Drew Fortin - Redefining Bosshole® Prevention in the Age of AI
We welcome back our colleague and friend Drew Fortin who is also the founder and CEO of Lever Talent! Drew is truly a thought leader in the world of people development, especially when it comes to how technology can favorably influence how we go about that type of work. Check out all the resources about Lever Talent!
Links and Resources from the Episode:
Click here for Lever Talent's website
Click here for The Lever Show
Click here for Drew's LinkedIn profile
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The Bosshole® Chronicles
“Drew Fortin - Redefining Bosshole® Prevention in the Age of AI’”
Original Publish Date: 1/2/2024.
Hosts: John Broer
John Broer: A very happy new year to all of our friends out there in the Bosshole Transformation Nation. Can you even believe it's 2024? I mean seriously, 2023 was gone in a flash and for as many wonderful things and even challenging things that happened in 2023, we are super excited that you are joining us to kick off 2024 with our first episode of the new year, and it's a great one. I know I say that every time, but it just seems to always get better based on our content, based on the amazing subject matter experts that join us, and we have a subject matter expert today. His name is Drew Fortin, and that name may sound familiar because Drew actually joined us back in November of 2022. Shortly after he founded and became the CEO of his company, Lever Talent, and, going to the show notes, you'll see all kinds of information in there about Lever Talent. I've always found Drew to be a real thought leader when it comes to people, development and the workplace and looking at the future in a different way. I've invited him back to talk about what's been happening in the last 18 months. What have they learned at Lever Talent and, more importantly, how should our managers and supervisors prepare for the new year? So let's kick off the new year with this great discussion with Drew Fortin from Lever Talent.
The Bosshole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, the talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode. Drew, it is so good to have you back on the Bosshole Chronicles. Welcome.
Drew Fortin: Thanks for having me, John. It's been a while. I'm feeling good to be back.
JB: Yeah, it's been a little over a year. I want everybody to go into the show notes and you will see a link to Drew's original episode or feature on the Bosshole Chronicles, which was November 1st of 2022. And that was really, Drew, at the beginning, the early days of Lever Talent right, and I wanted to have you back, as I had shared with you just because the way you process things ever since we met in the early, early days when you were at PI. I just really value the way you look at the world, the world of work, and I know what you're doing. Through not only Lever Talent but also the Lever Show, which will also be in the show notes, you're really creating a pathway for people to start to think about how we work coming forward. So tell me about the last 18 months, what have you learned, what are you experiencing in terms of the world of work and how we need to approach it?
DF: Yeah, so I'm very grateful to be in the spot that I am today. Yeah, and it's been definitely lots of learnings as first-time CEO and founder and entrepreneur, as well as working with many companies and leadership teams. The name Lever Talent, just to remind folks, is in homage to the impact that I believe technology and the proliferation thereof is having on humans at work. I think that the employee-employer relationship is broken, I think that the incentives are misaligned and I think that the more that technology takes over the more objective and transactional components of work, that's leaving humans to do the more subjective or relational components of work, and that means that we're going to covet human abilities in the future. And the more that technology proliferates and commoditizes all else, it'll be our unique human abilities that make businesses truly different, and that will be a leg up for each individual if here it comes yeah.
If individuals can truly understand their own superpowers and own abilities and what areas in business and what sectors in business their human traits are going to create the most value, and if they understand how best to lean into their superpowers and exercise them and develop them. Yeah, and so that's kind of where the rub is, because we rely on businesses for that. Also, when we had last talked, I have this major point of view that I've put out there, which, if you search for Lever Talent and five trends shaping the future of work, you'll find my post, but I had this POV. That was generally. The five areas are that machines are freeing humans up to do more meaningful work. Contrary to popular belief, it isn't taking over our jobs. It's like the more that we are relying on technology to do more in business. The technology needs a supervisor. The technology can't look through disparate data sets right now, can't make the subjective decisions that humans can, doesn't have ingenuity, doesn't understand the strategic implications, often, of things. More human judgment is therefore needed as technology proliferates. Because of that and what I said before, with human abilities needing to be coveted.
The third major trend is that as a business society, we are woefully unsophisticated in our way to correlate human behavior and performance to return on investment and business value creation. That's going to be a huge part, and we can talk more about that in a second. The fourth major trend is technologies like Web3 and Blockchain. Actually, whether or not we are using Web3 and Blockchain to do this have opened up our brains to the fact that data can be encrypted and portable and owned by a single person. There are now nonprofits and for-profits cropping up in that space to give people license to their validated resume or scorecard. I think we're going to see more of that, which is that's giving ownership back to the individual of their performance, which is otherwise kept under lock and key by businesses.
Then the fifth major trend is because of that, more individuals are going to take work in their agency, their talent agency, into their own hands. I think there's a future where we'll see talent agents. I think we'll see more contracted employment. I've been testing this in my employees at Lever Talent is- actually creating an employment contract that puts more onus on Lever Talent and regulates us and obligates us to take care of that employee and grants them a job and a salary that isn't just at-will. I think we're going to start to see more of that too. Those are the five major areas.
JB: Let's go back to number three.
DF: You kind of highlighted that one.
JB: Let's dive into that a little bit more. Sure.
DF: Let's go when we look at performance and you may do this with your firm, but we've done validity studies on, especially, behavior and personality traits, or cognitive ability to workplace performance, and the roles that we typically do this for are sales, because a salesperson has a quota and a number attached to them. Once you start to get away from that, though you think of engineering, you think of marketing roles, you think of people that work in production plants there are metadata that you can associate with these individuals for performance, but it isn't, as you can't necessarily relate it to revenue. I think that or we're seeing this more there's more desire to correlate those human behaviors, whether that's personality or cognitive ability, to these traits. We also have the ability inside business to even take a very standard five-point Likert scale from a performance appraisal. Granted, it's very subjective, but in aggregate it gets more predictable and we can use that. We're seeing more technologies come into the market that give more businesses, smaller businesses, access to using the high compute power that big businesses have to do validity studies, spending $50,000, $100,000 to do a study. This isn't realistic for a small business and now, with the tools that are available, you can find correlations in those data, do those studies for around $5,000. That unlocks so much on both sides. A baseball card I call it, the baseball player card is going to emerge and it's like what is that going to be on-base percentage, hit rate? You think about that, but think about it for an individual, think about it for a role.
There isn't a huge opportunity for HR leaders to lean in even more. For the last decade we've been hearing about strategic HR for the HR people. You should be offended that people keep saying that if you're not strategic, then what are you? It's just accessibility to analytics and data makes it so that you can make more educated and objective decisions. We're finally starting to see that in HR. There is no excuse If you're not going to take a data-oriented approach, a data-driven approach to running your company, and if your company in HR is the people, then you shouldn't be in that role. That isn't a strategic comment. That is just the data is there. We should use it. If you're not using it, you're not giving your company the fair advantage or even a fair level playing field.
JB: When you talk about advantage, it's not just a modest advantage, it's a huge advantage. Things that we'll lean into and understand how valid data can actually differentiate.
I mean how they recruit, how they onboard, how they train, how they go to market.
The advantages are exponentially greater. Something that you made me think of with the baseball card, one of the things, given that we have four diagnostics here at Real Good Ventures, PI being one of them, what I would love to be able to do sometime with the synthesis using technology, AI, which we're going to talk about in a sec. To be able to say, in this role, in the relative to self-awareness cognitive ability, general cognitive ability, psychological safety, whatever this may be, this is the dashboard or this is the model by which we can start to identify people that are going to have the highest probability of success and grow them into that role, rather than, to your point, the high degree of subjectivity that still permeates our management and supervisory and HR decisions. That's right, and all it does is it perpetuates an issue that, quite frankly, I think people are getting tired of. I think employees are tired of an antiquated methodology that needs to give way to what technology and objective data can actually provide, if that makes sense, yeah 100%.
DF: Prior to the work that I do here at Lever Talent and the past decade being in the human resources space, I spent time in media, advertising and the marketing technology space and that's what I found intriguing when I came from marketing technology to HR was that marketing analytics. At that time I thought it probably had a decade lead. On people analytics I'd say that's probably come down more to five years, but it still is a lead. And so, if we think about that, 15 years ago when I was doing marketing, we were just talking about cookies attached to web pages and tagging URLs correctly. We were excited just about that because it gave us access to the data. Now we could start collecting it and then, once you had the data set, now you can predict on top of it and well before that, the marketing teams and software could even do the prediction. They were talking about that because that's where it was going, and I think that's kind of where we're at now is.
There's no excuse. You need to be collecting the data, and that data that we need to be collecting isn't just are you doing your job and performing better than everyone else, and let's try to validate that. What makes it so you can do that. So we need to be understanding our behavior, we need to be understanding our cognitive ability, we need to be taking benchmarks on leadership competence, we need to be doing 360s, we need to be triangulating and figuring out all these data sets and collecting the data.
Let's just get that part first, because now, with AI, there are analytics tools that are coming about that will allow us to easily integrate these disparate data sets and let the AI actually compute and calculate and do what it needs to do, and what that means is, as a business, another part of the value that will be intangible. What will help us be valued more in the market will be the rigor and the data set that we have about our people data. Right, when people go, "oh wow, you have your stuff together, right, you have all this measured. You have all this ticked and tied. Anyone can come in here and see what's performing, what's not, and correlate that data. There's value here. Yeah, for sure, we're going to be more confident in the longevity of your business. Thank you.
JB: And we will be right back.
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JB: Okay, let's get back to the program. So let's circle back to or introduce the idea of AI in this conversation and, if we may, look through it, look at it through the lens of, I mean, at the Bosshole Chronicles. Obviously, we want to help managers stay out of the Bosshole Zone. I mean that's our objective and we know that nobody's a Bosshole on purpose. However, systems, lack of systems, relying too much on gut and subjectivity it just clouds our judgment in terms of being able to help people. Help me understand, help us understand how AI is going to factor into managers and supervisors just being far better at developing people than they are right now.
DF: It can be burdensome to have a professional development meeting with one of our team members or a performance appraisal and we, most of us in businesses, unfortunately don't look at that as administrative versus what it actually was intended to do, which is John, let's sit down and talk.
Let's look at the last, I don't want to say year, because doing a manually, but the last period and what does this look like, unless I have a conversation about it and then I'm going to actually document that and we're going to have really clear expectations. That is very daunting. I'm like, "Oh my God, I have a team and I have eight people on my team and I have to do eight of these and then I get it right eight two page reports and then and then, and then on top of everything else and that's why it becomes the administrative game Right, and what AI is proving very useful and right now is just being able to take my three bullets or we had a conversation about this before our recording of our conversation so I can focus on you and me and what's happening and summarize that for us and talk about what major action items and takeaways came out of it. That means we can have these conversations more.
JB: Yes, for context before we hit record, just so everybody knows, Drew has a piece of AI software. Is that right? Or a piece of AI? What's it called? Just I mean what's that Fathom AI. Fathom AI that records, transcribes and summarizes and provides what is it chapter headings or bullet points or what?
DF: It does whatever you want it to do, but it'll do general one to one meeting summaries, sales summaries, professional development summaries. I use it when even meeting every six to eight weeks with people with. I have two direct reports every six to eight weeks is mandated to talk about professional development, and now I can have Fathom running. I can bookmark different areas, I can highlight things, I can put in a little note and then I can literally have it summarized for me with two or three minutes of editing. I can send a follow-up email, whereas before that would sit and I'd be like I'll get to it next week, not that I didn't care about the person that's just- well, that's exactly right.
JB: You're taking your longhand notes and it's like am I trying to capture this? And again, I don't want people thinking Fathom AI is not a sponsor of the program. They're welcome to be if they want to, but it's just one example of really great AI. We use co-host AI to transcribe our podcast, but it is, I mean, I think you said this the amount of time it saves, and I think it's. I think, Drew, you said something also that it's not something you just sort of let go without some oversight. It does need a little bit of supervision and checking, but even with that amount, it is a fraction of the amount of time it saves by not having to either capture all those notes or transcribe an entire podcast. That is a simple piece of AI that already we're starting to see on your end and our end. It can be incredibly high value, yeah, yeah.
DF: Absolutely. I also think just the brass tax is communication and writing communications, summarizing ideas, following up with meeting notes right, we're seeing that pretty much in every way, shape and form. If there's an app for that right now and that's the beauty of when you have, like this big innovative technology, the markets flooded with ideas those will consolidate over the next couple of years. So don't like hit your wagon to one thing and think it's gonna stay there. But it's there and we should be trying it, we should be exercising it and there's little excuse now to say, oh, I can't come up with a plan or I can't come up with a framework to help my team work better together. Because AI the one thing that I learned, even in my time interviewing a bunch of people in the AI spaces ideation. Ai is great. Give me 10 ideas of what I can do with my team to help with this. There's the 10 ideas ready to go.
JB: Exactly.
DF: Give me this person's doing this, this and this well. What are great ways that I could recognize them? They're doing X, y and Z well. Write up a three sentence great job, with specifics in it. Like all that's available. There are specific tools now that actually allow you to do that, but even if you were using one of the like Chat GPT or Google Bard, like you could do that, no problem.
JB: Right now, absolutely, and I know that there and I'm probably and I know I'm older than you are I'm in the age demographic that is probably initially a little freaked out by AI and now that I have been using it, it's like, oh my gosh, this is.
I understand it, I get it. It's not the Terminator movie, which I think everybody is waiting for, but one of the things, and just for everybody's benefit, obviously, real Good Ventures. We are a certified partner of PI, as is Lever Talent. We are very excited about a piece of software that's gonna be bolted on to the PI platform that is strictly gonna be around meeting the managers where they are, in other words, giving managers direct access to human capital data and workflow information and behavioral data and AI right on their screen. And that right there. I mean this is gonna happen in 2024 and just for everybody's benefit. In the show notes is also my discussion with Adam Berke, who was one of the co-founders and CEO of Charma, which was acquired by PI. Drew, I think this is gonna be a huge, huge difference maker for managers and supervisors.
DF: It's a huge leap, and I think about what you talk about all the time, as I'm sure you do with your clients just the discipline of talent optimization, and you have the components of designing your team to meet your strategy, to creating the best hiring processes and methods that meet the demands of that design, to inspiring managers. And then there's the notion of diagnosing over time and when we draw this framework we typically have, and then there's a cycle. Well, the line in that cycle typically is done through emailing, or there's a rise in project management software like Asana and Monday and these other products. Those are more select workflows. They're essentially glorified in spreadsheets that help you connect different tasks.
Well, performance management is a space that has been growing over the last few years, and what I'm excited about PI's acquisition of Charma is Charma allowing you to do performance measurement powered by a predictive human behavior. So now I can give you a recommendation of how to give this person feedback, what to talk about in this one-to-one meeting, because this is gonna be the area where they need the most, or they want you to give them complimentary feedback on, and that is something that, in my experience, I've yet to see. Another performance management platform that is going to have this power that PI is going to have, because PI sits on this unique dataset.
JB: And again, this is such a huge distinction. Before, a manager may have gotten a tickler to say, hey, follow up with this individual, but it was on the manager's interpretation or capability, without perhaps any insight to the employees or the team members. Behavioral DNA this is gonna be based, and tailored based, on that person's behavioral DNA. You know PI data and you're right. I've never heard of anything like this. That's why we're so excited. But okay, so that's down the road. We're gonna have that in 2024. Let's talk a little bit about something that you did. I think is again just a testament to the cool stuff that you do. Drew, you did some interviewing recently. I mean, you sat down with was 25 business leaders and you tell us a little bit more about that and what you gleaned from this, because you were reaching out to pull in some really relevant information.
DF: Yeah, so the five trends that we spoke about. I'm a high extroversion person and so I learn by thinking out loud, processing with others, and so set out. With my co-producer, connor Lewis of Studio Lewis, we created a show called the Lever and we essentially set out and we booked 25 leaders across business, academia, economics and in the robotic space in the AI space as well, and essentially ask them questions to confirm this POV and what is happening and what should we be worried about. And it was just fascinating to hear the different perspectives of people, right, whether they're in robotics, for instance, robots and the robotics. Robots have been around for a while, but we all think about a robot and we think about like a Roomba and it's like not much has really happened in robotics over the past decade except for that.
Why is that? And now that we have AI, it's like the robots were waiting for AI to come. We're seeing an explosion in distribution logistics. Where I spoke on a startup panel at Robo Business West, which is one of the nation's leading robotics industry conferences, and like the magic there was like the early days when I was in, like internet marketing, I was gonna do these things right. These companies are literally at the forefront of changing the face of what businesses and how we operate and how our lives are going to change with robots. And it's just AI is going to rapidly accelerate that and we're gonna see much more from the robotics space and automation space proliferating much more of business.
The last decade of business has been soft. It's all about software, user experiences. What's this digital thing? And now robots are gonna bring that into 3D in real life. All the tangible objects in our life. We're gonna come to life, right, and that's what robotics is gonna do there. So just fascinating to hear these people's perspective about is this gonna like kill jobs, displace jobs, right? And probably one of the biggest takeaways is every time that as a society, we have a major platform or technological shift. You mentioned Terminator. We have this fear.
Oh yeah yeah, will it kill jobs? Absolutely. Mm-hmm, but more jobs, if history is any indicator will be created. Exactly. Then will be displace things we're not even thinking of.
JB: Right, yeah, the jobs that we will need to fill, they haven't even been created yet. And that's the other side of a paradigm shift or a huge transformation of this kind. Right, that people don't necessarily latch onto and remember, but it's cyclical. This happens every time we have a major technological advancement, whatever that looks like. Let me ask you, relative to that, Drew and I'd love to this really is my last question, and we'll begin to wrap it up and I wanna get your perspective. All that being said, for the last couple of years Real Good Ventures we have been on a focused journey of helping to reinvent the role of the manager. The manager of today and tomorrow cannot look like or needs to be different than what we've experienced more traditionally post World War II command and control. For those managers and supervisors and not only current, but the ones that are thinking about management and supervisory roles in the future what do they need to be thinking about in terms of being effective in that role? Cause I think it's a different kind of role.
I think it's a different kind of person, different kind of person that needs to go into developing other people, coaching other people. How do these trends, how should these trends influence the way managers, or would be managers, now think about their future?
DF: So I think in prior lives, in the command and control, we were looking to scale the exact same behavior again and again and again. That's why things that still stick that are still happening today, which is like you were great at this individual contributor role, therefore you're gonna be great managing all these people, which is not true. It actually was true a little bit at one point, because it was just like oh, I can have a lot of homogeneity and thinking, and if I find more people like me which I'm probably more apt to do cause I get along with those people then we'll have better success. Right, and that was thinking of. Humans are part of the machine. They were actually like pulling levers, and they were the levers in some case.
And now we're seeing, as we're in this knowledge economy, we're gonna be switching into what I think it's people call the creator's economy, into more of a doing economy, but what we're all going to be doing is more work on these intangible things, and so I think that, as managers, we need to start focusing more at lever talent. When we talk to leadership teams, we're like don't focus in the business, focus on the business. But really what we're saying is the key to being an amazing manager is figuring out how to increase the velocity of sound decision making across your team. Command and control means that you make all the decisions. Right.That's gonna be a bottleneck.
The more that we can actually disseminate the good decision making, the better, which means that we have to empower people more, and the world is more decentralized. It's really interesting the more connected that the world is, the more workers are decentralized, right? And so how do we ensure that we can empower our people so that they understand and have a clear understanding of what the company mission and vision is, so that they understand what the minimum required behaviors are, which are our values? I actually think that the role of manager becomes actually less complex, because we're gonna be focusing more on those things beating that drum over and over again. Now, the difficult part of this is that we we're gonna have to be more accountable and hold people more accountable, which means that, from a humanity standpoint, in business, we're gonna see a little more conflict in roles. Sure, right, and it's gonna be those soft skills that we talk about in leadership that are actually gonna be needed to be a better and more effective manager in this future of work.
JB: Right. Rather than carrying a big stick and perpetuating an old model that just is not gonna work.
DF: It's not gonna work.
JB: No, you made me think of the idea and just, I hate to use too many sports analogies, but you know, for a while there there was a big push let's get a player coach, let's put somebody in a coaching role, but there's still gonna be a player and it does not work. It absolutely does not work. And so when organizations finally are committed to the idea that our managers or supervisors need to literally be in a coaching, development, enabling and equipping role and they're playing days are over they're now curating and cultivating this next wave of performers. Until that happens, we're gonna continue to make these mistakes, but I think it is beginning to happen. I think you're right. I think that as we start to go into 2024, companies are realizing they have to step into a new, a framework of the workplace of trust and autonomy relative to leadership and managers and supervisors, because that's what's gonna unleash all of this capability that I don't think we've tapped into yet.
DF: They're obviously right. This is probably a good note for us to start to conclude on here, which is in the interviews that I did, especially with the folks that are in economics, labor economics, behavioral economics, brilliant minds. Is this notion of well, even in our current labor economy, we talk about like blue collar, white collar, low skilled versus high skilled labor and it's like well, those all have to do with the tangible, hard. Like it's still, that's a construct, that is still back in the day, right, right.
We need to start talking about abilities, right? I'm glad that we're getting more to like a skills-based hiring approach. Doesn't matter about your education what kind of skills do you have, right, but that's really code for what abilities do you have? What aptitudes do you have that are gonna give us a leg up as a business because we hire you. Right, and those are what we have to lean into in this future.
JB: That is so great, see, I knew it'd be awesome a year later, even a little bit more than a year later. I don't wanna wait a year to have you back, because I know you are always everybody and please give everybody at Lever Talent our best because we get to see what you're doing. I'm watching the Lever Show. I just wanna remind our listeners go into the show notes. I will have Drew's information in there Lever Talents information, the Lever Show and also related episodes, like with Adam Berke from Charma, now part of PI. There is such cool stuff coming down. We're really excited for the new year, as I know you are as well, drew. But hey, man, thank you, so good to see you. Thank you very much and we'll have you back again if that's agreeable to you.
DF: Always happy to come and contribute. All right man.
JB: All right, thanks everybody and we'll see you next time on the Bosshole Chronicles.
We'd like to thank our guests today on the Bosshole Chronicles and if you have a Bosshole Chronicles story of your own, please email us at mystory@thebossholechronicles.com. Once again, mystory@thebossholechronicles.com. We'll see you again soon.