The Alchemy of Talent: Leading Teams to Peak Performance with Vijay Pendakur

[00:00:00] Deel has helped over 35,000 businesses simplify global hiring, onboarding, payroll, and compliance. Visit Deel.com to learn more. That's D-E-E-L.com.

[00:00:15] All right. I want to talk to you for a moment about retaining and developing your workforce. It's hard. Recruiting is hard. Retaining top employees is hard. Then you've got onboarding, payroll, benefits, time, and labor management.

[00:00:28] You need to take care of your workforce and you can only do this successfully if you commit to transforming your employee experience.

[00:00:36] This is where iSolve comes in. They empower you to be successful. We've seen it with a number of companies that we've worked with, and this is why we partner with them here at WorkDefined.

[00:00:47] We trust them and you should too. Check them out at iSolvedHCM.com.

[00:01:03] Hey, this is William Tincup and Ryan Leary. And you are listening, hopefully watching, the You Should Know podcast. Today we have Vijay on. We'll be talking about his latest book, The Alchemy of Talent.

[00:01:16] And we know Vijay because we serve on an advisory board together. And in talking with him, he was telling us about his new book. We're like, yeah, we got to do this bit, man. We got to know more about this book.

[00:01:30] So, uh, let's just start. Vijay, first of all, Ryan, how are you doing? I got to do this bit because if I don't, he gets, he gets butt hurt.

[00:01:40] So, how are you?

[00:01:41] Well, you can't just say that and move on. Vijay, sometimes he'll just go through the intro and just say, this is William Tincup. Vijay, nice to meet you.

[00:01:51] Like, I'm right here.

[00:01:53] Erased. Just erased.

[00:01:55] Right here. Yeah. So, I'm doing well. I'm feeling a little, um, what should I say? Um, not able, I don't know the right term here, but I'm looking at Vijay's beard.

[00:02:05] You're having a hard time putting questions together?

[00:02:08] I'm looking at Vijay's beard and I'm looking at the scruff that I now have left.

[00:02:13] Oh, yeah. That's a legit beard right there.

[00:02:15] And I'm thinking, how in God's name do I do that?

[00:02:16] No, that's a legit beard. That's a beard. That's a full beard.

[00:02:20] Even, Vijay, even at full growth, which was just yesterday, it's still like high school patchy everywhere. And I said, let me trim it up, you know, and I trimmed it down.

[00:02:34] So, my, now I'm just a cue ball.

[00:02:36] My beard is, it's, the hairs just get longer. There's, they don't get filled in. It just, they just get, it just gets uglier. It is what it is.

[00:02:46] I will say, now that we've decided to open the show about beards.

[00:02:49] A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

[00:02:50] A trade-off here is you too can have a thick, full, dark, beautiful beard if you're willing to take the trade-off of South Indian genetics.

[00:02:59] So that when I was graduating from high school, I was maybe 120 pounds dripping wet and I was six foot one.

[00:03:07] So, you know, South Indian dudes can have some rock and facial hair, but, but I, I mean, you know, I was like a piece of paper.

[00:03:16] Yeah, yeah.

[00:03:16] But you had a full beard.

[00:03:18] If the wind blew, you blew over.

[00:03:21] What part of, what part of Southern India, where did you grow up?

[00:03:25] So I grew up in Chicago. My family is, comes from the Bangalore area.

[00:03:29] And I know we've gotten several tech backgrounds in the room. So, you know, the, um, my parents are both from small, like small towns, but now because of urbanization and where jobs are and everything, many of my cousins live and work in the tech sector.

[00:03:43] Wow. I've been there twice. It's, uh, it's fantastic. So, um, where in Chicago did you grow up?

[00:03:49] All the way at the Northern edge of the city, right where the Evanston Chicago border is.

[00:03:54] If you've taken the red line all the way North to Howard, uh, like five blocks off of that red line.

[00:03:59] Okay. Uh, I know where you're at. All right. Do us a favor and introduce yourself and then we'll jump into the book.

[00:04:05] All right. Vijay appendacore. Um, happy to spend time with you today, William and Ryan. I see Ryan, look, I'm naming you. I'm calling you in.

[00:04:13] I'm like William.

[00:04:15] As long as somebody loves me, I'm good.

[00:04:18] Yeah. Yeah. Um, new author. Uh, um, so,

[00:04:24] you know, I think today we're talking about the author side of things. So I'll bring up some other bio points here. Um, I was, uh, in education for a very long time. I worked at five universities, um, around the country.

[00:04:34] So those jobs had me moving from the Midwest to the West coast to the East coast and, um, uh, worked on the relationship between environments and student success.

[00:04:45] So how do learning environments shape the trajectory of students? Um, and with particular attention to what geeks call non-cognitive performance factors.

[00:04:56] We can get big into that if you want. Um, and then I moved into employee experience work, um, in corporations and tech companies.

[00:05:04] I worked at Zynga, which is a video game company and then VMware and then Dropbox. And then, um, after that launched a fractional advisory business. And my first client was Salesforce.

[00:05:15] And now I'm just doing all kinds of things. And I get to be on, you know, as a work as an advisor alongside the two of you at a phenomenal organization, WISC and have a new book out.

[00:05:24] Man, there's a lot to unpack there. Uh, let's, let's start with the book because we could go into your background and just talk about your background forever. Uh, the, the alchemy of talent out of all the ideas that you, you had, I'm just assuming there was a post-it note involved, lots of post-it notes. What, what got you to focus on this?

[00:05:45] There were, there were a number of post-it notes. Um, and, um, I think there was a, a mix of optimism and skepticism, skepticism that drove me to writing this book. And so let me, let me try and answer it with a balance of optimism and skepticism.

[00:06:02] The yin and yang. All right, I got it.

[00:06:04] So, um, the harsh reality that drove this was I was the, um, VP for diversity, equity, and inclusion or the chief diversity officer.

[00:06:15] At multiple, um, large complex organizations, publicly held companies.

[00:06:20] Right.

[00:06:21] And I lived through the rise, the meteoric rise and the, you know, Icarus style contraction in the DEI space.

[00:06:31] Right.

[00:06:31] Part of what I learned in trying to lead a function through explosion and contraction was, um, a lot of lessons, the hard way.

[00:06:41] And I think almost all real learning happens in the, in, in the operational battlefield and fog of war.

[00:06:46] And, um, part of what I figured out was in the search for stable ground in a function that was constantly being told to appear in different ways and then disappearing.

[00:06:58] And the difference between idea and execution was tremendous.

[00:07:01] The distance from best practice was tremendous.

[00:07:03] And where I found stable ground was around shifting from the normative language of DEI into the behavioral science of, of high performing teams.

[00:07:13] Oh yeah.

[00:07:14] And over and over again, I was able to make connections with product and go to market leaders around, Hey, tell me what's going on.

[00:07:22] Let me do some journey mapping and design thinking around what's happening for your teams.

[00:07:25] And they would go, I just, I need resilience.

[00:07:29] I need resilience for my team because we're living in a state of constant disruption or, um, I've rapidly diversified my org because we've moved into 12 new geographic markets in the last 18 months.

[00:07:40] And I cannot establish any sort of central sense of belonging for my people now, because there's a level of complexity that my people leaders don't know how to handle.

[00:07:50] Or we did a riff and the people who are left don't trust us anymore, even though they're still here.

[00:07:56] And I'm so surprised by this.

[00:07:57] And I'm like, well, let's talk about the behavioral science of trust.

[00:08:00] Um, and in all of those things, I was deeply consultative and advising and strategizing and building with the business.

[00:08:08] And so when I was launching on my own and trying to think of a piece of thought leadership that I could bring to market that could help cut through the signal and noise issues facing DEI, the skepticism here is like, look, what would make sense?

[00:08:24] If you look me up on LinkedIn, you're going to see multiple decades of work tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

[00:08:30] I'm not writing a DEI book right now, but I can still take everything I know and deploy it in the high performing teams arena tied to the behavioral science of how we unlock flourishing for people at work.

[00:08:44] Um, and for me, I actually see that as a DEI book.

[00:08:48] I'm just not using that language.

[00:08:50] Um, and I promised the optimistic take here.

[00:08:53] The optimism here was that, um, in the last 18 months, I I'm pretty heavily tech facing, although I do work in manufacturing and energy and transportation, but a lot of my clients are Silicon Valley based companies.

[00:09:08] And, um, there's been this real increased attention to performance.

[00:09:13] If you talk to any tech CHRO right now, and you say, give me your top three things, keeping you up at night.

[00:09:18] One of them is, well, we're doing, we're raising the bar on performance.

[00:09:21] And then if you dig in and if you're lucky enough to have a martini or a cup of coffee in front of you, and you can have a real conversation with that person and get into the details and you, and you go, what, what does it mean for you to focus on performance?

[00:09:32] Largely what you're going to hear is, uh, what I call talent hygiene or performance hygiene, which means, okay.

[00:09:40] So what we're doing is we're doing some rigorous attention to nine box.

[00:09:43] That's HR language of trying to plot where our talent sits against certain kinds of, uh, performance and capability metrics we're doing.

[00:09:51] Uh, we're reskilling managers on talent evaluation.

[00:09:54] So how do you do your annual performance review?

[00:09:57] And we've got some gating metrics set up so that only 5% of the organization can get exceeds and 10% of the organization has to get a one or a two, you know, needs improvement or a IBM way.

[00:10:09] Yeah, exactly.

[00:10:09] There's an, and now we're doing some talent density mapping and, uh, we've got a hypo program, a high potential program.

[00:10:15] I don't want to use too much HR language here, but you know, this is the basic playbook when they say we're focusing on performance.

[00:10:20] And so I go, okay, great.

[00:10:21] You're focusing on performance.

[00:10:22] I see that you've had three rifts in the last 18 months.

[00:10:27] What are you doing on trust?

[00:10:29] We're not, we're not doing anything on trust.

[00:10:31] I see that you, um, you're, you know, when, when we've been talking, you've talked about how, uh, your intent to leave score is actually pretty high.

[00:10:40] So it seems like you actually have a crisis of belonging or resilience on your team.

[00:10:44] Hi there.

[00:10:45] I'm Peter Zollman.

[00:10:46] I'm a co-host of the inside job boards and recruitment marketplaces podcast.

[00:10:51] And I'm Steven Rothberg.

[00:10:52] And I guess that makes me the other co-host.

[00:10:54] Every other week we're joined by guests from the world's leading job sites.

[00:10:58] Together we analyze news about general niche and aggregator job board and recruitment marketplaces sites.

[00:11:05] Make sure you sign up and subscribe today.

[00:11:08] What are you doing to reskill managers to leave for, for belonging or resilience?

[00:11:12] Or what's your connection strategy now that you're 80% hybrid and 15% remote and 5% in office?

[00:11:19] Uh, oh, we don't have a connection playbook.

[00:11:21] And so for me, the optimistic side here was I can bring forward a level of, um, research and data and science around performance.

[00:11:30] That is part of this performance conversation that somehow is the blind spot for the Valley Silicon Valley right now.

[00:11:39] If you want performance and you don't pay attention to non-cognitive performance factors, to take it all the way back to the start of this conversation, right?

[00:11:47] The reality that humans sit in an environmental ecosystem and the environmentals actually have a, um, can be tailwinds or headwinds.

[00:11:55] Then you're missing out on half of the levers that you could be pulling to increase performance.

[00:12:00] We know that high performing teams also function off of a currency of trust, belonging and connection, but we're not adding that into the performance playbook.

[00:12:07] It's all talent density, gating metrics, hypo, you know, let's exit out folks, IDPs, yada, yada, yada.

[00:12:14] Why, why do you find companies are ignoring this or failing to bring this to the forefront?

[00:12:20] Um, yeah, that, that's a great question.

[00:12:22] I think that there, I, I generally find that the executive layer of the companies I work with are super smart, super ambitious people.

[00:12:32] So this is not, there's, I don't want to gaslight here and be like, Oh, you know, people are just dumb.

[00:12:37] They don't get it.

[00:12:37] That's not true.

[00:12:39] I think a number of things have happened here, um, that are resulting in a miss, a potential missed opportunity.

[00:12:45] Um, and so let's, let me confine my comments to tech specifically, and then maybe we can think beyond that.

[00:12:50] But there, there was a good decade of, um, of endless wealth and prosperity in tech from,

[00:13:00] let's say 20, 2012 to 2022.

[00:13:03] Right.

[00:13:03] And part of the amount of VC money and private equity money and wall street deciding to not enforce kind of core, you know, um, mechanics like the rule of 40 for SAS companies, you know, like there was just a lot of, of, uh, of, um, internal governance, uh, pieces that were, weren't in place.

[00:13:23] And so, um, the executive layer could count on unbelievable, um, levels of OPEX spend to sort of drive things like culture and, um, employee total rewards.

[00:13:38] And, and, you know, uh, the, the employee value proposition became like, look, we're just going to pay top of market.

[00:13:44] Uh, you know, even if we're not actually that successful as a company, there's a lot of really bizarre sort of counter capitalist things happening in the Valley for a decade.

[00:13:51] And then all of a sudden, I mean, like all of a sudden, you know, things changed, right?

[00:13:56] 2022, about halfway into 2022, wall street pulled Silicon Valley's card in a hard way.

[00:14:02] Right.

[00:14:02] And you have a whole layer in the executive group that doesn't remember any other difference.

[00:14:09] The last time normal market fundamentals were applied, they were mid-level.

[00:14:13] I was at companies or advising in companies where the entire VP plus group, the median age was late thirties.

[00:14:20] So you were in your late twenties, the last time you were held accountable.

[00:14:24] So this is an, uh, this is actually a bridge of empathy that I use to remind myself that people are like in shock right now around like, oh my gosh, we've got to hold folks accountable.

[00:14:35] We have to be performance-based.

[00:14:36] And the first thing you go to is the stick, right?

[00:14:39] Between carrots and sticks.

[00:14:40] When I say the stick, you go to the stick, right?

[00:14:43] And your, your C-suite and your exec team is under immense pressure from their board.

[00:14:48] The board's gotten fiduciary all of a sudden, you know, and you're like, oh, so then you go to the stick first.

[00:14:53] And you're like, look, everybody needs to be on an IDP.

[00:14:55] And if, you know, we're going to, we, we've been tolerating underperformance.

[00:14:59] So the CHRO is, is suddenly, you know, like being whiplash, right.

[00:15:03] To like, you know, make a right turn.

[00:15:05] And so I, I do think the, the, the knee jerk instinct was to go to performance hygiene.

[00:15:11] But, and, and the missed opportunity here is that we, sticks are important.

[00:15:16] We need accountability, right?

[00:15:17] And, and we should have, managers should know how to do annual performance reviews.

[00:15:21] Some of this is long overdue, particularly in tech.

[00:15:23] On the flip side though, we need to understand that humans, homo sapiens are, our act, our software

[00:15:30] has evolved over tens of thousands of years to also respond to environmentals that we can take advantage of here.

[00:15:38] And, and amplify performance if we just had a broader playbook.

[00:15:42] And so that's, that's the optimist read here.

[00:15:45] And I, and I do think history sides with optimism is that we, we need to be able to expand the dashboard

[00:15:52] to add in next to the sticks, some volume knobs on, on things like, you know, trust and belonging and connection,

[00:16:00] which I know sometimes particularly to an engineering leader could come off as soft,

[00:16:04] but if you actually help them see the science and a lot of what I do as a consultant and a speaker

[00:16:08] is talk about the behavioral science, the neuroscience, the data we have

[00:16:12] that actually proves out the business case for these things.

[00:16:15] People are like, oh, that makes sense.

[00:16:16] And so partially I think that, you know, we're, we're in a, um, a paradigm shift, Ryan.

[00:16:22] And, um, when people let go of one trapeze bar in, they actually don't immediately grab onto the next trapeze bar.

[00:16:29] There's a moment where you're in free fall and we're in that moment right now in the town.

[00:16:33] You know, Ryan and I, on one of our, our new show, we cover a lot of things that have been happening in DEI

[00:16:40] and, uh, programs being shuttered and all that type stuff.

[00:16:44] And, uh, it's fascinating to me because I think what I, well, what I like about your book and the, uh,

[00:16:51] approach is to make it a business decision for talent.

[00:16:57] Like, okay, we can talk about race.

[00:16:59] We can talk about gender.

[00:17:00] We can talk about all of those things, not opposed to having discussions about any of that stuff.

[00:17:06] However, why don't we just talk about how do we create high performing teams?

[00:17:10] There isn't a leader of any company of substance that would say, no, no, no, no.

[00:17:16] I don't want to talk about that.

[00:17:17] Right.

[00:17:18] Right.

[00:17:18] I don't want that.

[00:17:19] It's kind of, every one of them is going to want that.

[00:17:22] And they're going to want to understand, okay, here's how we construct.

[00:17:26] Here's how we go about creating high performing teams.

[00:17:29] And oh, by the way, a derivative of that is DEI.

[00:17:34] Is inclusion, right?

[00:17:35] Inclusion is, is a catalyst, right?

[00:17:37] That's right.

[00:17:38] Right.

[00:17:39] Yes.

[00:17:39] But the, but the, what I, what I like is you've created an argument that there is no counter

[00:17:46] argument to for business leaders.

[00:17:49] Yeah.

[00:17:49] Like if you came at them with belonging by itself, I think you get half of the audience.

[00:17:55] Yes.

[00:17:56] Right.

[00:17:56] Yes.

[00:17:56] Half the audience would go, yeah, I don't really care if they belong.

[00:17:59] Yeah.

[00:18:00] I just care that they get their job done.

[00:18:01] Yep.

[00:18:02] Right.

[00:18:02] Yep.

[00:18:02] And same thing with, with all inclusion, equity, equality, diversity, all that stuff

[00:18:08] that they're not defensible positions to the executive and the board level where is it a,

[00:18:15] is it, is it good?

[00:18:17] Is it smart?

[00:18:18] Is it the right thing to do?

[00:18:19] Yeah.

[00:18:19] The moral part of this, no one disagrees with, but you're making a business case for high performing

[00:18:26] teams.

[00:18:27] Sometimes some of that will trickle down into all of those areas.

[00:18:31] Yes.

[00:18:31] Yes.

[00:18:32] Have Ryan, William, did you catch on to Nassim Taleb's work on anti-fragility in the economic

[00:18:38] space?

[00:18:38] No, I have not.

[00:18:40] So, you know, Nassim Taleb, famous for black swan events, right?

[00:18:43] Yeah.

[00:18:43] A number of years after the black swan moment brought forward this idea of anti-fragile

[00:18:50] things.

[00:18:51] So quick, you know, quick review for the listener.

[00:18:55] You might find this novel, right?

[00:18:56] I did when I heard it.

[00:18:57] So you have, you have three categories of things and we often only define the first

[00:19:01] two and we leave the third one undefined.

[00:19:03] You have fragile things.

[00:19:04] Fragile things are things that break under shock or friction.

[00:19:08] There's plenty of examples in the product design space.

[00:19:11] There's plenty of examples in the thought space.

[00:19:14] Your friend that comes through with the clickbaity hot take in a debate and you're like, wait,

[00:19:18] but what about, and then the whole thing falls apart.

[00:19:20] Fragile idea, right?

[00:19:22] On the opposite side, you actually have robust or durable things.

[00:19:27] Robust or durable things are things that withstand shock or friction.

[00:19:31] And these are well understood.

[00:19:33] Nassim Taleb uses the example of a wine glass versus a plastic cup.

[00:19:37] You drop the wine glass, it breaks.

[00:19:38] If you drop the plastic cup, it withstands the shock.

[00:19:41] What about things that actually get better when exposed to shock or friction?

[00:19:45] So this is actually the first chapter of my book.

[00:19:48] First chapter of my book is not about trust, belonging, or connection.

[00:19:52] It's the concept of antifragility and the relationship to high performance teams.

[00:19:56] And so here's the through line because I think you're pretty analytical listener base, right?

[00:20:01] The best, the most solid ground for business leaders is on high performing teams that I felt

[00:20:07] I could contribute to is team chemistry that unlocks innovation potential.

[00:20:16] Because I'm so heavily Valley facing in these tech companies, team leaders and my conversation

[00:20:20] with many, many team leaders across multiple parts of Valley, I need my team to be more focused on.

[00:20:25] Great.

[00:20:26] Let's look at the science of innovation.

[00:20:27] And one of the things you see on teams that consistently outperform in innovation,

[00:20:31] and there's 20 years of research to support this, is that friction is a key driver of innovation.

[00:20:37] Conflict.

[00:20:38] Conflict.

[00:20:38] Friction upends conformity and enhances deliberation.

[00:20:41] I'm using a line from a piece of research that came out in 2014.

[00:20:45] Upends conformity and enhances deliberation.

[00:20:47] Which ironically is diversity.

[00:20:49] Boom.

[00:20:50] That's it.

[00:20:51] So that's the whole thing right there is, so what I do when I give a keynote, I have a

[00:20:57] keynote that I do at conferences and this is a key driver for how I end up engaging with

[00:21:02] businesses.

[00:21:03] Oh my goodness.

[00:21:04] Bad touching, harassment, sex, violence, fraud, threats, all things that could have been avoided

[00:21:15] if you had Fama.

[00:21:18] Stop hiring dangerous people.

[00:21:21] Fama.io.

[00:21:25] Hey, what's going on everyone?

[00:21:26] Ryan Leary here from Work Defined.

[00:21:27] You know, if there was one thing that I could change about recruiting, it would probably be

[00:21:34] the amazingly awful candidate experience that job seekers have to endure at one of the most

[00:21:42] stressful times in their life.

[00:21:44] Hiring teams, it is time to step up.

[00:21:47] You've got to create an experience that is memorable, fast, and efficient.

[00:21:52] And you can do that with Indeed Smart Sourcing.

[00:21:56] Check them out online at Indeed.com or just Google Indeed Smart Sourcing.

[00:22:01] And the keynote opens with this.

[00:22:03] I tell the story of the research on friction and ideation and innovation.

[00:22:08] And everybody in the audience is like nodding, right?

[00:22:10] And then I talk about friction in our own lives, right?

[00:22:13] And the times that I've been in an echo chamber when my board of advisors, my personal board of

[00:22:18] advisors is too similar to me.

[00:22:19] And those are the times I have epically bombed in my life.

[00:22:22] And the times that I've been lucky to have people who call me or who are willing to stop and go,

[00:22:28] dude, I think you're making a huge mistake.

[00:22:31] Either with a tactic or a life choice or don't propose to her.

[00:22:34] She's bad for you.

[00:22:35] You know, all the things.

[00:22:38] And, you know, the friction is if you are ready for it can unlock antifragility where it actually

[00:22:44] improves your process.

[00:22:46] It is a catalyst for transformation.

[00:22:48] And the great setup here is that there is fabulous research that shows that it is not

[00:22:53] diversity alone that gets you there.

[00:22:55] Because actually, average management of diverse teams underperforms against homogenous teams.

[00:23:01] Homogenous teams are easier to manage.

[00:23:03] That's right.

[00:23:05] If you buy into diversity as an on-ramp to friction and friction as a catalyst for antifragile

[00:23:10] outcomes, you actually need the leader to have the catalyst to tap into the power of that

[00:23:16] diversity.

[00:23:16] And I position trust, belonging, and connection as the catalyst for the alchemy of talent.

[00:23:21] It allows you to take diversity as a form of friction and actually turn it into consistent

[00:23:28] outperformance.

[00:23:29] So the whole thing is, you could talk about this through DEI.

[00:23:33] There isn't really a reason to.

[00:23:35] You could just talk about this as the science of high-performing teams.

[00:23:39] And luckily, the research is on my side.

[00:23:43] Truth.

[00:23:44] Can we build high-performing teams before we have high-performing leaders?

[00:23:48] Oh, snap.

[00:23:50] Ryan, it's Wednesday.

[00:23:52] I don't know if I can be smart enough to answer these questions on a Wednesday.

[00:23:57] Dude, that was awesome.

[00:23:59] Yeah.

[00:23:59] All right.

[00:23:59] There you go.

[00:24:00] So let's...

[00:24:03] I'm going to think out loud, right?

[00:24:05] It's a chicken and egg discussion.

[00:24:08] Nobody's listening.

[00:24:09] We're not recording.

[00:24:10] Think out loud.

[00:24:11] Which one comes first?

[00:24:14] This is the same space.

[00:24:15] This is the same space.

[00:24:16] What we often do in organizational dynamics is we define high-performance for a leader

[00:24:22] as being an unbelievable individual contributor.

[00:24:25] Right.

[00:24:25] And we reward them by giving them three to five people to manage.

[00:24:29] Which they may or may not be suited to manage.

[00:24:32] Exactly.

[00:24:33] High-performance leadership is so different than high-performance when measured on the nine

[00:24:39] box, right?

[00:24:40] This is the mismatch here, right?

[00:24:42] Like, there is a leadership toolkit that is measurable, that is defined, that has business

[00:24:47] ROI that is different than operational and productivity tasks, right?

[00:24:52] Like...

[00:24:52] Right.

[00:24:53] And everybody has different strengths and weaknesses here.

[00:24:55] I remember when I got my first promotion in my 20s to managing a team.

[00:24:59] And I had, like, it was on a lark.

[00:25:02] There was a sudden change in the org.

[00:25:04] And there was a sudden leader departure.

[00:25:06] And the leader who was leaving asked me if I could step in as an interim director.

[00:25:09] Um, real talk in retrospect, amazing opportunity for me, but like, it shouldn't have happened.

[00:25:16] I had no idea what I was doing.

[00:25:18] I was horrible.

[00:25:19] This person took a huge leap of faith on me.

[00:25:22] Yeah.

[00:25:22] And the thing that came out of that moment is I actually came to learn I'm way better

[00:25:26] at leading a team than I am as an IC.

[00:25:29] Oh, really?

[00:25:29] My productivity went up at work.

[00:25:31] My self-efficacy, my belief in my ability to do the job went up.

[00:25:36] Interesting.

[00:25:36] I stopped operating out of my drudgery zone and I was actually in my genius zone far more often.

[00:25:42] So for me, leading a team put me in my strengths 80% of the time.

[00:25:47] Oh, we're...

[00:25:47] But that's not always the case.

[00:25:49] Complete opposites.

[00:25:49] Right.

[00:25:49] That's not always the case, right?

[00:25:51] And so in, especially in corporate settings, we tend to reward unbelievable Ferrari level ICs,

[00:25:59] right?

[00:25:59] Like people that just turn around and it's like, hey, your reward is we're going to saddle

[00:26:03] you with a team.

[00:26:04] And Google really figured out after a while, we have to create a promotion track for engineers

[00:26:09] that doesn't involve the managing people.

[00:26:12] And this is how you get the unlock of the principal engineer status, right?

[00:26:16] Because some of these folks, you do not want managing people.

[00:26:19] And I say that from a place of love.

[00:26:22] And you're really hurting your own business.

[00:26:26] Was Einstein a good people manager?

[00:26:29] Probably.

[00:26:31] Nope.

[00:26:31] Yeah.

[00:26:32] So Ryan, is that a good answer to your question?

[00:26:35] Yeah, I think so.

[00:26:36] And I think of...

[00:26:37] We've had these discussions before where I'm thinking of an example of a sales leader.

[00:26:43] Somebody who is just crushing quota, right?

[00:26:46] Great IC.

[00:26:47] Got it.

[00:26:47] Fantastic at sales.

[00:26:49] Now they become head of sales, head of revenue.

[00:26:51] And it's like, forget it.

[00:26:53] They just don't have the ability to do that.

[00:26:55] How do we test that?

[00:26:58] How do we know?

[00:26:59] I mean, again, scientifically, right?

[00:27:01] How do we know if they can make that transition?

[00:27:03] Was that where you were going, Ryan?

[00:27:05] Yeah.

[00:27:05] I want to know.

[00:27:06] How do we know they can make the transition?

[00:27:09] And can a...

[00:27:11] Hey, it's Bob Pulver, host Q Podcast.

[00:27:14] Human-centric AI.

[00:27:16] AI-driven transformation.

[00:27:18] Hiring for skills and potential.

[00:27:20] Dynamic workforce ecosystems.

[00:27:22] Responsible innovation.

[00:27:23] These are some of the themes my expert guests and I chat about.

[00:27:26] And we certainly geek out on the details.

[00:27:28] Nothing too technical.

[00:27:30] I hope you check it out.

[00:27:32] A low performer in a group.

[00:27:35] Obviously, they can be a great manager.

[00:27:38] But how does an organization pick out the...

[00:27:40] We were talking earlier about the...

[00:27:42] You're going to be the five.

[00:27:44] We need 20% of him to be at a one.

[00:27:46] How do we know that that one just isn't a crappy employee?

[00:27:50] They're an excellent leader of the rest.

[00:27:53] Yes.

[00:27:54] And so one, I should say, I think a forced assignment.

[00:28:01] A forced distribution of a certain amount of people must get a one.

[00:28:05] I hate that.

[00:28:05] Is unbelievably toxic in an organization.

[00:28:09] Quick story.

[00:28:10] I worked at IBM after they acquired Conexa.

[00:28:13] And that was the one thing we needed to do.

[00:28:16] Yeah.

[00:28:16] Okay.

[00:28:16] There was always certain...

[00:28:17] Certain number of five, forced number of ones.

[00:28:19] Who's your average...

[00:28:21] Your mainstay contributor.

[00:28:23] It was awful.

[00:28:24] It's so unfair.

[00:28:25] Yeah.

[00:28:26] Throw a dart.

[00:28:27] That's what we did.

[00:28:28] When I was the dean of students at Cornell University in a previous life, and there were

[00:28:34] still organic chemistry professors doing a hard curve.

[00:28:39] Oh, yeah.

[00:28:40] Oh, yeah.

[00:28:40] Meaning only 10% of the class can get an A.

[00:28:43] Right.

[00:28:43] But when you're at an Ivy League university, this means that a 94 on the exam was getting

[00:28:49] students of C minus.

[00:28:50] And so in trying to meet with the chair of the chemistry department, and the reality...

[00:28:55] And some people might find this interesting.

[00:28:57] But the reality is that that system actually has an asymmetric negative impact on first-generation

[00:29:04] college students, working class college students, adult veteran learners, students with disability.

[00:29:09] I mean, really, it rewards...

[00:29:11] I don't even know who it rewards.

[00:29:12] It's not a good evaluation of whether you know or go.

[00:29:15] It's horrible.

[00:29:15] Right?

[00:29:16] It is like some...

[00:29:17] I don't know.

[00:29:18] Like, the Spartans having to kill their puppies.

[00:29:20] Like, it's just a model of like...

[00:29:21] I don't understand what this is supposed to do.

[00:29:24] Right?

[00:29:25] And so...

[00:29:26] Yeah.

[00:29:26] But in going to try and change these systems, people are so wedded to like, this is how you

[00:29:30] sort the wheat from the trough.

[00:29:32] And I'm like, I don't know.

[00:29:34] It seems extremely toxic and demoralizing.

[00:29:37] So, yeah.

[00:29:38] And random.

[00:29:40] And random.

[00:29:41] Especially because, Ryan, to your point, sometimes somebody can be underperforming, not because

[00:29:46] they have no talent, but that their talent is misaligned against their current scope.

[00:29:51] Right.

[00:29:51] And so, I think that really savvy organizations right now, and there's many that are doing

[00:29:57] this, are actually putting a premium on internal talent identification and talent mobility because

[00:30:03] they realize that there's an extraordinary inefficiency in their go-to-market for talent

[00:30:09] acquisition.

[00:30:10] It's both inefficient in the normal churn cost of recs and posting and maintaining your TA

[00:30:15] division.

[00:30:15] But also, I used to use this phrase, and this is a little rough around the edges, but

[00:30:20] I've watched some of your episodes.

[00:30:22] I know that you keep it candid, but we would always say back in the day in one organization

[00:30:27] I was in, if you were trying to make a hire and you'd post it externally and you had internal

[00:30:33] applicants, we'd be like, well, so are we going with the crazy we know or the crazy

[00:30:37] we don't know?

[00:30:40] Because everybody has made a hire on an external applicant where you were like, this was the

[00:30:45] best interview funnel ever.

[00:30:47] Their work sample simulation was crushing.

[00:30:49] And then they come in and they're just bananas.

[00:30:52] And you're like, why did this?

[00:30:53] And the person that's been with you for several years, you know certain things about them.

[00:30:57] You know if they're stable, if they're kind, if you can count on them to deliver work product

[00:31:03] when they said they would, if their say-to-do ratio is high.

[00:31:06] It's stuff that you just don't know when you're interviewing an external.

[00:31:08] So organizations, especially in really tight talent marketplaces are realizing that they've

[00:31:14] got to get a lot better on internal talent analytics.

[00:31:18] Now, how we do this is a complete quagmire, right?

[00:31:22] Like whether we go the skills model, the competencies model, how we can use generative AI to better

[00:31:28] map existing talent against non-linear career pathing.

[00:31:34] I think there's a lot of work to do in this space.

[00:31:36] I'm not a subject matter expert in this.

[00:31:38] I can have an interesting conversation, but you have people in your circles who literally

[00:31:43] this is all they do.

[00:31:44] I would say, Ryan, to go back to your root question, which was, you know, I'm trying to

[00:31:52] take it back to this question of like, what do you do with, oh, is a person who's a one,

[00:31:57] you know, like on the team, could they be a good team leader?

[00:32:00] You know, part of, and then William, you jumped in and you said, how can companies actually

[00:32:06] create a better model, right?

[00:32:07] For understanding leadership capacity as opposed to performance or productivity metrics that

[00:32:12] have nothing to do with leadership.

[00:32:14] And so I work, I do, I work with a pretty large tech company, 20,000 employees that actually

[00:32:22] has a framework of leadership where they have codified that a leader needs to be able to

[00:32:28] show up as a coach, a mentor, a public speaker, an inclusion advocate.

[00:32:36] So they actually have incarnations of leadership that are definable and have skill sets associated

[00:32:41] with them that really have nothing to do with your IC job.

[00:32:44] So like the public speaking, I mean, this is such an interesting thing that they actually

[00:32:48] have like a premium placed on a leader's ability to speak, to group, to communicate,

[00:32:54] right?

[00:32:55] Tell the story, communicate.

[00:32:56] When you go into their hypo program for aspiring and future leaders, they actually, their whole

[00:33:03] curriculum is based off of these five incarnations of leadership.

[00:33:07] And I love their approach to speaking.

[00:33:10] They actually have a group of improv actors that train people in extemporaneous speaking,

[00:33:16] do the workshop and the role playing to build the skill set around, especially for leaders

[00:33:23] that don't love this part of their job.

[00:33:24] But you have to be able to pull your team together after a really bad company, all hands, where

[00:33:30] the team is upset and you got to be able to facilitate some kind of a conversation.

[00:33:34] And how do you do that?

[00:33:36] Right.

[00:33:36] And so I do think first and foremost, to distill that into something that is tactical and practical

[00:33:43] is have a model.

[00:33:44] Have a model of leadership that is competency-based, to use very old words, that is contextual to

[00:33:51] your company.

[00:33:52] So a sales leader in a SaaS company that is already in a mature stage of its business development

[00:33:58] may look and feel very different than a sales leader in a consumer goods company that is in

[00:34:04] a zero to one bill.

[00:34:05] You know, so again, that leadership model has to be so purpose-built for your business

[00:34:11] and its stage on the maturity curve.

[00:34:13] That would be my guidance there.

[00:34:15] So last question for me is you've done some wonderful work on anti-fragility and talking

[00:34:22] about that, resiliency and talking about that.

[00:34:25] Do you find companies talking about ambiguity or people that can consume ambiguity?

[00:34:32] And if so, what's the take or what do you have on that?

[00:34:37] Yeah.

[00:34:37] Yeah.

[00:34:38] So this is great.

[00:34:41] I love that you came here.

[00:34:43] It's such great counter signal for me because the preface, the title of the preface of my

[00:34:47] book is Disruption Fatigue is Real.

[00:34:51] So like, and I know you two didn't read my book.

[00:34:55] Sure.

[00:34:56] Sure.

[00:34:56] Not yet.

[00:34:57] I read it twice.

[00:34:59] Come on.

[00:35:01] Give an audio version.

[00:35:02] Great, great, great counter signal though, right?

[00:35:05] That I think that the trail of gingerbread crumbs is very clear, right?

[00:35:08] So I open with a preface on the human relationship to disruption and ambiguity because this is actually

[00:35:17] root cause analysis for me as a behavioral scientist that looks at the relationship between humans

[00:35:23] and their environment and performance.

[00:35:25] First and foremost is what does it mean to work in a slow motion earthquake?

[00:35:30] The last five years has been one tectonic disruption after another to the point where our

[00:35:36] nervous systems are in a constant state of cognitive hijacking, right?

[00:35:40] If you're familiar with fight flight response, limbic hijacking, cortisol dump, you know, overall

[00:35:46] dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin levels start to drop, right?

[00:35:49] This is, you can see this in meta studies of the workforce globally now.

[00:35:54] Lower levels of engagement, lower levels of satisfaction.

[00:35:58] Languishing is the psychological term for where a certain portion of the workforce is.

[00:36:03] My diagnosis here is actually that we are at a state where the battery light is just

[00:36:09] a blanket.

[00:36:10] We have been disrupted to the point where the playbook has to include a form of reattachment

[00:36:17] to work, our team, our boss, our company, our organization, because humans are actually

[00:36:26] terrible with ambiguity.

[00:36:29] Ambiguity first hits our dashboard, our like precognitive dashboard as a threat.

[00:36:36] Yeah, of course.

[00:36:38] I've been, I was at a dinner with an engineering leader of a major firm who a couple of months

[00:36:43] ago said to me, you're talking about VUCA, you know, volatility, uncertainty, complexity,

[00:36:47] ambiguity, and all of this behavioral science about how we have to help our workforce navigate

[00:36:52] this.

[00:36:52] Because if change is the only constant, I'm tired of babying folks like just get over it.

[00:36:58] And I'm like, okay.

[00:36:59] So you're not actually getting the point here.

[00:37:02] Change is the only constant and we're hardwired to experience it as a threat.

[00:37:08] That's right.

[00:37:09] So you can say, get over it.

[00:37:11] And you must personally be pretty buffered from the change.

[00:37:15] When everybody else is going, I don't know how I'm going to feed my family or is my job

[00:37:20] going to be around or is this technology going to replace my work or whatever they're worried

[00:37:25] about.

[00:37:25] Is my new leader toxic?

[00:37:26] Or, you know, there's all these things.

[00:37:28] That's where we, where the what's in it for me shows up strongly.

[00:37:32] You had a leader on your show recently who talked about change management, right?

[00:37:36] And you had a great conversation about getting back to like first principles when people are

[00:37:41] experiencing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity as through a fight flight response.

[00:37:47] And if you're going to be like change is the only constant and you'll be able to get

[00:37:50] over it.

[00:37:50] It's like, well, then, you know, garbage in, garbage in, garbage out to use a very old Silicon

[00:37:56] Valley outage, right?

[00:37:56] Your model for change management is off.

[00:38:00] You're not recognizing the core software that homo sapiens have.

[00:38:05] And you're going to miss out on the chance to actually retain and advance top talent, innovation,

[00:38:13] and high performing teams.

[00:38:14] All right.

[00:38:14] We'd be remiss if we didn't talk about how to get your book because today is a soft launch.

[00:38:21] Yes.

[00:38:22] So what's the bit?

[00:38:24] Where do people need to go?

[00:38:26] Because listening to you, I could just imagine the audience is going to go, yeah, I want

[00:38:30] to know more about that guy.

[00:38:32] I would love it and be so grateful and honored if people would pick up a copy of the book.

[00:38:36] There's two ways to do that right now.

[00:38:38] So it's Wednesday, September 11th while we make this recording.

[00:38:41] If you are a fan, you can go to Amazon and hit pre-order.

[00:38:47] And this is so critical to the way that the publishing industry works, author analytics,

[00:38:53] lists algorithms, all of that stuff.

[00:38:55] Oh, yeah.

[00:38:56] But there's some delayed gratification in this approach.

[00:38:59] So you have to be the kid that doesn't eat the marshmallow.

[00:39:01] Now, as the kid that always ate the marshmallow, I also know that that's not going to work for

[00:39:06] everybody.

[00:39:07] So you can also just, if you put my name, Vijay Penderkore, into Google, my website's the first

[00:39:12] hit.

[00:39:13] And there is a book page that has a link to buying it directly from the publisher.

[00:39:17] So the book is called The Alchemy of Talent, Leading Teams to Peak Performance.

[00:39:21] The publisher is Amplify Publishing Group.

[00:39:23] You can go to Amplify Publishing right now, hit buy, and the book ships to you.

[00:39:27] Because some people want to eat that marshmallow now.

[00:39:29] You want that sweet, fluffy goodness, right?

[00:39:31] And I totally understand that.

[00:39:33] But if you're a super fan, you do both.

[00:39:39] Well, one of the questions pre-show I asked you, I said, do they have to, with the publisher

[00:39:44] in particular, do they have to order in bulk?

[00:39:46] And you're like, no, they want one book.

[00:39:49] They get one book.

[00:39:50] And another thing that came up in pre-show that I really loved is you wrote it in a way

[00:39:56] that people can consume it in a flight.

[00:39:59] You know, from, let's say, Austin to San Francisco, it's about three and a half hour

[00:40:03] flight.

[00:40:04] You can consume it in that flight.

[00:40:07] Yes.

[00:40:07] And so it's not-

[00:40:09] Check it out.

[00:40:09] Product demo.

[00:40:10] We're going to product demo this.

[00:40:11] I've got a thin head, right?

[00:40:13] We talked about me being skinny before.

[00:40:14] So the book is even skinnier than my skinny head.

[00:40:19] That's fantastic.

[00:40:21] Soft cover, easy to put in the messenger bag.

[00:40:23] And it's intentionally designed so that it's read it on the plane, you're done.

[00:40:27] And then it sits on your desk because it is actually an action-based practical skills book.

[00:40:32] Right.

[00:40:32] For team leaders.

[00:40:33] Mike walks off stage.

[00:40:35] Vijay, thank you so much for coming on the show.

[00:40:38] Love the book.

[00:40:39] Ryan and I will promise to read it at some point.

[00:40:43] Thank you.

[00:40:44] Thank you.