#91 Measure what matters, Jacob Chase, CEO, The INFIN

DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

• What caring in the workplace means for Jacob.
• How performance shapes outcomes.
• How human capital is often left vague and subjective.
• Connecting individual contributions directly to business results.

RESOURCES

Transcript from the interview

Graeme Cowan  00:01

Today’s guest is Jacob Chase, and he has a really interesting background. He started off in Moore Street as a financial analyst and learned about the numbers that help companies perform well. He then moved back to his native Denver and started the real estate company and built that to 150 people before selling it. He then started a company called in thin and what that does is identify which people in the organization are doing the best work, and make sure they’re being well paid for that. And it’s not always the people that in the hierarchy that are doing the best work. Often it can be someone at a lower level, and it gives an example of a Accounts Payable person who was doing way more than their job description and wanted to make sure they were properly rewarded. And this new business helps to monitor everyone’s contribution in real time. What gets measured gets managed. And I think you’ll learn a lot what gets measured gets managed. And I’m sure you learn a lot from Jacob. I did enjoy. It’s a real pleasure to welcome Jacob. Chase the caring CEO. Welcome Jacob.

Jacob Chase  01:27

Thanks, Graeme, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Graeme Cowan  01:30

Jacob. What does care in workplace mean to you?

Jacob Chase  01:34

Yeah, I mean to me, there’s kind of two dimensions to it, right? Where the individual. Each person has to care about their contribution that they’re making in the workplace, but the workplace has to reciprocate that as well, with an alignment, so to speak, of kind of preserving the interest of the organization as well as with the individual. I think that’s really what it all comes down

Graeme Cowan  01:59

to. For me. Yeah, fantastic. And just for our listeners, you know, you’ve had a interesting career in three parts, sort of thing. Would you mind just giving them a bit more background about, you know, where you came from and where you are now into the work you

Jacob Chase  02:14

do? Yeah, absolutely. So I’m out of Denver. I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, went to school out here, and my first kind of career stint was on Wall Street, where started a couple years in investment banking, and then worked at a top hedge fund for a number of years as well. That actually wound up taking me around the world and seeing some interesting places, along with the finance work we were doing. Towards the end of that, me and a buddy started buying some real estate back in Denver, and that turned into kind of a side hustle that grew up and brought me off of Wall Street, brought me back to Denver, and me and a partner built a diversified real estate platform. And you know, that was back in 2017 when we started. And you know, ultimately we had kind of a traditional private equity type real estate business, and then several other ancillary service companies to support those investments, as well as support third parties. And that was a great run when, you know, running that business, we had 150 people was really when I started, you know, thinking through the lens of, how do you really take care of a workforce? How do you really align people with, you know, the work that the company needs and the work that the that is going to bring them, kind of the personal satisfaction and career development. And we sold out of the business in 2023 which led to my current venture, which is a company called the infin, which we help to decentralize assessment in the workplace in a way that allows the individual contribution to Team outcomes to be measurable and provide them the feedback of, you know, what is valued from the team around them for a base of their contribution, and how is it actually aligning with business success? And so that’s, you know, the work that I’m doing now, which you know, really stem from an executive position in the real estate business over, you know, managing a lot of people that you know you really want to give your best to and get the best from, and really trying to put some more measurable dynamics around how you actually do that.

Graeme Cowan  04:15

Yeah, I really want to go into that, but just jump back now to Wall Street and the work you’re doing there, I’m sure it was very much about numbers. What was the area you specialized in, and what did you learn during your period there?

Jacob Chase  04:30

So my first job was as a restructuring investment banker at a firm called Lazard, and this was during the height of the financial crisis. And, you know, I was a, you know, a non target contributor to that team, but it was the best first job I could have ever imagined. It was, you know, I’m working on deals in the boardroom that I’m reading about on the front page of the Wall Street Journal the next day, and just getting an incredible crash course in. Financial analytics, and, you know, high expectations for, you know, work performance and and learning, you know, real detail orientation about what quality work actually looks like. And so I took a ton from that first two years, which then kind of rolled into the hedge fund position, which was focused on distressed credit investing, where, you know, a lot of companies take loans that they can’t necessarily repay. And what do you do in those situations? How do you, you know, make money on behalf of your investors? And we were very collaborative firm that would try to partner with or with companies and management teams in order to manage their debt loads while obviously generating returns for ourselves at the same time. And so there was a tremendous kind of scope of the type of businesses that we were exposed to where, you know, we were all generalists. We didn’t have specific industry focused. We just got a really good exposure to the world of business all of the different types and formats and structures that work and don’t work. And I really took a lot away from that in, you know, in how kind of the economy works, and how it’s driven by companies, which are ultimately driven by the people who are working there.

Graeme Cowan  06:15

Yeah, and you mentioned just a moment ago that it was very collaborative team, and that doesn’t always happen in any workplace. You know, it can be competitive when you lose. Who was it that really contributed to that collaborative environment? Was there a particular leader that made that happen? And what did they do? Yeah, I mean,

Jacob Chase  06:36

look, one of the one of the company’s founders, a gentleman named Michael Gordon, was, you know, big on reputation. And you know, we wanted a reputation as a as a partner in difficult situations where we could be reliable and trustworthy and obviously with our own self interest. But it really kind of demonstrated the alignment that was required for successful outcomes. And you know, I think him helping to manage the firm’s reputation, made sure that we were only involved in situations where we could act accordingly, and I think that had a big impact on me.

Graeme Cowan  07:11

Yeah, and what did he do to enhance that reputation? I guess delivering good deals where everyone’s happy is obviously a pretty good place to start. Was there anything else City did that really provided, I guess, a roadmap of the culture that produced good results.

Jacob Chase  07:31

I mean, I think in large part it came from more of a governance perspective of which deals were selected for, and what were the dynamics of the situation and the stands that we were going to have to take as an institution, and were they aligned with what we wanted to promote? And, you know, and I think, through those actions, you quickly learn, you know, as a member of the squad to make sure that you’re aligned, and I think that those demonstrations were probably what reinforced that more than anything else?

Graeme Cowan  08:02

Yeah, I recently interviewed Alex Lou and he’s the, he was the global managing partner and chairman of Carney, a management consulting company. And it’s interesting, he was at the end of his career. Is but he was saying that, you know, what he really learned was that there’s, you know, three cleans, three things clients look for. It’s competence. You know, feeling confident you can do it, confidence that you know you’ll make it happen. And the third element for him was care. And he, after reflecting on 50 years of business, he felt the care component was what won or lost it, because there are lots of other competent ones there. But I guess that comes back to your boss having great reputation, and that great reputation probably does indicate that you cared about the work you did and cared about the results you delivered.

Jacob Chase  08:52

Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me a little bit of a warren buffett quote where you when you’re looking for people, you want competence, you want energy and you want good morals. Is if you only have two of the three, the lack of the third is always going to kill you. And I think there’s, you know, there’s some, some wisdom in that,

Graeme Cowan  09:12

going from that, you know, we’ve got a big firm, lots of support around you, to then deciding to start your own business in real estate. What was that first sort of six months like?

Jacob Chase  09:23

Well, look, it was interesting to leave Wall Street right where there was not a path that was well trodden. You know, most people were kind of very happy with the situation, and I was too. But there was always kind of an internal desire to, you know, go figure it out on my own to some degree, yeah, and a willingness for the trial by fire. And a, you know, I think a little bit more of a risk appetite too, not in the sense of, like, you know, investing capital in risky ways, but in a sense of taking some personal risk, allowing things to be dynamic. The early days were, they were. Hard, right? We had, you know, there’s a very small number of us. We built the team over time. It was acquiring properties and learning how to manage them and build the team to do so as we went, and then also soliciting third party business. It’s like we had these services that we needed to kind of augment outside of our own portfolios. And it was a lot of kind of early learning. A lot of the, I think, pressure dynamics of Wall Street, where it was very much a performed expectations type environment, just didn’t translate well. I was managing the small team early on, and, you know, there was a lot of adaptation required for my own leadership to, you know, align with the reality of kind of the folks I’m working with, their interests and skill sets and, you know, and learn how to adapt myself. I think was probably some of the hardest early stuff that I had to learn. Yeah. So what sort of changes did you make,

Graeme Cowan  11:00

you know, when you realize that your leadership wasn’t quite right and you had to do things a bit differently.

Jacob Chase  11:06

I mean, I think one was recognizing that the independence that was largely granted on Wall Street because of the expectations of, you know, you just do your job and perform didn’t translate as well, and that people needed more attention towards progressing the work. And, you know, I think understanding that probably took me longer than I should have, but there was a lot more of a kind of a coaching aspect, a lot more of an accountability aspect that I just that I wasn’t used to and what didn’t come naturally to me, but it was very clearly demanded by our team and the folks that we’re working with, and that, you know, I was the one who’s going to have to change in order to, you know, have a successful outcome.

Graeme Cowan  11:54

And what changes did you make?

Jacob Chase  11:56

I mean, I think one in one of tone was a big one, you know, that was one that being too harsh or being too demanding or being too authoritarian to a certain degree really had to change and learning how to collaborate, understand where people are, what they need to be successful, and being more, I think, empathetic to that situation required a lot of change in communication style, in kind of structure, in, you know, simple things like meeting cadence and agendas, and, you know, helping people be successful by being prepared based on these couple things. And that went a long ways to helping us gain momentum.

Graeme Cowan  12:39

Yeah, it’s quite a different thing to have a, you know, a company which has got five people, up to 150 with the, you know, I guess the last, say, the last couple of years, how do you keep your finger on the pulse of what was happening across 150 people?

Jacob Chase  12:57

Yeah, look, it was a challenge. And, you know, we had six individual businesses, each with, you know, various capabilities of leadership within them. And you know, we had to understand, where could we be more hands off? Where did we have to be more hands on? And you know, as the company grew, it became less and less practical to be more and more and more hands on. And so, you know, we wanted to figure out, like, you know, how do you really, you know, understand who your contributors are, you know, put in kind of a typical HR review process and and that, still, I think, wasn’t largely that meaningful, both for the participants and for the organization. And really looked to, you know, to really what I’m doing now to help to try to solve some of those issues.

Graeme Cowan  13:47

What did you how did you go about, I guess, identifying the key people in your business, the ones that made a big difference, a considerable difference to the success of the company.

Jacob Chase  14:00

Well as the company grew, you know, the key people were well known. You know, when we’re at 50 people, you know who everyone is. You know who the go to people are. You know exactly the workload that they’re carrying and the dependencies each team has on them. And it was really kind of when we get to that 120 or 150 person size, where you start to lose touch with that, where, you know, I was no longer hiring everyone personally and didn’t have, you know, and people were joining the company that I’d never met before and didn’t have any visibility into their roles or contribution, or very limited visibility. And so ultimately, you know, we tried, you know, the nine boxing and the kind of the manager directed evaluations, and they still kind of left a little bit of bad taste in my mouth, and we had high participation, and people, I think, genuinely appreciate feedback in a structured way, but it didn’t kind of connect the dots between the alignment of the organization. Education and the alignment of the individual in a way that I felt was needed. And I’ve, you know, there’s kind of one specific example that stands out in my mind, where we had an accounts payable person. And this gentleman, you know, was a rock star, like best Accounts Payable specialist you can imagine, way above and beyond his job description, a cultural torch bearer, you know, was, you know, highly depended upon by a lot of different people. And you know, really just set an example for, you know, the type of service that we wanted to extend to each other across the organization. But in the normal review system. It just wasn’t recognized the impact he was making.

Graeme Cowan  15:44

Sorry, I’ve just got to pull this. I think Mark Cowan is just, oh, sorry about this. Was there anyone in the business that had a big impact, which was surprising?

Jacob Chase  15:56

Yeah, absolutely. There’s one very specific incident that, or not instant, but individual that stood out my mind, where we had an accounts payable person, you know, and they were a junior person, low on the totem pole, so to speak. But they were truly a rock star. They were an absolute outperformer in every sense of the word. I he took a tremendous initiative. Was a cultural flag bearer in the way that, you know, we really embraced way above and beyond their job description, handling it issues and vendor issues and all sorts of things way beyond traditionally, processing invoices. And I’m looking at this person and the job market says they’re valued at $55,000 a year, but it was very clear to me that they were worth way more to the organization than what their salary band implied. And so I was really interested in figuring out, how do I actually measure the contribution of this individual in a way that rewards them for the extra contribution that they’re making above and beyond. What is, you know, kind of initially required,

Graeme Cowan  17:05

and how did you go about doing that? Were you able to address it in the right way, in the right manner?

Jacob Chase  17:11

I think so. I think so. And so there was a couple of fundamental assumptions that we had to challenge, or that, you know, that I personally had to challenge in order to kind of come up with a way to do it. And the first one was challenging, the idea of a centralized review process where, in our traditional program was manager driven. And here’s the 10 criteria, and each person is rated one to 10. It didn’t really surface, you know, with the things that were important. And what we ended up doing was embracing much more of a decentralized sense of judgment, where, you know, each person has their own perspective of what’s valuable in their daily interactions, and simply by requiring everyone to use this lens that was, you know, produced by our team, removed a lot of our ability to see into that. But when people are given, you know, a their own ability to judge what’s valuable around them, you can end up getting some system level intelligence that is really important and really useful. And so, you know, one other important kind of addition to that is, you know, there’s a limited amount of value that can be distributed amongst everybody on the team that like the performance of the organization matters in kind of establishing how big the pie is, but then the decentralized view of, you know, contribution, I think, can calculate each person’s slice in a very objective way that you know, really matters for how we reward contribution in the workplace, Yeah, and this led to, once you sell the business, it was a very successful business, starting your new company. And how would you describe your unique product offering that you provide to your clients? So at its essence, what we provide is a proportionate share of contribution. So if you have a team of 10 or a company of 1000 we can actually help you calculate the percentage contribution that each person is making out of the hole, and with that information, you can then do interesting things like evaluate how much each person should be paid based on the contribution they’re bringing, which is again, judged by everyone that they’re working with. But the way that we gather that information is through an ongoing feedback loop of each person inputting information about the people that they’re working with the things that are. Going well, the things that are not and in doing so, they also receive information from everyone else they’ve been working with about what they’re doing well and what they’re not. And so we’ve really tightened the feedback loops and created kind of a live view of, you know, of an individual’s contribution that I think has a lot of knock on effects that are very valuable, both for the individual and for the organization.

Graeme Cowan  20:25

We have some helpful resources that you can find at WeCARE 360, five.com.au, the first is our mental ill health calculator, which is a quick and simple way to work out what poor mental health costs your organization in lost productivity and employee turnover. You will also find our building a mentally healthy culture checklist, which shows how to launch a great initiative and keep that momentum going. These resources can be found at WeCARE 360, five.com.au,

Graeme Cowan  21:02

and what is the feedback anonymous?

Jacob Chase  21:06

It is the all of the inputs are anonymous,

Graeme Cowan  21:08

yeah.

Jacob Chase  21:09

And so, you know, we go to a great length to protect confidentiality of input information,

Graeme Cowan  21:16

yeah. And you know, there must be situations where there’s a huge diversity of opinion, where someone thinks they’re doing a great doing a great job, but someone thinks they’re not. What do you do in that situation? I guess to highlight there’s an issue there, and it’s not working as well as it could.

Jacob Chase  21:35

So we can obviously understand where there’s a divergent of a divergence of opinion. But another kind of analogy that I think makes sense to make is it’s the stock market like, at my core, I’m still a finance guy, and the stock market is the amalgamation of a huge set of diverse opinions in order to produce an answer, yeah. And you know, you have, you know, in finance terms, you’ve got your day traders and your value investors and your quant investors and your short sellers and all types of different people who are contributing to the view of the market. And our kind of our system helps to aggregate the diversity of views in a way that allows for effectively, a price, and that is the collective judgment of everybody for each individual. And so those divergent views get weighed accordingly in the market system.

Graeme Cowan  22:31

Yeah, and can you provide an example of a client that you’ve helped and served in terms of how you came to make them, how you presented, and, I guess, how you got them over the line, and the implementation, I think it might help our listeners understand more of the specifics.

Jacob Chase  22:51

Yeah, and so a recent client that we’ve worked with is a large construction company. You know, we started with an implementation with their executive team, and there was a team of 10, and, you know, because they wanted to get a feel for the experience of both the feedback loops that they’re going to receive about themselves and the obligation of providing information about everyone else. And you know, it’s, it was built in a way, or it is built in a way that, you know, a couple minutes a day on each person, or by each person inputting information keeps the system, keeps the market liquid enough so that you have really good data. And each person, just in a, you know, in that short experience with the executive team, learned things about themselves that they hadn’t heard before, and very important and valuable information. And it was fascinating, because it was almost it came about a week after their formal review process, and people learned a lot more than just what was provided in the formal review. And you know, from there, several of the team members implemented it on their teams. And, you know, and it continues to cascade throughout the organization based on an interest in the willingness to participate, and so there’s no mandate of participation, but we found that there’s a lot of interest. When people start learning things that they’re not getting elsewhere, that they find highly credible, and they have the data to reinforce the behavior change that their teams are seeking, and you can see your value increase as your behavior changes in a way that you just can’t do with an annual review cycle. And so it’s been a really successful test for this client, and you know, and they continue to use it regularly.

Graeme Cowan  24:35

How does it differ from a, you know, 360 degree feedback, you know, something which is often used in leadership circles, what additional information would you get that you wouldn’t get from something like that? I

Jacob Chase  24:48

think it goes back to the centralized assessment criteria versus the decentralized assessment criteria, where when each individual has their own perspective of what is value. Right? So you know, the CEO thinks that business performance is valuable, but you know, the new joiner, fresh out of college, thinks that, you know, the boss that helps them get integrated, the team member who helps them socially interact, or points them where to go throughout the organization and help them get adapted, that’s valuable. And so by allowing for all of those different perspectives, you just get a much richer sense of what your country, how your contribution, is valued by others and and you know, removing that limit of centralization makes a big difference in the feedback people are able to learn about themselves.

Graeme Cowan  25:43

Do you find that there’s a certain size company where you get in too fast and have the biggest impact straight away, or do you have experience with the full range to like a smaller organization right up to one with 5000 people?

Jacob Chase  26:01

Yeah, I think that in smaller organizations, there’s a familiarity that everyone has with everyone else that sometimes doesn’t lead to the need. Whereas in larger organizations that are distributed or have lots of cross functional teams in different regions and that kind of thing, the information is really important. And so, you know, we’ve really had most the success with kind of 100 to 2000 size organizations of individuals. And you know, I think that’s kind of our sweet spot for the moment of where we’re adding the most value. And yeah,

Graeme Cowan  26:37

I mentioned before we started that, you know, something similar to what you described, happened in our airline, Australia’s airline, Qantas, and they were looking at planning culture change. This happened a while ago, probably 10 years ago, and they’re looking at finding champions in the business who could help with that culture change. And so they went through this process to understand who was respected, who got things done, who is capable of going across divisions and making things happen. And, you know, the most valuable person turned out to be someone in a warehouse. Not only the executive thing were there, but he was just, his name was Elvis, and he just had this reputation of being able to get things done, being able to make things easier, being reliable, being trustworthy, and it

Jacob Chase  27:30

was a key part of the culture change. And I guess with your business as well, you know across 1000 people, you might identify 100 that could make the biggest impact because of the level of trust and respect they have. Do you ever use a method to attack into that 100 for example, to help change the culture and get in the direction that the leadership team wants it to go? So we can certainly do kind of the network dependency analyzes right where, you know, the we think about it as a network, an organization as a network, and certain nodes within that network are more highly dependent upon than others, and that often translates into value for the organization and you know, and for the individual you know. But another way that we think about it a little bit is oftentimes those most highly trusted individuals, or those most interconnected nodes, are the ones that already have a service oriented mindset, where they are the ones who are already going above and beyond to serve their teammates. And one thing with a kind of a centralized assessment platform is that, but creates a little bit of a political incentive where there is a self promotion incentive, maybe hold down some competition incentive in order to be recognized under that dynamic. But when you have a decentralized assessment system, the incentive then becomes to serve, because everybody has say over everybody else, and what is rewarded, the way that you become valuable is by serving your team. And so we really try to tap into that incentive structure of kind of a service oriented mindset, is becoming valuable and helping both create a direct incentive structure, and, you know, and a social incentive structure that are aligned with that tends to achieve best outcomes for the individual and the organization. And I think, in a very meaningful way,

Graeme Cowan  29:39

it’s interesting is it coming out of the service orientation, or what has been called servant leadership? It’s, you know, really interesting evolution from the old commander control environment that was there before I, as we mentioned, when I first started, I’ve just written a book called The Great Leaders care. And there’s a three part mindset in that. One is about self care, how we look after ourselves. Crew care, creating that dynamic in the team, and then red zone care, being able to identify and support someone who’s struggling. What do you practice self care? Jacob, what do you do to keep make sure you keep fuel in your tank.

Jacob Chase  30:22

Yeah. I mean, I have, you know, pretty dialed personal routines, like I sleep really well every night, eight hours, you know, I don’t drink. I work out heavily. I have good meal prep habits, so I’m always eating a good diet consistently. And, you know, I think that gives me kind of the energy to make sure that I’m always in a good mind state to make my biggest contribution and have a great family dynamic and a good kind of support structure for when I’m struggling. And I think all those add up to, you know, a really positive kind of self care state that I’m in now, for sure. Yeah, and what you’ve described is fantastic. You know, it’s obviously, is that a recent thing, or have you done in your entire career? Be really disciplined about your self care. I’ve been pretty disciplined for most of my life. I think it’s been adding new disciplines over time. But, you know, in general, like I work in well, in structure. And, you know, I’m disciplined about maintaining my structure, because whenever I fall outside of it, you know, the wheels tend to come off. And so, you know, I’ve learned that one through the years. Yeah, wonderful. And what about, you know, good and supportive friends. Do you catch up with people on a regular basis? Is there a is there discipline around that, or is it more, just sort of a bit more laissez faire? There’s less discipline around that. Although I have explored kind of schedules of keeping in touch with people and that kind of thing, nothing’s been incorporated as a habit yet. But like, I absolutely know the importance of making sure I’m checking in with folks, maybe when they have a time of need and aren’t taking you know, aren’t inclined to take the initiative, to reach out. That’s definitely one that’s been on my mind. It’s not official yet, but, you know, recognize the need to be proactive in that for sure.

Graeme Cowan  32:09

Yeah, I had a real mental health breakdown bad 15 years ago, and it, you know, emerged from there that I’d often let relationships go, you know, because I was focused on the work getting things done, and since then, and since that recovery, I’ve been very disciplined about having good people in my life and seeing them regularly. And, you know, I’m now absolutely convinced that the quality of our relationships determine the quality of our life. That’s, you know, to have people that are there to support you, encourage you, joke with you. All that sort of stuff makes a big difference. The second element is crew care, and this is about how we promote team belonging, Team connection, psychological safety, where people feel they can contribute and challenge ideas. And I guess also a bit of a growth mindset. We grow together. What sort of things do you try to put in place for your team, but also in the teams you consult with, are the tangible actions that come from your analysis that help make that happen?

Jacob Chase  33:15

That’s a deep question. Sorry. I think personally, you know, and I may be taking some lessons from some of my previous leaders is that I always try to demonstrate the behavior that I want to elicit from everyone. And, you know, one of those comes from an example, is always being open to everything before, you know, making any sort of shut down motion or anything like that, where, you know, I really want to encourage kind of the dynamism and the idea generation and the creativity in the team that you know, even if it doesn’t necessarily align with the current objectives and would be a distraction if we pursued like I definitely saw in my real estate business, kind of shutting things down too early, sets an example that you don’t want, and I’ve been really careful to kind of foster the conversation around new ideas, rather than, you know, jump to an answer that I may already think I know. Because, not just because you want to keep things efficient and organized, but because you want to foster an environment where those things are okay, because you know a lot of things you know aren’t going to be a hit, but you never want to create a situation where you’re going to miss one that would have been and that’s one where I’m really cognizant of and so yeah, with that, I kind of lost the rest of the conversation.

Graeme Cowan  34:38

You did really highlight not shutting down things too early, being open to new ideas. You know, collaboration is obviously a really big one. It’s interesting. I often, in my keynotes, ask people to reflect on a great team they’ve been part of. You know, could be the current one could be previous one could be when they worked at McDonald’s or. Played football or basketball or whatever, and ask people to really think about that team, look at the faces of people that were part of that team, and that’s into what made it different. And so I’ve got about 10 different factors there, and ask them to nominate three. And you know, there’s things like having a compelling vision, complementary strengths, you know, good communication skills, but in 95% of the cases, the top three things that come up is that we cared about each other, we had each other’s back, and we encouraged each other. And I think that just sort of reflects, you know, a fundamental human need to feel that we belong, we’re part of a tribe, part of the system, as you or a network as you referred to it before. But those things become more and more important as the world’s got more complex. You know, no one leader can have all the wisdom and answers, can they?

Jacob Chase  35:57

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of those dynamics thrive in the team that I’m currently on. And, you know, there’s a lot of ownership that each person is bringing, that they, you know, all, I think, bring their best every day. You know, even when things don’t work, then they’re encouraged and supported in the right ways to, you know, continue iterating and striving for what will work. And, you know, I think that we, we allow for the boundaries of independence in a way that’s really important too. Where, you know, we have a lot of we have a diverse set of skills on our team. And you know, some people have kind of highlighted skills in very complementary ways, where I think you mentioned one of the criteria was kind of complementary skill sets, and I think we’ve got that in kind of a perfect balance right now. And you know, when you combine all of the kind of interpersonal intangibles with everyone working for a vision that they believe in and that they think matters and makes a difference, and have their own kind of intrinsic motivation to see it succeed, that really kind of unlocks, I think, the next level of the team performance.

Graeme Cowan  37:10

Yeah, and I really love the direction that your business has taken, because people always say, measure what matters, and typically that’s sales, expenses, profit, etc, etc, but that’s the after effect, isn’t it? You know, measuring that is after the fact. And what you’re talking about is measuring the service and contribution of the people today and next week and what have you. And I would suspect that would be a very good risk strategy, risk management strategy, as well being identify where there are dysfunctional things happening in a certain division or a certain area, and being able to address it before you have large stuff, stuff turnover and that sort of thing. Yeah,

Jacob Chase  37:57

it was fascinating, because, you know, when we were at the real estate business, and it really kind of rolled out our first prototype of this program. One of the first thing that stood out were two kind of middle managers that were in the field away from headquarters, that were underperforming, and we didn’t know about it, and it stood out in the data, and based on the assessment of everyone they were working with, there were problems. And, you know, you go in, you know, do a little digging, and lo and behold, there was an intervention required. And you know, I think it really opened our eyes to the power of the decentralized, you know, perspective in really highlighting the things that needed to change. And you know, you have to couple that with the results of the organization to make sure that the prevailing opinion is linked to the outcomes of the collective and in order to kind of evaluate, you know, what’s you know, what’s a real problem, versus what’s not. But I think that that transparency kind of unlocks a whole new ability to not let problems get bigger, and it’s an important one for business

Graeme Cowan  39:06

today. Excellent. It’s been fantastic catching up today, Jacob, I’ve really enjoyed our chat. I always finish with one question is that, what advice would you give your 20 year old self, knowing what you know now, all that you’ve gleaned in the last 3030, odd years, what would you tell your 800 year old self if you had the chance to pass on something important? You know,

Jacob Chase  39:29

I do pass on this advice to, you know, college students when I’m speaking with them, and I think I got really lucky in it. It’s, you know, don’t pick the job. Pick the boss. It’s like, Who are you going to learn the most from? And you know, that’s what’s really going to accelerate you, rather than a title or a pay package or some sort of glamor associated with it. And I think I got really lucky from that perspective. Probably chose the job for the wrong reasons, but got lucky with the right people I was working with and working for. And I would reinforce that what you learn working for the right people matters way more than anything else, especially early on in your career. And then really would reinforce that one

Graeme Cowan  40:11

I really love, that choose the boss, not the job. Let’s see. You know, you’ll learn a lot more. Won’t you with the right boss compared to a bad boss?

Graeme Cowan  40:22

Indeed. Thanks for being part of the caring CEO jacket. But really appreciate your time.

Jacob Chase  40:26

Graeme, this was terrific. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Graeme Cowan  40:30

Thanks for joining us today. We hope you’re inspired to strive for a culture of care that also leads to great results. If you’ve enjoyed this interview today, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform, and don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss an episode. We also welcome any comments. If you’re interested in seeing details about our scalable WeCare365 mental health training programs, please visit us at WeCARE365.com.au, our goal is to make these programs accessible, practical and ongoing. You can also find me, Graeme Cowan, on LinkedIn, and I’d love to hear from you. And finally, if you’ve come across a senior leader who has impressed you and you think they’d be a great guest, please email us at support at WeCARE365.com.au, thanks. Once again for listening today.

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