Entrepreneur, author, and Founder / CEO of Vanderbloemen Search Group, William Vanderbloemen, talks about preparing for the Ice Age, why vision is seeing just beyond your feet, what the best of the best have in common, how to respond to the most dreaded interview question ever, why self-awareness is the #1 skill, and who DOES need to fear AI (hint, it's not that many people).

And be sure to catch more from William in Episode 235 of The Action Catalyst.

We are joined once again by William Vanderbloemen, CEO

and founder of the Vanderbloemen Search Group. William last

joined us on the program in 2018. But as you know, it's been

quite a five years since then. So what's changed for you,

William?

You know, I think in 2018, we were

releasing a book on culture, we've been studying what makes a

winning workplace culture, that books actually sold more copies

since the pandemic than before. Because now everybody's

wrestling with do we make people come to the office, if we're

going to make them come in and better be pretty cool, like,

what do we do? And I can't claim that I'm passionate enough to

know that that was where it was headed. But you know, I tend to

believe somebody else is in charge here. So maybe it was for

that. So that's been cool to see we actually revamped our culture

tool companies can take to see how they're doing against I

think it's 5000 companies now that have taken their teams

through it. So it's pretty cool. But then the pandemic hit, you

know, what I learned? I got a undergraduate degree in

philosophy and religion. You know what most people with

philosophy degree spent their career doing? Right? They spend

their career saying, Do you want fries with that? And then I've

got a seminary degree from Princeton, so that none of that

had how to read a p&l. Yeah. So lessons learned from the

pandemic. We are an executive search firm, we started out

helping churches find their pastor. And then we branched out

to schools, finding their headmaster, and then nonprofits,

and it's gone a couple of years. But during a pandemic, every one

of our clients was closed indefinitely. And this is the

business takeaway. If all of your clients close indefinitely,

it will change your p&l for the year. Now, some really cool

things happening before the pandemic, we decided that we

needed to decentralize, we're gonna open regional offices and

start to do more of a franchise model with a central office in

Houston. So we spent almost all of 2019 running a beta office in

Phoenix. And we had and we'd always use Zoom, but we had to

learn like we have to develop a okay, what would a policy look

like for remote work? Can we build backdrops so no matter

where people are, it's going to look like it's the same branded

experience, we had no idea what we were preparing for. But when

the pandemic hit as far as office operations, we were able

to just flip the switch, we already had all the pieces in

place, and we're I'm so thankful that is somebody else in charge.

But when the when the thing hit, I read a paper called leading

beyond the blizzard, and this is so good for any crisis

management, I'm never going to forget this. Entrepreneurs, you

guys need to decide is this pandemic? Is it going to be a

really bad blizzard? Where we got like, 10 snow days in a row?

Or is it a long winter? And we got a few months to shut down?

Or is it a mini ice age is last a year and a half like that. And

for every business, it'll be different. But you need to

decide need to decide now and commit to one of those paths,

and then live according to the path. I said, Let's treat it

like an ice age. Honestly, if I were really a good businessman,

I would have just shut the company down, send everybody

home and reopened it and start from scratch when the thing was

over, that would have been the smarter business decision.

Do you still think that's true? Is that how you would

handle the next crisis?

I used to think having good leadership

vision was being able to see like five years down the road

like have a 10 year plan and what are we going to do? And I

think I'm not trying to go all religious on you. But there's a

there's a line in the Hebrew Scriptures. It says Your word is

a lamp unto my feet. So I used to think that meant like a Xenon

headlight that give you eyes to see 10 years stellar. It wasn't,

it was actually a little lantern, they were on their

shoes, and it gave them just enough light for the next step.

And one of the most important lessons I had learned as a

leader was we don't have to know what's happening in 10 years,

you do have to know slightly sooner than everybody else what

you're going to do so I'm focusing more on my ability to

be agile, with whatever comes.

So that brings us to the new book out now called Be The

Data Driven Habits That Separate the Best Leaders From

the Rest. You drew from over 30,000 interviews for this to

identify 12 traits or soft skills that create standouts,

how do you define soft skills? And what put the wheels in

motion to write the book?

You ever meet somebody? And within like,

five minutes, you know they are a winner?

I believe I'm doing it right now actually

That was good. I didn't see that. You got

me? Oh, yeah, no, but you know what I mean? I mean, maybe

you're at a social function, and there's just somebody that's

kind of life of the party. Everybody likes talking to

everybody who's around. Or maybe it's a quiet person you run into

at a dinner and they don't say much, but when they say

something, it's like, oh my gosh, say more. Or you're in a

job interview, and you're interviewing a candidate. You're

like, this one's a winner, man, that guy's got something going

on. Right. So my question was how In five, what are they doing

in five minutes? That makes me think that, like, what is that?

So we said, as a product of the pandemic? You know, we've done

30,000 interviews now we can probably we've tracked them all.

And what do everything else do? Except sir, we were helping

people get their PPP money and figure out how to do live stream

services and things. So why don't we sit down and say, Can

we figure out out of those. So the 30,000, face to face

interviews are the 30,000 interviews that represent the

best people we've ever interviewed to get that

interview, you have to pass through a bunch of hoops, and we

were able to distill down, okay, these are the 30,000. We said,

okay, of those 30,000, who were the best of the best. And that's

who got the job, who stayed in it, who got promoted, like,

who's really been when we found those people. And then we said,

Do they do anything in common, they have anything in common.

And they do, I expected it to be things like the best of the best

all had IQs of 150 or more, the best of the best all had the

privilege of going to Ivy League schools, the best of the best

came from money. So they didn't have to start with nothing, or,

or the best of the best are all six feet tall, with amazing

hair, and really shiny teeth. None of that none of that. None

of that, none of it. And if you're an entrepreneur, you

know, it's not that it's different. What we found was its

habits as the way they behaved with other humans, which led us

to talk about soft skills. That's what you do at a cocktail

party, or at a dinner reception, or in a job interview. It's how

you function with one another, and how you behave. And the

super cool thing about our research was that these 12

habits that they all exhibited, are teachable, that are very

uncommon among most of us, but incredibly common among the best

of the best.

Does everybody have to have all 12?

No.

Are there any particulars out of the 12 that seemed to pop

up more often?

That's such a good question. So we said

Alright, so the the 12, once we identified the 12, we hired some

psychologists and some data analytics people, and they built

a survey for us, we surveyed a quarter million people to see

where are normal medians and means for each of these, and

what are the combinations like and where are you strong, and

what is that like? So that was really cool. And then we hired

him again, to actually build a software tool, where an

individual can go through an inventory, kind of like the

Enneagram, or the disc or Briggs. And it comes down to it

shows you like strengths finders shows your three tops, it shows

you your three best and your three worst, we took that and

built it into a 360 tool. So like, if I'm working for you, I

take it then you take it about me. And then some for me takes

it about me. And then I can see where my blind spots are. Now

what I'm what I'm hopeful for, we've sent probably 10,000

people through the inventory. So far, once we get to 100,000 or

so, we're going to be able to say you know what's really good.

In an engineer, you know, what you really don't want like one

of them is the innovative, if you're hiring a Chief Compliance

Officer or an accountant, you don't want him. I live in

Houston, we did innovative accounting, they called it

Enron, he didn't want that. One of the 12 that I think is the

most rare is self awareness, self awareness. In fact, of the

quarter million people that took the survey, like 86% of them

ranked themselves as above average and self awareness. Now,

think about that for a second 86% of people are not above

average, like that math doesn't work. The point is we are

testing people on whether they're self aware, and they

showed us in their answer that they're not. And where does that

show up? It shows up. If you take an inventory like this, if

you learn your Enneagram if you learn your disc, you can start

to learn where you'll flourish in business, like, you know, the

terrible question that people ask anybody. So tell me about

yourself, you know, no, it's horrible. How do you answer that

you give your life story. If you're equipped with some self

awareness, you can say, well, you know, interviewing for your

company is in hockey stick growth. And I know you're, you

know, asking me to join marketing, but I'm guessing

nearly every job description at your company right now has other

duties as necessary. You know, my top skills. I'm an innovator,

I don't sit still very well look back at my job at this company

where we had to change things to 10 times look at this right to

build from scratch with no knowledge at all just had to

learn it and go. It's like my career speed and leading up to

working with you because the way you're wired and what you want

me to do, is exactly what I'm good at. That is a good answer

to that question. You know, 30,000 interviews we also asked

a question out of the 30,000 How many people in their interview

told us that they got fired from a job really low? On my season

came to a close? Well, they did this to me or there were budget

cuts or I was made redundant or bubbled up but not I screwed up

and I got fired. And honestly, if I were the manager of the old

me, I would have fired me to. Here's what I've learned since

then, like that is just Not in our ability. So that's when if

you find some of this self aware, like, honestly, we don't

have much that Socrates taught because it was all verbal. He

didn't write anything down. But the one teaching that everybody

says, yeah, no, he did say that. He said, know yourself, that is

the height of wisdom.

Well, I can't let you go without touching the super

timely topic of AI. In short, William, do we need to be

afraid?

Oh, man, you know, that's human nature.

But when in business, have we not seen a cycle of we invent

something new, it replaces jobs, we figure out new jobs. I mean,

industrial revolution, internet, you name it, there's something

that creates efficiency that removes some old jobs. And then

we figure out new jobs. What I do think, will be as

interesting, I was in a small panel discussion at a small

business owner thing, where people pitching their ideas kind

of a shark tank sort of thing. And one of the sessions was on

AI, it was funny, this, this session was titled, What should

we title this session, like, as a guy, you know, and one of the

three panel people was Google's Chief of Staff, and who's in

charge of their whole AI, it was me and like, 50 coders sitting

in there, and they're all asking all this, like the back end and

the furniture to do to you most will be speaking Greek. I didn't

understand a word who said, you know, it was like, Well, you

haven't said anything to me. What what question you that I'm

like, I have a high school senior, what should I tell them

not to major in? They wouldn't answer as bluntly as I want to.

But this I'll tell you what to major in liberal arts, the

ability for humans to interact with humans is going to be at a

premium in the new era. And that's where I think the soft

skills, it's really, you know, of all the searches we've done.

So many times, the winner of a job is the one who gets along

well with others. And if you do any majority of the 12 of these

traits, you're gonna find that it's about people being with

people, you know, should we be afraid there's some jobs that

you know, I would not want to be a second year accountant right

now, where you just pour, like that's going away. You know,

those coders in that room were scared to death, coding will

probably go away. But there are other jobs, nursing. Oh, my

goodness. I mean, that's for 9000 Different reasons, a career

path that's going to grow, consulting at a very high end

where you can't it's not just data, but like, how do I make

sense of that? I don't know if I'm afraid. I guess the people

that were living at the front end of the Renaissance were

probably afraid to but what a cool that would have been to

live, right?

Where can people find the book, as well as the software

tool you mentioned?

Go to the unicorn book.com has got

everything in one place.

William, thank you for taking the time to rejoin us

today. And let's not make it another five years before the

next.

That's right. And let's certainly not

have another pandemic