How to hire, promote, and grow the right employees

How to hire, promote, and grow the right employees with Bert Bean

Getting more done with lesser people

I'm excited that you're joining me for a conversation with my new friend, Bert Bean. Bert is the CEO of Insight Global, where he has worked for many years, first as a recruiter, account manager and rising up through the ranks to CEO. Bert is passionate about developing a strong company culture that is based on shared values, great learning and development opportunities. Bert, welcome to the show podcast.

Thank you, Andy. It's great to be here.

We connected a little while back originally when you and some of your team had bought a ticket to attend our conference, the Talent Development Think Tank. I know some of your team are still going to make it. You are not able to make it to the new date, so we didn't get to meet in person. We talked on the phone right before the world went crazy. I remember being impressed with everything that you had built from a culture perspective, from a learning and development perspective at Insight Global. I was eager to get you on the show to share some of that. Before we do, maybe we can start with a little bit of your background and how you got to where you are now.

I grew up in Alabama. I went to school at Auburn. I know you're an SEC guy in Florida. I went to school at Auburn, majored in Marketing. I knew that coming out of school, it was important to me to find a place where I could work, where I could chart my own path. It was going to reward me based off of my merits, not necessarily off of my tenure or off of my college pedigree or lack thereof. It’s not to knock-on Auburn, an Ivy League school. I found that in Insight Global. That's the company where I started as a recruiter right out of school. I'll tell you that our company is super unique. We only hire people at the recruiter level unless you're a technical corporate person in our IT department or legal department.

Ninety-five percent of everybody starts off as a recruiter. We only promote from within. All through the ranks, all of our sales managers, regional vice presidents, myself even, we all started as a recruiter at Insight Global. Now, we're 3,500 strong, $2.5 billion in revenue and 60 offices. We all started at the same level. What was attractive to me then, which is still attractive to most people now, is the amount of emphasis we put on giving people opportunity in training development as a way to help people grow through the ranks. If you're only going to promote from within, you better be good at how you train and how you develop.

There are some companies that don't do that at all. They have a philosophy that they're going to hire great talent from outside the organization and hope that they make the organization great. There are companies like yours that try to only promote from within. If you're going to do that, you've got to give people great training and development because you can't rely on other companies to do that.

Not to knock on companies that hire always from the outside and hope those people make it if you will, but it seems unnecessary. With a little bit of care and intentionality, people will surprise you so long as you're hiring for those right intrinsic attributes like high character and hard work. We would rather do it that way.

Let's go back to the impetus for all this because I was fascinated by the story that you told me when we were on the phone before. To jump back to that conversation too, you mentioned growing up in Alabama and going to Auburn. When we connected, we traced back to our roots remembering we were in our respective SEC universities at the same time, me at the University of Florida, you at the University of Auburn. We realized we were at the same football game in the fall of 2001, Auburn-Florida game in Auburn.

[bctt tweet="When you train people really well, they get good at their jobs and get promoted." via="no"]

That was 2001. I remember we were three touchdown underdogs against the mighty Florida Gators under Steve Spurrier and Rex Grossman. We won that game. It was crazy. We also said that we were both members of the same fraternity. You guys stayed at our fraternity house, where I was living at the time. It was quite possible we were there at the exact same time.

Promoting From Within

We connect to do this show. It's amazing how it’s a wild small world. Getting back to Insight and you're coming up through the ranks and the company is growing. I remember there was a change in how things are done. Someone put the accelerator on hiring, you end up with a lot of people that was coming about.

We're only promoting from within and started in 2001. We're clipping along. We're doing great, doubling or at least growing by 50% for those first 6 or 7 years. By about 2012, we had new private equity owners. For the record, we've always had good experience with private equity. I've got great things to say about private equity as long as you're getting the right partners. We had these new partners. They said, “You guys do a good job of hiring and developing people.” We were like, “Yeah, that's what we do.” They said, “We created this model where you can see that if you hire more recruiters, you're always converting a certain amount of them to account managers.”

Those account managers always get productive to after a certain number of months and they're generating a certain amount of revenue. As long as you can keep your turnover where it's been, there's no stopping you. We haven't looked at the business that way, but we're like, “That makes sense.” It was thrown out there like, “Why don't you guys hire more recruiters and then it should all flow through.” I'd like to say that back in 2012, we said something to the effect of, “I don't know, that sounds like there are unintended consequences there,” but we didn't. We said, “Let's do it.” I was the VP at the time. We started hiring a lot more recruiters because we wanted to add a lot more salespeople.

What started to happen, as you might imagine, is when you start to stress the system in one area, you get all of these sorts of issues and others. We started to hire more recruiters. We started noticing that we started converting a lesser amount of them into account managers. These account managers that we were promoting, it was taking longer for them to get productive. Since it was taking longer for them to get productive, we started seeing more and more turnover. Unfortunately, how we were trying to solve the problem every year was, we had to hire even more recruiters next year. That went on until about 2017. Finally, forever was so rampant throughout the company that it was taking a major negative toll, not only on the bottom line, on EBIDTA growth as you might imagine, very expensive to hire that many people and had them forever.

On the negativity that comes with losing 1,000 recruiters a year, there's no good way of tell an office or a group of people that somebody decided to leave your organization and do that 1,000 different times will certainly take a toll. It was right on the end of 2017 that I got promoted to CEO. We knew that we needed to make changes there. It was obvious but we missed it. What had happened was as we were trying to scale the business and as we were starting to grow, we failed to invest in training and development. We totally missed the importance of it.

What happens is when you go from being startup type of a company, even though we were already over $1 billion in revenue, we still ran that way and operated that way. Our training was still very word of mouth and it was passed down. “This is how we did it in the old days, how you’re going to do it and let me show you how it's done.” Nothing was formalized. We had no real processes in place. In 2018, what we decided to do was that year we said, “We're going to reduce hiring and we're going to invest in training and development. It’s like we're in a university. We're going to create all these training guides, documents. We're going to start to script out what the first 90 days of a recruiter's job looks like with the company.” The first 90 days of a new salesperson job should look like once they get promoted. We created unmoored training classes. We started to look at it. It's like we’re in university as we call this guardrails for people's career.

Culture Change And Recruitment: Reducing hiring and investing on training and development is a better recruitment move.

We know that if our people can make it here for years then they're pretty much never going to leave at that point because they're seeing success and getting promoted. They're getting developed. They're starting their career. It's how do you make sure that you set them up to have a good first 1 to 4 years so that they are set up to have a good career here. That was the first big thing that we did. I don't want to say gamble, but it was a bit of a bet in that our capital partners let us know that if you guys hire less people this year and you don't fix attrition, that's going to be bad. We’re going to make it happen. There's nothing like having your back against the wall to focus you in on the exact things that are important and rushes to get right.

That was what we did. That was at least a first step that led to the turnaround. Account managers were turned over in 2018. It was over 40%. Now it's under 16%. Our recruiter attrition was going crazy in 2018. We were losing well over 65% of all the recruiters that we were hiring this year. We've lost two recruiters we've hired so far in 2020. Our recruiter attrition has dropped off the cliff. This funny thing happens when you train and develop people well, they tend to get good at their jobs and they get promoted to the next role. For us, that next role for most of them is going from recruiter to account manager. We've been happy that we've been able to still hang on to our model, which is basically hire, promote and grow. We've been able to do it with less recruiters that were hiring every single year, still getting more account managers and more professional recruiters and ultimately more productivity out the other end.

Getting More Done With Less

What you're saying is that when you make big investments in learning and development, you can get more done with less people or less need to recruit more people.

Isn't that a novel idea? That's exactly right. More than that, your people, they see what's happening, they see what's going on. They see and appreciate the investment that the company is making. They see that it's real. They're happier and they're more protected, or at least they feel more protected. What we've been very adamant about and this is a bit unique for a sales organization. If somebody was struggling, we would have performance plans. That means that you're struggling. Here's this plan that you have to go on. If you don't hit these certain metrics or revenue targets or what have you by this date, you're out of your role.

We had that. We used that even quite often. In the last few years, we've said, “Let's kill that. Let's kill our growth plans.” Let’s trust that we're going to put the right people with the right character and the right roles and they’re going to work hard. Let's trust ourselves to train and develop these people. What we tell people is if you start off slow, if you don't get off to the best start, if you're “behind,” no big deal so long as you're showing effort, high character and hard work, we can handle the rest. We can train you. We can keep working with you.

We’ll pull you out of this one territory and put you in another territory. If we've got to find other customers, fine. If we've got to get your sales manager on the road with you more, no problem. That’s fine. You look at our 1,130 salespeople, there is not a single one of them that's been here more than two years that never figured it out and never got successful. We very much believe if you don't quit and if you hang in there, you'll make it. That's been a nice thing to be able to tell our people. Long as you give us effort, we’re never going to put you on a performance plan ever.

If you put in the effort and give it the time, you're going to get the training and development you need, you can also give feedback and put in requests. You're going to get there and be successful. I'm assuming then based on that, you do have to let some people go, but those are the ones that don't put in the effort or do the work.

[bctt tweet="Put the right people with the right character and the right roles that are going to work hard." via="no"]

I can't remember the last time we let someone go. There are people that will self-select out. Our account manager turnover is still at 16%, but what happens more times than not is you've got somebody that comes and says, “I love the attention and love the training, love the development, but I don't want to do this. I want to do something different.” Sales isn't for everybody. It's a grind. It’s very hard. It's no knock on them if they decided it's not right for some people. More times than not, what happens is that they self-select out.

Hiring And Keeping The Best People

You build that culture. You give the right development opportunities. There are some people that decide that this is not the right opportunity for me. I want to go back to the beginning. It sounds like an important part of this before you even get to the learning development is hiring the right people. I'll expect being in the recruiting business that you know a little bit about how to hire the right people. Is there a formula there or advice, how do you go about hiring the best people so that they're set up already to come in and be strong?

We've tinkered with this over the last couple of years because this is another thing that it's funny as you scale a business, there are certain things that you do that work amazingly well. Over time, they stopped working but you stopped noticing that they don't work as well. Even how we hired internally, we hadn't refreshed it and forever. We decided to take a hard look at that because one of the things that we had changed was we had created a new value system in 2018. We call it our shared values. We’re crazy about them. We had started to look for this one other value that's outside the five shared values.

It's everything about who we are. It's this word, grit, that we'd look for. We said, “We're going to hire less people every year. We're going to train and develop them better. What we are looking for is we want to slow down how we hire because now, we're not trying to hire to infinity anymore. We're trying to be deliberate in order to do that. We need to make the interview process hard. At the same time, we didn't have a lot of depth to it. What we did is we rewrote our interview process based off the values of our company. Here are our values. Here's what's most important to us. Here's this other value, grit. This is why it's important to us. Here's what we want to know about how you align with these values and what they mean to you. We send all of our candidates before they come in to interview with the actual interview questions. We send them our shared values. We send them all those things. We want them to study and then present to us what they mean to them.

We'll say, “First round of interview, we want to get to know you as a person. We want to understand you and who you are. We know that you probably don't have a background in sales. We know that you certainly don't have a background on IT staffing because we don't hire anybody from the industry. We know that you don't have any a background, probably being a business professional, but we want to make sure we're hiring the right person with the right heart, the right character and with the right grit.” We're looking for you to show us that in your first interview. We'll tell you what we do as a company. We'll give you this high level. If you are still interested and you like us and if we think that you match up well culturally with us, then we'll go to the second round of interview where we get more into the job itself.” We have spent a lot of time training our leaders on how to do interviews. I don't know if most companies do that or not.

This is the only place I've ever worked, but I know that we did not do that for the longest time. We were kicking ourselves like, “How have we never trained our people on how to interview because it's so important?” It's easy to BS in the interview if you're the one interviewing the candidate. It's easy to go in under-prepared. It's easy to go in and look at a résumé for the first time and shoot some questions off the hip and that's it. We find it's incredibly inefficient. You're not getting a good view of this person at all. It's also not right to the person that's coming in to interview. They’re trying to get this job. They're trying to get employed and they deserve your best. We are trying to teach our people to lean in on these interviews and to ask good follow-up questions. Stay on a certain thread or to find something that the person is passionate about and go there. You're trying to get a peek into who this person is. We feel like so long as we can get the right person with the right character, we can teach them and train them.

Especially if you are only promoting from within, it's critical that you get the right type of people in there. You get the people with the right character because you don't want to have to worry about replacing them or bringing someone in at a higher level later on. That early recruiting process is so important. It's great to have leaders that know how to interview and find the right people. A lot of organizations don't think as much about that. That's important. You talked about getting them set up in the first four years. If they do well in the first four years, then they're going to stay there for the long haul.

Culture Change And Recruitment: Design your interview process based off the values of your company.

They're going to have a great career. I'm finding more and more as I talk to different clients and people out there in business, especially in the talent development world that companies are having a hard time keeping people past the 2 to 3-year mark. Employees are getting frustrated with not very much communication or coaching from their manager. They don't know where they're going with their career. They don't feel like they're getting the development they need. Attrition is going up at that level. It sounds like you're not necessarily seeing that. What are you doing in those first four years to make sure employees are getting what they need and they don't get frustrated and leave?

I'm not surprised to hear that at all. That's something that we started to see that in 2016 and 2017. We've blown that out of the water. For us that we would say that even at the two-year mark, the turnover starts to drop off rapidly. What I'm going to tell you, Andy, is not groundbreaking. We care about our employees. We obsess over their development. That's it. We don't say that. It's not a tagline. We also don't say, “That's HR’s job. HR job handles that and our leaders do everything else.” We've got an amazing HR department. We've got a guy named Eli Doster who runs Talent Strategy. You could think about him as the HRO or Chief People Officer. All of our leaders, sales leaders, corporate leaders, they act as HR leaders themselves and how they obsess over the development of our people.

We've also put a lot of process around 3, 6, 9, 12-month reviews in the first year, quarterly reviews. One of our five shared values is always know where you stand. It's making sure there are people always know exactly where they stand in their own career. What we find is that people get frustrated when they feel like, “I don't know exactly what my goal is. I don't know how to get there.” More than that, I feel like nobody cares about my goal. I feel like it's all BS and it's not real. Those values are words on a wall and that doesn't apply. It’s 100 little things. You've got to be good at around the development of your people. People are good at sniffing out BS. They know if it's not right. After a few years, if they've been there and they find that, “My training is pretty shallow. I don't have real goals. I don't quite know where I stand. I’m out.”

Millennials get a bad rap because they get blamed for leaving a lot. It's the company's fault for not investing in their development. We're lucky because we're a services business. We're only as good as our people providing that service. You have to invest in your people. Every company, whether you're selling a product or service, you’re better and you're only going to be as good as how engaged your people are. You're only going to be as successful as the engagement level of your people doing whatever you're doing, selling a service, selling a product, making a product, whatever. How do you get your people engaged 100%? You build a culture that's about taking care of your people. That's it. That's easier said than done.

If the shareholder is number one or if the customer is always number one, and if the employee is somewhere between 2 and 4, your people are going to feel it, they're going to be like, “I don't trust you with my career anymore so I'm going to leave.” I'm maybe the only CEO in America that thinks this way. This is how I've always felt, but the number one stat I care more about than the revenue growth, EBITDA growth, EBITDA margin, it is turnover. Employee turnover, I obsessed over that number. As for me, anytime somebody leaves your organization, what they're doing is they're firing you. They’re saying, “I don't trust you with my career anymore.” That sounds extreme. That sounds harsh. Maybe that's not always the case. Some people leave because I want to do something different. Think about it, if you were building the right type of environment, the right type of culture for that person and you cared about them, so much that they felt great about what they were doing, they still might leave, but chances are they're probably not going. I don't like being fired. I'm going to work hard to make sure that we take care of our people so they don't fire us.

That’s a phenomenal way to look at it. I don't think I've heard of any other companies certainly not a CEO that says turnover is the most important key metric that we look at. There is plenty of that talk about the people being the most important thing, that may or may not always be the truth. Paying attention to that attrition number is so critical. It reminds me of a couple of different things I've learned in my journey, but one of them is a saying a long time ago that your customer experience will never exceed that of your employee experience. Many companies talk about customer experience and ignore their employees, when employees who feel like they're not being cared for are probably not going to treat your customers that well.

How can they? We're all human beings. If you don't treat me well, I don't feel good and you're my boss, how am I going to turn on a dime and treat the customer the best with total respect? I'm not.

Getting Managers On Board

This culture sounds fantastic and culture I've learned starts at the top. It sounds like you're leading this and you're living it. I'm sure the people who report to you see that as well. I was wondering what a lot of people might be wondering is, but this has to happen throughout the organization. How do you get all of your managers on board, account managers on board so that they are obsessively treating their people well, taking care of them and making them feel included? They're in a great place like they're cared for so that they don't end up leaving.

[bctt tweet="It's great to have leaders that know how to interview and find the right people." via="no"]

I will say it's not easy. You have to be super intentional about it. You can't kick it to one group. That’s what HR departments are doing. They're doing their best as a good a job as they can. If you don't have total buy in and engagement from the rest of the business, it's not going to work. One thing that we did, it started in 2018 with this trip that we did, we called it Compass. It started when I was newly promoted. I was CEO. In the beginning of 2018, I had an executive coach. I was talking to him all about this. We've got all these turnover problems and all these issues. I don't know how we're going to solve them.

He asked me a question. It took my breath away. He said, “Bert, what are your guys' values?” I was like, “That's a good question.” We did have these things called the eight core principles. At one point, they meant a lot to the company, but we hadn't talked about years. I can only remember about four of them. That was probably three more than anybody else could remember the company. I was like, “I don't know. We’ve got to figure that out. The values that we have now, I don't think they mean anything to anybody.” I started thinking like, “I've got to come up with values and write them out.” We've got to care about them.

It hit me that I can't do this in my office. I've got to create these together with the senior leaders in the company that run the company. There were a lot of distractions at the time at the office. I wanted to get away. That's what we did. We found a house in the middle of nowhere in Utah. It was 28 of us in total. We went to this house to get some stuff figured out. We wanted to create new values. We wanted to figure out how we tackle this turnover problem. Figure out how we get better at training and development and a whole bunch of things.

I gave everybody a lot of homework to do before the trip. I gave them a book to read, Jim Collins' Great by Choice, a phenomenal book to getting the right headspace and we went to figure out all these issues. Before we got started, the very first night, we did something that was a little bit different. I wanted to go there as we like to call it with our people. We got in a circle and everybody shared their proudest moments in their career and their darkest moments or their lowest moments. The way these things work is that everybody typically has a Rated R version of what they're going to say in their head and a PG 13 version of what they're going to say. They say whichever version with whatever version the leader goes. The leader has to go first.

I went first and I went with the Rated R version of my proudest moments and my lowest moments of my career, how I got through them. Everybody else went and this crazy thing happened. Everybody cried multiple times. We had all grown up together in the company. We thought we knew each other well, but we didn't know each other at that level. You heard crazy things come out where people had been struggling with stuff their entire career. They had never said anything to anybody. You would hear somebody from across the room say, “I've struggled with that same thing. I’ve got your back. You never have to walk that lonely walk again.” It was a powerful moment.

What happens when you take the mask off as we call it, is that now we can all trust each other. There's no status management now. We can all trust each other and focus on exactly what's most important. They started at 5:00 PM and went to 3:00 AM. The next day, we were so dialed in. We knew exactly what we cared about. We knew exactly what we wanted. We were able to craft our shared values and like an hour. We were on fire. We left that trip feeling great, feeling super connected more than ever. We felt like we stumbled onto something but we want it to be, “How do we share this company?” What we did was we had all 28 leaders that were there. They did Compass trips with their leaders. Everybody in the company has been through at least one Compass trip, if not two Compass trips with their offices or sales teams, what have you. That's where we get to know each other. We take the mask off.

We lean into one another. In every office, we have our five shared values that our company holds dear. We've empowered every office and every group to come up with their own six shared values. You constantly make sure that the decisions you make and the messages that you carry out are made through the lens of your values. It's something that you have to work at every day. That's what a lot of companies get wrong. We got wrong for so long is that we didn’t message them. We didn't care about them. They didn't mean much to us and we didn't talk about them. Therefore, the company, unfortunately for a lot of years, was culturally hollow. That's what you have to do. That's a long-winded answer.

I love how you brought people off site, had those real conversations, gave people space to be vulnerable and share their real proudest and worst moments. I've been involved in a couple of things like that and I find that when people are able to be vulnerable and share what's on their mind, that's where true trust is built. It’s exactly what you're talking about. Most organizations, colleagues never get to that level of trust. They never have those conversations. They never truly know each other. They're often hiding behind masks. You've created a way for people to take off the masks and truly connect.

Culture Change And Recruitment: Build a culture that's about taking care of your people.

Simon Sinek writes about this in his last book, Infinite Game. I read that about it and I was like, “This is crazy. This is exactly what we did.” He talks about an oil company that did this. It was a bunch of rough-neck type of guys that all did one of these trips or did one of these experiences and they were never the same afterwards.

Remote Work During Crisis

It changes everybody. You become closer together. You realize we're all humans. It's not that big of a deal, which is awesome. I want to ask about your proudest moment, but I want to make sure we address the challenging times we're in. Everybody's made big shifts to working remotely because of Coronavirus. I know your organization is no different. You're big on this culture and everybody, communicating, feeling like they're cared about, cared for. What have you done to respond to this and support people while they're working remotely in these uncharted waters?

Communication is key. For the record, it's not like I know exactly what to do here either. I’ve never been a CEO through a global pandemic before. We all have to work from home. I'm shooting from the hip as well. I think about myself and where I would be your in-sales person or a newer manager, what would I want to hear? I would want to hear from my CEO. I'm constantly emailing the company. I've got some pretty specific emails that go out on certain days that I write with things to think about. We've been able to tweak our goals and some of our processes. I host a call every Wednesday at 11:30 for the whole company, to share what's on my mind and what's going on. I’m lucky that I've got an incredible leadership team.

These men and women are amazing. They were all at that first Compass trip. We have a morning meeting every day at 8:00, where we're talking about all the things that we have to deal with that day and that week. What are all the new initiatives? When you can be that close and that connected, it makes iterating, it makes turning on a dime incredibly easy of a large organization, incredibly easy. That's what we've been doing. It’s a ton of communication, very coordinated communication plans with the company, what's going on. We've adopted this idea, purpose as an organization. Our purpose that we have written everywhere is to grow our people personally, professionally and financially. It's funny. We love that and we mean it. We have been feeling over the last few months that maybe there is something a little bit more to that. We've been feeling. We’ve talked about this at our company conference in January that we feel that our purpose is to grow our people personally, professionally and financially, so they can take our shared values to the world around them.

Impact the world around them specifically our contractors. It's given us a real opportunity. We believe very much that we have an opportunity to be the light as we say where many Americans are out of a job. We are not the heroes of the medical profession. We are not those people. They are in the fire, risking their life every day. However, we still feel that we can contribute. You saw the jobs. It was 6.6 million Americans found themselves unemployed. Before that, it was 3.3 million Americans. Before that, the highest ever jobless layman and number of people that were unemployed in one week was 695,000 in 1982. We’ve crushed that. There’s a lot of darkness in the world. There are a lot of people that are hurting.

We are very lucky to find ourselves in a job that your only purpose is to put other people to work. We think that we've got an important role to play in the country right now and in Canada. That's what we've done. We've taken this be the light idea and have latched onto it. I am blown away with how productive they have been, with how motivated they have been. They're all working from home, figuring out how to use Cisco WebEx, Zoom and Microsoft like me. We've never used this stuff. We were not very prone to any video conferencing. Now, they're doing it. They're setting meetings. They're screening more candidates than ever and they're working with a much higher purpose. Somebody has to step in and help these men and women that find themselves out of work, figuring out ways to put their life back together and we think we can help with that.

Proudest And Learning Moments

It's trying times for our nation and for the world. You're in a position to maybe help a lot of people who are looking for the next thing. At the same time, it's shifting where a lot of things are going. There may not be as much hiring going on. I'd be curious where everything might be going with their company. I want to come back and make sure we get to a couple more questions about you and especially related to talent development and your own career. One of them, which relates to the offsite questions you had there, what's been your proudest moment in your career so far?

I've got several. Andy, we've only talked to each other twice. I probably can't go full nude on you as we like to say. We have two large conferences every year, one in January, one in the summer. On the day before the big conference, we have all of our leadership that come into town and we do leadership meetings for them. Typically, those have always been run by me, our presidents and our vice presidents. However, these past summers, leadership meetings, we'd gotten so big and there were now 400-plus people in leadership that there wasn't a room big enough for all of us. We had to divide up into this awkward five different conference rooms.

[bctt tweet="Your customer experience will never exceed that of your employee experience." via="no"]

Because of how busy we were with the conference that we're planning forward the next day, we needed to turn to our frontline managers to step up and to run all these different leadership meetings. I wasn't even able to be all that involved in coordinating exactly what they were going to say. A lot of our regional managers did that. It was one of those moments where I couldn't be that involved. The day before conference came and these leadership meetings started to happen and I bounced around to a bunch of them to put my head in to see what was happening. I was totally blown away by how our leaders had stepped up and were running these meetings better than I ever have. I don't know if this will make sense to your audience but for me, a leader that had always felt the burden on that, “I need to do this and to get it right.” To be put in a situation where I was almost forced to have no control and to see it executed at such a high level was such an amazingly proud moment for me. I was blown away. That was when I knew that we've got a special leadership team here.

It is a proud moment when you release control and you're setting other people up for success that they can go and do that. They don't need you in the room, which is very freeing as well. We'll go to the other side, and I don't know if we can go to the R-rated version, maybe the PT, but what's been your biggest mistake or failure or learning moment, one of at least in your career?

I've made a lot of mistakes, so there are a lot to choose from there. It cataloged by year, but I would say there were two times I feel like that I had to take somebody out of their role. I had done a bad job of communicating with them their deficiencies, the things that they were struggling with. Things moved a little too fast and all of a sudden, I was put in a position where I had to take them out of their role. I had not had the guts enough to level with those people as to exactly why they were struggling and why they were failing. Both of them were crappy conversations. They're sitting there thinking they're doing okay, maybe not killing it, but they don’t think they're about to be taken out of their role. Now, I'm demoting them. That was no fun. That was a huge mistake on my part and I learned a ton. Unfortunately. I wish I would have learned it from the first one, but I didn’t. After the second one, I did. How you've got to love with people and you've got to let them know where they stand. You owe it to them as their leader. If you don't, shame on you.

Major Trends In Talent Development

You mentioned that one of your principles there is that people always know where they stand. We've all made that mistake when we put that feedback off. We didn't want to give it the time. It's uncomfortable. It mounts and you have this uncomfortable, terrible conversation. I appreciate you sharing that. I'm sure a lot of people can relate. I believe you develop most of the stuff you do internally from a talent development perspective. I know you read a lot of books. You're always taking a look at what's going on out there in the world. Are there any major trends you're following especially with regards to talent development?

The one trend I would say is what we always say about ourselves that we use culture as a causation for success. I do think there is a big trend out there with the Simon Sineks of the world and the Daniel Coyles of the world that talked about the crazy importance of using culture in your company. None of us have our MBAs. We've only ever worked here. You can have a cool, fun culture if you're only promoting from within, unfortunately, you can be very insulated. You can be late to finding out what other companies are doing and what are the trends they are doing.

We read everything that we can find. I do like Simon Sinek and in everything that guy says. I would say that is a trend that is pretty popular out there. It's hard to execute on because the culture thing, it makes people uncomfortable a little bit. “Are we going to talk about that stuff? Are we going to go there? I'd rather put my mask on because I feel safe on the mask. I'd rather do that.” That's a hard thing to do. We had aspirations of getting into our own culture consulting business because we've had enough customers now that have asked us about it and asked us to do it.

We know that's going to be challenging in itself because unless you have a leader at the top that’s committed to that, it's hard for something like culture change in my opinion to take hold. It doesn't mean we're not going to try it. We did it ourselves, but you've got to have a leader that's what I call convicted and hungry for it. I was convicted. I was borderline desperate for it in my new role as a CEO because the turnover couldn't have been worse. Negativity was rampant throughout the company. There was not a lot of faith in the company. The wolf was out of the door for sure. I had no options. I was desperate to have culture change so I had to make it work. Ideally, that's the type of customer that we'd be looking for.

There are going to be a lot of opportunities out there, a lot of companies that will be looking for help on that. We always look to those who have done it well or have studied it. I usually ask about a book. You already mentioned The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. Interestingly enough, you are the second CEO that I've interviewed and both of you mentioned this book, The Infinite Game. That tells you there's definitely some good content in there. It's one that people should be checking out. Any others that you recommend for those trying to build a great culture?

Dan Coyle’s The Culture Code is good. I read that in April of 2018. It shaped how I think as a leader for sure. Dan studied the top cultures in the world. Everybody from Pixar to the Navy SEALs to the San Antonio Spurs under Gregg Popovich and found out they seem to do three things well. That is, they build safety, they share vulnerability and they establish purpose. It's a great book. I do love Jim Collins. All of his stuff is gold, but the one that I like is, and it's appropriate now because he wrote this as a response to 2009, how to navigate a tough economy. It's Great By Choice. It’s a phenomenal book.

Advice From The Pro

The last question for you, for any learning professionals out there or even CEOs or executives who are trying to build a great culture and be successful in their own careers, what's one more piece of advice you would give?

I would say one, you've got to be willing to go all in. You have to be willing to burn the boats and go on this idea of culture change and building a strong culture. The second thing you have to do right after is you've got to get a circle of people around you that are totally bought in. They are totally committed with you because you cannot do it by yourself. You've got to have other people helping you out. I call them my turnaround people. They have to share your same vision. They've got to believe it. They're only going to believe it if you're there leading out in front. Get your people around you that you trust with your life truly, be convicted and focus on it every single day.

Get a great team of people around you who are also convicted, who are bought in, who are supportive. Go for it and take action every day. Bert, this has been fantastic. You've provided so much great, not only experience and wisdom, but some great advice in how to go out and build a great culture. It's been great for me. I know it's been useful for our audience as well. Thank you again for coming on the Talent Development Hot Seat.

Thanks a lot, Andy. Take care.

• Insight Global
• Talent Development Think Tank
• Great by Choice
• Infinite Game
• The Culture Code