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Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.
Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.
Welcome aboard to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me, Ari.
Speaker 1:I I wanna jump into a difficult question, maybe even a little sensitive. Your role with the Crisis Line as a Crisis Line volunteer. Tell us that story. How did you get to that? What did the process look like?
Speaker 1:What did you get from it?
Speaker 2:Sure. So, goodness, this was 2000. I was walking around the University of Colorado at Boulder's campus. I graduated from high school a year earlier in 1999. I'm dating myself already.
Speaker 2:And I was studying advertising in the school of journalism. And I found myself also working at the local snowboard shop, going to eighteen hour credits a semester. And I was really ingrained in school and paying my way through school, right? But then I got to a point where I realized I needed more meaning in my life. And there was a flyer on campus that stopped me in my tracks.
Speaker 2:And that was a flyer that was essentially the Denver Metropolitan Crisis Line recruiting volunteers. And I thought, wow, now that's something that sounds like could be meaningful in my life and certainly give me the opportunity to make a difference in people's lives. So I pursued an interview with crisis line and sure enough, I was lucky enough to be chosen to volunteer at that crisis line twenty hours a week. I was at that time, that's when I was first bitten by the bug of learning and knowing the power of conversation and how
Speaker 1:So so before we get to
Speaker 2:that Sure.
Speaker 1:Just to make this incredibly transparent, this is a suicide hotline. People are calling in with suicidal thoughts, you know, some of the time possibly would act on it. What what is it what was the, let's say, the first real call that you had? What did that look like? What's going through your head as you're walking through this process?
Speaker 2:Sure. So, the calls I would say certainly there were, individuals that were contemplating suicide, but there were also individuals in severe domestic violence situations as well as challenges around sexual identity as well as a variety of issues that really spanned across campus and the entire city of Denver, where individuals were in oftentimes many abusive situations. So there were we actually had a lot of repeat callers. And we had a log where we tracked all of the callers that would call into the crisis line. Every time I would start a new shift, I had to study the log and really understand who called in.
Speaker 2:Obviously, were all anonymous callers And really one call that really stood out to me was an individual that said he was a collegiate athlete. And he was really challenged with his situation at home. He wanted to come out to his family and he had a very religious family. And this was a situation that he felt like if he really approached his family with his true identity then they would never speak to him again. And that was just one small example of the types of calls that we would get in And we were taught to ask the right questions to actually get the callers to solve their own problems.
Speaker 1:Was that scary to you? I mean you're I'm assuming something like nineteen, twenty trying to help people on a journey that would be terrifying.
Speaker 2:It was absolutely frightening at times and I would say probably every other night leaving the crisis line, I didn't sleep very well. But what kept me going and kept me going back to the crisis line was knowing that I was making a difference in people's lives and all through just a phone call and they didn't know who I was, I was anonymous as well And the power of connection between two humans who don't even frankly know each other, it became addictive to me to know that, wow, I could I could dramatically change the trajectory of someone's life or save their life with one simple phone call.
Speaker 1:Did you get a sense for the impact that you had on these people or is it kind of disconnected, right? You have the call, they disappear, you don't know what happened?
Speaker 2:We would actually receive messages and voicemails from repeat callers when they had a breakthrough and they would call us thanking us for they usually typically know the day time exactly where they were when they had that phone call. And it was obviously very much the juice that kept us going, right? So I would say that happened more irregularly. That wasn't a common occurrence but from time to time we would get thank yous.
Speaker 1:First of all, not an easy topic to talk about. Appreciate you sharing this with us. Before I crashed in with a line of questions, you were about to say how this changed you, what you learned from
Speaker 2:So I obviously as you had shared at the ripe age of 19, what did I know? Not much, And I certainly, I grew up in a fairly privileged environment. I didn't have a lot of struggles. I was very lucky not to have struggles as a child. But I realized that at a young age that I was pretty good at connecting with people.
Speaker 2:And I think what I learned in that crisis line was really oftentimes most people know how to solve their own problems but it's up to someone to ask the right questions. And knowing where and when and how to ask the right questions is frankly leadership 101. And so I will say that obviously learning the art of communication which really does stem through asking the right questions, was the perfect catalyst to launch a successful career in executive search because that's frankly what executive recruiters do for a living. They have to know the questions to ask, how to probe and vet talent through really unlocking the knowledge and information, among an executive. And you can't do that without asking the right questions.
Speaker 1:Did you have a sense of and I'm maybe committing a sin here of oversimplification. But did you get a sense from your experience at the crisis line and then twenty hours a week is a lot, for a volunteer activity, that there are some people that are caught in this victimization mindset and the world is the world and they have no power to change it and it's not them who needs to change versus I have the power to change. Is that a paradigm you experienced at all?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. So I'm sure you're familiar with operating above and or below the line. So the concept I think of operating above the line is not a woe is me. It's the world is not happening to me. You believe that you have more control over your destiny and the outcomes, right, in your life than operating below the line which is very much more of a victim mentality and that the world is happening to me.
Speaker 2:So I would say most high performing executives, they don't get to that level of leadership and learning how to empower others, which is the best kind of leadership, without learning how to operate above the line.
Speaker 1:Was there a correlation to any degree that you could notice between people who are operating above the line, who are not suffering from this victimism philosophy, and then having these moments of of eureka, of of this is I now know where I'm going and what I'm doing, and I'm no longer having suicidal or or other issues in my life because I took control. Did that your kind of limited view, was that did that correlate?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, somewhat I would say just because someone builds a tremendous career for themselves, it doesn't mean that they don't battle depression from time to time. And obviously there's some really intelligent people that oftentimes do tend to suffer from depression. These are people who can think deeply about the world, about their lives. And so I don't know if I would say there's a direct correlation.
Speaker 2:I think if anything many of these high powered executives are able to operate at a level of intensity where they don't always have time to even think about life and pause and do that internal work oftentimes.
Speaker 1:So there's a there's a saying that I have that a self awareness is a gift and it's the best superpower that a person can have, But it's also if you are, lucky enough to have no self awareness, then ignorance is bliss. And the I I warn people who go down this, path of self awareness that is incredibly excruciatingly painful. Because, you know, I remember 18 year old, me, and the joys of just believing that that you were right and that, you know, you were awesome. And the the 40 year old me who sees the, you know, both sides of everything, it's excruciating. It's complicated.
Speaker 1:There's no simplicity in life. And finding joy in that is absolutely possible, but it's more difficult than it's more complicated. So there's a thin line there that I'm not exactly sure what the right answer is. I appreciate you sharing your perspective.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I would say I actually embrace challenges and struggles. I've had struggles as an adult now. Forty four years under my belt. We're all about to, you know, it's almost impossible to get to middle age without some struggles, right?
Speaker 2:And I would say every time I have a challenge or struggle, try to stop myself and ask myself, what's the line of learning? There's always a line of learning and oftentimes there's even greater lines of learning among in a missed challenge than there are the good times and the wins. So I've tried to flip the script and when I'm faced with a challenge, I try to take it as a gift because I know there'll be an even stronger line of learning.
Speaker 1:I have a selfish question here. How do you teach that philosophy to your almost 11 year old, it's incredibly difficult because we say the things, right, that, oh, you know, every failure is an opportunity to learn, but I'm finding that it's harder for it to click.
Speaker 2:Yes. And obviously you'd shared that you, similar to myself at 18 years old, you thought the world was your oyster and you knew it all, right? So I think that's probably just a rite of passage where you have to, all of our kids have to learn oftentimes the hard way, right? And learn on their own. But I would say, I just try to be mindful and going back to our theme of asking the right questions.
Speaker 2:So when she makes a mistake or an error there's a tough lesson to be had, I ask the question of, what did you learn? What would you have done differently if you had the opportunity to do it all over again? And we should be asking ourselves those questions at frankly any age, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. He he failed this, not failed, but he didn't get a good grade in this test. And I was like, okay. Would you have done anything differently? Like, did you study?
Speaker 1:Were you focused? Did you sleep enough the night before? I went down this long line of kind of interrogation. And I couldn't find one fault in his process. Everything he did, he did well.
Speaker 1:He just got unlucky. I came to the conclusion after interrogating him for ten minutes that he just got unlucky. I said I said to him, you know what? Such is life. Sometimes you get unlucky, and you should not feel an ounce of regret for doing poorly if everything about your process was right.
Speaker 1:So it's fine. You you'll you'll do better next time. Like, don't worry about it. Everything in your process is correct. So all the decisions you made were correct.
Speaker 1:You just you just had bad luck. That's all. So, you know, just keep on going. So I I
Speaker 2:Words of wisdom, dad. And I think, is my philosophy is it's all about work ethic at the end of the So as long as they put in put in their best effort
Speaker 1:That's right. I deeply agree with that. It's just so at that young age and even older, it's so easily to be attached to your failures and have your failures reflect something about who you are as opposed to, you know, be a learning lesson. So it's, not quite sure how to how to teach my son that yet, but, it's a journey we're going on together.
Speaker 2:That's right. Hey. Sometimes the most interesting parts of us are the are the broken parts.
Speaker 1:This is this yeah. This is fair. This is very fair. Oh my god. This is dangerous because you're going you're going down a path which which, would be very long and deep.
Speaker 1:This is the art of going down the rabbit hole. So I, I need to think if I wanna go down that path. So so what's the most beautiful broken that you have seen that you enjoy?
Speaker 2:Oh, goodness. You know, so I have a statue in my office. I'm looking at her right now and she has one arm. And I got this piece of art, it's a sculpture. I wish I could show it to you.
Speaker 2:And I got this piece of art because I wanted to be reminded every single day that the true beauty really does come from our brokenness, right? And it's our brokenness that connects us as humans. So how many times have you been at a cocktail party or any kind of social setting and it's just small talk after small talk. Nothing pains me more than small talk and I'm sure given what you do for a living,
Speaker 1:And you can
Speaker 2:so where and when I find myself connecting the most with others is when they're vulnerable and they share their authentic self. And typically that's through the challenges that they've had and the struggles that they've had. And that's what makes me feel close to another human. So I think when I think about the brokenness, gives us an opportunity to be able to share our story of struggles with others and that drives really meaningful deep connected relationships. And it's I always say at the end of our lives what do we have?
Speaker 2:We have two things. We have our relationships and our memories. And it's goes back to being able to build those relationships does tend to come from those broken parts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I you mentioned that, oh, you know, the the 11 year old, you know, and the 18 year olds, they learn through the hard paths ultimately. That's not necessarily. There's plenty of 40 year olds, and I'm sure you will goof this, that never find the way to be more than that. And the reason that I went back to that point is I see these these 40, 50 year olds that their whole circle of friend is of is basically vanity.
Speaker 1:Right? It's you go on these flashy trips together. You've never had a shared experience of suffering, and those people will not be there for you when something truly goes wrong. So it does it does scare me that, you know, some people don't learn that lesson. So I I I'm I'm I'm a little hesitant to think that, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, my kids will figure it off on their own because I see these adults that are have the maturity of, you know, 16 year olds, basically. It's like
Speaker 2:social media for this, Ari?
Speaker 1:Look. You're in my generation and the because we're about the same age. And then the 50 year olds of today's generation, you know, they're ten years older than us almost, five, six years older than us or maybe more. We didn't have social media. So how can you blame something that didn't exist?
Speaker 1:So, no, I don't think social media is to blame. I think it's really easy to blame technology. But, you know, you and I and the 55 year olds who are our managers, they grew up where you had to, like us, come and knock on the door in order to have a, you know, have time with a friend. And, you know, there was no mobile phones. You know, you had to call a landline and then you had to ask, you know, the mom or the dad to speak with the the son or daughter.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, that's the world we grew up, yet many of us still became assholes, ultimately. Sorry for my language. So, no, I do not blame social media. I I do guard my my kids from social media because I I think it definitely has a dark side.
Speaker 1:Right? You know, there's there's way too much pedophilia and, you know, human trafficking, and a lot of it has deeper involvement with stuff like TikTok. And sorry, not tick TikTok, probably too, but the one I was gonna say is Snapchat. So so, yeah, I mean, it's definitely not, you know, a safe thing. Right?
Speaker 1:But you can pick up a hammer and smash somebody in the head, or you can pick up a hammer and build a house. Mhmm. So I I feel like that about technology. But, yeah, we were screwed up, and our our big brothers were screwed up even without social media. So so that's I I think it's a resounding no from my perspective.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. I'm with you. I told my daughter that when she's older and all of her friends are on social media that I will pay her every month she is not on social media.
Speaker 1:I love that. I absolutely love that. Ironically, and I didn't wanna get into my daughter, but ironically, my daughter is is doing incredibly well because of social media. But that's we talked a little bit about that before the show. So so okay.
Speaker 1:I wanna I wanna transition. You come away with this insight that words have meaning, that you can change people's lives with with with a sentence. And you lean into what I'm gonna coin or call the Socratic method. Right? It's the question based approach.
Speaker 1:And you figure out that there's power in this. How does this connect to headhunting in HR and finding the right person?
Speaker 2:Yep, absolutely. So it does We are hired to mitigate risk, right? So organizations, when they come to search, they are basically saying, we can't afford to make a mistake, Right? So, it's up to us to vet the A players from the B players. And we're not hired to recruit the B players.
Speaker 2:We're hired to recruit the top 1%. Right? Not even the top 10%. They're looking for the best of the best. So we essentially evaluate humans for a living.
Speaker 2:Right? And how do you do that? By asking the right questions.
Speaker 1:So I I wanna play the devil's advocate here or the defender of truth if we wanna use the Catholic church's, terminology. Many of us, me and my wife, perceive the bad headhunters and such as going through a checklist, just seeing that whatever the employer said that they want that they're getting it just to cover their asses so the employer says, yeah, this is what I wanted. And the interaction with the search firm head ons or whatever is quite minimal, actually. And it feels like a checklist, and it's kind of awful. And then there is very little value in that process.
Speaker 1:And you see HR people like this too, not just the headhunters. And then managers who do this as well go through the checklist. How did what's your philosophy? What's wrong with the world of of hiring versus your philosophy on how to do it?
Speaker 2:So great question. So we like to say there's a difference between recruiting and headhunting. So what you're describing feels more like recruiting. That's very much what we say in the search business, a post and pray mentality. So they're posting jobs and they're That the hire is in that batch.
Speaker 2:And in this day and age, especially in this existing market, we could post a job and a thousand applicants will inundate our inboxes within twenty four hours, right? So the difference between recruiting and headhunting is we are headhunters in executive search, right? And that means we're going after people who are not looking. We are not posting and praying. We are really very much consultants to the organizations we serve And we are going pretty deep into the business, the thesis, what's the vision, where are we going?
Speaker 2:And then we're basically scoping out the roles, skill set, track record that that organization needs to hire for in order to meet its vision and or end goals. And oftentimes that's we're focused on value creation because we want to exit the business in three to five years. We do a lot of work in private equity.
Speaker 1:So if you have a a core problem here, is this person an a player versus a b player, or God forbid, a c player? If you can figure that out for executive search, then that's an incredibly valuable problem to know how to figure out for any kind of search or hiring. What's the what's I don't know if you can tell us your secret sauce. What's the magic there? How do you do it?
Speaker 2:The magic? I'm happy to share the magic because it's a lot of work. So the magic is how we mitigate risk is based on track record of success, one. And secondly, we like to take the what we call take the car for a test drive. So one, in order to understand if an individual has the track record of success, we are doing behavioral interviews.
Speaker 2:We are looking for measurable results. We are ensuring that they weren't just in the right place at the right time. They were truly the brains and talent behind that organization's success. We are evaluating leadership skills. And as we learn about, hey, they took this business from 30,000,000 to 200,000,000 in six years.
Speaker 2:Right? We want to hear every step that got that organization there. And again, ensuring that they were the brains behind it. Right?
Speaker 1:Do you know that? How do you know the answer to that? Because they could be regurgitating the story that they intimately know because they were working with with, you know, a bunch of a players that they they got lucky to have. How do you really discriminate between that person was critical to the team, to building the team, to empowering the team, or were they just lying back and watching the success happen?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, an easy place to start, Ari, is did they build the team that made it happen? Right? And so and then really diving into because this is a meaty topic that I could talk about for hours, but it's did they build the team and then what was their strategy behind who they hired, how they hired them, right? I'd say most executives don't make it to the C suite because they don't have the playbook and a methodology to how they build high performing teams and then how they allow and unlock the talent within those teams to achieve ultimate success.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:So so coincidentally, of course, it's not coincidentally, I'm writing a book about this topic exactly. I wanna dive into one of the most interesting topics, I think, is exactly this. How do you build that team, and then how do you empower them? What are the let's start from the horror stories. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:What are the biggest mistakes that you've seen experienced where people either hire the wrong people or hire amazing people and then completely mismanage them?
Speaker 2:So it's a great question. So oftentimes we will see we'll see we see a ton of hiring mistakes. Right? We actually are hired to do a lot of cleanup of hiring mistakes. I will say an easy, answer to your question that I see repeatedly is they've got a Harvard MBA.
Speaker 2:They had a Stanford MBA. They went to an Ivy League school, right? And it's an organization that's highly nimble. There's no playbook, right? It requires it required scrappiness.
Speaker 2:It required the ability to be incredibly creative. And that doesn't always come from an Ivy League MBA, right? Who was studying finance, right? So we see a lot of hiring mistakes within organizations that tend to fall in love with the resume, but forget to actually vet the track record of success and their ability to build a plan and execute and roll up their sleeves to get that plan accomplished. Right?
Speaker 2:So sometimes they hire, they over hire, oftentimes over hire for intellect on paper. And oftentimes those folks are lacking experience that the organization needs.
Speaker 1:Here's one of the, I think, one of the travesties of the hiring process. You are let's say, I've hired hundreds of developers and interviewed thousands. One of the biggest point pain points for me was that developers don't know how to write CVs. They're not marketing people. Their ability to articulate anything about themselves in in a way which is not code is really poor.
Speaker 1:So I came to this understanding that CVs for some types of roles are kinda garbage. Yeah. It just provides no value whatsoever. So my hiring process and I I have literally, you know, interviewed thousands of developers. I had a look at the the resume for five parameters.
Speaker 1:We can talk about what those are. It's less interesting. And then I picked up a phone call, and I had a five minute chat with hundreds of people. Mhmm. Sometimes in in, you know, many, many, many people in one day.
Speaker 1:Right. As many five minutes that you can push in. How do you mitigate this challenge? If at all you agree with my my problem statements in a world where at least the perception is that these ATS systems are looking at resumes, they're filtering you out based on keywords. AI is doing some magic in kicking you out.
Speaker 1:There's a thousand, candidates in every role well, not every role, but at least on average in two thousand and twenty three December, there was a thousand candidates on average for tech roles. It's ridiculous. And that's not even the hot hiring season. Right? The hot hiring season would be May, April.
Speaker 1:So how do you solve for this problem if you agree with it?
Speaker 2:Yes. So we're big on reference checks as well as giving final project interviews, right? So again, taking the car for a test drive. Hey, here's a case study. Talk to us about how you would tackle this problem and actually turning the interview into a work session and getting a sense of what it would be like to work with the individual and then backing that up with references.
Speaker 2:So, hey, okay, they did pretty well on this project interview, right? And now let's talk to some folks who actually worked directly with the talent before and can speak to what it's like to work with them and what did they actually accomplish during their time together.
Speaker 1:So I I have heard a lot of criticism about about reference checks. I am a big believer, big time. However, I hear a lot of people saying, oh, you're calling somebody that they themselves said, like, it's a friend. It's a whatever. The information is not gonna be good or accurate.
Speaker 1:What would you say in response?
Speaker 2:I'm a big fan of reference checks. Imagine if you're in the dating scene and you have the opportunity to Call back. Speak to your spouse's three ex boyfriends, right? Imagine the intel that you would receive, So we actually end up using it as an onboarding tool, Right? We all have weaknesses.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And instead of spending ninety days to figure out the new hire's weakness, you could have it before their first day. Right? And then you know how to lead and coach and develop them into the role.
Speaker 1:For for the executives who are hiring, who are doing the reference checks themselves, is there a magic to it? What advice can you give the, you know, the muggles who are trying to figure out, through a reference check and do it right? Because I would argue there's a lot of ways to do it wrong.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. So I would say one of my favorite interview questions, reference questions is to really try to uncover the weakness of the candidate, which if you just flat out ask, well, what are their weaknesses? You're not going to get anything. But if you ask, if you were to give them any advice in their career, anything that you really feel like would allow them to take their career to the next level, what might that be? That's how you get the weaknesses.
Speaker 2:And that is probably one of the most valuable pieces of our reference checks that we do.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that. I'm in I'm in awe when I see companies that are just not doing reference checks. It's amazing to me. And I'll tell you that from my personal experience, I've never not done a reference check. And the amount of times where you call up the reference and it's horrible, the response that you get.
Speaker 1:Right? Oh, yeah. I was his or her manager, and, yeah, you really can't work in a team. And and you're then I think about the feedback saying that, oh, the person is gonna give you somebody in the organization that loves them. And then I'm asking myself, well, if they couldn't even do that, like, the only person that they gave then gave this.
Speaker 1:I'm like, oh my lord. Like, this this is not a great signal. So, yeah, I I would recommend that every single executive either works with somebody like like yourself. I try not to advertise, but since since I think this is important, either works with somebody like yourself or at least does it right or at least does it at all. So I I truly appreciate your perspective.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And the leadership assessments out there are tremendous. We work with a company called Hogan and it spits out a 60 page leadership assessment. We end up learning more about the individual than we'd like to say their spouse probably even knows about them. And this has incredible insights and it's actually also an incredible onboarding tool to drive self awareness to bring us back to the first part of our conversation together.
Speaker 1:One last question. We are so way over time. This has been so much fun that we we we lost track of it. This is a difficult question because it's personal. If you had to go back to 20 year old Camille, what advice would you give her?
Speaker 2:I would tell her to believe in herself, to know that her kindness will take her farther in life than she ever thought possible, and to never stop being kind.
Speaker 1:Camille, thank you so much for joining the show today. I appreciate you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Ari. Thank you for the time and the conversation.