- Positive Polarity Podcast
Helping Other’s Realize and Achieve Their Potential Through TTI Success Insights Assessments
So why don't you just kind of give us an overview of what TTI does?
TTI success insights exist to help people reveal human potential. That's why we are here in this world, and that is, we intend to help people understand their potential. We do that specifically by helping other people to become aware of themselves, to become aware of the people around them, and ultimately to become aware of the organizations that they are a part of. And we do that specifically by delivering assessments and reports to individuals. So, we look not only at behavior, but we look at motivators and drivers and emotional intelligence, and we even have competencies. We have stress assessments. We have a host of different assessments that allow us to go really deep into individuals and look at these multidimensions of a person's quote-unquote personality.
So, you're looking at it from an EQ perspective, from an emotional quotient perspective. So, from our perspective, I know that that's one of the things that you can actually improve upon in your daily life. How does that work? What are some things a high level that people could do listening to really work on their EQ?
There are a lot of different factors. Actually, five particular factors that go into EQ. It's awareness of self and regulation of self, as well as awareness of others and the regulation of others. That fifth factor is actually motivation. So, when we think about EQ, there were a few things that we can do. And some of my favorites are actually to just practice the pause. And in our particular culture, it's not always easy for us to give space. One of the foolproof methods is not necessarily to react, but to practice a pause and really give thought to what's happening around you and what's happening within you.
We were talking about just being, just being quiet and listening. Right. And it's so in our world where we're cruising along at such hyper speeds that even suggest slowing down, you know, is like really in most people's minds counterproductive. But I've noticed in my life that when I can slow down, I'm able to focus more. I'm able to deliver a better result when I do that. What do you find? I mean, what's for you personally, is it hard for you to practice that pause or pretty good job?
No, I'm not. And my behavioral style, it's an aspirational thing that I try to achieve every single day. When we look at the DISC model, which is one of the models that we use at TTI success insights, my behavioral style and my ask score, which stands for steadiness is actually in the single digits.
That means that I love to go fast. I love to have multiple things going at once, and I like to make quick decisions. Let's go, let's go. Let's go. That does not lend itself well to practicing the pause. So, it really becomes a very conscious effort on my part to be able to slow down and leave room for others because often I'm just so eager to go, go, go, go, go. And you don't always need to do that. And specifically, when you're trying to raise your emotional quotient or your emotional intelligence, you want to slow it down. And it makes me think of a quote that Rick Bowers, who is the president of TTI success insights always says, and it always gets me because it's so difficult for me to do, but he often says, "slow down to go faster." And it's a racing metaphor, but nonetheless, something that he always says. And so, it helps me from the EQ standpoint, but also to put my lower S score, my lower steadiness score.
Tell us a little bit about how you have kind of acclimated your way into your current role.
I'll give a really specific example here. I work with a team of customer care team members, and we call them solutions consultants at TTI success insights, and they are so good, and they are so not me behaviorally. Actually, they're my complete opposite style. So sometimes I think in a very different way, and I come from a very different perspective than they do. I'm motivated by very different things than they are. And the way that I behave is very different from the way that they are. But the thing that I've noticed and how we've become so effective together is that they actually complete me. They allow me to see the perspectives that I haven't seen before. As a leader, I'm vulnerable enough to say I've never considered it from that perspective.
Can you share more? Can you tell me a story about that?
So, my style like I said, we look like we make up a whole person. Suppose we come together with their styles, right. It was like 100 on everything when we fit together. But those make for the strongest teams, and they really do because you're able to consider all sides of you.
I was looking at your LinkedIn profile, and I found something that I was like, I think there's a typo here because it says there's an intersection between marketing and HR and operations. So, I want to understand how you're able to get those to talk to each other, then successfully do that. How did you bridge that marketing to the operations gap?
Well, I bridged the gap earlier in my career by going from operations to marketing. And I think that's where it all started so many, many moons ago. I started my career at Verizon. So, the corporate telecom behemoths, and I was lucky enough to enter a summer internship program at Verizon taking care of none other than absence management, like riveting. Right? Like so exciting. Not really. So, I was excited, though. I was 20 something, I was bright-eyed, bushy-tailed. I was going to work for corporate America. I was going to show up in the high heels and the slicked-back hair, and I was going to make it through absence management. So, I did a summer internship in this absence of management in field operations. So, I worked with those hardy souls that dove deep into the ground through a manhole or that climb to the very top of an unwavering telephone pole.
When it came back for a second summer, I worked in a garage and Verizon long Island. So, I was an ops. I was fully in ops. I was looking at data. I was analyzing, I was having morning huddles, even though I didn't know, it was a morning huddle. We had group ups. We weren't going through all these things. And I loved it until one day I went to an intern program, which they had at Verizon because they have a lot of resources to do that. I was able to see what the marketing people were doing, and all of a sudden, my green-eyed monster came on. So, in marketing, they actually had a rotational program. So, they would send people to, for example, into a call center and then take them out of that and put them in the branding department, then take them into advertising.
So, they got exposed to all of these really cool creative things that I from operations working with, like, you know, basically the dirt and the grime and like going out into the field with the steel toe boots. Wasn't the same as those high yields walking around in a corporate office. So, I had this green-eyed monster thing going on. So, I was lucky enough to get picked up by an operations VP, but she made me the operation staff's marketing specialist. And I picked up a cross-sell upsell program called the, sold one more program, ran with it, and loved it. So, my origin Dave is actually in operations, and I transitioned myself like a chameleon, as I said before, into marketing, and I've used it throughout my career. So, the discipline and the regiment that comes associated with having a really strong operation was something that just sang to my soul. But I really dug into the creativity associated with marketing and then the data associated with performance marketing.
So, you have that within you. A part of you wants to cruise at a hundred miles an hour, but then part of you wants to make sure that it's done correctly. So, I can't even imagine how difficult that is to have that going on. How do you work through that when you have both sides tearing at you to go in both directions? Who wins?
Oh, it depends. It's not easy. Right? So, if the urgency is higher in that particular moment, then that ability to go is what wins. But if it's really important to get it right, then that essentially that higher C or that perfection is what wins the most. But I love blending the two. And luckily for me, I'm not like off scale with both my dominance and compliance score. I'm more middle of the road. So, it's a lot easier for me to be able to regulate it. If it were super strong, that would be super difficult for me as well.
So, have you ever been labeled a perfectionist?
All the time. Personally, professionally, friendship wise, all of it. All of it. Total perfectionist.
I think the real challenge in business is, understanding that that that can be a real positive because so often it turns into be a negative, at least perceived by the business owner. And that's, I think, you know when we talk about that in training, you know, people don't appreciate at first that variation that difference. But I think we're seeing in a lot of different instances, we're seeing that to come true anyway. So, are you familiar with traction in the EOS system?
I've read the book. Yep.
So, when they described that visionary and integrator standpoint, how you need both to be able to work, they are opposite styles. Dave, I don't know if I'm out in the world, people are saying, "Hey, behaviorally, you need these different personalities." But I think that there is a cognizant understanding of exactly what you're saying.
And so when we do sales training, when we talk to different people about that, it is important to understand that there's different people, your style's different than the person that you're talking to. And so, you know, was it hard for you to make that marketing to operations, operations to marketing? Was that hard to jump, or is it just that you have, you know, success on both sides?
I think for me it was like breathing Dave. So, when say, "if the job were to talk, what would it say?" I think that in my career have been very fortunate that I've stumbled up. However, I also have been attracted to roles that were best for my style. And I think that at TTI success insights, they knew absolutely what my style was and how good of a fit it would be. But in other organizations, they instinctively knew that in some instances, but I was really lucky. I just found it. And I said that's what I want to do. And you don't have a position that's like that, but I'll, I'll do it. Like here's the value I can provide. So, even though I have a behavioral conflict when it comes to my roles, I don't have that. I don't have a conflict between me and my job because the job and what it needs is what I provide.
How will you use DISC in the hiring process? How do you suggest that companies use a personality profile to be able to improve that hiring process?
We recommend that essentially an assessment or at least a job benchmark is what we call it inside the industry that we use that as a third of the factor when evaluating candidates because I've been super lucky and I've built or found the jobs that were great fits for me. But if I weren't as lucky and I ended up in a role that's not the best use of my skill sets. So what we at TTI success insights recommend is that you build a job benchmark essentially to understand what the job requires so that you can more accurately assess if a candidate that you had would be fulfilled by the rule that you have using tools like DISC. Also, with the 12 driving forces, which essentially measure motivation and a host of other tools as well, to be able to find those right candidates. We fundamentally believe that everyone deserves to love their work and to be able to do it every day. And one of the best ways we try to help people in doing that is by providing those tools to build that comparison and have intelligent conversations about what's best for the candidate and the company.
What's the success rate a guess of utilizing assessments to be able to find the best person for that particular job?
I think that the success rate ultimately goes up, and here's why it's less about the actual data associated with it. And more about us as humans, being able to turn something very subjective to make it more objective, and to be able to have meaningful conversations. I think that a fundamental problem associated with the two-thirds of people that are not engaged at work is that we never even thought about "who is this person, and are they a good fit? And would they be fulfilled by that role?" In essence, we've done them an injustice by putting them in that position where they feel stuck and feel like they're not engaged. So, we, as leaders, as business owners, have an obligation to make that better, to take on that two-thirds problem and either reverse the stats or just completely wipe it out so that we are putting the best people in the best role.
When we talk about marketing ourselves, ourselves as a brand, and when we become more aware of what we like and what we don't like, even if it's not, "I want to be a nurse at a pediatric oncology office, right?" Like even if it's not that specific if we can at least identify where our strengths are and our weaknesses, we can start to articulate our LinkedIn profiles. We can start to articulate our resumes in a way that for marketers attracts the ideal employer and repels the anti-employer so that we would never get stuck in a role that we don't like because we're infusing some of that. Here is me, right?
I'm telling people, print out your assessment, bring it with you on your job interview. Number one, you're going to set yourself apart from the other people. You got to really look now at, how are you going to separate yourself? Because you could easily lie and say everything that they want you to say, which everybody finds out at the end.
When I first came to TTI, it was almost four years ago. I had submitted my application on one of the job boards, one of the platforms. We found that there was a match with my resume and a match with the phone screens. They said we'd love to send you a survey, a link to this tool that helps us understand you. So, I walk in for the in-person interview, and I was the leading candidate at the time, and they had my entire profile. They knew I was the leading candidate. We were continuing the conversations. And they said, since you're interested in, we're interested, we're going to give you this report. And I was able to take it home. And I was kind of like, "okay, this is, this is cool. This is nice." And then I brought it home to my husband, and I was like, "I don't know, what do you think?" And I handed it to him, and he read just the general characteristics, which is a three-paragraph summary at the beginning of the report. And he looked, he had the paper, he looked up at me. He's like, "Oh, they nailed you. Oh, my God. They know who you are."
So, it's amazing that this tool, this resource can get to know the person underneath the surface even if you can't articulate it. Because when I decided to join TTI, they knew exactly who they were hiring to the point where my husband said, "Oh, they figured you out already, all you did was took a short questionnaire."
So, what do you think from a marketing perspective? For somebody that's listening to that is working with marketing, how do you kind of integrate those different personalities into that marketing campaign?
Yeah, I think the most important thing to do is start with "who's your who?" Simon Sinek has a great talk. I believe it's a Ted talk where he talks about the golden circle. So, at the core is the "why," then you get to the "how," and then you get to the "what." But I think at the very, very center is the "who are you for?" And being able to identify who you are for what will help you adjust your marketing strategies no matter what you do. For example, if I had a marketing coordinator, I want someone that's willing to take things across the finish line. I want someone who is maybe a little bit slower pace but is going to make sure it gets done right. If I have a marketing strategist, I want someone thinking broadly, maybe visionary, right? They might be a little bit faster paced. They might be staying on top of trends. They may not be as concerned about perfection, but instead just understanding what's coming up. So, I think it's important to understand who you are trying to talk to and then adjust your messaging.
Who, so, if you are looking for a high D as your "who" then make sure you're using language and words and concepts that work for that high D because it's not going to work the same for someone that would be a high S which is very unusual to have those two scores together. But you just have to understand the "who is your who" that's the most important thing to start with.
There are words that certain personalities are attracted to. And certain words that they're repelled to. And I realized that for myself. So, I cannot stand the word process. The cool part is that I realized that I struggle with the word process, but you know what? I found a word to replace that. And it was path. Path, because I have a real comfort in the path. We have woods in the back of our house, and we've created a path, and it just puts me in this completely different spot than if I think about process. Do you find that marketing is that word specific at times to make sure that you're hitting the right people with the right message?
I think that there aren't as many business owners as entrepreneurs or marketers who think about their words specifically, and we see some bigger brands doing that, right? So, I recently saw a campaign by Coca-Cola that focused a bit more on "things used to be great," right? And they really have an acute understanding of their "who." They've been classic so long. They're targeting that person that is attracted to the idea of the way things would be. And they understand it. But I think that as individuals, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, or even just as marketers, the words that go into a story make them incredibly powerful.
If someone says to you just relax, how does that work for you when someone goes, "relax"?
So that's one of those trigger words for someone who might be that higher D with a lower S. Like "relax "is not in the vocabulary. And it doesn't work. Like when someone says to me, "just chill out, just relax." It's kind of like, no, I don't want to. Identifying those behavioral indicators gives us a great opportunity to be able to communicate more effectively with those around us.
What would you give for a business tip of the week?
Be very careful with the words that you choose to use with your audience or with people that you work with. To be able to understand what's really going to compel them to action, but also understand what's going to either tune them out or just completely turn them off. So, my business tip to offer up to everyone this week is to really begin to understand the words you're using with others and how they might tell you more about what they prefer and how they work.
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