[00:00:15]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: Hello and welcome to Lessons from the Leap. I’m your host, Ghazenfer Mansoor. On this show, I get to sit down with entrepreneurs, founders, and business leaders to talk about bold decisions, pivotal moments, and innovative ideas that shape their journeys.

This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers. At Technology Rivers, we bring innovation through technology and AI to solve real world industry problems. If you wanna learn more about us, head over to technologyrivers.com and tell us more about your project. 

Today on Lessons from the leap, we have an amazing guest, Jason Carroll, founder of Aptive Index, and I’ll let Jason introduce himself. Jason, tell us anything you want our listeners to know.

[00:00:58] Jason Carroll: Sure,  Before Aptive Index had quite a bit of a typical founder’s journey, dropped outta college because I thought I knew better myself, had a couple of startups, one that failed at the same time. My biggest competitor was selling for $125 million.

So I called that my $125 million mistake but most recently, prior to this new venture. I was the head of a company called Champion National Security and during that time I was there for seven years and we grew from 20 million to 80 million and then I had a successful exit just a few years ago.

And that’s really where I learned the most about myself, self-awareness, growth leadership and the most about really how to better run a business, how to build a better culture and it was also during that time that I got introduced to what’s called psychometrics, which is like basically personality assessments on steroids.

Totally changed the game for me and as such, after the exit when I explored, what am I gonna do next? I got into the world of psychometrics and built Apex Index as a result.

[00:02:07]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: Thanks for sharing. So you have a diverse area from tech to scaling a security company to founding Aptive Index. When you look back, what’s the story that ties your journey together?

[00:02:21] Jason Carroll: Just trying to innovate, disrupt even prior to my own ventures, you know, when I was even in my twenties, I was always starting new divisions of whatever company I’d be a part of, or inventing a new role, just I don’t know if you’ve heard the term intrapreneur, but I think that that really described who I was early on, and now I think I’m maybe am a real entrepreneur now that I’m out on my own and actually profitable, hopefully that sticks.

But, just the constant curiosity and desire to shape and innovate, I think has been the common thread.

[00:03:01]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool and what was the moment that sparked the Aptive Index? Was it a 600,000 hiring mistake or was it something you are building long before

[00:03:11] Jason Carroll: It’s almost like you’re cheating and you saw that on my profile. One of the hiring mistakes I made was a $600,000 mistake, it was very costly and when I talk about that dollar amount, I mean actual P&L like dollars who knows how much more expensive it was. We’ve all hired a dud or had somebody who worked out for six months and then failed.

And we know that the cost of that mis-hire far exceeds their salary most of the time, especially in leadership roles and the psychometrics, the behavioral assessments came into play partly because of that well that was kind of the final nail in the coffin, but even prior to that I had this amazing guy doing ops for me and because he was amazing at ops and I needed somebody as kind of like a my second if you’ve heard of EOS, they use terminology like visionary and integrator.

You know, I’m the visionary and I wanted an integrator and I thought this guy has been running ops for a decade. I bet he’s the right guy and while he is and was amazing, he was not the right fit for that leadership role. He was too opposite me and so he couldn’t keep up with my pace. I couldn’t see where he was coming from and we ended up just butting heads a lot instead of partnering to Innovate and it was during that time I got introduced to these psychometric assessments and when I saw from a scientific data standpoint what was actually going on, it was just like all the light bulbs that could go off went off and I, you know, felt like I was awake and seeing people and in just a far more profound way than I had ever seen them.

And of course, you know, part of my journey is self-awareness. I started turning that inward as well. Looking at my own behaviors and drives and everything else and realizing that there were things that I needed to work on more so than I needed to work on other people on my team.

[00:05:23]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: So, can you help us, can you dig a little bit more further into the Aptive Index, like how does it really work? So for the CEOs, for the hiring managers or for the applicants.

[00:05:42] Jason Carroll: yeah,

[00:05:43]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: any detail you can give, that would be great.

[00:05:45] Jason Carroll: Yeah. If you’ve seen things like Myers-Briggs or DISC, or which Harry Potter House am I, you know, these personality tests that are out there they range anywhere from a silly online quiz all the way to being scientifically validated, which is the realm we play in Disc and Myers-Briggs, those are helpful, but they’re not scientific they’re not validated in any meaningful way because it’s more about personality and personality shifts and adapts over time. We’re looking at hardwired drives, what is the motivating drive behind our behavior and by measuring that, we can look at somebody and tell really quickly where they’re gonna fit really well and where they might struggle.

It doesn’t mean that they won’t do well. But you know, again, your listeners, we’ve probably all seen a really good salesperson, like had the right wiring to be sales and then we promote that person to a sales leader and they fail miserably and we just go, what happened there? we look at the traits, the drives that will actually tell us what might be going on there.

That person is maybe a fantastic relationship builder ’cause they’re driven by the need for connection and belonging. They might be a great kind of like move forward and move fast because they have a really high internal intensity. But then we translate those things to leading other people.

And it turns out they’re not very strategic. They have no detailed bone in their body, right. So they’re not reporting the way they need to. They’re not holding people accountable and so that’s kind of like part of the concept. Another really easy one is to think, you know, that sales person, the person who’s great at sales would probably hate being an accountant.

And we know that intuitively what we are doing is measuring the proof behind why that’s actually the case and so if we can know where somebody’s gonna thrive and where somebody’s gonna be miserable, we can place the right people in the right seats or we can even look at a job role definition and know that we have a great person in that seat, but they’re misaligned and we can actually realign them by redefining what that role looks like for them, what the expectations are, who they report to all kinds of stuff like that.

And it leads to better engagement, leads to better retention, and less turnover. It leads to more productivity. We’re able to resolve conflict between people because of this behavioral data, I mean, we have a client who says that we literally saved his marriage and he’s not exaggerating.

I mean, this is powerful behavioral data combined with AI that really changes the game.

[00:08:38]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. So. I mean, we all have used different tools and you already mentioned Myers Brigg and Disc and all of those, and they all do different things like disc. I mean, I have used this predictive index, culture index, kolbe, 16 personalities, all of those.

So culture Index obviously does the more of, I would say, I mean, it’s a little, at least in our companies, we have used that a lot

[00:09:07] Jason Carroll: yeah.

[00:09:09]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: can you talk a little bit more about comparison with culture and predictive or kolbe maybe

[00:09:13] Jason Carroll: So Kolbe is a different kind of flavor compared to what we’re doing, but our similarities with Kolbe are that we are measuring conative attributes. It’s C-O-N-A-T-I-V-E. , it’s part of where the A-P-T-I-V-E, it’s part of where that name comes from which are more like our internal instinct drive volition. It’s those hardwired traits versus like the disc and Myers Briggs are looking at contextual personality. Like you get a lot of Myers-Briggs people who you know have like E for Extrovert, but that’s not actually what’s driving them.

Anyways, that sidebar, but Culture Index, predictive Indexes are similar to us in that it’s a free choice assessment versus a forced choice. So forced choice is like here’s the question. Here are the four things you need to choose from, and you have to choose one of these and if you don’t like any of ’em, tough luck.

So free choice is gonna be more accurate in a lot of ways because you’re not selecting things that are actually inaccurate to how you would assess them yourself. The difference I would say, if your audience is familiar with either of those solutions, first of all bravo for using a solution because they are great.

Like, I can’t imagine hiring anybody for any company of any size without a tool like one of these. There are a couple of fundamental differences. One is that they’re using decades old science. Both of those companies are, they haven’t updated their methodology, their algorithms, their adjective selections, their questions.

They haven’t done anything. They haven’t tweaked or improved. In decades which is weird because science evolves and we learn more and you know, at Aptive we are very committed to staying up to date. So that’s one kind of just fundamental difference. The other piece is the application. Pretty much every assessment on the market, including those, which again, are fantastic platforms.

They are used very heavily upfront. You get a chart or a PDF or something and you’re like, great. I can make a decision with this to make a better hiring choice or something like that and then it really collects dust. It takes a real power user who gets mildly obsessed with these platforms to really get any more out of it.

Beyond that initial putting the right person in the right seat and because of the way we, well, the advent of AI we have our own custom AI, it’s called Aria, and she’s like a behavioral psychologist in your pocket always available smarter than any advisor you’d hire smarter than me as the founder of my company as far as how we take this behavioral data and make it a daily strategic tool.

So hiring is maybe 20 or 30% of what our clients are using this for. It’s a huge ROI so keep doing it obviously, but it’s, you know, Ghazenfer and Jason are having some conflict, like, what’s going on here? How do we help them resolve that? Or, you know, Lizzie is doing well in these areas of sales, but she’s struggling on the negotiation side.

How can we coach her in that? Anything like that, anything your imagination can come up with if I had a behavioral psychologist and a Simon Sinek and a Brene Brown on speed dial who knew all of my people more intimately than their therapist does. What would I ask that person? And you just go nuts with the AI and it really is, I mean, it’s kind of insane. It’s the next level.

[00:13:13]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool and you mentioned Brene Brown so as a care to lead a facilitator trained by Dr. Brene Brown. How has that shaped your approach to leadership assessments?

[00:13:28] Jason Carroll: Man, big time. She has been a pretty incredible force in my life, not just as an author and speaker and Ted talker and Netflix special and all the things that she’s got going on.

I got to meet her and spend a few days getting trained by her back in 2019 and, you know, I was in a room with people that came in from all over the world, and her work on courage and curiosity and vulnerability is really transformative. It sharpens those, I guess what people call soft skills, which is a really bad branding if you ask me, because those are the, that’s the social intuition, it’s the emotional intelligence, it’s the ability to build resilience and to have self-awareness, like all those things add up to be, in my opinion a far bigger indicator of leadership quality than skills, experience, and even hard wiring and what we’re measuring. 

So we don’t measure these EQ soft skills. But we do show indications of where people are going to thrive and where they’re gonna struggle.

And that’s really important to the growth of a leader. If a leader is committed to these skills, that I, again, in my opinion, are maybe one of the most paramount to success.

[00:15:01]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: So how do you merge that, like emotional intelligence, vulnerability? But without losing the human side of the leadership.

[00:15:12] Jason Carroll: Well, I think emotional intelligence is the human side of leadership, you know, I look at, and I’ll pick on myself, I’ve got this profile and the way my attributes line up of somebody who always wants to be in charge, barely pauses to ask what anybody else thinks processes emotions so fast that I lose track of the fact that people around me are actually feeling a way.

And I move at, you know, Tesla performance model, foot to the floor speed at all times. So I lead people in the dust, I steamroll my leadership team in meetings. Like, these are things that I started noticing about myself back in like 2016-17 and, and so on and I started looking at like.

If I’m steamrolling my team, well, that was my first kind of, I just had a data point. It’s like I’m steamrolling my executive team, but then I realized that’s not true self-awareness like that’s just data put in a spreadsheet, it doesn’t help anybody. I had to confront the impact of that behavior, which is if I’m steamrolling my team.

I’ve got valuable members that have been around with this company for a decade who don’t feel like I value their contributions, their ideas, their input. They don’t feel like they have a voice, which means they’re disengaging, they’re doing lower quality work, they’re not inspiring other people that they lead.

So there’s a ripple effect of my negative behaviors at play, and it sounds simple to talk about. But in that moment of confronting the negative impact, that’s where that Brene Brown work really comes in because it requires a level of vulnerability, courage and addressing like the shame gremlins.

Because one of the most natural things that when we say this behavior is hurting people, one of the first reactions is defensiveness. Like, let’s shift blame, or let’s say now something else is going on or like that’s just me. Like, you can’t be upset because I’m just being me. That’s, I’m a leader, right?

And, so we’ll either deny or shift blame or we’ll confront it, but that shame will enter in like, well, why do I do this? And we’ll give ourselves answers like I must just be a really terrible leader. I’m a bad person and like, none of these things are helpful because they don’t lead to change.

They don’t lead to growth. So that’s, and to me where all of this comes full circle is you look at the behaviors, you understand what the impact is, you confront it head on with emotional intelligence, resilience, self-awareness, avoiding things like self-blame or blaming others and then you shift into the change.

And the change happens by understanding what’s driving the behavior and that’s where we come into play. We’re gonna tell you empirically why you’re, or like kind of what’s driving those behaviors and if we know what’s driving ’em, we can reframe those drives and those needs into different behaviors that have a better outcome and better impact, but still fill that drive. Does that track make sense?

[00:18:33]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: No, that’s good. Thanks for sharing that. So I’m gonna switch, going back to the champion national security place where, So you scaled that company from 20 million to 80 million before selling. What was one key thing that was done that made that growth?

[00:18:54] Jason Carroll: That people are humans. That’s it. The previous founder had a mentality of pay people as little as you can throw ’em to the curb when they don’t do well. When things go wrong, you yell, you cuss, you send all caps, emails. That kind of thing we came in and we looked, I mean, that was an industry that is low hourly wage, blue collar work.

And these people were treated like garbage throughout the entire industry, not just that founder, although he was part of the problem and we said, let’s treat people with worth and value and so when we came up with our core values, the number one, people matter much that’s it. Let’s conduct from top down with the core belief that people matter much.

Our turnover plummeted. Our overtime hour expenses plummeted. Our customer satisfaction rose, we started making decisions based on that. We had a client, like our third largest client, we fired. They were bringing in a lot of money. But it was just revenue and it’s treating our people like garbage and we said, that’s not like we tried to work with them to change things around and they wouldn’t.

We said, all right, goodbye, so we started making pretty much every major decision based on does this direction match our core values? and that was the chief core value. It was that people matter.

[00:20:28]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: People matter. That’s the keyboard. I’m curious the Aptive Index like have you seen any different feedback or different outcomes in different cultures? different, because nowadays companies have remote workers all over the world. 

[00:20:50]  Jason Carroll: True.

[00:20:51]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: We have people in seven different countries and we have seen different results depending on how people respond. Especially in certain cultures where even when people are responding to questions, they wanna look perfect. So that means the input is not really what the real person is. Not always, but

[00:21:11] Jason Carroll: yeah.

[00:21:12]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: Have you seen those differences in different people from different cultures?

[00:21:16] Jason Carroll: So there’s a couple of things to unpack there. One, the languages that we translate into we’re translating based on context.

So it’s not word for word. In fact, there’s not even the same number of words being used that people select from the questions aren’t just word for word. So that’s actually a big deal because some of the time, sometimes we see from our competitors an inaccurate response because the people in these other countries are either taking it in English, which is not their native language.

Or they’re using a translated version that isn’t contextually correct. So that issue happens. However, what you’re saying is something we do see, which is a kind of a global shift on certain attributes based on the culture or the region that we’re recruiting from. However, there’s still more to unpack there.

So like in the United States. There are no correlations between age, gender, sex, ethnicity, or gender sex. That’s the same thing, but like there’s no correlation. So when we see that there are correlations, when we go recruiting from another country, we have to ask what’s going on? And our data is only anecdotal, but like we have clients that recruit from the Philippines.

But they’re almost exclusively recruiting virtual assistants. Well, that is a different pool of type of person than, you know, I’m here recruiting for a CTO or a salesperson or, you know, something like that, we have clients that recruit from a bunch of different countries in Central America, and it’s the same kind of thing, like it’s a more specific niche role that’s the most common that they’re recruiting for.

So I can’t say empirically that there is a difference between different countries and cultures because I think that it’s as much to do or maybe more to do with the type of role that we’re recruiting for.

[00:23:26]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: And have you seen any differences, even here in the United States in terms of people like white collar or blue collar, or actually the results are consistent.

[00:23:37] Jason Carroll: The results are consistent across all like socioeconomics and role I guess like authorities or you know what, like job level basically and even across, I mean we I can’t say any of the names, but we’ve got some big athletes and some athletic groups that are bringing us in, like to the entire team.

So the coaches and these players, they’re not. I mean, we have no idea what their future job’s gonna be. They’re sports, you know, they’re basketball players and football players and there’s still, the results could be all over the place.

[00:24:11]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: Okay. People change along the way. So obviously Aptive Index is new, but have you seen any pattern, let’s say somebody assessed today versus, and then maybe six months, a year, how that behavior changes?and does that impact anything?

[00:24:32] Jason Carroll: Yeah, so what we say about, so we have eight attributes total. Four that we consider the primary cognitive, and then four that are kind of a standalone or secondary of the four primary. The language we use is that they will shift, but they’re not gonna change. So like somebody who has a high drive for details and accuracy and standards.

That’s a person that they’re hardwired. When they see something wrong, they have a visceral reaction. Like they, it hurts inside. Do you know what I mean? And that’s not something that’s just going to go away, right? They might learn to cope with that and not be, you know, as impacted by it. 

But 20 years from now, when they see a typo, they’re still gonna like they’re still gonna hate that there’s a typo and so those types of drives don’t change, but they might shift over time, the standalone attributes are a little different in that like, I mean, we haven’t seen drastic changes, but we also haven’t really, like, we don’t need to validate those the same way and so if we see shifts there, it’s not really a concern because they’re more about your style, cognitive style, emotional style, things of that nature and those things can shift a little more readily.

[00:26:02]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: So if you can give every leader one behavior to practice this week that would move them forward, what would that be?

[00:26:12] Jason Carroll: I mean, without knowing their profile, that’s harder. But I think just behavior in general is to get curious, go watch that darts scene from Ted Lasso. Have you seen that show? 

[00:26:29]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: No

[00:26:30] Jason Carroll: Look, there’s a great scene where the main character, Ted Lasso, gets into this dart throwing battle with kind of the bad guy, club owner or whatever and he gets into this whole rant about just being curious. 

When you are curious about what’s going on in other people’s lives and worlds, you tend to be less judgmental. You tend to make less mistakes. You tend to explore more possibilities of how things could be and so I mean, if I had to choose right here on the spot, I’m gonna say get curious more often this week than you were last week.

[00:27:09]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: So AI is becoming a major part, obviously everywhere, and so is your product. So when you talk to people, I’m sure there are always questions, pushback. So what’s the biggest misconception? You have heard from the CEOs, founders or whoever, the people you deal with about using AI for people’s decisions?

[00:27:35] Jason Carroll: The CEO group doesn’t really give much pushback.

It’s when we get to the HR group that we start hearing more whispers of concern, and I totally understand the concerns. The AI is trained and restricted. So that it’s giving you a better understanding of how people are wired and where they might thrive, where they might have growth areas, but it’s not telling you what to do ’cause we, I also don’t think that an AI should be making people’s decisions for us. What’s one thing to say, you know, Joe is going to potentially struggle with follow through on these types of things. It’s another thing for AI to say, don’t hire Joe. You know, or you should fire Stacy.

I don’t like that. But that is the concern we hear is Aria gonna tell us that we just need to fire everybody and like, no and if you somehow trick it into telling you that you’ve signed our AI policy, that is not what you’re supposed to be doing at all.

And so I think that’s really the main concern is are we compliant? Is this legal? Is it telling us something that is gonna harm people? and you know what? And this behavioral data’s powerful. You can even without AI, if you really understand it, you can use it to manipulate people and I would imagine you could probably ask AI the right question that kind of skirts around the rules.

To get it, to give you tips on how to influence or manipulate somebody. So I have no doubt that there’s gonna be a nefarious user at some point and I don’t like that, but there’s nothing we can really do about it, and I haven’t seen it yet.

[00:29:32]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: Okay. Coming back to how the assessments impact. So different assessments behave differently, I would say fail to capture how someone behaves under pressure. So any thoughts on that, whether it’s Aptive or in general, why the output is different and what’s the best way to address that?

[00:29:59] Jason Carroll: It’s interesting. I don’t think that we fail to, I can’t answer for the others but I think that we actually do get a lot of insight on how people perform under pressure.

How, with the caveat of what we can predict how they might act, but it really depends on how emotionally intelligent that person is, like what are they. Do they have coping strategies for example and I guess to be fair, I don’t measure that. So I guess, I don’t know if that person is equipped with resilience, emotional control.

Or whatever that might be so I guess I’m kind of reneging on my own answer ’cause that’s true. We don’t measure that and so we just kind of have to pry as we’re in our interview process, as we’re talking to people, coaching the folks that are already on our team to uncover what that might look like.

[00:31:04]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool, just a couple of more quick questions. Like any red flags to people. Often missed during the interviews. Obviously now assessments are becoming big and now AI based, so obviously things are different than it used to be.

[00:31:19] Jason Carroll: Yeah.

[00:31:20]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: Still any red flags? Do you see people still missing even while using these?

[00:31:27] Jason Carroll: Well, I mean, the biggest red flag is not using some other leg of a stool. You cannot trust resumes. They’re all written by chat GPT. These people lie on resumes admittedly. So even if they were a hundred percent true and written by the human skills and experience is one of the worst predictors of success, it tells us almost nothing.

Formal education is the same. So, relying too heavily on someone’s past experience or supposed skills is a huge mistake that still is made with or without assessments. With assessments as one leg of the stool, I’m trying to think what a red flag would be. I guess maybe overlying, overcompensating and saying, look these metrics don’t line up the way we wanted to and even though they have great referrals and a great resume and everything, and you know, did really well in the interview, we’re not gonna move forward. I don’t hear my clients saying that, but I think that would be, if that’s happening an over-reliance on the assessment results and not recognizing that these things are flawed, like 80, 90% accurate, but that means we’re not always right and we shouldn’t pretend to be.

[00:32:54]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: So what’s next for Aptive? What’s next for you? Well, can you share some plans

[00:33:00] Jason Carroll: Aptive is growing very quickly. We’re, it’s kind of like that hockey stick growth right now, which is excellent, we are moving into spaces, like I was talking about the sports teams.

We have multiple division one athletics clubs. We’re talking to the point we’re spinning up a whole another division for aptive performance and that’s really exciting. Probably January or February we’ll have some you know, big names and faces on video and things that we can show that’s super cool.

For me, I love building. I love problem solving with my clients. I’m gonna keep making sure that this is the best solution on the market. I keep retraining Aria. I mean, we actually, I just gave her some pretty cool upgrades in her knowledge base yesterday. It’s a constant improvement thing.

And so I think two years from now, three years from now, I’m probably putting somebody else in the CEO spot to keep the strategic scale and growth going so that I can have side projects, I can focus on product and I think that’s probably what’s next for me.

[00:34:23]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. So thanks Jason. Thanks for sharing your experiences. It’s so wonderful to hear from you and the success that you have gone through Aptive Index as going through that crazy growth. 

Thanks for sharing your experiences with our audience. One last thing before we hang, like is there, how do listeners connect with you? What is the best way? Is it LinkedIn? Is it email is just here?

[00:34:51] Jason Carroll: Yeah,

[00:34:51]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: LinkedIn is great and we’ll put it in our podcast information.

[00:34:55] Jason Carroll: I think LinkedIn is probably the easiest. Jason P. Carroll, two Rs. Two Ls, there’s too many other Jason Carrolls, so you have to throw the P for Paul or Peter, whatever you’re, I don’t know what the things are but Jason P. Carroll, find me on LinkedIn. That’s the best way to connect.

[00:35:16]  Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. Thanks, Jason. Thanks again for being an amazing guest on Lessons from the Leap. 

Thanks everyone. Have a good rest of the day.