Episode 137: How to Build a Kick-Ass Team with Claudia St. John

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

I do have a promotional products client who said to me, "You mean to tell me I have to praise all of these snowflakes when I'm paying them to do the work in the first place?" And here's my answer: Yes, yes, you do. You need to celebrate that. And, and data shows it over and over and over again. If you look at the Gallup poll, it's called the Q12 beta analysis, and it looks at the 12 attributes that highly engaged employees say are present at work, the most important things. And they are things, and this is in order of importance. Number 1, I know what's expected of me at work. Number 2, I have the tools necessary to do my job right. Number 3, somebody has given me praise or encouragement for a good job in the last 7 days.

7 days?

In the last 7 days. And on that whole list of things, money is not there.

We are an industry that rests on two pillars. Number one, a strong interdependency. We rely on an incredibly complex supply chain. And number two, we rely on a complex form of ingenuity. We take a product that anyone can get, and with our unique clients and with a talented team, we transform those products into an experience that no one else can emulate while under intense deadlines. That degree of complexity between the ideation process and the supply chain requires a diverse and talented group of people working in harmony. How do we ensure we are building the absolute best teams? How do we hire better, onboard better, retain and motivate? And how do we get our teams working better together? After all, your clients hire you to come up with not just any ideas, but with the best ideas. That's the subject of our episode today. And our guest is the gifted speaker Claudia St. John, who is the author of Transforming Teams Tips for Improving Collaboration and Building Trust. And she's the founder of Affinity HR Group, a national human resources and management consulting firm that specializes in hiring and recruiting and employee engagement. Claudia's weekly HR Minute emails and monthly articles are followed by thousands of business leaders nationwide. Claudia also knows our business. She knows our industry very well, which is why I love her insight. Also, we're honored to have Claudia as a keynote speaker at SKU Camp this year. She will be leading a workshop on this very topic. We'll be going much deeper. SKU Camp registration, by the is now open as of this week. It will be held September 13th through the 16th in Austin, Texas at the beautiful South Congress Hotel. Mark Graham and I fell in love with this property when we visited last year. It's quirky and cool and has all the SCU Camp vibe you could want. We have new surprises planned this year and the lineup of session leaders include, and I love this, Brandon Konovitz with Twelve NYC, Sam Brown with Proven, Ben Adams with Advocate, Yvonne Zeeman and Anna Nguyen from Monarch and Company, Isaac Etzroni with Imprint Genius, Kola and Angie Svek from Soul and Swag, Winston Lowe from Creative Boulevard, Nate Bailey from Ideation, and with even more speakers to come. SKU Camp is our fastest selling event. I highly encourage you, don't think about it too long. Hop over to skucamp.com and secure your tickets before they're gone. We purposefully capped this event. We want it to be big enough to meet new friends, but intimate enough to maximize our time together as a community.

So tickets are limited.

Again, that's skucamp.com, Austin, Texas, September 13th through 16th. Cannot wait to see you there. This episode is brought to you by CommonSkew, the platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. You can learn more or you can just start your free trial now at commonskew.com. Now here's my chat with our good friend Claudia.

Claudia, I can't tell you how excited we are to have you speaking at Sku Camp this year in Austin, Texas.

I'm so I'm really, really looking forward to that.

What can we look forward to at SCU Camp this year with you speaking?

The thing that I'm most excited about for this presentation, so we're doing From Hiring to Inspiring: How to Build a Kick-Ass Team. It's really sort of going through the fundamental pieces of how do you really develop that team that is inspired and gets energy from working together and you see it all around. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. I mean, we'll talk a lot about that, but my favorite part is that once As we go through some of the concepts and the visualization of what that team looks like and how do you get there, we're really going to be able to spend some time so that the participants who are there can go deeper with one another on the different elements, whether it's hiring or onboarding or engaging with one another. So there's a really core interactive learning, sharing piece, networking piece to that content that I'm really excited about. About.

I am really excited about this because your book, Transforming Teams: Tips for Improving Collaboration and Building Trust, is huge for our business. I mean, that's all we do all day long is ideate with our teams and with the supply chain network. As you know, because you've worked with folks in our business, it's crucial that we create this environment of incredible teams, but also that we inspire one another to greater work all the time. So this is why I'm really excited about having you at SKU Camp. Let's get into— let's give folks a little overview and kind of a taste of what they're in for just by going through some of your top tips as we look at building a kick-ass team. On your blog, Beth wrote this, that as of November 30th, 2019, the US unemployment rate was 3.5%. The US Department of Labor generally considers an unemployment rate of 4% or less to be full employment, and 34 states now have unemployment rates of 4% or less. We haven't seen a labor market this tight in 50 years. The article goes on to state that employers need to shift their focus to headhunting. How do we practically do this? And I ask this too because you'll, you'll have some folks that have tried this and they'll say it didn't work.

So I think that's a really great question. And the labor market being this tight means essentially this: everybody who wants a job has a job, right? So the person that you want is employed. Yeah, they're, they're currently employed. They're working happily, maybe happily, unhappily, we don't know, but they currently have a job. And so, right, a lot of our clients are frustrated because they put out, um, you know, really great job posts, uh, and they put them out on indeed.com, but they're not getting qualified candidates. And that's because the candidates that they want aren't looking for jobs. They have, right? Yeah. So, so this is why I love working with this industry this industry knows how to promote itself. This industry is fun. This industry is sexy. There are so many cool ways to put content on stuff that is exciting and different and new and eye-catching, right? Yeah. Yep. So, so the job really is for companies to take all of that creative energy and start putting it toward hiring their own talent. Telling their story, putting it out there in very creative ways. You guys are more creative than I am, but so that your message that you're out there doing really fun hip stuff is out there. So that includes social media, right? Using your Instagram accounts and the Instagram accounts of your employees to celebrate what a cool culture you are. Click here to apply for this job. It involves making sure that everybody knows that you are an awesome team and you're looking for more team members. You're looking for more crewmates.

Is it simple sometimes as us doing that? Because we really— do we relegate hiring to Indeed.com and then we don't do enough of our own recruiting within the channels that we spend? We spend so much of our time thinking of these channels as marketing channels for customers only. That we don't think enough about these for recruitment.

It's an asset that you have that most other industries don't have. So I don't think that folks think about it, but they should be. And, you know, and you see some— you see it when you're, when you're watching your own clients, right? You're watching companies in this space. You see them, you know, promoting their jobs and promoting their opportunities. And what it always invokes in me is like, oh man, I'd love to work there. So it's a combination of being very, very committed to telling your message in a cool, fun way to your employees, to your communities, to your clients, to your social media networks, everywhere you can put it out there to send your message loud and wide. It also oftentimes means hiring a headhunter. So for example, we are headhunters. Everybody that is a headhunter, we're all using the same tools that are all accessible to every client today. What do I mean by that? LinkedIn, you can buy a resume database and you can use key search terms to find employees with the talent that you're looking for working in the companies that you'd love to take an employee from. I never recommend poaching from somebody within your industry if they're part of PPAI or they're part of, you know, some of the other— we don't want to be stealing from one to the other. But, you know, there are people out there in this space doing cool things. Send them an email, right? You don't feel comfortable sending them an email, hire a college kid to do it anonymously for you. But all those resume databases, those talent databases, whether it's Indeed, whether it's ZipRecruiter, whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's even CareerBuilder, like you can buy access to those resume databases and, and, and look for and reach out to potential candidates. Yeah. There's no magic sauce. That's what all of us recruiters are doing. We're all— that's what we're doing.

Right, right. Well, according to LinkedIn, 48% of new hires come from referrals from existing employees. Is it also as simple as engaging your own workforce first? Absolutely. And sometimes this breaks down. So, you would think— I think most people think they're doing that. But then what they'll do is they'll turn to their colleagues, they'll turn to their employees and say, hey, we're looking to hire for this position. And then it just sort of goes dormant. But if 48% of new hires come from referrals from our existing employees, that's probably something we should push a little harder as opposed to mentioning it once and then letting it sort of dissipate. Oh, absolutely.

And I also say throw some money at it, man. I mean, if you're going to hire, let's just say you're hiring a normal recruiter, that's going to cost you, you know, $15,000, $20,000, $25,000 to fill a position. Give an employee $1,500 to bring in a successful candidate. Give them like serious money, right? Give them a week off, buy them a flight to LA and back, whatever it is. That dollar that you spend is a fraction of what you will pay if you have to go through— I love that idea.

Yeah, you have to go do it again and again because you failed. And yeah, absolutely, exactly.

So I say make those employee referral programs, make them hip and cool, but definitely make them financially meaningful. And you also have to make sure that the employee knows Okay, like, so I— one of the statistics is that people who are highly engaged, they have a best friend at work. I would never hire my best friend because she's a little bit of a, you know, of a disaster. And so some people are nervous about recommending their friends and family because they don't want their— they can't really vouch for whether that employee is going to be awesome. So I think it's also sending the message to employees that, look, hey, bring them in the door. That's your job. Let us develop them and manage them. That's our job, right? So your job is done once they show up on the first day with a smile on their face and are ready to go. Then you're— Yeah, yeah.

On this, on this point of, of hiring, right, you have what you call the rule of thirds, which I think many of us understand. The first two points that are— and I want to oversimplify these, but in the essence of time, past experience is your first point. The resume, you know, is this the right person? Are they a good fit culturally? Are they a good fit for our business? Are they a good fit for the position? But then your third point, I have seen I've got a question for you. It is so hard for business owners and hiring managers to implement what seems to be the easiest tactic in the world— assessments. Yes, they're vitally important. How effective have you found these with the companies that you consult with?

All right, so I'm going to give you— I actually have data. So usually I, usually I talk in empirical terms, but when we started as recruiters, we went through after a few years and looked at how many of the placements we had put there were still there after 1 year, and we found 70 were. That meant that 30% of our placements were gone. And we have performance guarantees on those things. And so we put in place just the DiSC behavioral model, and that retention rate went up to 84%. We now have a Trimetrics HD. And you know what, I can talk for days about the testing that we use. There are a lot of tests out there. They are affordable. There's no reason not to use it. But once we put this in, our retention rate is 93%. And it's not going to get any better than that, right?

How do you define retention rate?

They're there after a year. OK. OK. We place them, and 12 months later, they're still there.

Let me ask you this. I agree with you. For one thing, the reason assessments are so vitally important is it gets the business owner or the hiring manager out of their head, out of their own head. They get out of the cycle, the pattern that they're used to. They talk amongst their team. They talk amongst themselves. But they don't have really any objective information sitting in front of them. With entrepreneurs in particular, there's a real gut instinct to run your business by your gut. And I do believe that that's very important and vital. But it's— as you, as you grow, you're going to find that you're going to need to rely on other things a whole lot more.

Well, I'm not saying don't use your gut, right? We're saying one-third. It's not an either-or. Throw one-third of your gut at it. But if— but you need more than that. I mean, especially if you're hiring for a salesperson, because, right, their job is to sell you. On them.

Yeah, right, right.

And I'm very passionate about this also, but people don't fail because of their abilities. They fail because of their personality. They fail because of their attitude. And there is no way in an interview you will be able to assess that with any accuracy at all. That's a great point.

That, that speaks to one thing that I love assessments for, is that people are complex too. You can't reduce them down to the simplicity of 2 or 3 interviews. There's there's just no way you can get to the heart of it with just 2 or 3 interviews. So that's a very broken part of our system. What hiring tip or tactic has meant the most to you personally as you reflect on your most significant hires for either yourself or for your clients?

Well, I mean, that kind of is it. I mean, I'm not— no joke. Like, no, I agree. And I'm an optimist. I am a very extroverted person. I love to connect with people, and when I get that connection, I extend those positive feelings to everything, to my assessment that they're going to be skilled, to my assessment that they're going to work well with everyone, that they're going to be ethical. And, you know, it's just not, it's not a true assessment. So, you know, I think that rule of thirds. I also, one other tip is that we're very, we are headhunters and recruiters, so we, we do this for a living. We are very, very Committed to a process, because when somebody walks in the door that wows you, like, you want to be like, okay, done, we found our person, right? Right. And not be— not allowing yourself that bias. So that, um, using a panel interview— so you always want to have 2 or 3 people in the interview, because when they're talking, you can be listening and someone else can be observing. And you're all observing the same phenomenon as opposed to having one-on-one, multiple one-on-ones. Because if Steve loved, you know, George, and I thought George was, you know, kind of a sexist, then I had to go back to Steve and fight out with Steve who's right. And we didn't witness the same phenomenon. I'm fascinated.

So let's move on to onboarding. Onboarding is make or break. What do we take for granted about the process of onboarding? Literally everything.

And not to beat around the bush here, so listen to the statistic: 22% of all turnover happens in the first 45 days. Wow, 22%.

22%.

So if you don't get it right in those first 22 days or those first 45 days, like, you're, you're not gonna get it right. And I don't know about you, but I have vivid memories of showing up to my first day at work. Nobody knew where I was supposed to go. They didn't even know that I was showing up. They sit me down at a desk. There is no computer. I do have a phone. I don't know who to call. Like, I don't even know what I'm doing there. And, and if you don't hit it right, right out of the gate, you're gonna lose them. And if they're, if they're not feeling loved at that moment, then they're never gonna feel loved, you know.

Um, we're a little guilty of, of doing this with clients where we work so hard to win a prospect over, convert them into a client. Then once they're a client, we sort of ignore them in the same way. We don't give them near the attention and love that we did while we were trying to date them. So is there, you know, we talk about this being make or break. What is it you can do better in the onboarding process?

So here's, so here's some tips that, that we have put to great success, and I'm really, I'm really happy to share them. Number one is Okay, you are in the promo space. So even if it requires delaying their start time by a whole week, get all of their swag, get all of their cards, get all of their equipment, get everything up and running so that their desk has their name all over it and they're ready to go. So all of the stuff that you have to celebrate your company, you're using to celebrate them. So the very first day, they feel like You were— you knew I was coming, and here I am. Yeah, the second thing, and this is a little bit more nuanced, and I'm happy to share this tool with anybody that, that would request it. We've developed an— it's a 4 to 6 week onboarding learning objective plan. So basically, in addition to the first day, which is really the orientation— here's our dress code, here's the bathroom, here are our hours, you know, fill out these forms— What are the things that that individual needs to learn in the first week? And that might be your CRM system, that might be your inventory system, that might be your sales process, that might be your, your client, your vertical that you work in. All of the pieces that you need them to have down cold to hit the ground running. What do they, what are the pieces of those things that they need to learn and Who's responsible for that training? Yeah. And then what that does, Bobbi, is it gives them— they know that you've thought about them. They know what they have to learn. The person who's responsible for training that person knows they're on deck to be part of that person's learning. And if they're not successful, they own that. And then at the end, you're giving them feedback on all of those learning objectives. How did you do? You did a great job. This I think we're gonna hit again week 2. And you keep doing that. For the first 4 to 6 weeks so that they know what they need to learn, who's going to teach them, they're getting feedback, you're get— being able to assess their strengths and their vulnerabilities. You, you, you don't just dump and run, which is how most of us do it.

Yeah, yeah, it's a great point. I want to back up even a little further. I think that in our industry, we have an exceptional opportunity to inspire them in their first week of, of coming on board. So for example, meaning We want them to— often we will hire someone and bring them on board. And, you know, I can't tell you how many people I hired through the years, but I would do this often. You get them in and you're thinking so, you're thinking so hard about fast ramp up. You just want them to start producing, particularly if they're in a sales role or if they're in a customer service role. You just want them to be available and functional as soon as possible because you usually are hiring in a crunch. Right. But one of the things that we tend to forget is that people bring a bias to whatever business that they come into, whether they're coming into an insurance company, a finance company, or in our industry, the promotional products industry. And what they bring with the bias you have in the first week, you have to reset this bias either. And what I, the way I think you can do that is inspire them about the great work that you were doing. So whether that's walking with them through resources that are going to talk about the inspirational aspect of this business, how people can build careers around it, how exciting and fun it can be, or what you're doing with your own clients and some of those projects. Many of us, I think, need to just start doing a better job of capturing some of these stories that we work with our clients clients, not only for our clients, but, but for those incoming employees that are going to become an important part of our future. In a way, it's training them right about the culture of the business that they got into. And then, and that inspirational aspect will keep them fired up far longer than just the getting in, getting into the tactics. You have to get in and get them plugged into the tools they're going to use in the industry. They have to learn how the industry works and the mechanics. But I think they need to be inspired to learn first. And most people will learn better when they're emotionally engaged. You know what?

You said it once and it's, for me, it's the most important word that you just said, which is storytelling, right? So, we use storytelling in this industry to sell our clients, to sell our products, to sell our success, and to sell why these techniques and these tools and these products are going to be successful. So, you're absolutely right. And that's why actually the title of the presentation at SCU Camp is "From Hiring to Inspiring." You have an opportunity to inspire. I work with the janitorial sectors. It's hard to get inspiration in that sector, right? I work with the pension benefit fiduciary groups. It's hard to get inspired with them. This is an industry that you can, you can do that inspiration and bring that enthusiasm as you do that training. I agree.

By the way, I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's— we take it for granted. We take it for granted that our business is that exciting, is that fun, I think sometimes. But we But we, we take it for granted. But so maybe we know that, but we take it for granted that we need to stop and celebrate that.

Oh, you totally need to do it. And you know what, if you need any reminders, come spend a day with me, man, because I gotta tell you, there are a lot of industries, you know, the quick lube industry, the car wash can be flashy, but like seriously, this is, this is an industry that's— and it's growing, right? This is an industry that's growing bigger and better and cooler, and you get these, these multi-campaigns that hit all these different, you know, VR and Like, man, it's so cool. And who doesn't want to work in that space? 100%. 100%.

All right.

But also, but also letting sure that the person knows that, you know, I'm going to tell you all this amazing stuff. I don't expect you to know it now, but we're going to get you there. And here's how we're going to get you. And the other thing I want to say is, and this is going to sound kind of bad, but if they show up and they're bad, Right? If they show up and they are not bringing it within the first 30 days, they're never going to bring it. So we also are a little slow to fire.

Oh, aren't we ever?

Because we don't want— because we work so hard to get that warm body in.

We just went through that whole process. Yeah, where it's painful. It's awful. And we, and we, you know, we make it— we give a lot of excuses for ourselves and for them. Yep. We apologize for our environment. We apologize for the messiness that our business is. Every business is messy on the inside. And we, and we think that we can just outlast it. But you're so right. You're so right. Get it done quick. Exactly.

And that way, if you've really thought about their orientation, because my recommendation to everybody is you spend so much time focusing on the hiring process, you should not be spending nearly that much time on the hiring process. It should be on the orientation. That onboarding is the most important piece. That is your number one job. And if you've done that well and they stink, get rid of them. I believe, and this gets to the next subject, which is the inspiring part. The most important piece of, of onboarding, I think, is letting people know what they need to do and then giving them the feedback and celebrating not just where they are not failing, um, and, you know, are failing and need more support, but celebrating what they do well. Give them the confidence, like, oh, I hired you because of your ability to do X, but look at how you do Y. I had no idea This is amazing. You know, you want— there's a great— and I have a blog about it, but there's this great thing called the 10 penny challenge. And the 10 penny challenge is you go to work every morning and you have 10 pennies in your left pocket. Your job and your only job, the only job you have at the end of that day is to have given out a penny's worth of positive feedback to 10 people over the course of that day. I love that. That means it's like having kids. When you say to that kid, "Wow, you did such a great job of that, that helped me so much, thank you, thank you so much," you're going to get reinforcing behavior, they're gonna do it again. Whereas if you say, "That stank and you really did a crappy job and I'm disappointed in you," that doesn't necessarily inspire anything other than just rejection. So using that onboarding period to really hit home all of the positive things that you're seeing, all the opportunities that you're seeing, how excited you are for once they master this one There's something that they may be struggling on, but you're so close. And once you get it, you're going to just kick it. It's going to be great. I love your positive inspiration. I love your example.

I love your example of 10 pennies, because also it's a little reminder of how little it costs you to do that. You know, little it costs. And Claudia, I think many of us think, you know what, we hired you, we came to terms for a contract, maybe we negotiated and you're at the high end. And all of these sort of things are rattling around in our head. And we take it for granted that what you just said, there could be folks in the audience going, look, we made a deal. This is the deal. You came aboard to do this work at this scale, at this pace, to grow to this percentage. And what's all this pennies and encouragement stuff?

Yeah, yeah, totally. And actually, I do have a promotional products client who said to me, you mean to tell me I have to praise all of these snowflakes when I'm paying them to do the work in the first place? And here's my answer. Yes, yes you do. You need to celebrate that. And, and data shows it over and over and over again. If you look at the Gallup poll, it's called the Q12 Beta Analysis, and it looks at the 12 attributes that highly engaged employees say are present at work, the most important things. And they are things, and this is in order of importance: Number 1, I know what's expected of me at work. Number 2, I have the tools necessary to do my job right. Number 3, Somebody has given me praise or encouragement for a good job in the last 7 days. 7 days? In the last 7 days. Wow. And on that whole list of things, money is not there. Money is not a motivator. And if you want to, if you think just, and here's what I would say to that client now because that was a conversation from a few years ago. What I would say is, you know what, you're right. You don't need to give that positive feedback. You're paying them enough. They should be good to go. Great. They'll be gone within the first 45 days. And if not, then they'll be gone thereafter. Because if you don't care enough about them, they won't care about you.

Let's talk a little bit about working better together. I, this topic is one that I am just very, very passionate about because we're an industry that not only collaborates with each other daily, hundreds of times a day in this industry, thousands in this industry, and with our supplier network. So there's tons of collaboration going on. I'm fascinated by a team that collaborates well. Like I said, largely because we work in this incredible supply chain and we're very interdependent upon each other. As a leader, as those who are fostering this culture, what are some of the biggest barriers that we create, even unbeknownst to us, that prevents teams from working well together?

Oh, it's such a great question. I would say the foundation of it lies in behavioral style. And what I mean by that is that We all know that there are different behavioral styles, and I adhere to the DiSC model of behavioral style just because it's an easily synthesized, easily understood model. But essentially, you have your hunters, you've got your salespeople. They go out, they hunt, they bring home the kill. They have a high sense of enthusiasm, a high sense of urgency. They might have made some promises that they don't exactly know how they're going to keep. They might have made some promises that that they're not quite sure how will get done, but they needed it to get done and they needed it to get done yesterday, and off they go. And they handle, they hand this issue, this carcass of a sale, off to a customer service rep who then doesn't have enough information, has to try and keep those promises, needs to make sure all of the details get done, needs to make sure that they have everything necessary to fulfill that promise, those are opposite behavioral styles. So that extroverted sale and that introverted client services, they are opposites. You need them to be opposites. You need them because if everybody had the same behavioral style as a salesperson, nothing would get done. The details would fall apart. We'd all be very enthusiastic, but we would not be cautious enough to make sure we anticipated the potential potential minefields and failures. So I say that because understanding different behavioral styles is so important. Most companies, most owners in this space really celebrate the sales side.

Yeah, great point, right?

So keep going, keep going, keep going. And then they don't recognize the pressure and burden that they put on— if you don't have a solid customer service or account management team, that falls apart. Like, you're breaking promises, you're losing clients.

Yeah, which is the backbone of this industry. We say it has such a large gargantuan shadow over the business, but the backbone of the business is, is this, this network of service and support people. Exactly.

And so one of the things I do with my teams is I start from the fundamentals. Let's appreciate our differences. Let's appreciate What even though these things are annoying, right, even though I'm irritated by the fact that you have a low sense of urgency or that you keep making promises that I can't keep for you, let's appreciate those differences. So that's the foundation.

This, as someone who ran a business for years, took it for granted that I knew my team, knew the folks that I worked with, we didn't do enough of this. That, like, the question that comes to mind is how, how do we do this? Again, there are simple assessments. We can, we do this on the recruiting side. And again, we ignore those that are under the roof of our own building and understand exactly how they're wired. Our VP of Sales, Sam Cates, is really passionate about personality types. And I have to tell you a quick anecdotal story. Um, I, uh, don't know how I've tread so many of these years on earth without, without knowing my own particular behavioral style. But, and I'll be clear, I know my DiSC profile. I know I've done so many personality assessments. I've done so many career assessments in my life, but I recently discovered a particular behavioral and personality style that I that was such a manual, a handbook for me. It was such a— that I can't even really talk about. In fact, the book recommends you don't talk about it yet because it's just such a discovery. As I was sitting across literally last week from, from having lunch with Catherine, our CEO, I started to share with her what I was learning, what I was reading and what I was learning. And what I really appreciated about her was immediately she said, I need to learn this. I need to know what this is. She wanted to know all about this personality style, this behavioral style. Because one of the things we talked about is I think we have a lot of folks in our company that are wired this way, but we don't really know it, know it. And, but she said before, before it was more than just about the other company, she wanted to know, and I was so impressed as a leader that she would say, I need to take the time to educate myself on all of these behavioral styles because it's imperative that we have our team working well together. I just want to interject that little anecdotal story of a recent example and tell entrepreneurs, salespeople, entrepreneurs, owners, you don't do this enough. Do you really know your team? Do you know their strengths? Do you know their weaknesses?

Yes, and I want to take it one step further. So when we do these assessments, and you know what, these tests are cheap and the value is immense. I mean, they're just to know, to really understand. And so the first piece is what you described, your own aha, like whoa, like I now see that. Like once I have a language to describe a behavior, I see it showing up all over the place, right? It's like, you know, if I didn't— until my son taught me the name of a Ruby-throated Warbler, I just— it was a little brown bird. But now I see Ruby-throated Warblers all over the place because I have a word for it. So behaviors are the same thing. So that's number one. But the next step is the most important. So identifying yourself, recognizing your own style, then recognizing the style of others And then the most important piece is I, as an individual, need to flex my behavioral style to be in the behavioral style of the person I am dealing with. I should not expect that they're going to change. They won't change. The only person I can change is me, and if I change my behavioral style to be in the same form as the person I'm dealing with, then they will likely meet me halfway.

Let me ask you this, Claudia. One of the things that I learned was that once you understand your unique behavioral personality style too, you actually also understand the unique opinion and perspective that you have that others don't. Yes. And so for some of us, for, for those that are maybe more extroverted, may not need the encouragement to express yourself, to, to speak up when you you need when, when you're in the ideation process, or how to get things done. There are other personality types that might need to realize that, that you have, as the way you're wired, is an incredible strength for a team that requires diversity. And, and so exercising your individuality is critical on a team. But then I agree with you 100%, understanding and how to flex with others and understand— you don't, we don't do these personality assessments for our teams just so that we understand as leaders. We need them to understand understand each other's strengths and weaknesses. I need to be able— if I'm working with 2 or 3 colleagues every day to come up with ideas for my clients, and I don't understand how they're wired, then that's going to cause a lot of friction in the way when we work together.

And just to flip it kind of another, and I'll give you my, my anecdote, which is when I started Affinity HR Group 10 years ago, I hired people that were just like me, right? So they were, they were extroverted and happy. They chased shiny things and rainbows and So much optimism. We trusted everybody. We had so much fun and we made no money. And it wasn't until I realized like we, like there's nobody, there's nobody saying you shouldn't do that. There's nobody saying, have you really thought through that more thoroughly? And so then I deliberately hired people whose behavioral styles were the opposite of mine. So I made sure that I had somebody in every single one of the quadrants of our, of a DiSC wheel. Yeah. And I got to tell you, it's not always as fun. There are a lot of frustrations because I get tired of people telling me, "No, we can't do that," because I don't hear that. Right. But we are, we are a, we are a phenomenal team and a phenomenal company because We have so many different perspectives. And when we all agree, "Yeah, this is it," we know we've got something.

[Speaker:JIM_COLLISON] A lot of our lack of working better together comes from an environment that doesn't foster the sharing of ideas. There was a recent thread on Twitter I was fascinated by, because it's a glimpse at how innovation is absolutely halted. And the exchange was about how in small businesses, collaboration breaks down because you're so familiar with with working with your peers, your mind makes assumptions based on past experiences with these colleagues. You know, I know where Joe will be on this because he's always on this in this area. So when it comes to ideation, we need to work with our colleagues and free them from that history. And, and/or we have, as a small business, we have such ambitious goals and run such a fast, small but fast-moving ship, we tank right over people and their contributions. Now, in big business, people either focus their energy on a smarter rather than truly contributing ideas or by not saying anything at all. What are your thoughts on how we can foster a better environment for sharing ideas?

I love this question. So, and I'm going to sound like a broken record. This is not the panacea of everything, but it goes to behavioral style. So, and I also love Patrick Lencioni's 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. If you haven't read that, I strongly recommend that. It's a great, it's a great book. And, and, and, you know, the foundation, the bottom rung of that ladder that he has, of that pyramid that he has in Five Dysfunctions of a Team is trust. So I go back to when I have a team and we're going to start working on something, I go back to behavioral style. So we know that a high I is going to, in the DiSC model, is going to be very very optimistic and everything's going to be rosy, everything's going to be great. We know that the driver is going to say, "Let's get it done right away." And we know that the supporter is not going to share their views because they're conflict-adverse. And we know that the controller, that they're going to be very non-trusting and critical and risk-adverse. So knowing that the people that you need around that table are coming from some form of those biases biases in how they tackle something new, I always start with an exercise of reminding them of what their biases are and forcing them into the bias of the person that they're dealing with, right? So I make the optimist look at it from a critical perspective. What critical things could you say about this exercise? And we can come up with— we usually use a simple exercise of, you know, a baseball team and how How do you, you know, the simple, you've got a baseball team and you've got 24 players but you only have enough money to send 16 to the World Series, to the Little League World Series. Who gets to go, right? And trying to solve that in your own style and then trying to solve it in somebody else's style so that you know first of all that you're bringing a bias and that you want to hear the negative. You want to hear the concern. You have to speak whatever your bias is. And it's hard because there's a whole segment, all of your customer service reps, guess what? They don't want to share criticism. They don't want to be the ones to create conflict. They don't want to say, "No, I think this new CRM system that you're going to put in place is great," when they're worried about it. So they keep their mouth shut. So it's really creating this space where where their bias is toward creativity and ideation, where the risk— where they recognize the difficulty that they're going to have in that process, that they know that they're being asked to get outside of their comfort zone, and they know that there is no risk of failure. Yeah. And really mean that. Like, because, you know, there's no stupid question. Well, most of us believe that there are some stupid And if we're not honest about that and we're not putting that, creating a space through exercises, through artifacts, through game theory, through gamification of what we're doing so that we really get outside of our creative space, we're going to get stuck in what's safe. We always go back to what's our safe behavioral space. That's so true.

Oh, it's so true. You know, I'm going to be leading a session on creativity and collaboration. And one of the things we're going to talk about is that there are such a thing, there is such a thing as shitty ideas. There's such a thing as crazy ideas, half-baked ideas, compelling ideas, funny ideas, overworked ideas, weird ideas, terrible shit ideas. There's all kinds of ideas. But if you don't have a safe environment in which you can express this, then, then you're going to absolutely halt innovation. And there is this great article from the Harvard Business Review that talks about why brainstorming sucks. Brainstorming was invented— we'll talk about this at SKU Camp— but brainstorming was invented in 1939 from an ad agency executive, and we're still using it as a very very latent and basic form of ideation with our teams. And that there's 3 reasons why brainstorming sucks. Number 1 is freeriding, riding along with other people's ideas rather than contributing. That has a lot to do with the environment that you're in. The other, number 2, is regression and anxiety. There's this apprehension, there's this fear of looking stupid. Or what happens a lot is you're giving deference to somebody in the group that you know is a, you know, creative thinker or a faster thinker. There's extroverts over introverts. Or there is what is very common is a regression to the less competent. Somebody will suddenly mention an idea and you'll all regress to the less competent idea. All of this has to do with creating a very unsafe environment for expressing ideas. The third is production blocking, which it means individuals can only express one idea at a time. What I think is kind of funny is that of all bands, you're going to— don't laugh— the band Aerosmith has a weekly meeting called Dare to Suck, where you would have to show up at the meeting with a song or a song idea, and it— and they almost— it's almost a game of where— how bad does this suck? In other words, they've created an environment where it's okay to bring your terrible ideas. And look how many hits these guys have written, you know. It has a lot to do with the environment that we foster and understanding also too that we— there are better tools out there for creative. Anyways, we don't have time to get into that, all that today. But I just wanted, with you on this call in particular, it's a topic that I'm passionate about. It's something I think we need to work harder at in our teams.

I absolutely agree. And that is so exciting. And the one thing that I would want to say, the only, the other, only other piece that really matters to me about all of this is trust, right? And we are all, we all think we're trustworthy, but we're really not, right? We make promises and break them all the time because we didn't recognize that they were promises. So we think we're trustworthy, but we really suck at that. And that's a great point. And there are four— there are three components of trust, and one is sincerity. Did you, did you mean it when you said it? One is competence. Can you do it when you said you could do it? And the other is reliability. Are you gonna do it? Do you have the capacity and time to actually do it? And we all are vulnerable and guilty of breaking promises because we were not We're not clear enough about ourselves. And we were not willing to have conversations with each other about those 3 things, about their competence, their sincerity, their reliability. And the more you can have those conversations in a safe way, the more likely folks are going to be able to say, you know what, I've got the dumbest idea. I cannot wait to share it with you. Tell me what you think about that. Right. Right. But they have to feel safe to do that.

Like that. That's it. That's the epitome, I think, of a fantastic environment. When you foster an environment where someone can stand up and say, I've got a really dumb idea that I have to share with you guys, it's— to me, I think you've accomplished something as a leader. You really have. Lastly, let's talk about retention, because, you know, obviously the root cause of hiring is drastically poor retention efforts. I mean, it's a tough labor market. Um, what are your— as we wrap up here, what are your tips? How do we ensure our best talent doesn't leave? I know that's such a broad question. You've got like hours you could talk about on this particular topic. But what comes to mind?

The most important thing you can do with your employees is regularly give them positive feedback about how they're doing what you need them to do so that they develop the confidence in order to be inspired to go on and do other things, more things, greater things, different things. And We forget as many— and remember, people don't quit their jobs. They quit their managers. They quit their supervisors. So supervisors forget that their job is to not just say, you know, your shirt's too short, your skirt's too short, you showed up late, you know, you did that wrong, you know, transpose those numbers. We're really good at giving that negative feedback. What we really need to be doing is observing employees doing the right thing, doing what's requested of them, and celebrating them for their successes. And, you know, when you think about it, Bobbi, who do we give the most feedback to?

Sales, usually. Sales.

And what type of a performer? Usually it's your poor performers. You tend to, you tend to, you know, the squeaky wheel, the broken wheel, the bad wheel. But we oftentimes forget about the top performer because we assume, oh, they made that money, they know they're good, right? Yeah, they got that nugget. We know they're good. We gave her another buck an hour. She knows she's good. Yeah, money is not a motivator for most of us. Really, really high hunter salespeople, it is. But there's this Spranger model of the motivators of men, and they're basically 6 motivators. So one is to learn new things, the theoretical. One is utilitarian, making money. One is the aesthetic, being in a place of harmony and calm and beauty. One is the social, helping others, being in a position of authority and being part of a team. Those are the things that motivate people. We take for granted that people are motivated by money and what they really are motivated by could be very different. You could have two people in the same role motivated by very different things. One might be motivated by money and the other might be motivated by helping others or one might be motivated by learning. Learning new things. You don't know and honestly, there's an assessment for that, of course. Before I took that assessment, I had no idea what I was motivated by and it wasn't until I saw it, I realized, "Oh my gosh, like that shows up. I'm very, very highly motivated by being in a place of harmony." But I thought I knew what I was motivated by but it wasn't and then when I I realized, "Oh, I'm motivated by being in a place of harmony," and I look around and I'm like, "Well, that's why I have all these, you know, ditzy artifacts all over my office, and that's why my desk is oriented so that I can stare right out my window. I need that." That loving that space and being comfortable in that space makes me excited to go spend my time in it. And I never thought about that, and it wasn't until I had the language, the words that that assessment gave me. Getting back to the routine—

I can't tell you how much I love that.

It's so great. And I'm happy, you know, offline, I'm happy for you to take the assessment so that you can see what that— what— yeah, you can see how cool that is. But understanding that people are motivated by different things. People want to be a part of a whole. And they, they— so if they're getting feedback and they're feeling appreciated, they're feeling feeling like they are part of a community, they get respect, and they have respect for their organization, for what you do. People will stay for that. People will stay with bad money. People will stay. People will give up a job for way more money because of the relationships that they have, because of the connection they have because that job satisfies them. I can't— you focusing on that.

You've seen this happen so many times. And in my career, I've seen this happen so many times where the president or the CEO or the sales VP of sales, whoever it is, is suddenly shocked one day when their top performer comes in to resign. And they're shocked because they're shocked because that the money was there. There was engaging work, but it was that feedback channel that you're exactly right. You're exactly Absolutely right.

Yep. And if you— there's a great— and I recommend for anybody here, and we'll talk about it at Scoot Camp, but the Gallup organization has this Q12, and it's the 12 things that are motivated, that highly engaged employees say motivate them. And a lot of it is feedback. A lot of it is recognition. A lot of it is, is the relationships that they have. A lot of it is the respect that they have for the organization. And money is not on there. When you give somebody a raise, the shelf life of that raise is 4 to 6 weeks, on average 5 weeks.

Wow.

And then it's done, and then you've spent it, and then it's like, yeah, I got that raise, yeah, I got that title, but, you know, I'm still stuck doing the same stuff, or I'm still stuck in the same spot. Yeah.

Well, Claudia, wow. I, I could just— we could talk for another hour or two. We're gonna have to save that for SKU Camp and join us at SKU Camp because we're going to take a deep dive with Claudia as she's going to spend a couple hours with us as we get into this. Not only that, we've got some breakouts planned as we're going to get into how other entrepreneurs are dealing with some of these topics. But we're gonna have a great time. I can't tell you how thankful I am, Claudia. You and I connected briefly when I spoke at PSDA and you spoke and you've been involved at PSDA and PPAI. What I love about your bringing you coming to SKU Camp is that you're not just someone who leads a human resources expertise organization, right? You feel very passionate. It's obvious from this last hour that we've shared that you're very passionate about this. Not only that, though, you know our business. And that's something vitally important to me as I engage— And I love this business.

I love this business. It's such a great industry. Yeah. I'm so excited, Bobbi, and I'm just so grateful to Katherine and Mark and to everybody to be able to spend time because these are some really, these are really cool people that have the capacity to do really cool things and I'm so excited.

Well, and this topic is so vital, so vital right now. Claudia, thank you for your time today. This has been wonderful. My pleasure.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkuCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.