Leading With And Through TEAMS With Mike Zani

 

Every organization’s dream is to have all of its talent optimized for maximum impact and efficiency. Making breakthroughs in this emerging field is a SaaS platform called The Predictive Index, a tool where you can plot everyone in your team and align them with your company’s strategy. Imagine how cool it would be to be able to pick just the right talent for the right job. Thanks to this wonderful tool, it is a dream no longer! Joining Alicia Couri on the podcast to talk about this is Mike Zani, the company’s CEO. Mike gives us a walkthrough on how the platform works and how it is grounded by their organization’s leadership philosophy.

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Leading With And Through TEAMS With Mike Zani

With me is an incredible guest, Mike Zani. Let me tell you a little bit about Mike before we bring him on. After graduating from Brown University, Mike Zani coached the 1996 US Olympic sailing team, where he was named Coach of the Year for the sport of sailing. He later attended Harvard Business School. After which, he and a former classmate partnered to form a search fund, which searches to acquire companies where there’s the potential to apply better management practices to improve business results. The first company they acquired was LEDCO, a computer docking station manufacturer.

As CEO Mike increased LEDCO’s revenue by 350% in four years. After selling LEDCO, Mike acquired and ran ShapeUp, a SaaS wellness platform, and grew revenues by 600% in three years. Do you think he learned something? I think so. At both companies, Mike and his team used the Predictive Index, a workforce assessment methodology to ensure they were doing the best job hiring and managing people. In 2014, Mike led an investment to purchase the Predictive Index and became the CEO. Welcome to the show, Mike Zani, CEO of The Predictive Index.

It’s great to be here. I love your energy. I can’t wait to try and match it and see if I can keep up.

First of all, I love to ask my guests. The first question is what is your leadership philosophy?

This is something that Daniel, my business partner, and I have been crafting, but we love to win with and through teams. If you try and do it all yourself, you’re limited by whatever you can do. You might as well be an independent consultant. There’s not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s like if you want to build something big and audacious, you got to win with and through teams. You have to leverage yourself. Nothing is cooler than having every one of your direct reports and all of their direct reports be better than you are at their job. When that happens, you feel you stand back and watch it happen.

This is a different response that I’ve gotten from you than anyone else. You have had important leadership roles early on while you were in college. Tell us about coaching the 1996 Olympic team. How did that come about?

I feel quite fortunate for that to have come about. I was lost like a lot of graduates. I was a Geochemistry major. I was trying to make chemistry and my major work for me. I started as an environmental consultant and that was not my calling. I loved the people I worked with, but that was not my calling. I went back to the Brown geology lab where I worked as an undergrad. I worked for a professor and I was applying to get a PhD in Meteorology. I was good at maths. I said, “Meteorology would be great. As a sailor, I was fascinated by weather.”

I was making $9 an hour in the lab. It’s not a lot of money. It’s hard to put food on your table and make ends meet. It’s tough. I coached sailing and started doing sailing clinics to augment my compensation because I could make about $300 a day coaching. The next thing I know I had a sailing school and I had twelve coaches working for me. I had this little entrepreneurial gig going. I was working with talented people. Some of my athletes became Olympic-caliber athletes and four athletes qualified for the Olympics. The US Olympic team asked me to join the team because my athletes made it to the Olympics. They were like, “We need you.” I stumbled upon that.

It’s more than stumbling upon it. You had a calling and a gift for it. Your gift makes room for you and that’s what happened.

I couldn’t say at 26 that I had tapped into that gift, but I was working with amazing people and my philosophy in work, “With and through teams,” I was working with wonderful athletes, amazing talents. They trusted me, even though I was only 26 to coach, lead, and guide them through something. The powers that be on the US Olympic Team saw something as well. It was a romantic job, but I was on the road 330 days that year.

As a young person, that’s the time to do it.

If you want to build something big and audacious, you have to win with and through teams. Click To Tweet

It was romantic and it was cool, but it was also something I will never settle down and have a family, which is something I wanted to do if I keep that job.

I wanted to find out during your career as a leader, and as you were growing and building. Is there anything that stands out as a big challenge or your biggest mistake that you’ve done it as a leader in that role and figuring out like, “How am I going to recover from that?” Has that ever happened to you?

I’ve gone on this journey to find what’s all this junk of it is on my back of the T-shirt, which is the stuff I need to work on. We use this framework at PI called the front of the T-shirt, back of T-shirts. The front of the T-shirt is all this amazing stuff that you yourself were given jobs based on the front of your T-shirt, but the back of the T-shirt is the stuff that is as powerful, often related to the front of the T-shirt, but that holds you back. I did go on a journey in 2006, 2007 to find out what was on the back of my T-shirt because I wanted to know. I do think running people over and not listening to those things that I can do, I don’t do it every day that not being control of that stuff.

I love how you phrase that too. The back of the T-shirt stuff because you can’t exactly swivel your head 180 degrees to see what’s going on back there.

You can try, but you need to ask someone you trust. You need to be vulnerable to get there. It was interesting. I’ve been going on this journey to what’s on the back of my T-shirt. In identifying early on, when I was a young CEO 1.5 years into running LEDCO with Daniel, he’s effectively the co-CEO. I carry the title because I meet more people. He’s the inside CEO. I’m the outside CEO. I don’t think I was a good manager. I was trying to be a good manager, but if you don’t always listen to people, or if you’re too enamored with your own ideas, you’re not going to let great ideas bubble up from where the people who are closest to the great ideas. It can unlock much potential. I was being shortsighted, trying to do too much of it myself.

You’re a maverick?

I’m a persuader. Not far from a maverick, but a little bit of formality that keeps me in check.

We’re throwing out terminology that I know you’re not going to understand, but Predictive Index has seventeen different reference profiles. We’ll have Mike talk about the seventeen reference profiles in Predictive Index. It’s fascinating how simple this assessment is, but powerful in the results that you get and how you can understand yourself and the front of the T-shirt stuff and the back of the T-shirt stuff. I’m going to circle back to the reference profiles, but how did you unpack some of that stuff? Did it have any effect on your confidence as you were moving through understanding the back of the T-shirt stuff?

When I first learned of this front of the T-shirt, back of the T-shirt framework and it’s a Bain partner named Jim Allen who came up with this framework. My wife introduced him to me because she does a lot of consulting work. She used to be Bainy and does a lot of consulting work for Bain. She comes home with this idea. I was like, “I got to do that.” I hired a coach to help me identify the back of T-shirt stuff. That coach used a battery of assessments, Myers-Briggs, Predictive Index, FIRO-B, numerous others. I can’t even remember all of their names, but starting to try and triangulate on what this stuff is. Having said that, when Daniel and I first ran across the Predictive Index in 2006, we were clients. As soon as someone gave us our first read back, we’re like, “That was scary. I need that tool. If I could do that for every one of my employees, imagine how much more effective I would be.” I do think there are some people who switch on and go, “This data can be profound and have profound implications if you run with it.”

I took it and I was flawed. There are two that stand out for me, COLBI and Predictive Index. Those were life-changing for me. I appreciate it. Your journey to getting the Predictive Index was because you were a client.

That’s right. It is amazing when you’re a client of a product, you like it so much, you investigate and say, “We should buy this company.” It doesn’t happen that often. It is funny, the old Victor Kiam commercial where he’s like, “I like the razors too much. We bought the company.”

 

How did acquiring Predictive Index come about for you?

Daniel and I, we’re snot-nosed managers. We bought our first company using a search fund model. It’s not our own money. We weren’t born with a silver spoon. We were fortunate both to go to a business school that gave us a network enough. We bought a company and then pass the hat to a bunch of high net worth individuals. We didn’t put any money in ourselves. We didn’t have any money. All we had this debt. We sold our first company and had a good return on investment. Our investors said, “Do that again. We’ll give you more money.” That’s good. It’s like flipping houses.

If the first one goes well, you have money to go do the second one. We decided to do it again. We thought about what would be the best company to start with and the Predictive Index was top of the list. In 2009, we tried to buy PI and we pitched the board and got close, but they said, “No,” and we were crushed. We went on and invested and ran other companies. In 2014, the opportunity came back to us. If you’re a sports fan, we hung around the basket for a rebound. We did though keep in touch with them every year. We had good relations and we were patient. We always expressed that we loved the product and cared about it. If they ever wanted to consider selling, we would love to do it.

You continued using the product and that said a lot too, for all the companies that you purchased or invested in to use it as that model to increase the company revenue.

We did. We used it and we sold it and not for remuneration. I would go to my friends who were running companies like, “You’d be an idiot not to use this.” They’re like, “What?” I can’t use that same sales tactic now. Back then, I used to tell my friends. I’m like, “You need this. Take the assessment. I’ll give you a read back. You should do this with your senior team. It changed how I talk to manage. Think about the people. You should consider it.” Daniel and I both think we sold 9 or 10 clients, telling them to do it. 

Now you are running the Predictive Index. There’ve been a lot of changes that you were able to implement to even make this software even better than when you were using it.

It was a low bar at the time. The company started in pencil and paper migrated to online surveying, but that’s about all they had online. They had an online surveying tool and a repository for assessments that you could search and file people in departments. That was it, there was no analytics, there was no data play. All of this psychometric data that we’re sitting on to give suggestions, what would be good profiles for this particular role? What are these two people going to be like when they work together? What are the joys and frustrations? We realized there was much power if we built a proper SaaS platform that had data analytics.

We use a lot of sports references in PI because sports uses a lot of data and analytics to pick the best teams and to find great players and to find that top talent for your team. People would be unwise not to use what they have on the right in front of them, get the analytics, get the data so that you can effectively manage and create opportunities for yourself, your company and those that you’re working for.

I sometimes regret how often we use sports analogies because they don’t land with everyone. Sports had great data because sports statisticians seem to measure almost everything, but then they determine things that are predictive. I’ve heard from a scout in football and I don’t know if this is still true, but this is what they told me, “The number one predictor of explosiveness is the standing high jump, how high someone can jump?” If you take like a 350-pound offensive lineman, it’s not going to be as high as the wide receiver. If you look at all the 320-pound-plus people, you see this one outlier that they have massive, leaping ability you’re like, “That is the number one predictor of explosiveness.” You’re like, “Maybe I should look at that.” We’re on this early journey with strategic talent management and talent optimization to say, “What are the things that are predicting for people to be successful in their different roles at work?” It’s exciting to be on that journey.

We mentioned The 17 Profiles. It’s interesting how this short assessment it takes you 5, 6 minutes to do it, but how it pulls much data to give you these reference points. What are the seventeen different profiles? I know they’re in different categories. 

They can take the assessment too and map it up against that. No doubt that we can do that. The interesting part about the assessment is we ask only two questions and of those questions, it’s stimulus-response. There are 86 adjectives. You choose one that stimulates you and you don’t choose others. It’s called a stimulus-response tool. People say, “I only checked 25 words. How can you get that much from 25 words?” They’re not taking credit for all the things they didn’t check. Eighty-six data points, because we take it in five minutes, that’s a lot of data points on people.

What we do to people unintentionally at work is to put them in positions and asking them to adapt without regard to their needs. Click To Tweet

There’s some magic in our test methodology. It even makes it harder to gain because it’s not a forced choice. I’ll pick on the Myers-Briggs not because it’s bad, but I’m going to pick on it here in the Myers-Briggs there’s a question that says, “Are you pressure prompted or are you an early starter?” They’re trying to get at the judging perceiving dimension that if you’re an early starter, that’s a J. If you’re pressure prompted, that’s a P. Let’s say I’m pressure prompted but I’m like, “I’m not sure I want my employer to know that,” or you might say, “It depends.” It’s important, I’m an early starter, but if it’s something like the dishes like, “I do that last thing.”

That’s one of those that depends moment.

Those forced choices where you have to answer. In certain instances, it may not fit or you might say, “I’m biased how the audience might perceive it.” You have to be careful. Some test methodologies are easier to game or maybe not quite as robust in that process.

It’s completely self-reporting. It’s stimulus-response, “This feels like me and this doesn’t.” You’re able to plot this. I love how you have it plotted on two different scales where you have your reality and then you have how you are functioning in the world around you, like now. What’s pulling and pushing at you that changes who you are?

We don’t want to give the secret sauce away, but it’s designed one measure is consistently who you are test-retest. If we tested you ten years ago, we tested you now, it’s designed to be consistent. The other dimension of that is how you perceive yourself to be responding to your environment. It’s usually work but it can be if you had a death in the family or gave birth. Imagine your world where this was my wife, high-end consultant, had kids, not doing high-end consulting. If you tested her at that moment in time, it’s like, “I am modifying myself a lot and I’m not getting any of the stimuli that I need or sleep.” She, if tested at that moment in time would have been modifying highly. What’s important is if you see people who are modifying either in a previous job or in your current role, you can do something about it and ask some provocative questions, say, “How can we turn this around?”

That’s a lot of that back of the T-shirt stuff that we were talking about too. A lot of times you don’t realize how much you’re modifying your behavior.

Which is energizing. I like to think of it as if you’re getting your stimulus like writing with your strong hand. If you’re not getting your stimulus, it’s like writing with your opposite hand, you can’t do it. It’s not as good. It takes longer. It takes a lot more mental concentration. If I had you do it all day, you’d be cramping up. You’d be like, “Whoa.” Your spouse says, “How was work today, dear?” You’re like, “I don’t know. I was writing with my wrong hand all day and I have to redo all the work. It was terrible, my hands cramped and frankly, I need a drink.” That’s what we do to people unintentionally at work is without knowing or without regard to their needs. We put them sometimes in positions. They’re asking them to adapt. They’re not getting their stimulus. They’re going to burn out and either quit or do a bad job or quit in place, which means they’ve given up and they’re taking it.

I’m here for the paycheck. It’s like absenteeism. They’re sitting there at their desk playing solitaire half the time. They’re just there. Let’s talk about teams because your leadership philosophy is around teams. I know you have a new launch coming up. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

The Project Dream Teams, it’s about team discovery. To discover is your team well-positioned to execute on the corporate strategy or your department strategy, or even if your team strategy and how is your team made up and like, “How can we coach them to work together better and to say they’re not a good fit for the strategy, how to stretch to get there?” It’s about team dynamics and team fit for strategy. We’re excited because it’s the same science, it’s just one of these data applications that we built into the software. Arnold Daniels, our Founder, could have done this many years ago with pencil and paper but it would have taken a lot of work. We would have had to get people around a conference room table. Arnold would be shuffling paper and divining things like a wizard. People would be like, “What is that?” You’re like, “He’s smart and he’s using the science, but we built that into the software.” It’s accessible to companies. It’s accessible for a consultant like yourself to guide companies through this journey.

The tool is designed for multiple applications. It’s a hiring tool. It’s to inspire, which is that whole creation of opportunities for your teams to know their strengths, to work with them more, to be more effective managers, leadership, company culture, and all of those things are in that inspire tool. We have to diagnose and design. There are many different applications that anyone at any point can come in and use a portion of it or the whole suite. It’s flexible how you have created this to use it in an organization.

We’re getting started. In several years, we might look back at what we’re doing now and say, “We’ve come a long way.” At least it’s not a pencil and paper, but it will look like that. It’s because the discipline of talent optimization is getting started. We’re early in what is the implications of using data and analytics on managing people, getting them into the right job, making sure there’s fit with the job, manager, team and culture. If you do that, we unlock a lot of potentials. You started smiling when I said that. That’s what your employees will do if you get them in the right job, manager and team. They’re like, “Thank you.”

 

It’s like going to work every day with a smile on your face, feeling happy, and coming home energized. How does anyone get started if they wanted to find out more about Predictive Index or they want to get started with using this tool? What is the first thing you would suggest a company start? It’s depending on what their goals are.

It depends on who it is in the organization. If they are in the talent function, they have a great view of the company. They’re either called HR or people operations, some talent function, and they have to realize, “Do I have enough power in the company to do something strategic? Do I have a voice at the C-suite in this organization?” Are they in the C-suite and they’re thinking of getting to use this lever, “Finally, I’ve pulled a lot of levers at my company, but now I want to pull the talent lever?”

If they’re in those positions, the first thing I would do is call someone such as yourself, a consultant in the PI sphere that can understand them. What are you trying to accomplish? Understands the tools available. Where do they want to start? With human resources, we often start with hiring. It’s almost no company that doesn’t have a hiring problem. Even say they’re a 50-person company with a stable workforce, they’re still hiring 5 or 10 people a year. It’s almost impossible through retirement or voluntary, involuntary. It happens. Even a stable company has some demand, but what’s their biggest challenge? What’s their biggest issue? If I’m talking to someone from the C-Suite, I usually start strategically like, “What are you trying to accomplish? Is your team able to pull this off?”

That’s what I love about the software. You can plot everyone, see what their strengths are, and then align it with the strategy that you have for your team or company. See if they’re in alignment with the strategy. If they’re not, then you know where to start from like, “Let’s try to get in alignment here.” That’s one of those silver bullets in the PI software that allows you to look at your strategic plan for your organization. The people that you have, what do you have? What are the resources you have in the people and see if it’s in alignment or not?

Some companies get this right from the get-go that maybe someone in the organization sweats the details on people. Many companies don’t have it right. They let people stay in the wrong roles for too long a period of time. They’ve got B and C players when they need A-priority roles that are holding them back. They’re frustrated because they’re not able to pull off what they want to.

It’s not like you have to let that person go. They’re probably a better fit somewhere else in the company and you haven’t explored that yet because you don’t have the data.

The first thing we try and do, D and C players are relatively easy. For most companies, the biggest problems are when people are B, B-plus and they’re almost there, but not quite there. The first question we ask, is there another role in the company where this person could blossom and be an A? Is there something that we can take off their plate or could we make an augmentation? A great example of this, what if you have a great sales manager who’s not quantitative? You keep talking about metrics and KPIs and they either don’t get it or they don’t like it so they don’t spend time there.

It’s like, “It’s not in my wheelhouse. I don’t care.”

Assign them a finance person maybe it’s five hours in the first couple of weeks and says, “I’m going to help you build these models and these metrics. You’re going to give me all of your qualitative input. I’m going to turn them into quantitative stuff. Mike, your boss is going to get off your back because we’re going to have awesome metrics and we’re going to track over time. I’m going to make you love these metrics.” The person’s going to be like, “Why didn’t you say so?”

The shoulders they relax like, “Fresh air.”

You can do that augmentation doesn’t always work, but that’s what we try and do. Sometimes you have a player that you can’t find the right role and you can’t change the role or augment enough. That’s when you have a career discussion, what is it you want to do? You’re probably not happy in this role. We want to make you happy alumni because it doesn’t seem to be working out. There may be a role in the future that works. If you consistently make happy alumni, sometimes people left because they had a better opportunity. Sometimes family stuff happens. We had an employee give notice who’s going to work with her father on an entrepreneurial venture. You’re like, “That’s great.” You want them to be successful out there. When you make happy alumni because it wasn’t working out, it can still be as joyous if you do it the right way.

When you make happy alumni because it wasn't working out, it can still be as joyous if you do it the right way. Click To Tweet

I agree with that because sometimes it’s not the right fit. When you recognize that and not just recognizing it by gut instinct, but you have measurable data and you have something on paper that shows, “This is not a good fit.” You can then have a different discussion. It doesn’t become personal. A lot of times, things get personal and people leave hurt or angry. It doesn’t have to be that way. 

The most important thing to start that conversation for a manager is does that person feel that you have their back? If I worked for you for a year, and I knew that you cared about me through little things. Maybe my child fell out of a tree and broke his wrist and you’re like, “Take two days. Make sure that your child’s okay.” You entered into career discussions with me and you were constantly trying to help, counsel, and mentor me when it comes to you saying, “Mike, it’s not working.” I’m like, “You tried, you care about me as a person. You counseled me on my career and I might not like the answer, but I still respect you.” That’s important is do you have all of your employee’s backs?

This idea too that a lot of people leave companies because of bad managers. I know there’s a high statistic on that. A lot of people get into management roles without any training to be a manager or any leadership training they’re promoted. This tool can help you promote the right people and have those discussions, have those career pathing discussions with them.

If you think about how people become managers, it’s often they might manage a process or a project and have no direct reports, but they’re now responsible for at least something. Maybe it’s the integrity of data input on Salesforce. They do a good job so that you give them a resource. They get one maybe to start. They’re like, “I’m a manager, I’ve got one resource.” All of a sudden, they’re like, “I need to manage someone. How do I want to manage someone? I only know how to manage myself.” They’re going to say, “I had a great manager once.” They’re going to mimic that style, which all they’re doing is they pick the style that worked for them.

That worked on them, not for them.

The question is that they often apply the style that worked for them. It might not work for those people. We have tools that will say, “How can you modify yourself so that you can get the most out of the resources that are under the people resources? How do you understand the joys and frustrations of those people who are working together?” It does give someone a head start. My step-sister writes for Hollywood. For many years she was in the writer’s room and then she got promoted so she became the right-hand person. She finally got her own show and she was in charge. She spent the first day creating a document say, “What’s it like to work with me?”

She spent all of this time talking about her quirks, joys and frustrations. She used a bunch of psychometric stuff, but I read this document. She’s a writer so it was funny. If you’ve read this, you’d be like, “I think I know who my boss is. I know what I’m getting into.” These are the tools that enlightened managers sometimes do it on their own. We democratize those tools so that people can do it even if they have that one resource.

That sounded like a lot of fun. You have to be self-aware to do something like that too, which is what this helps you become. It helps you dig a little bit deeper and become a little more self-aware so that you can have that dialogue with someone, “This is how I am. If it starts getting on your nerves, I give you permission to tell me.” In working with some of the leaders, that’s one of the things that they most appreciate is when they’re able to empower those around them, to have a voice and speak up and say, “This works for me or this doesn’t work for me.” Instead of feeling like they have no voice or powerless to do anything in the company. This helps empower their direct reports, which empowers the others below. It gives everyone a voice in the organization.

Enlightened human resources for people, ops teams will create feedback loop opportunities whether it’s through employee experience surveys, engagement surveys, some mechanism to get feedback. If people have a voice, one, and then two, you take action on listening to that voice. You can’t always exactly because it could be anonymous and you don’t know who it was. There were things that, “I wish you paid us more and maybe that doesn’t happen.” There are many things you can take action on. Those feedback loops are critical to building that culture and work hard in a company so that people go, “I did have a bad day, but this isn’t a bad company. I’m going to give it another shot.”

All these little tools and things we’re talking about is baked into the Predictive Index Resource. If you don’t know how to do employee engagement surveys, we’ve got that for you. If you don’t know how to start the conversation, even in hiring, there’s a lot of questions and interesting opportunities for you to ask the right things of people to get the response that you’re looking for. You have thought of a lot of things that I don’t think others have.

One of the things on the employee experience survey or engagement survey, we use those names, interchangeably, but we spent time trying to find out is the person engaged or not. We also try and find out what are the sources of disengagement? Are you disengaged with job, manager, team or company? It gives you a clue or clues into what you need to turn around. Some people might be like, “It’s the manager.” All of a sudden you realize, “There are 4 of the 5 people on this team who thinks it’s the manager. We have an opportunity to coach up this manager.” It might be one person who says, “This job is not for me. I love the company. I love our mission, but could I have any other job please?” It’s not about finding out engagement. It’s about finding out sources of disengagement.

 

Which goes back to what we were talking about with taking the assessment, it’s not what you check off, but what you didn’t check off. We use all the data like what is there right in front of us, what’s not there, and what’s missing. There are ways to measure all of it. That’s what’s exciting about PI and the future of PI. I appreciate you sharing a lot of that. I have one more question for you, which is more on the personal side. For your children, how do you teach them about leadership? What is your advice to them about leadership? What is your advice to them about building their own confidence to step out boldly in this world?

We’ve tried to figure out the reference profiles of our children.

How old should someone be to take that by the way?

The survey is only validated for eighteen and above. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t work at 17 or 16. We haven’t done the work to validated for college placement. What you want to make sure is, do they have a strong enough vocabulary to be able to understand the questions, the instrument? For most high schoolers, they’re fine, but there’s a second question is high schoolers or even junior high schoolers are still trying to figure out who they are. It still may be influx so that if you assess someone at twelve even though they had a high vocabulary, they might be like, “I’m not sure.” What I did, our youngest when he was eleven, we weren’t sure we thought it was two reference profiles, either venturer or individualist.

We couldn’t figure out where the patient’s drive was. I brought home both reports. I said, “Read these. Which one are you?” He goes, “I’m definitely an individualist. This is me.” It wasn’t a scientific way to approach this, but it gives us a proxy. My wife and I have been like, “Individualist, they’re supremely unimpressed with authority. We’re going to have to change our parenting style.” What’s interesting about that is we’re trying to make sure that they are comfortable in their skin, because first and foremost, are they comfortable in their skin? They’ll then find their voice to be leaders, to develop followership, to do it in their own way. One we think is a captain and one we think is an individualist. We gave them the same instructions. They would not execute the same way. While I have credentials to give you consulting at work, I don’t have credentials to give anyone consulting as a parent.

Parenting is the hardest job that you can do. I love that you’re giving them the space to understand themselves and grow, be comfortable with who they are and not try to force anything on them. That is how they can be audaciously confident in this world and step out and do bold and great things. Thank you, Mike, for giving me your time and sharing all this wonderful information about Predictive Index, your journey and all this insight. I appreciate it. Is there anything that you want to share, last words before we wrap?

I do love your energy. I think this Audaciously Confident. Are your initials linked to that?

Yeah. Alicia Couri.

I’m a little slow on the uptake, but I love the energy. It’s great. It’s infectious. I haven’t smiled as much in a long time. Thank you for the great line of questioning. I appreciate it.

Thank you. I appreciate it. With that, I’m going to say, be bold, be brave and step out with audacious confidence as you lead your teams, your movement, or your organization, and thank you for spending time with us.

 Important Links:

• The Predictive Index
• Jim Allen
• The 17 Profiles
• Arnold Daniels
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/mikezani/
• https://Assessment.PredictiveIndex.com/bo/831/LWACPodcast

 About Mike Zani