In this episode of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, Brandon Laws sits down with Mike Zani, CEO of The Predictive Index and expert on talent optimization. The two discuss the effects of COVID on the current workforce, the War on Talent, and team-building strategies that really work. This episode also gives listeners a glimpse into Mike’s new book The Science of Dream Teams: How Talent Optimization Can Drive Engagement, Productivity, and Happiness.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Mike Zani is a bestselling author and expert on optimizing talent and building successful culture. His latest book, The Science of Dream Teams, is a product of his years of experience in building stellar workplace teams. Mike holds a BS from Brown University and an MBA from Harvard.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, Sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
BEHIND THE BOOK
“The irony is that most people don’t actually want science,” Mike explained. “They want science to work for them” instead of revealing opportunities for growth and improvement. As the CEO of The Predictive Index, Mike wanted to use his access to mountains of data to take more of a scientific approach to building world-class teams.
With sports, Mike noted, we’re heavily focused on the analytics. We’re all about “eviscerating the performance” of our favorite quarterback or our fantasy football teams, just trying to get an edge. But what would happen if we placed that same emphasis on the productivity of our workplace teams? Mike explained, “We need to take some of the good that comes from what we can learn from sports and get disciplined at learning more about the predictors of success in the workplace.”
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
COVID and Productivity
“The displacement of our workforce during COVID was the greatest displacement of people since World War II, and yet it happened five times faster. We laid off 40 million people in six weeks. We asked a hundred million people to work in some sort of hybrid model. […] Companies like ours, we were tracking productivity and our tech team’s productivity went up 70%. We’re not commuting. We’re having fewer meetings, fewer interruptions, and we’re actually collaborating — really effectively using some of these new tools. If a meeting’s over, we don’t just drag it out for the full hour. We get back to work.”
The War on Talent
“Now we’re coming back to work. We’ve abused our workforce. We’re starting to come out of this recession too into a fantastic period of growth. And now we have this new War on Talent, and over 50% of people said they are open to changing jobs in the next 12 months. So we’re going to have this churn where people are just hunting in other people’s ponds, trying to steal the best in their brains.”
“And I think the companies that are not on top of their talent optimization — that don’t have people in the right positions, that don’t have high performing teams, that aren’t taking employee experience or engagement surveys seriously, and acting upon them — they are going to have so much brain-drain as their talent walks out.”
What’s on Your T-Shirt?
“This concept comes from a Bain consultant, Jim Allen, who is a longstanding partner in the UK. The “front of t-shirt/back of t-shirt” is just an analogy. What’s written on the front of your t-shirt is everything that you’ve been given a job for — it could be your energy, your charisma, your analytic skills. It’s the things that your parents would say to brag about you. Now on the back of the t-shirt are those things about you that you can’t really see, that you don’t really have a great view of. And most people who talk about it don’t do it with you around — they do it as you’re walking away.”
“The reason I love this framework is that the onus is on the self-aware person to find out what’s on the back of their t-shirt. They have to ask people. They have to get into weird positions to see what’s on there. And when they ask people, they have to ask follow-up questions because some people don’t want to talk about what’s on the back of your t-shirt.”
It Starts With Leadership
“Again, it’s up to the leaders to create this openness, transparency, and vulnerability. If they aren’t vulnerable themselves, they will not create an environment where their people will want to show vulnerability. So I often talk about my ‘back of t-shirt’ publicly in all company settings to say, ‘Hey, I don’t do these things well. I’m trying to be better at them, and I want you to help. I’m recruiting you to hold me accountable for them.’ And if they can see that the CEO can be vulnerable and is working on stuff that way, they don’t think I’m out to get them. They realize that I’m interested in making them better for the mission, and that is triggered by that vulnerability from the leader.”
LEARN MORE
Make sure you go get Mike Zani’s new book, The Science of Dream Teams: How Talent Optimization Can Drive Engagement, Productivity, and Happiness. You can also head over to dreamteams.io, where you can take some behavioral and team assessments. And if you’re interested in connecting with Mike, reach out to him on LinkedIn or go to predictiveindex.com to check out some free talent optimization content.
Xenium’s annual What People Want from Work survey is back for 2021.
