1894 – Actualize your Potential with David Carter

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:59with us right now david c.m carter uh david you are the chairman and founder of entelechy academy you're found on the web at entelechy.academy the spelling for that to our friend that's listening e-n-t-e-l-e-c-h-y.academy david thank you so much for joining us Thank you very much for inviting me. Yes, absolutely. Well, tell me more about entelechy. Why don't we start off with talking about the etymology of the word? So Aristotle, two and a half thousand years ago, coined the phrase entelechy. And the entelechy of an acorn is an oak tree. The entelechy of a caterpillar is a butterfly. and so the intelligy of josh is the ultimate version of josh with all of his potential fully actualized and aristotle also coined another phrase which is that character determines destiny and what he meant by that was we all end up in life wherever we end up as a direct function of our character and it's developing our character which helps us obtain our intelligy the best version of ourselves with all of our potential fully actualized.

2:19Yeah. And it looks as though you bring this, like this is kind of the foundation of what you bring to the workplace then, or do you work with individuals? Are you working with companies then? It's a B2B business. Sure. So minimum 100 people in an organization up to tens of thousands. So let me explain a little bit of the background on that so there won't be an employer anywhere in the world who over the last 10 years or longer hasn't suffered from what people like the economist or pearson or the world economic forum or mckinsey have shorthanded as the soft skills crisis and basically what they're saying is young people leave college university and apprenticeship scheme school and enter the workforce but they don't have the work ready skills the human skills the soft skills that employers say they need them to have and about four years ago three and a half years ago about this time of the year when the world economic forum mckinsey the economist pwc Deloitte, all of them, Pearson bought out their annual survey on the soft skills crisis.

3:37I thought there's so much rubbish written in these reports and there is a solution, but it's not the one that you're putting forwards. So we interviewed over 300 heads of HR in multiple industries and verticals from companies with 500 to 50 ,000 employees. and we asked them three simple questions have you heard of the soft skills crisis yes does it affect your company yes what are you doing to solve the problem and oh we send people on courses and things like that and i said is it working are you solving the problem no we're not so we then asked them could you tell us exactly what soft skills your applicants or your young workforce don't have that you need them to have.

4:31And the original long list had over 800 soft skills. Now, to be fair, there was a lot of duplication where four or five people had expressed the same thing slightly differently. So there was duplication in it. But there were over 300 skills that people said were soft skills that were really technical skills, like Excel spreadsheet modelling, PowerPoint presentation making. And my favourite was the head of people for one of the UK's biggest retailers saying that Python programming was a missing soft skill. It's like, you lot just don't understand this at all. Yes, young people maybe need coding skills or presentation skills, but they're not soft skills, they're technical skills.

5:22and a large major global consultancy firm, I won't name them, who were at the time the world's third biggest in terms of total revenues. They were ninth in the world in terms of productivity measured by revenues per hour, revenues per employee or profits per employee, which was somewhat ironic given that they're going in consulting to firms about how to boost their productivity, that they themselves weren't as productive with their workforce. And the board came to the conclusion, because they bill in six-minute increments of time, that the real problem was time management, which is a soft skill.

6:04And they sent everyone in the entire firm over a three-year period on a$2 ,880 time management course. And they came to the conclusion three years later that despite that gigantic investment, their time management skills hadn't improved at all. And so I was brought in to try and help them understand why. And they said, listen, 95 % of the people who finished the quiz at the end of the course scored 95 % or more. So we don't understand it even more. So I said, well, show me the quiz. And very quickly, I said, you're assessing what was taught, not what's been learned and applied. But the second thing is, I said, you know, there's behaviours, or what we call them as character qualities, that underpin time management.

6:57Like, are you teaching your people to be accountable, responsible, disciplined, organised, efficient and reliable? No. Well, unless you teach young people to be those six character qualities, they're never going to be any good at time management. And what we realized was there was a missing domain underneath these soft skills of behaviors, character qualities, that was not being taught. So we then show them something like these 54 character qualities and say to them, if you could choose half a dozen of these character qualities that everyone in your entire organization was brilliant at, which six would you choose?

7:45To our audio listeners, David, I'll just illustrate what you're sharing with me here. I'm looking at a, what looks like a 10 by 10 or 10 by 6 matrix here of basically characteristic traits. There are 54 characters. 54, yeah. So collaborative, accountable, organized, decisive, sincere, strategic, committed, open-minded, resilient, so that sort of thing. So when we think about those soft skills traits that we would aspire to, I think. right but soft skills are doing skills presenting managing leading time management they're all whereas these are being skills and so anyway if if i asked the average ceo which six would you choose if you could get everyone in your organization to be brilliant they'll say oh we need people to be adaptable we need people to be organized responsible efficient reliable resilient confident um creative purposeful i was like whoa hang on a minute that's 10 well there's so many here that our young people aren't that we need them to be okay well let's hone in on 10 if we could get your entire workforce to be brilliant at the 10 you've chosen tell me what impact that would have on your productivity performance profitability and they're like wow we could grow our top line by 20 we can improve our margins by 20 we can reduce our first year churn and new staff members by 50 i said okay we'll put an economic value against each of those for me oh that one would be worth 5 million that one would be worth 3 million that one would be worth a million okay well that's 9 million so if you put your entire company through our program over the next 12 months, it's going to cost you£200 ,000.

9:41And you're going to get a 40 times return on investment because we will help your employees become those 10 character qualities, which will drive the performance and productivity improvements you're looking for. Yeah. So, David, I'm hoping just for our listener here, you know, how can we as leaders evoke more of some of these soft skills within our own organizations? Okay, well, sorry to be pedantic, but we don't help people learn or teach them soft skills. We help them learn and develop these 54 character qualities. Sure. And what we've done is we ended up, going back to the research, with the 77 essential soft skills that employers said their applicants and workforce lacked that they needed them to have.

10:30And for each of those 77 soft skills, we mapped the six character qualities that you would need to be good at the soft skill. And so I'll give you a silly but true story. So when we every Monday at 10 o 'clock, everyone in our entire company gets on a Zoom call for half an hour. and they say this is the character quality i'm working on this week or this month to develop my professional side and this is what i'm working on for my personal side and we'd taken on a new senior executive in the sales area and he was a very experienced highly accomplished sales executive and so you go into breakout rooms and there's three or four people in and he was in the room with three female colleagues.

11:26And they're like, okay, so which professional character quality do you want to work on? He said, well, you know, I've just arrived. I'm new beyond the block. I need to be disciplined because I need to hit the phone, send out emails, follow up sales calls. And if I was more disciplined, I'd make more calls, book more demos. And they said, so why have you chosen disciplined? And he said, well, I'm so easily distracted by my mobile phone pinging off with Slack messages or WhatsApp messages. And I, oh, who's called? Who's messaging me? You know, should I reply immediately or whatever? And I'm not therefore focused on.

12:05And he said, you got any tools or tips or ideas? And one of the others said, yes, from nine o 'clock till 1015, put in your diary sales calls and from 1015 to 1030 coffee break. from 10.30 till 11.45 sales calls from 11.45 to 12 coffee break and leave your mobile phone in the kitchen next to the coffee machine so it's not pinging off and distracting you on your desk and he's like well that's a very simple idea I'll try that the next week he turned up to the meeting with the same group and they're like oh how did it all go and he said well you know I normally think a good week for me is if I book 20 demos you know some weeks it's 18 some weeks it's 22 I book 31 demos this week and I can tell you it's all down to being disciplined and following the advice you gave me well he's suddenly 50 % more productive by focusing on one character quality and one action if you want I can tell you it's a brilliant story but the girls then said to me what did you work on in your private life?

13:16And he said, oh, I've been married 30 years. I love my wife. We've had our first grandchild and I really wanted to show my appreciation to my wife. So I decided to work on being kind. And I thought, what are two or three things that I could do that she'd really appreciate? And he said, I could take the garbage out on Tuesday nights and put it on the sidewalk because the dustbin men come and collect it first thing in the morning and not be nagged and reminded to do it. I could just do it. And I could take the dog around the block at nine o 'clock at night before bedtime, you know, and never be nagged, just get up and do it.

13:56We both leave our key car keys next to the front door and she leaves her dry cleaning tickets there and her dry cleaners next to my gym. And I could take her tickets and pick it up to save her a trip into town later on. he said right i'm going to do those three things this week so the following week the girl said oh how did that go and he said well every friday evening for the last 30 years we've decided we're going to have a romantic date night dinner for two at home just the two of us and about 6 30 my wife comes and puts a gin and tonic on my table in my office and says dinner's at seven tidy your desk switch your phone off your mobile off your laptop anyway she came in you know just after 6 30 as normal put the gin and tonic down on his table and she sat down in the chair next to him and had a gin and tonic herself and he said that was unusual and she said right i'm just going to come straight out with it are you having an affair and he said no of course not why would you think that well you've taken the dog out every night this week at nine o 'clock without being asked you picked up my dry cleaning you've taken the garbage out what's going on he said oh i'm working on being kind this character quality of kind she said well whatever drugs they're giving you please keep taking them because i love it so after a week just being conscious about working on two character qualities he had a dramatic transformation in two aspects of his life and any one of those 54 character qualities which you know people can go and see easily on our website any one of us could decide you know right this week i need to work on being more confident or need to be working more open-minded or collaborative whichever one it is and if you're conscious like if in every meeting i have any every conversation every task i do how can i be more collaborative or whatever then guess what the end of a week just by being conscious about it it will dramatically affect the outcome.

15:58Yeah. David, as I'm just thinking, you know, as leaders, what would happen if we encourage this? Like, let's say even just on a, you know, a very small scale, we just, you know, with our core leadership team to say, right, you know, this month, you know, let's all pick a character trait that we can really dive into for ourselves. What do you think? And we, we focused on one character trait each month or, you know, each two weeks or something like that. What might happen to an organization by the end of a year? Well, let me answer that in two ways. So, well, basically, I've got two friends who've got young children, and they put a character quality on the fridge in the kitchen.

16:40And the whole family talks about what would the benefits be of being more confident? How can you be more confident? And tell us a story when you back from school today about how you were more confident. And so because it's in the narrative, then guess what? People consciously apply up and work on it. The same applies in companies. When we start a new project in our company, we think about what are the character qualities you're going to need to perform that project to perfection? Who are the members of the team who are good at those character qualities? And we use character qualities to select team members for projects to make sure that we've got the right.

17:20So we'll start off a new project and say, right, which of the character qualities we need to knock the ball out of the park with this one?

17:30Analytical, pioneering, creative, whatever it is. Okay, well, who's got those character qualities in our company? Well, him, him, and her. Right, well, let's get them to get the project done. David, your website, again, is intellikey.academy. when someone who's been listening to our conversation goes to your website, what would you recommend they do when they go there? You can do a free character trial where you go in and do your own 180 and it produces a report for you with a mock 360 and everything else data. But you can see the quality and quantity of the amazing data that one character quality character key report for an individual would look like.

18:12And that costs$50. It's free for an individual, but if 100 people wanted to do it in your company, then it would be 100 times 50. There's next to nothing to get 15.7 billion data points on your organization's character competence. David C.M. Carter, you are the chairman and founder of Enteleki, Enteleki Academy, again, found on the web at enteleki.academy. David, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much for inviting me.

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