Barry Conchie, Founder and President of Conchie Associates, and business partner Sarah Dalton, discuss their research taken from over 58K executive leaders, including insights on holding two conflicting truths together, how people don’t change, but the context they exist in does, being both rigid and flexible like an air traffic controller, why likeability is not an indicator of job performance (but it sure informs a lot of hiring), the ROI of a tortoise vs. a squirrel, identifying the 5 talents that REALLY matter in leadership, and how sometimes leaders just can’t be made.

So let's start there. We rarely have two folks

at the same time, so let's start with that. How did the two of

you guys come to be working together share with me a little

bit of that history.

Barry and I worked together at the last company

that I was with. He was one of their major clients, and when it

came time for me to leave that organization, I'd reached out to

Barry to ask him if he could help me get another job. And he

just said, over, over, my dead body. If you're leaving this

company, you're you're coming on board with me.

In my version of that when I set my own company

up in 2013 My aim was to do interesting work with

interesting people. So my expertise is an Assessment and

Selection. I'd had a career spanning nearly 40 years before

I set up my own company. So I had a lot, lot of background, a

lot of experience in leadership, and I quickly got to the point

where we were growing so quickly that I couldn't handle it on my

Hill, and I needed to bring people on board. And being an

expert in select sheet, nobody came up close to what I was

looking for. And then when I started working with a company

where Sarah was at, it kind of dawned on me pretty quickly that

if there was ever a possibility that she became available on the

market, I'd slap her up in her heartbeat, because she checks so

many boxes. You know, I had a very successful book that came

out sold a ton of copies. And, you know, I'd always had this

idea of a book in my mind for our old one money based on the

work that we did. It was time to write that book, and I thought,

Sarah is going to be a part of this.

So you had a book 16 years ago, came out. Did

incredibly well. Tell us about this one, the difference. Bring

us up to speed on that.

The last book I wrote was while I was at Gallup.

I used to lead Gallup's Leadership Research and

selection. When I left Gallup was set up, my own company was

completely different focus to what I did in Gallup. I was

relentlessly focused on top level selection, whereas in

Gallup we were a bit more of an all round consultant. So we had

to, you know, cover a whole gamut of different things. But

in my own business, I just became relentlessly focused on

leadership, and I built my own leadership assessment. So

researched it, validated it, and that assessment, in and of

itself, tells a really interesting story. So it became

a story of itself, and it was a story that needed to be taught.

So if you could imagine my wife existing in three big chunks.

The first shot was like pre Gallup work. There's a senior

professional in education in the UK I spent about 10 years ago,

and they managed 13 years in lower business. And this

particular book catches the last 13 years. Now, here's an

interesting thing to think about, Stephanie, two things can

be true at the same time, even though they sound contradictory.

So here are two things that sound contradictory, but both

are true. The first is that human beings are infinitely

variable, but our experience of this is every person we meet,

and it doesn't matter whether they're professionally, it

doesn't matter whether they're fairly doesn't matter whether

they're in the neighborhood or community or whatever, person by

person by person, these folks are infinitely variable. Notting

people are upset, contradictory Fact number two, humans are

eminently predictable. Even though there's such a

variability, we can predict aspects of human behavior,

aspects of human performance, pretty accurately. But what we

do within our business is we try to marry both of which facts so

we measure the variability in people. We can see, you know

that you're different from Sarah and you're both different from

me, but we can work in a way that enables us to build up

accurate statistical predictions of success in terms of

performance. So when you think about that at a leadership

level, that sounds value.

So I'm going to ask you a question, and then I'm

going to ask a similar one for you, Sarah, and you probably

know the questions, because, as we just determined, humans are

predictable. But just in case, in your tenure, Barry, the more

you've seen Have you seen that people really stay the same, or

have you seen people as whole and as individuals change?

It's an interesting question, but

there's a question you need to ask before that, and that is

what can change. So I think about myself. I haven't changed

that much of 40 years, but what has changed is the context. So

when you think about where I was 40 years ago, what I was doing,

characteristically, I wasn't that different to how I am now.

I was still a relentlessly competitive it just manifests

itself in slightly different ways. I don't cry when I lose,

but I used to, used to hurt me that much I couldn't bear to

lose. You know, I've always been very deep thinker that I've

never been over all by a particular problem, because I

knew, I knew eventually I could probably find a solution. Those

characteristics have remained very, very constant. You know,

what changes are the experiences that we acquire over the course

of our careers, and that teaches us to either moderate or

extenuate certain characteristics that we've got.

I no longer try when I don't win. An interesting question to

us, you know, certainly if you've got a partner or a

significant other, but the question to ask yourself is, you

know, if you do have a partner in life. What success have you

had in changing their characteristics over the course

of the time that you've known them? See if they're irritating

things that your partner does, you know and you've tried to

change it? How much, how much look have you had with that? And

most people at that point crack out in laughter, because of

course, the idea that you're going to change is ridiculous,

but here's what does change. You learn to accommodate certain

things. You learn to live with it. You were dead, so the

characteristics of the person don't change, then your attitude

towards those characteristics don't change. They're still

irritating. What changes is how you handle it, and if you think

about that from a leadership perspective, then you know,

we've got a whole world out there thinking that you can

train people to do anything you can't, but we should stop lying

to people about this, because that's what it is. We're lying

to each other. No, you can't train people to do anything. If

you want to pick nuts off a tree, don't hire a tortoise.

Hire a squirrel. Squirrels are brilliant at picking nuts on the

tree. Now you could teach a tortoise to them, and maybe they

could pick one or two before they fell off. But what's the

return on that effort? It's really, really limited. We don't

change any way near as much as we thought we do, and so we live

in this pretense, and that pretense is I manage myself

differently. Then I've learned, over experience, not to say this

in this environment. I've learned to keep my mouth shut

and let other people speak before I speak. We're just

managing them in more effective ways.

Wow, that is food for thought. So flip side

of that similar question to you, Sarah, when folks reach out to

you and say, Hey, we need some help improving our hiring

processes, improving our retention, all the all the

myriad things, how receptive Do you really find that folks are

to changing their mindset? I mean, in your experience, walk

me through what that can look like.

It's always a journey. It doesn't happen

overnight, because when you think about a typical hiring

process that you lead any candidate through the factors

that we're usually looking at have to do with the person's

background and career experience. So what companies

they've worked in before, how long they've been around in

certain jobs, we look at the kind of skills and expertise

that they list out on their resume, and then we get them in

a room, and we have we try and have a human conversation with

them, and at that point, what you're really doing is thinking

about how you build chemistry with that person, whether or not

you like them, whether you can see yourself working with them.

But likeability isn't a predictor of future job

performance, and neither are the companies that you've worked in,

how far you went in college, or any other things that people

typically list on their resume, none of those things predict

future job performance. So it's the very reason why we can get

someone who might be brilliant in an interview where we build

up a ton of confidence about what we think they're going to

be like in the job, and then we plug them in, and then we find

out otherwise every manager has had this experience where

they've had this brilliant candidate in an interview.

Everyone may have interviewed felt really good, really

positive about them, but yet, how they perform in the job

isn't what we thought it was going to be. So none of the

things we typically look at are a really good indicator of

future performance. You know, one of the first questions I ask

some managers that I'm working with is, tell me what kind of

candidate you're looking for. Describe it and always describe

aspects of talent. So when they talk about, I need a really good

problem solver, or I need someone who's going to be the

relational glue in an organization that's otherwise

really dissatisfied right now. Know, or they talk about someone

who can put good processes in place, these are all

illustrations of very specific talents that we can measure in

people. The difference is we put them through an assessment, we

can ask way more questions in an assessment and get a much more

reliable read of how people think and whether or not they

have the talents that you might think they do in an interview,

but they really don't. It's way too easy to fool someone in an

interview where you've got no real experience with them.

They're not exactly sure what questions to ask. So what I've

got to do in my job is to wind people back and try and get them

to hold back their own gut instincts and decision making

about the candidates that they like, and say, Look, I know you

might think this because you met them once or twice, but here's

what the assessment results tell me about how they actually

think, and here are the questions that you should be

asking. It's a journey. It doesn't happen overnight, and

they don't always listen to us so they don't always take our

advice. They don't always listen to us when we say, do not move

them forward. We just look at what happens. We're usually

right.

Do you have a stack of I told you so cards?

We definitely have those. And that's, you know,

that's what helps us tighten up some of our predictions and our

understanding of what characteristics drive better

performance in a role.

Okay, so let me shift gears and talk about the

book, The Five Talents That Really Matter, How Great Leaders

Drive Extraordinary Performance. And I think what's just so just

catching already is we are definitely seeing an emerging

emphasis on a different kind of leadership than probably existed

Barry when you first started in your career, the way that people

are really embracing this idea that you know, Leadership isn't

just about climbing the corporate ladder. It's a lot of

responsibility, not just to those north of them, but to the

folks that they're leading and managing, etc. So tell us a

little bit about how the book came to be, and maybe give us a

couple of nuggets to entice us there.

Well, the book came to be because there isn't a

book out there like this right now. And the book does four

things. First, it describes as the title suggests that there

are five talents that really matter. So when people ask the

question, what is it about leadership, and what do we need

to know about leadership in a way that drives high levels of

performance? The answer to that is the five talents. Now the

five talents, I've just very quickly rolled through that. The

first one is setting direction. So establishing a course heading

somewhere, right? You need to be heading somewhere. The second

thing is harnessing energy, and that means you're going to

motivate people. You got to motivate yourself. Third

component is exciting pressure. Leaders need to change people's

minds, and in our view, without the capacity to do that, your

organization will really go nowhere. Not everybody's going

to agree with you that you're still going to get there. The

fourth element is improving connectivity, and that means

organizations are associate as well as professional. It's about

the connections between people. If your organization is

supremely well connected, it predicts strategic agility. And

if it isn't, you're going to get silos, trenches and divisions.

You're going to get missteps, poor animals and so on. The

Fifth Element is controlling traffic. And controlling traffic

is how you think about the way that you manage complex

operation. And the controlling traffic that we describe in the

book is like an air traffic control. There are rigid roads

that, my goodness, you've got to change on a dime in a heartbeat,

and things change, playing malfunction, angry passengers,

the drug pilot. I mean, whatever it is, you know, you got to be

able to deal with it. So you got very, very strict rules that

guide certain parameters, like how far planes you've got to be

apart, how fast they go, how quickly they descend, how you

move them around the taxiway. Then everything after that is

managing them to the road. Goodness. Has so much

unpredictability, you've got to be able to go with that too. So

the five talents that really matter is our explanation of the

critical elements that predict the top performing leaders. Now

not everybody is going to be good at all of them, but you

need to be good at enough of them. And what the book does is

describe that balance, because I've got to tell you, there are

some things I'm no good at, absolutely hopeless.

Sarah, did you want to chime in on this?

She's got a book of these things. And as I think

about my career, Step B, I've learned to do more and more of

less and less. So I'll let certain things go, and that's

how. Actually a really interesting model The book

describes, because we're not saying everybody has to do these

five things. We're saying these five things need to be taken

care of, so you need to contribute sort of them, but

maybe the way you build your team fleshes out the rest. So

first element of the book, five talents that really matter. Then

there are three other things. First two. Number one, the way

we've talked about leadership in the past is immature, inaccurate

and ineffective. We've either said leadership is a million

things and we've complicated it, or we've been even more silly

and said it really only boils down to this one thing, like, I

don't know humility well. Goodness me, that's just not

true. So we deconstruct a lot of nonsense that's been written

about leadership over the last 40 years or so. The third

element of the book is the companies get a lot wrong about

selection. Sarah highlighted a few novels a little bit earlier

with respect to face to face interviews. So what we do is we

analyze what they get wrong about selection and then put in

place a series of things that will help correct that. What

which, of course, is the assessment that we describe in

the book. If you use a well calibrated predictive

assessment, you'll make far fewer selection errors and far

more selection hits. So the third element of the book

describes what companies are currently doing wrong, how to

fix it. And the fourth element of the book is the most

exciting, and that is we give people a chance to take the

assessment. So the book covers those four issues. One of the

things that we'll be saying to folks before we even think of

taking the assessment is not everyone is cut out to be a

leader, but not everyone is going to make it as a leader. Be

prepared.

I mean, just to add to what Barry is already

saying, the idea with the five talents that really matter is

that there are unchanging elements of who people are that

drive very good performance in leadership roles. Now very said,

not everyone will have them, or people will have them to

different degrees. So what we wanted to do with this book is

give people a means of very give people a very clear language and

a means of identifying the characteristics in themselves

that might lend to more effective leadership and to help

them think about where they spend their time if they're

going to develop those usually, I think one of the mistakes we

make in our culture is thinking that we should be well rounded

people who are who are just good at everything, or that we should

focus on the weaknesses that we have and try and coach those to

just get a little bit better. But that's not how you get the

best performance out of people, we got to help people understand

how they're unique and what talents make them stand out. And

we know through research that if you want to get the best out of

people, if you want to help them perform better, you've got to

give them a way of understanding the natural talents that they

have and the things that they naturally do really well.

Because the more interesting question is, How good could you

be in those areas? We want people spending their time in

the areas where they've got the greatest potential to develop

and grow as leaders.

Sarah's point about self awareness and helping

people understand more about who they are, recognizing that they

won't be brilliant at everything. We do have people in

our database, by the way, who think they're brilliant. You

might even have met one or two in your career. But here's

something really interesting. When you ask leaders about the

trait or characteristic they must admire in themselves, the

most common response we get is how good they are at strategy.

Here's the problem. Strategy is the rarest element in our entire

database. We find it at a lower level in relatively few people,

and at a high level in a tiny number of people, and yet nearly

everybody claims it. Disconnect is not only worrying to us, but

it's also potentially damaging for the individuals who claim

that and for the organizations that they need. So we have to

spend time on picking those perceptions of self and saying,

look, I think what you really mean is you pretty smart, but

there's a difference between being intellectually smart and

being very good strategically. So a lot of the time we've got

to pull people away from low levels of self awareness and try

to shine a light on what they really mean about themselves in

ways that is much more helpful to their goals and development.

So maybe a good piggyback to your book would be

self awareness for dummies?

Yeah. That might be a good precursor to this. I

don't think there's any virtue in being always wrong, but never

in debt. Those two things worry me, and I think too many people

have got an inflated view of their capabilities, where covid.

To interviews and selecting people. So I'll give you an

illustration. One of the questions I often ask the CEOs

we work with is, how would argue leaders? Nobody's ever said, I'm

bad. And then I'll say, so what's your hit rate when they

look at me and say, Well, what do you mean by that? Of your

last 10 appointments? How many turned out to be above average

performance? Well, they look at me and they say, Well, yeah,

maybe, oh, maybe six, I said. So what you really said is you

don't know, because people don't track this information, and we

wish they would. You should have a number, and you should be able

to say six of the last 10 people are appointed with the average

performance. It's remarkable the lack of specificity that

organizations communicate with us about their hit rate when it

comes to hiring. These are people, by the way, who measure

widgets to microns of tolerance. They can tell you, you know,

with a nanometer of, you know what the tensile strength of a

steel beam is, they can tell you how many widgets are in transit

between Indonesia and Cape tech, right? They go into this

inordinate detail. Most important thing of all. Well, I

think it's about six out of 10, just good as they can get, that

we think it's embarrassment, and we need to change it.

We hear all kinds of books and stories and

feel goods about what made somebody a great leader, or, you

know, a certain characteristic, or something happened in their

life, or some kind of professional event or whatever.

And I'm not saying there's not value in them, there's stories,

there's inspiration, but in terms of really modeling a

formula, a research based way of approaching leadership, it

sounds like you've got the corner on that.

And we think we're doing a big public service

Stephanie, because if we stop the person in their tracks and

make them think maybe I don't want to be a leader that's

actually really good for them, because there may well be

another role that isn't a high level leadership role, where

they could be utterly brilliant. But if we can encourage people

who've got measurable leadership potential but have either not

been encouraged or, you know, a little bit on, you know, unsure

of themselves, if we can build their confidence to take on

these bigger jobs and to unleash their talents on the world and

be a great success, you know, we think that's phenomenal, So we

take that really, really seriously, just because you

might not be cut out being a top leader doesn't mean there is a

role out there where you can shine and be fantastic. And if

we can help people in those kinds of discoveries start only

good for them, good for the people they work with, good for

organizations, actually good for society.

Yeah, that passion definitely shines

through. Thank you both so much. This has been super fun and

really a fascinating topic. I can really hear the passion and

the mission making the world a better place with better

leaders.

Well it's been great talking to Stephanie.

Thanks for the opportunity.

Thank you so much.