270. Mike Goldman | The Strength of Talent

Hello, Book Thinkers family, and welcome to our personal development podcast, Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books. During each episode, we interview one of the world's top authors, and as a listener, you can expect to discover new books, new mentors, and new resources that you can use to achieve more and live better.

Hello, Book Thinkers family, and welcome to our personal development podcast, Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books.

In today's episode, we have the pleasure to interview Mike Goldman, author of The Strength of Talent: How to Grow People to Grow Your Profit. Mike is a leadership team coach, bestselling author, TEDx speaker, and host of the Better Leadership Team show. Over his 30-plus-year career, he's worked with companies like Disney, Verizon, Chanel, and Polo Ralph Lauren, and his insights have been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and Chief Executive Magazine. Widely regarded by CEOs as the expert on building great leadership teams, Mike helps leaders grow their business by first growing their people. In this episode, you'll learn why traditional performance management is broken and what to do instead, how to retain and develop your highest performers while avoiding polished mediocrity, and how to make people growth your number one priority in measurable, practical ways. Now get ready to learn and enjoy this incredible conversation with Mike Goldman.

Mike Goldman, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. I'm excited to chat with you about your brand new book, The Strength of Talent. So tell us, what problem is this book solving? That's my first question for you today.

Yeah, it's, it's a great question. I have been coaching and consulting for over 35 years now, and I know I don't look that old, but, but I'm old. And, you know, what, what I have seen is that more and more traditional performance management— annual performance reviews, uh, PIPs, 360s, you know, the annual goal setting— performance management is killing our companies. Traditional performance management just doesn't work. And I've spent the last 12 years working with my clients on a better way. And, and because when one of the really important things that, that I think a lot of leaders talk about but they don't back it up with action is you hear very often, well, people are our greatest asset. And that sounds great, but it's BS, frankly, for most companies. When times are tough, one of the first budgets to get cut is your people development budget. And I think it's important people understand that the number one driver of profit growth is people growth. It's not a new strategy. It's not a new technology. It's not a new market. It's people growth. So, we need to make people growth our number one priority. And the biggest mistake leaders make is that people growth happens when they have the time, as opposed to it being their most important thing.

So what are some of the big ways that people growth gets allocated inside of a budget? Are you talking about paying for a team to attend in-person conferences? Are you talking about handing them a book every once in a while and say, read and implement this? What are the drivers of people growth?

Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned budget because I think that's actually part of the problem is people are like, well, how much of our budget should we allocate? And the right people growth is tough to measure in terms of dollars. What does it cost you to align around a set of expectations with your people? What does it cost you to make sure you're having weekly one-on-one meetings to hold people accountable, to give them feedback, to coach them? What does it cost you as a group of leaders to hold each other accountable for improving strength of talent on your team and improving performance? It's not about the, the, the book we're buying for everybody or the leadership development program we've just built or the training we're going to send people to. And I'm not saying those things are wrong. Certainly, I We want people to buy books. That's a good thing. But it's really about those things that aren't measured. Those are the most important things.

Like what? Can you give us a couple of examples? Yeah.

One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is there is very little alignment between what their expectations are of performance and their direct reports' expectations. In fact, saying there's little alignment is kind because that makes it sound like there is an understanding of the leader of what they expect, and there's a different understanding of the team member of what's expected. That's kind because most leaders don't know what they expect. I was in— I did a session for 100 executives in Madison, Wisconsin 2 weeks ago. And one of the things I asked them to do is I said, Write down the names of all of your direct reports. And next to those names, I want you to write what are the 2 to 3 most important measures of success for each of those direct reports. And 90% of them struggled. They said they didn't struggle to write down the names of the folks that reported to them. They were really good at that. But coming up with the measures The expectations, you might call them key performance indicators, which is only one part of expectations, is productivity and this culture fit. But I was asking them specifically about productivity and they drew a blank. And, and one of the things I found is that unclear expectations lead to unacceptable results. They don't lead to unclear results. They lead to unacceptable results. So there's something that's not necessarily going to go in a budget. How much money did you spend aligning around expectations? But man, you know, if you're a leader listening to this, and if you don't have a clear picture of what success looks like for each member of your team, as soon as you're done listening to this, stop whatever else you're doing. And, and draft those expectations. Better yet, collaborate on those expectations with your direct reports. But that's one example of something that certainly costs time, but it doesn't go on anybody's budget. It's not sending them to training. But man, how do we expect them to perform if we're not clear on what performance even means?

Yeah, there's that Peter Drucker quote, what's not being measured can't be managed. And I'll admit, I'll admit, Mike, I'll admit that going through this book, I felt called out a little bit. You know, there's this, there's this pattern of behavior of leadership that I've sort of fallen into where I thought that by building a self-managed company and giving my team a big leash and saying, you know what your job is, just go execute it, I don't want to micromanage you, that My expectations have become less clear over time, and I'm failing my team because of that. And now I've got a small business. I have 10 people on my team, but that's no excuse. I mean, I, I need to implement everything that I learned inside of your book, and I'm sure most of the audience listening today feels the same way.

And, and don't confuse Setting clear expectations and holding people accountable with micromanagement.

And I did—

That's the trap we fall into.

Yeah.

Because we think that's micromanagement. And, you know, it's not about— it's not about micromanaging. It's not about doing other people's jobs. It's not about jumping in to help when we should leave well enough alone. Absolutely, let's hire great people and Trust them to do great work. But we have to set clear expectations. We have to hold people accountable. And for the companies that are large enough to have leadership teams, those teams need to get together. The leaders, the senior leaders need to get together and hold each other accountable for improving the performance of their people. And that's something that rarely, if ever, happens.

Yeah. What are some of the big companies that, that you've worked with? Uh, feel free to toss out a couple of names on here that you've seen also struggled with this in the past, just so that the smaller business owners in the audience know it happens in larger organizations too.

Well, I, I, I'm not gonna have a great answer to that question because my focus is small and mid-market companies. Um, I will tell you companies like Microsoft ditched the idea of an annual performance review years ago. And just to kind of dive into that, a big company doing something different, and they struggled with it for years. But most of my clients really struggle just defining what the measures of success ought to be. They struggle with defining how you— how do you define and measure culture fit? That's a struggle for big and small companies. And I was just having a conversation with one of my clients that is a fairly new client. They're trying to build a lot of this. And the conversation the head of HR wanted to have is, hey, Mike, I want your help implementing an annual performance review process. We've never had one and we need one. And my first piece of advice was, this is going to be easy because I'm going to tell you not to implement an annual performance review process. When I'm with audiences, you know, very often I ask people, how many of you do annual performance reviews? And 3/4 of them raise their hands. And then I say, how many of you believe that annual performance reviews are the worst invention ever created in business? And the same damn people raise their hands. And, and some people are smirking because they're like, yeah, we do quarterly performance reviews. And my answer is, congrats, you do a crappy process 4 times a year. So, part of the problem is some of the smaller companies are aspiring to do things like annual performance reviews because they hear bigger companies do that. And that's just the wrong way to do it. Bigger companies are screwing that up too. Imagine anybody listening that's a sports fan. We're going into playoff season for baseball. I grew up in the Bronx. I'm a big Yankee fan. Yeah. But could you imagine the manager of a baseball team seeing a player in a slump all year and waiting until the year is over to say, hey, I've been watching you all year. Let me tell you what I think you're doing wrong so you could fix it next season. Like, you don't do that in Little League baseball, let alone the pros. And yet we do that in our companies all the time. We need a better way. And that's what my book and my, what I call the Talent Density System, is all about. It's a different way to do it, not only to set expectations and hold people accountable, but to coach and develop people and give them feedback every week, not once a quarter and not once a year.

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Now, Mike, I just had a totally random thought related to this as you were speaking, and I don't remember whether or not you addressed this in the book, but it sounds like moving from an annual or quarterly review to a real-time review weekly, whatever the case is, and changing the process a little bit would actually improve employee retention. I mean, so many companies right now are struggling to retain their talent, and it sounds like getting more involved and as a leader showing that you care in the development of this person would actually improve retention on the back end. Is that what you found as well?

It does, it does. But, but I'm going to be more specific because it does 2 things that are really important. It improves retention, but it improves retention of your highest performers. One of the things that happens when you implement a process like this is the bright light of accountability shines down on people, and your highest performers Just love that. They're waiting for that. Your lowest performers kind of scatter when they see that. So what happens is, from a retention standpoint, is there are people you will actually lose. You will lose some of your lowest performers who are very uncomfortable with that bright light of accountability. You will retain a lot of your best performers Because they love that. And it kind of leads me to another big mistake I made as a leader, and I see most leaders make, is we spend so much time with our lowest-performing people. We overinvest in our low performers, and we underinvest in our highest performers. And if you think about it, it's simple, right? I mean, we can talk for half a day just on this one subject. But if you think about it, it's simple. It's something I call high-performance math. You take your— and I'm going to pick a salesperson just because it's a very measurable position. You take your top salesperson. You work with that top salesperson. You coach them. You develop them. You challenge them. You raise the bar. And you help them to improve their performance, which probably means revenue, new revenue, you help them to improve that by 10%. Now you take one of your lowest performers, you coach, you develop, you teach, you challenge them, all these things, and you help them to improve their performance by 10%. Which number is bigger?

The math is mathing. Yeah. The higher performer, that the 10% is a bigger number, of course.

Yeah. And the other, and the other thing that's super important other than, than the math that just works is your highest performing people want to grow. They want to be challenged. If they don't grow with you, they will grow with someone else. I've been there. That's been me many, many years ago when I had a leader that annual review time said to me, keep up the good work. I was 30 years old. Keep up the good work? Yeah, I've gotten better career advice from a fortune cookie. Keep up— it was at that moment I decided I need to— needed to go somewhere else in order to grow. We need to be investing in our best people. And by the way, sometimes the, the, the best way to help support our best people is to fire are worst. And that's, you know, so many leaders keep underperforming or toxic people around, not only for months, but for quarters and for years. And the answer I get is, Mike, you don't understand, it's complicated. No, I understand it's complicated. And you get exactly what you tolerate.

Yeah, you had some stories of that in the book.

Yeah, there's so many stories from my own life and from my clients that just prove this out.

Yeah, what I love about this point— sometimes you hear this as it relates to your strengths. I mean, as an individual human being focused on personal development, I can't fill every little gap in my knowledge base, but I can learn more about the things that I focus on on a daily basis. Double down on your strengths. Don't try to patch up every little weakness that you have, right? Remove them, delegate them, hire somebody else to fill in those gaps. It'll bring them energy. It doesn't bring me energy. And so, it seems so obvious to make the same comparison to business, but I feel like so many people rarely do. They try to lift up their low performers. They try to get them to be a great culture fit, even if it's a square peg in a round hole. And ultimately, that leads to poorer leadership, right?

Yeah. And here's what happens. Here's a picture that may be really helpful for folks to get them out of this habit. And again, I feel like I'm looking in the mirror and talking to myself because this was my habit for the longest time. But imagine you've got a whole bunch of high performers and a whole bunch of low performers. Imagine you are working your butt off, investing a ton of time, most of your time working with those low performers. What happens? Do those low performers become high performers?

No.

Probably not. What happens is we end up dragging those people up to maybe average, probably not even that high. But we drag them up to something that may be acceptable. So, we're making our low performers a little bit better. Okay. When we're not focused on our high-performing folks, on challenging them, coaching them, developing them, teaching them, Mentoring them, when we're not focused on that, what happens to their performance? Do they become low performers? No. Now, some might leave. But let's even assume they stay. What happens to their performance? Well, they get a little stale. You're not paying attention to them. You're paying attention to all the low-performing folks or the toxic folks. So their high performance is going to come down a little bit. It's not going to become low performance typically, but it comes down. So, picture this. You now have better low performers and worse high performers. You picture that in your head, you realize what you have is something I like to call polished mediocrity.

Yeah.

And that polished mediocrity is not what wins in business. And it's not what's going to help you sleep soundly at night.

Yeah. And I can imagine if we use the example of sales again, because it's easy to quantify, that your high performers will decrease their performance a little bit, your low performers increase their performance a little bit, and it washes out, right? It's all even again. And so, your company hasn't grown. You've just kind of made everybody a little bit more mediocre.

Yeah. And, and you, and you've got mediocrity. Yeah, exactly. That's what you've got. And that's the big challenge for companies is they got a whole bunch of folks in their organization that are fine. They're doing a good job. Good enough is not good enough, right? If we're gonna be great companies, we need great people. So we need a different way of thinking about it.

Way back in the day, Mike, before I, I went into BookThinkers full-time, I was working for a software company and it was acquired by a VC. And the VC came in and on day one they said, in a few months we'll be doing a performance review. We are going to fire the bottom 20% of each department. And naturally what that would do was kind of raise the minimum standards because now somebody who was performing, let's just say, at the 21st percentile is now the bottom. And, uh, it would just raise the caliber of what was happening and they would replace it with new kind of fresh blood and they would set those expectations up front. And they would say, hey, every quarter we fire the bottom 20% and we continue to raise the bar. And it takes a special type of person to get excited about that. But it is the person that when the accountability spotlight shines on you, you get excited about it because, you know, you're competing for something special. And, you know, that's not exactly what you're teaching, but I think it's a representation of this kind of mindset.

It could be that the challenge I have with that mindset, and that's kind of the Jack Welch GE mindset from many, many years ago. For folks that are old like me to remember Jack Welch, is, you know, it's— I don't think it's about firing the bottom 20%. And I know you don't mean literally like that's what it's all about, but it's not about firing the bottom 20%. You could have a team of all high-performing folks. Don't fire the bottom 20%. You've got a great team.

That's a great point.

You could also have a team of 80% low-performing folks. It's not about comparing people to each other. It's about comparing people to expectations. It's about how they're performing against expectations. Don't create an environment where in order for me to stick around, I've got to be better than you or better. Don't create an environment where— what do they say when the bear is chasing you? I guess I have to— I don't have to be fast. I guess I have to be faster than you.

Right, right.

So, it's not about that. It's really just about— and by the way, even the low performers, it sounds kind of heartless. One of my philosophies, or philosophy I've learned, I didn't make it up, is fire fast, hire slow.

Mm-hmm.

And fire fast sounds heartless, but here's why it's not heartless, is I truly believe that everyone could perform as a superstar Somewhere. Right now, until I said the word somewhere, it sounds like a, like a BS kind of statement, like that's kind of crazy. But I do believe everyone can perform as a superstar somewhere. And when we keep low-performing folks around, I actually think we're hurting them.

Right.

And, and, and this idea of everyone could be a superstar somewhere, I don't just believe as a leader, I believe it as a father. My son, I have a son, he's now 31 years old, but he's got Asperger's syndrome. And I remember when, when he was younger and we were having a lot of struggles, there was a story on the news that one of the high-tech companies was only hiring autistic adults to do their system testing, to test their code, because the autistic adults had a way better ability than most of us more typical people a way better ability to hyperfocus on something over and over and over again, which is what it took to test programs, to test code. So they— so I truly believe that everyone, I don't care who you are, everyone's got the ability to be great somewhere. And we're actually hurting people by keeping them around if they're never going to be a high performer In our companies or on our team.

I think that's a beautiful way to articulate it, and you're totally right. I had an experience in my own company, BookThinkers, a number of years ago where I kept somebody on staff for too long until I had a mentor teach me that same lesson, that, hey, this person on your team is probably going to be a high performer somewhere else, but you're tolerating their low performance, and therefore you're keeping them away from their potential. And that reframe helped me say, you're totally right. And so I was able to let that person go. In a few months, they reached back out to me and said, hey, I landed a dream job, and they were so happy about it. And so I can, I can totally back up what you're saying there.

Love it.

Love it.

Yeah, I see it all the time. And, you know, it's, it helps. You know, the reason why people hold off On the difficult conversation and firing, or I like to call it coaching out people on their team. It's because— it's not because they're bad people or they're not smart. We're human beings. And it's a tough thing to do. I'm not sure there's anything more difficult than firing someone from your team. But it is an important skill and something that's important for you to feel comfortable with. And if reframing it that way, helps you do a better job of helping men and helping them and helping your company at the same time, then it's a really important reframe.

Mike, can you give us one more example of a mistake that you see leaders making?

One, another big mistake is, again, people like to say people are our greatest asset. But here's an example of where I call bull on that is when I'm together with a group of leaders— typically for me it's CEOs of mid-market companies— if I go around that room and I ask each of them, as I do, you know, how are you guys doing on profitability so far this year, they could all tell me down to the 10th of a percent how they're doing compared to last year and how they're doing compared to plan. They got it. But then I say, how are you doing on people growth? And I get answers like, oh, pretty good. I think we're on the right track. That's not a measure. If the number one driver of profit growth is people growth, well, we've got a problem, right? Because there's this cliché, you can't manage what you don't measure. And you said that was kind of a John Maxwell thing as well. It's a cliché because it's true. Well, if the number one driver of profit growth is people growth, that means we need to measure people growth. Pretty good is not a measure. So one of the things that I've built with my clients over the last 10 years, and it's in the book, is something I call the Talent Density Indicator, the TDI. And there is a whole framework for how to assess performance, and it categorizes people into different levels of performance. And the Talent Density Indicator is a measure.

Okay.

And very simply, it's the percent of your folks that you consider high-performing minus the percent that are low-performing. And there's a couple different categories of low performance in my model. But you subtract your low-performing percent from your high-performing percent and you get a number. You get a percent somewhere between positive 100% and negative 100%.

Right.

If you've got all high-performing folks, that's positive 100%. All low-performing, it's negative. Normally, you're going to be somewhere in the middle. But what that becomes is that's a measure that becomes a benchmark. And while there's no right number, you should be at 42.5%. You know, if you're at zero or negative, you got some problems. You have, you have more low-performing folks on your team than high-performing. If you have all high-performing folks on your team, it may feel great, but you better coach them and challenge them and raise the bar. Help them grow or they're going to go somewhere else to grow. So, you've got work to do. And that number, that TDI becomes a benchmark just like profit or revenue benchmarking. That becomes a benchmark and you could start holding the team and the individuals on the team accountable for raising that TDI.

I love that you make people growth measurable. And Admittedly, I went through your book pretty quickly, and I have to go back through the entire book slowly and implement it. What do you think the right timeline is for somebody to self-implement this material?

I believe you start— what I've seen, and by the way, part of what I do is help people implement.

Which I want to ask you about in a minute.

But absolutely, if you're going to self-implement, because I can't help everybody and I want people to get value from this This book is start with the senior leadership team, which means if you are a business owner, CEO, call it whatever you want, it means work with your senior leadership team to implement this process. Do not say, as some have done, and I'm flattered by it, that, oh my God, this is a great process. We're doing it for everybody. You, you can't have a great rollout of a mediocre process. We need to make the process great. And I suggest start it at the senior leadership team level. Get good there before you start cascading it down to anyone else. That also means if you read the book or you're listening to this and you're not the business owner or a CEO, you may be a member of that senior leadership team. Well, then self-serving, buy the book for the other members of your team. Talk to your CEO about it. Again, try to implement it as a senior leadership team. And if that feels difficult, if you feel like, well, they're not really on board, but I want to do this, then do it with your direct reports. But, but the idea is start small, get good at it. And when I say get good at it, initially, there are a lot of leaders on a team are protective over their people. They won't give great assessments because they don't want to get challenged to really coach someone or coach someone out of an organization. So, it takes some time to get this right. So, don't cascade it out through the organization until you do.

And if you are a troop on the battlefield and you feel like, hey, you wish your leadership team would implement something like this, pass it up the chain. I mean, I would, you know, I love when My team members come to me and say, hey, I read something great in this book. I think we should implement it at Book Thinkers. And so, uh, you know, hopefully you're in an environment, if you're listening or watching today's podcast, where you're capable of doing something like that at any level. And then, Mike, I love, you know, I love books like yours because as a business owner, I read it, I understand it. I know that I could self-implement, but sometimes there are shortcuts where you can hire the author. to come into your organization and help you implement the material. So, what's available for people that are curious about hiring you individually?

Yeah, if you go to my website, which is mike-goldman.com, you'll see a lot of the things that I do. But one very specific to this book and this framework is I have something called the Talent Density Launchpad, which is a workshop. Typically, it's with the CEO and the leadership team. To exactly what it says, to launch this thing, to do the— to help them set the right expectations, to assess performance in this way for the first time with the team, to come up with actions for each member of the team, to come up with ways to hold each other accountable. And then talk about how do we start cascading this down through the organization? When do we start? And as I said, it's probably not right away, but we talk about that. So, that's one way that I help clients do this. And in process, and I wish this is something I could get out there now, but I'm working on it. But I'm also working on a web-based application I call Talent Density Systems that will help automate this process and do a better job of accountability because it will all be in a web-based application. So, excited about that coming up. But for now, if you want help, you can either go to strengthoftalent.com, learn more about the book and everything there, or go to mike-goldman.com and you'll see some ways that I can help.

All right, great. I've got a few more questions before I wrap up today. How does your system, from your perspective, compare to something like EOS? If somebody's running on EOS, should they add your system on top of it? Is it complementary, competitive? What's your perspective there?

I wish I told you to ask that question before because I friggin' love that question. So, the 2 things I hear about a lot are EOS and some— I don't know if you've ever heard of the Nine Box. So, I'll start with EOS, but I want to talk about Nine Box for a minute too, if we've got time. But EOS, in my larger coaching practice, EOS sometimes is a competitor of mine. And frankly, I have a lot of good things to say about EOS in total. And some of what I do looks very similar to EOS. They have something called the People Analyzer within EOS. While I believe EOS is good at a lot of things, my view is the People Analyzer It's just not deep enough. It's, you know, get it, want it, capacity to do it. It's better than not evaluating folks, but I don't think it goes deep enough around measures of success. It doesn't go deep enough around culture fit. There aren't prescribed actions depending on the level of performance. There's no measure like the Talent Density Indicator for you to use to know how you're doing, benchmark it, and hold people accountable. So, it's a fine starting point, but I think it's missing a lot. And then, the other tool I hear a lot is the Nine Box. And the Nine Box is a— it's 2 axes, and one is performance. I'm sorry, one is performance, and one is— the other axis is potential. Now, I have something similar. My model is 2 axes as well. But it's productivity and culture fit. Here's the problem I have with performance versus potential. Performance is a word that no one really understands. Is performance about productivity? Is it about behavior? Is it some combination of both? I believe performance is productivity and culture fit, and that's why I separate the two on different axes. Their second axis is Is potential. I believe everybody has potential.

Yeah, that's hard to judge.

It's very hard to judge. And they wind up with these 9 boxes that get really complicated, and it's not actionable. So, so it becomes, you know, some have used it well, because they put a lot of their own thoughts around morphing it into something that works better for them. But it's almost, you know, I think, I think EOS is a little too simplistic. I think Ninebox is a combination of A, too complicated, but B, I think it just measures the wrong things.

Well, I love your differentiator is a really big focus on people, right? People growth. And so I see you as either a complement or a competitor, but with a very clear differentiator from those systems.

Yeah, I agree.

Um, what, what do you hope happens when the book comes out here shortly? I mean, what's, what's the idea?

Other than, other than me becoming, uh, richer and more famous than I am today?

Other than those, other than those beautiful outcomes. Yeah.

I really— my, my big goal for this, and, and this may sound soft and squishy, I don't know, maybe I don't care, But I really look at this as a movement. You know, there was a study done. The Mercer Group did a study and found only 2% of leaders believe their performance management processes were adding real value. Well, if the number one driver of profit growth is people growth, that's a big problem if our people growth processes are not working. So I really hope this starts a movement. to fix what's broken.

Hmm.

And to, to, for, for leaders. And I'm actually doing a session in about a month for, for a whole bunch of coaches like me to help them learn this process so they can share it with their clients. But I really believe this can start a movement, not just to help companies grow. And yeah, that's part of it. The, the subtitle of the book is Grow Your People to Grow Your Profits. So I'm all about company growth and profitability. But I think it could start a movement to help leaders become way less frustrated and way less overwhelmed because they've got a team that can go out there and perform. And I think even bigger than that, what I hope this creates is more growing and more fulfilling environments for the team members, let alone the leaders. You know, I'm 60 years old and I, you know, some people at my age are starting to slow down. Uh, I feel like I haven't peaked yet. Like, I love what I do so much. There's so much more I want to do. And when I hear people in their 30s talking about how many years they got left until they could retire, and they're looking forward to retirement, that kills me inside. You know, I think retirement should be like a dirty word. Like, I, I want people to feel so fulfilled by what they're doing. They're like, why would I want to stop this? And, and to me, that's, that's more— yes, I want people to buy the book, and I want to go out there and speak about the book, and I want to work with more companies, but I really hope this starts a movement to, to just change the way people think about work and the way people lead.

Yeah, fulfillment is the name of the game. And we were just joking around, mostly. We've only ever bought lottery tickets once or twice in our life, but My wife and I bought lottery tickets, whatever that was, a month ago when something hit a billion dollars. And, and I was serious when I was telling my wife that, yeah, if we win the million dollars, the billion dollars, of course some things would change, but I would go right back to work on Monday morning because I love what I do. It brings me energy when I wake up in the morning. I say, I can't wait to sit down in front of my computer to read these books, to learn from these amazing people. And you're right in that creating more fulfilling environments helps profitability. Of course it does, because employees are more engaged, team members are more engaged. They want to show up and do great work. One final question for you, and this is a very open-ended question, so feel free to take it wherever you'd like to go. But when you think about the recent emergence of artificial intelligence, how does that play into a model like yours and a philosophy like yours?

It's an interesting question. I, and, and, you know, to me, any new technology like this is, is like fire. You know, people could use it for good or people could use it for, for evil. And, you know, I am very focused on the good that it can do. And in fact, I'll give you a real-life example of it. So I have built a tool called, called Ask Mike, which takes my my 3 books and all of the solo episodes of my podcast and all my social media. It's got, it's got me in there. And there's a whole bunch of coaches within it. There's People Coach and Difficult Conversation Coach and, and Rock Coach, which is a quarterly priority. And, and, you know, I've got about 6 or 7 different coaches and my clients actually are starting to use those coaches even in my sessions. There's KPI Coach. They're working to come up with and align around better productivity measures. They're going into KPI Coach and having it help them come up with those measures. Now, you could look at that and say, you know, hey, Mike, you know, doesn't that replace what you do? And the answer is, yeah, it does replace some of what I do. And by the way, if anybody's gonna replace me, it's gonna be me. So I'm gonna build these things. But more importantly, what it does for me, and I think we could kind of extend this out to how this impacts companies, is I need to start thinking really quickly about how my coaching with my teams change. If there's more they can do using the AI that they used to rely on me for, that doesn't mean they don't need me. That means when I'm together with them, I can elevate them to a whole different level. I could focus on team dynamics and less on— Blocking and tackling that they can do without me with the help of an AI. And I think as leaders, that's something we need to think about is, you know, help our team members not fear it, that it's gonna take their job, but how do we take what we do to the next level? How do you take the parts of the job that are a pain in the neck that take too long? How do we make that quicker so we can all focus on the things that are gonna add more value? to our clients, more value to each other. I'm excited about it. I think, I think it opens up a whole new world of, of coaching and leadership that I don't even think we're scratching the surface of.

I love the optimism, and I, I would fall into the same side of the spectrum that you do. You might as well use it for good. Well, Mike, today's been a great conversation. For those, again, that would like to get a copy of your book or maybe reach out to you individually, They'd like to hire you to come in and implement this. Where can they go? What can they do?

For the book, depending on when you're listening to this, if you're listening to this before October 14th, 2025, or there around, best place to go is strengthoftalent.com because you'll be pre-ordering. And when you pre-order, you get over $400 worth of goodies. Once that launch week passes, if you're kind of after October 21st, 22nd. Then go to Amazon, wherever you buy books, go to, go to my website, mike-goldman.com. Uh, there you will find the book, and you'll also find a number of ways that if you, if you need some help, there are a number of ways that, that I can help. Uh, on there you could also request a complimentary coaching call where we could talk about any challenges you, you're having, and maybe I could help, or, or maybe on that call we'll Solve some problems you've got.

Amazing. And okay, here's the final question. And of course, all of that'll be in the show notes below. I think I know the answer to this question, but if this book was deleted, gone, wiped from the internet, no longer exists, but you could leave the world with just one simple message from the book, what would that be?

My, my focus would be on leaders. And it would be to— my message to all leaders is make people growth your number one priority, not just in the words you say, but in the actions you take.

And there's usually a difference between the words somebody says and the actions they take. So make sure they're aligned, right?

Absolutely.

Thank you for the great conversation today, Mike.

Thank you, Nick. This was great.

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