GA 495 | Finding and Retaining the Right Talent with Kerry L. Bass

I think it was the CEO of Spotify that he was in the news because he told his employees and was made public that we are not a family. You're not my relatives, you're a team member. And so therefore, you need to expect that we are functioning as a high performing team.

Today. I'm excited to welcome Carrie Bass to the show. Now, Kerry and I had a really interesting conversation. We talked all about employee engagement, which is, you know, it's a topic that we've, we've approached a few times on the show, but in particular, we spent quite a bit of time talking about, you know, how do you identify the ideal candidate for your company? And then how does the candidate identify the ideal company that they're going to work for? Because, you know, let's be honest, it's a, it's a marriage. It's got to go both ways. And so really interesting conversation, kind of working around those themes and, and Carrie has a strong, long background with the ASQ organization. So towards the end, we got into world. Does continuous improvement have in this whole engagement equation, if you will. So I think you're going to get a lot out of this episode. I know. I enjoyed it. Show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 495. And again, as I've mentioned on the last few shows, thank you for everybody. That's. That's left of review, if you don't mind, whatever app you're listening on, the Apple one or Spotify, wherever you are, if you can scroll down a little bit and hit five stars and say a few words, I sure do appreciate it. And it really does help the show reach more people through those podcast algorithms or whatever they call it. So anyhow, I appreciate that. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Jerry, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Great.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, man. Where are you calling in from?

I'm in Marietta, Georgia.

Okay. Not too far from Texas, you know, in the South. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. All right, well, hey, man, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to the conversation today. So, as you know, we like to get things going, Carrie, with our guests sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Well, it seems a bit arcane and maybe a little bit kichi or whatever, but I like the quote from Darth Vader where he's going to the Death Star under construction, and he says you may dispense with the pleasantries. I'm here to get you Back on schedule.

Oh, yeah, I didn't think he did too. Maybe he was the ultimate project manager. Is that right?

I think so.

Good stuff, man. Good stuff. All right, well, hey Kerry, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background and maybe how you got into the line of work that you're in and what that line of work is like. What are you up to these days?

Well, right now I'm spending a lot of time working with the ASQ, the American Society of Quality. I'm their 2023 treasurer and also active in the government services division. I also have a small boutique consulting practice called Potential to Reality Consulting where I focus on change management and I go across the full spectrum. I spend a lot of time in the government sector, public sector, but also work in not for profit and commercial also.

Okay.

Background. I got a long career in technology and management and not for profit leadership, including working in a church. I also have a lean Six Sigma master black belt, several certifications with ASQ Project Management, Talent Optimization. And I'm really kind of a change junkie. I really like to help organizations go from where they are to where they want to be. Help the leaders.

Yeah. Love it, Love it. Well, good stuff, man. All right, so we're going to talk all about employee engagement, you know, so it's interesting times we live in right now. You know, you hear about all these, all these problems with so called quiet quitting and you know, people just aren't engaged. And I mean that's nothing new. That Gallup poll has been around for a while, man, and it hadn't been looking good, you know, and I don't see it really necessarily improving unfortunately. So let's, let's, let's dive into that whole topic and maybe open up. I'd love to get your, your thoughts. Carry on. You know, just, you know, is there a way to even out of the gate like find the, the folks that are going to be most successful in our organizations? Right. Like, like, is there something that we should be doing as we're, as we're hiring people?

Well, you know, one of the things that I advise folks, particularly in change management, it also has to do with operations and, and getting the people engaged is you really need to start out thinking about what are you all about and what is your organization about. Matter of fact, I was just doing some look on purpose driven organizations and how they actually produce more value over the longer period of time. And I think that's the right thing to do is understand what is the real value. Why are you doing what you do. And if that is the case then you understand that and you can clearly state that to other people, then those are going to be the people that are going to be attracted to the type of thing that you're doing and those are the people that you want to do. And if you haven't thought through that and you're really just focusing on hiring people for the lowest possible price, you get what you pay for, people will come and go because it's to their economic interest to just be with you for the period of time that they are.

Yeah. So I mean, so then talk a little bit about, okay, so I need a higher five people for my company or something like that in and I'm out there searching and you know, it's not easy. Like you know, we've hired people here at Game by Academy over the last few years and several people and you know, it's difficult. Right. Like to find folks that, you know, align with what we're trying to do and, but also that we're going to be a fit for them. So like talk more about that. Like how do we help, you know, sell the, sell our company to the potential employee but then also how do they sell themselves to us? And there's a good marriage, for lack of a better word.

Yeah, there's they. Traditionally that had been an art that hiring managers and people that are talent recruiters did was being able to ascertain what do people believe and what are their true motivations and their personality. Like currently there's lots of tools out there though now that generally had not been in use while people were hiring. They used them after people were already hired. And they this personality test. One of the tools that I've added to the tool kit that I have for my practice is called the Predictive Index. And what it is, it allows you to be able to, for both hiring and for team building, be able to do a quick personality test that allows the characteristics of the individual at work to be identified and matched with some core characteristics over this database that they have built over like 50 years of doing this work with AI. It also allows the leader to be able to capture what is the true focus of what their organization and their team is. And the AI will allow them to be able to match the people that have the corresponding or complementary personality profiles to match those teams. And there's other tools like that. But the idea is that you want to be able to try identify up front those folks that match what you're really trying to do.

Yeah. So for example, if you're hiring, you know, sales leader or something, or just a sales rep, you know, who, let's say they need to smile and dial all day long and be okay hearing, you know, 99 no's before they get that one. Maybe, you know, like, is that, I guess, is that something that you would pick up then on their, their assessment?

Yeah, absolutely. Because one of the examples that, you know that, that's kind of a core example that they use is that you really don't want to hire a barista for that job. You know, while they may be a quick learner and that sort of thing, they may get pretty discouraged pretty quickly by saying, no, that's not what I wanted, and folks walking away, you know, so you want to get a person again, and that's. If that's their personality profile, you want to match it to the type of role and the work that you want them to do.

I mean, to me, the hard part, just thinking about, you know, my own situation when hiring people is, you know, you get your, you got your job description, here's what your job's going to be, and, you know, here's the education that we're looking for and all that. But, like, really thinking about how I would feed an AI engine as far as, like, the characteristics of that role. Boy, that, that's difficult, man. That takes some thinking, doesn't it?

Well, that's one of the reasons why they built it on the database that they have of collecting those, those profiles over so many years. What they've determined is that there are some template types, several different types of personality profiles by answering some simple questions. And, you know, you have to answer enough of them and to get a, you know, a valid sample of what this person's real profile looks like. But it gives them a pretty clear example of what their process, their, their work personality is like. And so then you match that work personality with the types of tasks that this role would entail. And so there you get a better match of those people, which gives you more success because you don't have to go through retraining or rehiring, which is very expensive and difficult in this type of labor environment. It also allows those people to be more successful right off the bat because they're in the place that they want to be initially.

Yeah, I recently, earlier this year, not that recent, I guess, but I read that book, Six Types of Working Genius by that Patrick Lencioni. Are you familiar with that?

Not for me with that book, but for me, yeah.

So, I mean, it's it's probably very similar to what you're talking about. Like he identified like there's all these various geniuses. One is wonder, like they're curious, they ask questions. One's invention. They can, they can, they can create one's discernment, they can evaluate information. One's galvanized. The galvanizer, you know, can rally people and, and there's a few other ones. There's a tenacity, you know, somebody's just, that's your salesperson. Right. Like they're just gonna, you know, you just can't, you can't shake them. They're just, they're hunters. Right?

Right.

So yeah, I think. What about like just, you know, everybody's done the Myers Briggs over the years, you know, and you know, the extra virgin. Where, where do you stand on just like, you know, like a, the difference between say an introvert and an extrovert and their role in an organization. Do you feel like there are. Because, you know, sometimes the best salespeople are introverts. So it's not necessarily that they're always extroverts. Like what's your take on that?

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It'S not necessarily that they're always extroverts. Like what's your take on that?

Well, it depends again on the type of role that you, that you have. Me personally, I'm not much of an introvert, but I'm not much of a salesperson either because I synergistically kind of build on the conversation. And if you're excited, then I get more excited then I like to be able to solve the problem. But I think one of the best and I've been around several salespeople and they say one of the best skills for a salesperson is listening. You really want to be able to listen to what the prospect is telling you and be able to understand what are their needs. And if you understand their needs, then you can bet and if you understand what you have to to resolve those needs, that helps you be able to make that, that conversation more productive earlier on. And you know, the best salespeople, a lot of times they, they're not necessarily the ones that will say yes to everybody. They say, you know, you better serve with somebody else and let's not waste each other's time.

Yeah, I mean, keep talking about salespeople, but you know, we have a bunch of continuous improvement people like selling Ron shop. Maybe they are selling, I don't know. Yeah, Talk a little bit now. Maybe I'm curious to get your take on just company culture and the role that that plays in and you know, finding the right talent and then retaining that talent. Like what are you seeing out there as it relates to the company culture?

You know, and company culture, again, is the root of where it is and that, and that's really defined by the leadership of the organization. And there was one shocking kind of piece of news. I think it was the CEO of Spotify that he was in the news because he told his employees and it was made public that we are not a family. You're not my relatives, you're a team member. And so therefore you need to expect that we are functioning as a high performing team. And you know, and I found that even though it was kind of like one of those Darth Vader moments, but it was really kind of clarifying because people understand then that I'm not looking to get, you know, the types of feedback or input or relationships that I get from family. What this is about is performance. And that if I perform, I expect to be rewarded. And so therefore I can expect to be rewarded. And I know that's the contract that if I perform I get, get rewarded well, and if I am not on a high performing team and I'm a high performer, then I get discouraged and I want to go to where there's another team of high performers. So if your culture is high performance, then you will attract high performers. If your culture is nurturing, then you'll get people that are nurturing. And that's the type of thing that you want to look for. One of the things though, I think is really important is that you want to have a balanced and a diverse team because you can't have all of one type of person to be successful in that team. You really don't want to have a whole bunch of change junkies in the team. Everybody wants to change and I want to drive it through right now. And so no, let's do something else today that would just destroy the team. So you need to be able to balance that with the types of roles to be able to get that high performing team that has the various supporting and collaborative and synergistic roles together.

Yeah. So, okay, so let's talk, you know, ASQ and you know, all this kind of stuff. So quality, the quality movement, continuous improvement, all this type of stuff. Like where are you seeing it playing a role in this whole world of finding and retaining the right talent? I.

We spend a good bit of time talking with that amongst my colleagues and people in different industries and quite frankly we're still right in the center of that. You know, it seems like that people were thinking in terms of the 80s back when we were fighting to, you know, to get our auto industries and other industries back in competition with others that were producing products that had a higher competitive value to compete with others that were producing products that were more reliable, that had a better price comparison for the output. But as you are well aware, and I like the name of your talk here, the Gimba Academy. Gimba gives Credas to a higher level of quality that's not only just on the production floor, but now at the process level and even to the very C suite where the quality of strategy is key because you're probably well aware that the different types of. I get the Japanese terms wrong. But bottom line is if the executives don't produce a strategy that the management can implement and the workers can do, no amount of improvement at the front line will improve a bad strategy.

Yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, Hoshin Connery policy appointment, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, for sure. In fact, I, I actually did a, I did a little virtual workshop from one of our customers today and, and one of their executives at the very end, sort of the Q A was like, you know, what, what are some of the, what are the three, what are three, you know, important characteristics or whatever of a successful thing. And I stole from Mr. Masaki. Am I. He, he, he's, he's famous for having said, answering that question the number, number one, you got to have top managed leadership commitment. Number two, you got to have top leadership commitment. And number three, you got to have top leadership commitment. You know, and so, but then, but to, but then I went on to, you know, basically explain what you just said then. But you've got to have a strategy that didn't. Cascades and answers. Why am I doing this? What problem are we solving here? By, by this Lean or the Six Sigma or this TQM or whatever we're doing. Right, yeah. And, and so often that doesn't happen. Right. So I, I actually feel like our continuous improvement movement can and will, you know, really help galvanize, you know, this honestly broken world. You know, I mean, you can, you can use it to unite. Right. It doesn't matter what you believe and politics and all the rest of it. I mean, we all want things to be better. Right. And so use, use this methodology, this frame, this framework, this way of thinking to just make things better and leave all your opinions out, you know.

Exactly. Matter of fact, one, one thing that we did, and I just transitioned to the advisory board after being the founding chair was the center for Electoral Quality and Integrity. You know, in democracies, particularly like here in the United States, election quality and election integrity is a major concern because it's foundational to democracies being able to. To exist. But the, the perception of quality of elections has been diminishing over time for a long period of time. And just recently it's gotten, you know, to a tipping point. You probably read that book, Tipping Point where now there's a significant amount of the population that don't believe elections are fair.

Yeah. And so, well, until their guy wins, then it's fair. Says you're cheating. If the right wins, the left says you're Che.

Exactly. But, but the idea though was is there is a quality principle called. You're probably familiar with the KANO model. I was given a presentation Noriaki Kano and he actually came to my presentation while I was talking about this last summer. It was really neat, but. And also a little bit of pressure, you know, question. But. But the idea was is that people expect a. The operations to be flawless and to deliver quality on flawless operations really doesn't buy you much in the value of the customers. What gives you higher value is when you find out what they are really concerned about and that you can demonstrate that. That you meeting their expectations, meeting and exceeding their expectations. And then if you really want to get to customer delight, then you have to anticipate their wants and desires even before they can articulate them and give them to them. So in the case of elections, where we are is 99.9% of all election officials are running flawless elections. There are occasions where we have. But if you think about the amount of elections that we have and the amount of voters that we have, how many actual failures of either mistakes or fraud, waste and abuse or misrepresentation of votes is minuscule, almost approaching the six sigma level. But if you look at what people expect, and that's what the election officials are working on they are working on trying to ensure that they are delivering this expected level of quality. But that's not what the voters are telling them what they want. What they're saying is they want to know that their vote is actually being accepted and that they are able to vote in the way and the fashion that they want to vote and that others that are not supposed to vote are not being allowed. So my vote actually counts. And so we're working on the wrong things. And so that's one of the things that we're trying to help election officials be able to look at, is how can we start gathering the expectations of voters and then show that we are meeting those in our electoral organization?

Yeah, well, there's so much, you know, just thinking about measurement system analysis, if you will, on in that type of an environment. Like, you know, you got to be able to get the facts, you know, like, did dead people really vote? Yes or no. And like, how do you prove did this dead person vote? You know, and like this. But the media gets involved and it's all the bias starts in, and you just can't.

That's.

There's so much noise, you can't find the signal. Right. And so I think it's beautiful for a group like. Like yours to get in there. No dog in a hunt, man. Let's just. Like, that piece of paper went in the box. Let's count it. And that's it, right?

Yeah, and that's it. And you know, and one of the other things is that, you know, we're not promoting any particular technology or whatever, but there are technological solutions that allow people to have confidence that my transaction happened accurately. You know, we do it all the time with credit cards or credit transactions, so.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Good. Hey, so maybe to wrap things up, Carrie, I'm wondering if maybe just someone's listening right now and the wheels are spinning in their head as far as, you know, finding the right talent and retaining that talent and just, you know, it's win, win for everybody, win for the employee, win for the company. Like, is there any. Maybe some just parting thoughts or practical advice you could give to that, Maybe give it to the hiring manager, but then also to that person out there that's looking for a new position. Like, what are some practical things that. That both sides should be thinking about?

Well, and I think that that value. What. What am I doing this for? Question is fundamental on both sides. What am I doing this business for? And why do people want to come and join me to do that? And the other thing is, from the employee standpoint, I don't get this time back. So am I doing something that I'm willing to spend this amount of time on? And if not, then I'm wasting my time and the organization's time by doing things that I really don't want to do. And so, you know, if you're looking for something that matches what you do, see if there's a cultural match, are they producing services and products that you want and that you want others to have, and you see the value in. And that gives you the reason that you want to join that team, to be a part of that mission.

Love it. Love it. Very good. Hey, Kerry, if folks want to connect with you and not your son, I understand. Who's also Carrie. I'm sure he's a fine young man. But, you know, Carrie L. Bass is you, right? What's your son carry? What?

Carrie J. Bass.

J. Bass. Okay.

All right.

We're looking for L people. L carry Elvis. All right, what's the best way? Are they your LinkedIn or what do.

You think on LinkedIn? And also you can look at my site for the company is called Potential to Reality Consulting, but It's making it reality dot com. That's our website, www.making it reality dot com. And that gets to our website and you can be able to catch me there.

Well, I'm surprised you were able to get Making It Reality dot Com. That sounds like a pretty cool name. So I'm surprised that was available. Or did you have to do one of those auctions and pay a million dollars?

No, actually I was trying to get Potential to Reality and that was already taken. But Making It Reality, I said, oh, that's not bad. So I got that.

Yeah, yeah, good stuff, good stuff. And we'll have everything linked up in the show notes. Folks, you know the drill. So let's go reach out to Carrie and. Yeah, well, hey, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. And yeah, keep up the great work.

Thanks, Roger. I really appreciate it and enjoy being with you this afternoon.

All right, thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years, or perhaps you're just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 lean and 6 Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching, as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo head on over to gembaacademy.com.