In this bureaucratic episode, Jay Johnson, CEO of Coeus Creative Group, shares behavioral intelligence for team building. If you struggle with personality clashes or self-doubt as a startup founder, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What choosing behaviors empowers founder agency
– Why understanding behaviors boosts stage 2 team harmony
– How to assess four elements for better hiring
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Scott, hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the start, scale and succeed podcast. It’s the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a founder, I’m your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and one of the things that I see founders struggle with, especially as CEO, especially in stage five, is trying to build the right team around them, and we like people that are like us. We need people that aren’t like us. And we get stuck in between trying to navigate this space. And so there’s tension on the team. There’s people who don’t see the world the way that you do, there’s people who don’t talk the way that you do. And it can be a huge, huge challenge, especially when we’re trying to decipher Is this a them problem, a me problem, an us problem? How do we get to the bottom of it? How do we build a high performing team? I’ll let you know if I come up with the answer. But I invited someone who I think does have the answer, and that is the one and only Mr. Jay Johnson, who works with individuals and organizations to empower teams drive growth and enhance leadership. He’s co founder of behavioral elements. He’s a two time TEDx speaker and designated master trainer by the Association for Talent Development with a focus on behavioral intelligence. Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high performance in teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. Well, Jay, welcome to the show. I’m exci ted to have you here.
Jay Johnson
Thank you, Scott, glad to be here with you.
Scott Ritzheimer
Awesome, awesome. All right, so let’s just start from the beginning here in terms of there are what I believe you call behavioral elements, right? What are these four elements and why do they matter for busy founders and CEOs listening today?
Jay Johnson
I love that question, Scott and thank you again for having me so. The behavioral elements is built on a different scientific framework. Everybody’s familiar with things like disc Myers, Briggs or any of those other personality assessments behavioral elements is actually a little bit different. It’s built on the science of Dr Paul Lawrence and Dr Nitin Nohria of Harvard University, who established what’s called the Four drive framework. And ultimately, what they wanted to answer is, why do we do what we do? Why do humans make the choices that we make, because our choices are ultimately what drive our success and failure. So what behavioral elements does is measures the four core biological drives. And to give you a little context in this, this isn’t like a personality assessment. We each have all four of the drives, the drive to acquire, the drive to defend, the drive to learn and the drive to bond. We put the elements on those just because it’s easier to remember what the elements are so fire, which is our drive to acquire. That is associated with our dopamine systems, our desire circuit. We want to win. We want to get results. Think about it, is acquiring resources. We often see this in sales. We’ve done more than 40,000 assessments, so we’ve got great behavioral data, and I can’t wait to share with you what founders end up showing. The drive to acquire is one of our big ones. All right, so this is drawing in resources, competitive results, focus the drive to defend this is more of our systems and processes. And Scott, if you’ve ever been at the other end of this phone call, I need you to come down to my office. Were you like, oh yes, I’m getting a raise. Or were you like, Oh my God, what’s going on? Right?
Scott Ritzheimer
The principal’s office? Yeah, we never graduate from that feeling. Yeah,
Jay Johnson
That’s right, we are actually wired to defend ourselves, and we do not like uncertainty. The brain does not like uncertainty. So this drive to defend is associated with our limbic system, cortisol, adrenaline, norepinephrine, and what it does is it tries to plan excessively, because if we can plan it, we can survive it. If we can predict it, we can survive it. So this is all about systems, processes, focus the drive to learn. I mean, let’s think about it. We all need to learn new skills, new things, but this is really where our innovation comes from. It comes from the hippocampal region of our brain. We get a better understanding of things like adaptability, agility, changing, collaboration, all of these things that really kind of help us in the idea of growing new tools, growing new skills, or exploring new territories. Last but not least, we have the drive to bond, which is all about people. It’s all about our connection, empathy, really engaging with others and essentially supporting the idea of larger communities. Right now, every decision we make, every single one the four drives, are at play. So it’s not one or the other, it’s all four. Sometimes they working in concert, right? Like if, for example, my family. Family and I, we decide we really need to push forward for results and everybody’s on board. I might see my work as contributing to my drive to bond, my drive to acquire, but there are times when work may pull us away from our families, which now all of a sudden, my desire to be with the family, drive to bond, and my desire to work, drive, to acquire those two things may be in conflict. So understanding these about ourselves helps us understand our decisions when we understand our team’s drives. That’s really where the sweet spot is.
Scott Ritzheimer
There’s so much unpacking there. I’m trying to pick which one I want to do first. But let’s, let’s approach this from the team perspective, because I think that’s really, really helpful. There are, there are kind of two arenas in which this is playing. Out there’s the internal arena. We have all four of the drives. They’re they’re competing in some, they’re collaborating in some. But in a team perspective, one of the things that makes it a little harder to navigate is twofold. One, not everyone’s got the same stack that we do, but two, we’ll have a tendency to personify the differences, right? So we make it you know, you might have a different preference, but that’s you and you’re wrong, as opposed to just a different perspective that we can benefit from. So how do you help teams to use this four elements approach to really understand each other better and make better decisions together?
Jay Johnson
Yeah, it’s a great question. So each of us has all four the assessment measures. Which of these elements is more of your primary, which is your secondary, which is your third, and depending on the levels of your scores in each of these different elements really signifies different patterns of behavior. So I’ll share with you. I’m a high fire element. I have a strong in fact, I’m unbalanced, as we would call it across the entire thing, strong drive to acquire, strong drive to learn. Lower drive to bond, lowest drive to defend. Meaning, I don’t do systems or processes Well, I hate monotony. Give me a spreadsheet, and I’m going to try to figure out how we can make money off of it, as opposed to, I’m the person that’s going to sit there and fill in the details. Now my executive assistant, who is very high Earth, I’m low Earth, she is the person who wants those details. She’s going to structure things for me, put organizations together when we’re working well together, our fire and earth can really complement each other when we’re not working well together, she could be like somebody that says, hey, I need all these details and everything from your latest Expense Report. And I’m going, I don’t have time for that. I need to get onto this next assignment, because my drive to acquire is taking priority over the drive for certainty, reliability, et cetera. So in both instances, we can see how a founder who maybe brings a team together would benefit from knowing all right, is this person more motivated by reliability, certainty, structures and systems, or are they more motivated by Team connection, culture bonding, or are they more motivated to go and win results, sales, etc, knowing those different drives in each of us give us the opportunity to avoid some of those conflicts, because you’re absolutely right. How you see something and how I see something could be very different. That can be beneficial if we’re working in collaborative function, but let me tell you, in any startup, in any entrepreneur, or even in any corporate, you’re going to find places where those drives just don’t align and conflict will occur, yeah, yeah.
Scott Ritzheimer
So I want to look at this through the lens of putting together a team, right? So as founder now CEO, we’re trying to kind of build, reinforce, even reimagine what our executive team can look like. Let’s start with a founder. You’ve got a lot of data on this. What are the typical drives behind founders?
Jay Johnson
I love it. So I actually did a study of 400 entrepreneurial founders and startup founders from I gave a keynote speech in Estonia at startup day fest, which is one of the big ones in Europe. It’s really an amazing thing. And what we end up finding across there is about 61% of our founders ended up having air as their primary element, the drive to learn and think about it. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. You’re founding something. You’re exploring new territory, you’re creating now air elements are exceptional problem solvers. They look at things different. They’re often win, win. They’re often very collaborative. But one of the opposite. Definitions of error is structure and systems and processes. So in this study, what we ended up doing was mapping all of the Harvard data, all of the Business Insider, etc, for all the reasons why founders and startups fail, and usually it’s because a lack of systems. Now Earth is often the lowest in that founder side, the secondary that we end up seeing is the drive to acquire so this is make decisions, move quickly, get things done and essentially get it across the line. This is also where we see a lot of people saying it’s less about the win in the beginning, it’s more about the idea. And then it shifts into that, okay, this idea can really take off, I can scale, I can sell, I can do all of these things. So that’s what we see as a generalized profile. Now, it’s not always, it’s not 100% but this is one of the common ways that we would look at this pattern.
Scott Ritzheimer
So we’ve got a air and what was the what was the second one?
Jay Johnson
Secondary is typically Fire, fire to a fire. Yes, yep,
Scott Ritzheimer
Yes. Okay, so high energy type a you know, tend to go get it see it needs to happen, get it done. Maybe not the best system and process folks in the world. But like you mentioned, high degree of failure if you don’t have some systems and processes in place. So we need to somehow bring that earth element into the equation. Ask this question twofold, How and when do you incorporate that properly?
Jay Johnson
So that’s a great question because there’s two different ways to do it. I’ll start with the how. The how for me is twofold. One is it can be internal. So here’s the cool thing about understanding and bringing awareness to this, my earth is my lowest. Just because we’re low in an element doesn’t actually mean that we’re bad at those behaviors. What it means is I’m not motivated to do them. So let me give an example. Search engine optimization, super tedious, very detailed work, very structured, very systematic. I’m actually very, very good at that. I like to win. So I want to get to the top of Google. So I’m driven to win, but utilizing these Earth pattern behaviors. I’m at the top of Google if you search behavioral intelligence, okay, I’m not bad at Earth behaviors. It’s just if I do search engine optimization for 10 minutes, I’m exhausted. If I’m speaking in public or if I’m out selling, I get energy from that. So internally, I can shift my own behaviors. I can learn to adapt to new systems, processes, etc. It may not be comfortable at first, but I can do that secondarily. The opposite way is building a team that helps, helps fill in the gaps that maybe you have, but you have to be okay with giving up a little bit of control, because when you bring an Earth on and they say, Well, where does this fit in a strategic plan, how does this look? Why is this a priority? Now? Why are you shifting gears? You can get a lot of frustration if you’re the founder, if you’re the CEO, if all of a sudden you feel like somebody’s putting up roadblocks. Now, in their mind, they’re not roadblocks, they’re safety checks. So this is one of the things that we have to be aware of. When should you do this? I say as early as possible, because if you neglect one of the drives, if you neglect one of these areas, ultimately it can lead to pretty catastrophic failure. But you got to do it in the right way and make sure that people understand what is my role, what is the actual impact that I’m helping to create, and how can I do this in a very collaborative way?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. So we’ve talked about our founder, who tends to be air and fire oriented, and I can, I can see why founders would love to have a lot more fire people around them, right? They’ve got an idea. They got a bunch of people. Go win it, right? Go make it happen. We’ve talked about the need for systems and processes and how it’s such a significant threat if you don’t have them. We haven’t talked much about the water element. How does that fit into our executive team that we’re building?
Jay Johnson
Yeah, and I will tell you right now, water is probably the most important element. And I hate to say one or the other, but if you look at our subset of data, 40,000 people across you know, general industries, etc, 51% of the average population shows water as their primary element, which means 51% of your customers are water. 51% of your employees are water. Well, what does that mean? They’re strongly driven towards social connection, bonding and interaction. They want harmony. They want to create conditions of a positive culture. We all know how important culture is. Is culture starts with the drive to Bond. It means that we have a shared value system, a shared future together. So water becomes one of the most important elements to bring into an organization. I love it, Scott, and I’ll tell you this when and I’ve consulted with some big organizations, one of the things that I always hear is, you know, we’re trying to fix our culture. I don’t understand why we have disengagement. I don’t know why we have quiet quitting. We have exceptional pay, we’ve got great benefits, we’ve got all of these learning opportunities. And my first question is, is, how often does your team high five each other? How often do they laugh together? How long how often do they say thank you to each other, those three markers, three small markers, can actually predict how high a team performs. It’s because we feel connected.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. So what I’m hearing is that teams should have at least a sum of each of the styles. Is that accurate? Should there be a balance of the styles? How much should you be paying attention to it when constructing a team?
Jay Johnson
Yeah, I wouldn’t say, and I’ll tell you right now, as my profile is imbalanced, my own and I’m a founder, I’m a start. I was a startup. I’ve started up a number of different companies, and it’s never been balanced. So don’t stress if your team’s not balanced, because the awareness of it helps us to understand as a team, Earth would be our lowest we do have a lot of fire, but we have a lot of air. So I know in every meeting, I need to bring in structure, I need to bring in some kind of system, or I need to be thinking about this. So as we’re pondering a new project, considering a new client, we have a checklist that we’ve created to make sure, are we dotting the i’s, crossing the t’s? All of these behaviors can be essentially turned into habits, even if you don’t have a high element. But we have to know, hey, unless we systematize the elements, nobody’s going to be thinking about the systems or the reliability or any of those pieces. So the way we do it ultimately, is get a better understanding of where we are imbalanced, and then make sure there’s protocols in place to solve for whatever the imbalance might be. If we know we’re too high a fire, we take a slowdown on our decisions. If we are too high in water, we make sure that everybody feels very comfortable with a five to four decision, and moving forward, because water wants nine, oh, decisions. You know what I’m saying. So we just make sure that those things are in place and that everybody has an understanding of those different pieces.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. So Jay, there’s this question that I have that before I let you go. I’m very interested to see what you have to say, ask all my guests, and the question is this, what is the biggest secret that you wish? Wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Jay Johnson
I think the biggest secret, and it took me a very long time to learn this, Scott is behavior is a choice, and how we choose to behave is going to determine our success and failure. For so long, I was a victim of, hey, this is your personality. This is who you are, and this is what you’re stuck being. And the reality is is, yeah, personality is one aspect of behavior, but there’s other things, environment, context, motivations, drives, etc. And when we really, truly adopt the idea that behavior is a choice, it gives us this sense of agency and empowerment that we can actually be in the driver’s seat of all the good, all the challenge, all the negative things that happen to us as founders, as owners, or anything else. So that’s the secret that I wish everybody knew.
Scott Ritzheimer
So good. So Jay, there’s a number of folks that are listening that would love to know more about that. They’re wondering what their natural elements are, what that stack looks like. Where can they find out more about the work that you do? Maybe even take the assessment around these four elements?
Jay Johnson
Yeah, absolutely. So you can go to behavioral elements.com and take our free assessment, and you can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And I am on LinkedIn at J, a, y, Johnson, CCG, that is my handle there, and I’d love to share more information with you or answer any questions you might have about behavior.
Scott Ritzheimer
Brilliant. Jay, thanks so much for being on the show. It’s a real privilege having you here with us today, and for those of you watching and listening, I highly recommend the assessment. I got to take it earlier today, and it was fantastic. I also know that your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait. To see you next time take care.
Contact Jay Johnson
Jay Johnson works with individuals and organizations to empower teams, drive growth, and enhance leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents.
Want to learn more about Jay Johnson’s work at Coeus Creative Group? Check out the behavioral assessment at https://behavioralelements.com and connect with Jay on LInkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/