387. Unlocking Exponential Growth: The Secret Sauce Behind Psychological Safety

Welcome to episode 387 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Hugh Massey, founder of DNA Behavior. Ready? Let's get started. You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer. Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I am joined by Hugh Massey. Hugh is the Executive Chairman and Founder of DNA Behavior International, the behavior and money insights company. He recognizes that to make quantum leaps in life and thrive for longer in a digital world, there's nothing more important than the health and fitness of your heart and brain. Hugh is most known as a behavioral solutions architect who self empowers people globally with increased behavior and money consciousness for unlocking exponential growth which has led to over 2 million individuals to experience reduced stress, greater happiness, more success and better health for longer. Drawing on over 4,000 scientifically measured behavior and money insights and 40 years of diverse international business experience and building on his deep understanding of all life energies, Hugh helps people develop the exponential 10 to the power of 9 growth mindset for unleashing their true money energy potential, enabling them to make quantum leaps in their life and business. This is accomplished by leveraging one's authentic identity and unlocking the congestion caused by the three dimensions of money. Hugh has authored three books, Mastering your Money, Energy, Financial DNA and Leadership Behavior DNA. And while most of my guests with books are here with a focus on those books and usually around launch time, we're doing something a little different with Hugh today. As you'll hear in our chat, this conversation came about today because I recently gave a talk to the Global association of Applied Behavioral Scientists or Gabs on my book what your employees need and can't tell you which Hugh attended. During the Q and A, he asked some questions and started a conversation about the importance of psychological safety into business and shared about some amazing stuff his company is doing with technology to layer this in for their clients. It sounded fascinating and we haven't had an episode yet on the show really dedicated to psychological safety, so it felt like a serendipitous interaction since I was booking and setting up interviews for this quarter and so here we are. I really loved this chat with Hugh and I hope you do too. Really quickly before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure. You know that there are links in the show, notes for everything including my top related past episodes and books, a timestamp summary of the episode, ways to get in contact with Hugh and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 387 now let's jump right in. Hugh Massie, welcome to the Brain Eat Business podcast.

It's great to be with you, Melina.

Yeah, well I am excited to chat with you. We just officially met. Well, we've been connected on LinkedIn for a while earlier this week and I will have told the story, you know, in the intro outro here and I'm delighted that you agreed to join me on the show for, for everyone who doesn't yet know you, can you share a little bit about yourself, your background and the work that you do.

So I am a behavioral solutions architect. I run a company called DNA Behavior and we are a behavioral sciences technology business. We're all about helping growth minded leaders build a more people centric business and with the objective of providing a better employee experience but also a better client experience. We use technology very heavily in that because in today's age that's what's required. But technology can now allow us to understand a person and then use it to interact with them more effectively, particularly in communication, matching talents to roles, having a conversation, scripting messages, whatever, you know, so that, that's what we, that's what we do. And I think technology is allowing us to do things that we perhaps couldn't do in the past very easily.

Yeah, well, I know and I'm sure same on your side, right? Like I have people asking all the time, you know, it's the AI and machine learning and behavioral science, like do they even go together? Like what or which one are you going to pick if you have to go down one route? Or the. Which is of course, well, like they go very well together and you need to understand behavior to create technology that's going to be properly supporting your people, your customers and everything else. And so, you know, really perfect place that y' all have created with the work that you do. How did you, you know, what was kind of the first foray into that? Was it tech side first and then behavioral stuff or all at the same time?

No, it was, it was behavior first and I think it's interesting for people to, to understand that. I'm not from a psychology background directly. I actually started life as a CPA or in Australia we called a chartered accountant. But in, in and I worked in one of the large accountancy firms, Arthur Anderson, at the time. It's no longer around, sadly, but, you know, it gave me a great workplace experience in, in the sense that I met a lot of people, saw a lot of different things going on, good and bad. But, you know, my foray into human behavior in some way started in there. Molina, because I, I was a tax specialist and, and we had to provide tax advice to clients, and I had to figure out, okay, this person over here is not very detailed. They actually asked me for the advice. They need it in a summary. What decision am I going to make? They're only going to spend a few minutes reading it, even though I've spent, and my team has spent hours crafting up a solution to some problem, but also knowing that there are other people in the organization that will probably read the advice from a governance perspective, a board of directors, some other chief tax officer or whoever it is, an auditor even. And so I started to learn that I had to present work differently for different people. And this is in the mid-1990s. And when I decided that my career at Arthur Anderson was finished for varying reasons, I think there was a desire to be an entrepreneur. There was also, you know, and I think this is what's touching me very deeply around psychological safety. And I know we'll come back around and talk to that, but there are a lot of circumstances there where I certainly didn't feel psychologically safe and, and I wasn't the only one. But, you know, the foray into human behavior then got a little bit more direct when I set up a wealth management family office business. And I started interacting with clients and I realized that they behaved differently under pressure. And I needed to know what that was and how do I communicate with people when they're under pressure. And often money is what causes pressure, and it does different things to different people. And if you can imagine, you know, I'm helping a family out, navigating the life and money decisions and events that they have to deal with. I've got to understand who each of them are as unique individuals. You can't treat husband and wife or patriarch matriarch and the children as the same people. They might be trying to come up together with the same decision, but they're different people. And so I have to understand how they behave. But also I realized that a lot of people have their guard up when they're dealing with advisors and consultants and accountants. They don't know what to say. So I've sort of had to figure out what's a way I'm going to get these people to talk more about themselves so that I really find out the truth. And in a lot of ways that psychological safety dressed up differently there. They don't know what to say and something. And as I found out with one of my clients, there was a psychological safety issue, if you want to call it that, or a communication issue between the husband and wife and they weren't sharing fully between themselves. So these issues run sort of deep and broad as far as I'm concerned. And I think that's. This is what took me into human behavior. And I wanted to have a process, Melina, that me as a leader, whether it's a leader in my business or as a leader of clients, I could share more of myself safely and then get, get the clients to go through or my employees a similar process and get people to more openly share who they are and talk about things. And when you get a level playing pitch, then those things can happen so long as everybody behaves properly. You know, you don't get mouthing off or threats in, in voicemails and things like that. You know, that's a little bit at times what I lived with when I worked in an accounting firm, you know, is that be well, you got to do this now and then some very aggressive stuff. And you realize, I don't know that that's quite the right way of asking me to do something. And I'm not, I'm not a pussycat in that sense. You just be direct and I'll go and get it done. But abuse is a different thing and it all comes up in lots of different ways. And I think this is, you know, what we were talking about the other day. You know, how I thought you brought up something that was really interesting and powerful around the fact that the cost of communication is 17 hours a week and things having to be recommunicated and re explained. Well, some of that is just really bad communication up front. Some of it I think is communication and learning style related. You know, we've probably all sat in a meeting and said something, you know, delivered a message, had a conversation and then you ask everybody to recap. And it's amazing how they've all heard different things. Right? That's human beings. But these are all the issues. But I think if you sort of said from a background perspective, I had my experiences working in Arthur Anderson, working as an employee, working with clients in my family wealth management business. I had a set of experiences and ADOL took me down the Path of saying, you know what? I need to have my own system that measures behaviors. And it wasn't just. I knew there were systems like Myers Briggs and Disc out there, but I needed something that went deeper, could be delivered in a more psychologically safe way, but also dealt with money, because money is a big issue that we all sort of, in a way, run away from. Money conversations are hard for people to have, whether it's in the workplace or at home, but we need to create a safe environment to have them. And that's. That sort of took me to America, and here I am talking to you.

Definitely. Well, and just to reference back where you were mentioning. So that where we connected earlier this week was because I was very fortunate to have been invited by the Global association of Applied Behavioral Scientists, of which we are both members, to do a talk about my book, what yout Employees need and Can't Tell youl, which was very exciting. We. One of the stats I talk about in the book and what we talked about on that in that session had to do with the. That 17 hours per person per week is spent clarifying something that was previously said. So much time. So much time. And I didn't even, you know, end up sharing in the conversation we had earlier this week that, you know, it's something like some 60, you know, so 50% of emails sent are misunderstood. Like, people don't know what you're talking about when you send it. And so that's bad, too, which is why we're having to clarify so much. And I believe it's that 68% of emails are unimportant because of all of this additional work and chasing and looking around and things. And so when we are more thoughtful to the people around us, we think about what we're asking, why we're talking about it, what matters to them. We're able to communicate in a way that is helping them to do something. And we're all kind of realizing we're in this together and how we can help support those around us to get things done as a team, essentially, is a lot of what I talk about in my book. And then, you know, you were bringing up at that point, psychological safety and some of the cool stuff that y' all are doing at your company. You mentioned. Let's. Let's dive in on the psychological safety stuff because I think that's an important place to start. And based on what you were just going through in your history. And of course, I know that not everyone listening, I guess, you know, we age ourselves in Some of this, but not everyone listening hears Arthur Anderson and thinks and has an alarm bell go off of knowing the company. Right.

I could give you one that everybody knows about if you like.

No, but I think, like, there are a lot of us that hear it and go, oh, and realizing why psychological safety kind of comes up there. So if you want to share some of what psychological safety means, as I said, we haven't talked about this as thoroughly on the show yet. And so I'm excited to be able to have that conversation. So if you can help define that for people, kind of what it means and yes, please, any examples you want to share, I think will be valuable.

Well, I think, and you know, for the, for the listeners of the, of this conversation, there's a company there that we all know, it's called Boeing, and there's a great Netflix movie about Boeing and its demise. And really, it gets down to. And I was watching it the other day while I was doing my peloton bike ride, and I just thought that this is fascinating. This is really connecting all the hot buttons for me, connecting all the dots and triggering me everywhere. I almost couldn't ride the bike. I was listening to this thing. And, but, but what, what it got down to was that, you know, management had such a push for, for financial results and they were dealing with the, you know, the pressure that's coming from Airbus because Airbus had started to make a leap on them. And so they designed this plane, the 737 Max, which is really a workaround solution on what they already had. And, and the, and the, and the innovation teams, the design teams, operations teams, are raising all these concerns in emails about the max, the need for pilots to be trained, et cetera. There was emails there about how we got to dodge the faa. The whole lot was being pushed up the line. And anybody that spoke out got fired and the emails got suppressed. And so, you know, the employees there eventually, at the end of the day, just shut their mouths and let it all go. And then the behavior of Boeing in dealing with the problem was suppression. And so that's a cultural issue inside that organization. But Boeing isn't the only one. You know, everybody at Arthur Anderson blames Enron for the failure of Arthur Andersen. Arthur Andersen had 9, 10, 12 other similar Enrons there. And there was a lot of psychological safety issues. Suppression, in fact, Enron itself inside that, if you really unravel it, psychological safety. And I think you could say that almost when any business is not working properly and not getting the results, there is a Psychological safety issue going on and it's really at the end of the day it's about the open, the ability for team members to share information upwards to raise a concern, raise an idea to take innovative risks in the business, deal with a customer the way that they see that fit. And you know, it doesn't mean that you can go and do bad things. But I think that people need to be free if they are properly put in the right roles, got the right experiences, need to be free to express themselves. And we all in the business have got to treat everything as a learning experience. In my company, I don't know everything and I rely on other people's inputs on things. I might make the final decision on a number of things, but my team also makes a lot of decisions and if one of them makes a mistake, I can't just go and bury them for that. In fact, I've got to support them. If you get a tough customer, right, and we've had those, who do you look after first, the customer or the employee? And I think this is where, you know, some people think a customer is always right, they aren't always right. And bad behavior from customer in our company doesn't get tolerated. But if it's triggered by bad employee behavior, that's a different matter, you know, and I think these are all the tightropes that we all walk every day. But you can't, you can't have suppression of thinking views of people and you certainly can't go around with a recrimination culture. So that's, that's where I think the psychological safety is. But I just, I just know Melina and everything I've been involved with in my 40 year business career, when things have gone well, I've looked, I've been reflecting on this. Psychological safety has been strong and where things have failed, including investments in businesses or whatever, the psychological safety has been bad. And anything that I've observed out there around others and obviously I'm much more in the behavioral world. It's poor psychological safety.

Yeah, yeah, I was reflecting on this too, just as you were even talking here. So the. One of the first real jobs I had was at an airline and in the. Like funny enough not. But the. So I worked at Alaska Airlines as we speak about the Max 9. And interesting more problems with Boeing and the Max 9 here. That happened just a few months ago. Just shocking stuff with the plane with Alaska Airlines. But when I worked there I was in the, I ended up being in the customer care department which was like the place you call when you're really mad and you want to yell at someone. That was me. I was the one answering the calls for that. And oh, my goodness, the types of complaints would run the gamut for sure. But I know, and I started in that department when I was 19 and had one of my managers that had said, you know, one of the leads or whatnot in the team, and she had said, I want you to know that I will never second guess a call that you've made to a customer. Like, whatever it is, whatever you say, you're gonna do what you can't do. I, like, I'm not gonna, you know, put you under the bus in that way. Like, I will always support it. So make sure that, you know, it's easy for me to do so. Right. Like, that's not gonna come back in a certain way. And knowing that, like, that next person in line is going to have to uphold whatever it is and that they are going to support my decision whatever it is, you know, there needs to be a reason if you can explain it. And I carried that with me and, you know, still do as far as when I have team members and things. And I know I gave the example in that gabs call that, you know, with my team at the financial institution that I was at, where I had told them to, like, I, like, I will own whatever it is if there's. If there's a mistake or decision that's make. I, like, it's me going in because you can delegate the a task, but not the responsibility with it. So I own it. And so whatever choices you make, like, let's be sure that we feel good about, you know, me being the one to go live by that and go into the CEO's office and explain it. Right. And I very rarely had to go and, you know, fall on the cumulative team sword in that way, but because my team, you know, they didn't want to put me in a bad spot in that way. And it. I think it helps. And they. But they know that they have that autonomy to make a decision, that we can have a conversation about something. Having that space be open, I think really makes a big difference for people being able to have conversations.

I think that, you know, in working in the team environment and you are the leader in that situation, for your team to know that you've got their back and that you are going to be the leader and take responsibility, that's really important for them to know and for them to see you do it. And it's interesting, you know, the leaders that will give you that pep talk, but then they'll run away at the first sign of any trouble and dump you under the bus. It builds no trust.

It's negative trust. Right. I mean, it's so much worse if you've promised that you won't and then you do.

Yeah. And it's ruined. It's basically ruined forever. And, you know, I think that when there's the open environment and there's been, as you said, the conversations about it, including a problem, and you've handled it evenly and then you. You're the one who's got to walk into the boss and deal with it. Everything works at the end of the day when you do that, because there's the right. I think there's the right energy there.

Yeah, definitely.

And that's. That's something. You know, as you were saying that and sort of giving that story or example, I was thinking about his energy. I think that how we as leaders show up each day and our mood is really important because if we come not in the right mood and do not show up the right way, that infects the whole team. And, you know, okay, everybody has a bad. Had something go wrong in their lives, you know, that you've got to deal with. So it's not like we're going to be perfect every day, but you've got to be really careful. It's just like if you had a bad day in the office, how you show up at home is really important too. This is all interrelated, but you've got to be able to manage your emotions. And when something goes wrong, you can't just hit the roof and go postal over it. Now, if someone's lying to you perpetually, it's a different matter, you know?

Right.

But everybody knows when that's happening, right?

Yeah, yeah. It's where you're just saying that of like, how things trickle into different areas. I have my list of episodes I'll be linking to in the show notes. So definitely the Speed of Trust by Stephen, Mr. Covey and when he was on the show talking about how you can build trust and through being vulnerable, things like that, really, really valuable. Also, Nuala Walsh, when she was on the show the first time, talking about some research she did on whistleblowing and how few people actually blow the whistle and kind of why that happens. And then I'm also going to link to an episode on the microstress effect, which was such an interesting. And showing how those little things can add up and spill over into where it's whether it's personal life coming into work, work into personal life, you know, and all, you know, in between and how that can trickle in a really negative or, you know, positive way if you do it right. But the point of that book being more about the negative stuff there when you think about doing some work. I know you said you were really interested in doing work kind of centered around psychological safety these days, like how have you work that into the, the work that you're doing. And I guess for someone who's listening, whether they know they're in an environment where psychological safety is not high and maybe whether they have power or not, you know, I think both sides are important here. You know, do you have advice or thoughts or resources for people that you, you know, to kind of help them out?

Yeah, it's, it's very, it's very interesting as we, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the work we do is in financial services type firms. Half of it would be in that area and then the other half is not out, is not in there. But what we find is that, you know, in this all starts often in the sales process. To be honest, people are, you know, looking at our website. The solution, oh, that looks good. They try it out. Well, how can we adopt it in the company and you know, where we've learned to go with that is that if the leader is not prepared to complete their DNA discovery profile assessment online and firstly, not prepared to complete it, but secondly not prepared to share it with their team members and talk about it, we actually generally don't want them as a client. We know that everything else is going to go downhill from there and the conversation does get to psychological safety, that, that we're saying that there's a lot of mileage you could make by being open and authentic and sharing who you are and trusting in that is going to help your business. And the problem, one of the factors that we measure, unlike pretty much any of the other systems out there is we actually do measure trust. So someone like me who is, I suppose a relatively take charge leader and I've had to learn to modify that, comes up lower on trust or more what we would call skeptical. So I am going to be a little bit more suspicious looking at things in a discerning way, checking details and those types of things. But you've got to learn to modify it. But if you are a leader that is not going to accept that that's your way. Now that is a strength too. There's strengths in it, but it's how do you use the strengths is really what's important. Important then things aren't going to go very far. And I think a lot of people look up at the top and if they're not doing certain things well, why am I going to do it? And, and so in where we have been very successful with our clients is that when from the top down they want to share who they are, have those conversations and build that into the organization and to the fabric of the organization. Things go way better when they don't. We find they actually don't want to use our solution and they say well I don't think anybody else will do this. Or yeah, that's, that's, that might be good for my junior team members, but I'm not going to do it. Or yeah, I might get a couple of clients to do it, but I'm not really going to give it to these other people. I know it's dead and they're not really engaging in psychological safety even if the, the rhetoric is there. But what we've done in our business, Molina is to with the technology is that everybody can access it and see who each other are. Now there are settings where you might limit certain things, but we don't, we don't encourage anybody not sharing their profile. If that is becomes a closed book, it's a problem. It's a core value of our company. And I sort of always at start call this knowing me knowing you. If I was not prepared to share who I was to my team and to my clients, I shouldn't expect them to do this. And I think that's the, you know, that's the framework of this and that's how we approach it. And then we've probably made it easier for people to use now that we've brought AI into it so that people can go into the gene what we call Gene AI tool. So Gene we picked up the name as a relates to DNA because your genes but also Gene. It can be a boy name or a girl name. And so everybody feels comfortable with that. But you can go in and ask her questions. So let's say that I've got to get Andrew to or and marry two very different people to work on an initiative. I can take the same core email and adapt it to each person's style because I can put it into Gene and say can you re write this for a person that's a community builder and for this person that's a strategist same message underneath. They got to do the same. You know the same thing's got to happen at the end of the day, but they'll hear it a little bit differently. It's written in their language. You know, one is a little bit more direct to the point, the other one's more approachable, you know, and so that's how technology can. The technology now can be used for good, to customize the language. But, you know, I think as we talked about yesterday, you. If you've got to write to a lot of people, it's not always easy to do that. But you. But if you know the styles, you can make that happen.

Yeah, yeah.

Technology allows you to do all those things these days.

I think that is so fascinating. And I love this opportunity to be using technology to better communicate with people in the way that they want to be communicated to and showing how that bit of thoughtfulness, to be able to say, hey, I get you. And so here's the information in the way that I think that I believe you would like to hear it. Right. That you're able to. To do that and not having to put such a burden on the sender of the email, the manager likely to say, now you have to sit down and think, okay, for teammate A, how would you write this email and then write a new email for teammate B and write a brand new email for teammate C? And I mean, it would take forever to be able to do that properly without having the technology. And that even just assumes that that person has the emotional intelligence to understand how that person really wants to be communicated to. Getting out of your own way enough to even know what it means to be, you know, a community builder versus a strategist and. And what they care about and how you could shift that language. And so having that support, I think, is really, really cool. Before we get into the way that the technology works, because I'm really intrigued to hear a little bit more about that, and I'm sure the audience is as well. Can you share a little bit about that? The system, like you said, you knew, there was Myers Briggs and discs and big five and whatnot. So what is different about your model and kind of what goes into that? What are some of the types of people you can be? How does that all come together?

Yeah, so in our model, people take. So it's all focused on measuring a person's natural, hardwired behavior. So I think as humans, our hard wiring, the core of who we are, is 85% by the time we're three years old and 95% set by the time you're seven. And that's been proven in science, but that's what we've worked with for the last 20 years. And when people are under pressure, that's what they revert back to. And in a way, that's where they're also innately more comfortable, generally speaking, in the environments that they're going to work in, live in and operate in. So to get people more aligned to that core and communicate with them on those terms, that's the key now. So in some ways, the questionnaire and the way you ask the questions is really important. And I think this is a part that's overlooked. So we use what's called a forced choice scoring model that uses singular words. So we took out situational bias. We're not asking people, well, you know, what would you do if your mother died, was diagnosed with a, you know, with cancer? And rank one to five? Well, your answer to that could vary depending on which way the wind's blowing, to be honest, or are you prepared to take a risk on your insurance policy, blah, blah, blah. And those answers change. And a lot of people don't know what to say to that. We just get people to choose between three single words. Are you most like aspiring or detailed or patient? And then you choose the least like. And so the model's set up that way. And then we know from the out, from the questions asked, takes 10 minutes who somebody is and what their. What the psychometric metrics, if you want to call it, are you. And we actually can measure 4,000. Now, when we report back to somebody, we just show them five that they need to know. But there is 4,000 under metrics, under the, under the surface or in the engine, if you want to call it that, depending on the settings that people are working with. But generally, you know, if you like, if you go and do a disk profile of Myers Briggs, it's telling you four things. But with us, we are going a bit further. We will tell you the same things that disk tells you, but we're going to tell you, do you trust? How do you set goal, how do goals, how do you take risks, how do you innovate? Or the reverse of that, how do you. Don't you do that? But it's also the language that it comes with in terms of we never use the word weaknesses. Everybody uses, oh, you've got strengths and weaknesses. Weaknesses is very disempowering word to you. So the lang. We use the word struggle, which is if you overplay your strengths, let's say you're really strong at talking and socially engaging. There's a day where that might backfire on you and it's to be aware of where that line is. Not addressing it on a repetitive basis can become a weakness or a bigger problem. But I don't think people want to be told they've got weaknesses and how the language is used is really important. So that's something that we've really infused into this. And you don't need to be a psychologist to understand it. You don't need to be, you know, it's not unfriendly, it's very approachable language. And I think they're the big differences. So it is the depth of it, the accuracy is very high, you know, and people have redone this one year later, five years later, 20 years later, and they come out very similar. And that's the proof in the pudding on the hard wiring, because the hard wiring actually doesn't change. People really only need to do it once. But of course there are retest situations. But what we did was when we got it right up front with a lot of work and that it's not something you just sit down one night and come up with a questionnaire. A lot of work, a lot of retesting, but it's proven to be extremely accurate and reliable and then there's lots of things you can do with it. And I think part of what we do that's different to everybody else, that we've got a lot of APIs, so, you know, application program interfaces where you could go into somebody else's platform, some other workforce type platform or financial planning platform. I mean we've got a whole lot of financial, health insurance, whatever, and complete the exercise there. It's processed in our system and then the results come back on that platform and then it's used in that environment on a day in, day out basis and it's programmed into software which sort of keeps it to being an alive life cycle experience as opposed to. Well, we did that. That's a nice 70 page report. And then it's dumped in the bottom drawer. It's a bit useless.

Yeah. So from what you were saying there, do you have people using it? Obviously you have people using it within internal teams. Right. So ideally, you know, it's something that the whole organization goes through and everybody does the test and then you're able to know who is whom and you can use that to communicate better. But do you also have people that are using it with their clients like you're saying, in that wealth management space? So if Someone's coming in and looking for that investment advisor and helping them to feel safe with the conversations they can have to help them to have better communication with their clients and customers as well.

I would say 90% of the businesses that we serve are using it with their clients.

Oh, interesting.

But it starts with the team first and then they're using it with the clients. Now that started because I was in the wealth management space and I wanted to use it with the clients and that was for how we went and sort of presented and solved the business. But as time's gone along, we've got all sorts of organizations now using this with their clients. People are getting the fact that, gee, if I know myself, I could start to deal better with my clients and.

They want to know, yeah, so is it most. So I know you said different types of industries. So wealth management, investment type services. What are some of the other types of spaces where this is Seeing technology.

Businesses serving clients, where I think where there's any situation where there is some ongoing engagement needed or ongoing relationship needed, then this gets done. You know, where there's any, any regular repetitive sales situation, communication situation, the system is being used in that way to understand some. The person they're interacting with that's outside of their team and outside the company. Now, you know, again, if you're a, let's say you're in a B2B business model and you're the salesperson responsible for going and selling kegs of beer to a bar, you're probably not going to do it, but nevertheless, you still gotta build a relationship with somebody and you're probably not gonna get them profiled, but you know a little bit more about yourself. Interesting how the sales go up and so it does sort of get used a little bit that way. I mean, okay, it's a little bit of guessing going on, but that's where people are sort of working on this to build that better relationship. But generally, Molina, it is going to be a business where there is a longer lasting relationship and there's a lot at stake, then this is getting done.

Yeah, that's fascinating. And what I really think is valuable in that is not relying on, I think what happens often if you do Myers, Briggs or disc or whatever else people, it's easy to find out what you are and then use that as a crutch or an explanation of like, well, I, I just send things this way because I'm a whatever, right? This is how we do things. And you make it kind of about you and not taking the time to invest and understand the person you're communicating to, which is so important. Right. And to see how maybe they're different than you and what they might be interested in and in that like, you know, treat people the way they want to be treated aspect of the world.

Well, and that's the difference sort of between the golden rule and the platinum rule, for sure. Communication, the golden rule is a bit more limited. Well, I'm this way, so it's okay for me to communicate with others that way. Platinum rule is no, I'm this way, but who is the person on the other side? And I need to adapt.

Right? Yeah. And, and I'm such a big advocate in the. It's our responsibility to help to communicate in the right way to other people and be thoughtful to what it is that they need to hear in the moment. Especially where, you know, we're typically any interaction, we're trying to get someone to do something. There's, we're asking them to, to do something, we're trying to nudge them and some way we're curious about getting them, you know, if it's a team member to get work done, if it's a client, it's someone you're selling to and to default to the way you like to do things. And just assuming that is how everyone wants to operate is, is silly. You know, when you look at that, I had a, a vendor once who ended up being the, the guy that I would call when I had just totally off the wall, ridiculous things, last minute ask, you know, he could always get something for me for, you know, marketing promotions and things like that. But early on in our working relationship, he insisted on calling to me and members of the team to follow up on stuff. Like we would send an email and ask a question. He would call back and leave a voicemail and say, okay, and call me back when you have time and I'll answer your questions and say no, like we're not gonna call. And so I ended up having to sit down, have a conversation with him and say, you know, we like working with you. We, we know you're doing great work and we will never be able to work in this way. If you're unable to adapt to the way that we need to work, we're gonna end up having to go with someone else. So if we email you, we need you to email back responses. That's just how we gotta do it. But you know, I think so many people end up ghosting their, their vendors, their clients, people that are pitching them on stuff. I Know, that was something where being ahead of a marketing department, I used to get pitched on everything all day, all the time. And I would tell people, like, please, like, send me the proposal, put the pricing in it. I, I don't need to have the big pitch meeting.

Right.

I get why you want to do it, but I just need to see the thing. And I promise I'll tell you if it's a no, like, when I can look at it, and I will get back to you, I will tell you. I'm not going to leave you hanging. And I cannot tell you how many people would just have this huge sigh of relief and say, oh, my God, thank you. Thank you so much that you would just tell us if we can let this go or not. Because you just. People just drag people along forever to avoid having the rough conversation. But it's so helpful. The other person on the other side typically actually wants that, if you're willing to have that conversation.

I think it's a really interesting point you've just brought up, and it's really another dimension of psychological safety, and it is relating to psychological safety in the sales process. And I think that, you know, if you want to have a relationship with the person down the track, you've got to respond back. I watch very carefully who responds to me and doesn't respond to me. It's interesting that there's somebody I'm building a relationship with for a little while now, but I know he's got a tendency just to email us to go out there in the ether and, you know, I sent him something fairly important this week, and I. And I said to our CEO, if he does not respond this week to even say, I got it, and I'll look at it when I can, his future with us will be limited because there'll be somebody else that wants to work that way. I don't need. Because I've emailed somebody to respond one minute later, but bearing the email, ignoring it. Nah. And not if you want a relationship with somebody. And it's like somebody was trying to sell me something, you know, from a company called PitchBook. I've done the demonstration. He's followed up. I said to him, follow me up in middle of February, did everything. Now I'm not ready to buy it. I actually love the product. But I said, look, reach back out this time and we'll assess whether if we're ready to use it then. But there's a relationship there, at least because I know then if I need to have a pricing discussion or more not so much to haggle the price, but to get set up properly. It's all going to work better. And I think there's so much disrespect these days around and with this ghosting and I don't get it. And for me, I've just come to the place, I don't want to deal with people that are going to do it.

Yeah, definitely.

And that goes with friends too. I'm not interested anymore with ghosting. I think you can at least respond now. You might be traveling people, that's again, you might be traveling indisposed, doing a presentation. You can't always respond a minute later.

Right.

You wouldn't get any work done, but you've got to respond.

Yeah, for sure.

Out of trust. You know, you talked about it before, the speed of trust. You know, I think it's all, it's all part of it and it's very brittle.

Definitely. And I, yes, I think like you said, it all comes back to that psychological safety, that giving something for others to get. Everything's a give and take. Right. As we look at different relationships, whether they're personal, professional, anything along those lines and you know, bringing it back to being thoughtful all the time is always where, where we go here at the brainy business. So I do want to make sure we have some time to talk about the technology aspect of what you do. And I think there's kind of a choose your own adventure moment. We, we get to these often in the show because I see multiple ways that we could go and you can kind of pick what feels best to you. So one aspect would be, I'm sure there are people who are listening that are thinking about setting up something that would be layering in technology into the work that they're doing. And so just even the idea of the process of starting to talk through the problem that you're solving and how to even think about building that out in a way that is going to be, you know, applicable and valuable for you and customers, I think could be interesting for people as well as, you know, kind of going just the path of, I guess, what it does and why it matters and you know, how you got to that point can work too. And there's always option C, which is if there's something else that you feel is more important since you know more about the work you do, you may choose that as well.

Yeah, I think that, well, you've given me a lot of latitude there.

I try.

But also I think just, you know, so that we, that we wrap up and end on a sort of strong and clear note. I think, you know, when we're talking about human behavior, a lot of the time people, the conversation gets to strengths and you know, getting people to work in their strengths and that's a big part of what we do. I absolutely part of the strengths based movement, getting people aligned to their strengths. But as a leader and then in a business, the holy grail of human behavior and dealing with it is dealing with the differences among people. And in a way, you know, whether you've got 10 people in your team or you leading an organization with thousands, you've got to deal with all of the differences that are there. And the more that you know who everybody is, you got a better chance with communicating with all of them and getting them to, to go much more in a straight line. You know, you see the, the graphics out there of the planes flying together or the birds, you know, moving as a flock, you know, in an organized way. If you visualize that, that's what you want to happen. And that can happen when you can communicate with everybody. But what I found with the technology that we have is not only does everybody in the business get profiled from the top down and do we create an open sharing environment? That's absolutely important because the profile itself doesn't work in that sense. It can't just be. It's not just a profile, it's how it's used, it's the language it's used with and it's the mindset. But what, what the tooling does. So with the gene AI that we built into our system enables people real time to take their profile and say, gee, I'm Hugh, I'm an initiator style. I operate this way. Gene, how am I now going to communicate with Molina that likes to communicate and operate this way? And how can we build a performance plan and have a conversation about it? Put that into Gene comes back the script, I go away and do it, or what questions do I need to ask this person? Because we're dealing with a touchy subject and it might include money, you can go and ask those questions. And so back to your point before it just needs a little bit of thought about how you got to prompt it. But if you've got clarity in your mind about the outcome that you want to get, and that's I think, where leaders often need to stand back and just get that mental clarity about what is the real objective here, what's the problem being solved, Then you can use the technology to help you bring everybody along and this can be done in that setting of I'm going to ask questions each time I interact with somebody. But it can also be set up to be used in a more automated way so that you take, you take my message and how it's carved up into four ways, eight ways. And then it's just programmed into HubSpot or Salesforce, whatever technology you want to use because we're connected to those platforms and outshoots to everybody and they're getting the same message just written differently to appeal to them. And you know, I think that you talk about 17 hours a week. I'm sure this will would cut down that 17 hours a week, you know, and talk about that across a lot of people. If a leader took, whether it's 10 minutes more to think about how they're going to deal with the situation or an hour more and then they do all of these things, think about the savings and it's huge, but it's being able to sort of make that little investment upfront I think can save you a whole lot later on.

Yes, absolutely. And kindred. We're very kindred spirit. So I think we've, we've known through our connections this week and previously too. And so I think anyone listening because will be resonating with that because if they resonate with what I talk about, definitely on the same page as what, what you're sharing.

Well, you touched every button for me in the gaps the other day. I didn't know what to expect except I like the title, you know, what's the thing that employees want but they can't say. I think that, you know, it's deep below the surface and you know, my interpretation of it was if we, if we create a better working environment, then things will get communicated better and they'll be able to say it. But, you know, there's many dimensions to it, Melina. Many dimensions.

Yes, definitely. Well, for everyone who is so excited now to learn more about you and your work and connect and, you know, what is the best path for them to do so.

So the best way to, you know, sort of get in contact with me and to have a look at what we do is just go to our website@dnabhavior.com there's plenty of resources there, videos, materials. You can try out doing the profile. We can set you up so you can see how to make it work, cycle in a psychologically safe way on your, you know, in your business. And I think that's, that's the best place. And my contact details can be found there as well.

Perfect. Well, we will of course link to those in the show notes for everyone and just thank you again Hugh for joining me on the show. It was a lot of fun to chat with you today.

Thank you Melena. It's been fantastic.

Thank you again to Hugh Massey for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I'm really glad that we finally had an episode around psychological safety because it's so important for businesses and I really like how this was able to weave in the role of technology, machine learning, AI and more because I know so many of you out there are looking for all the ways this can integrate into your business in a way that's valuable and not going to be detrimental or turn people off. I love how Hugh and the team at DNA Behavior have looked at ways to make email more appealing and likely to help individuals feel safe, seen and like they matter, while reducing the burden of the person sending the email. It's so fantastic and a real win all the way around. What opportunities are out there in your business to leverage technology to make jobs easier and help people to feel valued? Maybe it's around email and communication. Maybe it's removing tedious work that could be better performed by a machine. Maybe it's helping to get responses out sooner to people who want to learn more about your services. Maybe it's helping new staffers to get easier access to information without having to ask a single person who knows it all and could really leave your company in the lurch if they ever decide to leave. All this and more is possible when you thoughtfully consider technology and layer in some psychological safety to ensure the team knows they're valued and can speak up. I've linked to the recent episodes with Huggy Rao on the Friction Project that one specifically because of how he talks about asking questions and being thoughtful. Removing friction, being this balance and support of how being curious is actually generous to other people. I think it really dovetails nicely with this episode and I've also linked to my conversation with Eve Boudreau from Google Cloud with his tips around using technology in similar ways at companies. Those are waiting for you in the show notes, along with links to other top related episodes, books and ways to connect with Hugh and the DNA Behavior team and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 387 and thank you again to Hugh Massey for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful. Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.