147 - Mastering the Art of Hiring and Collaborating with Experts' Perspective with Kolby Goodman

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Colby Goodman, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO and founder of First Best Now. Which is an HR recruiting consulting firm. And you can be found at first— nope, bestfirstnow.com. Bestfirstnow.com. I want to get that right, right? Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Doug. I appreciate it.

So give us a little bit of a backstory. You live in San Diego. You're pretty amazing work. Tell us a little bit about who you are, where you are.

Yeah, the, you know, I have always been somebody who I think has been able to kind of meld well with all people, um, understanding that it's kind of always about the other person, um, trying to be a giver versus a taker. And I think where that led me ultimately is in this, into the service industry and into the technical service industry. So I spent, started my career in a decade of IT operations, uh, leadership and management. And found my way into more important rooms, conference rooms, working with C-level people and helping them with everything as simple as resetting a password to setting up huge data centers. And what I found in that work was that we— there's a lot of disconnect when it comes to leadership. I think that they seem to say what they think that they're saying, but it's not being heard by the right people. And there just needs to be some voice of reason in the room. And I gravitated toward doing that in the later of my career and finding the right people to do the right job. Right? We can't do everything ourselves. We shouldn't be doing everything ourselves. It's not, um, cost-worthy. It's not sanity-worthy. And so I took that inspiration and took that, uh, gift and started to work with individuals who were finding trouble in landing in the right opportunities and didn't know how to, how to present them skills, their skills, own their expertise. I mean, really be the best that they could be. Started up a business, um, or as, as a job coach helping people seek out dream positions. And over the next decade of doing that, helped over 4,000 people, spoke to over 20,000 in live conferences, events, and workshops. And was really blessed in helping a lot of people legitimately change their lives throughout all that time. What I found here, Doug, is that those high achievers, those people who are willing to take the time, energy, and the money to invest in themselves to go find a place where they could contribute even more, were being subconsciously and consciously pushed away by poor leadership, right? Whether it's through a really bad candidate experience, whether it's through generic interview questions, whether it's through ghosting or any of those kind of cliché experiences that candidates have, a lot of these, I think, well-meaning managers and leaders were shooting themselves in the foot because they weren't able to identify and onboard the right people. And that's where Best First Now came in, is finding a way to kind of go full circle in helping leadership not simply identify who is qualified for the job, who can simply just check the box, because goodness me, there's so many people out there that can do that. But how do you find somebody who come in and be your ideal problem solver? And that's where, you know, I help my clients with this, not simply just hire for, for skills and qualifications, but what are you trying to offload? What do you need done better? How do you make your life easier? By hiring your next rock star.

It sounds like a dream come true for a leader to be able to do that, right? I mean, what leader in the world wouldn't want to be able to make every hire their next best big rock star?

I mean, I, I think that's where people go into this process, right? Of course they want, you know, they— we come up against a really major pain point that's forcing us to hire as the solution. But what I found, unfortunately, is we tend to hire in ways that we've been hired. And what I've seen is there's been some generational trauma when it comes to leadership and management. And so if we were hired, if we were hired poorly, if the questions that we were asked weren't very in-depth and were very surface level and not intriguing, that's how we hire. And we go off that instinct and we go off a feeling and there's just no real connection. We're hiring based on if somebody can predict what we're going to ask them, which is not really a great indicator of long-term success.

You're suggesting that learning how to hire is a skill set that must be mastered.

It's a skill set that must be mastered if you want to grow and if you want to grow with as minimal pain and suffering as possible.

Right. And I'm also picking up that this is not an intuitive, anybody can do it kind of thing. You got to, you got to find somebody like yourself who really knows how to do it and study with them for a while.

I think partnering with somebody who knows both sides of the equation.

Okay.

Right.

Even though in the last, you know, few years we've gone through this extreme pendulum swings when it comes to the job market, whether it's swung in the areas of the job seekers, swung in the areas of the employers, you need to go about this with strategy. Or else you're gonna cost yourself so much time, ton of money and, and energy. Where I have found good capable leaders who have said, screw it, I don't need to hire anybody, I'll just do this work myself. Work that is beneath them, work that is way below their hourly wage, and work that if we're given to the right person, not only would allow that work to, to be vibrant and profitable, but would give that leader the right space and bandwidth to do what's in their genius zone, which is something that I borrowed from The Big Leap book by Jay Johnson. It's like, stop doing the things that don't bring you joy, don't bring you the right energy, that are a waste of your time. But if you're not able to find the right person to do that for you, to build a partnership, you're gonna be drowning in your own success until you don't want it anymore.

Hmm. So what is it that gets you up in the morning, gets you excited to go to work?

For me, it's helping people relieve that pain, relieve that pain and find joy in the work that they're doing. Right? Because when I used to be on the candidate side of things, that was it, right? It was helping people find what are the problems that they want to solve. And that's different than asking the question of, well, what do you want to do next? Those are two very different questions. The doing of the job, and I think we all know this, can be a little monotonous, can be a little numbing. But if we know that it's going to a greater cause, a bigger good, a more interesting problem, we can trudge through it. And so what I do now is go to the other side of the table, go to the leaders like your listeners, and say, what is the work that you want to empower somebody with? How do we help you help yourself? By engaging with an expert who can relieve your pain and knowing that when I help a candidate get placed, when I help a team devise a strategy to onboard the new rock star and they get the results of that, there's a, there's a weight lifted off their shoulders and they can do not simply more, but they can do better. And I think universally the karma comes back to me because if more people are doing the jobs that they want, and not doing jobs that they shouldn't, it'll come back to me at some point later down the road.

Right.

So when, when you're, when you get engaged by an organization or by a leadership team to do, what are the, what are typically the kinds of things that you are doing diagnostically to figure out what's going on?

Figuring out what does, what problems are those leaders and those companies facing that they want to give to an expert? Too often people are going out saying, well, we need to hire a new accountant. They need to know QuickBooks, they need to know ledgers, they need to know, you know, basic math and Excel. It's like, okay, like we can find people that will do that. But in order to find the rock stars, let's figure out what problems do you want that accountant to solve, right? Do you want them to help you figure out not only where your books are currently, but do you want them to figure out where you've been? What's the trends? What is the trajectory? Why would that benefit you? What does that prevent? What is the lack of that information preventing you from doing that? And really looking at it as a holistic problem-solving venture versus simply just a hiring one.

Hmm.

And what kind of responses do you get from people?

There's a bit of pushback cuz it's just a, it's just a new way.

I am not surprised.

It's a new way of thinking.

Mm-hmm.

Right? Like, cuz we don't, As leaders and as, as owner, business owners, we, we want to serve and we want to, you know, check the box. And we just— unfortunately, there's so much stuff going on that a lot of people don't take a beat to think strategically now. And so when I come in somewhere and say, well, you know, we just want you to find this next person, I can find you the next person, but let's help you figure out who the right person is going to And it's helping them take a pause, exercise patience, and get it right with a little bit of investment of time and energy versus having to repeat the process and be frustrated by high turnover, low performers, and wasted time in training and onboarding.

And what kind of success do people have in, in, in turning to this kind of more strategic process?

An immensely better success than they ever had before.

Right?

Because what— the way that I look at it is I'm not a recruiter, right? I'm not going out there convincing other people to leave their stable jobs to come work for you, right? I'm not in the sales business. What I am in the business of doing is helping companies present their culture, present their employee brand, and encourage the right people to come to them to solve the right problems. And what that allows my clients to do is to cut down the time in interviewing and onboarding. Uh, while they may get less candidates in total, we're not— this is not a volume business, this is a quality business. So having them get more quality people in the door and the tenure of those people and the impact those people have in the first 30, 60, 90 days, so much more impactful, right? Because we're not simply just hiring for qualifications or requirements. We're hiring for culture and attitude too, so that you're not having to reinvent the wheel or suffer through somebody's employment. You're, again, you're partnering with somebody long-term.

So you live, you live down in Southern, in Southern Southern California, San Diego. Yes. Um, very interesting, diverse employment mix down there. Um, tell us about the kind of industries that you work in.

Yeah, so, um, law, technology, um, um, biopharma is a lot of my pop. I mean, kind of, it breaks out pretty nicely to what's here pop in, in terms of the population. Um, and what they're f— what I'm finding is that those who are— have higher technical skills, and not technology skills, right, but technical skills, skills that are science, technology, engineering, math-based, those STEM fields, right? Those are the leaders that tend to have the most frustration because as a technical person, and I know this from being a recovering technical professional myself, is they tend to look for somebody who checks the boxes. Oh, you know that programming language. Oh, you've worked on this hardware before, or you've created similar drugs before. Okay, you can do the job, right? And there's, there's not enough time and energy spent in training leaders how to develop a candidate experience, how to guide an interview conversation, ask the right questions, follow up correctly so that we go beyond the technical capabilities, right? Like I said, it's, it's, you're hiring a person and not a robot. And while that sounds so totally obvious to you and me, I think it kind of falls flat on too many people that forces them to either hire a subpar person and suffer with the consequences or hire nobody long-term and suffer the consequences of having to do all the work themselves.

Yeah, it strikes me that people are afraid of looking, of either of demonstrating authenticity and looking for authenticity. There's a big fear factor there.

Authenticity equal— expressing it equals vulnerability. Right, right. And we, especially when the candidate side is like, they're trying to avoid rejection as failure as much as possible. They have every guard up that you can imagine. And so it's the interviewer's job to help them ease into the conversation. And I think showing vulnerability, showing authenticity first helps somebody put their guard down. But if, again, if it's armor against armor in that conversation, there's no way you can get deep. There's no way you can get real. And even if you're falsely persuaded to hire that person, that armor's gonna come off eventually, and you better pray and hope that you got lucky in picking the right person before it's too late.

That's right. And, and I, it's been my experience working in the field that I work in, which is in— I'm a lawyer turned peacemaker professionally— that technical people, people who are STEM trained, tend to be underdeveloped emotionally. And they tend to, they tend to be underdeveloped in terms of their emotional competencies because, one, they haven't been exposed to any good training, and two, they get attracted to STEM because it's kind of cut and dried.

Very logical.

And here, well, yeah, it could be logical, but the rules and, you know, everything, yes, the processes, and it's very predictable. Whereas working with human beings, until you're trained, appear to be chaotic, unpredictable, irrational messes that we just don't want to mess with. That's totally not true, by the way. That's a myth that's been out there for 4,000 we're extremely predictable. And once you learn how to understand the essence of human nature, which is that we are not rational beings, we're emotional beings, then all of a sudden you get clarity around behaviors that before didn't make any sense to you. But my sense is that the STEM people are gonna have a difficult time getting authentic and being and finding authentic people because they are emotion averse. I think, yeah. But it—

and I think what you've said here is absolutely right. They just haven't had the opportunity to self-explore and do that good work to find that, right? And it's not until there's enough real internal pain that forces us to look that way. And go for it.

I was gonna say, and I mean, How much pain can you tolerate? I read a, I read a statistic earlier this fall that Amazon is losing something like $18 billion a year on employee turnover. Whoa, that is a third of their total gross profit. Whoa, how come nobody isn't paying? No, how come no one's paying attention to that number?

I think it, I think people are, I think it's, it's a hard solution, right? It's not a mathematical, logical, 1 1 always equals 2 solution. And I think it takes a little bit longer. It takes a lot more vulnerability. It takes a lot more practice to solve those kinds of problems. And that's what I commend the people that look to work with me have is that like, hey, like it's not working. And something needs to change and that change needs to first come with us as an organization. And that's, if you, you know, those are the kind of companies employees want to align themselves with, right? Like people who are vulnerable, people who will tell the truth, people who will, you know, avoid sugarcoating.

And people who will be leaders and, you know, who will grow you as a subordinate. Teach you how to be a leader.

Yeah.

Teach you how to be successful. I mean, I, in my mind, leaders have, well, there are a lot of different functions, but number one, leaders have got to hire people who know how to hire. And number two, they've got to be leading two levels down, teaching and training the next group of leaders coming up. Leaders should be teaching themselves out of a job.

And I think that's a part— that's the other issue is there's so much— there's gatekeeping, there's territory, there's a lot of territorial practice and stuff, right? And I think that comes from extremely high up, if not the highest tip of the point, is that like you can't lead— paranoia and quality leadership are mutually exclusive.

Exactly, right?

And so by understanding first how you are as a leader and how you develop other leaders, and that's a lot what we go through with my clients, It's like, okay, well, what, where do you, and not to ask a cliché question, but like, what do you want this person to be in 5? How are you gonna help them get there? What do you need them to bring to the table to get help you get started? And again, I think hiring is, hiring has historically been treated like a bandaid, and I'm trying to go out there and help people look at it as important life-changing surgery.

Right. I mean, hiring in many companies, it's turn it over to HR and make HR take care of the problem and get it off my plate. But you can't do that. Not to be, not in important jobs.

I mean, it, it's, it surprises me how much, how much of that, what you just mentioned is true. It's like, well, I'm just gonna hand it off to the recruiter, talent acquisition, HR, and they'll figure it out. It's like, you're gonna spend more time with this new hire, maybe more than your significant other, your kids, you know, your pets, right? And so you should be very strategic about how you hire. It's funny, like, you know, I, uh, the hiring process, it's like having to get married after the second date. It seems absolutely crazy, right? It seems totally backwards and insane, but it's just what we get to deal with. And so if you're not strategizing how you're going in to develop and maintain that relationship, which is what it is between two or more human beings, if you're just going about it by the seat of your pants, transactional, you're, you're gonna suffer so much. You're gonna— and maybe your listeners are experiencing that right now, and I would challenge them to just take back and say, hey, like, what, what's broken here? What isn't clear? What, where is the personality, you know, clashing? But also Am I looking at this person to delegate work to as a, you know, again, a robot, or am I looking to bring on an impactful problem solver who can reach to the top of their potential while relieving my pain and creating the most powerful win-win you can in business?

How important— we're going to get to the core of the show— how important is listening in all of this?

Oh my, it's everything, right?

It's listening.

And it—

I was gonna say, how many good listeners do you actually come across?

Not as, as many as I would hope there to be in the world. I think we— and I fall into this trap too. It's like, we are survival beings, right? We are in it for ourselves. And so the presence required to truly listen is just not practiced that often, if at all. I've been a practicing meditator for many years. I have not— and I say the word practicing because I really mean it. I have not— I'm not a perfected meditator. I'm a practicing meditator. And even that has not made me to a level that I want. But I think that on top of making sure that you're present, that you're clear of mind, and that you're omnifocused, I think the other great superpower that a good leader and a great hiring manager can have is the ability to go deeper, to ask good questions. Because if it's so, it's so surprising, and people I work with who are saying, well, you know, I ask these questions and I'm getting these answers and everything seems fine. And then when they get on the job, I realize that's all BS. Well, if you're asking generic and obvious questions, you can't be expecting amazing and differentiating answers. You have to go deep. And I think it's about, like you said, the listening, helping people go deeper and listen for really what they're saying. Or if you are not clear about it, being vulnerable, saying, you know what, I don't, help me understand where you're going there. And those are two hacks I wanna pass along to your clients here is two probing hacks that I really like are starting your questions with, help me understand. I love that because it gets people off of being defensive. Help me understand what exactly you did with that manager to, to gain that result versus tell me what you did, right? And it just eases it a little bit more. Or on the same, the same, uh, Wavelength is, I'm just curious, I'm just curious, like, why did you go from job A to job B?

Right?

And that just brings some levity and it brings trust. And again, you get people to lower their defenses, which is your number one objective in any interview.

Right. Ted, tell me, explain to me, describe for me.

Mm-hmm.

Those are your open-ended questions. And then what I teach people to do is listen for the emotions. What's the emo— and then reflect back the emotions when they— and so when you say, tell me about this situation you had, and somebody will start talking about it and then say, oh, that made you really frustrated. You, oh, that made you really excited. I mean, you reflect back their emotional experience, forget their words.

I think what you just hit on there, Doug, is something that I taught exclusively when I worked client side. Historically, a lot of people are going through the STAR method of interview. Situation, task, action, result, right? It all plot driven. But what's missing from that, right? Character and emotion, right? And that's needs to be sought after. That needs to be 1,000% clear before you ever commit somebody to a role. But again, we hire how we've been hired. And so as long, as long as somebody is able to tell me how they did the job and they can check the box, I'm gonna hire them. But as a listener to your podcast, I'm sure your audience out there doesn't see themselves as an average leader. They see themselves as trying to get better and pushing forward and growing. So interject some emotion and character, and I think you need to first do that for yourself and then give people a safe space, not to use a cliché, but a safe space to share and to be honest and vulnerable. Because I think you need, again, you just need to leave their guard down or else it becomes transactional and worse, it becomes performative.

That's right. So the way that you create safety is to validate another person's emotions. That's the fastest, easiest, most powerful way to create emotional safety or to create psychological safety on a team is listen to emotions and then validate them. And that's a skill, believe it or not, that can be mastered in about 8 weeks. It's what I teach. I've worked, I've worked in maximum security prisons training murderers to be peacemakers to stop prison violence. And I worked in the Congressional Budget Office training senior analysts how to de-escalate members of Congress. It's amazing. And it works everywhere.

And I think that's the thing that a lot of leaders who are trying to be better don't understand.

They haven't had the training.

They don't have the training or they don't think that it's possible to learn those soft skills.

Right?

Oh, I'm—

term soft skills. You know where that came from? No. It came from the US Army Training Command in 1964.

Okay.

And so the US Army Training Command was trying to distinguish the kind of skills that a commander had to have to control the battle space as opposed to a guy who drove a truck or drove a tank or shot a rifle. And so they came up with this term soft skills to distinguish it from fixing a truck, for example. But unfortunately, it got picked up as a pejorative in the business world. And you hear all these business people say, oh, that's just that soft skills crap, you know, and I just shake my head. I mean, come on. It came from the US Army. It's designed to teach all the skills that a commander has to have that are not shooting a rifle or driving a tank, which is a whole bunch of stuff.

What I think that goes back to what you said earlier, Doug, about, you know, hiring yourself out of the job.

Yeah.

People they don't tend— they are promoted into leadership, right? But I found not because they are— because they can lead, but because they can do the thing really well.

That's right. And that's a huge mistake. And nobody ever asks a producer, hey, would you like to be a leader? And if the producer says yeah, fine, we need to send you to leadership school. Do you know how many hours of training a corporal has to take before he or she can even apply for sergeant school in leadership training. They've got to take a 30-day course in leadership as, as an 18-year-old or 19-year-old before they can even qualify to go to basic NCO training. I mean, the military does an amazing job at training leaders and they start right at the beginning. And yet in corporate America, it, it Not even thought of, not even considered. It's crazy.

I think, yes, I would agree. I think it, you know, we get management training program, you take a 22-year-old and you're getting them to going around to production and to logistics and the sales and to administrative, and they get their exposure there and that's kind of it. And it's a, it's a bit of a sink or swim from there. And I think you're a lot of, too many companies are putting good, potentially great leaders at risk by hoping they figure it out on their own.

Right. You can't figure out leadership on your own, just like any other thing. It's a whole set of skills. It's a set of attitudes and motivations that you have to learn, and you can be taught these skills. They're teachable skills.

And I think with all that as well, there needs to be long-term habit building and accountability.

That's right. Absolutely.

And I think that's where somebody like you comes in to say, hey, like, here are the tools and I'm gonna make sure you're using them.

Right, right.

Cuz it's, it's all about habit building because I think we could, and that's where I'm also trying to evolve the way that I give my workshops is peak excitement and app, uh, application of the skillset happens about 5 minutes before a 90-minute workshop is done. But then for every day after that, the half-life of that dramatically dips. And so how do you— yeah. And so developing long-term success programs so that these leaders can continue working on themselves, continue to contributing to the business and learning these new skills. But I think too, also want to dig in and dig deeper into the company because they say, well, you know what, my boss told me I should take this this workshop and in working with these providers, working with my boss on this, I'm learning more about myself. And it gets them excited and it gets them indebted to you, not simply as somebody who signs the paycheck, but as somebody who is there to contribute to who they are as a whole person.

I was just gonna—

and that's how you eliminate turnover.

On the workshop thing, you're right about the half-life. So what I do now in my workshops, I, I teach deescalate, de-escalation work, how to calm an angry person in 90 seconds or less. But I never do a one-off workshop. You hire me for a workshop and you're gonna have at least 4 1-hour Zoom follow-ups after that for 4 weeks after the workshop. And that's the only way I'll do business because I know that coming in and taking somebody's money and not having follow-up is, is a waste. It's a waste of my time and it's a waste of the company's time.

I totally agree.

So that's what I do. And if you don't wanna do it, then I'm not the right guy for you. Well, we come to the end of our 30 minutes.

One more question, Colby.

What's one thing about yourself that we would never know unless you revealed it to us?

Great question. Um, I, uh, spent 7 years as a professional improv comedian.

Um, so not comedy.

Wow.

Yeah.

So I'm not quite Jerry Seinfeld with a microphone and a stand. Um, but I was, uh, excited enough slash dumb enough to get up in front of hundreds of people and take one or two word suggestions and spin it out into full scenes and characters and situations. Um, and I think that experience in literally and figuratively working without a net helped me become a better listener. The yes and principle is rule number one in improv. And also to just know that the time and our words are ephemeral. They go like that. And you cannot regret what's happening before and have anxiety what's happening next. You just got to be here or else you're going to miss it all.

You know, that's right. Great. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time with us, Colby. I mean, I just love the conversation.

Doug, it's been my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on. Absolutely.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com.

Podcast.

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