Hire Like a Pro and Build a Healthy Workplace Community

Now I want to move on to another part of our model here. It's back to FASO. So we talked about the fit, right? So the fit is someone that is a match to what you have available. You also have to assess ability to make sure those abilities match the talents for the tasks we need, or they have the talents that match our tasks. This is the bridge or the connection between leadership and team building. We need to make sure we hit all 4 of these elements. This FASO, this bridge, which connects the leader and the team. It's the pathway, you know, to the vision you have. Under here, see those spikes? That is the challenges that FASO overcomes. So employees can have doubt, fear, a sense of I don't belong, or worthiness. There are challenges, and it all goes back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. All these things, ironically, it can be kind of like a spike. And so there's many little Maslow hierarchy of needs there. FASO is the bridge across where people can perform at the highest level, which is self-actualization. So fit means that people feel that they belong. And you know this because their talents, their abilities are matched to the tasks you have. And you know the way to do it. That is a massive part of this bridge. They feel safe in the organization psychologically, physically, all those elements, and they have ownership over the outcomes. When you do this, when you bring that fit to the organization, you protect people from this collapse down. This is definitely the bridge and the connection between what you're doing, how you're serving your team, and so they can move a pathway forward. Just wanted to add in that element because when we don't do it, you know, people fall off the bridge. There's these obstacles and these painful experiences they go through. It's you, the leader, who's going to build the bridge. Hope that brings even more clarity to this. Serve your people. So we're going to dig into ability. Quick story is there is an industry, it's half a trillion dollars in revenue, and they don't do interviews. And they have inevitably the best talent for the needs they have. Again, match talent to task. What industry is it? It's a sports industry. What's the sports industry do? They do skill assessments. Now there's two forms of it. We're gonna explore both, but first we have to understand where abilities are demonstrated. So this chart here represents the full abilities of an individual, and I've concluded there's basically three levels of abilities. This lower level makes about 20% of a person's ability, and this is the next level. Let's go through each one. The core foundation of an individual is experience. Over time, this does get filled, right? We have more experience over time. And experience basically is my past is indicative of my future. Then we have what's called innate. Maybe I should even reverse these. Innate is how we're naturally wired. This is our natural behaviors. I believe for most people, this makes up about 20% of an individual's talent. Or ability. And what we do to discover this is testing processes. Now, this is foundational. Like, this is— you got to know these things. Experience does indicate the future, but you may have experienced this, that sometimes you hire someone with experience, you have to untrain them effectively to get them to a level of experience that you need or you want. So they come in with a training or background that's not appropriate. You have to untrain that and retrain. So experience can be a double-edged sword Experience though is the quick start. So there's great tools for doing this. Skills assessments are the best way to see if someone has the right experience and even any ability. Now there's other testing you can do here that identifies an ability, and the best testing is when you package it all together. And there's tools out there. In fact, that's what I've partnered with myself is having these tools available. I'll give you a story about a company I interviewed an organization. It was the medical department of the University of Chicago. I interviewed Jewel Kucera, and she shared an interesting story. She was recruiting director for a period of time, and I, I asked her, I said, uh, interviews, how important are they? How do you structure them right? Expecting this would be the core of our discussions. She has interviews, she says, are worthless. She says, I take it back, they're very valuable if the job or the career for this person will be doing interviews. Meaning if they interview well and their job is being interviewed by countless people, then you should consider that because that's the skill you're assessing. You're assessing their ability to interview. She then went on explained how they do skill assessments. And what they did in this one particular study was they had individuals who were being considered for employment as a check-in administrator. And part of the check-in process is you, you take someone from a patient that comes into the emergency room, whatever it is, and you have to check in and, and do other things, some, some preliminary steps. So they had candidates who came to the office for an interview, be interviewed in the traditional sense, tell us your qualifications and so forth, and then went through skills assessments. Well, one of the stations that they were assessing was this check-in procedure, exactly entering someone's license and their health data, uh, insurance information. Well, Jewel herself was managing that skill assessment station, and she emulated, uh, having cerebral palsy. Her roommate had it, and she knew the fine motor skills were very difficult. So she was doing this, and she noticed that some of the candidates that went through the skills assessment were very thoughtful and said, please take the time you need. It takes about a full minute, she was saying, to get the license out of her purse or wallet. Some people say, "Take your time." Other people say, "May I assist you?" One candidate very aggressively just ripped out her hand, says, "Let me do this for you. It's taking too long." Guess who they didn't hire? That person was not a fit. They weren't accommodating to a patient that had a specific need. Interestingly, that same candidate who was not hired was the best interviewer. And the mentality for us is if someone interviews well, they're confident, they're strong, they're probably great at their job. No, that person was very assertive and strong, which may be good for other jobs, but not a 5-star fit for this particular role. They hired other people. Interestingly, it resulted in the most equitable dispersion of individuals, meaning it was representative of their community's makeup and diversity, but also best retention, best performance because they did skills assessments. So what I want you to start doing is assess skills by testing for this. But what I want to talk about now is the biggest form of ability in all humans, including you, including me, is potential. Can we express our full potential? This is the 80% makeup of people, is potential in waiting. So how do we discover potential? I think there's a great lesson from the sports industry. Imagine this, that a football team, for example, has a candidate come in and say, well, just tell us, do you like football? Are you great at it? Are you a rockstar football player? Or imagine a football team says, all right, get on the field. By the way, interview format versus get on the field, which is skill assessment, or a camp. And that's where potential is revealed. They also run camps in the sports industry. Well, I'll give you my own personal example. I played lacrosse in high school and I was an average to average minus athlete. Admittedly, I was not the star by any stretch of the imagination. I got invited to, or not really even invited, I had an opportunity to go to Hobart Lacrosse Camp when I was like a sophomore or junior in high school. And they invited, you know, kids from all over. There was 300 or 400 kids up there and we went through this camp. What was interesting is they started teaching us skills and I was learning and so forth There were other students there. Certain athletes were tapped on the shoulder and said, hey, you're really demonstrating skills of a particular quality. We'd like to bring you to another field where there's more competition and you can learn more advanced skills. And some of those players were tapped on the shoulder and brought to another field. At the end of the camp, 4 or 5 days, they identified a few players who ultimately played at Hobart. They were the elite players, a perfect fit. Here's what's interesting. Everyone was getting better in the process. Everyone was learning a skill. I was not one of those players invited to play at Hobart. I did play lacrosse during my college career, and I would argue the reason I was a better athlete in part was because that Hobart lacrosse camp. Why was it engaged in sports? Because that camp was so interesting about camps is everyone elevates, but the instructors also get to evaluate. So elevate while you evaluate. That's the key doing camps. If you want the best talent, I'll give you the secret to top performers. Again, every human is a top performer when they get to do where their potential is. Top performers have curiosity, right? So right now, just think of a few things you love to do. Hobbies— you play an instrument, you like to do hiking or something in the yard, you have other interests. What do you like the most? Job interests— what are you most passionate about? You'll notice when you have a passion that you often, almost always, want to learn more. If our passion wanes or fades, then, then we stop learning. But if we're interested, we learn. If we're passionate, we want to learn more and more. Top performers Top talent, A candidates, A potential folks always are learners regardless if they're employed or not. And that's the honey that attracts the bees. Put on educational events, allow people to learn. The beautiful thing is everyone improves and you get to cherry-pick the people you're interested in. So whatever you're looking for, run a workshop. I'll give you some examples in the business space. Home Depot, they do build a birdhouse workshops. Do you know they can recruit through that? You go down there and you're building a birdhouse, you have a great experience with Home Depot, but they're looking for people that show the indications of potential, which always reveals itself in the same 3 stages. First, curiosity. People show up curious. Then it yields into desire. I have a lot of questions. I want to learn more. Then thirst. I can't stop. I can't quit. Our job is to look for people that show up and then start demonstrating these components. Those are the people that have the most potential. Audible, they have returnships. Same thing. Learn how the modern workforce is working. If you've been out of the workforce for a period of time, you can have a returnship. And they look for people's desire and thirst. I think they've hired upwards of 30 or 40%, maybe even more, of their candidates through identifying desire and thirst. And this goes on and on. Google famously has these boot camps and these workshops. You can go for a weekend, they teach you skills and coding and so forth, and they're evaluating people to be hired. The beautiful thing is the primary reason to go is because you're looking to learn, not that you're being considered. In some of these places like Home Depot, other organizations, you don't know you're being recruited or being considered, that's the privilege of the instructor. So I want you to do or to consider for your organization is whatever you're looking to hire, whatever position you're looking to hire, whatever tasks you need addressed, start teaching that skill so that you can attract people and identify potential. Or if you need to have someone that already has certain skills, you teach the next skill up and you make that skill level a prerequisite. You must already be proficient at accounting or teaching some sophisticated new AI-based reconciliation. And the candidates who come in who are looking to learn AI reconciliation, I'm making that up, had that prerequisite and now you have the skill level already established and you see who the learners are who self-vetting identifies the best people. Here's the ultimate shortcut. If you feel a bit overwhelmed running a workshop, attend them. They exist all the time. You're looking to hire computer tech, find where there's computer tech courses going on and sign up as a student, not to be the student, but to evaluate the students and look for the common indicators which are curiosity, people showing up, desire, and thirst. That's how you find the 5-star fits. Let's move on to now safety in the FASO model. And, uh, let me pull our Maslow hierarchy. We were looking at this earlier. We have physiological safety itself, which is physical harm. So that's physical. We have psychological safety where that kind of bleeds in between belonging and these basic needs of safety. We have financial, which is part of this too, and relational. And a business owner can address all of these. I do want to share a quick story of where it started out. There was a story called the Ghost Girls. These were individuals hired back in, I think it was the 1920s, don't quote me on that, it was around World War I, to make watches. And if you remember back in the day, they had watches that could glow in the dark. They use a material called radium. It's a radioactive material. These individuals were hired and told that it was safe to take a paintbrush, dip it into radium, radioactive material, put this dot on the watch, which then capture light and glow, lick the tip of the paintbrush to give it a good point and repeat the process again and again. And pretty soon tumors appeared, their skin started to glow in certain cases, their teeth were glowing, hence why they're called the Ghost Girls. And it became a deadly incident. As employers, we need to provide all forms of safety. The most foundational is a physical, psychological safety. If I'm presenting to you right now and someone comes running up to me and starts threatening me physically, I, I'll stop presenting. I revert to the base level needs. We as employers need to have those components addressed. Think about it, you ever try working and you're just starving to death? You have a headache about it, about you, and can you work and perform? Is so difficult, becomes such a distraction because our body has a physiological need that's happening. So we need to, as best we can, address those things. Food, water, and stuff like that definitely sets a better work environment. In fact, when I was in the computer industry, it It was so interesting. We went through training on disaster recovery. If there was an earthquake or something like that and the computer technology went down, how to address it. The number one thing, the first lesson foundationally was make sure the team repairing, restoring, or repairing stuff has food and water available. Can't work under those conditions adequately without it. Very interesting. Second thing is we have psychological needs, and that's belonging in the community. Do we feel comfortable working there? I'll tell you a way we did this. We hired an employee, his name was Pradeep, for one of our tech companies that I had in the past. What we did was when someone came on board, he was the first person we did this with, we bought business cards for him. We got one framed and then around the frame everyone signed how excited we were to have him on board, which is a form of demonstrating that he belongs. We all went out to lunch together. There was a celebratory moment. Is the integration of team members that was so important? The biggest component was could he be himself? The way leaders do that is we're naturally ourselves. We show our weaknesses and warts. We're integral and honest, which encourages people to be the same. So great leaders demonstrate the behavior that we want our team members to have, that we present ourselves as approachable and supportive and, uh, real and integral and transparent. And our team will promote that. It brings about psychological Safety. Again, if that's compromised, we are now driving down here and we can't perform at the highest level. So to expect our team to perform at a high level but have concerns around psychological safety, it pulls them back down. Financial security is another one. I think one of the big misnomers is you gotta pay your team more and more and more. That does not bring about necessarily financial safety. Financial safety is where we have security in the moment and our perceived future. I worked with one organization in teaching their employees on how to bring about financial security, personal financial management. So education can help. But one of the biggest things a company can do, a leader of an organization can do, is open book management. What's so interesting, I was hesitant to do this myself. Once we did it, what I realized is it first brought understanding of how a business operates. Every dollar in revenue is not going to the bottom line. It isn't going into the owner's pocket. There's expenses, so forth. So an understanding for how it works. They also saw the ebbs and flows in our business. And therefore, when we had a unique challenge come back, in our business in 2023, an unexpected challenge presented itself and it caused, uh, immediate, uh, harm to our profitability. We talked with the team, we said, this is what's going on. We showed the financials and the team rallied. People were excited to do whatever it took for the company to move forward because they knew the company was revealing at all times the, the goods and the bads with our finances. But they also understood the reflection on how it impacted them, understanding where the business is without having a cloudiness or a lack of understanding gave people confidence. So it's interesting, financial security doesn't mean find money that you don't have and just infuse it into people's pockets and always have money. It just means being open and honest in your communication, including around your finances. So, and that brings around safety. Relational is the next level I want to talk about. And relational is where I feel comfortable with the people I work with, that I belong here and they belong with me. One of the greatest ways to do this is through one-on-ones. We conduct weekly one-on-one meetings with every employee, which sounds absurd. How? Who has the time for this? Most businesses meet with an employee for a review once a year, once every 6 months. It's usually a massive corrective thing, or like, you're doing okay, just do more of that and we'll talk in 6 months. Weekly, we meet 5, 15 minutes. I don't do it as the owner of the organization. In this case, We have leaders in our organization who manage this, and the conversation is balanced. It's, how's things going on in life? Because what's happening in your private life is maybe happening or influencing your business life. What's happening in your business life is perhaps influencing your personal life. So wherever people are comfortable exploring, we say, hey, how are things going? And micro-corrections and adjustments can happen. That constant dialogue allows these adjustments. There's rarely a situation where it's like, oh, there's a cataclysmic event. We see where we're going. Problems are happening, things aren't working well, or they are working great. Let's keep doing that. But we are allowed to adjust. I remember interviewing, um, an attorney and they talked about the challenge of terminating someone. And in certain circumstances, of course you need to do that. If someone's harmful to the organization, if they're unable to perform even through correction, that is the appropriate thing to do. And the lawyer shared something very interesting. They said termination should never be a surprise. It shouldn't be a shock. Meaning we've taken these corrective actions along the way, and one-on-ones are the foundational way to do it. So going back to this sheet, the last component I want to talk about is ownership. One of the most common things I hear is, I wish my team would act like me. I wish my employees would act like owners. The strategy we need to be aware of is called psychological ownership. The awareness you may have is rental cars versus owning cars. If you've ever rented a car, you surely don't take it to the car wash before you return it. You probably drive it more aggressively. But the car you own, you probably do get washed or you maintain it. You probably don't drive it as aggressively. So the question is, why would we treat a rental one way and a car we own differently? Because we have psychological ownership. Now what's interesting is this is different than legal ownership. You may not own your car. My car, I'm making the installments, the payments on it, so the bank owns it. But I feel like I own it. When I feel like I own it, I care for it differently. If people feel they're renting the job they have at your organization, is naturally more abusive. In fact, most rentals have what's called forced compliance, and when we are forced to comply, we seek to defy. You rent that car, you have to return with a full tank of gas or penalty. Dents, things, penalty. Dirty or filthy interior, or it's not vacuumed, penalty. We're forced to comply, we seek to defy. We try to elbow our way out to show some authority. But ownership is, it's mine. Now, how do we deploy ownership? Well, there's research by John Pierce. I think it happened in 1980s, maybe it was 1990s, don't, don't quote me on that, was studying this and found that there was 3 elements that make someone feel like they own something. First is the ability to have control over the object. So yeah, I can drive my rental car where I want to, but I may not be able to take it out of the country or out of the state. I may be limited on miles, so they restrict control. The car I own, I can drive it when I want, where I want, I can park it where I want, I can use it anytime I want. I don't have a return time. So the more control we have, the more we feel like ownership. Personalization. So the more we can personalize something, then, you know, I can put a bumper sticker or something on my decal, my window on my car. I can't do that on the rental. I feel that I own it. And the last thing is intimate knowledge, meaning the more knowledge I have about something, the more I feel I own it. You may have noticed if you've ever purchased a car, new or used, you probably spent a lot of time learning about the car. Maybe you went through the manual, learning what every bell and whistle is and so forth. When I buy a new car, I may sit in for a half hour trying to figure it all out. When, uh, I rent a car, nothing, just start driving. So with your team member, can you give them these elements? Give them more control over their role. I found that when we agree to an outcome, what the achievement is, giving them control over the path to get there, even though you have best practices, let them use that. Having control over it empowers them, gives them greater ownership. Personalization. How can I make this more their own? Can they invest themselves into it and give it some uniqueness that they introduced to it? When someone co-creates an idea, so instead of me telling you, here's what you need to do, we say, what could you do? And we discuss it. You are having personalization. You're having authority to bring about your own ideas to it. You're more likely to do it. That's why people believe in their own ideas more than given ideas. Intimate knowledge. The more detail, the greater they understand something. The better they can do. That's the ownership element. Give people those elements, do it in small incremental stages and steps, and people will feel like owners, and they behave radically differently than when they don't feel like owners. When they feel that they're forced to comply, it's natural to seek to defy. When they feel they have ownership, when they're nourished, they flourish. That's what we want to do. We're covering a lot of material, so we're going to wrap things up now. Under my desk, I'm going to kind of pull away. I have, uh, I put my little Bozo doll because this guy Bozo here became, well, a great story on leadership for me. So this is the real Bozo. Uh, it's one of these punching dolls, like you push them and they come back up. The Bozo doll, I thought, oh, what I'll do is I will get him and we put little numbers on here. We'll do a Bozo battle. So the team, I invited our team, shoot the Bozo from a dart gun and whoever hits the nose first or gets the most points We'll win $5 and we'll do this every morning. It's a fun way to start the day. Day 1, everyone did it. Day 2, the interest was waning. By day 3, they're like, oh, we don't have to do that stupid Bozo battle, do we? And I felt diminished as a leader. I was like, oh, it was a stupid idea. Like, how silly is this thing? And so I grabbed Bozo under my arm and I started to walk out of the office. I said, gosh, people really saw this as a stupid idea. I feel like such a fool. And Jenna kind of heard me mumbling to myself. She goes, said, Mike, I want you to know something. Yeah, it was not a fun thing to do. It maybe wasn't a good idea, but she goes, I want you to know something. People don't care how you care, they care that you care. And that became a massive lesson for me. And this is what it is: great leadership is through effort. It's the desire and ability to change ourselves, to make an extraordinary effort. You will fail in this process. You won't be great at the entire FASO model and bridging that connection. That may not be what you excel at from day one, but if you don't make the effort, you're not building that bridge, and that's the problem. I challenge you to become the best leader, to aspire and make the effort to be the best leader you can, and accept the failures along the process because your team will notice that you're making the effort. Like I shared, I'm not a great leader. I aspire to be. I do everything I can to get better, including dumb things like that. I'm definitely a better leader than I was before, And my team, as a result, has responded by giving me their best performance. So put your effort, put your heart and soul into this, and people will respond. I'm wishing you tremendous success in your journey as a great leader.