Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back to Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. In these episodes, I sit down with the people building, backing, and running better workplaces. I'm your host, Curtis Forbes, and my guest today is Dean Carter.
Speaker: Dean is ceo of Instill, a performance culture intelligence platform that takes a human-first, AI-empowered approach to accelerating the impact of teams through observed behaviors.
Speaker: Before stepping into the CEO seat, Dean spent more than two decades as a four-time Chief Human Resources Officer leading people functions at companies including Patagonia and Sears Kmart.
Speaker: He's an independent board director and a number one bestselling author, widely recognized for his regenerative approaches to both humanity and AI in the workplace. And still is built on a simple but radical idea that culture can be measured in real time, passively, without a single survey, by reading the behavioral signals already flowing through the conversations where work actually happens.
Speaker: Today, Dean's helping leaders see culture not as a feeling, but as something they can finally observe, understand, and improve. Welcome to Behind the Build, Dean. Thanks for joining me. Curtis, thank you. Looking forward to it.
Speaker: i um I've been really excited for this ah for this chat. I absolutely love everything about what Instill does and this idea of performance culture intelligence. it it It strikes a nerve. We'll have to dive more into that in a little bit. But first, let's talk a little bit about ah you. I mean, you did something most people never really do and in your seat after a couple of decades of of head of HR.
Speaker: you You publicly retired from the role, said you were done. it was final. what was What was going on for you then? What what made it you know that final? um I didn't want the option to go back.
Speaker: I knew that if I didn't do that publicly, then I would get calls over and over. And one of them would be so compelling, I'd say yes again. And so I would be in my fifth head of HR. And after being head of HR for Patagonia,
Speaker: to some extent Sears and Kmart, which believe it or not was a glorious experience. Yeah. The, uh, I had a wonderful time and I thought I was going to spend my rest of my career at fossil. And, uh, that was, I'm still, those people are some of the closest people and good best friends of my life.
Speaker: So, and i made wonderful friends and did some really cool things, won several awards at my short time at guild. And I just thought, I, I do love this work.
Speaker: I love the profession, yeah, yeah I have a, I really want to do something else and to force me and the community to not try to pull me back into the head of HR. I had to publicly resign because I knew someone would bring, you know, how about the head of, you know, this amazing company. I'm like, Oh man, I gotta say yes. that mean i I wanted to really, you know, close the door hard and force me
Speaker: and And the identity as a head of HR was so strong that yeah i it was hard to bust it. and to And I really had to to do something big to break that identity.
Speaker: That was bold. I mean, I'm not going to lie. that was ah That's bold. But, I mean, not long after, right, you you you said yes to running a startup, right? ah Clearly something new. But, I mean, CHRO to h r o to ceo is not the most common jump. In fact, very first time you and I met a while ago, that was one of the questions that I had asked you just, you know, casually in our conversation because it's such an interesting, an interesting move. So, so what made you say yes to this one?
Speaker: The, uh, uh, courted the CEO job before. So this isn't the first time that got close, um, at, uh, To some extent, you know, it wass a little bit of conversation about that maybe happening at Patagonia when we had leadership change. I was in conversation with a healthcare company a bit.
Speaker: um I've been told that before. Wow, that would be something you'd be, you should consider. i never really considered it in the past because some of the ones I knew, it just ate them up.
Speaker: And I just didn't want to, I didn't want to have that life. And then I thought, well, if I reinvented the HR job in a really different way, maybe I could reinvent the CEO in a different way if I got a shot at it.
Speaker: And so then when, um, a may what, who's the founder of is still called me, he said, I keep talking talking to people about, I need someone to run this and your name keeps coming up. Uh, let's talk. Cause I, I neither need to you you guys, and I need to do something or just tell them to stop talking about Dean Carter. so I met him and this is something instill does is something I'd wished I'd had a long time ago.
Speaker: yeah i wish I had this when I was at Patagonia so we could have our really understood the DNA of the company. I wish I'd had it at Sears so that we can understand what's going on the culture when we're you two hundred seventy thousand people in 270,000 people and in a really small HR team to some extent.
Speaker: So this really, is the thing that we've been looking for for a very long time. How do we get to what's going on in the company at the team level without asking a bunch of self-reported questions and fully in the flow work, passive. we vote Everyone's talking about passive data. How do you get passive data and information and get you know predictable information that connects to real outcomes?
Speaker: it's ah To me, it's like a it's like the holy grail that we've been searching for for a long time. So to be able to run it, And to be able to bring it to market yeah and and have the ears and the eyes of a head of a jar designing this is very different than, oh, I think this is cool that HR people might like Yeah. I mean, ah you just touched on a ah whole bunch of different things and that I could spend hours talking about, I feel like. Yeah.
Speaker: Being in the roles that you were in, like make you that perfect fit for what you're doing now. Um, just like you said, this was something you wish you had back then, but you know, obviously the technology didn't even exist to be able to do, you know, do the things that it can do now.
Speaker: Um, But now that you're, you know, now that obviously that you're able to, now that we have AI, now that we have, you know, this sophisticated technology to be able to do it, having somebody in the driver's seat who knows exactly what's going through the minds of those people leaders, right, is is ultimately who should be sitting in that seat. um You know, what what you what you said about surveys has been a belief that, a core belief that I have had for so long. And and it's not...
Speaker: It's not that they're not valuable because they are valuable. they're they're to they're There's value in the surveys. However, there is an inherent bias that you know that that they are dripping with for multiple reasons.
Speaker: um Obviously, this the self-reporting, you know, that is is the obvious one, you know, and we always kind of forget about the folks who are just kind of, you know, pressing those buttons to get get through the survey as fast as possible, right, with ah whatever agreeable marks, you know, is going to make them look good to their to their direct, you know, right them.
Speaker: throw rights right above themre sixty five They're like, oh my God. is Yeah. Exactly. So the the fact that you can create something that's hard to, what's also beautiful about, and we'll get more into instill in a second, right? I'm like, I'm creating this, you know, 45 minute commercial for AI, for instill. But um what's great about it, right, is the ability to capture this behavioral signal and you can't hide from it.
Speaker: No. It's there. you're not You don't need to be asked a question in order to deliver the signal. And you don't have to choose, just like a survey, you don't have to choose anything. And you don't have to physically interact with something to get the data. It's there.
Speaker: And you can't run from Unless, of course, you have an AI bot that's taking your place on the phone call, which case, you know, that's about the only way around it that I can see. The best way we also could get information about our behavior in um in some sort of situation at work was 360 feedback, which is the only thing more challenging than the engagement survey in terms of self-reported. Yeah. 360 feedback is loaded with bias, reasoning with bias.
Speaker: And so you get like five different opinions and perspectives of people who really don't want to give 360 feedback to you. and then ah And then you read it. And then what I didn't like about it as a head of HR is I knew when I gave 360 feedback to a leader, they were trying to figure out the person that gave them the feedback. Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Read their, oh, I know. The first thing they would say is like, oh, I know was this person. i know who said that, yeah. I know who said that. I'm like, no that's not the point of this thing. Yeah. And so what you do get with instill is the ability to not have 360 feedback, face to like eye to eye feedback.
Speaker: Like this is you know, feedback in panorama to some extent, because it is objective completely. It is intelligent completely. It is fully safe because it can determine your pay. It can determine your emotion. It has no vested interest in your,
Speaker: success or failure. needs you to know what's going on in the room, period. It reads the room better than any human could read the room. Because we are loaded with bias. So it doesn't, and it was actually trained not to have bias.
Speaker: So this is, um yeah, it was like we have six models to eliminate bias as much as possible. You can't eliminate bias completely. But the the the the thing is, even if it is biased, it doesn't have an impact on your job.
Speaker: Like there's a difference between, you know, bias that can actually impact your job in a 360 feedback. This is actually no one gets the information other than you. So this is practical and private for your own personal agency to make change so that you're a better player on the team.
Speaker: So let let me let me ask you a little bit about. Before we get into, because I also want to make sure we give everybody a really good understanding of exactly what Instill is. But but I think before we go there, yeah i kind of want to mine your experience a little bit.
Speaker: Okay. and And you led all of these people functions at, you know, very different companies. Very different. What did those cultures, I guess, I don't know, teach you about what actually makes a workplace work?
Speaker: Yeah. The right culture. And what I mean by that is at Fossil, the number one cultural part was the thing called irreverent humor.
Speaker: So the reason why that was important is because you really had to have a sense of humor to get people to buy a watch in a tin can. don't know if you remember. do. You have to laugh a little bit. It's literally in a tin can. And they had all these like old fifties kind of making fun of itself imagery on it. And the more kooky and the more weird we can make the tin cans, everyone collected the tin cans. I don't remember that, but people that like closets full of, you know, Patagonia tin cans, mean, fossil tin cans. But that was an important, once we started talking about the culture, irreverence was really important. The CEO would go on the speaker every day at 4.45 and what time?
Speaker: You know what time it is? You would be on a scooter and you'd like go on a glass and blow a space like a giant blowfish on the room. But it was just all about. And that's what made the place fun. Really leaning into the day fossil would no no longer be what it is. It's the day we stop being irreverently humorous. Funny. Like this. He didn't like the word fun or funny. He's like, it's just you just are.
Speaker: And that was one we were trying to determine our values. Someone said, it's a fun place to work. He goes, the day we call this a fun place to work, we're no longer fun. was like, okay, that's correct. then i ah And I got the master class in values and what that means in Patagonia like that.
Speaker: And then then I understood it wasn't just about behaviors. Values are about the the systems that you create around it. for So, for example, at Patagonia, um environmental activism is a value.
Speaker: And they hire for it. So if you're ah arrested for peacefully protesting for the environment at Patagonia, they pay for your bail, your jail time, and your spouse's jail time if they if you get thrown in jail. Wow. And all of your time off.
Speaker: Wow. So if you hire activists who are going to protest, who peacefully protest, well, you want on the back of work fast. So you pay for the bail to get them back. but This is a business concept, not like ah a benefit. So i if you're if you're a company that helps cut their companies or and not just pay tuition reimbursement, but pay for tuition up front because you believe that a better educated workforce is a better America.
Speaker: That's what Guild did. And every everyone got free education or higher education by being there called Guild for Guild. then My point of this is if I had hired someone, would visit a gaming company and there were like Red Bull everywhere and popcorn on the floor and bells ringing and score scorecards and it was loud. And I thought if I brought someone from Patagonia into this place, they would die.
Speaker: Yeah, it sounds like. Up in a corner and just like, well, they would have a hyperventilating. I took someone from that company and put them at Patagonia. It would be the worst day of their life.
Speaker: So when I talk about you have to have the right culture, you had to understand a reverence. You had to be an environmental activist. You had to either drink Red Bull and love gaming or you had to really value education.
Speaker: once you get to the core thing that you have to fundamentally believe and belate support both intrinsically and extrinsically, then you, then magic things happen.
Speaker: And, and it can't be just intrinsic and it can't just be extrinsic. It has to be both of those.
Speaker: First of all, I have to say, man, I really liked the way that you described all of those, you know, all of those places and those experiences. And, it almost makes you want to experience it for a day, or at least it makes me want to experience it for a day, you know, which, um, which is good, right? You should get that feeling if it's being described to you from the person who was head of people.
Speaker: Um, you, you're known for this regenerative approach, right? it's It's in your bio. And, um, for somebody hearing that maybe for the first time, what does, what does it mean when it comes to how we treat people at at work?
Speaker: i I stole this idea completely from Patakonia. So the ah the company's original mission was this. Build the best product, do no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire solutions to the environmental crisis.
Speaker: I pledge allegiance to the company in California. um Then ah they changed it to we're in business to save our own planet. There's a big difference between do no unnecessary harm and saving the planet.
Speaker: So what Yvonne determined was that instead of making sustainable made puffer jackets, we would move to regenerative agriculture, which means um traditional agriculture is the best example I can say is you plant something um when it starts to grow, a big microbial community underneath the ground, pulls all the nutrients in, feeds the corn, The corn grows. It produces something a year later.
Speaker: The farmer says, what did you produce? It says, I produced this 3.5 years of corn. Congratulations, you got a 3.5 corn. Takes all the corn and then slices back into the ground right after.
Speaker: and all of the microbial community dies. All the carbon that was squestered goes back into the air. And the soil is more dead than it was a year ago. so you have to pour water, fertilizers, and pesticides on it to make it grow the food that we have.
Speaker: I, after I heard that story of regenerative agriculture, I thought about what is a process that we have annually that people annually dislike where you get a 3.5 that is destructive according to neuroscience and takes six months to recover that you have to spend a lot of money to fix the damage that's been done. I'm like, that's the annual performance review. Yeah. I saw where you were going with that. We it.
Speaker: Like it's universally despised. And then we we talked a little bit about the engagement survey. You know, the intent of that is to get discretionary effort. So we not in HR, the people the people people, invented the most despised tool that people hate annually. And then we invented another tool to get discretionary effort out of you. So it's a manipulative set of questions. So you give 110% and you get rewarded for 110%, which comes out of your life and family. So my point is work should be,
Speaker: Work should be the same thing that we treat the environment. Right now, we have to spend all this money on health care, just like fertilizers and pesticides and water with humans, because we make them sick at work. Dr. Jack Pfeffer talks a lot about this work.
Speaker: And what I believe is that work should be restorative. And it came down to this question when we experimented with a few concepts at Patagonia.
Speaker: And if you can to answer this question right and say yes to it, For what I put into my work, I believe the company puts back equal or greater value to my life. And to to say that companies don't extract from people's life is inaccurate. We answered questions like this, or asked questions. As a result of working Patagonia, do you have a better relationship with your spouse than you would have otherwise?
Speaker: as a workfor As a result of working for Patagonia, do you have more time to spend with your children if you hadn't otherwise? Would you have more time to go the doctor, the dentist, do all these things? how do how does your How does work at Patagonia not just impact productivity and innovation and collaboration, but your life?
Speaker: And so when those numbers go up, then ah i believe that's that is what regenerative HR is, is actually putting more into people or at least put in as much as you extract from them so that every single human isn't depleted when they're done with working with you.
Speaker: They're actually energized and ready for next. I love that. I think that anybody listening to this is going to steal it. So um that's pretty good, Dean. um So kudos to Patagonia for, you know, at least jumpstarting that concept.
Speaker: um You know, You've also talked about, you know, for a lot of your career, culture was the thing. everyone Everyone talks about nobody could really measure. You know, it was something that was sort of soft and squishy. And and I'm kind of curious, you know, from the inside, and this this obviously leads into our conversation about it still, but I mean, how much of the work was flying blind? and and And when did you start believing that the culture could be measured in some way?
Speaker: Patagonia. When I got to Patagonia, was their first head of HR and real like head of HR. They had other people who did like payroll and did you know some stuff, but the first real head of HR.
Speaker: And I thought, wow, everyone loves work here. Everyone's smiling. There's no annual performance review. There's no engagement survey.
Speaker: There's none all the junk and tools that, you know, that I came with my backpack here to to do. And the place seems to be running pretty well. So my view of it was like looking around the room, I'm like, don't mess this up.
Speaker: And so I knew that Patagonia was going to grow because I knew how much money we were making and I knew was going to catch on fire. And so my goal at Patagonia was to capture as much of this culture as I could so that when we scaled and went from, you know, 250 to 2 billion, like what would the, would we still recognize the company?
Speaker: And, that was really important to me. I, I did lots of things. I would, i had to spend a lot of time listening, listening to you know, philosophers, listening to Kim Stroud, who worked for the company from the very beginning, listening to Mona Chouinard, the wife of Yvonne Chouinard, to Rick Ridgeway, mountaineer who'd been with the company from the very beginning. I just listened to all these storytellers.
Speaker: And that was the only way. Val Franco, who ran the archives, I ah can think of, and that was the only way I could just write it down. i went into the archives and i read every single newsletter that ev was ever written by Patagonia so I'd know its roots.
Speaker: I could look at all the old clothes. I could look at old pictures and I just studied it. Now that took a lot of work for me, for me to do all this research and study it.
Speaker: And I felt like I got to really got to know the culture because I worked that hard, but there, I just knew there was other ways to get to know a culture and what it is then, you know, doing all the, you know spending time in the archives, doing all the things that I did at Patagonia to make sure that i knew what it was at at its core. Yeah.
Speaker: And, uh, and so when I knew, i believe in technology, I love technology. And that's good. You should. i do. I do. love I love tech and I, ah I love data and I, you know, believe in running an HR team, you know, a database HR team, hundred percent, not gut. You only get, you earn gut because of, you know, the data.
Speaker: That's my view. I, um, I knew technology would come around someday that we would be able to passively understand culture. And then when AI came around, I jumped on it fast and became kind of known for a person who was working to apply AI to HR.
Speaker: And when it still found me, thought, I manifested this. I manifested it. I put it out into the universe universe. I'm like, how cool would it be to work for a company as a CEO bringing this to the world?
Speaker: Yeah. The thing that I always wanted. Yeah. That's very cool. What is that that you just said you you earn, you earn gut. What was the rest of it? Oh, it was, yeah.
Speaker: You, you, data enables you to use your gut. Like you can't just use your gut. Right. Tons and tons of data so that you can use your gut.
Speaker: you know You earn gut through data. Okay. I love that. I love that. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to i'm gonna have to frame that. So this brings us so it brings us to instill, for anyone who hasn't seen it, tell us what it is. What is it? What's the problem you set out to solve?
Speaker: The problem was, how do you measure culture? How do you understand it? So everyone said culture is strategy for breakfast. There's tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of 50 years of research that says how the direct correlation between culture and outcomes The greatest research scientists in the world, Amy Emerson talks about the importance of psychological safety. There's just not, there's no, there are very few articles that say culture doesn't matter.
Speaker: Every single thing says it matters in a big time, but we've never been able to measure it. So we use things around it, like the engagement survey, or we'd hire consultants to measure it. And so what it still does is it, first of all, define culture, which is how people work together.
Speaker: Not how I, what I believe, but what are the, how do people treat each other when they're at work? So how does it feel to be in the room and how do we get that work done together? That's the definition.
Speaker: So then to peel that apart and see it, uh, the founder built a series of agents to sit in rooms where people were meeting and having conversations. And it listens for signals and behavior signals around trust and psychological safety and collaboration and innovation inclusion.
Speaker: And any other you know values that a company would put in or any other cultural icons that they wanted to capture. And at the end of it, there's also ah an agent of agents that sits over it to go, okay, what these signals are larger, smaller, how to score this.
Speaker: And at the end of the meeting, this is a, ends to a mean, but every single person gets their own email. Every single person. Now you have to go somewhere, but an email gets sent to you can open it or not. And it has,
Speaker: Everything had been the team's behaviors on it. These are what shapes trust, psychological safety, and this is how this team behaved. It also has information about my behavior and how I impacted this, and I am scored on every single one the I just talked about.
Speaker: The meeting is also scored towards, is this a good meeting? Like, did you have, good did you have an agenda? Did you stick to it? Did you wander around? Was there good decision-making? And these are scored separately, independently.
Speaker: So what this means is the score for this meeting rolls up with the last score to the meeting. So it is a LLM, it's intelligent. So it knows trend, it knows what's moving, knows what's happening. At the same time, that score rolls up at the team level all the way to the company level. So the company score and the team scores are completely moving every single time. Every single time someone meets it at Instill or at Instill company, the culture company score changes up or down. The score matters and it doesn't matter. It's about relevance.
Speaker: Either you're moving or not, you're going up, down or not. And are you being intentional about the behavior? So I get the opportunity in a really fair way, an objective way to hear information about my behavior and I can choose to change that. So what could happen is if you imagine every single time, every single person you meet, team meets or your company, say you 10,000 people.
Speaker: Every single time they have a meeting, they get information about one behavior at least that they can change to make the team perform a little bit better. So imagine like 10,000 times a week, 10,000 people are a little bit better next week than they were last week.
Speaker: That's what it still does. like that is So it really breaks down culture to the behavioral level so that people have the opportunity to adjust it and change it.
Speaker: And then once you can connect that to, ah HR outcomes, business outcomes, and you can understand for your particular company, what are the dials you need to turn up and when the ones that don't matter when you want to build and drive your culture and and sustain it.
Speaker: I love that. I mean, I think a lot of culture tools are basically like, you know, a survey with a nicer interface. But it still really goes and in in a very different direction.
Speaker: You measure, I think you mentioned you measured five performance culture vitals, right? it's um You can correct me if I'm wrong. See if I get this right. It's trust, psychological safety, innovation, inclusion, respect.
Speaker: ah Burnout, resilience to burnout. Resilience to burnout. Thank you. resili Why those five? what what Why the score? ah Why score the team rather than the individual?
Speaker: The way we got to that, because there's a lot of things that could be signals, accountability. There's a lot of things around culture that you know could be important. Those were, we just studied what the experts have been saying for years and years and years.
Speaker: Like these five things are the top things. There probably 10 things or 20 things at Shape Culture, but we really wanted to pick five that it if a company focuses on these things, have the highest likelihood of high performance.
Speaker: So these are the ones, not just because they're cool or good, you it feels good to have collaboration or feels good for inclusion or feels good to not burn out. These are the five that are scientifically and data-based over the past 50 years of research that are most likely to drive high performance for the company. So that's why we picked up five.
Speaker: And we also realize that just because we picked those five and benchmark them, everyone's culture is different. So you have the ability to carry your own values and your own you know parts of culture too. So 70% is you know the own company. And then we measure that. And then you know another 30% is ones we do for everyone just to benchmark.
Speaker: But that's what, um that is why it the, the, there were a lot of debate about the five, the Really? We get tested it, tested, tested, and those are the ones that actually drive high performance. Now, the reason we do it at the team level is because no one gets work done alone.
Speaker: You could work in an area, but ultimately great work happens when teams come together, come together. That's actually where real work happens. And so to understand what culture is, it's culture. a single person isn't culture. The culture is how, a you know, a group of people come together and treat each other.
Speaker: That very definition. So we have to measure it at the team level. Now you do get scored individually. You are the really only one who sees that scored just so I can have some level of adjacency, not on my, you know, how's my culture score, but how am I impacting the team?
Speaker: And that's the thing that I want to know more. It's like, How can I get better at helping this team be be a better high performing team and the people around me? Yeah. How do I impact the team? I ah i want to put, i'm I'm not always into labels, but I really do kind of want to put a name.
Speaker: on what this is because, you know, it's not engagement surveys. It's not performance management. It's, um, it's genuinely a new category. Um, I, I tend to refer to this as behavioral workforce intelligence. I'm kind of curious, does that, does that land for you? How do you describe the category in your own, in your own words? It is, i would say the foundation is, um, behavioral workforce intelligences of intelligence. So I think that's it on top of it.
Speaker: is so what do you do with that? It's also a culture operating system. So I can ask for culture. So culture impacts everything in even at then and at the behavior level, you can connect it to a lot of things. You can determine you know the impact for a coaching intervention.
Speaker: You had a town hall. Did that change behavior? You had a um a new you know ah program that you launched. Did that change behavior? Someone took a coaching course. Did that change behavior? i changed A change of structure team. Did that change behavior?
Speaker: All these questions we um we weren't able to ask until the another the next one year later survey. You can see changes absolutely fast now. So we're very absolutely fast. Yeah, yeah. Very quickly. So that, i I don't know what to call this. I struggle with it sometimes, but I think this, the the core of it is behavioral intelligence.
Speaker: that enables one of the things is an operating system for culture. You're talking about, you know, fast. give me a moment Give me a moment where the signal told you something that the people in the room didn't even know about themselves.
Speaker: o I'm sure you've had a moment, right, where where you see the email come back and you're like, what? I did get one, like the second meeting, you got one like i got a really low inclusion score. I'm like, what the?
Speaker: this i'm really thinking i know I know who gave me that feedback. I have bad or inclusions. Like, gosh, dang it. So what what's the deal? And I read it and it said, you know, it does it in third person and the conversation is done in growth mindset. So it says, you know, Dean and in the room, you paid a lot of attention to three engineers because they were the most vocal voices in the room.
Speaker: There are actually two people in the room that you didn't pay much attention to and given the background, you probably should have paid your attention to to to. Maybe you might consider next time, you know, engaging them first and engaging more people in the room, just not in addition to the you know the engineers, the loudest voices.
Speaker: I'm sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. The next meeting I did. oh it's so much to say. and why she's quiet because and didn't say anything. She lives in Ukraine and that's a in Kiev.
Speaker: So, yeah, just she's thinking about safety, not psychological safety. She's thinking about that. So I have to engage her and bring her into the conversation. And by the way, she's brilliant. I start with UX now and I move to the other ones. So my inclusion score went up. That's not the point.
Speaker: I have a better team and I make better decisions when I start with her first. I love that. That's very cool. um No one would have told me that. No one, no one on the team would have ever told me that.
Speaker: There's, um it brings up something that's really interesting to to think about is that there's, i think that there's, right, like this, um you know, 2,000 pound gorilla in the room, right? The, the,
Speaker: There's the worry that the second you say you're reading behavior, right? It's like, is this a surveillance tool? So how do you draw the line between intelligence and spying, right? Look, where where does a human have to step in?
Speaker: That is the fundamental question. And we we're very concerned about this being used as a surveillance tool. And we did everything we could to design it out because that was a first design principle is for it not to be surveillance.
Speaker: So what it does is any information you get about you is for you only. Your manager can't see it No one can see it. So we make it private to you. So that was the first thing. um All of our data is encrypted. No one can get into it other than you.
Speaker: Now, this we de-identified what happens to the team level at any team smaller than four. So the team has to be five enough even to report on what's happening with the team at a more senior level.
Speaker: So we did what we could to protect it. And we have to do a lot of change management because the moment a manager uses this in a performative way to you know see what employees are doing, what they're doing wrong, that that then it becomes a useless tool. No one's going to use it.
Speaker: The moment people see they have agency to change their behavior way in advance of getting a performance review or something like that, then it becomes a really powerful tool. tool I believe that that companies like Instill are some of the first that really help people and may save their jobs versus trying to take it.
Speaker: There's nothing about Instill that would take someone's job, nothing. but there is everything about might preserve it and help them get better at it. So it's not doing anything you're doing already at all, but it is, should do things that help you do what you're doing already a lot better.
Speaker: Let me ask you, and, and um, I, I, when you talk about the steps that you take to, you know, make sure that, you know, the, um,
Speaker: it's, it's not a surveillance tool, right. And, and how, you know, your individual results are, are sent directly to you. Does, is there a recommendation to use personal email accounts instead of work email? Cause obviously work email can, can be accessed, you know, by your, the, the business is there, um Or maybe, i don't know, maybe maybe it doesn't get that far. We don't look at were a email.
Speaker: So that's not something we observe. So we feel like there's a lot of information in email that may not help us actually make, create noise. Oh, I meant get them at the results being sent to. Oh, you know what? I guess someone could intercept enemy. If they really wanted to see it, they could intercept the email. If they worked really hard. You got to work. really Yeah. If someone, you know, wanted to do that. Yeah, they could.
Speaker: But then they're not just spying on the still they're expiring everything. Right. I mean, at that at that point in time, you're you're the surveillance goes far beyond anything. that yeah would be Anything you're doing is being surveilled. Yeah. Everything. So it's not something that, oh, my God, you know, instills the only thing they found out about you. Right. but That in that case, you know, there's there. there They're looking at your badge in and out. They're looking at your keystrokes or looking at your email. They're looking at your Slack. My guess is someone's doing that level of surveillance.
Speaker: Then all the, all the, the, you know, tools that we would put in place wouldn't work. If someone really wants to do that, we probably could. Dean, let's ah let's talk AI.
Speaker: you know I think your your take is is sharper than than most, given the seat that you're in. A lot of companies right now are bolting AI onto the work they already do, and they get to do it a little bit faster, right?
Speaker: And you've talked about this being table stakes, right, in the conversations that we've had. um What's the more interesting question I think that we should be asking of AI?
Speaker: Well, there's... You can ask AI anything. That's, I think that's the thing to remember. You can ask it anything. The thing is, don't let it think for you. This is the, I think, and this, I'm not talking, saying anything. Not a lot of other people are saying, but what I, AI is best either when you're curious about something, you need something confirmed and then you still know it's going to not be maybe exactly right.
Speaker: You can, ah you can also use it for being more creative. Like it's helpful This is a silly example, but it's helpful for me when I cook, like when I make something, I'll work on a recipe. I'm like, do you want to try this in Mediterranean style or maybe a little bit of like Asian fusion? I'm like, wow, I like that.
Speaker: I love that. I'll try Asian fusion tonight. How do I do that? ever day I've never made Asian fusion food before. where' this like you know it It does make me more creative when I use it in creative ways.
Speaker: If I just have it think for me, like, and I just like, I only want to make this type of food, tell me how to make that. And I kind of already know how to make it. Then I'm not thinking that much. But my view is using AI to um bring you information so you can make better decisions.
Speaker: That is the ultimate use of AI. It's like use it as a giant research library. and then also if you can get it to do the things that you, you know what good looks like and have it it do that for you.
Speaker: And I, if it's something you know you can do, and it would take you a week, and you know exactly the outcome that you want, having AI do it an hour is a wild savings time.
Speaker: Don't have it do anything that you have no idea what to do ever, because it will mess up. And you have to catch it. you kept to You have to know when it messes up, and it will.
Speaker: Yeah. ah Yeah. Get things wrong. Yeah. just is' It's not perfect. It isn't. And I don't think anyone should think it is. I think you've talked a lot about how um AI can help us do things that we genuinely could even never have done before. Right. I mean, measuring culture in real time, passively in the flow of of work feels like one of those, like we could have never done this before. yeah things Right. I mean, i couldn't run this company without it.
Speaker: Not that it's because it's an AI company, but I i have lots of assistants that I build for for me for financial support. I have a lot of assistants that I build for me around marketing support. I have a lot of assistants even around legal support. And so I can build these agents, which are pretty darn smart to do things that I would have. I mean, I still have someone does a little bit of legal work.
Speaker: Someone does a little bit of, you know, finance and accounting for us. but I don't need a team of 20 people or 15 people to do that um because it enables me to do as a startup, um and I think this is what's great about AI. It's going to enable a lot of little companies to start without having this fleet of people with you, and this enables the other fleet of people to do some really cool stuff too. So i my view is you know we're in really, as long as we don't,
Speaker: and As long it doesn't blow us all up. absolutely Which it could. that that I did ask it once, what is the point that you can determine that humans are no longer necessary? And I said, wow, that you asked that is very human because, you know, that's not something AI asks itself.
Speaker: like And I said, the thing about it, Dean, um is that humans design everything AI does. And so what could happen if humans aren't paying attention that the wonderful things that make you human, you could quietly and unknowingly and silently give it away.
Speaker: And that was a really powerful ending of that, which is AI won't be able to do anything. We don't give it.
Speaker: And so to some extent, whatever it is, we, we choose to enable it to do it will. because it can. And so I just, we need to be very careful about what we enable AI to do because it can.
Speaker: One thing that I think is, is,
Speaker: or i'd I'd be interested to touch on here. I think a a lot of so mostly small business leaders, I think they hear AI and they feel, uh, behind, or maybe they assume it's not built for a small team.
Speaker: um You just made a comment a little bit ago about the size of a team. And you talked about a team even as small as five people. Five people is an incredibly small team. i mean, what what would you tell an owner, an operator, you know an HR practitioner who thinks that this kind of intelligence is only for enterprise?
Speaker: oh I think it's more perfect for small companies. Do you? 100%. Not even blinking. Like that is the biggest gift you can have right now as AI to run your company. You can do things and get to information so fast that you would hire it out to someone else.
Speaker: When I get sales pitches, just for all of you who are pitching me on LinkedIn, aye I copied the pitch and put it into chat GPT and ask it if it can do this. And it goes, oh yeah, I can do that. I'm like, okay, do that for me.
Speaker: So I, i i anyone who says they can service for me, especially if I get 10 of them a week, you know, the same exact service, I'm like, well, someone else is using AI to deliver this service. So I'm going to be able to do this too. So the bar is so low, I'm getting 10 of these a day. So anyhow, that's, that's a great time to be a small business person because you really can do things that would be impossible do.
Speaker: I can do things with finance. I don't have finance degree, but I can do amazing things. I can build spreadsheets and really complex things to understand all the way down from my pricing model to my go-to-market model like that.
Speaker: Yeah. It's amazing. All of a sudden I became so good at Excel, whereas I used to be used to never be able to do that. Me too. Yeah. But I know Excel enough to know when it messes up. I'm like, that cell doesn't look right. You know, talking about that.
Speaker: And I can design beautiful things like, like, creatively, you know, before I'd have to go through, so you know, 16 iterations with um an artist. and Yeah. Yeah. It's really, really fast. And ultimately, you know, you want an artist to be the one who actually does the final product, but I want to iterate on my own.
Speaker: Right. Right. Dean, zoom out a little bit. um When you think about like the next five years of work, what's the shift you think leaders or maybe,
Speaker: underestimating right now, you know, or or yeah. What do you think they're underestimating? And then it may be as AI takes on more, what do you think becomes more important about the human side of the of the work?
Speaker: Well, there's a lot of doom and gloom at the moment where it's just going to take up everyone's job. It's not going be at work. I don't believe that I believe. And not that what I believe matters. I believe we're clever.
Speaker: We're wired to work. We are wired for it. We're wired to collaborate. We're wired to do this. And I think that whatever it is that comes, I don't i don't think it's going to be the government's role to figure this out. But I believe in human human nature that we'll figure out how to make a living from this. It may not look the way way we've made a living in the past. And by the way, these some of these concepts in the way we make living now didn't exist 300 years ago or 200 years ago. so Right, right. We're making money, and we think people made money like this forever. That's not true.
Speaker: And so I just think that what we what we can't do in five years, I can't ah can't tell you what it's going to look like, but I can tell you it's going to be something that we never would have imagined.
Speaker: that That is what I know. I mean, I think um you study history, right? The Industrial Revolution killed so many jobs, but it also created so many more, right? The internet or even just computers, right? Computers killed a lot of jobs. It created a lot more. The internet killed a lot of jobs. It created a lot more. And we're in the age of information right now. the AI...
Speaker: The AI. um AI is, yeah, it's it's going to kill a lot of jobs, but it's also going to create a lot. um but I don't share the doom and gloom. um i think there's doom for some, but I definitely think there's a sunny side of it. And I think that that's part that a lot of folks maybe underestimate.
Speaker: I'm not building a bunker. I'm going to get the next time I'm spending my money on a bunker. I'm not going to do that. I believe in humans enough. and By the way, if it all goes to, to you know, a big problem, i I don't want to be here after it's all messed up. Yeah. yeahm I'm not going to go to a bunker. You know, one of the and one of the things i'm I'm sure as a founder, right, you'll when maybe you're you're having a ah creative moment, right? And you're you're thinking about what life looks like when Instill has been ah adopted, you know, in 99% of workplaces, you know, across the globe.
Speaker: um If that behavioral workforce intelligence becomes normal, paint me a picture of of this great workplace that that doesn't exist yet today. 50% of CEOs have HR experience.
Speaker: this This conversation actually very very well tethers to to one of the ones I had very recently with David Gutman about, you know, as a really experienced business owner, multiple exit founder, his insistence that in the companies he advises and works with, that he puts in leadership, in he puts in the HR function really experienced leaders in other, from other segments, right? Because of the importance and the significance, right?
Speaker: Of that function itself. So it's very interesting rather than having the, the, the moving the HR into other roles, he takes the talent from the pool, right? That's come up through other roles because traditionally, right? There's, there's,
Speaker: you know that's where so much of the the talent concentrates and move it up into senior HR roles because of its importance in the organization. And I, when I was at Patagonia, the when I started the job, the day I started job, the CFO and general counsel reported to me.
Speaker: So what if you rotate a c ah head of HR into the head of finance job? So that's possible now. like it.
Speaker: I can, I can, I can lead a finance team and I can be, I can, people who do that pretty darn good. And I can learn what that needs to be. I can tell you right now, I'm, I have learned so much being a CEO about what it is to let them thinking about, you know, finance and a P and l I'm never going to be, you know, perfect on that, nor is a CFO ever going to be a very perfect head of HR someday, but, but I'll pick up the skills and capabilities. And I, I think that, uh,
Speaker: The paradigm that we've had is, you know, put someone into HR. I think you need to put ah HR people into operational roles and into finance and those things. And you'll have the best CEO that you've ever had.
Speaker: And my belief is, just to be honest, a lot of what finance has been doing is ai is going to be able to do. Sure. And legal. And legal. So those two roles, you know, the access to knowledge and information and be able to put numbers together. AI can do that. What it can't do is to understand the uniqueness of what it is to be human.
Speaker: And the EQ that's required to do this job is going to be essential as a CEO. And I believe that is going to be more and more people. If I see, if it's still the challenge we've had since 1920, we've had gap principles, ways of really understanding financial data and be able to interpret that and report that to the board. We've never had really good pieces of data other than turnover, a number of employees and you know some level of information, but never down to the behavior level. We're getting pretty good at skills, but we've never gotten down to the behavior level. Once we get a really good piece of data in terms of understanding you know what drives um outcomes in business in the same way finance and marketing have had in the past,
Speaker: If we get down to that granular level of data, then the job becomes the most powerful job and the most important job, I think, to lead companies in the future. These are some wise words. Dean, this is good because I i want to i want to wrap up with this question. if ah If a leader were to kind of come to you and say that they want to build a culture where the people – thrive, not just survive, right? what What is the most important piece of advice that you're going to give them?
Speaker: Ask them and they'll tell you. So the listening, right? Yeah. They, people know what it is, what it means. So if you, if you say, um I think what people need is more snacks or ping pong tables or whatever, people are out all day long. in the second i thing My, my view is,
Speaker: The best way to understand in this, I've had situations where I had people having terrible experiences and I made lots of assumptions around why that was happening. I just go in and listen. What's going on?
Speaker: And I could give you so numerous examples. Tell me what's happening with your experience. And then they start to say, well, this is happening. This is happening. This is happening. I'm like, what would be your ideal situation? This, this, and this.
Speaker: Every single time it costs me no money. It gets better and things improve. And everyone else, someone else in another team is having a better time too. So I, I don't, don't make any assumptions.
Speaker: And if you really want to know how to great, great experiences where people thrive and companies make money to ask them, they have more answers than you think.
Speaker: And it's not the other people in the C-suite. Ask them. I like it. Ask them. Dean, thank you. Thanks so much for joining me. Appreciate you taking the time today.
Speaker: was delight. Thank you so much. Thanks to all you watching and listening to Mustard Hub Voices Behind the Build. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. And please visit mustardhub.com to learn more about Mustard Hub, AI predictive foresight, and how we power behavioral workforce intelligence for the global workforce.
Speaker: Until next time.
