Traci Scherck: Welcome to kill an optimization with Tracy Scherck today we are talking about how to create dream teams inside of our organization and within those dream teams, how we have our teams actually manage themselves.

Traci Scherck: And with us today, we have Mike Zani and Mike is the CEO of predictive index Mike welcome to the show.

Mike Zani: Tracy it’s great to be here thanks for having me.

Traci Scherck: Absolutely, and I have to say my you have inspired not only my business, but you have inspired me.

Traci Scherck: In what I do and how I serve others by really engaging individuals, where they are with their strengths and i’m super curious how throughout your career, have you pulled on strengths to really engage people in the work to be done.

Mike Zani: You know it’s interesting I think when I was a coach arm for the US sailing team, I had an opportunity to meet TIM gulliksen who was pete sampras’s coach.

Mike Zani: And we we shared we shared a table at a dinner at an award we’re both nominated for a coach of the year for our respective disciplines so when i’m talking to him, I mean I mean I was a sailing coach so he was probably less psyched to be sitting near me then I was sitting there.

Mike Zani: You know, a tennis coach and pete sampras but we got to talk about strengths and weaknesses.

Mike Zani: And it was interesting that his little story about you know pete sampras and how he won and the data and analytics behind that.

Mike Zani: Because we were talking and we pulled in the other people at the table, but we talked about, you know how much time do you spend you know really refining your strengths versus.

Mike Zani: You know sort of nitpicking and bolstering your weaknesses and he was a big proponent of really spending more time on the strengths and trying to play the game.

Mike Zani: In your strengths and the little anecdote and story that he used was and i’m going to paraphrase the numbers because I do not remember the numbers from you know.

Mike Zani: Exactly, but he was like pete sampuras one of the greatest serve and volley tennis players in the world.

Mike Zani: And the serve and volley is set up by the first serve if you serve it really powerfully you your competitor has a week return.

Mike Zani: and ideally pete sampras charges, the net and end of point and.

Mike Zani: You know, when you look at the game you’d say wow pete has a weakness, with his groundstrokes because he’s such a good servant volleyer he should work on his groundstrokes.

Mike Zani: And gilligan was like no they’re missing it this whole thing is set up, if his serve goes in greater than 65% of the time first serve.

Mike Zani: He always wins, and then, if it’s like 55 to 65 he’s in the game if it’s below 55 he’s beatable so because we practice a lot of first serves and.

Mike Zani: that’s how that’s how sampras plays the game in his strength um and it’s it’s interesting.

Mike Zani: That that really informed me one as an athletic coach and then, when I got into management of how do we make sure that all of your employees all of your team members all of your co workers.

Mike Zani: are playing the game of business, and specifically the work that you need to do.

Mike Zani: How are they How are they playing that game in their strength, so if I assign an employee hey, we need a PowerPoint deck for this presentation in two weeks.

Mike Zani: I shouldn’t apply the way I would attack the deck I I need to make sure that they feel empowered to attack the deck the way they would.

Mike Zani: so that they can be their best you know their best self as represented by that deck and you know, I think.

Mike Zani: That that lesson applied to business is really powerful and leaders and managers have such authority in this to help their players one identify their strengths and then and then play the game in their strengths.

Traci Scherck: Thank you so much for that example because we see that happen, day in and day out right, and especially when we have self managing teams they’re determining how they do that work and just focused on what is the outcome we’re looking for right.

Traci Scherck: what’s the outcome at the end of the day is so I love that you know, one of the things you stay in.

Traci Scherck: Your book that was just released on dream teams is there’s this quote, that I love and it says a coach can help set goals attack weaknesses bolster strengths, a coach can keep the dark secrets help dig deeper to find the sources and Mulder response.

Traci Scherck: You know, and as I was listening into the story that you were just telling and.

Traci Scherck: You know some of those situations where we see individuals that are on the self managing teams do things really, really well it’s because.

Traci Scherck: You know they’re really allowed to do that, but they also have that place where they can go to say hey help me work through this thing where it’s not managing.

Mike Zani: yeah I do think that there you know these self managing teams have to have an openness and a trust and a willingness to be.

Mike Zani: Transparent and vulnerable because it say you have a self managing team and the topic is finance Does that mean the CFO if they’re on this team.

Mike Zani: Or maybe it’s the controller, who has the most background in finance and accounting should have an outweighted say.

Mike Zani: And a lot of teams tend to do that, they go well, this is your area of expertise, so you dictate what’s going on, whereas there could be some I know the most about finance, but i’m really not good at presentations you know, maybe.

Mike Zani: Maybe the presentation person should work on this is the story Arc and i’m just trying to make sure that we’re telling the right story financially um.

Mike Zani: If if the team is not open and transparent about their strengths and weaknesses and each role or if they don’t have the power to push back on say the CFO and say hey CFO person um.

Mike Zani: that’s really a boring story.

Mike Zani: which you don’t often get away with that with.

Mike Zani: A C suite but it’s it’s sort of if if the if the CFO is being really brutally honest they might be like.

Mike Zani: You know i’m not a great storyteller how about you, you architect, the story architect, the finance and you can have these blissful Aha, but only if the team has that dynamic of trust and openness, respect and transparency to get there.

Traci Scherck: Absolutely, and when you’re looking at that you know that trust and transparency to get there you have to have agreement over what are we doing.

Traci Scherck: And why are we doing it right, what is our strategy and what are those outcomes where we’re driving towards, because if we don’t agree with them of what we’re doing it’s not going to matter anyways.

Mike Zani: it’s right it, you can have all sorts of you know circular discussions if you’re not in agreement on what is it we’re trying to accomplish.

Mike Zani: Which which was, which was why, in our sort of team discovery module at the predictive index that we we really made sure there’s no good or bad teams there just might be good or bad fit for the work.

Mike Zani: So we had developed this whole module on like, how do you define the work that needs to be done, which was, which is really fun and exciting to do because it helped people with you know what is the strategy and how do we best accomplish it.

Traci Scherck: Right and I have to say, the framework that you created out of out of that made it so fun to work with organizations and what is it we’re actually doing, because what i’m finding when i’m working with our clients.

Traci Scherck: Is there is so much disagreement over the work to be done, that they can’t even get off that first spot, which is why they’ve been getting stuck.

Traci Scherck: So the framework really does allow for that agreement of here’s the work we’re doing here’s the outcomes that we’re looking for right and that’s really different than what an output is like hey we’re going to have a meeting well who cares right.

Traci Scherck: I want to know that we’re going to get xyz done at the meeting.

Mike Zani: Oh, I agree, and he there’s there’s when you get a group people in the room, it, it does it one, it surprises you on how misaligned you can be, and as a CEO I used to get mad like I took it as like a personal affront i’m like, how could we be this misaligned we spend.

Mike Zani: So much time and effort trying to get aligned I I view this as a failure and abject failure of my number one responsibility so used to get mad and then I realized well, people are bringing their own pet projects.

Mike Zani: to bear or from their perspective, I mean say you’re in if you’re in operations, the importance of having world class operations is probably first and foremost, so you overweight those things.

Mike Zani: You know so once you peel back pet projects and then sort of me issue sort of perspectives, you can really start stop was stopped talking past each other and then start really refining you go maybe we don’t need world class operations, this year, you know, maybe.

Mike Zani: As they reach 30 things are more important.

Mike Zani: And we’ll work on the operations in in phase two and it’s those conversations and I think the tools, make it more objective.

Mike Zani: Instead of just being like Tracy you and I keep having this argument blah blah blah and you’re like you know you’re just lobbing grenades at each other versus having an objective way to say you know you bring up a really good point if we work like your thing first mind becomes.

Mike Zani: Easier yeah.

Traci Scherck: And I think that there’s a point where there are going to be really positive disagreements, because we’re coming to it from very, very different directions and both are valid, but they’re not valid for the prioritization of the project at the time.

Traci Scherck: And, and I remember the first time, my executive director at the time, said that to me i’m like I don’t understand, I just want to run this thing and she’s like hold on backup right.

Traci Scherck: Like let’s just look at the different perspectives, because when we can see that we can also see where we’re going but we’re in alignment to it, so we can work together it’s like Oh, that was the light bulb.

Traci Scherck: You know, one of the other things Mike that I appreciated out of your building dream teams book was you have an engagement by performance.

Traci Scherck: Two by two where you have some really fun names in here for kind of where individuals are inside of the engagement and performance metrics inside of an organization.

Traci Scherck: You know, and as we’re talking about these dream teams and you know, making sure that we’re on the same page to actually get to those in results.

Traci Scherck: One of the things is really clear is if we don’t have engaged folks on our team.

Traci Scherck: That are also performing that’s not going to happen, but what you do with those disengaged individuals and so i’m super curious about you know the ideas for kind of quadrants that that you have talked about and created and how this fits into creating really strong dream teams.

Mike Zani: Well Tracy the the language that I use in the book is is maybe even a bit sensational, I would first like to say I wouldn’t use these names, with the actual people.

Traci Scherck: to contaminate or Mike know you’re like hey you’re in the contaminated bucket I mean do something about that.

Mike Zani: Yes, so to share with your audience, the four buckets you know we’ve got a simple two by two matrix where you have engagement high or low and you have performance high or low.

Mike Zani: And seems really simple and the trick is how do you determine that we’ll get into that in a second but let’s define the buckets.

Mike Zani: So in the high high bucket you know you have your you know cultural champions, you know these are the, these are the people that are a joy to manage high performance they’re very engaged.

Mike Zani: they’re really the fabric of your organization and you need to feed them and one of the classic mistakes is is under feeding your star performers.

Mike Zani: And then they leave and that’s really dangerous, because they are so important.

Mike Zani: Then, then let’s go to the low low That was the contaminate or I mean this is someone low performance low engagement they’re dragging.

Mike Zani: they’re dragging the organization down, and this is a very tough thing to fix because not only do you have to improve engagement.

Mike Zani: Which is not easy, you have to improve performance, which is also not easy, you get this double not easy dilemma, but these contaminates are really toxic to the environment and it it if you let them fester yeah it can breed further contamination, which is why we use that sort of you know.

Mike Zani: hyperbolic name.

Mike Zani: um I think we even use the symbol for you know nuclear.

Mike Zani: Radio activity there i’m in the book and then we go to you know the the low performance but high engagement and we’ve identified these as silent killers.

Mike Zani: And let me just give you an example, this is the, this is the one where you Monday after the football game where someone walks around and talks to everyone.

Mike Zani: until lunchtime and does very little work, and is it is a great office presence from an energy perspective loves the company, you know, maybe even dyed in the wool.

Mike Zani: towards the team colors but you know they’re not actually moving the ball forward through work.

Mike Zani: And, and while if you have occasionally that it’s it really doesn’t create the silent killer but if someone’s doing that a lot.

Mike Zani: People on your team know who the high performers are, and when you let someone get away with continual low performance.

Mike Zani: It will beg your high performers, why do I work so hard you know why am I working after dinner, or you know why am I.

Mike Zani: You know feeling a client call on my pto and i’m not advocating that that should be the definition of high performance but people always remember when they went, above and beyond.

Mike Zani: And it always calls into question if you let people low performers get away with it, why should I do it.

Mike Zani: Day in and day out, and it can drag back the culture of performance, you want to create so you really need to make sure the silent killers are are in some sort of corrective action so.

Mike Zani: They are improving their performance over time, because, at least if a high performer sees a lower performer making progress and working on it, they.

Mike Zani: It doesn’t have that that that silent killing effect, and then I save for last is my favorite is is the high performers low engagement we call them grinders.

Mike Zani: And these these grinders are your biggest opportunity, you can walk into someone’s office and say you are a standout performer you are so important, the organization.

Mike Zani: I want to make sure I understand you know how I could make you more engaged with the company, you know it could be me.

Mike Zani: You know your manager, it could be a peer and a fouled relationship, it could be aspects of your job, it could be, you know connection to the mission, if you can unlock that source of disengagement.

Mike Zani: And and they’re real just even asking the question will move engagement North usually and if you can, if you can crack this and it can happen quickly it.

Mike Zani: In you know, but it has to be real change it can’t be a palliative that says Oh, I listened to you and then everything went back to normal, but your grinders you can turn your grinders into cultural champions now what we did in our organization is we had pretty high engagement.

Mike Zani: So we actually had to sort of force rank this stuff and we pushed you know week, so we knew performance and we knew engagement we bumped these two data data sets together we did it in a in a in a sort of blind way.

Mike Zani: And, and then, once we had that we had action, for you know for managers to talk to their people about this and say we really want to pull your engagement up.

Mike Zani: You know, in a in a systematic way, so it gives you a great way to take action, and the reason, this is so important to us.

Mike Zani: And an anecdote I do put in the in the book is, if you read glassdoor for the predictive index.

Mike Zani: me, and if you read our last three years of engagement surveys and, if you read our exit interviews there’s a theme we move too fast.

Mike Zani: And if you listen to this theme you’d be like wow you know we lose too fast we move too fast.

Mike Zani: And it’s creating you know, an unhealthy environment for people who mentioned our glass door and the engagement survey.

Mike Zani: And then, when we bumped it up against engagement performance we realized, there was a even quieter message, the message that we’re not moving fast enough.

Mike Zani: And that message was coming from our cultural champions are high engagement high performance, so if we unintentionally, listen to the silent killers and contaminate others.

Mike Zani: who are saying hey you move too fast versus listening to your cultural champions, who said no, we need to move faster and you’re like Could you imagine tapping the brakes.

Mike Zani: appeasing the low performers low engagement and disenfranchised in your high performers high engagement like that would be a tragic mistake and.

Mike Zani: that’s why you need you can’t listen to everyone’s feedback equally, and I know from a fairness perspective, you like that that seems wrong.

Mike Zani: But if you’re trying to world run a world class team, I suspect lebron James has more time with the coach and influence than you know the rookie who just you know is sitting on the end of the bench.

Traci Scherck: Lets talk about the bucks for a second right, I mean we are in Wisconsin here my no i’m kidding.

Mike Zani: let’s talk about Giannis he.

Mike Zani: When he says this is going right and this isn’t going is right to the coach at halftime.

Mike Zani: His comments carry more weight because he’s more than one fifth of a player on the offensive Defense when he’s on the floor.

Traci Scherck: Absolutely, and one of the things I love about kind of how you just walk through the US whether it was with you know lebron or giannis or what you have john within predictive index is.

Traci Scherck: Listening into what individuals are truly saying compared to their performance, because what we see so often, when we go inside organizations before we’ve introduced predictive index.

Traci Scherck: Is hey we’re doing these climate surveys yet we’re not looking at performance at all so we’re just looking to to we’re just listening to the facts and i’m going well, wait a second you’re missing.

Traci Scherck: A complete set of data that’s truly going to inform the reasons why you know so these contaminated and the silent killers inside the organizations, you know.

Traci Scherck: If they’re not producing, why are we listening to them and I don’t mean that you know.

Traci Scherck: From from a mean way, but we need those performers inside the organization The other thing that we find that i’m curious, for your take on this.

Traci Scherck: is especially with a silent killers is before we come into an organization and bring you know, a tool like predictive index in.

Traci Scherck: Individuals aren’t always in the right seat so sometimes we can look at that and say Okay, you know what you’re super engaged but you’re in a role that is just completely draining you and sometimes there’s some quick fixes when you’re first introducing a tool like predictive index.

Mike Zani: You made you made something very clear this, the importance of performance, I wanted to bring back to.

Mike Zani: So we started talking about sport and for the members of the audience who don’t like sports analogies i’m sorry I was a former coach I apologize I think it’s I think it’s important so even a casual sports fan.

Mike Zani: On Monday morning after a football game.

Mike Zani: You know, we we.

Mike Zani: And all the pundits on talk radio and all the fantasy sports people start beating up the you know, the assessment of the game and if you have a quarterback who’s not getting the job done in two or three weekends.

Mike Zani: You are calling for their head, you know, we need a new quarterback.

Mike Zani: And we are brutal with our sports teams, we are calling for their heads, we want a replacement, we want them off the team and we’ve even people who are who did it for us, three years ago, and maybe brought us to some sort of glory three years ago they they’re not.

Mike Zani: they’re not immune to.

Mike Zani: Having their head chopped off by by the pundits so we’re brutal in sport, but we don’t do that business.

Mike Zani: We let my average performance stick around for years and i’m not i’m not saying blitz be brutal in business, but I am saying performance is a very credible thing to bring into the equation when you’re trying to create world class companies will class teams.

Mike Zani: Because if you’ve let it fester you know this this lower performance, you know you’re risking the mission, what are we trying to do what is the work that we’re trying to do.

Mike Zani: And it also disenfranchises people we’ve got to bring in this culture of performance into companies, and that brings up the point of sometimes you need to make these low performers, especially the low and engaging.

Mike Zani: alumni you’re trying to make them happy alumni, but they need to be alumni and I talk a lot about you know how to make happy alumni.

Mike Zani: it’s not easy, it is a very worthwhile cause and you can do it if you create a.

Mike Zani: sort of a an engine to do so because, just because someone’s not engaged in your company or maybe not a fit for their role that doesn’t mean they’re a bad person and it doesn’t mean that they should be, you know destitute, so you can make happy alumni systemically.

Mike Zani: But these people are going to succeed at another person’s company.

Traci Scherck: Absolutely Thank you so much for bringing up that happy alumni because.

Traci Scherck: With those happy alumni it’s that path outside of the organization that still ensures that you keep your brand you know intact, but also ensures that you’re meeting your performance indicators.

Traci Scherck: And we kind of gone in a circle here today, a little bit you know we started with coaching and then kind of came back to hey what’s engagement and performance.

Traci Scherck: So I want to circle back to coaching just for a second and when we’re talking about you know, bringing in coaching and ensuring we have you know self managing teams.

Traci Scherck: One of those things that’s really important with self managing teams is you really have to have those cultural champions on the team self managing teams don’t necessarily work when you have individuals with low performance and low engagement i’m thoughts on that at all.

Mike Zani: yeah I do think culture culture is really a.

Mike Zani: little bit of.

Mike Zani: aspirational design, you can you can try and build a culture but it’s not your culture until your people embrace it and, like you said that those.

Mike Zani: Those self managing people who become the internal coaches they’re, the ones who need to say hey that’s great but that’s not really the culture of how we do things around here.

Mike Zani: and

Mike Zani: You know you’ve succeeded when you hear people talking about your cultural mores your values in the hallway when they think no one is listening.

Mike Zani: right when you hear that you like and honestly, it could be wrong, it could be like I don’t want that to be the cultural mores.

Mike Zani: So you, you have to.

Mike Zani: um you know you have to capture it and you see great examples like wells fargo where a once Great Bank created a culture of meeting your goals at all costs.

Mike Zani: And that created a toxic environment which enabled people to think it was okay to be somewhat fraudulent um you know I talked I talked to the chief people officer at wells fargo two years after that happened, and they were like we’ve got years of cleanup to do because of how the culture.

Mike Zani: unintentionally ran amok.

Traci Scherck: Right right, and I think we saw that really strongly throughout the pandemic I just had an interview with Shell Johnson.

Traci Scherck: The chief people officer for paylocity, you know and what she was saying was you know.

Traci Scherck: We really had to model exactly what we were looking forward to our people, she is like so you know i’m holding this all staff meeting with staff across the entire organization.

Traci Scherck: You know, in my son comes in and is on video, and you know, making that okay as we’re working through this but still producing high quality work is something that becomes really important, we have to model what that is because at the end of the day.

Traci Scherck: That cultural is those behaviors that we allow our don’t allow and that kind of goes through every layer inside of our organization.

Mike Zani: You know there’s a new topic here, and I think cheryl spot on it we’re coming back to a hybrid work.

Mike Zani: Maybe we intentionally told.

Mike Zani: The senior management team, we cannot all come back to work, four and five days a week, if we’re going to signal to the organization that it’s okay.

Mike Zani: To work hybrid or even fully remote and we have to demonstrate best practices and running world class hybrid meetings.

Mike Zani: Because if we don’t then we’re going to go back to these old bad habits, where the conference room table dominates the meeting.

Mike Zani: And or people think they need to have facetime so, even though I might want to come to the office, three and four days a week.

Mike Zani: I don’t i’m trying to make sure that I come to the office two or three days a week, because you know if if the boss is here, I should be here for someone comes in and says know that you know the boss, or the senior leadership is not.

Mike Zani: It is taking this seriously, so you cheryl spot on you do have to live live that culture, but you know senior leadership comes up with.

Mike Zani: I would love the culture to be like this, they don’t get 100% of it, they get some hopefully high number 80% of it, but they have to keep tuning in refining it but getting back to your point of the self managed teams its celebrating those cultural.

Mike Zani: Drivers within the team who are doing the coaching at all levels of the organization that’s when you really know you’ve you’ve you’re winning that that that cultural design game.

Traci Scherck: Absolutely so Mike as we bring this in we always like to talk about what’s one key takeaway that our executive and ceo listeners can take away from our conversation today.

Mike Zani: What one thing, but.

Traci Scherck: I know.

Good luck right.

Mike Zani: Mike my my my one thing if I had to say one thing is.

Mike Zani: If you.

Mike Zani: If you are not take in talent optimization seriously that.

Mike Zani: The biggest competitor to talent optimization is doing things the old way unstructured interviewing off of resumes you know, bringing your own conscious and unconscious biases to bear and how you hire and manage people and how you assemble teams and the question I asked is.

Mike Zani: Does your chief people officer report into the CEO.

Mike Zani: Who is, and if we don’t have a chief people officer Okay, who is your most senior.

Mike Zani: HR people OPS talent person in the organization and who they report into and you learn about this organization and if the chief people officer does not report directly to the CEO.

Mike Zani: they’re not doing talent optimization and it’s very clear how seriously they take it, I just I just spoke to a CFO yesterday.

Mike Zani: they’ve they lost their chief people officer like four year four months ago, and there are no hurry to back fill this position has like a lot of work to do your CEO does not believe that this is important.

Mike Zani: and see if I was like completely agree so you know how does this even a CFO convince the CEO, this is the most important lever, they need to push so.

Mike Zani: I think that’s The one thing is look deep in your organization and find out, are you taking talent optimization as a company seriously and if you’re not you know how do we get on a pathway to do that.

Traci Scherck: awesome and now i’m going to flip the table a bit here and say what’s that one takeaway for our human resource professionals listening in whether it’s you know that that entry level HR person or it’s that chief people officer inside the organization what’s one key takeaway for them.

Mike Zani: I think that this is a long journey that.

Traci Scherck: You don’t you don’t.

Mike Zani: You don’t go from zero to hero in talent optimization overnight, I mean rare people can and rare organizations can, but this is a new discipline.

Mike Zani: Adopt and embrace the disciplines start evangelizing and your own organization go on this journey.

Mike Zani: And it will be really meaningful for you, so when you’re interviewing for your next job that you could say, we had a company that wasn’t quite.

Mike Zani: On board with optimizing talent, but I went on a two and a half year journey and brought us from here to here, and even if you do that, from an individual contributor or manager director role.

Mike Zani: I mean that is truly meaningful you move the needle in an organization, and that is an aspirational thing to do, and you can even bring talent optimization to your whole life, you know you’re.

Mike Zani: you’re a member of.

Mike Zani: A club or a church or a ymca board, you can bring that in and that that too is meaningful.

Traci Scherck: Absolutely well Mike Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing a bit more about kind of this journey of talent optimization some of those key points to it, whether it’s you know, looking at engagement and performance on the coaching piece of it.

Traci Scherck: Any kind of last words you have her audience.

Mike Zani: Know Tracy I thank you for having me it’s been a treat to talk about talent optimization and the book the science of dream teams which.

Mike Zani: You know just recently came out and thank you for you know reading it and embracing some of its content, I am I just hope people took a nugget away from this and, and you know go on this journey because it’s important for us to make a better world by making better workplaces.

Traci Scherck: Absolutely, and if you’re looking to find more out about Mike Zani the predictive index, we will have that information in our show notes, and if you are super curious about what is predictive index what what does this.

Traci Scherck: Assessment kind of work look like, especially when we create dream teams, how do you create dream teams.

Traci Scherck: I will have a link there as well, and i’d be happy to have a conversation with you on that, or one of our consultants as well, so you will also find that in the show notes, because.

Traci Scherck: This is definitely one of those journeys that is so incredibly rewarding so with that Thank you so much for joining us and have a fantastic rest of your day.

Mike Zani: Thank you.

Mike Zani: You as well.