Michael: Welcome to the HaBO Village Podcast, where we talk about developing the whole leader for the whole business. I'm Michael Redman.
Kathryn: And I'm Kathryn Redman.
Michael: This is the podcast for entrepreneurs, founders, and business owners, leaders like you, who are running companies.
Kathryn: Our goal is to encourage you, give you practical tips and tools that you can apply today, and even more importantly, remind you that you're not in this alone.
Michael: We believe that you can build a company that is financially successful, fulfilling for you and your team, and avoid burnout all at the same time.
Kathryn: We know because we've done it and we've been helping other leaders do it too for over 20 years.
Michael: Welcome to today's show, let's dive in.
Kathryn: All right. So excited to be here.
Michael: Glad you're here today. Thank you for joining us. Today we're going to talk about three things.
Kathryn: Three powerful things-
Michael: Three powerful things.
Kathryn: ... that you can do to help create and develop a strong culture.
Michael: We've been thinking about culture a lot lately. Obviously when we think about the whole business and the whole leader, culture's an important part.
Kathryn: Yeah. Who you work with, where you come to work, how much you enjoy it, or don't. I'm helping somebody draft a, just a, what's the thing you put out there when you want to hire someone?
Michael: A job description.
Kathryn: I'm a little tired. I'm helping someone craft a job description, poor them, that I'm doing that for right now.
Michael: For an ad to a attract actually.
Kathryn: For an ad to attract and really so much of it is about what actually makes us stand apart, and what makes us stand apart potentially is our culture.
Michael: Right.
Kathryn: This culture piece is so critical, not just for how you're living and working day to day, which is a big chunk of your life, but also how you attract and retain people.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: Right?
Michael: Absolutely.
Kathryn: Especially in this world, where hiring is more and more challenging and somehow finding and retaining people seems to have stepped up a notch with the way COVID kind of shook things out and all the people wanting different things now.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: There's a lot to this culture piece and we want to do what we can, and today spend a little bit more time just talking about what can you do to create a really powerful culture where people want to work, want to stay. They're excited to come. They're excited to be part of the dreams and visions that you have, and they're kind of on the team with you moving the world forward. That's what we want to talk about.
Michael: It's probably worth saying that culture as we talk about it, I mean, this is a mantra we kind of have and we talk about it over and over again, but it bears repeating. I love that saying. There's a whole lot of value to a positive culture. In a positive culture, it's going to attract higher quality people. It's going to retain higher quality people. It's going to allow those people to actually work better together, more harmoniously, more effectively. They're going to produce more. They're going to solve more problems more effectively. These are all critical things.
Michael: Some people might be saying, "Why do I want to have a good culture?" Well, the basic reason is, it actually makes working nicer. I mean, it makes it more enjoyable. It's like, "Well, I don't want to work in a crappy culture because that sucks. I want to work in a good culture because I enjoy that more." A lot of leaders, when you say, "Why isn't a culture important," they aren't able to fully articulate the grassroots of the reasons, that financial reason. One of the biggest expenses in America, and probably in the world, is turnover.
Kathryn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Michael: It's a horrible hideous, hidden expense. "How do we keep those people? What do we do? What does that look like?" We had a conversation that started yesterday about an employee who has to make some life decisions, some life changes and is like, "Well, can we accommodate that?" In today's world, everybody would say, "Well, you accommodate everything." I don't think that's healthy for the people. I don't think it's healthy for your company, but we sat there and went, "Okay, well, this change is going to make things a little different for probably two years." I'm thinking immediately because of the reputation of our company and because of the patterns that we have with our employees. Well, two years is going to go by nothing flat. This person's still going to be working for us because most of our people, they just continue to stay working for us.
Kathryn: Well. What was fun is this person's making a major life shift, a major move. I mean, it's a big deal. Most of the time a person like that would say, "Yeah, I'll just figure something out when I get to this new location," as opposed to the phone call that says, "This is what's happening. I love what I do for you. I love my job. I want to keep working for you."
Michael: Yep.
Kathryn: "Can we work this out?"
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: For me, that's the piece that I'm like, "Okay. I feel so blessed that she loves her job and wants to keep working for us." I think that's just amazing.
Michael: Well, and I like the fact that we want to keep her.
Kathryn: Yeah. We agree that we want to keep her. She's a valued part of our team.
Michael: That doesn't always happen.
Kathryn: Not always. So what do we do, Michael? We want to talk today about just kind of three core powerful ways-
Michael: Right.
Kathryn: ... that we can develop and strengthen a culture.
Michael: What are those three? Let's start with the first one, and that is hiring the right people.
Kathryn: Yeah. Hiring the right people. Specifically, we're going to talk about people who have good judgment.
Michael: Yes, so step well. Yes, good judgment. I think this is where we talk about for a moment, when you're hiring, you want somebody to have the competence that they need, the skill levels they need, that are appropriate for doing the job you're hiring for in your company. You can't of have that.
Kathryn: Yep.
Michael: You can't hire somebody. It's amazing how often we don't measure competencies when we're interviewing people, we just kind of like, "Hey, do you have a little bit of experience here? Do we think we can train you? We like you." They've got to be a right fit culture wise and value wise, for sure. You want to make sure that as you're looking, you're evaluating their competency, their character, and that their character introvert extrovert, their core values align with your organization. If you don't know what your core values are as an organization and you haven't defined them and written them down, you're missing a magnificently huge piece-
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: ... to leverage something that with a lot of work upfront, could last for decades in your company to help you steer the ship with a lot less effort. Now we have competence. We have character. We have those core values. Once we have that, can we hire find somebody with good judgment? Just because they have good skills, just because they have a strong character, doesn't mean they have good judgment. Judgment is something that's learned.
Kathryn: Yeah, just give us an example, Michael of, okay, you say good judgment. Give me an example or an illustration of somebody who's competent, but doesn't have good judgment. What would that look like?
Michael: Well, competency is, let's just say competency is something where I have the ability to do something. Great, just a general example. You have five people who have a resume and they know how to do it.
Kathryn: Mm-hmm (affirmative). They've got the training, they've got the skills, they've passed all the tasks.
Michael: We've all hired somebody who has the ability to do the work and has their own opinions and everything else. Yet, while they can make a widget, they can build a website, website designers are perfect, they can program the code. They can do all these different things. They can make graphics and do stuff. They have their own opinions about what makes a good one and makes a bad one. There is very few that actually know how to, web designers, that in our experience for 20 years now so I'm not just talking randomly-
Kathryn: Last week.
Michael: ... that don't know how to build a website that actually for a company, that actually is good for their business and helps customers bond with them and spend more money. There's a judgment there. Here's what we mean by judgment. What we mean by judgment is actually three parts, that you can assess properly assess, properly is important, properly assess the situation and the challenge of the problem. You can properly design a solution and then you can properly administer that solution or implement that solution. How many people have you ever met who say, "I know exactly what you need to do. I don't have any problem telling you what you're supposed to do," but they can't do it in their own lives. They can't ever. They don't actually know how to accomplish it. They don't actually understand how hard it is or the challenges or the nuances. They just know they've seen it or read about it in a book or something like that. A judgment might be somebody who does that and they can't complete it or they read the situation completely wrong and they're like, "You're solving a problem that doesn't exist."
Kathryn: Right. Which could be a task problem or a people issue, right? It could be on either side of that.
Michael: What do you mean?
Kathryn: I'm thinking about, part of good judgment is being able to understand and read the room a little bit too, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: I will never forget and I know you wouldn't either, but-
Michael: Oh, I might.
Kathryn: ... when it came to hiring for competency and then going, "Ooh. Hmm." This guy came into interview with us. This was a hundred years ago, probably, I don't know.
Michael: Is this the graphic designer?
Kathryn: This was the SEO guy.
Michael: Oh the SEO guy.
Kathryn: Right.
Michael: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kathryn: He came in and he literally sat down with Michael and I, and he just started telling us how brilliant he was and how wonderful he was and how much he had to teach us and how he would really like to work from home, but he would be willing to come into the office to make sure that he can transfer his brilliance to us. We just looked at each other like, "What is happening right now?"
Michael: Yeah. After we told him what the job required and what we wanted and what we needed, he was off in another, "Let me tell you what I think your job really needs to be."
Kathryn: I would say he had poor judgment.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: He did not read the room.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: Or the job description as a matter of fact.
Michael: Right.
Kathryn: You look at that and you go, "Okay." Obviously we didn't actually offer him a job, but had we offered him a job, that would've been really bad.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: We needed the skillset he had, but mm-mm (negative).
Michael: We've had situations where, us at times in the past, and even lots of clients that we've worked with, who you go, "Okay, I see how this person spoke, speaks well. I know how they interviewed well. I know that they have this resume of all these things they've done. It looks like they're brilliant and everyone around them is talking about brilliant." Then they get in the job. There was this one person that worked at the company on Humboldt and we will leave the name of the company out, that basically the guy that reorganized the org chart the first month he was there.
Kathryn: Yes. Brilliant.
Michael: Put people that were his peers, underneath him in his org chart.
Kathryn: I think he lasted about 25 days or 30 days maybe. It was not long.
Michael: It was not long. He interviewed well.
Kathryn: He interviewed brilliant.
Michael: It all went well.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: It looked well. His resume went well. Sometimes people get stuck in a job where they've been there for five years and you're like, "These people are not as competent as they look or sound. Quite frankly, they lack good judgment." Okay. We could spend a whole-
Kathryn: And probably will again.
Michael: ... episode on judgment. Here's what we need to know about judgment so we can move on to point two. Judgment, so you may be asking the question, rightly so. Okay, great. How do I value good judgment? Quite frankly, if I were you, I'd be saying in my car right now or wherever I was, I'd be going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you think I'm doing when I'm interviewing them? I'm obviously trying to find out if they have good judgment or not. I don't want to hire an idiot."
Kathryn: "I've never really talked about it like good judgment. It's never like that."
Michael: "That's what I'm doing."
Kathryn: "I'm clearly looking for that. How would I do that better or differently, Michael?"
Michael: Okay. One of the things that we've done over the last umpteen years, basically our whole career, we've continued to look for experts in fields that articulate things really, really well and bring clarity and wisdom in the solution of business and people and everything else and tools.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: We have found a tool.
Kathryn: We have a tool.
Michael: We have a tool that is literally one of those tools that's like, "This is an amazing tool." It is an assessment. It takes 20 minutes to take. It is called the Judgment Index. Now, if you want to know more about it, contact our office. You can also Google it and look a little bit up on the internet. We want you to use this tool. Now, we offer this to our clients. We resell it. There are different price points. I'm not even going to talk about the price points, but you can use this tool, this assessment, for everything from hiring multiple different types of employees and use it as a pre-screening tool to evaluate whether they have good judgment and little extra bonus here, this assessment helps you actually measure how entitled they are.
Michael: That's one of the biggest problems employers are saying right now is, "Everybody's just so entitled and titled. I don't want to hire people who are entitled. I want to hire people who actually don't mind working hard to achieve a goal, as opposed to they expect to be given everything." You were in the room with me when this one client said that they had an employee who, when they didn't get a, somebody in their forties who didn't get a promotion in the company, looked at the boss and said, "You are stealing from me. You're stealing money from me." Do you remember this?
Kathryn: I do not.
Michael: This was like the epitome of entitlement.
Kathryn: I was apparently in the room having a different conversation.
Michael: What he did is he told the boss in the discussion is, I was really impressed with this leader because he actually entered into the conversation as opposed to just firing the guy right on the spot, "What do you think? What's going on?" He believes in this whole idea of not universal healthcare, it's a universal wage. Everybody deserves the same wage. It's being talked about in certain circles. I think it's ludicrous because you get paid not based on what you should do, on your work or your job, your responsibilities, or even the quality of your work, you get paid equal to everybody else. If somebody is making more than him, that is where he's like, "That's not something I could have earned. You're actually taking money away from me and stealing money away from me because you didn't give me that promotion. I deserve that money." "You don't deserve the promotion. Why do you deserve the money?" That's an entitlement.
Michael: This Judgment Index will not only help you find out if you can see people who, for judgment, have good judgment, but they're entitled. Couple of different ways you can use this. They have a report, same assessment, a report for law enforcement, a report for emergency medical, or emergency response.
Kathryn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Michael: They separate out police officers because of the uniqueness of being a police officer. There's a report from the medical industry. There are reports for things like construction workers. What we do is, we use it at Rabbit Hole Hay for all of our employees, no matter what level they're coming into, because what we're looking for is we care about lowering our workman's comp issues and claims. Good judgment is a direct response to work comp. Almost inevitably all the stories you hear when you go to a work comp workshop, is stupid things like, "I got on a swivel chair to change a light bulb and it spun out from underneath the person and they landed and cracked their head at work and now it's a workman's comp claim," and your workman's comp insurance just went up.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: These are huge deals and good judgment affects everything from making stupid mistakes that can cost you more money in your workman's comp, to making poor decisions like a client of ours had an employee one time that lost because of a bad decision, over $20,000 for the company. The employer, Doug, was incredibly gracious. Mistakes happen, it's okay, but it shouldn't have happened.
Kathryn: Right.
Michael: They said, "Okay, we're going to work on it, but that can't happen again." That's an expensive example of good judgment. The assessment, it's called the Judgment Index. Half a Bubble Out offers that as one of our tools in our coaching and consulting, and even setting it up and working with companies, if nothing else, just to use it as part of a hiring tool. Phenomenal hiring tool. It is legal to use. I would just say that you use it as one third of your assessment. You combine it with an interview and a skills assessment evaluation, so that when you tell somebody they can't have the job, if there are red flags on the report, you are not just basing it on a report, which could give you a little bit of challenge in legals aspects. It puts you in a situation where it's been defended in court, but you don't want to get yourself in court. You want to be wise. That's number one, hire people with good judgment because good judgment people are going to actually create a more positive culture.
Kathryn: Yep. Yep, yep, yep.
Michael: Especially after you've aligned them with your values and they have competence. When you have good judgment aligned with competence and that character and alignment of values, it's actually a multiplier in their productivity.
Kathryn: That's good.
Michael: Okay.
Kathryn: That's good.
Michael: Number two.
Kathryn: Second thing. Second thing is develop your employees.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: If you care about having a good culture, pouring into your employees and making sure that there are tools and tracks to help develop them-
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: ... is really, really important. I'll tell you that it is a cost and a budget decision to invest in your employees, but it is such a win-win.
Michael: Okay. Talk to us about this. Why do you think, because this is an expense that a lot of people push back on, right? Why would you do this? Give us a couple of examples of what do we mean by developing our employees.
Kathryn: Yeah. There are multiple ways to do this, obviously, but the large corporations talk about team building exercises and running everybody through strength finders. There's a ton of different ways to do it.
Michael: Right.
Kathryn: One of the things that seems to be universally true, is that we as human beings love learning about who we are and how we function.
Michael: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kathryn: That's part of why personality tests are such a big, they're such a big hit, right? Everybody loves knowing their enneagram and knowing their-
Michael: Right.
Kathryn: ... Myers-Briggs. Those are a really big deal. When it comes to developing your employees, taking those tools and then being intentional about how you mold and shape and have conversations around them, becomes, I think, what the development is. Recently, we actually hired a coach to walk with our people through a series of development steps to help them learn more about who they are, where they excel, their strengths, their liabilities, and how they fit within our team, right? We did all the individual stuff and then we had this really great team meeting where we got to work on like, "Who are these different people," kind of all like guess the person who is this, right? It was a really great time, super good team building exercise, but it also was very, very enlightening. It was enlightening for the employees who walked through it. It was enlightening for us as leaders.
Michael: Okay.
Kathryn: It was a win-win.
Michael: Let me ask this really quick. As we talk about developing individuals and all this kind of stuff. Let's face it, I'm going to put on the devil's advocate hat for a moment as a business owner, this is a huge industry. This has got to be a billion dollar industry on its own-
Kathryn: Multimillion.
Michael: ... on selling assessments and selling little reports. "I'm going to make money telling you how wonderful you are and how special and unique you are and how much you are a snowflake." Okay.
Kathryn: Don't tell them they're snowflake. That's bad.
Michael: Believe me, I get it. Then the derogatory part of this is, there are some of us that-
Kathryn: "Develop yourself on your own time."
Michael: ... Yeah. I mean, what happened to the, "Get a life and actually that's why you went to college, to develop yourself. That's why you should do stuff outside of work to develop yourself." It feels like it's just freaking entertainment that we have to pay for at work.
Kathryn: I would laugh if I thought you actually believed that, but it does feel that way a little bit.
Michael: Okay. I know I said-
Kathryn: There are parts of that too.
Michael: ... I'm going to be a devil's advocate and there are people who I've heard say things like that.
Kathryn: Yeah. "I give them a paycheck. Should that not be enough?"
Michael: I have to admit, I have at moments had to wrestle through those thoughts of my own.
Kathryn: Well, yeah. As leaders, is it our responsibility to grow people up even, right? Especially with, as you deal with sometimes younger generations and folks that aren't learning things at home that they-
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: ... should be learning.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: They come kind of a little bit ill-equipped-
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: ... in some of the social environments. Is it our job? Is it our job to grow them up? I mean, this requires an entire podcast all to itself, maybe a series.
Michael: They all do.
Kathryn: What's the difference between, "It's my job to parent my employees," versus the opportunity in a work environment to develop them. If you take off the devil's advocate hat, why would you say that that's actually an important thing that is not just a value to the employee, but also a value to the culture and to the leadership as a general rule?
Michael: Well, I would say these types of things coming out of that negative, because it is. To be honest, I'm just acknowledging the fact that there are folks that we all have these questions in the back of our head. Some of us have them very forefront in our minds and say them often.
Kathryn: Well, and us older folk are like, "No one ever did that for me."
Michael: Right?
Kathryn: "What the heck?"
Michael: "I made it here, I'm fine."
Kathryn: "I had to do that on my own dime."
Michael: Here's what I would say. I would say, first of all, things change. You are given a set of resources in any situation, in any context and in today's world, running a business with the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity that we have, the VUCA we have in everything that we talk about a lot. In a day where we have the great recession and there's companies trying to figure out. I mean, for the first time in our lives, companies are having to justify that having employees in the office is actually a good thing.
Kathryn: Right.
Michael: People are saying, "I don't have to do that." It's going to balance out at some point, but right now you have got these people in this situation. If you have people that aren't their best selves yet, and you can make an investment of a dollar and gain an additional $10 out of that, let's just think from a purely financial perspective, that's what is going on here, is you have these people where they have potential. You are looking for employees that have great potential that hopefully have actually been able to see some of that potential come true because of their skill and development and competencies. If you see this and you go, "This is great." If I can find a great person at a fair wage that everybody agrees is fair, and maybe even everybody agrees it's generous and you don't lose them, then developing them actually makes them go from being a contributor of your company that's working at 60% productivity, that then is working at maybe 70% productivity, that might even make it to 80% productivity. As they're being productive, they're also working on larger projects or more complicated-
Kathryn: Responsibility.
Michael: ... and bigger responsibilities, and you don't have to babysit.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: That's what's going on. How does this apply to culture? If you hire them properly, like we said in step one, and step two is you start to develop those people that you know have good judgment and align with your core values and have a measure of competency, then all of a sudden you are pouring in. You have set your investment up. It's just not a blind investment on your random employee.
Kathryn: Right.
Michael: This is like, "I'm going to invest in this whole thing. I've got a Ferrari that just needs tuned up and some TLC," as opposed to, "I bought a 30 year old lemon that no matter how much money I put into it, I'm just dumping good money in after bad."
Kathryn: Yeah. Well, and if you've been hanging out with us for any length of time at all, you've heard us talk about the disengagement rate and how 74% or more, depending on when the Gallup pull is run, but consistently over the last 20 years, about 74% of American workers are disengaged at work. They're just sleepwalking through the day. They're not giving you their best. They're just punching the clock and looking for the paycheck.
Michael: I looked up to numbers the other day and in all fairness, they're coming down a little bit.
Kathryn: Oh, that's good.
Michael: Yeah. They're in the sixties now.
Kathryn: Okay.
Michael: Mid sixties was the last one I saw, still six and a half out of every 10 employees just disengage.
Kathryn: Still rough. Not quite seven, but six and a half. Thanks for that correction. Never mind, don't invest in your culture. It's only six and a half out of 10 people now. The reality is when we talk about culture, this is part of what we're about is, how do we sure you up so that your company isn't part of that pervasive challenge out there, where six and a half or seven out of 10 of your employees are just not bringing their best selves to work? They're not engaged. They're not moving your company forward. We want you to be successful as a business owner, as a leader. Part of that is making sure that you are doing the kinds of things that help your employees to engage, that help them feel cared about, and as part of your team and your culture.
Michael: If you're working on something that is improving them, and you've got people who value growth, which a lot of people do-
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: ... then we're not just talking about a fun activity, but we're talking about activities that actually produce positive benefits. One of the side effects, I think, is I like to see it like this, one of the side effects is everybody likes it.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: Everybody has fun doing it, which is a bonus.
Kathryn: Yeah, it is. We've done a couple of large group sort of activities with clients using the Myers-Briggs, for example.
Michael: Right.
Kathryn: We did one with the entire staff of-
Michael: A school.
Kathryn: ... a charter school.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: We did one with an entire team of folks who work in an insurance company. What is so cool about those things is yes, they really love it. They learn about themselves. They enjoy it, but it is amazing what it does for their communication, right? All of a sudden it's like, "Oh. Oh, that's how I need to respond to you. That's how I need to interact. That's what I need to do to help you bring your best," right? There's such powerful application for growth and development within a team concept as you help people learn more about who they are, how they function, kind of what triggers them even.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: How do you help them bring their best selves? How do you help them as teammates interact? If you have multi-level management in your company, how do you develop your managers so that they can help develop their teams? Those kinds of things, it is an expense and it is an investment, but if you want to have a culture that stands apart and doesn't fall into that, "Nobody cares. They don't really care about you or your thing. You're just somebody who's helping them pay the rent," which matters by the way. If that's just what it is, then investing in and developing your employees really truly is a win-win.
Michael: Okay. What can we do? What's the best way we should be looking at this, or maybe not the best way, but what are things we can do to invest in them? There's two things that I want to break into. If you're looking at your team and you're talking about investing in them, you're going to invest in the average employee, just generically everyone. How do you help them grow in their competency, their self-awareness, their emotional intelligence.
Kathryn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Michael: Having more self-awareness and then others' awareness, is part of this development world.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: It's helping them develop their inner game so that their outer game works better. Then the other aspect that I want you to think about is, your folks that are either in management, that mental middle, we're going to call management middle leadership, the biggest difference between managers and senior leaders is senior leaders get to choose direction.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: Managers are there to guide and lead their people to implement the assignments that have come down and making sure that things get done in operations. You have the people who are already in those positions, and you have the people that have the potential to be in those positions. To briefly say, there are unique ways to put together a leadership plan, to help them develop their understanding of how to lead others and grow as a leader, is going to be critical important. That means you will be able to, as a senior leader, have more things happening in your company that are exactly what you need from a financial perspective, from an operations perspective, from a culture perspective, that you don't have to babysit and continue to micromanage because you can manage from a higher level of assessment.
Kathryn: Well, and again, our friends at Gallup, just because sometimes these statistics are what help us go, "Oh yeah, this matters."
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: They'll tell you that 80% of people who leave their jobs, do so because of an issue they have with their manager.
Michael: Yep.
Kathryn: Again, that's back to that turnover. It's back to that, just the pain of losing good people to poor leadership.
Michael: Yeah. Yeah. They're doing it. Patrick Lencioni is doing a lot of work in that area and really focusing more on managers now and stuff like that. That's something you can do. Let's go back to fixing the culture. Here's what you want to do. You want to continue to invest in your folks using a tool. You can use something like the Judgment Index now, not just for hiring, but now that they already have it, you can start to use it to give them more insight and you can give them more insight into how do they grow their judgment. Now that you have them, how do you do personal development? You could do workshops on skills and occasionally workshop skill training for the tasks that they have, whatever that would be. If it's being better at Excel or Google sheets, or if it's better at programming or something, whatever it is, skill development is something that you should program into your world multiple times a year, even in short burst workshops, that'll be phenomenal.
Michael: The other part of development that you can do is this helping grow their judgment, their ability to properly assess the situation, properly come up with helpful solutions that are viable solutions. What does it look like to think through to implement, so that they can think through their judgements and go, "I saw something. I came up with a plan and I can assess what will happen down the road when it's all done that I can't see yet, but I can better assess or better estimate what the outcome of that would be." I tell you on a scale of one to a hundred that's measured, and the Judgment Index does an amazing job of mathematically measuring, there are 80 different points of judgment. When we look at that, you can actually go, "I can measure where you are. I can help you grow and I can show you the results of your growth. I can assess that." The average person on a scale, in America, is a 50 on judgment. The average leader is a 35 on judgment and good solid judgment starts at 20 points.
Kathryn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Michael: Now I'm going down.
Kathryn: Lower is better.
Michael: I'm going down in numbers. It's like a golf game, right? Golf score. The higher you are, the worst your judgment is, the higher score is the lower. 10 to 20 is ideal in your score. The average leader has a 35 and the average person has 50. There's plenty of ways to grow because as we talked about wanting to hire people with good judgment, if you can continue to strengthen it and helping them make sure that they maintain good judgment and are aware of the things that can negatively impact or positively impact their judgment, you've got some great development opportunities.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: You've got things like Myers-Briggs-
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: ... and strength finders and those kinds of stuff that you could use.
Kathryn: I'm thinking about, what should a good goal be if this isn't something you're doing, to do one of those personal development things once a year for your employees.
Michael: No, I like that. I think that's a really good thing.
Kathryn: Just annually. I mean the competency things, the trainings that they need in their particular skills, those are things you need to be looking for and on the lookout for good training all the time. This kind of stuff, even if you were to do it once a year.
Michael: If you put a plan together for a person who's a potential leader or your managers, or even everybody else, if your managers are doing this with their direct reports and say, "We're going to pick one goal for the next quarter or six months, maybe even for the next year," and every meeting they have, at least once a month, they do a check in.
Kathryn: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Michael: If you've got six, the ideal is no more than six to eight direct reports for a person. There are some people listening, going, "That's crazy. I have 15." 15 is crazy. I get it because we do that. We've done that in the past. You want to meet with your direct reports ideally once a week, but if not, every two weeks meet with your direct reports and as part of that, there should be a plan of, "Okay, how are you doing on your personal development? Are you working the plan? Are you not? What's the goal," and have a goal. One goal.
Michael: If you have a basic plan that you set up once a year and you have one goal and you're just checking in to see how they're doing, and you have a tool to measure, whether they're growing or not so that you can see it and they can see it, it's a, win-win. It radically impacts the culture, the health of the culture. It allows you to make sure that you're maturing people so that they become stewards of the culture and you're not the only steward. It's shared as a team.We've seen this over and over again at Half a Bubble Out, you will find that your people go the extra mile to protect the culture and invest in the culture and continue to build the culture up because now you've described more and more what you think your culture needs to be.
Kathryn: Okay. We promised you three points. The third and final point is, pick a small group that you see has incredible potential and put them on a really more intentional leadership track.
Michael: Yeah. I guess I fudged on that.
Kathryn: You kind of morphed those a little bit.
Michael: Morphed those three. Let's just say the first one is hire well and hire people with good judgment and use a Judgment Index tool or a tool that will do that if there's another tool out there, I don't know of it. If there is one, use that. Two, invest in the average person and build them up because when you build the whole team, as a pastor said a long time ago and it's been said before other people but, "When the water rises in the harbor, all boats rise."
Kathryn: Yep.
Michael: We want to raise the water level in the company by raising the entire company's competencies and then having a program to put together. There are two programs that we recommend. The Judgment Index because it's being used with everybody as an powerful tool and it will give insights into a coaching program for your leadership development. You don't need to have a company of hundreds of people. You can have a company of 10 people and have a leadership program with one person or two people and start building that up. The other one is, the Leadership Circle Profile, which is the second tool we are certified at Half a Bubble Out to use and we use with leaders. That gives you an ability to say, "Okay, there are five categories that are associated with our ability to have great leadership in a company." They're associated with profitability and our leadership skill level. Then there's another three that are detractors.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: "In those, there's more information about competencies that we could develop and more insight." What it does, is allows us to measure. We measure on those levels about once every 18 months. We work with those leaders. Now what's really great is there's an assessment in the leadership profile for senior leaders that have ability to choose direction and all of that. They might be a leader over a huge division, they're used in Fortune 500 companies and stuff like that all the way down to small companies. There's an assessment that's very similar for managers, when we were talking earlier that the big difference between managers and leaders is direction.
Kathryn: Direction and vision setting.
Michael: Direction and vision setting. Absolutely. We have an assessment for them. We have two tools, the Judgment Index and the Leadership Circle Profile. Now, there are other people doing this kind of work out there, and you may find a different tool. You need a tool, at least one, if not two, that's going to help you see these things so that you can give people insight into where they are currently, that you can figure out a positive plan to grow forward with them, with these people that you're developing, and that you can measure their success so that you know that they're actually growing and that they know they're growing. They have feedback. If you can't assess feedback, a baseball player, they catch the ball more, they make more plays, they hit the ball more often, they get out less. There's metrics.
Kathryn: Their batting average goes above 200.
Michael: Right? Those are good things. Having those metrics are critical. You have to have some kind of metrics. So often as leaders, we're like, "Well, what are we going to do? Where do I find this? How do I do this?" We got you covered. You're not alone in this. We've got tools that really help at Half a Bubble Out. We have spent years looking for these tools and then assessing certain tools to see what works, what doesn't work, and what's accessible to those of us in small and medium sized companies too. These tools are. You've got the culture as you do these things, so the leader goes, the culture goes. Your managers and your mid-level leaders that you have, they're stewards of your culture. They can continue to be a steward of culture. You're developing your people and you're going to have better quality people and they're going to stick around longer.
Kathryn: Yep.
Michael: And then hire the right people.
Kathryn: Well, we were laughing. We were talking about what we would call this podcast earlier. Michael was like, "How to put your culture on autopilot." I'm like, "We are not calling anything autopilot, because everything requires care."
Michael: But it was a cool title.
Kathryn: It is cool title. It's very catchy. What is true, is that if you do these kinds of things, when you step away for periods of time as a leader, whether you're on business travel, whether you're on holiday, when you step away, your culture continues to move forward.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: Right? People continue. I mean, we talk a lot about rap and we talk about the different things that we do here for our culture. Our people do not stop doing those things when we're gone.
Michael: No.
Kathryn: They are fully invested in making sure that those things happen and happen well and they continue to move them forward. There's a sense in which while we would argue that everything requires intention, you always have to be cultivating right? As you cultivate, the more you do that, the more you can step away and other people are doing that cultivating. In that sense, it becomes a little more autopilot esque.
Michael: Well, we designed a system that needed a lot, lot, lot less maintenance.
Kathryn: Yes.
Michael: It was finally designed well and it was-
Kathryn: It was like putting in a drip sprinkler system instead of having to water your plants every single day.
Michael: ... By hand.
Kathryn: By hand.
Michael: Yeah. We have three acres now. I like having a drip system.
Kathryn: Drip systems are important.
Michael: Right? That's it, those three things are really critical. If you can hire people with good judgment and hire well with competency, character, and alignment with values, and then make sure that you are looking on top of that to good judgment and have a tool to assess it, judgment indexes, that tool. Number two, develop our people. There's lots of different things out there. The Judgment Index, because you've already done it. You can pull a different report that's a development report, and actually use that as employee development.
Kathryn: And realizing mindset wise, it's a win-win.
Michael: It's a total win.
Kathryn: Total win-win.
Michael: Then third-
Kathryn: Picking a small group that you see as having great potential and really creating a specific development leadership track for them.
Michael: ... Yeah. If you already have some managers and leaders assess your managers in there, then start doing regular leadership development for your managers.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: The goal isn't just to get them there and then leave them.
Kathryn: Mm-mm (negative).
Michael: The goal is to continue to figure out a way. If you have a plan that doesn't require you as the senior leader to always be doing it and all of that, a system and a plan that works, then it's like systems everywhere else in the company. They start to become ingrained in the company and everybody knows what you're supposed to do. It doesn't require as much stress. Remember, our goal is to help you build a company that's more profitable on the top line, on the bottom line. The fact is that you're actually doing work that's more fulfilling. Your team is more fulfilled.
Kathryn: And you're avoiding burnout.
Michael: And you're avoiding burnout. These are the things you do. Building a culture and three powerful things you can do to build your culture and if you would like help figuring that out, we've got blogs, we've got a book called, Fulfilled, that we wrote, that you can find where books are available.
Kathryn: Wherever books are sold.
Michael: I love saying that, or on our website at halfabubbleout.com. If you want even more help, we have coaching programs available, leadership developing programs, business development programs here at Half a Bubble Out. You can just call us and get some insight. We'd be glad to help. We're here-
Kathryn: Yep.
Michael: ... to help you grow your companies and develop Passion and Provision companies with more profit purpose and legacy.
Kathryn: Amen brother.
Michael: All right. So that's it for today. Anything else you think we need to say?
Kathryn: I think we've said plenty.
Michael: Thank you for joining us today. I'm Michael Redman.
Kathryn: And I'm Kathryn Redman.
Michael: This is the HaBO Village Podcast and we hope you have a great week. Bye-bye.
Kathryn: Bye-bye.
