139: Brandon Miller — Build a Thriving Values-Based Business

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Well, in scaling up a company, the leaders have to deal with people and people are the hardest part. We love to work with people based on strengths, using the Gallup strengths tools and to align that to the overall culture. The other practices that we have to bring a values based company to life, articulating the values and then ingraining them in all of our traditions, integrating that with what people love and making that a whole comprehensive framework, then tying it into the KPIs that people use and so on. Today's show is with someone who does deep work in the area of strengths and cultural development and I think you'll get a lot out of the show in terms of what you can do to develop your people. Listen in.

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Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and Scaling up coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Brandon Miller.

You're going to remind me, Brandon, you paused. I thought that was my innuendo. Are you an activator, Bill?

I am. What are your top five?

I'm an activator as well. I always know I'm with an activator because there's going to be some talking over. So cool. Take two, right?

No, we are rolling, man. We are rolling people of our world just from that, right? So guys, Brandon is a co founder and CEO of 34Strong. They're an employee engagement company. They do strengths work. But they're about more than strengths. Is the tool they use to develop great companies and engage middle managers and tie in the KPIs. We're going to talk about all of that kind of stuff today and like that. Right. Anything else I should say, Brandon?

No, I think you covered that really well. I think we'll, we'll find our way through our time. Good.

So my top five, right, Ideation, strategic communication, activator and command.

Okay, so I'm the maximizer, achiever, activator, strategic arranger, maximizer number one, achiever number two, activator, three, strategic four, arranger at five.

Oh, nice, nice, nice, nice. Well, I love when I have maximizer and achiever in some of my management team because I know those people are going to do great working on their teams and producing some results.

Very much I agree.

I had one guy who didn't have achiever at all in his top 10, but every last one of his managers, like 16 managers in his team were achievers. So one thing they all had in common, I'm like, wow, without realizing it, you are getting very good at hiring people in of a particular category.

That's good. That's a stacked deck right there.

Yes. All right, so talk to us a little bit as we like to begin. Give our folks a flavor of your background. How do you get to be somebody who helps make companies and managers great? How do you get into this line of work? Talk to us.

Yeah, so I'll go back 15 years ago. My career started with a bent towards becoming a teacher and a football coach. And that's everything I could have imagined being in my earliest memories of what do I want to be when I grow up in junior high, high school. But that direction took a hard turn around 22, found myself interested in calling to the ministry and so went down a path to become a pastor and was serving in a local church. The church grew rapidly. We had 2,500 congregants. I was in an executive role managing about 28 of our staff. Plus, as you know, in many nonprofits, a lot of volunteers. And I was introduced to this idea of improving our workforce by building a strengths based culture. I had no idea what that meant though. Obviously, you know, some idea of, okay, focus on people's strengths. Well, as I read through a book called now discover your strengths written by Don Clifton and Marcus Buckingham, I was mesmerized. We just said my number one strength is maximizer, which means I love to find strengths and build strengths. It's everything I want to see in a person, everything I want to see in a group, a team, an organization. And so with a half the training I, I ran for, it had every person in our organization that we could take it started to figure out where we could piece people. And I started to see how this approach really aligned with my personal values, really thought about, I want to, I want to help people be the best they can be, which certainly aligned spiritually, but very much aligned just from a professional way of thinking. Now I should mention that many people that go into the ministry are bi. Vocational. You don't make a lot of money in ministry. You don't go into it for that reason. So I, I had business ventures going on on the side. I've been a serial entrepreneur since the first time I was asked to go sell candy bars for the soccer team. And I could sell more than anyone else. Anytime that, you know, there was those contests, I was the kid that always won. So I had this pension and interest in starting businesses. So. So after my experience with the church and the staff, I started to delve over into some consulting work with some partners, launched a company, started using strengths and just found out that it would align so well if a company could get their values organized. What we know in many companies is that you can have just the most amazing vision, great idea for culture. But if your values don't translate down to where everyone knows them and shares them, then your culture is hodgepodge. You end up with, with a, with a whole variance of how people think about their behaviors and attitudes and what we like to say. Or my own thinking on this is majority wins. If leaders don't help the culture become something established around values, then whatever the majority thinks is going to be what we end up with. So in learning that, I decided that I had a keen interest to really think about organizational development. It was at a place in life. I should mention that I have a large family that was growing rapidly. And so I decided that dad needed one job after baby number six of seven was born and so decided to go, go do the wise thing at, you know, my early 30s and launch a business and leave behind the security of the ministry job and all the other variants. So just went that direction and coincidentally at the same time there was this opportunity to go to Gallup. The holders of the IP of strengths get certified. And so we, myself and some partners launched a company called 34 strong. And we've been helping companies think about their culture, think about their human development strategy and really think about their managers and how to build with them. And so that journey over the last really intensely last six years has, has just been the most amazing learning experience I could have ever encountered. Because what I said about leaders is most of us don't know the culture formula. We think we got it. If we, you know, if we, if we put it on the wall, repeat it in a few meetings, then yeah, our people will eventually, you know, align themselves behind us. But this reality is true is that people don't believe the truth you try to tell them. They believe the repeated message they hear the most often. And so we really try to help reinforce now and have found just great enjoyment with just training leaders on get clear on your values, know what it is that's important to you. And I recently heard this stat bill of people have retention for no more than four values, right? So if you give them this list of 20 things or 10 things that this is what's important to us. Their ability to retain and recite them is very limited. But if we can get it down to really practical examples, then that's what can translate into what our managers hold as their model of what they will actually do in the trenches, what day to day interactions look like. Then that goes down to your individual contributor levels where that's what we're repeating, that's what we're hearing, that's what we believe and what we know about people is that we want to align and with the herd, we want to align with the crowd if we can believe in the message. And so we, in just being a student of this and really understanding it in our work is very rewarding because we're really helping take the vision. A lot of our work is in, is in the family owned business space, you know, somewhere where most, as many of your listeners might know of Vistage as an organization where you know, many CEOs join up and they support one another but they're often in this legacy type business where they're transferring second, third, fourth. We have a client with fifth generation and they're being able to take the ideas that founded and coalesced and made that business successful and now get good at aligning it with how do we develop people and how do we maintain our edge and our competitive advantage. So it's been a lot of fun going down this path and interestingly enough, full circle. I mean it's a big part of how I still align my faith and values, how I still align my family. And now it's been Intricately a part of what I get to do professionally.

Let's talk about then some specific applications. And I think it's good. You talk about getting the values in and the values in action and real values versus just things that fill a wall. So when you say values and you talk about a small number of them. So we will tell people like 3 to 6 and I would say most settle about 5. I know that and our listeners will know. It's one of the first things we start in with is having companies develop real values and then develop traditions and practices around them. Tell me about your work in that area first.

Yeah, so when we are engaged and this is something that we try to influence very early on, before a person, whatever, you know, decide to hire a company like 34 strong is this mantra. Cultures are built, they're not bought. So you can't buy a culture. Culture has to start with leadership. And it has to be something that not only do you message it well, but you model it better. Because culture has to pass what we call the 3M test. You got to be able to message it, it's got to be modeled. And I only know if I'm passing it if it's mirrored back to me. So I agree with 3 to is a great number. I the reason I use 4 is I was recently talking with the founder of an app based employee recognition software. In all of their research, they found that if the number exceeded four, they started to find that only about 30 to 40% of the leaders could really recite them off the cuff. You got lower 20% of the managers and even lower like 6 or 7% of the individual contributors. And what they would find is if you don't make them real talk. You know, one of the companies that we highlight when we share on this topic is Southwest Airlines is a great model. They have three warriors, spirit, you know, servant heart, fun loving attitude. And you can, you could pull a Southwest employee almost anywhere and they'll, they'll roll them all off. And so it. Because culture is sometimes this big, gnarly, interesting way of thinking about our business that actually can be, as you probably know very well and your listeners will. If you can get it down to something that's able to be shared, then it can go into what you just commented on, the rituals, which is how do we develop people? Because every organization under the sun has to do it and the work that we chose to follow. And again, we use a tool called the strengths finder. It's not the only tool out there, but we really Appreciate the philosophy of the late Dr. Donald Clifton behind it, which is his findings were. There's two ways to develop people. You can go the conventional route where you assess their strengths, assess their weaknesses, and put maximum effort to fix what you don't like. That's the report card conversation. In the majority of our homes, when we look at a kid's report card and we see the low marks, that's where we're going to spend about 80 or 90% of the time, which mirrors exactly what happens in a manager eval. Excellent. Excellent needs improvement. Excellent needs improvement. And we are going to talk about how we're going to improve you this year. And that's where all the resources go. Well, that's, that's parenting education, management. And if we go over to the opposite approach, which is assess strengths, recognize weaknesses, maximize strengths, manage weakness, which Don noticed, we're already doing it. This is how we coach athletics. This is how we assess performing arts. And so what we offer, when we think about this topic, which really, as I said, because you can build this into a culture, starts with a mindset. Well, maybe our value needs to be that we play to people's strengths. Maybe our value needs to be that we want to focus more on what's right with them. And then, yeah, maybe a tool helps. Maybe, you know, a team that can come in and jumpstart this helps. But that is a very personal place that we find leaders can either embrace. Yep, we have to do this. And then, as you know, Bill, if, if you don't make a business case for anything, you know, a C level person, once you're crossing a certain size, they got to see the numbers. And so I do think a big part of what we try to advocate for is how you can start to see measurable outcomes with any kind of shift like this.

Yeah. So when we start working with someone on the values first. Right. The values will spend maybe an hour to half a day, depending on, depending on the team and things like that, articulating the first version of the values. And then when we think about the employee life cycle, we put the values in the job scorecard and in the job posting. So we're hiring for and evaluating the candidates against the values, looking for where they fit them or don't fit them, how they embrace them. But at the same time, we're looking, although we're not using strengths in the recruiting process, we're using the WHO top grading type interview. We're looking for examples of what that looks like in their life. And so somebody might Uphold a value using one strength or another. But you can hear when they get specific about their past and what that looks like, you can start to hear that thing come through. And then as we're developing them, we're using the job scorecard to see how they're doing in their job. But when they're coming up short or they're struggling with a particular quarterly priority or one aspect of the job, then we're going to the strengths and looking at, well, which of your strengths do you see applying in this area and how, how do you see that you could use it? What comes to mind? So we will explore that with them. And then we can. And we can also look at what should you not be doing. And like, when I think about my own business career, I think, okay, so many times that I tried to be a better operations manager. And when you look at like which categories of leadership or the strengths groups that I like, the, the execution side is really weak for me. Like, I don't like to do that kind of thing. I'm all about strategy and influence. And, and that's kind of where I live. So I tend to hire people around me to do the other. And I recognize that and I don't try anymore a better operator. I try to use tools, routines, checklists and team to, to do that kind of thing. Right, that's.

Right. That's excellent. And I, I would, I would say that because you could use, you know, a tool like Strengths Finder, the CliftonStrengths is a great tool. And there are other, you know, culture indexes out there or DISC or Myers Briggs. Whatever tool you use to assess, you're this, I'm a. That your personality is this. Like, that really is user perspective. We really try to encourage. And this is a big DIY tool that I have shared, whether it's with mom to a group of kids, manager to a group of team members, leader to an organization is there are indicators to strengths and they are very hard to miss once they're recognized. And so we use five E's. Don Clifton had five words that identified a strength, but they aren't rule off your tongue. Easy to remember. So we give five indicators that you almost could match what you just said, for example, strategy and influence. Well, that means if we took it down to the task level, you have enthusiasm to do a thing. It comes easy, rapid learning. You do it with excellence, third party validated. It gives you energy, so you want to do it again. You actually feel a reward system from your internal hormones released. And then you enjoy it so much, you'll push through adversity to do it again. This is, you know, we use the marathon example. You enjoy it so much, you'll run through pain, you'll push, push hard. Well, when you take those five and then you overlay it to, well, then how do we clarify a person's work? I love the job scorecard analogy. We call it the triple G. We think that you could take every task in a person's work life and put it into one of three categories. It's either their grinding. That's just the. I gotta do it because it's required stuff. You know, the chores, the, the, for me sending a lot of emails, I'm just grinding. I'm just doing it because it's not going away. But the other two categories, the middle is greatness. Now we're into the things that hit all five E's. Or as Marcus Buckingham is quoted as saying, the things you do that make you feel strong, that no one else can tell you, because strengths and performance are not the same thing. So if you're operating in an area of strength, you're in what we call the greatness zone. This is now your, your space where you have maximum productivity. And what Don was so caught up in was sustained excellence. Not enough that you could get there once or twice or on occasion get the 100% on a test, but you could sustain it and grow it to what we call the third category, which is your genius zone. This is where you're top of the class, you're the highest mark, you're the best of the best. And that illustration or way of thinking, literally, you can do a self diagnostic to get to the point of the ratio we encourage you to look for. So for a leader, we would tell you that if you combined your greatness and genius and you equal out somewhere near 70, 75% and you can keep your grind somewhere near 25 or 30, you've transcended career to calling. You are in the best possible space you will probably be in for that organization to be successful. And if you scale that down to, well, what does that look like for my exec team? What does that look like now for my middle managers? Can we have you more time? Your example of doing all the task stuff, that'd be like the grind, right? If I can limit that to a percentage of time, that, all right, I can accept it, then we can be really successful there. So that's a way, a simple way to use this thinking that if my value is I want people to do what they do best every day. My value is I want to play to people's best parts and not focus on their weakness because the outcome is we're going to be more productive, profitable, better retention, we're going to see better customer numbers by making this shift.

So when I start and you know, in. In my scaling coach work and a lot of the other coaches, we'll do kind of an intro level of growth of strengths, work with people and. And we have coaches and teams that use all different kinds of tools. So I've used Myers Briggs, I've used disc, I've used PI predictive index. I've had people do Colby and Enneagram and lots of those things. And I find that I come back to and really prefer the strengths. So as an example, like, disc is one of the ones that I hear a lot. It's really too simplistic for me. Like, in case you can't tell, I'm a high di. I'm really low on the asc. And it's interesting to see teams in the makeup of things. And you need all different kinds of people, for sure, in an organization to get things done, right. You think of the A team, you think of Hogan's Heroes if you're a little older, if you think of like there's always. Everybody has a certain specialist role, right? And you're this person, that person and that gal and this guy and. And that. That's a beautiful way to think because as you point out, there are things that we really love and we throw ourselves into and we're repeatable at those kinds of things then everything else. So we'll use strengths because it's got a rich set of 34 words, right, that we can look at. And so I look at my top five and I can embrace those things and I look at the next five and. And I have an indication of the area like to play and that I have some aptitude and interest in. And then I look at the bottom ones, right. Like my bottom ones are analytical harmony, restorative, consistency includer. And you could tell from those how much I.

We share some of those in the bottom.

Actually, I hate being on a committee. Right. I like to be in charge, command.

In my top five, those in my bottom.

It's like, oh, just like, just so uncomfortable to be on a committee. Right, right. And be in the front of the room and all that. And yet there's a time and a place for all that. You have to rein it in. You have to learn when to. So when we'll use strengths and then sometimes we'll just use a simple thing, looking not at strengths, but at the specific tasks that people are currently managing. And we'll say, which ones do you love and which ones do you hate? Right, right. And think of, I have a graphic in my slide deck from, from the old do the right thing and the radio Raheem and his love and hate rings, which goes into which pile? And everybody's got something that's just such a chore. And so we will ask, okay, so what could you delegate, abdicate or automate?

Oh, very good.

Maybe not in that order. Right. But like there are things that you could just give away if you really stopped and said, you know, it's time for me to give the way. And there, there are a lot of things today that you can automate that you could just dial in so they're even if you have to touch them a little bit, that they're way more streamlined. And then there are things that you could simply say to the team, this is a good idea and I'm never ever going to do it. I'm not doing this anymore. Somebody else could do it or we're just going to drop it as an organization. But if you're going to abdicate stuff, you really need to communicate that or you're going to have some messes. Right. If you simply stop doing things, you or anyone on your team stop doing things without talking about it. And people are used to that, it's going to create some upset, some breakdown, some team rupture. Right?

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think you're well on, I mean, that's a great way to describe it. We, we have these five ways to overcome the grind and it's very similar. What thing are you doing that if you stop doing it, no one's going to miss it. And as you know, in family owned companies that are 40 years old, there's some holdover stuff that let it go, let it die. I mean, we don't need to do that anymore, that event or that thing. And then we get into exactly what you said. What can you delegate? Where can you share? Where does technology, I mean, the trains left the station. I mean, we have so much technology rolling out every day that there's ways to decrease time in the things we're not good at. Because there's probably an app out there you just haven't discovered yet. So.

Yeah, very well, depending on your age and background though, right? You may or may not be comfortable with all that. I mean, we have an Awful lot of people who just like, oh, tell me how to work the Facebook.

And, and, and we run into that. I, I, you know, even, even when you're looking at that, that transitional generation, right? Like we're the, we're, we're making the handoff from the baby boomer to the Gen X, perhaps. And okay, so the Gen X is coming up with more tech, but right behind them, these millennial or Gen Z's are, I mean, they're eating this stuff for lunch. I mean, it's just so natural to change and move and adjust. So I agree that there's solutions, but sometimes it's not quite as plain as it can be, but worth the effort to go down the path.

Right? And of course you can overcomplicate yourself. Like, I have a lot of teams who do, and it's probably a good segue into KPIs, but I have a lot of teams who create fairly automated dashboards. And in some cases across things around the world in their distributed offices, they'll have these screens with fancy graphics of all their dashboard KPIs, priority status, things like that. The problem is they become so automated that they become like background noise. They become, or they're changing so continually, people can't keep up with which tool is that on and where am I? So they get overused tools and then they tune tools out. And in fact, we've had a couple companies this last year where productivity went off. We said, okay, stop a minute. It, let's stop right now. Go on Amazon, order however many, you know, order 12 whiteboards, have them delivered tomorrow, the next day when you get back to the office, put one in each work area. Let's work on the KPIs now. And you're going to go in and deal with those KPIs every day as a team. And we'll see, we'll just put in whiteboards and markers and we'll see productivity rise if we spend a minute to pick just a couple KPIs, maybe two per person, person, four per team, that kind of thing, and just drill in on that. And I know you do some work on trying to align KPIs and strengths and the role. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah, very much so. We can't make the case for strengths without aligning it to something that is measurable. And so where we really appreciate the work that Gallup did is that when they, but right before they launched StrengthsFinder as a tool, they actually released a book called now excuse me, first break all the rules right around 99. And this book was the culmination of their 25 year study of why a person would engage or not engage in the workplace. And employee engagement as a science, as a, as even a KPI was essentially born. I mean there were ways to think about it beforehand, but this is really what started to drive this concept. And so what we really emphasize with leaders is one, the idea that you already are measuring this, but you're measuring it in ways that are the symptom, not the problem. So you're measuring your productivity, or you're measuring your safety incidents, or you're measuring absenteeism and you're trying to turn those levers. But if you could rise above that and say, well what is inducing this? What's causing these, these channels to open up in ways that we're not liking the trend? Well that, that has everything to do with that middle group of people that we call managers and our equipping of them to know how to turn the right levers to gain what, you know, could be referred to as employee engagement. And so a very simple way that an organization can start and it's great to do it with a sample team. I was just speaking to a CSO today that literally today had someone walk in his office, top, top profile team member, gave his notice and he's just looking at the ground going, what did I miss? Where did this go? And so literally as part of his, his, his next step is invest in a survey. It's, it's, it's reasonable per person. It's a team of, in this case, 15. And they're going to find out with a 12 point survey how people respond to 12 indicators that interestingly enough doesn't include pay. It includes 12 indicators that have more to do with the interactions between you and your boss, you and your team, you and your team members, and how you feel about the organization, which statistics show us actually has a greater impact upon whether or not you have a great attitude at work, you're psychologically invested, you're emotionally connected. All of those points that can be termed employee engagement.

Yeah, that's a really, the tool that we use the most often for that is just a net promoter. Like an employee Net promoter score becomes an internal ongoing tracking tool. But I love digging into all of the things that make someone happy and feel engaged in their, in their job.

We found that where we saw a gap is that in the, in the window of businesses that live somewhere. We'll just say on the low end, lowest end, 10 million up to, you know, let's call it 500 million, is that we know that we're growing and we know we need to install managers. But the question becomes, well, how do we train them to be effective and where we've seen a gap? And so I'll, I'll just quote my own stats. This is my own, you know, non validated research of 1,000 CEOs and companies ranging in that size of how many of them have programs to train their managers, how to engage their employees. And in this survey that we've been doing over the last four years, we're somewhere around 2%. 2% have programs to train managers. In most cases, what they will acknowledge is someone's good at a thing. And now you're the manager of the thing and the training that comes along is all compliance training. Here's what you do to not get us sued. Training to know how to sit and do an eval, how to do some kind of, you know, let's just call it onboarding. Setting expectations, making sure they have what they need. Where do they voice their challenges, how do you coach them? That's, that's absent. And so in a lot of situations, I think what's being sparked right now, and I'll, I'll give Gallup a ton of credit for really pushing this conversation out there, is we've forgotten the men and women in the middle who really account for what I started the conversation with around values. You can have the most amazing values ever, but it's the managers that make it real. We don't work for companies, we work for bosses. We don't leave for pay. We leave because of that manager 75% of the time. So it's a really powerful way to think about shifting not only the scorecard into something cool. This gives me a nice way to read how we're doing, but then actually physically training the manager to know how to impact the score. How do you set expectations? How do you make sure they have material, equipment, opportunity to do what they do best? As an example of the top three.

You know, it's interesting. So our, I would say our clients range, I don't know, like, I mean they, they, in truth, they range like 5 to 500 million. So it's a huge, huge range. But probably an awful lot are in the 75 to 100 million dollars size and they have a little over 100 employees and that kind of thing. And I'll often take on smaller companies, but as companies start to grow in scale, one of the things that we Notice almost right away is that while the CEO might invest heavily in themselves and training, there's very, very little, just general employee development investment going on. There's very little in the way of anything beyond the most basic, like T based training. Here's how you do this particular job and I'll work with you on that. And mostly that's unstructured. So the idea of having a proactive training program or strengths based training is really unusual. And yet a lot of the folks that come to us, the owner, the CEO is a member of Vistage or a member of ypo or some other organization and they spend all kinds of money and time going all over the place, but they don't have anything proactive for the team. So one of the first things that happens when we're like teaching them the basics of scaling up and then we start to introduce the strengths and other tools to them and they start to engage that. But getting that to trickle down and having training be a function within the company is kind of a big challenge in, in many companies, right?

Absolutely. I mean it is, it is. It's the first, you know, wall to climb, if you will. And I think that's where the numbers really play. Because what we've learned is that facts will tell, stories sell. Right. Stories change minds. And so case studies that can demonstrate this is where this company sat because this is where their employee engagement rate was. So the national average is around 35%. We'll say on the high end, that's a good day. Gallup measures this every single day. So 35% on the high end. And I've yet to meet a CEO that's happy with 65% of their people being something other than engaged. That is not a good idea or something they promote. Yet sadly, that's what most of their scores will show. Well then when they, when you start to take action to really manage the middle, the, the the without guaranteeing rates, an approach that shifts your human development strategy underneath, a guided value can flip the number. You can literally see your 35% go to 65 or 70%, which when you think of how culture then plays out, we call it the, the 90 day rule. A guy shows up for the job, he starts with you the first 30, you get the moonlight, you know, all the best he could possibly be. But then he's going to start hearing a message and that message is going to be repeated from whoever's around him. And that's the culture message. At 35%. The culture message is not what you want to send at 70, it probably is very likely what you want sent because it's a repetition of your values played out in real time. Well then when you trigger that to, well, what did that do to productivity? How did our profit number show? Are we seeing our best people stick around and do customers stick with us, refer us, come back and buy more. And those are very measurable outcomes in addition to others. And that's I think what starts to jog a mind toward am I, you know, because buying decisions are all different. Right. So is it future pleasure that I'm going to think about or is it current pain, present pain? Most of us make decisions out of present pain. So anyone who's in that mode goes, you know what, I want to measure something. And then forward thinking guys or ladies that are thinking about, wow, I could really improve it, they'll go the future pleasure. So we see some of that roll down as people start to at least investigate, well, where am I at today? And the good news is, as you know and you promote, those tests are out there. Those opportunities are available to us.

As we were getting ready for the show, you talked about a few different examples. We don't have a lot of time, but I'd love for you to share one to bring all of it to life and maybe choose from either like Cascade Health or Christy or I don't know, why don't you? What do you think would be the more relevant one to share with our listeners?

So here's a quick one with Christy. Christy was a what I would consider a raw, talented manager. Meaning when you looked at her strengths finder, you would say this person has the talent to be a great boss. Gallup says the stat is that 1 in 10 have great talent to be a manager. I have found that to be true. And seven, excuse me, two more have adequate. Christie was one of the one in 10. But what she was lacking is what we call the four legs of the manager chair. So you look, we all look for technical, then we think about tenure or track record somewhere else. But we're not often really assessing talent and we're certainly not giving tools and training. And if you pull any one of those chairs off of a functional four legged chair, you got an issue. Right? You can get away with three sometimes, but you got an issue. Well, she was the classic technical and tenure. Check, check talent. Oh my gosh, awesome. She was missing tools. So the first year her team did a Q12 that came in really dismal, not great. But what it did for this manager is she could Then take that tool, go in front of her team and do the courageous thing. She asked them about the scores and asked what do I need to do to help make it better? That's a great boss. Great boss. And more importantly, she took action. So from year one to year two saw a significant increase. Year two to three, now she had a tool in her hand. She got to use this on a regular basis, Saw the opportunity then to introduce StrengthsFinder into their organization. So now she actually had what you were talking about earlier. She knew this person's a strong executor, this one's a big thinker, that one's my influencer. It shifted her approach. So by the time she got her third metric, she started as a 2 percentile team in comparison rank to a 99 percentile team, top ranked team in her company, top rank in the world. And that dramatic shift was simply if you asked her, was, well, I, I, I want to be a great boss. I've always wanted to be a great boss. Now I have tools to help me get there. And year four she actually slipped just below 99 to 95% because now she's been promoted. So now she's a VP of a department she's now managing through managers, which she would tell you that's tough but you know, new level and new opportunity for growth. So it's a cool example. When you watch it happen and to the point about an organization, what you might imagine is seeing Christie's have that result, then you start to play it out to the other metrics that we really have them focus in on what's that doing to your productivity? What's that doing to your profit? You know, start to see if the levers connect and that's really where it clues into, all right, that aligns with my value. Now I can make this a part of our ethos. This is now who we are.

Well, when you have strengths aligned to jobs aligned to values, everybody's pulling together. When you have an A player team, predominantly A players, and you're developing people and you're creating a growth path for people in the organization, people stick around and they give you their best work and they're doing what they love and I mean it's obvious that the performance and the results are going to be higher unless you're really just, you know, shooting money out the window. So it makes perfect sense that you would do that. And yet the payoff is not always as immediate in that like you, it's not like putting out a fire right now or a Clever new campaign that drops something in your life. It is an investment in something. But if you are scaling and building a business, as our listeners are, are deeply interested in doing, then this kind of investment starts to pay. And I would say it's the sort of thing that accelerates. You take on the training, the learning of a team. That team survives the growth through multiple stages, from the fledgling team of 50 people through the first hundred, through the 500 as we get to a thousand now that the basic tenant structures, the habits, the culture, the routines are built in there, and the team survives the stages of growth very much in a totally different way. Right. I think it's really great. I want to remind folks, we did a show once before on Strengths with Dean Jones. And so if you want to learn more about the world of strengths, you can go looking for the show with Dean Jones. Dean is the. I don't know what his current thing. He's like head of talent development or something like that at Gallup Organization. He's one of my old mentors, years ago.

I think he's the Global architect.

I think that's Global Architect sounds fantastic.

I love his title and he is just an amazing resource for this topic. I mean, you couldn't go wrong listening to anything Dean has to say on the topic of strengths.

Yeah, he trained me as a workshop leader, as a facilitator, as a coach, and he's just been fantastic. So there's another show on that, and if you want to learn more about Brandon's work, and so Brandon's near us in Northern California, you can go look for him at 34strong.com and read up about their work. And they do much deeper work in strengths that we do in the basic scaling up stuff. So you can get a sense of some of the work in the programs that he does there. So I just think it's so great. I really glad that we finally got you on the show and that we could talk a little bit about it. And I know you've got a book coming up that you're working on on strengths and the same kind of things applied to parenting. So we'll talk about that. We'll have you back on when. When that's ready to go. And thanks again for coming on the show with us today.

My pleasure, Bill. Thank you for having me.

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