Importance of Organizational Habits

Michael Mendenhall: So it is really with great pleasure that I get to introduce another customer of ours. Something that has been incredibly topical today, and that's education, and certainly with COVID that becomes incredibly important. So we have the Founder/CLO of Education Elements, Anthony Kim, with us. Anthony, come on up. So pleased to have you.

Anthony Kim: Thank you. Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Michael: Yes. Well, I think you've been living in Vegas, is that right?

Anthony: Yeah, I'm a local. I've lived here for three years. Go Vegas.

Michael: Go Vegas. But I think you started the company, what, in 2010?

Anthony: That's right. That's right. Yeah.

Michael: So, I want to first have everyone understand, how did you get into the educational piece? Then we're going to get into what that looks like, what you did, why it was important. And then we're going to get into COVID, and how has that changed. And there's a lot of consternation with parents and people around education. So let's start with how you got into this, how did you?

Anthony: Yeah, I grew up in San Francisco, like a lot of folks...

Michael: I brought that up, yeah, yeah.

Anthony: Oh yeah, so I grew up in San Francisco, and I wasn't into education until about 2000. I started out working in the concert industry, I was a concert promoter in Silicon Valley.

Michael: Any big names?

Anthony: Oh yeah, like Sting, the Beastie Boys, Metallica.

Michael: Awesome.

Anthony: You know the Flint Center over in Cupertino?

Michael: Yeah.

Anthony: Well, that's where I got started, and we worked closely with a lot of the colleges and what we found is that there were a delay in how organizations operate in higher education that's different than the way Silicon Valley operated. So I got excited about education just as an opportunity to do something different.

Michael: Yeah. What did you see that was different in Silicon Valley versus general education?

Anthony: There's a lot of looking back into how to do things right, historically, in education, as opposed to startups that are looking forward and seeing how things need to change to make a bigger difference and change the way we do things every day.

Michael: So, you develop programs and you went around to different districts. Most of you probably know that every district is sort of different. They have a different school board and they have different approaches and nothing's uniform, right? Nationally, there's nothing really uniform.

Anthony: Right.

**Michael: **So what did you do to try to bring some uniformity to all of that?

Anthony: So, I mean, really talking before COVID, just to give some stats, there's 13,000 school districts and 55 million students in the country, so the impact of COVID was substantial and it's still going on today where schools are still doing remote learning and such. But before COVID, what we saw are academic gaps. In school systems there are big academic gaps in math, English language arts in third grade, sixth grade, eighth grade, and what we found is that educators work incredibly hard to educate every child, but the systems that exist are really difficult to do that with the level of personalization that's required in order for it to be engaging for you or somebody else. Everybody has a different way they like to be engaged, and so we as a company focused on personalized learning as a way to engage learning so that people learn how to learn.

Michael: And Anthony, can you do that at scale?

Anthony: Right. So that's the hardest thing about doing anything like this. How do you customize learning for individuals that are so different? And you guys talk about people matter, well, at the student level, each student matters because they all have equal potential when they come into school at kindergarten. And then somehow it gets separated as they get into high school and over time.

Michael: That's terrific. So, did you have any sort of barriers to sort of going to market with this product? I mean, were there school boards or people saying, "Whoa. Hold on a second. This could cost us more." Did you have barriers that you had to overcome?

Anthony: Yeah, entering education has a ton of different barriers. One, from politics to the desire to not get things wrong. And they feel like the stakes are so high, they actually don't want to try a lot of new things oftentimes. What was interesting about COVID is that, for the first time, every district in the country was forced to try something around virtual learning or remote learning and they realized that it served some students really well and some students not so well, but they had to do it at scale.

Michael: So these programs that you created, they've been deployed. How many school districts have you implemented your product in?

Anthony: Yeah, so the primary aspect of our company is consulting services and professional services. We have some minor technology components, but really we're trying to provide consulting services to help school districts and school administrators think about their work differently and approach how they get the work done differently than the way that they have.

Michael: Now you've taken this idea and you've parlayed this into businesses.

Anthony: Right.

Michael: And you've written a book.

Anthony: Yeah, yeah. I've written two books, one is called “The New School Rules” and it's the Six Practices for Creating Better Schools. And then I just wrote another book called “The New Team Habits” which talks about three habits that make organizations more effective.

Michael: Well, that's what we want to get into.

Anthony: All right.

Michael: Because there is a lot of organizations here that would love to understand, certainly in a very dispersed workplace, because you have probably with small, medium-sized businesses, 60% are going to remain remote or hybrid. This idea of team, this idea of habits that become important, do they apply now more than ever? And can you talk to us what those habits are? Talk a little bit about that book.

Anthony: Yeah. So “The New Team Habits” has three habits that we focused on. One is the learning habit, one's the meeting habit and one's the project habit. And before I go into each habit, when we think about an organization, like you said earlier, organizations are just a group of people that have come together and agreed on a set of rules to operate under and a purpose to operate under. And so, when you think about how organizations function, there's an untold level of understanding of what you're trying to accomplish together and often that's forgotten over time as new people come in.

And so, the first habit that we talked about, the learning habit, it's really about psychological safety. How do you create psychological safety? And one way you create psychological safety is by sharing your mistakes. So, oftentimes it's our natural tendency.

Michael: That's a big problem for a lot of people in business.

Anthony: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Right? You don't want to share your mistakes, it's not natural to do that. But the way we learn as humans is, I share my mistakes with you and then you learn not to do those same mistakes. And so that's how we evolve and actually get better at things.

Michael: So that's one. What are some of the others?

Anthony: So the meeting habit. It's really focused on inclusion and building the practice of being able to speak with equal talk time in meetings. Often what happens in a meeting is people will just kick off a meeting and someone will start blabbing away and with the appropriate use of a check-in question, what's the one thing you learned at CES today? If you start your meeting that way, then everybody gets a chance to speak. And through that opportunity to speak, they built a practice of engaging in the meeting.

Michael: Do you think that that's more important now with the idea of telepresence and the fact that maybe you're not all in the same room? You're in a virtual room.

Anthony: Right. Yeah, so especially in a remote setting, it’s a lot easier for someone just to take over the whole conversation, especially since most of the audio is not duplexed, right? And so the hard thing about these kinds of remote situations is how do you get everybody to say at least one thing to build the habit of contributing to the meeting.

Michael: That's awesome. And then what's the third?

Anthony: The third is a project habit and this really came out of a lot of the projects that we did at school systems. There were a lot of times where we would walk into a project and we would get sent to a school and no one knew that we were supposed to be there. And what we noticed is that, consistently, projects and initiatives get started, but no one knows other than maybe the person that started that project, that the projects exist, there's a purpose, or anything like that. And so we really talk about the need to properly kick off a project and to build that muscle.

Michael: Oh, that's awesome. So I want to go back to education for just a second.

Anthony: Yeah.

Michael: You talk about listening. So listening is an important skill.

Anthony: Right.

Michael: Right? In the book. Do you think that the school districts are listening? And do you think that our educational system is improving?

Anthony: Oh, that's a loaded question, Michael. I think that educators are working incredibly, incredibly hard right now and it's an incredibly tough job to serve. You have so many different stakeholders from parents to board members to communities to local businesses to your school principal. And what's hard is that every single family's needs are completely different. And the support that each family, each student, gets at home is completely different. So I think the challenge the system has is, we can't cookie cutter what education looks like for every city, every community, every state, it's just not the same at that level. And what we're seeing is the need for greater customization in education so that it meets the needs of the community.

Michael: Is it happening? I love this idea of personalization in education.

Anthony: Yeah.

Michael: I think that's so important because every child is different.

Anthony: Right.

Michael: And you want to see that take hold. Is there real adoption there? Or is it like they're listening and, "Yeah, that's interesting. We'll get to that"?

Anthony: Yeah, it's one of those industries that change due to macro massive conditions like the one we're in right now. And so it's starting to break away some of the systems that existed. So we're seeing a huge growth in homeschooling, for example. A lot of parents realize that they could teach some of their kids at home a lot easier and it's safer, more convenient or whatever. And so homeschooling went from 2.7 million students to over 5 million students over the course of the year.

Michael: Oh wow, so it doubled.

Anthony: Yeah, exactly.

Michael: So, if I was to say one last thing, based on your book that you did, what would you offer as some great advice to these entrepreneurs that are all here today? They have startups. Some of them have two people, some have five, some have like 70 or 80. What would you give them as advice?

Anthony: Yeah, the main advice I would give is, especially in the conditions that we have now, it still requires a lot of human connection. And even though you and I might be able to meet in person, when we do, we spend quite a number of hours having conversation and discussing different things. What we found in the current situation with remote work environments is that we often schedule meetings back to back and we don't have time to actually have the human connection part and so we never really check in on each other.

Michael: Yeah. Well, okay, that's very good advice. You have, how many employees? 70?

Anthony: Yeah, yeah, exactly. 70. Yeah.

Michael: So you have 70 employees, we're talking about people matter. How important is retention for your company and your people?

Anthony: So I think about retention differently. The way I think about it is, how can each individual grow and learn to be their full potential? And if I can provide an environment where they could reach that goal, then they should continue to stay at our organization. If they find that through their experiences at our organization, they need to reach their next level somewhere else, that's great too, because we're building an ecosystem of like-minded people that can implement the practices, right?

Michael: Well, that's a great culture. A great culture. Culture's important, I think.

Anthony: Right, right.

**Michael: **Yeah. So, well, I want to thank you, one, for taking time out during CES.

**Anthony: **Yeah, thank you.

**Michael: **To be here and be on camera with us for a lot of people to see. Two, I want to thank you very much, you've been a longstanding customer of TriNet's. We appreciate that. We hope we serve you incredibly well and that you continue to stay with us.

**Anthony: **Yeah, absolutely. It's been awesome working with TriNet. And one of the things that I would mention is that we actually sold our business not too long ago and merged with another company and it really helped us to have your guys' expertise in the HR component because all of this transition required so much knowledge, especially with a distributed workforce. Each state required something different and I really appreciated how well you guys treated us through the transition. Thank you.

Michael: Oh, that's awesome. Well, thank you. This was awesome having you. Really appreciate it, Anthony. Thank you very much.