Conscious Capitalism: Balancing Profit and Purpose in Strategy

Jonathan Morgan [00:00:00]:

Welcome to the Strategy Gap, a show for leaders who want to bridge the gap between strategy creation and strategy execution. I'm Jonathan Morgan, and along with Joe Krause, each episode we have conversations with strategy and operational leaders on key issues in strategic planning and strategy execution. If you're looking to actually accomplish your goals, this is the show for you. Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Strategy Gap. Joining us today for our conversation is Tino Mantella. Tino brings to the conversation a wide breadth of experience across nonprofits, government, technology, and more. He has a passion for community engagement with a successful track record, accelerating impact related to the lives of people, the alignment of teams, and the effectiveness of organization. His experience has included time at the Technology association of Georgia, where he's expanded membership from under 350 to over 36,000 at the Arthritis foundation, where he directed efforts to allocate more than $50 million towards research for arthritic diseases, the YMCA, where he led the Chicago Y for over 10 years, and much more.

Jonathan Morgan [00:01:11]:

Currently, Tino is the president and managing director at Retained, an executive search company focused in technology and nonprofits, and the chief strategy officer at Relevantz, a software development company. Tina, welcome to the show.

Tino Mantella [00:01:25]:

Hey, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I appreciate that introduction. It covered a lot of ground.

Jonathan Morgan [00:01:31]:

Absolutely. And really covered a lot of ground because you've had quite a successful career that really, truly has spanned across multiple industries. And I don't know, I feel like a lot of times when people's careers span across multiple industries, it's short stints in a couple of industries. But really for yours, most of them have been longer successful tenures leading these organizations across the industry. So all these roles, I'm sure at some portion in time you've been responsible for at least some aspect of strategic planning, whether that's leading the direction, leading the execution, facilitating ideas. I'd love to begin the conversation just by, you know, talking about, in your experience, how has the role of strategy and strategic planning compared across those different industries?

Tino Mantella [00:02:13]:

I love this question. And I would say that there's a lot of similarities in terms of how at least I've gone about it. And there are some differences. But I always like to start and I always say if I'm going to write a book, my first chapter would be it's not My Vision. And what I mean by that is I really spent a lot of time talking to the constituents, the stakeholders, which could be people that are currently engaged in the organization or some that should be engaged in the organization, in my opinion, and really getting that input. One of the things that helped when I started at TAG, specifically to have the opportunity to talk to 90 meetings in 90 days, I called it so really to have opportunity to be out there. And the organization was somewhat struggling. They hit that 2000 bust period for technology companies.

Tino Mantella [00:03:10]:

And then coming out of that in 2004 when I joined the organization and really having the chance to talk to these folks and bringing back the ideas that I heard so that I could communicate to the small but mighty board that was there at the time and say, here's what people are saying, here's what they're saying. The organization should be far more powerful than me saying here's what I think the organization should be based on what I read, the research that I've done prior to taking the job. So those are always kind of commonalities for me across the board. The differences are obviously what the organizations are involved with. So if you're involved with arthritis, it's helping people in the hundred plus diseases that are part of arthritis to understand really what our goal should be for that organization. How to create awareness, how to bring in resources, how to drive a team that was very much decentralized with 54 chapters around the nation that all had their own presidents and their own board. So that was a. That could be a whole nother podcast on a decentralized organization.

Tino Mantella [00:04:19]:

The YMCA was great in Chicago. We had 35 different branches with CEOs, more of a corporate structure, so they all indirectly reported to me. But we had the overall plan for the organization with KPI's goals, budgets. But then we also had every one of those organizations. I had a great guy that was head of our strategic initiatives and we had a process where we'd meet with each of the YMCAs and help them develop their plan. So there was consistency around the planet. But what was different was if there was our branch that was a camp in Wisconsin, a sleepaway camp in Wisconsin, versus an inner city YMCA in the heart of Chicago, versus a suburban YMCA with an affluent community. There were again common grounds in terms of how the plan was developed, but very different outcomes based on what those organizations needed to achieve.

Tino Mantella [00:05:17]:

Maybe in some communities there was getting gang members out of gangs, or in other communities there was infant mortality prevention. Other communities it was health and fitness, which was pretty much across the board. So that gives you kind of a sense of hopefully that helps in terms of thinking about it. But I love planning. I've always loved planning. I think if there was a Superpower. It would be helping people think through strategy, thinking outside the box in terms of ideation of what the organizations could become.

Joe Krause [00:05:46]:

And thank you for sharing your experience there because in my role of helping, organizations typically help either refine their strategic plan or create a strategic plan. The question I usually get, is this a top down exercise, is this the bottom up exercise? And I answer with the, with yes, it's both because you have to talk to everybody, but there also has to be somebody at the top who's making the tough decisions on what are we not going to focus on? Because if you take the input of everybody, the plan could be too large and unwieldy and there's no focus. But if you don't take the input of the people doing the work, then you might not be focused on the right things. So what other techniques besides maybe talking to stakeholders that you mentioned have you utilized in order to get 35 different branches focused on a singular vision? But how they get there might be different by each group. And everybody feels that one kind of direction. What, how have you employed your techniques to get people rowing in that same direction?

Tino Mantella [00:06:37]:

I'm glad you mentioned the 35 branches because they have a good experience there. So one of the things we were developing was in the YMCA Metropolitan Chicago, a strategic plan for capital campaigns and people that know capital campaigns is basically how much capital you're going to raise to in our case build new YMCAs, retrofit old YMCAs, a variety of things. And there, if you think about affluent communities and not so affluent communities, there was different amounts of their capacity to raise money. And what we found was that some of the wives that needed the most money were in the areas that couldn't raise, could raise the least amount of money. So we brought all 35 branches together in a full day strategic effort. Everybody brought their priorities. There was one representative kind of getting your point of how do you go from large groups of people getting the input from the bottom up, which in the wise would mean members, staff leadership and the corporate office, that kind of thing. And so the beauty of what happened was every organization got, let's say, five minutes to make their pitch around what their YMCA could do.

Tino Mantella [00:07:53]:

And then we basically talked about the importance of each ymca, the impact that they would have. And what happened was a number of the Y's in the affluent communities understood that not all the money that they were going to raise was going to go to their particular organizations. It's kind of like democracy to some degree. And at the end of the day they Voted the way I would have done it without including them, which was to give more money to the wise that had the most need, where they would be able to do that. And then those wise and the more affluent communities, they wouldn't take a haircut, so to speak, but they would do less with their money. Or maybe if they could raise, let's say, $5 million, a million of it would go to those urban communities that needed it. And then also we had big gifts that we would approach for foundations, think or big corporations that may be in one community. But The Again, those 35 people voted that even though they were in their particular area, Schaumburg or Naperville or wherever it might be, they understood that the ask that would be made would be for the organization or be not just for their particular community.

Tino Mantella [00:09:11]:

So a little bit of selflessness, but the only way we were able to do that was really to bring those groups together. So to answer your question, at some point people have to make decision in the ideal world, they would make the decision collectively in some way, shape or form and take input from the bottom up. But then it goes to a group of people that would represent them and then coming together with people with different needs, different YMCAs in that case. So hopefully that kind of gives you a sense of how we used to do it.

Jonathan Morgan [00:09:40]:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think you certainly have a unique perspective on this topic compared to most leaders because there's a huge difference in this mindset and motivation on the not for profit side and the for profit side. Right. A lot of time people on not for profits are in it for the reasons that the company is in existence. Right. They want to give back to the community, they want to help serve this disease, they want to help grow whatever the foundation is that they're working with. But on the for profit side, that can be sometimes a little bit more challenging because you have to tie that into the organization itself. Originally, I was going to ask a pretty similar question to what Joe just asked, but then I saw you posted a video on LinkedIn last week about the concept of conscious capitalism.

Jonathan Morgan [00:10:23]:

That was a new term for me. I hadn't heard about that before. I'd love to give you the opportunity to talk a little bit about that and how that contributes on this motivational factor within organizations.

Tino Mantella [00:10:35]:

There's a movement that's growing. I wouldn't say it's at a blistering pace, but people are becoming aware of it, called conscious capitalism. I attended an event with the speaker and it was a person in the food Industry that was one of the leaders in the space. It was actually Whole Foods. And if you think about Whole Foods and how they provide their food and some of their policies, there's a lot of thought about the environment, for example. And so the bottom line on conscious capitalism is there's two bottom lines. One is you do have the accountability to produce profit and revenue for your stakeholders. You need to be able to pay your staff right.

Tino Mantella [00:11:17]:

You need to be able to have good relationships with your vendors. You need to certainly deliver a good product or service to your constituents. So that is the bottom line. But there's a second bottom line, a lot of companies that's emerging and just more thought around it. Some have been doing it forever, but it's that there's a purpose that goes beyond that. And purpose driven companies produce better results. There's lots of statistics around staff now when you think about disease and the millennials and all generations. But I'll kind of pick on those two is they may not want to work for a job where they feel like there's only that bottom line of the company wanting to produce a profit.

Tino Mantella [00:12:01]:

Even if they're making money from that, they want to feel like they're doing something beyond that. So people should check out the movement. Conscious Capitalism, the leadership's in Texas. There's a big conference annually. There's. I'm in a chapter in Atlanta that's been growing with other CEOs and leaders around, sharing experiences, showing empathy around what the needs are. But the kind of final thought is that typically there's a purpose driven responsibility for the company that goes beyond having a financial bottom line. Although we say capitalism because we're believers that capitalism is important, it's not taking anything away from that.

Tino Mantella [00:12:44]:

In fact, there's giving something more to that by having that purpose beyond that.

Joe Krause [00:12:50]:

It's interesting you say that because I mean, if you go to business school, at least in the last few years, the idea of what's the purpose of a business, it's to drive shareholder value, which obviously isn't the most inspiring thing, especially for everybody that maybe is in the organization isn't directly tied to that. So you see a lot of organizations being on this journey because it's all about how you're incentivized. At the end of the day, if you're incentivized by the share price moving in a certain direction, it's going to drive the behavior in your plan versus there being a higher calling to like we are not just doing this for that. There also is A way that we're impacting the community. So I guess the question I have related to that would be what incentives have you seen be put in place for nonprofits for profits, you name it, to make sure that they actually keep an eye on the ball relating to the strategic plan. Because a strategic plan, by its very nature, it's going to potentially take multiple years for any sort of real change to materialize. And if people are maybe not as invested in seeing that plan through, they're not going to see the best results. So what behaviors you incentivize, you end up getting.

Joe Krause [00:13:50]:

So first, strategic planning. What activities or what incentive have you put in place to make sure that people care and stick with it so that they see the results that the plan was trying to drive in the first place?

Tino Mantella [00:14:00]:

Yeah, I'm a big believer in what gets measured, gets done. I've stuck with performance standards, whereas I was recently with someone that was like, I heard it secondhand. But it's like, well that's a stick. Well, it's not a stick. If you provide good performance standards that align with your organization and then that's a guide for the staff. It's not be punitive. It's really have a impact. So what I like to think about, I'll get to your question, but how does everything come together? Working with a couple non profits.

Tino Mantella [00:14:31]:

Now I'm on a strategic planning committee for one of the organizations that I serve on the board of a nonprofit. And it's like, okay, remember you're talking a lot about budget and goals for the organization, but how does that Translate into the KPIs, the operating plan, the budget, the performance standards that are measured so that everything aligns. I've had the opportunity to at the Turkmet Leadership Group when I was there, lead some strategic planning efforts. So that's always part of it. And then I would say to your question is how do you build in if you really believe in the purpose driven ideals of the company? I use my friends from JB and Consulting as an example, but they have goals. When I was running tag, where some of their junior people would have the opportunity to provide pro bono support to an organization like TAG to think through their strategies. So I think building in the plan, how many days a year can an employee work in doing something outside the organization, helping a nonprofit, going back to that, what's the impact that you're going to have with your vendors and how do you tie that in? Not just trying to beat them down all the time in terms of getting the best Price, but also how to treat them like part of the family. So I think building in with your strategic efforts, everything that's important, certainly making your revenue numbers and hitting your targets and getting new employees, expanding your, maybe your portfolio of services.

Tino Mantella [00:16:18]:

But then added to that, there should be sections in there around the purpose driven parts of your organization because the three of us have all heard this, but there's placards that you put on the walls, right, that says here's our purpose driven mission goals. And then the staff get frustrated because they never see it translated into anything meaningful and it becomes. And then you get pushback because they say our organization is really just interested in a, the bottom line money. And then you have a higher rate of people leaving the organization and a lot of other challenges with that. So walk your talk, make sure if you are talking purpose and meaning in the community, then make donations, support other organizations to give your staff an opportunity to learn and grow through their own personal development, that kind of thing.

Jonathan Morgan [00:17:20]:

Yeah, I love that example. And honestly I didn't really thought about that from a traditional business standpoint. And I feel like any, any crime drama I just got finished watching this week in the show, you, Honor, which is a Showtime, a Netflix show. Better Call Saul is similar where there's always the typical story is there's a, a high profile prosecutor or defense lawyer that then wants to go back and just do the pro bono work. And sometimes like that works well for them, but a lot of times it ends up distracting them in the TV shows from their, from their real job and they actually can't get things done that they're supposed to be doing. I imagine that's probably what keeps people from doing this in a business standpoint. They're like, yeah, this is a good idea. We want people to give back to the community or do what's going to help them develop as an individual.

Jonathan Morgan [00:18:05]:

But we also don't want that to happen. And the side effect is they don't actually do their, their core job. Right. They don't actually drive the bottom line for the organization. They don't actually focus on the main aspects of the plan. So in your opinion, from what you've seen, obviously at TAG, you work with 30,000 plus organizations that were probably doing a variety of this. How do organizations strike that balance? Right? How do you give people that purpose driven component without distracting them so much from the core business aspect where they ultimately, you know, aren't able to balance those two?

Tino Mantella [00:18:38]:

Well, balance is the key word. And what I've again seen companies do is they kind of build in some time for whatever that secondary purposes or that impact. So you have your goals that you need to achieve and that's also part of the purpose of how do you help people achieve those goals. So it's not just about sharing goals, but it's how do you actually do you give them a mentor when they first come in? Gone are the days for the most part, maybe it's coming back. But you know, you hear about the IBMs of the world, how many hours people used to have in training and development before they actually got into their jobs. Or companies that have people rotate through six or seven different positions so that they learn the entire part of the organization. It's hard to say what companies are doing. I'm thinking back of in the organizations that I've worked for.

Tino Mantella [00:19:34]:

I'll use the Turknet leadership group where I was president and CEO and we had great growth and high goals and also had people that you just would make sure that they could carve out some time for those things that were they wanted to do that to have an impact on their community. So it's just a balance. But I think every leader has to strike that balance and also involve their staff. And again, I'll use the word stakeholders because it's broader than staff and what that means. And then the best thing to do is make sure you live by that. The worst thing to do is to just have it on paper. And then comes time, 11th hour where deadlines due. And now it's like, okay, well forget about that plan.

Tino Mantella [00:20:20]:

You know, that was just on paper. But you really need to do A, B, C and D sometimes you can't. I mean it's like you guys are experts at strategic planning. So it's a document. It's not the be all, end all. It should be a living document. So it's changing as the environment's changing. Another thing that I've seen is you have these bold goals and then there's a black swan event like Covid and those goals are going to change and say, okay, you're going to be out meeting 100 people and having 100 face to face meetings.

Tino Mantella [00:20:58]:

It's like, yeah, I'm wearing a mask, but I still can't do that. You have to change with whatever the environment is dictating, not have it be the same. So if you're measuring your employees during periods like that, you're going to have to be very flexible and be on top of you know what the environment's telling you.

Joe Krause [00:21:18]:

It's Interesting you say that because I run into that a lot with our clients is that they, they have this immense pressure when they're creating the plan. They think that they have to get it, quote unquote, right. Where they are going to somehow see into the future perfectly and understand the priorities and the KPIs and the budgets and everything that they've set out to do in January is going to somehow come to fruition throughout the year with no issues. And the idea of going back and revamping the plan midstream is seemed more as a failure versus like the way things actually happen. And so how have you encouraged organizations to realize that even the best planners in the world are going to get some things wrong sometimes just because of the information they received. Sometimes it's a black swan event. But I think the through line here is that leaders need to come together regularly and test if the assumptions made in the plan are still valid or do they need to be revamped. Is there like a certain amount of time that should pass for that to happen? Is this a quarterly event in your experience where people are, leaders are getting together and just like giving a good look to the plan and if it needs to change, they make the change, as I say, every six months, every year.

Joe Krause [00:22:21]:

What have you seen as it relates to making sure the plan is still relevant and giving it enough time to actually percolate? Like there seems to be a give it a take there. You have to give it some time, but not too much time. What's your experience, Ben?

Tino Mantella [00:22:32]:

Yeah, I'd say monthly at least, because at least it's taking a look at the environment, how the plan's coming. We like to and there's lots of different tools for this. Now being in technology organization doesn't make me the best technologist in the world, but there are tools to use related to tracking the results. So at most organizations I work with, really all of them, we did like a monthly check in in terms of the plan. And at the time we'd say okay, here's the and I have more than normal and people tell me there's too many. So how do you focus on them? And I've never been a believer that you have to have like three goals or four goals because there's whatever is needed. Now probably there's a half a dozen major goals that you have. But then under that there are object.

Tino Mantella [00:23:26]:

There's different nomenclature as you guys know, but let's just say aims, objectives, targets, and we always tie in who's responsible, what's the reporting that's going to happen. And then as we're discussing it, it's like, is this still a realistic target, whatever it might be? And sometimes it's that we were not bold enough. So let's change the number. So I recently, because I also, one thing I should say is most organizations I'm trying to think of, if there's any, but I'll just say most might be all of the organizations. When you're a CEO, the goals for the CEO oftentimes are different from the goals that everybody else has. In other words, the form formula, the format and all. So I always felt like it was important to have my KPIs, my personal goals, on the same trajectory in the same format, using the same sheets of paper or now technology online documents that everybody else had. And for the most part, particularly in nonprofits, I would submit those to my board and say, okay, they never asked me for them.

Tino Mantella [00:24:36]:

It's like, here's my goals, here's how you should measure me. And I felt like it was important to be consistent with the other staff that I was asking to do that. But I think on the monthly basis, getting back to your question, that it's a good idea to do things at least monthly, just to check on the targets. I recently had a goal of this is a kind of a small. It's not really even a goal. It's like a aim or something, but of having 16,000 people on my LinkedIn, because part of the goal was to just create more awareness on that. But I'm already at halfway through the year, I was already at 16,000. So in thinking about it and talking to the founder of the company, we said, well, why don't we increase it to 18,000? So, I mean, you can go up or down in terms of your measures.

Tino Mantella [00:25:22]:

Some things could totally. I use the word, let's kill that or there's an opportunity that pops up environment, let's say, in the executive search space, where initially we were focused on CIOs and CTOs and then nonprofit C suite. Well, what we're hearing is there's a lot of need out there for great CFOs, so it's small organizations, so we can change these things quickly. It's nice that they have bureaucracy. So I'm like, okay, now we're doing CFOs also and trying to create a game plan to also let companies know that we can help them fill their CFO role.

Jonathan Morgan [00:26:03]:

Yeah, I really love the aspect that you talked about where you align your own personal goals to the organization's goals and that's what you submit to the board. I think unfortunately what you hear too often, particularly in the larger and larger organizations is the CEO is trying to do whatever is going to get the CEO the biggest paycheck at the end of the year. And oftentimes, you know, sometimes that's aligned to increase in shareholder value but that's, that's certainly not aligned to what middle management and frontline employees are experiencing and doing on a day to day basis. And I think you can certainly tell a CEO hey, you should do this. But the inherent fact of it is that has to be an internal aspect that that leader and that CEO wants to do on their own because their motivations are the same for them personally as for the rest of the organization. I want to use this as a segue to kind of what you're doing currently in the placing leadership and the executive search standpoint obviously culture, the individual's perspective on the organization that's very important to align to the organization. Leadership arguably is a very important aspect of both creating and executing the strategy. How do you go about approaching kind of the aspect of finding executives and the importance of them being a great fit from that cultural standpoint and not just from yes, they, they have the skills, they have the experience from a track record standpoint.

Tino Mantella [00:27:29]:

Great question. And I think it was Peter Drucker that said culture eats strategy for breakfast. So I've always seen that you could have a great person but not a cultural faith bit. So I think and I picked up a lot of this from Turknet too. And then also working with Betsy Robinson and the tier four group team running retained. She's been doing this for 10 years for tech. Staffing is taking some time particularly well for every job but it's probably just going to be more time allocated for your higher level jobs to spend time with the company to understand what the the culture is. When I was at Turknet we spent time in doing assessments for all of the key leadership positions.

Tino Mantella [00:28:15]:

We had every assessment known to man pretty much in our portfolio and that would tell us like and people. I'll just use disc as an example. Are they a high D or are they an I or Myers Briggs had some other things and the Hogan's have other things in terms of those assessments. But then we interviewed if the person at the top was retiring. Let's say we'd interview that person at the top and we'd find out more about what made them tick and what people thought about their culture. So before the even going into the interview stage and the posting stage, learning as much as you can about the company culture. And the only way you can do that is really talking to people in the culture, making sure there's assessments. Are they a hard driving organization? Are they an organization that has strong communication, whatever the elements are with that understanding the environment they're getting into.

Tino Mantella [00:29:15]:

And then after that then retained, we post the job and then we use our AI plus my experience 3 decades as a CEO plus other team members to say, okay, here's what we're looking for. Now let's start narrowing the field down, presenting some good candidates. I think some distinctions for retained is that we're diversity certified organization. There's not many out there that focus on the DEI kinds of things. And then also that we have C level leaders like me CEOs that will be doing the search is directly. We'll have support from sourcing people and recruiters. So and we'll spend as much time as we need to to understand that culture prior to getting into the hiring process. And then there's some trial and error where we'll bring some people to the company and say what do you think of these folks as a first round? And then we may need to go back and do a second round.

Tino Mantella [00:30:19]:

But at the end of the day our commitment is to find them the very best person we can. And the only way to do that is to spend time understanding the culture. And the only way to do that is to talk to people that are in that culture. And you might even go beyond that to understand the stakeholders kind of thing. I like to tell the story and this is a little bit off topic here, but it's for people that are listening, that are thinking about their next job. You've all been part of that too. But as you're interviewing, you really want to know if the person interviewing has spent time understanding the culture. So when I took the YMCA Metropolitan Chicago job, which was the largest YMCA and New York and Chicago, largest two Y's in the world, I was under 40 years of age and everybody told me, well, you haven't jumped through these five flaming hoops of fire before you should even go for that job.

Tino Mantella [00:31:17]:

So another topic for another day is surround yourself with some people that are going to say, yeah, go for it. I did have some people like that, but I went for the job and I flew out on my own money a week ahead and I started meeting with the heads of the United Way and members of the organization, people that use the fitness center and the Childcare. Frankly, by the time I got to the meeting, I was so far ahead of all the other people that were in the final batch for the job because I knew so much about the organization, the culture, the impact. And I was the first person they ever hired in their 100 year history that was from coming in from, grew up in upstate New York. So first person in the history organization that was over 100 years that they ever hired from outside of Chicago. But that was because I really spent the extra time learning about the culture of the organization and what people out of the organization so I could come in. Kind of goes back to a mini 90 meetings in 90 days to make that happen. Yeah.

Joe Krause [00:32:24]:

And I appreciate you sharing your experience related to executive search and the importance of culture. I'm proud to say one of my best jobs in my undergraduate studies was with a retained executive search firm in the pharmaceutical space. It was called the Stevenson Group. They're still doing great business out of Fort Lee, New Jersey. I owe a lot to everybody I met there and my mentors. And Jennifer K. If you're listening, they spent an inordinate amount of time and as a neophyte to the whole industry, I was a junior in college. I had no idea what it takes to be the scientific lead for a diabetes franchise in a global pharmaceutical company.

Joe Krause [00:32:56]:

How much time each of the lead recruiters spent meeting with these individuals, really understanding them as a person to figure out if they'd be a good fit. And the way it was described to me was that if they get to the point where they're even being vetted by this group, they probably have the scientific chops, they have the ability, they have the accolades. They had everything that potentially would be a good fit to do the actual job itself. But the part that's the unknown and the part that you've mentioned and the part that maybe we don't spend enough time on is how are they going to interact with the teams, how are they going to interact with the culture, how are they aligned? So what I've seen is it's a very delicate balance because you don't want to put up 75 hurdles for the individual to have to clear in order to get the job, because they might not be interested. But you can't put up two hurdles because that's not enough. And so it's the balance of how much can you possibly do in an interview to suss out if they're going to be a cultural fit. And it sounds like from what you're, what you're saying and what I've experienced as well, the extra time that you spend putting the time into that is money well spent, time well spent cutting corners on if they're not going to be a cultural fit is only going to lead to potentially tears in the future. So is there sort of a balance in your mind? Where is it like at a certain point, how do you at least as much as you possibly can know that this person potentially is going to be a good culture fed? When's that turning point for you? When you're interviewing candidates, is there a magical moment or is it truly case.

Tino Mantella [00:34:17]:

By case in the tech world? Right. We say that if people are looking at CIOs and they're good candidates, that the technology's table stakes, there might be some that know AI more or some that know machine learning more. So just make that assumption and then trying to figure out like, well, how are they in terms of supervising staff, how are they in terms of managing up to the organization, how are they in their communication skills? Because this even is part of the culture. But in the tech world, we used to laugh when I first got the tag and say that we don't know what those tech people are doing. You just their doors close, you just have to slide the pizza under the door and make sure you know that there'd be some outcome there. But now they sit at the board table, they sit with the CEO. If you're a CISO chief security officer or if you have responsibility for security, you might be have a direct line to the board. So hopefully the colleges are teaching and encouraging people that are in technology to have several communication and branding courses because you have to be able to articulate that specifically to your question.

Tino Mantella [00:35:32]:

I don't know if there's a magic specific time, but the good recruiters like what we do at Retained is you just have to really spend enough time learning the environment if you could. And some examples at Turknet, again, before we started the process, they were looking for a new managing partner for an accounting firm. And we interviewed the managing partner, current managing partner, because he was great, he was just retiring. And then we did assessments for each of the reports. And so before we started the process of finding the next managing partner and there was three or four internal candidates which made it interesting. We really did the assessment and interviewed each of those direct reports to say what's important to you as someone that reports to the managing partner and what are their skill sets. And so you can't do that on every search by the more that you can do that I think you know when you say, when do you know? I think you know when you feel like you have enough information to say, okay, I have a pretty good sense of this culture and you could bounce it back off the organization. Hopefully they know their culture, then you can run from there.

Jonathan Morgan [00:36:45]:

Well, perfect, Tino, We've absolutely blown past our normal allotment today, which is perfect. This might be our longest episode yet, but I know our listeners will enjoy all the insights. Before we close out, just wanted to end the conversation with our one final question. So, thinking about your career and if you could go back and visit yourself when you were first starting your career, either in strategy or leadership, or pick a time and place and give yourself one piece of advice, what would that advice be?

Tino Mantella [00:37:12]:

Yeah, that's a pretty easy one for me because I think most leaders don't go on a straight line and you can point to your successes and you can point to things that you weren't as successful in. And I had an experience at one of the jobs that was more a federated model with disbursement of leadership responsibilities across the board. And my experience had been that you could use tools like promotion, termination and variety of other things as corporate setting and leadership, even if there wasn't a direct piece. And so what I found is during the time in the federated model is it was really more of an influencing role and spending much more time building things I'll call like kitchen cabinet groups of people that are coming together and working together so that you're not more of a pit bull that's trying to drive something because it's the right thing to do. So in some ways, I would say, and people listening to say, well, that doesn't sound like me, but slow it down a little bit and make sure that you're getting enough input from your whoever the stakeholders in this case it was staff and building alliances so that when it comes time to make a decision, you've pretty much figured out that you've got enough input and also you have enough votes because you don't want to go into something trying to make a decision in a big corporate culture. And this was $150 million organized organization, not huge, but in the culture and trying to bring something forth and then having some of the people that are in the background that have some influence trying to push another direction. So that's a long answer, but the short answer is make sure that you figure out how to engage the stakeholders in a way that you understand what they want. So when you come to present for a decision, you actually know what they want.

Tino Mantella [00:39:20]:

Either you're bucking up against them, or you know you have the votes to make it happen.

Jonathan Morgan [00:39:25]:

Sounds great. Well, Tino, we appreciate the time today. I think we already teed up a couple of future topics for future podcasts, which we'll have to take you up on in today's conversation. So thanks for joining us, and we'll talk soon.

Tino Mantella [00:39:37]:

Yeah, appreciate you guys. Thanks for what you're doing. This is great.

Jonathan Morgan [00:39:40]:

Thank you.