About This Episode
Most organizations already collect behavioral data on their people. It arrives through hiring assessments, culture exercises, offsites and executive coaching, and then it tends to sit in a snapshot that nobody uses again. On this episode of the Future of Work Podcast, host Frank Cottle talks with Dr. Jay Harrison, co-founder and director of behavioral intelligence at Align Behavioral Intelligence, about what it takes to turn that data into everyday decisions.
Dr. Jay Harrison spent 15 years in professional hockey, including time as an NHL defenseman, before earning a Ph.D. in performance psychology and building a second career in mental health and performance. He and his team have worked with the NHL Players’ Association, NASCAR, Major League Baseball organizations and military special operators. In this conversation he defines behavioral intelligence and behavioral visibility, breaks the cost of limited visibility into talent, time and teamwork, and uses his own exchange with Frank (one verbose, one direct) to show how understanding a difference can turn friction into a better working relationship.
The two also take on AI. Frank describes his companies’ practice of putting “an angel on everybody’s shoulder,” with AI agents listed in the org chart as reporting to people, and Harrison argues that behavioral intelligence tools should help people accumulate more intelligence rather than replace their judgment. The episode closes with a practical question every leader can use: if you wanted to put a number on your behavioral blind spots, where would you look first?
Why This Matters
Gallup has found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement, which makes the manager the most direct lever most organizations have on performance. Yet the tools managers are given to understand their people are often one-time assessments that never make it into weekly decisions. Harrison’s argument is that the gap between collecting behavioral data and acting on it carries a real cost, and that the cost can be measured in hiring outcomes, manager time and team friction.
For HR and people leaders, the episode offers a practical starting point: audit the return on the behavioral investments you already make before buying anything new. For workplace and flexible workspace operators, Frank’s experience running a global network of operators adds a useful counterpoint to standardization, since that network concluded its members’ differences were its strength. And for executives weighing AI’s role in the workforce, the conversation makes a case for AI as an augmentation layer that sits beside people in the org chart, with humans still making the decisions.
Behavioral intelligence and behavioral visibility, defined
[00:00] Jay Harrison: How much am I losing from my people who don’t feel understood or put in positions to succeed? How can I re-engage them, and what that might mean for our productivity and capacity to get closer to our goals?
[00:12] Frank Cottle: Jay, welcome to the Future [of] Work Podcast. Really excited to have you here today. Gosh, I really enjoyed some of our previous conversations as well. It’s given me a whole insight into the importance of behavioral psychology and intelligence. Today, what do you think not paying attention to this element, operating without this intelligence layer, which really it is, is costing organizations, large and small? Not just large, but large and small.
[00:45] Jay Harrison: Yeah, thank you, Frank. Our conversations have been great, haven’t they? I feel you’ve provided as much, and our dialogue has been so great. It’s a great place to start with this idea of behavioral intelligence and behavioral visibility.
[00:58] Frank Cottle]: Excuse me, let’s define behavior intelligence for everybody.
[01:01] Jay Harrison: Sure. Behavioral intelligence is a term we use to take data around an individual or a group and actually operationalize that to gain insight, and then use that insight to guide action as the moment calls for in specific situations or contextual abilities. It goes from generating data to actually using data to inform how we go about managing the insights related to that data. We call that behavioral intelligence, and the idea of gaining behavioral visibility, which is really the capacity to fully understand the dynamics, behaviorally, of the teams and individuals who we work alongside or are in charge of, ultimately enhancing that performance.
From the individual “operating system” to team patterns
[01:46] Frank Cottle: Is that more effective on a group basis, or how do you tear that down to the individual? Because companies are built, organizations are built, one person at a time from the bottom up overall. So what’s the difference in instructional data, if I can call it that, that you can get on the individual as you start to create the culture overall within the company to maximize its efficiency?
[02:27] Jay Harrison: Yeah, so we really use some older practices of the idea of getting that congruence for the environment and really understanding the natural underlying behavioral tendencies and preferences of individuals. The way I look at the world and see is that everyone has the capability to do things, but certain things come more naturally to us. Others require more investments of energy. Our capacity to navigate those preferences generally operates at a degree or level of awareness. But through insight and practice and intentionality, we can enhance our effectiveness as far as bringing out new behaviors, or even mitigating some other behaviors that may not be necessary or helpful in a given environment.
So what we largely do, and look at behavior, is that we try to understand a person from that 360 perspective, and understanding how those natural inclinations and behavioral orientations shape their world and how they likely go about navigating information, work tasks, motivational profiles, how they relate to others, how they relate to themselves, how they manage themselves, in order to get, again, that behavioral layer of insight to say, we have a good understanding of the operating system of this individual. Step one. And not a new science by any stretch. Something we’ve been trying to do for a long time. [I think the Egyptians started that. Yeah, right. — speaker?] Like, the 12 zodiac signs have been around for quite a while, trying to understand.
Here’s now where the exciting part comes: how, in this age of transformation, we can now use that data, which has been relatively either siloed in a moment of time to get a snapshot of an individual, and then not really leveraged in other situations. We’re in a world now where technology is allowing us to interact with that data in new ways, and how it can serve the individual and the team. So we build our technology from the team up, and how we can get that deep dive on an individual to help align them for the greatest success and gain that foresight.
But then also, how do we do that more collectively when we see groups of very complex, dynamic people coming together? We now have the technology and capability to see what some interesting patterns might be relative to this group’s strengths or potential blind spots that, as a leader, I can now work alongside, and understand how they might be supporting a certain behavior, and have greater strategies and be able to impact the outcomes.
Are differences a strength, or does data make us drones?
[04:43] Frank Cottle: I’m trying to think, as you’re speaking, of specific applications of team structures that I’m aware of. And I’ll use one scenario that’s really just a comment. We have another company that manages a network of flexible workplace operators globally. And after four or five years of doing that, and it’s a 30-year-old company, after the first four or five years, we came to the specific conclusion that our differences were our strength, not our similarities. The differences we each brought to the table were our strength, not our similarities. So in that case, in applying what you know, and I don’t know how we would draw data from that, but just applying what you know: is that common, where differences create strength? I know in small teams, you have a team of individuals, each with different skill sets, specifically to make the team overall. Or are we getting into everybody marches at one pace to one drummer because AI tells us to do so? We have so much data, we convince ourselves that we should become drone-like.
Verbose meets direct: behavioral intelligence in real time
[06:07] Jay Harrison: I think your point is incredibly well taken, and where diversity truly reflects our strength. I think, to your point, the awareness of that, and then the appreciation of those differences in how we operate, create that strength. To that example, our example right here is living. If you looked at probably both of our behavioral profiles and how we align people, you would recognize that I’m very verbose, and you would recognize that you’re very direct, and [“Jay, you said a whole mouthful.” — speaker?]. So in that, there is the opportunity for me to potentially be frustrated by the communication: you can’t see what I’m trying to say in the big picture. And you’re frustrated with me because Jay talks and says all these great things, but I have no idea what actually is coming out.
But rather, recognizing your desire for that simplicity and directness and clarity of message, and my imaginative ability to create things through talking over periods of time: you sharpened my message, but I also appreciate your patience to dig deeper and understand what I might be getting at, to get the underlying points that just simply going to the first two or three sentences might get to. So there’s the opportunity where a behavioral intelligence, or a contextual understanding… Jay talks too much, Frank is too direct, right? Instead, now understanding those differences, you allow me to sharpen my messages quicker, and I will do so for the rest of this podcast, I assure you. But you also now recognize that Jay’s process is a little bit longer and a little bit more drawn out and communicative: “I’m going to create a little bit more tolerance and appreciation for how Jay’s process might work in order to get to those good nuggets that he might bring to the podcast.” Helpful contextual understanding, I hope.
One objective, and the customer at the center
[07:48] Frank Cottle: So what’s the bottom line? I think companies, organizations, whether they be sporting organizations, political, military, economic, all have to have a single overarching objective, and everything they do has to drive towards the accomplishment of that objective overall, the outcome that you were seeking, all of us together. All of us, every day, in interpersonal relationships, business relationships, trying to explain politics to the proverbial other side, whatever it might be, in a communications way rather than a table-pounding way. That’s a major challenge. Some people, some groups, seem to do it almost instinctively. Some cultures seem to do it almost instinctively. Others really struggle with it. Where does it take us if we’re going to build something from the ground up?
You and I and three friends are going to build a company from the ground up, and our overarching objective is to create a product that makes the world a better place. How do we use this behavioral psychology, not just with the people we hire, the people we manage, the people we train, but with our customers? With our customers, because ultimately, the most important person in your company is not the CEO. It’s not the head of technology. Most important person in your company…
Talent, time and teamwork: where limited visibility costs you
[09:35] Jay Harrison: Well, I think that’s a bit of what I would call a meta effect of integrating a behavioral intelligence layer and enhancing one’s ability to know themselves and understand themselves. They’re going to be able to better serve that customer, using their strengths to align them with the outcomes that they’re going for. First and foremost, we’re building that company, and the goal and incentive is to make the world a better place. I need people who are aligned with making the world a better place, and what that actually means and understanding. So when we talk about the areas of behavioral visibility costing us, right, I like to look at it: talent, time and teamwork.
Behavioral visibility is going to reduce our time, in a way that we can ensure that we’re getting up to speed, evaluating people, getting them aligned with things that are aligned with who they are. That talent: making sure we’re bringing those individuals who have that cultural alignment, and can measure that. And then, most importantly, using that insight, as we just did, to balance the teamwork capacity out: how to understand the potential friction that may exist between two people, and frame that potential friction as an opportunity for growth, and how two people may go about a different task, a problem or an incentive differently. So it allows us to get out of each other’s way in that sense. But as to the customer, I think the greater capacity we have to do that internally enhances our ability to do that externally.
[10:57] Frank Cottle: Okay. So basically, using behavioral psychology and all of the data around it, the data points can be grabbed. And that’s got to be an interesting data set when you start setting it up for each company, each group individually. There is no one data set fits all.
[11:18] Jay Harrison: We are all [ends of one? / an n of one?]. That is for sure.
[11:20] Frank Cottle: That is a fantasy. As you do that, really, you’re talking about using behavioral psychology to create a productive culture that stimulates itself and strengthens itself, as opposed to having to constantly rope people in within a group. Overall, you’re talking about the difference between a talented group versus a truly high-performing team. You’re talking about a football team with a 50-50 season versus the Super Bowl.
Talented people vs. great teams
[11:58] Jay Harrison: Well, yeah, it’s a great question. And I think, like, you’re hinting around the difference between talented people and great teams. I get asked this a lot with my sports background and military experience. What I’d give you off the top of my head is, it’s always about leadership. It’s the most generic, token, mail-in answer. But the data shows that.
Self-leadership is everyone’s job
[12:18] Frank Cottle: Well, I’m going to interrupt on the leadership point, because I agree with you completely, but I want to interrupt. We just recently did a leadership training element across our entire company. It wasn’t for the managers or the supervisors. Everybody in the company gets leadership training. Our belief is the most important leadership role you can play is your capacity to lead yourself.
[12:45] Jay Harrison: Yes, self-leadership.
[12:46] Frank Cottle: Okay, that is where it starts. So if you’re able, with my interruption here, to take that leading yourself and weave that into your structure here so that you can help people understand better… I don’t know, maybe I’m taking you off base. I apologize.
[13:07] Jay Harrison: No, you’re actually, as our conversations usually go, you’ve fast-forwarded right to exactly the destination that I had in mind, which is fantastic. So as I say, the generic answer is yes: 70% of the variation in engagement in the workplace comes from the effectiveness of a leader. And more specifically, the example I like to use, it was a line I heard from a coach, when he said, “I don’t need more than you, I need more of you.” And to me, it just was a very profound way to put the perspective of the leader. And in my experience, especially in sports, we know that the most talented team is not necessarily the team that wins. Usually it’s not.
It’s usually the team getting more of what they have, when ordinary people do extraordinary things that lead to those outcomes, right? So where I see the connection between those things is, those teams have leaders that aren’t saying, “Oh, I wish we just had a better X, Y or Z, and then we would be great,” but rather they’re looking deep internally and saying, “What is it about these individuals, and how do I elevate that performance? That’s my job as a leader.” Behavioral intelligence allows us to see what that authentic self-leadership looks like. How does this individual lead themselves and lead others? How do I breathe life into that and pour confidence into that? Because also, at times, a leader has to see potential in someone that they don’t see in themselves. You have to hold that space.
So, of course, as we get to that, we have high-performance cultures meeting high-performing self cultures in organizations. As you said, every person has a leadership role to play. They all may look very [different?]. But if I have insight into how you lead, right, and communicate to you and affirm that to you and say, “Listen, I don’t need you to speak up in every meeting. But I do want you to learn something important about a coworker. And I want you to go do that two or three times. I don’t need a report. I don’t need anything. But I know your leadership style is connecting with people and listening and supporting and building that collaborative effort. That’s your leadership style, and I want you to play into that.” I may have another individual who’s inclined to behave very differently. They may be a more assertive or upfront person. We may need them to create more challenge and opportunity in the room. But putting each of those people in those positions, recognizing both behaviors as leadership, is critically important to getting the most out of them and getting that buy-in from them: I feel seen and I feel valued for who I am.
The Peter Principle and the plateau problem
[15:39] Frank Cottle: Well, you know, I’m going to disrupt some of your thinking here for a second. Peter Principle, leadership. People can lead to a certain level, and then their leadership style, or possibly focus and energy, desire, dynamics… Literally, Peter Principle: peters out. That element. The other element, and let’s use your sports issue: what you were talking about is peaking in a season, where a team gets the best it can do, and it hits the season just right. There aren’t too many sports dynasties that do it season after season after season after season. They might win two or three, let’s use football, it’s the season, Super Bowls, but then they’ve lost it. Somebody else comes and beats them. So my question is, how do you drive consistency and continual improvement in performance that doesn’t peak and end within a group? Because if we plateau, everybody’s making money, everybody’s doing da, da, da, we’ve plateaued. How do we keep from that? Keep on the mountain going up.
Consistency: the Red Wings and the seasonal athlete
[17:08] Jay Harrison: Yes, sports is a very unique animal, and the analogy oftentimes only goes so far, right? I mean, the Detroit Red Wings did make the playoffs for 20 years straight. To me, that is probably one of the greatest feats. You can talk about winning Super Bowls in a row, but when you talk about consistency…
[17:27] Frank Cottle: And they did it with all variety of different players.
[17:30] Jay Harrison: All varieties of different people, but certainly a cultural element to that organization, but even still is going through its rebuild now. And you hit on an interesting point that hits home for the athlete in me. One of the unique things about being an athlete is the seasonal nature of what we do, the ramp up, ramp down. And the world doesn’t always work that way. And even in an athlete transition, and working with a lot of athletes through looking at life beyond sport and transitioning, adopting and adapting to a new pace of life is very different. So that’s not lost on me. It’s like, yes, okay, that’s great. In a sports context, we’re ramping up and then we have this ebb and flow.
But when we’re looking for pace and consistency, I think a big part of that is having a very grounded strategy as to what success looks like, and that evolution of growth and performance. Some colleagues talked about, when you think of the role of a founder, right, the leadership role a founder of a company plays, and how that changes from those introductory phases as a startup, and ramping that company and getting it into a growth phase, and then operating and scaling that company and leaving a legacy with that company. I think as our individual aspects change, the growth of the company does as well. And what performance and consistency look like as well has to be more than just winning at times.
Cultural exhaustion and knowing when to change
[18:58] Frank Cottle: Let’s talk about cultural exhaustion. We’re going to go, we’re going to rah, rah, rah. At what point does cultural exhaustion step in? And maybe it’s a sporting analogy. I know you had 15 years in the NHL, so you’ve seen a lot of this. You’ve been around a lot of sporting and business and military organizations. Is that an element, where we’ve been on a peak for so long, we just can’t sustain it anymore? Does that mean there’s a change in leadership needed to revitalize, or a change in players needed to revitalize? Or is that just a business continuity issue? Where does that play in the whole thing? Because you see that with sports teams. You see, we’ve been on this peak for so long, and everybody goes on their break, their seasonal break, as you say, and everybody comes back. They haven’t… and it’s not one person. It’s everybody.
[20:12] Jay Harrison: Well, yeah, this is like… nothing occurs in a static state and is the same forever. Things are changing and evolving. People are evolving. Markets are evolving. Leagues and dynamics, the nature of the game, changes. And I think that is a very important leadership element: to have people recognize when change is necessary, when change is in leadership, when change is in philosophy. Sometimes change for the sake of change can be highly refreshing, especially if an underlying symptom might be complacency or leaning into specific things. So that, to me, is also an interesting leadership dynamic, and a certain type of behavioral intelligence that individuals have, to recognize when it is time to change and when it is time to stay the same. Because athletes tend to stay the same. We like to stay the same, but the leaders around the businesses don’t like to.
[21:10] Frank Cottle: No, no, you can’t. And if everybody’s going to stay the same, you need a new leader. [Correct. — speaker?] I think Moses was the longest-reigning CEO that kept the group together moving in one direction. Right.
[21:23] Jay Harrison: And boy, did they have problems.
More data isn’t more intelligence
[21:26] Frank Cottle: He kept that going for quite a while. Let’s break over to AI a little bit, and information. There’s so much business intelligence, not necessarily psychological intelligence, but business intelligence, available in real time today. I don’t know that that business intelligence, though, is really creating better decisions on the behavioral side. So how do we start integrating business intelligence, AI? And AI is such a broad term. It’s like, how do we integrate philosophy? It’s such a broad term, means so many different things: robots to one person, data to another, process management to someone else. But taking, we’ll say, the massive amount of information we now have today and applying it more intelligently to really get not just better mechanical process management, not just robotic [manufacturing?], we’ll say, overall, but really better behavioral intelligence?
[22:48] Jay Harrison: Yeah, it’s a great question, because more data doesn’t inherently imply more intelligence, right? Because intelligence moves beyond data towards, you know, actionable understanding.
[~23:00] Frank Cottle: Well, we have a mantra. We have a mantra that we’ve been using since the late ’90s, by the way. This is about ’97 or ’98: Get the data. Data becomes information, information turns to knowledge, and knowledge allows action. So get the data. You have to have data as a foundation for that knowledge, intelligence, action. But the data itself is just a pile of numbers.
[23:31] Jay Harrison: Correct. And that’s why I think it’s so important for me. And I get caught in this sometimes: I love concepts like the idea of theory and philosophy. We have to have an underlying architecture to make sense of what these things ultimately mean to guide our actions, right? So without meaningful models, theories to apply our understanding of these particular things, whether the behavioral frameworks or whatever they might be, they become relatively throwing darts at dartboards, and largely [an open AI? / OpenAI?] is very much like that.
So in our model, we actually use an underlying theory and understanding of behavior, and what these behaviors actually mean and how they might work together, to help breed that understanding and communicate that understanding to, not necessarily, someone who has to have a practitioner or behavioral psychology level, but can translate some of these meaningful insights and connect them to the behaviors or outcomes that you’re seeing, to give you more actionable insight, which really is what we call that intelligence. How do I work with this? How do I understand what this might mean? And then how do I use it to our benefit?
Small adjustments, and AI as an accelerant
[24:42] Frank Cottle: Well, you know, it’s funny. I’m philosophically inclined, you probably would call it. I’m pretty [inaudible?]. Okay. And the way I look at all of this, and data, by the way, is: I take what I learned yesterday, make a decision today that turns into action tomorrow. So I have a three-day process on everything. Okay. And so data is what I learned yesterday. Information and knowledge is a decision I take from data to make my decision today. And then my action is what I do tomorrow. But every day I get data. So you may notice from my background that I’m a sailor.
And, you know, I know as a sailor and as a racing sailor, a lot of little tiny adjustments makes you go faster than big adjustments. Okay. And we talk about companies pivoting versus companies adjusting. A pivot: think of a group marching down a field, turning around and marching the other way again. That’s the ultimate pivot. Tiny little adjustments made in real time are how you go fast. And AI today is an accelerant more than anything else. It’s an accelerator, to me at least, overall. And it’s not about replacing people, but helping people to understand the world that they work within better. Not just their own behavior, because their own behavior is a reaction to the world they work within. Generally, generally. At least that’s my opinion.
An angel on everyone’s shoulder
[26:23] Frank Cottle (continued): But helping yourself to understand that world that you work within is an accelerant. And I think too many companies today, and your view I’d be grateful for, are looking at AI as a replacement tool as opposed to a behavioral adjustment tool to accelerate and augment people so that people can work better. We say we put an angel on everybody’s shoulder. Okay. Even within our org chart, you have a person, Jay, and there’s two or three angels on Jay’s shoulder. And it’s right in the org chart what those agents or angels are, that actually do things and report to Jay. It’s not the other way around.
[27:22] Jay Harrison: Right.
[27:23] Frank Cottle: And it’s not, “Well, let’s get rid of Jay because those three things can do it.” No, those three things can help Jay make better decisions faster, but they can’t make the decisions for Jay.
[27:35] Jay Harrison: That’s… yeah, you’re bang on. People aren’t tools of AI. AI is a tool that supports people. And don’t mistake the idea of using behavioral intelligence to replace your intelligence. The goal of behavioral intelligence is to help you accumulate more intelligence, to make you more effective at your job, whether you’re the individual or the manager or that overarching person within the organization. As you said, what we really want to do… that angel analogy is great. Our behavioral intelligence tooling is designed to be that angel on your shoulder, to help you make more of your intelligence, to accumulate more capacity to be sensitive to things that you may not be able to see or sense, or have the data information to make sense of. So in that way, we don’t see this as a replacement of people at all. We see this as an enhancement of people’s capability, to make them more behaviorally intelligent of themselves and others, for the capacity to make their organization as successful as possible, and themselves as well.
Layoffs, productivity and the whole chain
[28:35] Frank Cottle: Well, if you look at a big company, I’m going to throw some names out there, probably piss some people off. But you look at Google, you look at Amazon, you look at everything: “Oh, AI, we just let 12,000 engineers go because AI can code faster.” Okay. Those companies are trying to probably hit their quarterly numbers, by the way. But those companies are not building the strength of the person within the organization, not enhancing them, not augmenting them so they can produce more. They’re trying to save themselves, or save their way to success, rather than produce their way to success. Do you think that, within large companies, is too overwhelming a position?
I mean, everybody in manufacturing, let’s take the automotive industry: “Oh yeah, robots. Robots are going to be…” And I know lathe operators in machining are one of those robotic machines, CNC machines, et cetera. You have people working remotely now running four or five machines. But somebody’s still running those machines. And you say, “Well, I got rid of five lathe operators.” Yes, but you’ve got a highly skilled individual, blah, blah, blah. And now they’re producing more, as a result of which, on the production of the raw materials, you actually need more people. So the whole chain really doesn’t… It changes shape, but it doesn’t change the need, I guess, for people, if you look at the entire chain rather than a single position. Are you seeing that, or am I just a crazy guy that’s out there?
[30:34] Jay Harrison: No, I’m largely with you as far as when we think about forecasting. Like we’ve talked before about the idea of taking jobs and losing jobs, generally, with every technology’s advancement, as we’ve talked about in the past: the thing they all have in common, from the waterwheel to the printing press to the assembly line, is speed, right, as you’ve aptly pointed out. But those have always generally created more roles. They created that evolution of the workflow, and that redistribution of the workforce is a natural product of that evolution, generally for the benefit of society and the wellness and the raising of our society level of well-being and work and things like that.
So I’m optimistic in that sense, that we do still have that capability. But we’re also starting to see that desire for more human interaction. And I think it’s ironically becoming more important than ever, our capacity to understand and connect as individuals. I think there’ll be a sensitivity as we grow, our ability to tell when we’re talking to machines versus humans. We’re going to pick up on that very quickly. That sense is going to happen. And that desire for human connection will all of a sudden be the next thing, the commodity that you have to have: “I talk to a real person.”
Jargon, loneliness and the phone zombie
[31:54] Frank Cottle: Well, there’s a big discussion going on right now around language. And the language discussion is new jargons: Gen Z jargon versus, I’ll say myself, boomer jargon, and all the adjustments we have to make to actually communicate one-on-one together. And one of the things I’ve noticed is that Gen Z jargon, the replacement for early millennial and millennial jargon that’s in management right now, is really closer to almost boomer jargon of 40 years ago. Interesting. Wait a second, you’re just skipping back and forth. But this communications capability… today, you and I are communicating via machines. And we are using AI in the process of our discussion here, each of us individually and cumulatively in our presentation. Astrid, our producer, is supported by AI. And yet it’s still a very human interface overall, I think, and I hope we will stay with that as we progress overall, and help each other as opposed to isolate away from each other.
And yet you see isolation, loneliness, et cetera, is a pandemic-size or epidemic-size issue within different generational groups. And that is machine-driven. I was walking down the street in my neighborhood the other day. My wife was out walking the dog, and a fellow walked past us the other way. Had his face down to his phone. He’s a neighbor. The absolute phone zombie. Absolute zombie. He had no awareness of anybody or anything else around him. I was worried he was going to get hit by a car. And you’re running into that overall. So I don’t know how the psychology of leadership and human behavior… is that something that needs to be adjusted, corrected, or just adopted to?
Going forward vs. going the right way
[34:18] Jay Harrison: Well, I think it’s all of the above, and we have to be mindful as we become aware of how these technologies impact our psychology and our social functioning. And we think about progress as always going forward. But as C.S. Lewis points out, unless you’re going in the completely wrong direction… going forward is the exact opposite thing you want to do. You want to go directly backwards.
[34:44] Frank Cottle: Well, you know, we do have to remember C.S. Lewis was on some serious drugs at the time.
[34:49] Jay Harrison: Fair enough.
[34:51] Frank Cottle: A nice guy that he was, but you’re talking about going down a rabbit hole.
[34:55] Jay Harrison: We can find those. But the idea of being mindful and vigilant, and sometimes we have to work hard to not necessarily always do what’s easy, as to what’s good for us. I think that’s just part of the human condition as well, to which technology has become one of those things and those luxuries, and makes life easier, but doesn’t necessarily make life better. And I think that infects all areas of leadership: how we lead our companies, how we lead ourselves, how we raise our families. I have four teenagers who we navigate, and this requires a high degree of vigilance and understanding, and, again, communicating those values, but importantly, living them out even when they’re difficult, especially when it comes to technology. I think that comes down to the question, when we sit down day one as a company: What kind of company do we want to be, and how are we going to make sure that we’re doing that and we have people aligned with that?
Where to look first: putting a number on blind spots
[35:56] Frank Cottle: A deliverable question, if you will. If I run a company or an organization, any type of organization, actually, and I want to put a number on my behavioral blind spot, I want to say, “This is the thing I need to correct, and the impact of correcting that will hopefully be X on the positive side.” How do I decide where to look first? And what should I change?
[36:27] Jay Harrison: Yeah, great question. Organization by organization seem to have behavioral visibility, different needs. As we’ve talked about, larger companies with the [scale down?], getting information quicker. Our smaller companies that we work with are seeing more of that collaborative, productivity-enhancing component that really drives them towards the platform and tool. But the first thing I would do: most companies are doing something in the behavioral intelligence realm. They’re assessing people when they come in. They spent a fortune on a culture exercise. They’re doing offsites or executive coaching. Just look at the ROI that you’re getting. How much better is that investment making you? And how much more do you think you could get out of the investments you’re already making into whatever type of behavioral intelligence you’re looking at?
The second thing to look at, as easily, is: Are my managers armed with the knowledge, skills and tools to effectively lead their people and develop them? If I can give my managers back 20, 30 minutes a week because behavioral intelligence is allowing them to connect with their people faster, put them in positions to succeed and handle that managerial workload better, what’s that worth to me? Of course, the elephant in the room is the mis-hire, right? Eight out of 10 hires that don’t work out have nothing to do with skills. It’s more about fit and getting that alignment. How much are we looking at from our turnover? On our Align Behavioral Intelligence website, we have a cool calculator where we’ve pulled some of the greatest data points and facts, where you can potentially calculate your behavioral leakage and where that blind spot might be for you, based on company-specific numbers.
And then, of course, there’s the productivity drag: How much am I losing from my people who don’t feel understood or put in positions to succeed? How can I re-engage them, and what that might mean for our productivity and capacity to get closer to our goals? Those are some of the areas that I really started looking at and I listened for with clients. Rather than trying to say, “We do all this,” let’s look at something very specifically, a behavioral visibility challenge that you’re having, and let’s go to work on it and show how we can actually work with that within your organization to produce an ROI that makes this type of tool in your toolbox a must-have, not a nice-to-have. Because once you get in there and start using it, it spreads like wildfire in its capacity to bring value.
Pick a metric and find the pain
[38:47] Frank Cottle: Well, I think anytime you can strengthen your culture towards your objective, you want to take advantage of it. The challenge most companies have, though, and I think what you’re addressing, is where to start. You’ve got to pick something to start on. Get the metrics off that. Measure it. Determine the benefit you’re getting. And it could be in any number of things. It could be economic. It could be stability. It could be quality of service. It could be any number of things. But you pick a metric that you want to manage, then you just do it. So I’ll go to my old stoic approach: What I learned today gives me a decision today so I can take an action tomorrow. You’ve got to get that data, the [leadership IQ?]. You’ve got to get your… fill in your behavioral blind spots.
[39:36] Jay Harrison: That’s right. That’s the [game? / gain?] you’re looking for. Yeah, and finding that pain, and making that pain… the reality of that pain, is an important place to start. And then there’s no doubt, as you start to consider behavioral intelligence as a layer for your company, you start to see the other places. I don’t need to tell you, you’ll start to see where it benefits your business. But again, finding that spot where we could genuinely benefit, or we can actually put a number beside that leakage, is a great place to start and makes the urgency all the more clear.
Frank’s takeaway and close
[40:08] Frank Cottle: Yeah, you know, it’s funny. I want to make the final comment here: I think if I were to take everything that you said today and apply it to my own company or companies that I know, I would look for the behavioral intelligence interconnection between the team, the company team, and our customer as the place I would look to start, so that I knew I could get a definitive ROI and create the culture that I wanted to create. That’s what I would take away. Well, Jay, thank you so much. Or I should say, Dr. Jay, thank you so much for your insight today. It’s been really helpful. I’ve learned a lot. I hope everybody else has been able to gain as much as I have. And I thank you for that.
[40:59] Jay Harrison: Well, thank you as well. It was a very insightful conversation. I hope we can have more again.
[41:04] Frank Cottle: Look forward to it.
