nikodrakoulis-0zxhsylic_raw-audio_rachel-cooke-niko-drakoulis_2023-nov-09-0319pm_excellence_at work

Hi, and welcome to Brennan Hall Group's Excellence at Work podcast. I'm Rachel Cook, I'm the host of our podcast, as well as the COO of Brennan Hall Group. And I'm excited to be here today with Miko Droukoulis from Shore People. He is the founder and CEO. And today we're going to be talking about leadership in general and navigating how to help leaders, empower leaders to be successful in today's environment. And just want to also mention that Miko and Shore People are a gold sponsor of Brennan Hall Group HCM Excellence Conference in February. So we're excited to have you and your team. And again, I'm really excited to have you with me today. You have an intriguing background. You founded Shore People and the belief that people are the most important factor of success, that the quality of companies, careers and personal lives are determined by the quality of relationships. Miko's ability to bring people together and to create a strong culture is based on more than 25 years of experience as an accomplished executive, serial entrepreneurial and five-time patent holder. Congratulations. He is a member of the University of Illinois Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame. Prior to founding Shore People, Miko was chairman and CEO of Aku International, named one of advertising agents' best places to work. So you have a little bit of experience in the business world and working with leaders. And so tell us, what do you feel is critical for leaders to be successful in today's world? Oh, Rachel, thank you so much for that introduction. And we're so honored to be working and sponsoring Brennan Hall. Your purpose aligns really well with our objectives as well. You know, I hear success in my bio and it's like all my failures are actually the things I think about, which actually drove me to found Shore People. The things that I didn't know about managing people, the things that I thought I knew when I was a younger leader of a team. And you've heard maybe Simon Sinek say, you know, if you don't understand people, you don't understand business. And Simon Sinek, you know, being an author and inspirational speaker. And you hear that from a lot of people. There's so many organizations in today's, you know, I would guess, learning and development and HR tech space that are trying to solve the problem, bring great leadership programs to the table with great content. The problem is, you know, it still persists, right? 77% of the global workforce is either actively disengaged or disengaged today, which leads to new terms. This year we're quiet quitting and loud quitting and those change every year. But the one thing that is consistent is the disengagement figures. They're always so high. And why can't we fix that? And that's the challenge that we took. And when we really thought about what was the root cause of that, right? Not just thinking it's a one size fits all, let's grab a leadership program and teach you about people skills. Because everybody's wired a little differently. And that's what I learned, you know, in my career as I was making those mistakes as a leader, not understanding that when I communicate with my entire team, the people that were like me, that were giving me the high fives, they were connected to my message. But that same message wasn't resonating with other people who were wired a little differently. And that's the root cause that we needed to solve. And that came down to really looking at the science of who people are and understanding then how do you develop those people differently and how do you help them with their skills? And that's really what started Sure People and what really inspired me to go out there and help leaders and teams, you know, and go beyond that with Sure People in the future. We have big dreams and aspirations to bring that to the B2C world one day. But right now we have a big challenge, you know, of really scaling our business and empowering leaders with the tools, but the tools that are driven by data and the data that is really about individuals. That, you know, there's a lot of people trying, a lot of people that get close, you hear about other types of psychometric assessments that are really good in the market. But the difference is that those psychometric instruments have only one set of data. So it could be just your personality or just your temperament. The root cause may be your fundamental needs and drivers or how you manage conflict or what motivates you. There's several data points. And that's where I feel we're really, I say, blessed a lot, because as we look to enhance the psychometric data and get it to root cause analysis, we're able to understand what's happening. We're able to empower a leader when they go into a one-on-one meeting to know how to communicate with another individual based on how they're going to receive the message. Or with a team, when you're addressing a team, to be able to speak to the team holistically and make sure that you address the needs of everybody on the team. So that's really the thesis of our business is really getting to the science of who people are and understanding how to bring, how to communicate, how to align, how to problem solve based on that same need. And do you see certain types of attributes within leaders that are more, more, I have the ability, I guess, to learn or to embrace new leadership styles as we're starting to see how leadership is evolving? Absolutely. I mean, that's a great question. And once again, leaders need the tools. And they need those tools also in the flow of work. You know, when you go into a situation this morning, when you wake up and go to the office or remotely, get on a Zoom and you have to address a need with your team, when you have tools, and that's one of the things we're really proud of, you know, the leader dashboard and being able to say, look, I'm going into a meeting with so-and-so individual and I have to manage a conflict situation or I have to get them motivated because they had a tough week last week or there's a personal issue going on, how do you address that individual? And when you can empower a leader with that tool set to go in and say, look, I'm going to meet with Rachel today, how do I address Rachel's needs based on how Rachel is wired and based on how I'm wired? So I may be the problem. The way I deliver my message or try to coach you. So I think the personalization is really what differentiates what we're trying to do. And what I think we all need to do as organizations trying to solve or empower leaders to manage their teams, it's not a one-size-fits-all approach. And I think that's what's been a problem. You have a one-size-fits-all approach and you may solve half your team's problems, but what about the other half? And that's where turnover comes in. That's where performance issues come in. So I think, you know, 85%, Harvard, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon did a big research project. And out of this, they came out with data that shows 85% of job success is excellent people skills. 15% is excellent people skills. So now when you think about people skills, great, you can become a better listener, a better communicator. You can be heartfelt and have emotional, relational, and team intelligence. But you have to know how to address an individual. So personalizing those people skills is what I think is really critical. So you know how to address the needs of every individual. And that's what leaders, none of us as leaders, were ever taught that. You know, they teach you the general topics of being a leader. And that's why a lot of times you get somebody who's really successful at a role, right? And they're the highest performing sales individual or the highest performing marketing individual. But then you put them in a leadership role. And what's the difference? They know how to do the job better than everybody else. They were the highest performing, but they don't have those people skills to know how to manage. Because being a leader is about supporting people. It's about being a servant to them and understanding their needs. And that's what we believe is the difference. And how do you scale that? And that's what we try every day in our mission. Very true. Just because you're great or you're a success in your role or you're able to reach your capabilities in that particular job does not then translate to necessarily always being a great leader or manager. And there's a difference between a manager and a leader, right? A manager is making sure the process is being done and more like project management in some ways. But being a leader is kind of taking it to the next step and really learning truly how to delegate and influence and connect people. There's a lot that goes into being a great leader. And a lot of it, some may be a little bit more natural, but a lot of it takes time and experience. In our research, we've seen year after year how important the people part of the whatever, you know, talent or HCM subject that we cover, there's always the people side that comes out and the experience that, as you mentioned, how it's so important, your people and how you onboard them, how you develop them. And otherwise, whatever business function that you're trying to, whether it's a new technology tool that you're implementing, if you're not able to align everybody and to be able to bring everybody on board, it just makes the effort so much more difficult and you're not being able to optimize the purpose of what you're trying to accomplish. If one, you don't have the right people and two, you don't have the leaders that can help really bring everyone together and move them and influence them and help them. Oh, Rachel, you're so spot on and you just sparked so many thoughts in my mind. Most recently, look at the NFL football team. I'm not sure if you saw the news about the Las Vegas Raiders, right? Firing two coaches who they're still paying, I think $80 million of payments are still through contract going to go out to these two coaches and they fired them because they didn't know how to lead. They didn't know how to manage. It was a people side. It wasn't about the X's and O's. It was about how the coach, the most recent coach, was treating the people and communicating. For $80 million, so you think about this, sports really resonates and we also have a sports vertical that we service. One of our value clients just won the World Series. We just signed a new deal with the U.S. men's diving team, which we're really excited because we see again, it's people skills. We're not teaching them how to dive. I don't even know how to dive. I never have done that, but we know how to help the coaches connect at a deep level on a person, truly personalized. Personalized doesn't mean, hey, your role is X and we have great learning for you with the role. Personalized means it's designed for how I'm wired, how I receive information, how I learn. I think that's really the key to success. If you can personalize on that level, and people have done that, psychologists, you get into, that's why they have done a lot on the executive level, but it's costly, it's timely, it's not scalable. What we've done is we've actually created a solution that within 30 to 40 minutes, you complete the PRISM psychometric questionnaire and now we give you all the insights about you so you learn about you. Then our tools help you understand the insights on your team member. Then we go to action. Now, here's what you do. By the way, then we can actually deliver prescriptive content to you. We use the word prescriptive, change it in and out because sometimes it fits and sometimes it doesn't, but it really is prescriptive. It's what I need to learn so that I can actually either continue to focus on my strength or address a blind spot I have. To me, you mentioned another thing about the connection and the onboarding. Even from an onboarding perspective, from day one, when a leader comes into a team, right now, we've looked at some data from Gartner. Right now, I think the data that's out there is that 40% of executive leaders fail within the first 18 months. Why is that? They've done all the background checks, they've done all the historicals on them, they've looked at their experience, they've looked at references, they've done psychological tests on them, but yet they fail because when they go into a new team, by the time they get to know people, by the time they understand how people feel, that's where the challenge happens. One of our solutions for executive onboarding is that we create the team leader coming in or the executive leader coming in, speed to relationship, team assimilation. We help you understand how, one, you can address each individual one-on-one. We help you understand how to address the entire team, how they feel based on how they're wired, and that creates speed to relationship. That's what we're really excited to see. When you have that speed to relationship, team assimilation, that leads to less turnover, more trust, higher productivity, everything that an organization wants, and everything that the people on the team want. I think that's what it's all about. It's about getting into a clear understanding of human beings. As Simon Sinek said, if you don't understand people, you don't understand business. That's what drives us every day. Yeah, that's a great question. In order to scale, we wanted to make this fully digital and power leaders. Our platform is completely digital. Now, you can definitely add value by bringing in consultants and coaches. We work with some of the top consulting firms in the country, both on the HR side and leadership development side. Ultimately, we're a turnkey solution. Individuals will come in. Within 30 to 40 minutes, they'll complete the PRISM questionnaire. Now, they're going to have their PRISM portrait where they see 54 traits and attributes across the modules. You'll understand your personality and how you show up and how people experience you, how you process things. Are you inward or are you upward? Do you process with logic or emotion? How you're motivated and why you're motivated. Your fundamental needs and drivers. If you don't meet your fundamental needs and drivers, you're not going to be happy in your life or in your work. That's really important to understand for an individual and for a manager to make sure that you're meeting your needs. How you manage conflict. That's one of the big ones, too. Are you avoiding or competing or are you collaborating or compromising? By bringing this information, and there's no wrong or right, there's no good or bad. This is just how we're wired. You take this information and now, as Aristotle said, the beginning of all wisdom is self-knowledge. You have self-knowledge about yourself. That in itself helps you as a leader. Really open your eyes. When I first started this journey, it really opened my eyes to so many things. It improved me personally as well as professionally. Then, you also have that information on others. Our tools will take that and provide real-time coaching in the flow of work. When you're in a relationship, you'll pull out your phone, you'll go to your computer, and they'll say, hey, I'm in this situation right now. What do I do? When we think about the future and some of the things we're doing with AI, we've got some exciting projects right now that you'll have a virtual coach that you'll talk to and say, hey, I'm in this situation. This person did this. What should I do? You get coached based on all the data of how we're all wired. That's the difference. We make it really easy. We also integrate other tools within our platform. For a leader, we empower them to ask their team how they feel. They can launch surveys right from their dashboard, team insight surveys. You can launch 360 assessments on your own as a leader. You don't have to wait for a major 360 from your organization to get the information. At the time you get that information, it's old. Situations are different. Now you get that information real-time. Most importantly, you have a library of content and digital programs that are available. If you need to go get trained on something specific because now you know what the root cause is, you have that. We've integrated with a world-class partner, Harvard Business Publishing. We have all their content that's mapped to all the categories of Prism for learning. We provide that to the leader immediately when they need it. Again, in the flow of work, wherever you are, you'll have everything you need. It's like your toolbox, everything that you need. This is for leaders of executive teams, sales leaders, marketing leaders, operation leaders. It's for sports teams and coaches and their athletes, for university coaches and their athletes. That's the toolbox that I think is really important, giving that, empowering them with those tools that's driven by the data. Nice. We should have started this earlier on in our high schools and our junior high. All of our kids are in sports. Sports is great, but there's so many peaks and lows. It's a rollercoaster. Some coaches are great. You wonder why they're there for so long. Yeah. You know what? You have such an impact on a child's life. My daughter is a pre-K teacher. She has a blended class with special needs as well. We've always talked about how with her, I'm like, see, one day we're going to create a book about emotional relational team intelligence and teach kids through a story. Because they're not going to take the prism and go on a platform, but you can teach them about emotional intelligence and relational intelligence and team intelligence. Emotional intelligence is about you, understanding yourself, controlling your emotions, seeing it from that lens. Relational is about me and another person, one-on-one relationships. Team is about me being part of a group. There's different dynamics in relational and team, but it all starts with you first, understanding yourself. I totally agree with you. That's our personal mission as we grow our business and we cross over to the consumer market. It is to help the young children. I think I mentioned this to you earlier before we hopped on this interview that kids grow up in the same household, yet people are like, oh, my children, this one's this way, this one's this way. Yeah, you can parent the same way, you're going to get different outcomes because people are wired differently. If you understand the traits and attributes of your child, you'll know that you approach one child one way and the other. Your parenting has to shift a little, just like leadership. You have one team member and another, they may be very different or they may have one or two traits that are different that make a big, that's the root cause, that one trait of being concrete instead of intuitive. Similar personality styles, but the fact that somebody's concrete, it changes everything. That's what we're really excited about the future and hopefully being able to help all people. There's that nature versus nurture, right, about how two can be experienced in the same environment, yet completely different in some aspects. That's where your nature plays a big role. It's interesting just understanding the dynamics and understanding the different personalities and what drives you. Also, oftentimes a lot of it is based on emotion. Being able to control that emotion or know what triggers that emotion, whether you're a man or a woman, emotion is not just for women. I think even if you're concrete, there's still, you see people that are black and white, yet they get triggered and highly emotional about certain things that you really, they need to understand how to take a step back and be able to reflect. Right. Reflection is a very important part of growth. I think that's, again, going back to the challenge of why does this engagement number stay so high? Because to me, the data, people talk about personality and it's important, but personality is only one set of data. It's how people perceive you and how you show up. All the other data is really what I believe has been missing. Because earlier in my career, we've had coaches come in, consult with us, try to solve problems, and we would never get to the root cause. That's where having the depth of data is so important across multiple instruments. But who wants to sit there and answer all these assessment questions? That's why I think we've cracked the code with Prism. I shouldn't say I think, I know we've cracked the code, because the people that we're working with, and that's where it starts. It's understanding how we're wired, as Simon Sinek says. Understand people and understand them across all the data sets. Do you have different layers of assessments? Or is it just one assessment that you take and that's kind of your blueprint for building? For how you're wired. Yeah. So it's just Prism. And Prism has seven integrated modules. So it's as I mentioned earlier, personality, and how you process things is another module, and how you make decisions is another module, how you manage conflict. So those seven integrated modules really bring your holistic portrait up. And that's where it begins. You have all this data. Think about it. If you have data that's missing and you're trying to get to root cause on financials, or you're looking, I use this a lot in sports. If you looked at Shaquille O'Neal's free throw percentage, you'd be like, I'm not taking him on my team. Yet, he was one of the best players and everything else, but not in free throw. So you need all the data to get to the root cause. And that's where I think we differentiate. That's like money ball and baseball. It's so funny you mentioned that, because our chief commercial officer was at a conference where Billy Bean from Moneyball was speaking, and he was talking about all the data. And Sean said, hey, if you had all this other data, the psychometrics on athletes, how would that differentiate? And how would you correlate it? And Billy Bean said to him, well, when that is available, please call me so we can talk. And that's why we're in baseball, because we have a few teams in the MLB, and we were proudly honored to be invited to Major League Baseball's winter meetings this year. It's by invitation and approval only. And our team is doing incredible work there, and we're very proud and honored that we have a chance to go there. But we're trying to bring in the data of performance with the data of how you're wired to see where the correlations are. So there's a lot of interesting projects going on. But you brought up Moneyball, which just, again, triggered another thing for me. Well, that's great stories you can share. So yeah, hopefully we'll see some of your clients at our conference in February next year. All these would be great examples to be able to showcase how it works. Yeah, look, in last year at the conference, which was our first year, we learned so much. We met so many great people. It takes a lot of solutions to bring it together, right? There's still the technical development, which is important. But yeah, we're looking forward to the conference this year. Very excited. We're excited to have you, Nico. And before we wrap up today, is there anything that you would like to share, or what's coming next? And also, what advice do you give leaders today, if there's one or two things that they should be mindful of to also prepare for the future? Yeah, that's great. So I'll start with that. For leaders, just understand that we're all wired differently. And you could be a great-hearted person. And I was raised to respect, to treat people the way you want to be treated. I would change that. I would give leaders the advice, treat people the way they need to be treated. Be kind, be thoughtful, but treat people the way they need to be treated. Because if you treat people the way you want to be treated, they may not like it. You may not get the response you want. We're all there. That's such a great perspective. Thanks. Yeah, believe me, it took me a lot of failures. And look, you can hire bad people. Unfortunately, there's a small percentage of people who are bad, no matter what you do, no matter how much you try. They're just not a good fit. And it could be because they're just... But most people are good. Most people are good. And if you have the ability to understand how they need to be treated based on how they're wired, that's the magic. So that would be my advice. Just simple. And I've learned that the hard way. But now I feel so powerful, empowered, knowing that. Because I'll always sit down and think about it. I have five people in front of me. I can't treat them all the way I want to be treated. Because I'm outward. I'm a big picture person. They may need the details. So how do I address the needs of that individual? Or if they're inward and they don't really speak out, how do I tell that person, hey, what are you thinking? Tell me. You've got to just always think about how people need to be treated. So that would be my advice. And then in terms of exciting news coming up in the future, we are going to reveal at the Brandon Hall Awards the Show People Native app. Our team is right now doing such incredible work to bring that to life. We are available on mobile today from a responsive perspective. But what we're introducing is going to be incredible. We're going to help you. Your toolbox is going to be much stronger. So before you go in a meeting, when you wake up in the morning, your notifications are going to say, hey, you have a meeting today with these three people from your team. Would you like any advice before you go into that meeting? I love that. It's really great. It's tools in the flow of work. Do you have that for your children too? In your meeting with your teenagers today? Oh, yeah. We're definitely going to have that too. That's where we're excited. This is the first step towards moving into the consumer market in the future because, again, we want to help all people with their challenges. The workplace is one that had the biggest challenge first, and we're addressing that now. But we're going to definitely expand to help you with children as well. No, that's great. I can't wait to have access or take a look at your tool once it comes out in the app. It sounds like it's going to be a really great resource and something that's going to be beneficial for leaders. It's exciting. Congratulations. Thank you for being here with me today. I look forward to seeing you next year, if not sooner. I hear that you come to our neck of the woods often in South Florida and Delray and Boca. We're looking forward to connecting with you soon. Yeah, same here. And thank you and everybody at Brandon Hall for the incredible work you do. You help us deepen our relationships, meet new people, and that's really powerful for us. So we appreciate all you guys do as well. Thank you. That makes me feel good because that's one of our drivers is to be able to bring together just great people, great companies, and being able to share in a variety of different business topics and HR and training topics. So it makes me feel good. Thank you. Well, my pleasure. Thank you too. Have a wonderful afternoon. You too. Bye for now.