5 Secrets to Master High Performer Mindset
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we speak with Mike James Ross, author of the book Intention: The Surprising Psychology of High Performers, about why intention-driven leadership is the secret to creating high-performing teams and meaningful employee engagement.
Mike reveals how organizations often misunderstand high performance, how AI will transform HR, and why leaders must empower people to embrace risk and innovation.
🎓 In this episode, Mike discusses:
How AI will fundamentally change HR processes
Why intentional leadership unlocks true performance
The real meaning of high performance in organizations
Overcoming fear to foster genuine employee innovation
Practical ways leaders can empower teams to take meaningful risks
Achieve efficiencies, boost effectiveness and enhance employee experience with AI!
Equip your prospective and current workforce with AI-powered tools to reduce time spent on straightforward tasks, and leverage AI to generate insights for strategic decision making on people practices and measuring the value of HR.
AI can help with a range of HR activity from creating personalized development plans and suggesting career options to answering queries on benefits and summarizing 360 feedback.
With a single user experience and secure data model, seamless HR processes and an AI-embedded infrastructure, Oracle Cloud HCM can help you redefine what best feels like for your people.
Mike James Ross 0:00
I think a lot of HR these days is performative. We're doing stuff that we're doing because we think we should. And I'll give you an example your annual review system. For a lot of organizations, there's a two or three page form, and the supervisor managers are cutting and pasting things they're filling in the week before. You know HR, you have to chase them. Hey, get your reviews in blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's just done because they think that they have to. I think AI is going to make that a lot worse in the short term. So rather than a two page form, it'll be a five page form, because the AI is going to help you write it, then you sound a lot smarter. Boom. I just press a button and it's going to be good and accurate. But what's going to happen is the employee is then going to take your five page form, they're going to stick it in their AI, and that's going to spit out the two or three bullets that they actually need to know. But the hope Chris, the hope is that then we're going to pop through that and we're going to say, You know what, as a manager, my job is not to fill in a performance review. My job as a manager is to give a shit about the people that work with me. And I can skip all this kind of manufactured processes and actually just sit down with you and say, Hey, Chris, this is what I see, and this is how you can get better. And these are the risks that I'm willing to let you take, and this is perhaps the guard rails I'm gonna put in place. But for me, AI is pushing through this level of technological intervention that we have now, and we're gonna become humans again. On the other side,
Chris Rainey 1:22
you Mike, welcome to the show. How are you? My friend?
Mike James Ross 1:33
Hey, thanks very much, Chris. I'm great. I'm happy to be here at Spring. So, okay, cool.
Chris Rainey 1:37
Yeah, I love it. But is your spring like hot, or is it like, still cold,
Mike James Ross 1:43
still in Canada, right? So,
Chris Rainey 1:46
yeah, whereabouts
Mike James Ross 1:47
are based in Canada, in Montreal, so on the east side of Canada?
Chris Rainey 1:51
Yeah, it still blows my mind when I, like, think how big Canada is. I don't think people really understand the magnitude. But the thing that most people
Mike James Ross 1:59
don't realize about Canada, if you take Canada if you take Canada, but something like 80% of the population was right along the
Chris Rainey 2:05
border. Oh, really, there's a whole bunch of
Mike James Ross 2:07
it that, like, just nobody's there because it's empty, it's cold and huge, and trees and bears and
Chris Rainey 2:12
stuff. A moose, moose, yes, I want to see a moose in real life. I was like, you see, you're bigger than you think. I know. I can imagine when I see them all, like, on videos, I'm something like, wow. Like, is it that big? That's crazy. That is a big animal. Yeah. That's like, a very does America have moose? Or is that just, just Canada?
Mike James Ross 2:33
I think they must, yeah. I think they must. Yeah. Probably art, you know, Vermont and stuff like that, right? Probably moose don't really respect the borders they kind of
Chris Rainey 2:40
wander. This is an error respect anything, because I've seen in roaming the streets. I've only been to Toronto. That's the only place I've been so far. It's like, it's so much in the city, though. I do want to see like I want to, I want to get out a seat I've been in that off Toronto. Yeah, I want to go like, the middle of nowhere and really experience that as well before, before we jump in, tell that one, um, little bit more about your background and sure and the journey to where we are now with the new book.
Mike James Ross 3:10
Yeah, thanks very much, Chris. I'm look, I think that I'm kind of your classic sort of nomadic person in the sense that I was a finance lawyer. I was a management consultant at McKinsey. I ran my own consulting firm. I started an ed tech startup, but relevant to what we're going to talk about today, I had the great pleasure of being the CHRO for one of Canada's biggest retailers, a company for the Canadians on the show called Simons, where I led a team of about 40 people with 5000 employees. And that experience really taught me a lot about you know, I think professional services, lawyer, consultant, to do some investing, things like that. You see from outside, but once you're inside, you really realize the challenges of helping organizations and helping people really develop and grow. And so that led me to think a lot. And then, with a couple of friends of mine, I wrote a book called intention, the surprising psychology of high performers, which we wrote, really, in an effort to help individuals, but also help people who run teams to think a little bit different about how they make choices. What
Chris Rainey 4:11
was the spark behind the book, though, like, and had you left the see it row before then? What's been I wrote
Mike James Ross 4:18
the book at the same time, so nice evenings and weekends. But then left the CHRO, I'm now sit on the board of the organization and spend, spend a lot more of my time thinking about these things now. Yeah, it's great. It's great. I think the Genesis, I mean, I think that, you know, I think probably a lot of your listeners, everybody sort of has a book in them somewhere, you know, you sort of AI be really neat if I could write these ideas down. Yeah. Think for me, the thing that really I see as the root of a lot of the work that I've done, including the book, is, you know, Gallup does this survey every year. I'm sure you've seen it about employee engagement, yeah, of course. And they say, and I think I can't remember the exact statistic, I think in Canada, it sounded like two thirds of all employees. Are either disengaged or actively disengaged at work, yeah, and that's tragic, like I was just to me, there's just such a massive opportunity. And so that's the kind of the thought, I guess, center idea for me, of a lot of the stuff I've done my consulting work was around cultural transformations. My work as a CHR, I was with an organization going through a cultural transformation, and the book, I think, springs from that as well, both in terms of, how do you transform the culture of an organization, but also as an individual, how do you take responsibility for your own engagement in a
Chris Rainey 5:30
work context? Yeah, when you when you high performers, is used quite loosely as a term, yeah. Now, what would you say is, how do you describe a high performer?
Mike James Ross 5:39
Yeah, it's a good question. You know, it's funny, because I wrote the book with two other guys, and we debated this a lot and, and actually, like, wasn't super convinced that that should be in the title of the book, because I think it puts some people off, right? I think they're kind of like, oh, high performance. What is that? To me, high performance is a very subjective concept. So if you're Michael Phelps, right, and you're six foot eight, and your arms are like, 10 feet across, and you've got wet feet, and you can breathe underwater, or whatever it is that that guy can do, then winning bazillion gold medals the Olympics. Yeah, that's amazing. And I'm sure even with all those attributes that he had, it's still a huge stretch. But if you're somebody who has, I don't know, let's say, like, massive social anxiety, right? Just like crazy, crippling social anxiety, and you manage to leave your house and take the bus, that's also high performance. So for me, high performance is a very subjective concept. It's overcoming our own limitations, doing hard stuff. If something is hard for you, and you manage to push yourself to be able to do it, that's in my world, high performance?
Chris Rainey 6:40
Yeah, no, I love that, because one of these I never liked is the idea of like, if you're saying that this population is high performance, does that mean that the rest of your employees are not, absolutely not, you know, does that mean that I'm now a low performer? Yeah, all right. And then, and then, therefore, you're in this, just this bucket of high performers and low performers. And then, of course, the high performers are getting the investment from a learning perspective and opportunity. I've never really liked that concept of like companies saying visa or high performance. I understand why, and I understand, obviously, the business rationale behind it. You know, I run my own businesses, but what does that mean for the rest of your employees, and what message is that sending to them. Does that make sense? It absolutely makes
Mike James Ross 7:23
sense. I think part of it for me, and I think, you know, we'll probably use this word a lot in the course of our context today, is choices, right? I think as an organization, you have to say to the organization, this is what we're looking for. These are the skill sets that we think are really important. These are the things that we need at this moment, perhaps in our history as an organization, or in particular role. Particular roles, it's going to be very subjective, very contextual, dependent. And I think it's fair for an organization to say, Hey, Chris, you're amazing at this podcast thing. We want to put you doing more of that. We want to double down on that incredible strength you have. We also need a whole bunch of people to do, I don't know this other job, right? The accounting Excel spreadsheet stuff. And I don't know anything about you, Chris, but let's assume, just for the personal argument, that that's not your I
Chris Rainey 8:07
hate, that you perfectly got that one so perfect. So,
Mike James Ross 8:10
I mean, it's often the case, right? The folks who, like you are sort of very gregarious, outgoing. That kind of number crunching isn't your thing. Well, if I really need the Excel person, I'll probably say, Chris, that's not where I want you to be. I want you to be in the podcast side. And I think that a lot of that notion of high potential, high performers that people use in organizations is they almost skip a step of let's define the categories of things that we're looking for, and then line people up against those categories. And it's not to say that because you can't do Excel, you're a low performer. It's just that if we're trying to make you do Excel, we're failing as an organization, and it's high potential for that particular stream that you're in.
Chris Rainey 8:55
Yeah, you just made me think of school. It's like, schools that does that really badly, right though, like, because they're like, pushing, because I was a kid that, you know, I didn't get I failed English, math, science, you name it. But, you know, got an A star in graphic design, in fine art, in ceramics, in all of the creative endeavors, and then, similar with sports. I was, like, excelled in that area, but I was seen as a failure. Because lucky you
Mike James Ross 9:24
even had a school that had graphic design and ceramics and arts, right? Imagine the kids who go to school where the only options are these kind of traditional subjects of rote memorization and just regurgitating back on a test what the teacher told you three weeks ago, terrible. It's horrible and and what is it? The, I think it's an Einstein quote, is that if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it'll live its whole life thinking it is a failure.
Chris Rainey 9:50
I love that, yeah, and that's why I did feel I was a failure for most of my young, young life, like and because that was how. I remember sitting next to my mom and my teacher with them, talking about, basically how, how much I'm failing, and I felt felt like I just made feeling like such a failure, because I didn't, because, because English and maths and Religious Studies and all these topics, which I was like, just so disconnected from and struggling. But like you asked me to to paint you. I could paint you perfectly, right? You asked me to do a portrait, or you asked me I was playing, you know, professional hockey, ice hockey, basketball, break dancing, actually, professionally at the time, doing stuff like, but I was still a failure. So it was insane, actually. But I feel like I'm taking the reason I'm saying all that. It takes me back to your point about in the workplace, like, rather than doubling down on those skills that people really thriving, like trying to pull people in different directions, it doesn't really absolutely lean in and,
Mike James Ross 10:54
you know, it goes back, and I think I'm sure you've had other folks on the podcast talking about this, but it goes back to this whole notion of strength based feedback, right? And how, yeah, more that we can help people identify their strengths, but, but one of the things we argue in the book is this notion of, again, intentionality, right, making choices that I also have a responsibility look as a little kid, fine, like you don't. But if you're in an organization as an employee, and you don't know where you should be, then you're also failing yourself, right? You should have a clear idea that. You should say, hey, look, I shouldn't be doing this Excel stuff. I should be doing that thing over there, and I should be arguing for it. Now, I don't want to be simplistic, right? Everybody lives, lives that are much more complicated. There's a context to it, all that stuff, but you need to take responsibility for that as a human being, for your own constructing your own life? Yeah,
Chris Rainey 11:41
I think I the traditional workplace environment isn't set up for that, though, you know, no, I mean, it isn't conducive. I feel like it took me quite a long in my career, I would say maybe, like, five to seven years in before I actually took charge of my career and my learning and, yeah, and, like, kind of the traditional waiting to be promoted and, you know, horizontally into the business was like the traditional setup, whereas now, as we move to more skills based organizations, now, I feel like that does open up what you're describing and getting empowers people more than They didn't in the past,
Mike James Ross 12:21
yeah. And I think that sort of modern HR information systems, HRIS systems will help with that, right? Because as you get, as you say, more of a skills analysis, and I can match what you can do versus what we need better, absolutely, I look, I think you're absolutely right at the same time, I think it's kind of our fault, right, in the sense that if we're the head of people for organizations, and we don't have clear structures by which we can identify people who are perhaps misplaced, right, square pegs in round holes, and we could say, hey, wait a minute, rather than saying to this person, hey, you're fired. Get out. It's not working. But actually have a much more interesting conversation, which is to say, what could work right? And how do you identify those things for yourself, and how do I help you find that thing that's, again, it's work and the systems and AI, and we can talk about that a little bit later on, sort of the effective AI in HR. But I think one of the things that AI will bring in a very positive sense. There's a lot of negatives, obviously, but a very positive sense of the HR world is going to be better matching of skills and tasks. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 13:19
we're definitely seeing a lot about that. What would you say is the top traits of a high performer?
Mike James Ross 13:30
Well, I mean, I wrote a book called intention, right? And so my whole thing is around this notion of your ability to make decisions. When I was hired into my CHRO role, I was hired by one of the fancy head hunting firms, right? And I was talking to the person who was who hired me in and what they said to me was, when they're looking for senior executives and organizations, they look for three things. The first is skill set, right? HR, you need to know HR, finance leader. Need to Know finance, right? There's kind of for the obvious, that task marketing, you need to be a marketing person. The second one is cultural fit. You need to be aligned with the way the organization works. So if it's an organization that's kind of hard charging, you know, excellence at any cost, all that kind of you have to be, kind of be that person, or else it's just not going to work. But the third thing, I think, is the really interesting thing, and what they said to me was, what we look for at a senior executive level is the willingness to take responsibility. And what they said is, it's actually really rare, because most people grow up learning organizationally, doing what they're told. And I think the thing that makes all the difference between somebody who is a I mean, just kind of going with the flow, doing their life right. And there's nothing wrong with that. But to somebody who's actually really crushing, it is the willingness to take responsibility, the willingness to say, I am making decisions about what it is that I'm going to do and how I'm going to live my
Chris Rainey 14:55
life. Yeah, I love that you kind of put in a different frame, and we internally. Me and Shane, my co founder, we grew up as next door neighbors. We always talk about it through the lens of, like, our superpower is execution. Yeah, because we don't go and we just take it on ourselves and just go and execute. We just do it to your point, like we write, like radical ownership, almost like, you know, and we were like that in our companies we used to work for, and we used to get in trouble for that. And because, you know, most companies, yeah, exactly right. You know your CEO, your boss, saying, like, like, you know, you should never do that again, or go over my head, or, you know, you come to me when you do that, and I'm like, wait a minute. You're punishing me for trying to improve. And fingers are new ways, right? So we were always kind of going against the grain in as employees. And I think that's kind of one of our superpowers as entrepreneurs, is idea to execution. We don't think about we always look for it through the lens of like people, like, I can't do this, or these are the barriers, and we're always looking it through the lens of like, but what if we can? And how, yeah, and how, like, it's just a completely different way of framing it. You know, in your mind, and most successful people I speak to, they look at it through that lens as well.
Mike James Ross 16:19
What comes with that, though, is risk, right? Yeah, if it doesn't work, it's your fault. And I think for a lot of people, they're more afraid of that than they are that they want to succeed, right? They have this kind of, you know, fear bias, right? Yeah, I don't want to be blamed for this, right? And it's, it's amazing that once you kind of, we talk in the book about this, you ever seen the movie? Free guy? Yes, yeah, right. So we talked about this in the book, because it's one of those things where in free guy. So for those of you who haven't seen it, right? It's this movie. I won't ruin the whole movie, but he plays this NPC, right, a non playable character in it. And then one day, he kind of wakes up, and I like in life like that, in the sense that I think that most of us are living this kind of just do what I told, whatever, by parents, by society. But once you start becoming execution mindset, intent, intention mindset, it's kind of like the scales fall away.
Chris Rainey 17:15
It's so good. Oh my is it? It's a game. It's a, I don't even have a word to describe it, you're right. It's it's once you and what you can't go back after, after that, like the moment you have for me and Shane, is when internally, we were pitching, like different ideas. We worked for a big global events company and at different conferences. And that's how I got into the HR space, because I built the world's largest HR conference, and I remember pitching the CEO a new idea. He and he just said, just go and do it right. And you got to hear some budget here, some resources. And I built, you know, I built with the team, our website, our payment gateway, our products, the team. And I was like, Wait a minute. I just built a whole business. I literally just built a whole somebody else for somebody else. But I built a whole business, right? And we made a couple 100k off the back of that from the event. And I was like, and I was always doing stuff anyway, but that was like, the aha moment of like, I don't need to be here. Yeah, I literally did every single part of the process. And then I was like, I couldn't get out of my head, and then me and Shane sat down. I was like, There's literally nothing keeping us here, apart from the fear of failure to up to your point. And it was more crazily, actually. It was more around the perception of, like, what would my wife think if I failed, or what would my friends think, or the whole, oh, everyone's gonna be like I told you. So, you know, who do you think? Yeah, who do you think you are? And less about, can we do it? Yeah, absolutely, because we obviously have the skills to do it. We've been doing it for 10 years to your point, but soon as we overcame that, it was just from there on in, we've been guys the limit, sky's the limit. What would you say is that kind of common misconceptions about high performers that people have?
Mike James Ross 19:12
Well, I think, I think there's a lot of it, again. It depends on how we use that definition. And my definition of high performance, right, was that ability to do subjectively hard things. I think often people don't realize the effort that's being put into things. But I think a lot of people say, I don't think it's just easy for that person, right? But actually, there is that, that intellectual leap, and a lot of it, a lot of it, is just getting over that hump of, geez, what if I fail? What are people gonna think about me? But I think that the other thing I would talk about here is just in an organizational context, right? This is HR leaders, right? Like we're talking to people who are leading groups of H and they say, oh, yeah, I want more of those people. I'm sure all your listeners are saying, give me more of those people. Right? You. Yeah, but it doesn't just work like that, like I think that we actually have a responsibility to help build environments in which those people can thrive. Yeah, right. And how do we do that? The Easy, easy thing is empowerment and allowing people to take risks, right? It's, you know? What made that flip for you was your boss saying, Here's a budget. Go do it. Right? And how often do we as leaders do that with our teams? Because we're also afraid of them failing, first of all, very in a very caring way. I don't want you to fail because I don't want you to feel bad, but also in a selfish way. I don't want you to fail because then my boss is going to come to me and say, What, you gave them a budget and they screwed it up, yeah?
Chris Rainey 20:44
And I agree I had Amy Edmondson on the show recently, yeah, of course. And obviously, you know, psychological safety can't have the conversation without bringing up Amy. And it's still to this day, surprises me how many organizations still have a sort of a fear based leadership style, you know? And that was something in my last career that really kind of I struggled with, because it was always Chris, they your employees, they're not your friends, you know, like, and all of the systems and processes we set up were, like designed to do the opposite of what you're describing. Yeah, you know, even our even the way our KPIs, and the way that we were rewarded financially from a compensation point of view, was like, Well, I can't do that, because that's going to affect my bonus. So basically, it was all these like constraints on, on, on you being aware as at a point I kind of just didn't care anymore, I was like, I'm gonna do this anyway, even if I don't hit my bonus. But obviously I shouldn't have to do that and sacrifice that to be able to absolutely
Mike James Ross 21:47
well. And like you say, you know, going back a bit in our conversation, it starts in school, yeah.
Chris Rainey 21:53
Oh, you got a D, you got an E. Oh, that's great. That's gonna rebuild confidence
Mike James Ross 21:59
in me. I want to learn in this other way. I want to do this other thing, right? I'm, yeah, I'm break dancing, and I become really good at it. Can I take a day off so I can go and compete in this thing? Oh, no, no, you can't take a day off. No, no. You have to do this, right? And it's kind of like, what are we thinking? Yeah, right. We're, we're trying to build our society as geared to try and build these kind of drone, you know, do what you're told, kind of things, right? That we were talking before we started the show about, you know, the first iPhone. Go back, if you get a chance, go back and watch the apple 1984 commercial, right? It's when they launched the first Apple Macintosh. It's amazing, right? And it's 1984 right? George Orwell, all this stuff. And it's this commercial, this kind of big talking head, and everybody kind of looks the same, and this woman comes in and throws this ledge hammer through the screen. And the slogan at that time was, think different. And I use that all the time when I'm talking to groups. I go and I talk at organizations and things like that. I bring those learnings to them, and I use it. I show that ad, and I say, look, that was what 40 years ago, yeah. And we still think that this is the way to run an organization everybody, stay in your box, do your thing. It's dangerous, yeah,
Chris Rainey 23:05
and that, ultimately, that was the reason I left, because I was in the same role for 10 years, and I was asking the team for new, new opportunities in the business, in marketing and in production and anywhere, to be honest. I'm like, Hey, I've kind of, like, been doing the same thing over and over again for like, and it was like, nope, stay in your lane, you know. And I was like, Oh man, I'm so like, I'm making great money, you know. Like, I got an amazing team, but I was just, like, just really struggling, like, to turn up and be engaged every day when I'm like, my brains is not being challenged.
Mike James Ross 23:43
Yeah? Okay, let me do a little riff with you. Yeah, curious, you say you played ice hockey, but let's talk about this in the context of football, soccer, right? The goalie, what's their role to
Chris Rainey 23:54
say, to stop, stop goals from going in, right? Yeah.
Mike James Ross 23:58
And the defense, right? The folks, they break up the plays. They come down the field right, and the striker right. The strikers the front was their job, school goals. And the answer to that, of course, is that all of that is wrong, that the role of all of those players is to win
Speaker 1 24:13
the game and but it's such an interesting
Mike James Ross 24:17
flip. And there's a very famous ice hockey goalie. It was Canadian, actually from Montreal, where I'm from, Montreal, where I'm from, named
Chris Rainey 24:23
Martin brother. Yeah, I've got a jersey upstairs. Okay, amazing.
Mike James Ross 24:27
You'll know. You'll know that he won more regular season games than any other goalie in history. Yeah, what you may not know is that he scored more goals than any other goalie in history.
Chris Rainey 24:39
I didn't know that? No, I didn't know that.
Mike James Ross 24:41
So you have this guy, his job is to stand between the pipes right block the but three times he saw this opportunity where he said, Hey, my job right now is not this. My job right now is to help create a play that's going to score a goal. And we talk about that a lot when. Go and I talk to organizations. It's about this notion of filling the void, right? If you see a space, take it now. We don't want Martha Brodeur skating all over the ice all day long, right? Because, of course, then nobody's going to block the net. So he has a job, of course, and you do that thing. But what you want to create in your organizations is people who have the vision to say, what is the game. What is my contribution? But also, how do I step out of my lane sometimes, not all the time? Yeah, and actually help build that amazing goal that's going to change the way that this is
Chris Rainey 25:31
working. What do you you know, many of the churros I speak to every day agree with you. What stuff, what's hot, what stop, what's holding us back, what's the biggest hurdle we need to overcome fear. Yeah, one of
Mike James Ross 25:43
my favorite expressions is how you do anything, is how you do everything, right? You ask those CHROs, right? How often are you stepping out of your lane? How often are you you're in the executive committee meeting? Right? I've been well, do these right? You're in the executive committee meeting. The CFO says something, and you're kind of like, I'm not sure that's going to work, but you're not the finance expert, right? It's not, I oh, I'll just let her do her thing. No, you should raise your hand and say, Hey, with respect. It's not like, Oh, look at me. I'm going to score, you know, I'm dunk on you, whatever. No, no, it's with respect. And you're saying, hey, when I listen to this, it seems to me that maybe there's, maybe there's something I don't understand. But is there an opportunity for this to be different? You know? And I think that that if you're a chro and you're not acting with this sense of full empowerment and without fear, and you're making mistakes and taking risks, yeah, you know, I've got this client, we're helping them build a more creative dynamic culture, right? They really want this kind of risk, not not risk positive, but not as risk averse as they were, right? So they want to sort of embrace risk and things like this. And they said, how do we, how can we, what are the kind of moments we can create? And they have this annual event, like many of almost all organizations have. And they said, Oh, you know what we'll do, we'll give a prize, right? We'll give the innovation prize. And I said, Okay, great. Who are you gonna give it to? And they said, Well, we're gonna give it to Jane. She came up with this new idea. It generated $200,000 kind of like the Chris Rainey story, right? It generated this whole new thing. We're gonna give it a prize. I said, okay, but you know who you should give it to? His Bob, yeah, Bob had this great idea. He spent $50,000 on it, and it went nowhere. Complete failure. Get bob up on the stage, give him the prize and say, Hey everybody, this prize is not for winning, it's for trying. It's for taking risks. And we're going to give it to Bob even though he was a total failure in this thing that he did. And when you give it to Bob, you say to him, What did you learn, Bob, and that's a incredibly powerful symbolic moment for your organization, saying we're not rewarding success in the classical sense of it generated revenue. We're rewarding the willingness to take a risk.
Chris Rainey 27:56
Yeah, I love that, and that was something I was interviewing Novartis as CHRO, and they have, they do exactly the same thing every year, and then they talk about it in Simon Brown, the former chief learning officer, wrote a book around sort of how they created that culture of curiosity, yeah. And that's a lovely word, yeah. And I love the culture of curiosity, and part of that even in such a highly regulated industry. How do you still create, you know that, and they do exactly the same thing every year at awards. And I love that, like, because you're it's in such a clear message, and you're rewarding the pursuit of the pursuit of greatness, you know, or the pursuit of that. And that really then inspires everyone and creates that psychological safety, like we just mentioned earlier, and it's coming from the top right, like, very clearly, but
Mike James Ross 28:46
that's where it has to come from. Yeah, yeah, there's, there's an expression that your CEO is your culture. I don't agree that 100%
Chris Rainey 28:53
to certain extent, like I agree, because even in my meetings with my team, and I've also got a small team, I may have team members that come up with ideas that I know aren't going to work, like I know in my soul it's not going to work, but I will still let them do it anyway, of course, because then they because they'll learn so much. I realized that I didn't do that in the past, and I realized, you know, that I was robbing them of that learning opportunity. Yeah, that's a really nice thing, Chris. I was robbing him of the moment to actually learn. Because otherwise, if I keep trying to, if I keep trying to, you know, I learned it with my daughter as well. If I was
Mike James Ross 29:27
just gonna say, the parallels are incredible. Yeah, we have a whole chapter in the book about parenting with intention, because it just we were living through this experience with our kids, and we're like, oh man, we've just got
Chris Rainey 29:37
to write about that. No, yeah, in fact, nice way possible. I'm trying to put more obstacles in front of my daughter, yeah, do you know? To build, to build that resilience and understand that like, you know, we she's doing jiu jitsu at the moment, and every other week she wants to give up, she'll cry, and I don't want to do this. And the next day she's like, I really want to go jiu jitsu again, right? And it's like, so cool to see. Like. Constant failure, like, and she's like, the more reps she's putting in that now she, you know, she doesn't cry anymore, and she gets submitted and is excited about it, and the challenge of it, yeah, exactly the challenge of it. But in the beginning, it was like, and it's funny, because there's a friend, her school friend has started, and their parents are going through the same thing we did, crying constantly on Saturday, she's coming over to the French crying and rides. And I was like, Tasha, that was where Robin was a year ago. Yeah, I want to give up. I want to go home. You know, one thing I would love your your your thoughts and perspective on is we talk about higher potential. And you spoke earlier about people having naturally been more gifted in specific areas, right? But I find that most people have never given themselves a real chance to know whether that so people always say to me, one of my employees actually, for like a Secret Santa book present, bought me a book that says how to be great at everything. It's like a joke because they're like, you're really annoying, because you're good at all these things. But I'm not right, because I told you about English, maths, etc, all those things, right? But as this assumption, I am, and I speak to so many friends, and they're like, I'm not, I'm just not good at that. And I'm like, How many times have you tried? And 99% of times, like, twice or three times, right? And they're like, you're just good everything I'm like, but you didn't see the 1000 times I fell on my head, break dancing already, a million times I fell over on ice skates, yeah, but you just gotta be willing to get up and keep putting the reps in, right? So that's, that's one thing I feel like. I don't know how like high performers are, just, you're just willing to, like, just keep going. But even when everyone says you shouldn't, and even when you sometimes you yourself are in doubt of you should, but you just do it anyway. I can't, I can't explain almost, my wife would say almost it to a point where it's unhealthy, because sometimes it leads to me to burn out and get sick. So there's kind of, like a balance that needs to be found. I think you're
Mike James Ross 32:05
absolutely right. And I think a lot of that's kind of classic, that kind of Carol Dweck growth mindset stuff, right? Like, I'm not good at this yet, right? Rather than just, I'm not good at this, right? My kids make fun, because I always say that to them all the time, right? And they're like,
Chris Rainey 32:16
that's good. I'm gonna use that. I mean, I haven't got that one yet in my in my arsenal, I'm going to use that one. I like that, yeah, it's
Mike James Ross 32:22
just, it just, I mean, it's, again, it's fixed versus growth mindsets, right? Fixed mindsets, I'm not good at this fake growth mindset is, I can get good at it, and I think that in the context of an individual, but also as an organization, the difference becomes clarity around the objective and the utility or the importance of that objective, right? If I'm I'm trying at the age of 23, years, and I decided I wanted to learn how to skateboard, right? Which is not a good age to try and learn how to skateboard, because that's the kind of thing you got to start when you're six, right? Because you fall much further. So I said, I'm going to learn how to skateboard. I did it for like, a week, and then I was doing this kick flip. I hit myself in the ankle, which really hurts, and I was like, Oh, that's it. Forget it. But the reason, the thing, is that, like, the reason I was learning how to skateboard was just because, I don't know, I wanted to impress girls or some stuff. It just wasn't an important thing for me. And so I stopped.
Chris Rainey 33:15
But I love that reasoning. I mean, oh, you just spot so many good things in my mind. Go ahead, it's like, that is such an important thing, like the so I when I was break dancing, I always, by the way, I also grew up skateboarding at a quite a high level, and I also started again a couple of years ago, and hit myself an ankle, and it swelled up, and I couldn't skate for a couple of months. I was like, I'm old now maybe I shouldn't skateboard. So I was, I was trying to go back. But I realized there's like, if you don't have a clear why, or real, genuine passion, you will give up. Like I've seen people when I when, when I was break dancing, it became very popular. It was all over TV. Britain's Got Talent, Andrea Scott talent, you know, it was like a big thing. And I saw all these people come into break dancing because they saw it on social media or on TV, and they gave up very quickly and or they, Oh, this is really hard. Like, you know, it's not really, it's not easy to do a handstand or spin on your head. No, no. It only took me. Like, it hurts, and it hurt, yeah, and the literal physical pain of it, whereas you had others that when there was no cameras watching, no one watching no no social media. Do you in your room and and you're putting the reps in, doing the work with no external validation? Yeah, those are the one people that really progressed and were willing to go through, through the pain, absolutely intrinsic,
Mike James Ross 34:38
extrinsic motivations, right? In the sense that if I motivate playing outside of myself and myself, maybe sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but if I motivate something inside of myself, it's a much more powerful motivator. I want this for me, yeah, right, not because somebody's gonna give me a prize, but because of who I am and what's important to me, it is much more powerful. Now I think the next question, I can hear you thinking. You're going to ask, is, okay, but I'm running an organization. How do I create that
Chris Rainey 35:03
intrinsic, yeah, that's exactly what I was going to cover that next. Yeah. And the
Mike James Ross 35:07
reality is, is that it's hard, but you can, right? And the way that I do that, well, one thing is, I'm very clear about what as an organization, what is the game we're playing, right? We talked about this goalie thing, right? And things like that. If I don't have a clear idea as an individual and organization of what the game is, are we trying to maximize profit? Are we trying to maximize longevity? Are we trying to maximize views? Are we trying to impact the world in this way? What is it that we're trying to do that has to be drilled into your employees again and again and again and again and again, right? I need to have this very clear sense, you know that classic Simon Sinek start with why? I think that can be a bit simplistic, but it's definitely a big ingredient of what that is.
Chris Rainey 35:50
Yeah, it's fascinating. Honestly, I feel like most of the people I speak to that have that it's like a switch and a ha moment that they lost a lifetime. There's like a moment in time for me, it was like the first sport I ever played, which was basketball. And before then, I had never picked up any sport, and I spent the summer playing, and I remember going, Wow, if I put this level of commitment and time, day in, day out, I could do that with anything. Yeah, and that was it. That was it now. The rest is history. Unless she was like, whether it's building our AI product that we're building right now, whether it's ice, hockey, basketball, I just went on a tear. I was like, I was like, I was like, and it's like, I just unlocked a new superpower of, if you're willing to fail, feel pain, be like, be laughed at. And even, you know, I remember my mom, and even my mom and my brother sister would laugh at the idea that I was going to be a break dancer. Like my older brother would be like, she's going to be a brain and then years later, it's like, oh, come in the house and watch my brother. He's amazing, a brain dancer. And I'm like, Oh, I remember remembering used to take, you know, make fun of
Mike James Ross 37:02
when you phrase that, right? That's superpower, right? And that superpower, for me, is intention, right? That superpower is the ability to make a choice and stick with it. Yeah, even when we think, we think and we break it down, but we think things like willpower, oh, I don't have willpower, right? It's not true. It's just not true. You have this conception of yourself. Most people have this conception of themselves, and they limit themselves, and you want to shake them and say it's not true. You're, you're so incredibly powerful each of us as individuals. And look, let's, let's be thoughtful about this, right? There are people who live in a context where it's very, very hard, right? You don't have any money, you don't have support, all this kind of thing, there are people living very difficult lives where the range of control over the existence that they have is limited. I get it, but even within that range, you have the ability to affect change in your life, yeah.
Chris Rainey 37:59
Well, that was us. Like, we grew up on a council estate government benefits. My mom was a single parent with four kids. There was days we didn't have electricity or food, or, you know, like it was rough, like, you know, like, for some there's many nights we went to sleep without really eating the good meal, and I had hand me down clothes. Was bullied in school because of it. And, you know, everything you can think of, where I lived was the highest crime rate in the UK. So you didn't really, you know, if you was outside, you're either selling drugs or robbing cars or getting into trouble. Luckily for me, Shane, my best friend and co founder here his his dad, got us into sports and took us away from all of that, which didn't realize now until older, how grateful we are for was for that. But the thing that really always kind of just was in my, ingrained in me, was like, I hated hearing everyone's excuses and yeah, and the victim mentality drove me insane. I was like, yes, yes, yes. No one in our in our family, has ever owned a property. That doesn't mean that I can't, right? Yes, we have no money. Yes, it's going to be harder for us, you know. Yes, we're in a ton of debt, right? Like everything like that, you'll describe like, you know, but I refused like. We refuse to be like, defined by something that's not in our control, like, control. What's controllable? Right? Control. The controllables is something we always mean Shane always talk about, like, forget about everything else. Control. What we can control. I
Mike James Ross 39:31
want you to cost you to practice break dancing in your living room.
Chris Rainey 39:35
Free. Exactly right, for free.
Mike James Ross 39:37
Willingness to be wrong, willingness to fail, willingness to bump your head every once in a while, right? That doesn't cost anything. No,
Chris Rainey 39:43
you're right. And also, like, half of, like, the stuff that I learned from sales or some free YouTube videos, or, like, you know, stuff I found online, like books I could download, like you can, if you really want to do something, you'll find a way. Like, even when I play basketball. I did a presentation recently, and my first slide is a picture of a rusty basketball net on the side of my mom's house, which is still there to this day. I did a presentation a few weeks ago in New York, and they were like, Why are you showing a rusty, rusted basketball net? And I was like, this is the start of everything. And they're like, What do you mean? I was like, I was like, and it was, and one of the things is there's no backboard because we couldn't afford a backboard, but my mom could only afford the hoop, yeah, and, and it's all mangled. And I went to see her just throwing to you, I was like, wow, that's gonna be my first line. Let me take a photo of it, right? And every time I walk go and see my mom, I see that, and I'm like, That is everything like that is the beginning. There is no HR leaders, oh, uni, without that basketball hoop, I'm actually gonna take it down and actually create a piece of artwork at home that I'm gonna have in the hallway as, like, a That's it right, right there. But you I remember, like, that was a lot of money, like, 20 pounds, like we have to save up for a while to buy me that basketball hoop. Yeah, you know, it wasn't just like, and we couldn't only get the hoop. We couldn't get people always, where's the backboard? And I'm like, there is no backboard. That's all I got. And it's the same one. We didn't replace it. Like, is, it was bent up a mango wood. But you got to do what you got to do, yeah? To do it? Yeah, we can't end this without talking about the impact of AI, so I love to hear your thoughts and perspective on that.
Mike James Ross 41:30
Well, I have a pretty strong opinion about this, right? And I'll keep it short, I'm an optimist, but I'm a short term pessimist. And what I mean by that is I think that a lot of and certainly in the impact of AI in HR context, I think a lot of HR these days is performative. We're doing stuff that we're doing because we think we should right. And I'll give you an example right to sort of your annual review system. For a lot of organizations, there's a two or three page form, and the supervisor managers are cutting and pasting things they're filling in the week before you know HR, you have to chase them. Hey, get your reviews in. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's just done because they think that they have to. I think AI is going to make that a lot worse in the short term. So rather than a two page form, it'll be a five page form, because the AI is going to help you write it, then you sound a lot smarter. Boom. I just press a button and it's going to be good and accurate. But what's going to happen is the employee is then going to take your five page form, they're going to stick it in their AI, and that's going to spit out the two or three bullets that they actually need to know. My optimism comes not from that moment, because I think that moment, the performativeness of this is going to get a whole lot worse, right? Let me do a little bit of a tangent dating apps. Right? People on dating apps, you know, I can take a picture and then with AI, give myself nice, long, flowing hair, it's going to write some smart stuff about me. And actually, if it's not doing it already, it probably will soon, where my dating app profile is going to talk to your dating app profile AI is just going to met all that. By the time we meet together, we'll be like, wait a minute, that's not the person I thought you were at all. Right? But the hope, Chris, the hope is that then we're going to pop through that, and we're going to say, You know what? As a manager, my job is not to fill in a performance review. My job as a manager is to give a shit about the people that work with me. And I can skip all this kind of manufactured processes and actually just sit down with you and say, Hey, Chris, this is what I see, and this is how you can get better, and these are the risks that I'm willing to let you take, and this is perhaps the guard rails I'm going to put in place and stuff like that. But for me, AI is almost like we're pushing through this level of technological intervention that we have now, and we're going to become humans again on the other side.
Chris Rainey 43:37
So that's my hope. Now, I love that because, like, over the years, we've created all of these, not say, unnecessary, but a lot of these processes, right? Kind of like, don't work in the modern way of work, the way we work now, right? They were at a certain moment in time. They made sense. Maybe they're
Mike James Ross 43:55
made they're meant to simulate the caring. Yes,
Chris Rainey 43:59
that's a good way. I've never thought about it that way. But in fact, it does the opposite, because it removes you from the being a human,
Mike James Ross 44:06
exactly, exactly. So that much worse. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 44:09
I do. I see where you come from, both the Pro and the con. I think right now, the con that you mentioned, I never really looked at it through that lens, because it's making it less human short term, because the AI is going to be doing it's basically just going to be replacing the manual, what you is going to do anyway, but with even less personalization, because it's going to be so generic, just based on the algorithm and whatever it's actually, actually,
Mike James Ross 44:37
I'll push this a little bit Chris, because I think that what's going to happen is I'm going to happen is I'm going to plug the AI into my email system, right? And it's going to sit in every one of my meetings. The feedback that the AI is going to give you will be much better than any feedback I ever could because it will have read and thought about everything you've ever written. It'll it'll have listened to every podcast you've ever done, and it'll say, Hey, Chris, and it's so smart, if it's not there, it's going to be that smart in a week. It's going to. Give you feedback that is much better than the feedback I could have given you. I think that that's true. The problem is, is that it just strips away the humanity, which we've been, as you said, for years, stripping away ourselves because of the simulation of humanity, because scale and mobile God and people aren't doing reviews. I have to force them to do it. And there's a system and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, really, we just got to get rid of all that stuff and get back to actually. Back to actually being good people. To one
Chris Rainey 45:25
of, like the very Smith made, like a set sound like a small thing, but I've noticed it is now in any meetings that I'm in because I have the note taker, I am more present because I'm not thinking about writing notes, yeah, or read, you know, like I'm actually engaging with the person, as opposed to looking down writing notes, you know, or referring to something, because I can look at that later like it's recording to be able to do that. So I find that I'm way more engaged.
Mike James Ross 45:54
But how often do you look at it later? That's the thing. Never.
Chris Rainey 45:57
I mean outline. If I said I do, yeah. So taking
Mike James Ross 46:02
this thing that you did, taking notes, which was a total waste of time, but you help, and I'm not talking about you, Chris, but I feel you feel a sense of fear, right? What if I What if I miss something? Yeah,
Chris Rainey 46:13
oh, that you have to write in HR. Or the managers, they have to for, like, performance reviews, and they hate that, like, Oh God, I gotta write all this down. And only do I have to write down, I need to then do it again and put it into a system. It's like I had the same conversation with my doctor recently, and basically because in NHS, in the NHS, they still have to have a manual copy of everything, which is insane. So like watching my doctor write all of the details down in like, a folder, and then, and I was like, do you have to write that up later and put that in the computer? They're like, yeah. Like, manually. They're like, yeah. So I was like, the I was just like, in my I was like, think about the weight, how many more patients that person can see, and how much more engaged that they would be and happy that they would be in a conversation if they didn't have to do that, as simple as an AI note taker just sitting there. And the crazy thing is, a few months later, I went to a private doctor. What did they have a tablet on the table with an AI note taker? Because they were a private they were a private practice, and didn't need to adhere. And he was like, What do you mean? I was like, that your note taker, yeah? And I was like, he's like, Yeah, connects my emails, gives me a recap after I drop you an email. And I was just like, and now I actually felt like I was having someone, a conversation with someone who truly cared and was genuinely curious about, you know, why I was feeling unwell. And you know, it's way more, way better experience. Yeah, absolutely. So listen, I can talk to you forever, but where can people connect with you personally, and also, where can I grab a copy of the
Mike James Ross 47:44
book? The easiest place to find me. I have a website. Mike, James, ross.com, links into my LinkedIn, links into places where people can find the book. You can order the book online, anywhere it's available anywhere. Again, it's called intention. The surprising psychology of high performers. It's been such a pleasure. Chris, thanks for having me on
Chris Rainey 48:01
the show. Super fun, man. I wish all the best. And if everyone listening, wherever you're listening, watching right now, if you click the link below the link, the link will be in the description, so click that now, go connect with Mike, grab a copy in the book, and I wish you all the best. Until next week. Thanks. Very good. Thanks. Bye.
More from the HR Leaders Podcast
Mike James Ross, author of Intention: The Surprising Psychology of High Performers.