Ross Slater:
If you've made the decision to call your bank on the phone, you've probably exhausted whatever other alternatives are, you've tried their app or their website to solve whatever it is he wants, you can't find it. So you're calling in to finally talk to a human. And when you end up having to deal with computers for the next five minutes, and that's very frustrating. Your people know where your customers are experiencing friction. You know, if you have a call center, or people who are supporting the customers of the branch, people interact on a one to one basis. If you ask them what annoys our customers, they'll tell you.
James Robert Lay:
Greetings and Hello, I am James Robert Lay and welcome to episode 298 of the banking on digital growth podcast. Today's episode is part of the exponential insights series and I'm excited to welcome Ross Slater to the show. Ross is a partner and vice president at rich capabilities, Inc, a Toronto based consulting company that helps individuals and organizations build their capabilities, enhance growth and maximize results. Ross is also an accomplished facilitator, coach and certified consultant for Clifton Strengths, disc, and Kolbe. Now, Audrey and I have talked about Kolbe, which is a key assessment that we use here at the Digital Growth Institute to help financial brands unlock the growth potential of people, of leaders of teams by gaining clarity into how they initiate and take action, going all the way back to Episode 124. And today, Ross and I are gonna dive even deeper into how you can maximize the growth potential of people, particularly in the age of AI, at your bank, at your credit union or at your fintech. Welcome to the show. Ross, it is so good to share time with you today.
Ross Slater:
Thanks so much, James Roberts have the pleasure to be here. Before we get into
James Robert Lay:
Talking about all of these exponential opportunities to unlock what I'm looking at as exponential human growth potential for individuals and for teams throughout organizations. What is good in your world, it's always nice to start off on a positive perspective.
Ross Slater:
Well, it's a fantastic start to the new year this year, because last year was our best year ever revenue wise, which is ironic, since everyone was struggling and having some challenges. But you know, one of the silver linings of the pandemic was the switch to doing things digitally. Yeah. And it's been fantastic for our business. I remember talking with my business partner, who's also my husband more on that if you want to know what it's like to live and work with somebody 24/7. And so in in January 2020, we were saying, you know, we need to figure out a way where we can expand our market that doesn't involve us going and doing live in person presentations. It's not necessarily great for us. And it's not always economical for our clients. We just didn't know how to figure that out yet. Along comes the pandemic and it solves the problem for us where we don't have to educate people about going online. Everyone is online. Yeah, they have no choice about it. And so some of our clients that were like we always want you in person whenever we can afford it turned into Oh, like you can be virtual, and we're good with virtual. So it was a bit tough at the beginning. But then 2021 was this big virtual year, and 2020 year was 2022 was a hybrid. So this year, we're growing off of that wonderful progress. And I'm really excited about what that can do for us.
James Robert Lay:
A lot of change we have experienced as individuals, as teams, as organizations, going back to the start of this decade. And change can sometimes feel scary, it can feel complicated, it can feel frustrating and overwhelming, but it also opens up new opportunities. What opportunities did you experience thinking about just your own transformational journeys over the last two or three years? And how did you navigate the complexities of change as a leader yourself?
Ross Slater:
So our big interesting thing that I'd say is the biggest change we had was when you are sitting face to face with someone and you're in person in a workshop, you can grab a lot of subtle clues in terms of body language tone, are they paying attention to their phone more than paying attention to you? And there's a learning environment. There's this energetic learning environment that gets created. Don't get me wrong. I love being with people and I think that it really works better. But sometimes the cost of moving a physical lottery from one place to another mate creates a lot of complexity that it doesn't have to be that way. So I think the biggest thing that we learned was how to recreate what we always call ourselves. We call ourselves entertainers, and you tainment with purpose. So we're entertaining, which is important for adult learning. And we're also educating and trying to do that virtually How do you create that edutainment experience, we can't do experiential learning pieces that we used to do all the time that would really flesh out the providing information in our sessions. And so when we learned was, how do you watch? How do you encourage people to be online? How do you get all your clues just from their faces?
James Robert Lay:
That's a great point. And when you think about that, the it's still focused and framed around people. But technology is now a capability multiplier, if you will. And when you think about that technology, technology is going to multiply whatever it multiplies. If people are having a positive experience, it's going to make that even better. If people are having a negative experience, it's going to make it even worse. And that's one of the reasons when I'm working with financial brands, and we're guiding them through their their digital growth journey, they often think that it is all about technology. And I'm like, no technology is one half of the equation. The other half. And probably even the more complex piece of this is, is the human element. And I think about one organization right now, who is in the digital growth University, they're having some very challenging and tough conversations, from the knowledge that they're gaining. But more specifically, from the awareness of where the leadership team is, and how they aren't exactly 100% aligned. And so that's where I think human transformation must precede or at least work in conjunction with quote, unquote, digital transformation. And human transformation begins with I would say, the awareness of the self. And I know that y'all spend a lot of time focused on awareness, what's your take on this idea of awareness in relationship to human transformation.
Ross Slater:
So it's so interesting, you would say that your market that you work with is financial institutions, because our market for the most part, our financial institutions as well, small ones, where it's an individual advisor working with their clients, so a small team of two or three, or 10. But we also work with the two of the largest Canadian banks Well, with all the largest Canadian banks and a number of large American banks. And some of them are huge. Like, when you have 100,000 people in an organization, the decisions that you make are quite fascinating. And I found a couple of things digitally, because we do work with the digital teams. And sometimes those can be very quick. And sometimes they can be quite slow. And and there's a couple of jokes that we've been telling about sort of some of our financial advising companies is like, they all want to be agile, and they all want to be and so I kind of laugh and I go really agile, what does that mean to you. So they redefine Agile to be bank agile, as opposed to market agile, right? There is bank speed versus market speed, because they are not market speed, they can get very excited about significant changes for them in terms of how they work together. And the biggest thing that they're working on with teams right now is matrix teams, as opposed to hierarchical teams. But it's all because they're trying to transform their speed to be more what the digital can world can offer. Right? The challenge with a human team, a regular human team is they are very hierarchical. And organizations are driven by who's in the meeting. What did they say? Do I get on board? How does this work? And then how do we carry this out in a safe effective way. And that can be much slower than how the digital pace occurs, which is experiment retrench turnaround experiment again, but human beings take a long time to learn. And you know, you're Kobe and you know that you're very attracted to high risk situations and you're very comfortable operating in uncertainty with limited information. Yeah. However, a lot of bankers are the opposite. Correct. They need a lot of detail information, which takes time and they're risk adverse. So our teams are really trying to be both what the market needs, but also who they naturally are. And that's not always an alignment.
James Robert Lay:
I want to pause you here because you bring up Colby and as I mentioned before Audrey and I have discussed is going back to Episode 124. But for though, the listeners who did not catch that, and we do have a global audience and their financial brand leaders from the C suite to SVP to VP marketing sales ops service, I can pretty much say the majority of them are going to be initiating fact finders or initiating follow throughs. So I wanted to slow this down for them and being very aware of the dear listener. Let's pause on this because I want to come back to two Two points, you mentioned the hierarchical structure versus more of the matrix or the cross functional teams. And how does Kobe play into this? And maybe we can just pause, let's unpack Kobe first and then work backwards into the team alignment here. So give us give us an overview of Kobe, and what I'm talking about that it's common language to people like you and I, you know, factfinding and follow through and Quickstart. And you're aware of my Colby profile. Let's let's, let's start there.
Ross Slater:
Sure. So, there's a lot of ways that we function as human beings. And there's three major categories. One category is our intelligence, usually termed our IQ, the official word for it is cognitive. The second major category is our affective, our feelings, our personality, our values. Colby doesn't measure either those, although they're really important. I mean, working with a smart person versus working with a not so smart person, you get different results. Working with an honest, engaged person versus someone who's dishonest and disengaged, you get different results. What Colby is is the Colby a index, specifically from Phoenix, Arizona is Colby core, Kathy Colby was the one that figured out a measure what your third part of how we function is called the cognitive and cognitive is our natural problem solving instincts. And as you measure mentioned, there's four different ways that you can measure and we all have some mental energy built into us on those cognitive instincts. And one measure is how much we need to gather and share information called factfinder. One measure is how we need to create structure an organization called follow through one measure is called Quickstart, which is how we engage with risk and uncertainty, and implementers. The fourth one, which is how we actually have a need to demonstrate or to understand things, conceptually, your combination is always where you land on each of those four measures. It's a one to 10 scale for all of them. And they're not correlated. So if I can be so bold as to talk about your 3294. Knowing that about you, I know you are very, very experimental, you do things on deadline and not before, you are willing to take huge risks sometimes. And hopefully, you're an honest person who is also smart. So those risks pay off and don't hurt anyone else. But there's no guarantee on that because cognitive has no correlation to each of those other two. It also means you don't need a lot of information to jump in and make decisions, you really push back on anything that's too structured and makes you into a straitjacket. But you also need things to be somewhat tangible. So when you go to buy physical equipment, like your wonderful studio, you are going to spend the maximum amount of money you can talk yourself into to get the best possible quality because you need that quality engagement. So that's a little bit about what I would know about you and it full disclosure, my result is a 6644 which as I'm in the 10% of the group called facilitators are mediators I'm I have nothing like you have where it's like you initiate the need to generate an innovate new ideas and new and and take on new tasks. I'm very responsive. So I love dark format, where you ask me a question, and I get to respond to it, because it taps into my natural way of actually operating.
James Robert Lay:
I appreciate you unpacking that, and I want to stay on it for just a little bit longer. Because when we look at the traditional makeup of teams within an organization, leadership teams, C suite teams, SVP teams, they tend to initiate by fact finding or by following through building maintaining systems, but they are more likely to be resistant to quick starting anything, which is where I'm trying to come in and ruffle some things up and maybe initiate some action all in a very good positive way. And what what is important to be aware of since we're talking about self awareness here, knowing that the dear listener is probably initiating some type of fact finding or follow through with just their own. Mo.
Ross Slater:
It's interesting, you would say that because I think you'd be surprised how many different kinds of listeners you have. You are targeting people that are innovative, they're trying to do something different. They're trying to be intrapreneurs. Or maybe they're actually entrepreneurs. Typically your your result your actual way your combination is a very typical entrepreneur, you would have been very difficult for you to actually work for someone else, unless you had a real need to do that. Or they could figure out how to harness you with some guardrails to kind of keep you continue. Ain't otherwise you would have been bouncing all over the place and changing jobs and companies all the time.
James Robert Lay:
I've already told my wife if this ever and I've been doing this for 20 plus years, that if for whatever reason, this just blows up, I'm driving a truck across the United States and Canada, I'm gonna be by myself,
Ross Slater:
That would keep you occupied for a few weeks. But then you'd come up with something new.
James Robert Lay:
That's exactly right. All that quiet time by myself, literally.
Ross Slater:
So long quickstarts like yourself, if that's we're talking about you're initiating action and your most dominant is that you actually do need to try new things. And our experience has been entrepreneurs are typically long Quickstart. But in addition, we have a whole history of finding a bunch of executives that are long Quickstart because they they try new things and experiment and push forward. Now, if you're talking traditional banks and financial institutions, you're absolutely right, if you don't have at least a mid range on the factfinder or a long factfinder. I mean, typically in the population, about 25% of the population is what we call long 789 10 And factfinder. In banks that 70 to 100%. Yes, so very detail oriented. And oddly, they don't necessarily lead with their follow through, but they actually react in the follow through. And so the interesting part about that is the existing systems and processes that got them where they are, are the same ones that they tried to keep using to get where they want to go in the future. And so they get a bit bogged down in Oh, wait, we're this has always been what we did before, we're going to keep doing what we did before. But we're going to layer on more like the system is going to get bad data does it keep doing more and more and more, whereas you would just blow up the system and start from scratch and then change it all the time. So it's a very different experience. But to go back to what you're talking about with teams, what you will probably find is that most people are most comfortable with similar cooperatives. So if you are a lawn Quickstart you happen to be attracted to someone who's really special in your life, your wife, who's also a lawn Quickstart. And you surround yourself by other people in whatever groups you're in, who are also long quickstarts, because their methodology of solving problems resonates with you. And you're kind of like, Hey, this is great playmates in banks and financial institutions is the same. They filter for people that need to have a long factfinder. And anyone who doesn't is often filtered out, not that they aren't capable, and that they don't need them because they do. They just don't know how to keep them in house and keep them engaged.
James Robert Lay:
I want to come back to a point you mentioned before, when you're talking about the in person, educational experiences, you use the key word, energy. And when we think about Colby in the energy that it takes, let's let's stick on this point here for just a bit, particularly when it comes to team and team alignment. More specifically, Team matrices are cross functional teams and how you can blend energies together and why that is good. What could be some of the potential challenges that come from this blending as well?
Ross Slater:
Absolutely. And so we work with a lot of teams, there's functional teams, where you can think about like a team of accountants, or like Accounts Payable clerks or a team of whatever. Often they're clones of one another, because they're doing the same job like a swim team all in their same lane. But their results are all lumped together. And we call them team because we call lots of things a team. Yeah, but Kobe is very predictive on cross on teams that are trying to achieve something together a collaborative team, think about an executive team that actually does have to solve problems together, rather than just reporting out, or you think about like, it's like a, if you think about a basketball team, basketball teams, five players on the court, they're passing the ball back and forth, they depend on one another. In a interactive collaborative team, which a lot of the matrix teams are trying to become and suffering a bit from the This is brand new and weird. But we can see the value. You want them to be cross functional, you want them to actually have a synergy. And the natural synergy is best. If you have a good balance of people that initiate action, like say, a gas pedal in a car like you do in Quickstart, or people that counteract and prevent in certain amounts, like a brake in a car like you do in your follow through or in your hand your factfinder but in the middle zone where you have that implementer where I'm at for two and implementers. So I totally get that spend as much on technology as you reasonably can force the budget to do right and and so in the middle, you want to nothing that middle I always call it the stick shift, but no one drives standard anymore, so they never know what I'm talking about. But but if you can have a write percentages, those percentages of energy really create a team that is measurably more productive To give Yeah, you solve problems faster and more efficiently than individuals on their own, or teams that are cloned?
James Robert Lay:
Yes. Let's talk about cognitive cloning for just a bit. Because I think once again, we do see some of this in the traditional financial services space, not necessarily like the FinTech side of things, which I would view as more entrepreneurial in nature, but maybe an incumbent bank or an incumbent credit union. What are the points to be aware of when it comes to cognitive cloning for team alignment, efficiency and productivity?
Ross Slater:
So think about the FinTech and how you said that they're different from traditional banks, I would totally agree with you. But I would say they probably clone as well. Yeah, a lot of them are startups, but then clone with long Quickstart. So they're willing to take bigger and bigger risks. And we've seen some of the problems with that when they get excited about, hey, this cool new idea, and they learned something. And then maybe they didn't follow all of the regulatory rules, or they didn't think through what some of the downsides could be. You get traditional banks where there is a lot of cloning in terms of the rank and file in a traditional FYI, is your right very factfinder driven very commentating in the follow through, so we're going to get very risk adverse, yes. So they don't take on change very quickly. Any of those teams can be cloned, and they clone themselves, maybe. So that's how their work gets done best. But in terms of working together to solve the future problems, they're cloning isn't necessarily all that useful. And even in the, you know, the fintechs, they're trying things out rapidly, they're pushing the boundaries, which is awesome, and they're dragging the established fit into the future. But that doesn't mean that they're not going to burn themselves some of the times too. And that's just what an entrepreneur does. They take those risks, and sometimes they pay the price for it.
James Robert Lay:
And that's where we've seen, you know, his if we were having this conversation back in 2014 2015 2016, I think a lot of the incumbents would be looking at FinTech as well, that's a competitive quote, unquote, threat. I'm so happy to see the narrative beginning to shift that they're not competition. They're collaboration opportunities, that they have capabilities that we don't have, and we have capabilities that they don't have. So competition just goes away. And we look for ways to work together to create something that was not even, you know, possible on our own back to your point here, since we're on the subject of self awareness, and in you do work within financial services to what we're talking about can be perceived, perhaps by some as touchy feely. You know, we're talking about the humanities here. How do you overcome some of that, perhaps, resistance to talking about this within leadership within teams, because I think when you overcome that, that's where you start to unlock real human potential going forward.
Ross Slater:
I think that people sometimes forget when they get so task oriented about technology, or money or business, that they forget, the only reason any of those things exists is because of the people. Yeah, not only for the people who created them initially, but the people are the ones that use them, and you're your target market. And if you forget that people are the thing, you're really losing out on the potential of what could occur. Technology enables human creativity, you know, the idea of coming together in a team with so you can be more productive together, not yes, if doing subsistence farming totally on your own and be at the risk. So you know, there is no purpose of technology if it's not for the people. So when we talk about touchy feely, and you're right, we do get that sometimes where it's like, oh, yeah, we could never use this with our legal team. It's like, oh, yeah, I have to tell you, we've worked with every kind of team at every kind of organization. And people are people. And yes, you basic things. People tend to be very competitive, especially if they are an achievement oriented. And we typically work with executive leaders. So they're very competitive. And one of the things we get them to do first off in our workshop sessions, when they're in person is they work with Duplo blocks. Oh, and they kind of look at you and go Duplo blocks, and we're like, Yep, and then they get into it. Yeah, because they're people have their number one favorite topic is themselves. And our workshops are all about you trying to understand you better so you can be more self aware. So you can better self manage your role in a China shop. Are you actually leading the charge? And then from that great mutual understanding, I think it's awesome that you have your wife's Colby and you everyone on your teams Colby because then you can know when you might stress them out, or when you can tap into their best potential to be a great partner. Yeah, differences can be conflict, or they can be wonderful collaboration. And then from that, when everybody knows it, the whole team knows it team effectiveness goes up. And our whole goal is to help lead people to new levels of achievement, because they're working better together and leverage the technology, leverage all the other things, but do it because you're supporting the people of being their best selves. so touchy feely, sure, but not really.
James Robert Lay:
Yeah, I like the Duplo box example. And I'm gonna tell you why. I think here in the age of AI, one of the greatest advantages for future growth, particularly as a financial brand leader, is going back to being a curious kindergartener. I want to get your take on this because you're talking about adult learning. And why edutainment is key here. I feel that some, you know, reach a place in life that, you know, they they think they've reached the pinnacle that they know all that there is to know about the subject matter expertise that they have gained. Although I'm starting to challenge some of that and take more of a Socratic approach to I know, I know nothing kind of a thing, particularly as AI is showing us that the intelligence that AI brings is exponential to what we bring as human beings in and then we'll move maybe move into what the potential is for humanity in the age of AI. But when it comes to adult learning, in the age of AI, being a curious kindergartener committing back to that type of a mindset, what holds us back from making that commitment?
Ross Slater:
I think it's because we get serious and I think because the work world and also the education system is based on cognitive, it's based on intelligence. You're supposed to learn these things and demonstrate your intelligence and your intelligence can solve every problem. And we have TV shows that reinforce that movies, books, we look to people that are intelligent, we measure whether someone's worth is how intelligent they are. And one of the things I was so fascinated about Kathy Cobis work, when I learned about it a very long time ago, is that that means that I'm inexperienced, not anything else. And so what's neat about that is it she so Kathy Colby is actually her father was EF Wonderlic, who created the Wonderlic IQ test. So she grew up with this whole idea of IQ the whole time. And so he was very about IQ, which was very useful. It was the first way we could measure it was easy to measure, there's right and wrong answers. And then, you know, about a century ago, we started getting into, okay, it's great to know your IQ, but what's your personality? What's your value, and there's a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists and therapists and all kinds of self help books and books out there that talk about this. And this idea of interpersonal connection communication, which I think is great, too, it's really important too. But you can have a really smart person, and you can have a really personable person. And they're still not that effective. Because they haven't tapped into their cognitive instincts, there will be measured cognitive instincts of solving problems, I could describe an absolutely horrendous job for you, that you would be more than intelligent to do. And you would actually, maybe commit to it personally, because you can see the value of doing it, maybe what we should do for you is put you in a little studio with not talking anyone else. And every day, we should give you 25 spreadsheets with detailed information about AI and digital banking, and all kinds of interesting things. And then we want you to summarize those all down to one thing, and we want to make an app do that analysis, you're smart enough to do it, you probably have the skills and if you really needed to you could commit to it. But it wouldn't be very long before what there'd be blood somewhere, either because you went crazy, or because you actually wanted to hurt yourself because it was just so hard on your natural problem solving.
James Robert Lay:
So you know what I would do in that situation? And I want to I want to like Yeah, go for it jump into this because my mind is like okay, well what would happen if that because I'm now initiating my QuickStart Are you give me 25 spreadsheets, I'm gonna feed all of that in the chat GPT until the chat GPT summarize this and then I'll make a video and communicate it back out to the world.
Ross Slater:
And, and that is a very interesting way that you would then do it. And I think about digital, I think about technology. And when I look at is it's meant to be an enabler, not a replacer. Yeah. And and so you would innovate that way of doing it, which is great way of innovating. There are other people out there that wouldn't want that innovation, because they would dive right into that kind of analysis and they would love that. Yes. And so you know, different strokes for different folks. Yes, but when you can tap but how could we then take those people and go AI isn't to replace You know, it's to leverage you, you still need to make the leaps, machines are brilliant because they're fast, not because they know what they're doing. I mean, I think that's very simplistic. And human beings have leaps, they have leaps of innovation, they have leaps of curiosity, they have leaps have ways of figuring things out that have never been done before. Machines typically, typically, unless I'm getting AI, Ron, are like, let's do the one thing we do really, really fast. But we do it so fast that we make it look like we're making leaps.
James Robert Lay:
You know, that's a great point because it's it's it's a enabler, it is a augmentation to the capabilities that we have to do them even that much better not to replace us. And one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about, particularly within the financial services space, in the age of AI, and probably multiple verticals, for that matter, is we attach so much of our identity, to what we do, like think about, like, when we're out, you know, meeting someone, what do you do, and then we respond to that, and how much of that is actually attached to our identity as an individual as a soul, basically. But then AI is gonna come in, and we have the perception of oh my gosh, like that could get disrupted. But I'm already thinking of what are all of the other things that are going to be created in the top of my mind right now. You know, as of recording, we're about three or four months post introduction of AI to the mass human consciousness, chat GPT being launched on November 30 2020, to prompt engineers, being able to prompt the AI with the proper questions, to get the outcome, or the result that we're looking for, I feel is going to be a key skill that has to be learned over time. Because if I go back to 1994, when the internet reached the mass consciousness of humanity, using a search engine was foreign to so many people. But now knowing my Colby and I'm an initiating Quickstart, I just jumped in and figure it out and learn it very, very quickly, and then started teaching other people like how to search I think about my wife, though, at the time, who was you know, she's first generation Lebanese, so they didn't really have a computer or anything growing up to watch her Google search back in 9697 9899. I'm like, why are you searching that way? It was very curious into that. So I think that we can take lessons from the past and apply them to the present, about this idea of being able to prompt but it's detaching from what we do. Taking time to pause and review the lessons learned through those experiences, the then think about how we could use technology or other capabilities, other people even to do even better through the next iteration. But it's this constant, need to reinvent, is that am I off with this thinking here? Or
Ross Slater:
I think that what you're summarizing, if I was gonna say them to paraphrase, it's like judge someone by their questions, not by their answers. So the skill that you're describing, I think, is the ability to come up with really good, interesting questions that then can be answered by our personal digital assistants, which is mean, we already carry around with Siri and Alexa and the mall in our pocket. And so then it's like that the next stage, though, is going to be I I'm a huge sci fi geek. And I just love Star Trek, I'm a total geek when it comes to it. And I live for the day that you can go computer and and it does things. It doesn't work very well yet. But you have to frame what you want from them to get the response you want. Otherwise, they easily misinterpret it. Yes. Whereas human beings are still much better at picking up on cues in conversation. I'm really fascinated with language. And I think one of the things about language is you have both the regular what that diction dictionary meaning of a word is, but you all the emotions attached to it. And I'm wondering how, you know, digital assistants are going to be absorbing the emotional attachment, how use a word versus the technical attach a technical definition of a word, because they're not the same, and they can change.
James Robert Lay:
And once again, that's coming back to the idea of having some type of subject matter expertise around whatever that that knowledge base might be. So that you have are able to apply the context to identify is this the right context is the incorrect context. I think about my 10 year old daughter, who recently did a project on the emerald ash borer, which is a an insect that is destroying ash trees. And she did all the research. And then I said, let's just do an experiment because she had to have a couple deliverables presentation and you know, it was a lot of different deliverables in her own whatever she wanted to do. So I said, let's write it but she wanted to write a book. So I said, Well, let's get a chat. GPT I'm going to show you this. So we collaborated with Chet GPT. To write a children's book about the emerald ash borer. It took about an hour of prompting to get the correct context. But because she did the research, and she had the subject matter expertise, she was able to say on those first, you know, 567 iterations. This isn't correct. This is incorrect. So it was about then going back and re prompting and asking other questions, to then get the output until she was finally satisfied with the creation, if you will. And then we took all of that copy. And then we ran it through Dali, and illustrated the book, and then went over to Canva. loaded all of that into Canva and printed a hardback book and then took the copy, ran it through a voice AI and did an audio book, all of that with a video all of that in about seven hours.
Ross Slater:
So it's so good that she did all this work on her homework on her own. It's collaboration. Yeah, collaboration with her dad, who was helping her a lot with their homework whereas you know, parents that help it's just interesting seeing idea. It's funny, you would say that because we're thinking the same way. Last year, we created a new module called the competence cultivator, which was all about how you can actually build competence. So 2021 was about the resilience cultivator and we did a lot of that. And then we know that this year is gonna be more about competence. Well, when we developed it, you had to do a lot of your own searches, you had a little a lot of certain information. So we ran the same kind of, like, shall I say, We, my husband, Wayne ran the same kind of test, what have you as chat GPT, to actually summarize all the most important competence killers and competence builders. And the key list that came back was the same list that he had actually done all the research on, and then we had edited down pretty close. So we can saved ourselves a bunch of time to get to the same result. And then you're doing the opposite, you're getting your daughter's ability to do really great research to prompt it. So we would do the flip, we would ask for the research and then edit it down. You asked, she did the research, and now you're going to get it to build up. So yeah, but it's all human beings managing that, right managing it for their own style, right, using the technology. And to compensate for where they come along. versus something else,
James Robert Lay:
You bring up an interesting word that I've been thinking a lot about, particularly over the past few weeks since the failure of SVB. And the perceived banking crisis. I've been sharing content and thoughts around that this is rooted more deeply in a confidence crisis that is tied very closely to a communication crisis. How would you define confidence? And why is it important to consider this as the capability to build up within an organization within individuals within teams, to then we can continue to maximize growth going forward into the future.
Ross Slater:
So I'm an economist by my background training, way, way, way, way back in the distant past, and one of the things that you talk about is the only difference between being a robust economy versus being in a recession or depression, is the overall summary of competence in the in the marketplace. Yeah, well, competence is everything. With competence, you can do virtually anything, no matter how hard it appears. Without it doing anything is very, very difficult. So confidence, to me is the belief that you can achieve and actually be successful, even if you don't know what you're doing. And so what we looked at why we wanted to cultivate confidence is because I think during the pandemic, resilience was how do you survive an unknown situation, but people weren't necessarily trying to create new things in that situation. They were just trying to get through it. Yeah. And so now we've gotten through it, and we're on the other side, and we have to go back to if we're not going to have it all fall apart, we actually have to figure out how we can achieve things that we don't know what it's going to look like. And when you're focusing and it's so interesting, you're focusing on digital growth. That's such an amazingly interesting thing is how can you change how you're going to do things? Well, no one knows what the future is going to be like no one has that lock on it. So you just got to plunge ahead. Yeah, and I think people like you with your cognitive and your willingness to experiment and innovate and potentially fail Yeah, and having the confidence that you can succeed allows those the rest of us like myself who love following you, I don't want to be the initial troop going rate out of the you know, whatever the van, but I'm very comfortable being in the van and be the one that comes second or third, not sure what second or third? Yeah, there's a lot of people like me that want to follow where you're gonna lead. And then there's gonna be people that will trail while they're gonna have to come eventually. See why they're trailing
James Robert Lay:
As we start to wrap up here. You know, we've talked a lot about team and team alignment, and how working within an individual's cognitive strengths and then also the team There are a lot of different tools and we've focused a lot on Colby. But then there's disc, there's Clifton Strength Finders, you know if someone is listening, and they want to take a more of a, an ancient Greek philosophy of knowing thyself, and even think of like the writing of Sun Tzu and the art of war, if one knows thy self, and knows the enemy, they didn't need that fear the result of 1000 battles, but it all starts with knowing the self. All of these tools, what do I pick? What do I choose? How do I know I'm picking the right one for myself, for my team? For my organization? Can you provide some clarity around that? Because I know that there might be some confusion. As to many that we have worked with. I've never heard of Colby. They've heard of this. And they've heard of, you know, Clifton Strength Finders. But how does one pick? And are they complementary to each other?
Ross Slater:
So I go back to one thing I would say is, if you know yourself, then anything is possible. If you don't know yourself, then you're really going blind. And I really look at teams. And I would say, if you're trying to do team development, sometimes it doesn't matter what the tool is so much is the journey. But if you choose the right tool, you have much more potential success on the journey, you know, if I'm gonna go into the desert, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be picking ski snow skis not gonna work so well. So when I think about it, I look at usually people don't want to know about their cognitive. And you can't necessarily change that. But you can certainly we do a lot of focus on skills training, when we do so particularly like, do you need to know how to use chat? GTB? Yeah, but you also need to know how to use like a keyboard. So okay, great. If I'm thinking about our clients that come to us, and they have team issues, and it's a communication issue, or it's a personality challenge, with a leader being maybe too direct, or too dominant, or whatever, I will often move them into the disc sphere, because that is about communication and personality, and it can really transform people's understanding about how to interact with other people, right? If you're trying to do a self discovery of how to who do we want to be? And how do we want to describe ourselves, Clifton Strengths from the Gallup organization is wonderful. But there's tons of other tools in that same sphere, and both of those land in that aspect of personality sphere. Yeah. But if I have my choice, if I had my druthers, I always choose Colby first, for two reasons. Number one, it's about how you solve problems and work. If anything to get away from the it's too fluffy. You want to actually say how does this work? This is about how you solve problems. And you can be provably more effective. Yeah. And the language that Kathy Colby wrote is always positive. Everyone scores a perfect score. It's always about how do you and even simple things like it's a bar graph of four bars, but they start at the top of the page, and we say you're long and something are short and something. And I think a lot like, if I'm aware of my height, because I'm pretty tall, I'm almost six foot four. My long legs are super useful when I'm on a tight connection going through an airport airport, and I have to get from gate to gate. And then I go and sit on a plane for three hours. And it doesn't work so well. Yeah, yeah. But you do it, it's not an excuse for what you can't do. But when you know yourself, then you can actually put yourself into situations that are better fit for you. So your success is more fun, more enjoyable, more guaranteed. And you can appreciate a lot of other people. I remember talking to someone before he did his club, he thought everyone in the world just like me only not as good. And what he realized very quickly is he was good at the things he was orienting himself towards, and he was ignoring the stuff that he wasn't. And other people were really good in those areas, and hence the teamwork that is possible. And then that much more. And I think about what technology can do to support all that. Like, it's not a replacement. It's a support of our natural need to be successful personally, and to actually engage with others.
James Robert Lay:
That's a great way to wrap this up Ross in thank you for sharing your knowledge, your insight, your experience, your expertise. For someone who wants to get to know you better, what's the best way for them to reach out connect with you and say, Hello.
Ross Slater:
Well, it's funny, you would say that our company name is reach capabilities. So reach capabilities.com There's a lot of eyes in the capabilities, but it's ours. And also I happen to have one of those wonderful names that if you google search me I'm pretty much one of the first ones because Ross later there's not a lot of us on the interwebs so you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter and Instagram and Facebook plus, but our website has everything and it's great place with all the links to all the things we've been talking about today to
James Robert Lay:
Fantastic connect with Ross. Learn with Ross, Google Ross, and grow with Ross Ross, thank you so much for joining me for another episode of banking on digital growth. It's been a lot of fun. It's been
Ross Slater:
My pleasure. You're an excellent interviewer You and I loved our conversation was so much fun. We were doing worked out, weren't we? I'm not sure it was.
James Robert Lay:
It was fun. It was fun. And as always, until next time be well do good and make your bed.
