want Eddie Van Halen.” Now, how do you find Eddie Van Halen without knowing who he’s going to be?

We already know Eddie Van Halen is a qualified person, and if we called him, he would reject us, he’d laugh. The A players are gainfully employed, they’re making Goku box, and they’ll say no. But if we could have Eddie Van Halen when he is 12, that’s when he discovered guitar, I bet you we could’ve secured him. So, the big question, of course, is “How do you know Eddie is going to be Eddie Van Halen?” Well, you do a workshop. We could put on a guitar shop. If we need a future guitarist, we need a great guitarist. Let’s put him in a workshop.

I actually play a guitar but I don’t play it well. We need somebody that’s really a trasher, maybe you do, but we’ll bring in someone from the outside, and say, “We’re going to pay you for a five-day workshop, or one day, or one hour online, whatever it is,” then we reach out to all 12-year-olds, and say, and their parents, “A hundred dollars, learn to play a trashing guitar.” Then we look for the indicators of potential.

It’s always in three stages. Curiosity is the first stage, “Oh, I will do this or not.” So, people vet themselves out right there. Second stage is desire, it’s like, “Oh, I really like this.” Eddie couldn’t put the guitar down. He’s asking tons of questions. That’s what Home Depot was looking for, the parents that help other parents, ask questions about building birdhouses. The final stage is thirst. Thirst is, “I can’t stop.” It’s almost an addictive level. The job of the instructor is to provide an education so everyone comes out better.

Then, or additionally, observe for desire and thirst. When you find those people, that’s when you pull Eddie aside, and say, “Hey, by the way, we happen to be starting a band. Thanks for joining our class as a student here. Do you want to join a band? Do you ever think about that?” That 12-year-old Eddie may have said, “Yeah.” And we don’t know he’s going to necessarily be the Eddie he became, but those desire and thirst are the strongest indicators that he has that potential to become that guy.

Pete Mockaitis

And in the setting of the workshop, I can see curiosity, what are some of the telltale signs, “Ooh, there’s some desire. Ooh, there are some thirst”?

Mike Michalowicz
So, usually, if there’s homework assignments, they actually do the homework. Another part is lots of questions. So, curiosity will come after questions, but desire is also indicative of questions. It’s the person who’s raising their hand the most. The second one is attendance. So, you’ll see if someone is really into it will often arrive early, stay late. They’ll usually be distraction-free. That’s actually the biggest indicator.

When people try to multitask, it means they’re not engaged with the task at hand, so they’re trying to do other things. So, you can see someone online, or wherever, if they turn their cameras off, those are awesome indicators. In a workshop, someone is checking their phone regularly. Well, when someone gets immersed in it, it becomes this tunnel vision. So, we’re looking for the tunnel vision effect.

Thirst may not present itself right away. It may come later on but thirst is an inability to quit. It’s the person that stays for an extra five hours. It’s the professor that says, “Oh, my God, I wish this person will go home now,” or the instructor will go home. That person who can’t quit it has thirst, so we look for those elements.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s so phenomenal. And this reminds me, I was doing a workshop for a pharmaceutical company, just a series of workshops, what you said about the homework was striking. And I thought, “I need to encourage these folks to do the exercises outside of our workshops.” And so, I thought, “Okay, we got gift cards,” I thought a little bit of accountability, a leader board might embarrass them, like, “Hey, your boss and everyone is going to see that you’re not doing the exercises,” and that didn’t really motivate very many people.

Mike Michalowicz

Unbelievable, huh?

Pete Mockaitis

I was surprised, like, “I’d be so self-conscious about my name being at the bottom of the leader board.”

Mike Michalowicz

I know.

Pete Mockaitis

But, sure enough, there were two people who were smoking it, like, with great consistency, getting it done. And so, we stayed in touch, and they might be listening to this show. Hello, guys. And it was so funny, they said, “Hey, you know what’s really interesting, Pete? The two of us were the ones who got promotions, and we were also the ones who scored highest on doing all of the homework.”

Mike Michalowicz

No surprise.

Pete Mockaitis

And I was like, “Yes, that is interesting.”

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, very interesting.

Pete Mockaitis

Because they had the desire, it’s like, “Ooh, I really want to develop these professional skills,” and they went after it, and then they signed up for my email list and other stuff afterwards because they were just into learning these skills, and it so happened that those skills are the ones they needed to flourish in their careers, which is why that was the subject of the workshops in the first place. And so, that’s really telling. If I can give, set a stage to create an opportunity whereby people can distinguish themselves by choosing to proactively do the thing or not, that’s supremely telling. I love it.

Mike Michalowicz

I remember I was doing a presentation last week in front of 200 folks, and these are all business owners. And I said, “Who in the room here is an A player?” And I said, “Please don’t be bashful. This is an opportunity to brag, if you feel that’s appropriate.” And every hand went up. And they defined A player, drive and all the stuff. And then at the same group, I said, “Keep your hand up. I’m curious, what percentage of the population is A players?” And they’re like, “Five percent, 2%.” The most gracious was 10%.

I said, “Okay, we have 100% of the people who are A players, yet, at the same time, saying 10% of the population is A players.” So, this is some bizarre statistical phenomenon happening. There’s some warp in the universe right now, or something is not right. And what I believe is not right is everybody is an A player in the right circumstances. These people, and we all see the best, we all have the potential to see the best in ourselves, some people don’t, but we do have the potential to see the best in ourselves but we have to be put in the right environment.

Eddie Van Halen is probably a pretty crappy, or was a pretty crappy bookkeeper. And so, we’d say, “He sucks.” Yeah, but you give him a guitar. The thing is my little business, I got 20 people here, I have maybe one more role available in the next year. Of all the people in this planet, there’s a small percentage they will be a match for that. But what I had to realize as a leader, as an employer, everyone coming in is an A player. The question is, “Are they an A player for my needs?” And it does change the perspective.

When we think most people aren’t a fit, it’s all about just, “Oh, everyone sucks.” When we think everyone is great, then we start saying, “Well, what will be an indicator of their greatness in compliance with what I need or in alignment with what I need?” It just changes the vision a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis

It is, yes. And it feels more kind and hopeful.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, totally. And I think it’s the truth. Pick any person, in the right role, they can crush it. And I’m not saying everyone is going to be great nine to five. Maybe some dude, all he does is sleep all day. Maybe he can test mattresses. Like, you got to figure it out.

Pete Mockaitis

“Dude, get in a sleep clinic.”

Mike Michalowicz

He’s a sleep clinic tester.

Pete Mockaitis

“You’ll be giving so much data for the scientists.”

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, or maybe he watches training videos to see if he can stay awake to any training videos. And if he does, he’s a great tester.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, Mike, you’re so fun. I love these perspectives. Okay. Well, that’s such a huge takeaway right there, is creating these workshops or camps. I’d love it if we could get a few more examples for how this can be turned into reality. So, Home Depot, build a birdhouse, sports camps, we talked about the Fossey Foundation. What else?

Mike Michalowicz

So, we worked with a preschool, and this preschool is what’s called site directors. This is a multi-location preschool and they need teachers that can review the performance to ensure all standards are being achieved in their multiple locations. And the prerequisite is you need to be a teacher already. And so, you can get people with advanced skills by having prerequisites.

So, what we did is we reached out to all the competition. And this is the beautiful thing, the competition will send people. We said, “We’re putting on an educational event,” it’s always educational, “We’re going to charge $150 or whatever it was, for a one-day training on site directors services and how you’d manage it. The prerequisite is you must be a teacher for five years, blah, blah, blah.” Our competition sent teachers, so now, at our location, all the competitors’ teachers there, and we teach in this process, we start observing who shows desire and thirst.

By the end, everyone has a certificate, they had accomplished the prerequisite skills or the tests, whatever, but we also identified three of those teachers, we said, “Well, gosh, you’re perfect to be a site director. We happen to be hiring,” but they’re also ethical, we said, “Hey, listen, you have a current employer. If they have a site director opportunity, it is clearly your talent. We invite you to talk with them and consider that, but if there’s not an opportunity and this is something you want to pursue, we’d love to have a conversation with you.” We got our best two site directors that way.

There was another case where a company of bookkeepers, they’re based out of the US, the founder, her name is Tuesday, she is originally from Kenya, an African country. I think it was Kenya. And she teamed up with the University of Nairobi, and said, “I’ll give you a bookkeeping course, all remote.” Actually, she even prerecorded the videos. She had an adjunct professor, she taught bookkeeping. They didn’t offer this course before at this particular university. I think it was a dozen students who went through it.

By the end, the onsite director, she gave them direction, saying, “As an adjunct professor, give me feedback on who’s doing the homework, who’s engaged the most, and I want to talk to those people, and I’ll start doing one-on-one coaching.” So, they did additive education, and she started coaching them individually, and she vetted down about three people that she hired. They’re her best performing employees. But the beauty of that story is the remaining nine people all got jobs as bookkeepers at other companies.

Now, here’s the last thing I want to share, this kind of feels overwhelming. I got to put on a course, I had to do a webinar. Even if it’s an hour, I don’t have the skills. Here’s the ultimate shortcut. Whatever position you need to hire for, find the workshop, the course, the education, the class that’s teaching it, and go as a student to observe the other students. That’s the shortcut. Just go and watch the others, seek desire and thirst, talk to them, and say, “Hey, I’m looking to hire, not deal.”

Pete Mockaitis

This is beautiful. All right, workshops is huge. Well, keep it going, Mike. What are some other pro tips on building these unstoppable teams? And I want to hear, generally speaking, interviews aren’t the method between desire and outcome that we’re after. Workshops are a cool alternative means of selecting folks. What are some other things you suggest that are not interviews?

Mike Michalowicz

So, the most common other thing I heard, and this was also mind-blowing to me, is the desire was, “I want my employees to act like owners.” The method was if you achieve certain goals, you’ll get rewarded. And the outcome is most employees see their job as just a job and don’t function as owners. They don’t put in that extra effort because they don’t have a desire.

What I found is a concept that was buried away in the 1970s-1980s called psychological ownership which is ignored by leaders, but, my gosh, it’s the tool that makes any of us, leader, owner, or not, to feel like owners. What it’s called is psychological ownership. So, there’s two types of ownerships. There’s legal ownership and psychological.

Legal ownership is just a contract of sorts but it doesn’t give you the feeling. Psychological always does, and we need to amplify it. The best example is I own stock in Ford, a hundred shares. I recently drove by a Ford factory, and I was just driving by, I didn’t look at it and say, “Oh, my God, I own three of those bricks on that building.” I just drove by, and I go, “Oh, there’s Ford. Where’s my money?” which is entitlement even though I have legal ownership.

Now here’s the irony, I also own a Ford pickup truck, and I feel that I own it but I actually don’t. The bank owns it, I’m making installments but I feel like I own it. So, the question is, “Why do I feel that way?” Because I treat it with such care. The reason is three elements. First of all, I have the ability to personalize it. I can program the radio stations the way I want. I can put bumper stickers on the back. When you can personalize something, you feel a sense of authority over it, and it becomes part of you. It’s an expression of identity.

The second part is I have control, authority, meaning I can park it where I want to park it, I drive whenever I want to drive it, all those elements. And the last part is I have intimate knowledge, I know all the bells and whistles. I went through the whole manual. I know what every button does. So, the more intimately we know something, the more we can personalize and put authority or control into it, the more we sense ownership.

So, as employees in an organization, within the confines of their job, where can they assert control? Part of it is idea generation. When someone comes up with their own idea, they feel control. Say, “Hey, here’s where we want to move our company, here’s your capacity in it, what do you think you could do or want to do to help us move the business forward?” So, now you’re asserting control, “How can you make this more your own? How can it be an expression of yourself?”

One thing we do when we have an SOP or standard in our own company now, I used to have the person that does it, currently teach it, and everyone follows a script, no control, no authority. Now, we do is we have a script, we give it to the new person, and say, “Learn from this. And then how can you enhance it and create the new training video because it’s going to be your standard?” The irony is the best student in every room is the teacher. So, they’re teaching, which means they’re learning, but also because it’s an expression of themselves, they have more ownership in the role.

Pete Mockaitis

I want to put you on the spot with, like, this really tricky example. Like, let’s say, “Hey, there is a standardized process by which this needs to be done for the sake of compliance or for the law.”

Mike Michalowicz

Right. Right. So, you can’t change the coding or anything.

Pete Mockaitis

So, there’s a few things that are kind of immovable. But could you give us some cool examples of how, even within such environments, folks manage to feel a lot of that cool personalization, control, and intimate knowledge?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, so a quick simple personalization tip, trick, is to change the name of something, maybe not publicly but internally. So, if there’s some kind of compliance document, I can call it Kelsey’s compliance, and right there, with the assigned names, you have a sense of authority, and really personalization over it so you can give it unique names and lingo. It’s a real simple technique.

Intimate knowledge, I would exploit that. So, I’d say, listeners, “Rules and regulations, we had to follow it to the tee. I want you to be the master at this. So, research it, study. Can you find loopholes, which is an opportunity?” When you find a loophole, it’s a technique of personalization, it’s like, “Oh, there’s a little button here that no one knows about that I can get through.” So, explore it. But even if they don’t find “loopholes” the fact they know the protocol better than anyone else, they’re building intimate knowledge.

Control and authority. There may be protocols they have to follow but can they control the submission times? You can say, “Hey, when is the optimum time to get this in? Does it always have to be Monday at 10:15 a.m.? Or, can we work with a schedule that suits you?” That’s giving them a sense of control so you can assert it. Again, what we’re looking for is for them to say, “This is my responsibility. This is my job,” and that means they’re sensing that authority.

I will give one word of warning though. There is a risk here of fiefdoms. And what a fiefdom is it’s where a person has so much knowledge that they start blockading other people from access. That’s dangerous. So, we want to move to a higher level of psychological ownership which is called collective psychological ownership.

What we do here is you have multiple parties involved, you make teams around it, so if there’s something, a risk of a fiefdom being built, invite multiple people to work in concert, in that way you prevent those walls from being built.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny how into things we can get in terms of if you feel like you’ve got your own little touch on it. In terms of like if I am getting into my own audio editing, which I do from time to time, here and there, even though I’ve got great supportive teams, I love to do certain things which are just sort of my little style. It’s like I’d like to do a gentle downward expansion to attenuate the intensity of a breath sound as opposed to a harsh noise gate that have layers of rich complex gradations of silence. It’s like, “Okay, that’s so dorky but I own it. I am invested in this.”

Mike Michalowicz
Amazing.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny, if someone were to take that away, in terms of, like, “No, Pete, that’s not how we do it here. Actually, you’ve got to comply with the situation where we use XYZ software,” I wouldn’t like that.

Mike Michalowicz

Totally, right, because when someone asserts control or authority on you, we start building resistance. I was saying, when forced to comply, we seek to defy.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, Mike.

Mike Michalowicz

The classic study, and this works from poise, but the classic is with rental cars because we’ve all experienced this. The next time you go to Herts or wherever, you go through a protocol of compliance requirements. First, you got to fill out a hundred forms for an hour. Secondly, if you don’t return with a full tank of gas, we’re going to penalize you by charging $10 a gallon for us to fill it because it’s so hard. Secondly, no scratches, no dents. Third, must be clean. Fourth, good luck passing the DMZ zone where there’s going to be flashing lights, spikes coming up, and some dude coming out with a gun asking for your ID, all that compliance.

So, when forced to comply, we seek to defy. What do we do the second we pull out? We do donuts in the parking lot, or we fly into the light and skid in sideways, or we punch it when it turns green. We definitely drive it more aggressively. Rental cars get beat up on compared to our own car, where we’re, “Hey, this is my car. We’re going to take care of it.” No one washes their rental car before returning, but we wash our own car. Why is that? When forced to comply, we seek to defy.

And this is one of the things that great leaders realize. Most leaders focus on compliance, achievement, and so employees are seeking for elbow room to get back at the boss. Great leaders embrace the internal human and allow them to take charge. Yes, there’s rules and confines. You can’t let people just go wild. We have to work as a team collectively. You can’t have a football team where you say, “Everyone just run any way you want.” We have to serve the plays.

But if we can give them self-expression, they can expand.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then as we speak, there’s a world of work, there’s these back-to-office mandates. Tell us, as we think about personalization and control, what’s your hot take on these?

Mike Michalowicz
Is that in the best interest of employees? Sometimes you have to require something that actually serves people, and you’ll get resistance, a.k.a. if you ever had children, that’s the world of raising children. My kids, “You have to take a shower at our house after a week.” There are some minimum requirements. These stink bombs walk around, and it’s really in their best interest.

Some employers are doing this because we’re losing the socialization at home. Everything is going virtual. And we’re losing that tactile experience. So, the employers that are requiring come back to the office to promote socialization are building connectivity among people.

It’s funny, they used to wonder that the water cooler, that business got done there, good ideas. No, business didn’t get done there. Connection happened there. People talk about their kids. When we have connection, we understand each other from a tactile level, we have trust. So, it’ll actually rebuild trust. But employers that are mandating it because they want to track time, or trying to assert authority, “I got to make sure you’re producing, so come on in.” That’s not going to work. People are going to, when forced to comply, they will seek to defy. That definitely won’t work.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, it sounds like what you’re saying is there are certain rules, guidelines, times, places, contexts where it is good, right, proper, and necessary for there to be some, “Hey, we’ve all got to be here” stuff going on, but if it’s from a perspective of authoritative, “I’ve got to watch you,” we’re in for bad news.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, if there’s a kind of a nourished, flourishing, comply to fly. So, if you are nourishing people, have demanded to come back because you’re going to nourish the team, “Go team,” and it’s really in the best interest of people, they will flourish, that’s a great move. If you’re doing to force compliance, measurement, control, authority over, you’re going to get that resistance, and it’s not going to work long term.

Pete Mockaitis

Awesome. Well, Mike, tell us, anything else we really should know before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mike Michalowicz

So, one last thing, it’s about safety. Leaders have to build a safe environment. Now, I’m not just talking only about physical safety. But ironically, this is a concern with many companies, including mine, and I didn’t even know. We’re a knowledge-based business, we’re writing books and speaking engagements, and other stuff like courses and classes. So, how can I have a safe environment?

Well, we ran a survey, and my colleagues said, “You know the back alley that goes to the cars…” we have a parking lot behind the building, “…is dark at night, and it’s kind of creepy going out into the pitch-black walkway.” I’m like, “Oh, my gosh.” So, starting at 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon, the sun sets in the winter by 5:30, people get nervous about going home, I’m like, “This is crazy.” We just put lights up, string lights, it’s always bright.

And now my colleagues are like, “Oh, I can see what’s going on. I feel safe.” So, we got physical safety, but the bigger thing is relational safety. Do people feel comfortable expressing themselves as they are? Because if they can’t show up as they naturally are, they’re going to start faking it, and now you get a depleted version of that person.

The leaders got to express themselves naturally. Lead with humanness. Show the warts. I’m not saying have a cry fest and talk about how miserable you are. What I’m saying is you can share your struggles. Be integral about your own experiences in life and talk about the wins and the losses, and you’re going to encourage your team to do the same, which actually builds connectivity.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, Mike, could you share with us now a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, this is attributed to Oscar Wilde, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mike Michalowicz

My favorite research is, oh, there’s a book that came out called The 3.3 Rule by a guy named John Briggs. And what he did was he researched out productivity and found that people can work up to three hours max without needing recoveries, safe recovery, and you need 0.3, which is 30% recovery time. So, if you work three hours, you’re going to need 90 minutes of recovery time, if that works right, and so forth, 3.3.

Pete Mockaitis

Three times 180 minutes.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, I mean it’s not 90 minutes, but you know what I’m saying. It’s maybe 48 minutes. So, yeah, 30% of the time used is needed to recover. So, if I worked for one hour, it’s going to be 18 minutes or whatever that works out to be of recovery and so forth.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Mike Michalowicz

I just finished reading 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan. Really opened my mind to perspective.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Mike Michalowicz

My favorite habit is sauna, I do it with my wife. And I’m going to try to convince her to do it again tonight. I will tell you this, when you’re in a hot box, it is so hot you can’t have your phone in there, which is great. And the only thing you can do is talk, and it’s hard to think. So, when someone is talking, you’ve got to listen deeply. It’s like the best connection device ever.

Pete Mockaitis

And is there a key nugget you share that folks retweet and they quote back to you often?

Mike Michalowicz

Yes. What I say often is that the number one job of an entrepreneur is not to do the job. It’s to be a creator of jobs. So, I get that retweeted often.

Pete Mockaitis

And, Mike, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where shall we point them?

Mike Michalowicz
MikeMotorbike.com because, similar to your last name, no one can spell Michalowicz. MikeMotorbike rhymes with motorcycle. Everything is there. I got book downloads. I used to write for the Wall Street Journal, you can get those articles, plus I have a podcast archive there.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, your clients want you to be profitable. And this isn’t just a final thought, but when you look at your clients, are you proud of your surviving check by check, to say, “I’m barely making it. I’m struggling,” or, “I’m very profitable”? I’ll give you context. Say you had an emergency, and you go, “I got rushed to the hospital. I have a heart attack,” or something. Doctor one comes down, and says, “I’m making no money. I need clients. I need patients. Let’s get this done quickly.” Or, doctor two says, “I’m very profitable and wealthy because this is all I do and I’m exceptional at it. I have all the time in the world to do this with you and do it right.”

Who do you choose? Option two. When your life is on the line, you want to be catered to. When your life is being altered or served in some capacity by us, we want to be catered to. Your clients want to be your number one customer. They want your undivided attention. And if you aren’t profitable, you can’t do that, so they want you to be profitable. You should be profitable.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Mike, thank you. This is a treat. I wish you many, many fine colleagues who are all in.

Mike Michalowicz

Thanks, brother. It’s been a joy.

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

Todd Dewett
Hey, great to see. I’m hoping this time, I, in fact, will figure out how to be awesome at my job.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I think you’ve been awesome for, well, at least these last seven years. It has been seven years. Wow!

Todd Dewett
Crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me, any remarkably transformational discoveries you’ve made over the last seven years?

Todd Dewett
Discoveries? I would say two, very briefly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That’s quick.

Todd Dewett
One is that the online world for education continues to surprise me, and surprise me, and surprise me with its ability to innovate and improve, and its ability to grow. And I didn’t ask for it but, somehow, I’ve got to be a part of that through LinkedIn. So, that continues to blow my mind on what they’re able to do. Just 15 years ago, people were saying, “You can’t learn online. You need a person in the room, right?” So, that’s blowing my mind.

And the other big discovery is, and this is the truth, and it’s a segue to our conversation we’ll have about this book I’m about to put out, but I now know, Pete, I now know with great confidence that I cannot write novels. And here’s how I know that. I’ve tried three times over 15 years, around 15 years, and each of those three times, I’ve ended up with a pile of words that was not useful.

And then the most recent time is the final time. I’m done trying to scratch that itch. I’m comfortable that I tried, but the idea that I was working on the story, then led to the book that we’ll talk about a little bit today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, indeed, let’s do just that. Your book Dancing with Monsters, what’s the big idea here?

Todd Dewett
Well, like I said, I wrote this novel, I was trying to write a lighthearted take on a vampire going through office shenanigans, as we’ve seen in many television shows, I just was intrigued by the combination of those components, and I had fun writing it, as I always do. When I determined it was not good, and my beta reader or two determined it was not good, I sat there licking my wounds, and I thought, “Can I use this idea some other way?”

And for years, I had been interested in the business fable book market. Many years ago, I read Who Moved My Cheese. I read many of the Pat Lencioni books, etc., and I thought, “Well, maybe I can do that. I’d been thinking about that. Maybe that’s a style that fits me.” And so, I just got all passionate one day, maybe it was too much caffeine, and sat down with that idea, a rough small idea from the failed novel, and, out of me came this 18,000-word quick fable in six hours. It’s been edited, thank goodness, since then, but that’s why I had an idea. I had a market, a fable market, and I decided to see if I could write that style, and I think the answer is yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And so, what is the fable here?

Todd Dewett
Well, we got a premise of a monster, he’s the main protagonist, is Joe Vampire, and he’s kind of cocky and full of himself, but not performing well lately, doing the one thing all monsters want to do across many genres for the last few hundred years, of course, which is to scare children. And he’s pulled into a meeting with an HR-type person, which is a witch in the character, in the book, and told, “Look, you’re basically in trouble. We’re going to ask you to prove yourself by leading a team of other monsters who are having issues, and you’ve got a big goal. You’ve got to solve together to figure out whether or not we’re going to let you continue with your monster status,” so to speak.

And so, there is a mummy, and a zombie, and a ghost, and a werewolf, all having huge issues being themselves. The werewolf can’t turn into a werewolf. She’s just the human that’s not able to transform. Issues of that nature. So, Joe fumbles around trying to lead these misfits and does terrible at first and fails before he realized that he’s doing it the wrong way.

And he remembers some amazing advice from his grandfather who was quite capable as a leader, and he starts to humble himself, and he has some epiphanies about what it means to think through empathy and build rapport, and to use kindness as a means of connecting with people and getting them to really try harder for the first time.

And his efforts to humble himself and be a facilitator instead of a dictator really pay off as these monsters discover their inner awesomeness. At the end of the book, they actually…well, I won’t spoil the end. I’ll just say they become a much, much more interesting version of themselves. And along the way, you’ll learn some stuff about leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I was going to ask, when it comes to fables, yup, there are some lessons, some takeaways, some wisdom, hopefully, that readers walk away with. Could you share with us, is there maybe a key quote or excerpt from the book that you think really delivers some of these in spades?

Todd Dewett
Wow! I’m in love with the book. To be honest with you, I’ve never said that about anything I’ve created, so I’ll choose one because it’s personal to me. As I thought about these characters in this short fun tale, yes, some of them reminded me of archetypes of people I’ve written about or seen in consulting, coaching, and so on. And one of them really is reflective of me, to answer your question.

Joe Vampire, the protagonist, had a moment after failing for a while, where he thought to himself, “Maybe it’s not them. Maybe it’s me. And maybe if I get authentic with them about my imperfections and insecurities and fears, which we all have, and I show them something about myself that they’re not going to see coming, which will tell them how sincere I am about trying to reboot our relationship and our efforts toward making progress, that that will work for us.” And he did that.

That came from my life. The fact that he did that in one of the pivotal scenes in this little book came from my life. And I’ll tell you what it is because it mattered enough to center this story in a book. I used to work for Ernst & Young many years ago before I did a PhD and became a professor for years, and I didn’t fit well at all, to be frank with you.

Great job. Prestigious. Everyone thought I should be happy. Look at the young successful professional. Didn’t fit at all. And I knew that, and I didn’t know what to do because I thought I knew where I wanted to go, which was to get a PhD but that was risky and I was scared, “Was I smart enough that I want to go broke?” For all the years, you’ve got to go broke to do that much grad school, etc.

And I was in my loft in Atlanta, Georgia where I used to live, and my mom called, checking up on me one day, she lived in a different city. And I was, in my voice, giving it away that I wasn’t in a good place. And she said, “Hey, what’s wrong with you?” True story. “What’s wrong with you?” And I just broke down, I started crying. I think I was 28 at the time. I started crying, and my mom, not something I normally did at that stage in life, but it happened.

And she said, “What is going on?” And I told her, “I’m very unhappy and I think I know the answer but I don’t know if I should do it.” She said, “Well, why?” I told her what it was, PhD, all that, and she said, “Well, why wouldn’t you? What are you really scared of?” She said it to me kindly and firmly just like that. And I sit there blubbering at my mom, I realized the obvious.

There wasn’t anything to be scared of. I didn’t have kids. What are you scared of? There was nothing to be scared of but I needed someone to smack me with those words and wake me up and push me in a new direction. And that made a huge impression, and that’s why Joe Vampire stepped up and made a huge impression on these other misfit monsters.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that is powerful. Thank you. And so then, can we dig into a few of the core takeaway messages then in terms of there are some rules of leadership in the book, such as collaborate, don’t dictate? Can you share with us a couple of the most you think are transformational, and need to be heard by the world, takeaways?

Todd Dewett
Well, I got to tell you, I loved the way you set up these questions, but the truth is most people to do what I do, there’s different ways that we do it from speaking to writing to what have you. There’s not much new under the sun. Sometimes there are new ideas but mostly it’s about finding new vehicles to help us convey well-known useful ideas that people have yet to focus on in the proper way or the proper amount.

The one you just mentioned, actually, is a spectacular example – collaborate, don’t dictate. What Joe and many other real managers have to figure out is that even though they’ve been vested with authority to do stuff at work, they have the legitimate power as a holder of a position in a hierarchy, that does not mean they should use that power just because they have it.

The truth is, a team is optimized not when they receive dictates from a boss but when they feel that they are being facilitated and collaborated with by a person who’s on the team with them, not looking down on them. Now, that sounds terribly simple, and I’m here to tell you the reason this book, and many others, really do focus on a few simple rules that make teams better is because busy people forget them at work every single day.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had leaders just kind of whip out a dictate, “A think I need you to do,” no explanation. It just sounds like an order being given. Now, you don’t need me, Pete, to tell you that adult humans do not like to be treated like children. So, when I thought about the small number of business leadership maxims I want to put in this book, definitely collaborate, don’t dictate, be a partner, not a boss is a different way to say it, was one of the first that came to mind, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then it sounds pretty simple in terms of just do that, just collaborate and don’t dictate. Is there any sort of best practices or do’s and don’ts to following that?

Todd Dewett
Yeah. The book is simple on purpose. And later, if I’m lucky with a variety of companies, I’ll deep dive on exploring what you just asked, but I’ll give you a preview, for example, that you’d see in a deeper training course. There are different types of decisions people face at work. And the question is, if you believe in this collaborate, don’t dictate idea that many of us talk about, is, “Well, what kind of decision are you facing? And when should I be a boss using authority versus a quiet person listening and trying to get input long before I make a decision?”

Well, there’s decisions, frankly, that you have to own with no input. That’s part of the managerial burden that anyone in the leadership structure faces. Things about strategy, things about compensation, who to hire and fire, ultimately, is not for the team to make. Team can have inputs sometimes on those but they don’t own those decisions, and that’s probably proper.

Then there’s decisions where you absolutely are going to own the decision as the leader but you absolutely should spend time, as much as you can, given how busy you are, finding their voice, listening to them, understanding their view, and allowing that to shape your decision because you believe this particular decision is going to feel, they’re going to feel it. There’s going to be an impact on them. That’s a second type.

A third type, and this is most common, I won’t say an unimportant decision but there are a variety of decisions that have to be made all the time where it’s really best to let go completely and allow teams to own it. For example, “To get this work done, do we work a day that everyone’s going to be having a day off? Or, do we work extra hours three days in a row? There are different ways to get the same outcome. What do you prefer?” Let them own the answer to that question.

So, you’ve got to ask yourself as a leader, or as a decision-maker, “What’s the reality here about my need to use the authority versus the benefit, the smart wisdom of gaining their input before a decision is made?”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now could you share a bit about some of the other rules: the candor, not kindness; the opportunities, not obstacles; the authenticity, not acting; the be the change, not the boss?

Todd Dewett
Man, we don’t have all day. I love this. So, here’s one that probably is my favorite – candor not just kindness. I want to say that carefully – candor not just kindness. I didn’t say candor and no kindness. What we have right now, and I explore this a little bit, here’s the truth. We have so much love in forward-thinking organizations today for positivity, for kindness, for congeniality. These are things I absolutely value and preach, for sure.

But sometimes we’re so uncritical and so passionate about pursuing those types of ideals that this thing gets created, which some thinkers and scholars have now started calling toxic positivity. That’s the idea that we’re so wanting to be kind, so wanting to not offend others, that we will refrain all kinds of things. We’re really over-shape and resist. Why? “Because I don’t want to really ruffle feathers or cause tension, etc.” That’s a problem.

So, what I like to remind people is that kindness and all of its little brothers and sisters that go with it are immensely important, and that’s a foundation that gives you then the ability to use the other thing that pushes us towards finite needed conversations that are to the point, and that’s candor. Candor, which is just no beating around the bush, saying what needs to be said, this is important, ready, can be done positively. Candor does not imply brusque to the point of negative or mean. It just means you’re saying what needs to be said instead of beating around the bush.

So, here’s the truth, a lot of candor in an environment that doesn’t have a lot of positivity as its foundation, part of its culture, can be damaging quickly. But in a workplace, defined by a lot of positivity and congeniality and helpfulness and kindness, well, then candor is a thing that becomes directive and useful and digestible. That’s the difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a bit about the opportunities, not obstacles?

Todd Dewett
Yeah. So, I was talking to a boss the other day somewhere. I still say that word because I’m old. Supervisor is what I’m supposed to say now. And they were lamenting the lack of resources and budget they had for something, “And what should I do about this?” So, I say, “Well, don’t lie about it, don’t hem and haw, don’t tell them there might be more coming later. Own it and be honest, and then try and shape without BS’ing in any way. Try and shape how they feel about the situation.”

Opportunities is about perspective. That’s the whole point of the book. It’s about perspective. We all face challenges, budget-related, people-related, market-related, customer, etc. We all face them. That’s inevitable. That’s a daily if not weekly, we face big ones. How we feel about them, however, is a choice, and that starts with the person who has the most status and the most power in a group, which is the group leader, the supervisor.

There’s great science here that says when you help people see, forgive the cliché, the glass half full, the silver lining, call it what you want to, they will, on average, over time, tend to think about those issues more productively, more positively, and, thus, tackle them more effectively. For no other reason than choosing to think about them in a more productive way.

I’ve said this many times over the years, the greatest things we know about you optimizing you, and you optimizing a team really don’t cost a dime, or they’re low cost, but they usually don’t cost a dime. It just requires you to be a little more thoughtful about how you’re thinking about yourself and others and how you relate.

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

Todd Dewett
Well, no, I think in terms of leadership, this is a really fun 101 dose wrapped in a story that is emotional, fun, and memorable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Todd Dewett
Well, there was something near the end where the HR person, embodied by the character of a witch, I love my HR brothers and sisters, by the way, if you’re listening. The HR person said to Joe, “I’m not sure if your performance, basically, was good enough for you to be saved or not. The committee,” it’s another reference to kind of management or bureaucracy, “The committee is still on whether or not they’d agree but they do know that they love what you had done today and want to offer you a job.” And he says no.

And that’s a big deal. I love that because fit matters and passion matters, and he doesn’t want to go, become the bureaucrat he’s battling against. He actually wants to stay where he is because he’s discovered now, that he’d figured out how to do it, that he loves being a manager. And what he said to her, and I’m misquoting myself because I don’t remember that clearly, what he said was, “One monster who believes in themselves is spectacular. But a monster squad who believes in themselves is truly formidable,” because that’s what he created. And I think that’s true, and that’s the power of a team.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And now could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Todd Dewett
Well, there’s tons of research. For example, why do people, this is classic stuff, why do people stay with certain jobs over the long term? Is it because of their immense fit with the role? No, although I wish that were true. Is it because of the love of the high pay at this particular job where they’re staying? No, I wish that were true.

The best answer, by far, is that they have a quality relationship with their manager. The number one reason people voluntarily leave, this has been a true finding, a known finding, for 30 years, jobs that they have voluntary turnovers is because of bad boss relationships. So, I loved, in this book, trying to bring that research to life by modelling what bad leadership looks like, by then having that person go through something of an epiphany, and then finding how to do it correctly.

So, there is good research to back this up. What do we know about, for example, perspective that we were just talking about? There’s tons of studies and psych cogs, social sites, org studies, etc. that talk about how we frame decisions and how people react. And when you take the time, and that is always the thing that trips us up at work because we’re so darn busy putting out fires, I respect that, but when you take the time to think, at least the important issues, and think about them first and how you’re going to package them effectively to be understood, and maybe even to motivate people, no matter how challenging they might be, you tend to deliver a better message. That’s powerful research.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And can you name a favorite book?

Todd Dewett
A favorite book. I’ll go with Please Understand Me by Keirsey. One of the classics on personalities, because I’m a huge believer, I actually posted about this today, a huge believer that talent is awesomely important but often overrated. And what I mean by that is what ultimately matters is chemistry. And great teams with chemistry that have less talent than teams over here with great talent and no chemistry often outperform teams with loaded talent.

So, how do you achieve chemistry? Well, you get along by first understanding yourself and then others. And one of the first books that really pushed people effectively to start thinking about personality types and how to understand others who are different than you, was Please Understand Me by Keirsey.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Todd Dewett
Well, I would say any kind of feedback tool. One in particular that’s on my mind lately people might check out, there’s a new company using AI called Yoodli. I think it’s Y-O-O-D-L-Y or D-L-I, Yoodli. And they’re trying to help people in terms of presentation and conversational speech. Look into a camera, open their app, speak, have it analyzed six ways from Sunday, using AI, and also attach, using feedback mechanisms, to people that you supply emails for so you can bring in that feedback, try again, and then have the program once again assess how you’re doing on a variety of ways.

I think AI, in terms of helping people study their interpersonal communication is a host of tools emerging there that people are going to enjoy in the coming years.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And do you have a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Todd Dewett
Yeah, I’m into humility because I’ve got plenty of go-go power in me, plenty of ego. And if you are like that, then you’re going to fail eventually. We all do. And so, I like to remind myself on a regular basis that I don’t know it all. And I like to remind myself of my favorite failures, no joke, because those are the things that make me think through what I’m doing now a little more thoughtfully, which is terribly, terribly useful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Todd Dewett
In general, yeah, outside of this book, I have a few that always stick with me that I love to share. Probably the most common is that “More is always possible,” which sounds like a motivational speaker, which is one of my hats, would say. The science actually backs it up. One of my favorite stories ever involves my ex-wife/one of my best friends, who had asthma yet somehow learned how to train for a marathon.

And when she was done, we’re having a conversation, and I said to her, “Wow, can you imagine what more you could possibly accomplish?” She never even dreamed of this because she didn’t think it was possible, and it blew her mind, and she’s been thinking about it and excelling ever since. More is always possible.

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

Todd Dewett
Well, thanks for asking. There are two obvious places. One is my website DrDewett.com, that’s D-R-D-E-W-E-T-T.com and the other is my favorite social media platform, which is LinkedIn. I would love to chat if this brings up questions from anyone listening. Find me on LinkedIn and connect. I’d love to chat.

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

Todd Dewett
I would say just don’t assume you know it all and stop blaming others, which is so easy and sometimes justified but never productive, and ask yourself what you can do differently to continue improving.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Todd, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck with Dancing with Monsters and all your adventures.

Todd Dewett
Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.

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.