Zach Schaefer - Identify, Select, and Retain Top Talent

Time is precious and so are our pets, so time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24/7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow-ups for up to 5 pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments, and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year-round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care. Hi everyone, it's Bill Black, the exit coach from the Exit Coach Radio show. You know, one of the biggest questions I get on the show is what exactly goes into a business exit plan and when should I start creating mine? Well, I always tell people that the best time to start was 5 years ago, but the next best time is now because you never know when you might need it. So we put together a free report that describes what an exit plan is and what you should know. You can get it free by texting exit plan with no spaces to 442-22. That's exit plan to 44222. Again, text exit plan to 44222. Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And now here's your host, the exit coach Bill Black. Thanks to our listeners. It's been a real pleasure to have you today. We're just getting started here on Exo Coach Radio show. My next guest is Zach Schaffer, and Zach is in the behavior change business, and he's going to talk about how companies can identify, select, and retain top talent in under 20 minutes. Zach, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining me. Hey Bill, good to be here. Zach, tell us a little bit about you and and your business and uh you uh you're you're out of Saint Louis. uh the it looks like the name of your company is Spark the Discussion, which is a cool name. So tell us a little bit about you and your background and how you came to start the business. Absolutely, uh, I like to tell people my head gets cold because I tend to wear multiple hats and so over the last 15 years I've actually had two dual careers, uh, and I just this past May retired as a tenured professor, um, and along that entire period I also have been owning and operating my, my firm sparked the discussion and so I think that's important. Because that academic theory stuff kind of gives me the understanding of why we should do things in a business setting, but then my management consulting experience gives me the what and how for clients. Wow, that's a, that's quite a, a mouthful of what you just said. Tell, um, you're a tenured professor, uh, do, do you mind sharing what university? Absolutely, yeah. So the academic gig was a lot of fun, but I learned early on. I prefer to get my hands dirty and be in the churches with people rather than theorize about it. Uh, I, I just retired from a state university in Illinois called Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, which is right across the river from Saint Louis, and my field is, so I was doing research and teach teaching at the undergrad and graduate level. In the areas of high performance teams, conflict management, negotiation, organizational culture, that type of thing. Well, well, congratulations on your career there and on starting spark the discussion. Now, one of the things that you mentioned in the intro was how companies can identify, select and retain top talent in under 20 minutes now. All of our customers, all of our listeners are business owners who really can use this type of information. First of all, identifying top talent, whether it's inside and they don't see it yet, maybe they need to take a look and find someone that's already inside, or maybe they need to find that individual from the outside. And then selecting them and bringing them up to a top talent position, a management position, and maybe they become the second in command because that's very important for a lot of our listeners is to find that second in command so they can retire and then retaining those people. That's a lot of stuff. I don't know, I don't know if we can talk about all of that in under 20 minutes. Let's try. What is talent optimization? Let's talk about that first. So we basically give our clients a a couple of different tools to help them really understand and be able to predict how their people are going to behave in the workplace, what kinds of work are going to motivate them, and they'll accept that, and then how quickly they learn and apply new information. OK, so it starts with, it starts with a kind of an awareness of what what the problem and the situation is and then using some of these tools so that you can start to decide whether, whether these people are, I guess, um, whether it's valuable for them to be optimized for them to to move up, up the ladder or whatever, right? So are those questionnaires, are they assessment tools, um, how involved is it? So we actually have another tool called the job assessment where people who have skin in the hiring decision fill out another tool and create a visual profile for that job, and then we can overlay the candidate's behavioral data on top of that fits and gaps for how that person will fit into what you're designing. We were talking about talent optimization and how an individual can a position can be measured, and then an individual can be measured against. Those factors to to determine if that person is optimized for that particular position. Um, let me ask you this question. Does behavioral science really matter in the workplace? Absolutely. If you're hiring humans, I always say it's important to have a better understanding of who you work with and yourself. And so if understanding your team members and any key stakeholders you work with is something that would make work more collaborative and cohesive, which obviously then impacts the bottom line, behavioral science is extremely important. Um, now I don't want some people drink the Kool-Aid and say, oh, if you've got people's dead it's perfect. You'll you'll manage them perfectly. Clearly that's that's false. That's a myth. Uh, I, I always just go to if I would rather have the opportunity to have more data about someone, a person, or a process to make a more fully informed decision, I'm always gonna lean into that. Yeah, absolutely. Why wouldn't you, I guess, but, you know, a lot of people wonder about that, especially, you know, our audience is primarily. A baby boomers and this stuff didn't exist when they were starting off so much. Now a lot of the stuff like behavioral science and these tools have been developed for very specific reasons like I've heard some are by, you know, the government for for specific positions, and they've been fine tuned over the years. What, what, what's your experience been as far as the accuracy of some of these tools? So in terms of the tools that I'm familiar with, ours are extremely accurate, uh, which is why they're so popular. So in under about 5 or 6 minutes, the level of accuracy that you're able to get on a person in terms of what motivates them, what needs you can predict, and how they're going to behave in the workplace to fulfill those needs is, is powerful. Um, the phrase I always hear is, This is almost scary or this is like magic. Am I looking into an eight ball and it's like, well, welcome to psychometrics. Um, having said that, our company's tools have been around for 66 years, and, and it's funny you mentioned the military. Cause Arnold Daniels, the guy that actually wrote the original algorithm and developed our whole system, he was in the military and he was a bombardier, and he went through tons of psychometric training and was fascinated by it. Clearly a good salesman, he somehow persuaded the government to sell him that data and then he used that to build the predictive index formula and he shortened it so that companies could do the same thing in a much shorter time frame. So I guess it kind of gives credence to the phrase salesmen are born not not made right, a little, a little bit. Now when someone, you know, I have, I work with a lot of business owners and they say, you know, I need somebody like me to come into my business to be my second in command so that I can start to turn the business over to them. The problem is, of course. A lot of business owners are kind of like a Swiss Army knife as far as the number of things that they can do. They can do a little bit of everything because they've been brought up. What, what would you say some of the best traits of a second income man would be for a business owner leader? I know that's It's a broad question, but should they be better in, should they be better in sales and a people person, or should they be more technical? What's easier to bring somebody in under, if you know what I'm getting at, and build around them for their their weaknesses? Excellent. So one quick caveat, and then I'll give you three traits that popped into my head. The first one is that that leader or owner founder that's retiring, they should be hopefully building out a succession plan beyond simply just getting a number 2 to replace them. The key question they should be thinking about is, what does my baby, my business that I built, need to look like in 3 to 5 years or in 5 to 10 years? And is this number 2, the person that's going to get it to that point. Once they've had that conversation. Three things popped into my mind. You want a strong listener, somebody who can listen to both understand another's perspective and to analyze, to break it down. You want somebody who can is a good delegator, um, because once you go from sort of a senior manager or director role to the executive level, your time shrinks, as everyone knows. So you need to be able to delegate and elevate very quickly and authoritatively. And then the third one ties into my caveat I made. You need to be a strategic thinker. If you want your business to be around for decades, if that's the goal, then you need to be thinking about what do the type of jobs we need to have in 3 to 5 years need to look like, and you can actually use some of our tools to design those jobs, even though you won't have them yet. And then you can click a fund button and it pulls up everyone in your organization and plots them against it. So you can begin to use your internal people to build your company of the future. Now, a lot of our listeners have uh family businesses and they're looking for those traits in their offspring to take over the business someday and a lot of times they're saying, well, um, they're not a great listener, uh. They certainly don't delegate because usually they get delegated to I don't know, and the question there is do they have the authority because if I had 11 young man say, you know, the problem is all of these people that work here saw me in diapers, so it's kind of hard to become their authority figure at some point. And then the strategic thinker, of course, requires probably that you've gone out and seen a lot and done a lot so that you can bring all that experience back in. Um, can these things, uh, be any of these things be learned, um, by, by an individual or are most of these going to be kind of built in? No, excellent. Anything can be, I'm a both ends kind of guy Bill. So yes, a lot of things are nature, other things are nurture. I believe it's mostly gonna be both and. Um, and when you're dealing with family businesses, there's some delicacies there, and I was, I was just working with the family business around the three hats they wear equity, management and operations, and then the family dynamic. And so when there's a transition or succession going on in those businesses, the number one important quality you need to have that's over a multi-month or year process is clarity of communication. You need to have those difficult, candid face to face conversations about expectations, the hard-nosed, um, and oftentimes what I've seen is families can struggle to do that on their own if they're not working with an outside facilitator or just some objective party that doesn't have skin in the game, you know, so I'm actually have a mediation background, so I've done over 500 divorce and employment mediations and kind of see people at their worst, and um it, it can be tough and it can get really nasty. Especially if they're trying to manage those kind of conversations. So I just strongly um recommend your clients for family businesses, just bring in some outside party to help you have those important face to face conversations. And really it's about finding the nos that you need to say that help you have successful yeses in the future. Yeah, and it's not easy work, and it takes someone to come in with who can really face face you and tell you the truth and whether you're ready to hear it or not. And so you have a book out, Dr. Z called American Creativity. What's the book about? Yeah, that was a fun, kind of just a passion project where I got the opportunity to interview 25 folks from different industries, um, so from military generals, interviewed a billionaire, um, somebody that worked on the railroad union, uh, a janitor, certified financial planner, just across the sort of American spectrum. And I started it with one question. What is creativity? And then the follow up was how do you get to use that in the workplace. And it was just fantastic for me, um, because what I ended up doing for the book was really kept the words in the participant's own language and style for each of the chapters we put together. What my takeaway was people are wildly creative in the workplace, even when they don't know that that's what they're being. Hm. That sounds like a fascinating project. It sounds like a great read. It's called American Creativity available on Amazon, and if you'd like to know your behavioral profile at no cost, you can email info at sparkthediscussion.com. And a member of Dr. Z's team will send you a complimentary assessment and report. Can't get any better than that. Again, the email address is info at sparkthediscussion.com or just check out the website sparkthediscussion.com. A lot of great information and It's, it's been great to have you on the show, and I really enjoyed it, and I hope you'll come back because we just started to scratch the surface on some of this information that's very deep, and I think it's information our listeners will really enjoy hearing more about. So please come back and visit with me again sometime soon, will you? Happy to Bill. I had a great time, thank you. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio. Time is precious and so are our pets, so time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24/7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to 5 pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments, and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year-round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care.