Scott Christiansen (00:06):
Welcome, Victor LaGroon. Victor, you’re an executive strategist. Your specialty is people, and basically every company in the world needs your help right now. We’ve talked a lot. One of the things you believe right now is there’s a big disconnect between what businesses want out of people and what people want out of business. Solve that for me in 10 seconds.

Victor LaGroon (00:30):
10 seconds. Alright. No pressure at all. At the end of the day, people want to feel heard, seen, valued, and respected, right? I don’t think most people expect to get everything they want at the same time. I think it’s the feeling that they have as they leave an engagement or an interaction that really will determine how that relationship plays out. And as it pertains to employees, the people we ask to drive our missions, our outcomes, our profit margins, what they’re really looking for is an environment that gives them the feeling that, hey, this is where I belong. They are invested in me the same way I’m invested in the outcomes. And at the end of the day, the folks that I’m going to work hard for will take care of me, whatever that take care of me looks like. And I think it’s different for all of our employees today.

(01:17):
For some of our younger employees, it may be the quality of life that they’re seeking. For some of our older employees, it may be the level of stability that they need in their life at that phase of their existence. The days of employees coming to a company, staying for 20, 25, 30 years, they’re pretty much over, I think. And there’s a number of factors that’s contributed to that. So today, when we engage a workforce, the real goal is what does retention look like for our organization for that talent? Do we have the ability to grow talent within our organization and develop them, invest in them, or are we accustomed to a three to five year turnover margin? And I think a lot of companies are in that three to five year turnover margin space, especially for their younger employees. When we look at the under 30 population, for example, we see them coming into the workforce, finding a job, thinking about what they want career wise, and then moving to their next career step. And that means you’re going to get a more transient population. I think as things develop, I also see that there’s a crunch in the market where talent is coming out of the academic institutions looking for their first opportunity, and it’s more people seeking those fewer opportunities. So competition for today’s talent is a little steeper.

Scott Christiansen (02:35):
It’s so steep. Can I speak on behalf of employers for a second? Absolutely. I feel like I work mostly in the middle market, lower middle market, the organizations we work with, and I just feel like it doesn’t matter, you work with companies of all size, but you work with the giant global multinationals as well. But I just feel like employers have been on the back foot ever since COVID and just first it was, oh, work from home. And then what led to the quiet quitting phase and now recruiting, retention. There’s not enough people don’t want to work, but maybe they just don’t want to work in this environment. What do we need to change? And now we’ve got AI and the change management that comes with that is just like drinking from a fire hose for most businesses.

Victor LaGroon (03:34):
It really is. I think we initially grossly underestimated the impact that AI would have on labor, and I think we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg today. We are going to see job elimination because of technology, and we’ve seen some of this in a number of different markets. A good example would be today when you go into McDonald’s, you want to order food, there’s a kiosk, and you go to the kiosk and you punch the key and you swipe your card and someone at the counter calls your name and you pick up your food. That’s very different than what it was like five years ago. So we’re seeing different emergent markets. I think back to self-checkout at Target or a grocery store.

(04:17):
Before I could take my items, check myself out, that eliminated a human being who was doing that work and we’re seeing it now in autonomous cars. So now there’s fewer Uber drivers in some markets, little by little we’re seeing those changes. We’re seeing also changes in, we really had an uptick in who was doing cybersecurity, who was designing applications. Now we’re seeing what applications, creating more applications. So that’s going to be some workforce reduction in those markets as well. So different markets will respond differently. I think that we see more specialized care. For example, in healthcare, I looked at a robotics procedure at one of my client’s offices and I said, man, that’s interesting. They said, yeah, the doctor’s remote and he’s operating this machine that’s providing this surgery. So now we have more surgical opportunities, but that’s one less physician in that location.

(05:19):
So how that changes the emerging markets across different industries is going to play out differently today. We see it more relevant in some spaces than others, but it’s going to be a challenge. And how we respond to those challenges will be important. So I think some of it is that we have to have a very sober conversation with society and say, these markets are emerging. However, some of the other markets are going to be hit differently. And how we get young people to look at career opportunity really is going to be important. Because what we don’t need is a more frustrated workforce who now has expectations that hiring people aren’t going to be able to meet, right? We’re not going to be able to guarantee that you’re going to have gainful employment in certain industries for the next 20 to 30 years. Different people will have to change how they do work or what work looks like for them. So we do have some challenges.

Scott Christiansen (06:11):
Just thinking about my kids entering the workforce. You and I have had to reinvent ourselves. But maybe five major reinventions? Kids or younger people entering the workforce, they might have to reinvent themselves 20 times, 30 times this year.

Victor LaGroon (06:38):
I see a future where before we were concerned about someone graduating with a master’s degree and still working as a barista, we’re going to see, I think two things. More young people becoming entrepreneurs, thinking about what they can create and how that goes into the marketplace. And then we’re going to see another group that will have to acquire different skills as they move throughout workforce development. So today they may be doing something in community contact, for example, providing outreach, engagement, making phone calls. Many of us spent careers on the phone. I remember selling subscriptions to the newspaper as a college student. That’s going to be automated. So now that same person who was selling subscriptions,

Scott Christiansen (07:28):
What’s a newspaper? You’re going to have to back up for me there.

Victor LaGroon (07:33):
Right? Well, I mean, for example, healthcare today, someone from the insurance industry is going to give you a call and say, there are other options. These might suit your family’s needs differently. Tomorrow it might be an automated option that reaches out to you say, Hey, select one if, select two if and so on. So there are already steady changes we see developing, and I think young people today will have to be far more flexible than you and I needed to be. I think we were finding ourselves in different industries and saying, oh, I don’t want to do this anymore. Let me try my hand at bartending. Let me try my hand at education. I was a substitute teacher at one point in time. I also worked in hazardous waste disposal. I was in the military. I went into healthcare, then public policy, then government affairs. So I think we had some level of evolution also. And this generation is suited and tooled for development and evolution. We do have to walk them through what some of those opportunities are going to look like.

Scott Christiansen (08:36):
Yeah. Tell me, I want to use you selfishly for the people that I work with mostly. So those mid-market healthcare businesses, give me some tips on creating an environment. And I’m not talking about a huge health system. I’m talking about a smaller organization that maybe just manages the anesthesia or maybe an organization that’s making a technology for the hospital. These aren’t huge organizations, but they need really talented people, specialist people, and they’re hard to recruit and other people want to poach them. So any advice?

Victor LaGroon (09:25):
I think one of the things that I see being more helpful today, and I have a client who is a network of community clinics. So they have about 10 clinics in the community, and one of the things I’ve advised them on is hire more people who have diverse backgrounds. And the reason for that is that the people who are capable of doing more than two or three things will always have some place within your organization.

Scott Christiansen (09:50):
Oh, I like that.

Victor LaGroon (09:52):
So even if you may hire someone in accounting who might have an IT background, they can shift to another part of your workforce without losing that talent and losing that intellectual equity that your company’s benefited from and still stay in the development phase of how you build them as an employee.

Scott Christiansen (10:10):
When you think about change management too, people who’ve been through different scenarios aren’t as scared of change and they’re easy to adapt to change. You just described the perfect accountant today, somebody who’s been in IT and numbers because it’s all merged.

Victor LaGroon (10:26):
It’s a great merger. And so as you think through healthcare, you may hire a nurse today who could be in another part of your practice. They could provide nurse management in your dental practice. They could do other things within your organization, whether it’s in billing. There’s always a place where a leader who’s developed in leadership skills can lead in an organization. The problem is when you start throwing people leadership skills or leadership positions out of necessity and not out of development of talent. And I think that’s where some organizations find themselves in a bit of a pinch. It’s someone that they hope that they could convert into a leader who hasn’t had leadership development. So that is a point of caution that I share with some of my clients.

Scott Christiansen (11:17):
Do you find that people actually really know how to express what they want from their job or their career, or they just know that they’re not seeing it when they’re not seeing it? Because as a business owner, how do I find out what people want if they’re not sure what they want, or maybe they are, and I just haven’t asked the question?

Victor LaGroon (11:40):
Well, what I would advise in that scenario is talk to your people more than you talk to your clients and make sure that we used to have this thing back in the day called an open door policy. At any point in time, I could go see my leadership and stop them with a challenge, bring a solution, work through how I could make something happen better or different that move the needle as far as how we work productive in an organization. That’s a challenge today because larger organizations really don’t know their people.

(12:15):
I know that John shows up every day, works at this desk, does this thing. I don’t know any of the mechanisms that makes John’s life move. And now because of that, when something affects his life, I’m not sure how to respond as an employer, but when you have a level of investment in your people and it’s easier in a smaller organization than it is a larger one, now I can better forecast and say, oh, someone might have a daycare issue that they just can’t manage. As far as timing, do I have flexibility within my organization to change their calendar? If it’s talent that I want to retain, I need to solve that problem that’s on me as much as it is the employer. Because what I don’t want to do is start over every time. There’s a challenge, right?

Scott Christiansen (13:01):
Yeah.

Victor LaGroon (13:02):
Attrition is never your friend. So your back door is always going to be a bigger concern than your front door. So organizations that are burning through capital and burning through people, they’re never going to have the level of stability to be as profitable as they can be.

(13:18):
Your competition. On the other hand, some of them have figured this piece of it out. I’m going to always work to keep my people who are talented, hardworking, invested in our outcomes, and I need to mutually be invested in them. Now, I can’t be all things to all people, but what I can do is ensure that my people know there’s a challenge. Come to me and we’ll work through it. We’ll figure it out together because that allows me to keep that talent in place, give them the ability to commit themselves to more work and not more work as in volume, but in quality. That’s really where I want to exist with my workforce

Scott Christiansen (13:56):
For the Root3 Pointer now, I want to share some information with everyone that you’ve shared with me. When we first met, one of the things that we worked together on was initiatives to encourage organizations to hire veterans. You’re a veteran, you taught me, just open my eyes to some really cool things about veterans that if you don’t know it, you’re missing the opportunity. So first, I just wanted to give you a chance. Why are veterans amazing teammates?

Victor LaGroon (14:33):
I think a big part of it is that from the very beginning when you come into the military, you’re surrounded by people who are nothing like you typically. They didn’t grow up where you grew up. They didn’t come from a community like yours. They often don’t look like you. So what you start learning is commonality. And in that commonality, finding those common threads, you also get to develop new relationships that are often strong bonds because you’re going through that development together, right? It’s kind of like if you started out together in a new company, you went to orientation together, you are new in your department together, you start having lunch together. So now there’s a commonality to our showing up in this new space together, and we are having these joint experiences and we’re developing and we’re helping one another be successful. That’s the culture you really want to build in your workforce. You couple that with high expectations at a very young age. Most of our service members are coming in at 18, 19, and 20. So a year ago, they needed permission to stay out past 12 o’clock. Today, we’re trusting them with millions of dollars of technology. And lives. Absolutely. So you have the most tech savvy generation of service members over the last 30 years coming out into the workforce and saying, Hey, I’ve worked with different cultures, different communities, different languages. I’ve galvanized teams around mission. I’ve driven outcomes since the very beginning of my career in the military. When I come out, I want to exercise those skills. I want to help my organization thrive. I want people to be committed to one another. I want us to build a culture of honesty and integrity and accountability. But all those things are mutual. So it’s different than, as opposed to a college student who’s coming out of college at 22 or 23, asking them to lead in environments in which they’ve never led. It’s leading yourself at 22. I remember struggling at the workforce and asking questions and knowing who I could get mentorship from and all the other things that you try to figure out at 22 versus coming out of the military. You’re self driven, you understand what commitment looks like. You have been around the world in some aspect or another, and so you recognize what it’s like to be responsible at a high level, at a very early age. And I think that type of workforce, these are the entrepreneurs of the past. These are the legislators of the past.

(17:03):
These are the folks who built our institutions. I look at marketing firms that are colossals in the industry today, started by veterans in the past. I look at how veterans changed the landscape of Ford Motor Industry after World War II, building the infrastructure of our country. And even some of our great educators came from the Vietnam Era. Many of them went into education, sought to educate a new generation of folks. So there’s always going to be those veterans who’ve made these huge impacts across our landscape. The biggest issue is having an opportunity.

Scott Christiansen (17:41):
That’s what I wanted to talk about too, because this was a real eyeopening thing for me. You told me when I’m interviewing a veteran, they’re going to be very different than anyone else I’m interviewing because very likely they will not sell themselves.

Victor LaGroon (17:56):
Nope.

Scott Christiansen (17:56):
You got to pull it out of ’em.

Victor LaGroon (17:58):
You do.

Scott Christiansen (17:59):
Tell me the key to interviewing a veteran.

Victor LaGroon (18:02):
So one of the things, and I realized this about myself when I first came home, my first job in Chicago was at University of Chicago. I’m sitting in an interview with the head of the cancer center, and she said, tell me some things about what you were able to accomplish. And everything I said was about team, because that’s the culture in the military. She said, well, yeah, but tell me what you did. And I said, well, I led my team in these ways. I was able to help some of my younger service members really develop themselves as professionals. And it took five questions to get me to, oh, you just want me to talk about me, right? Yeah. It’s so counter to our culture because we are in a very team rich environment.

Scott Christiansen (18:45):
You still haven’t gotten over that, by the way. You’re still the most humble person I know.

Victor LaGroon (18:51):
You know what? There’s some great truth to that. And I think every day I try to be a little better at recognizing that I can speak to the things that I’ve done individually and still honor the work that I’ve done with great people.

Scott Christiansen (19:06):
That was a compliment, by the way. It was not. It’s really cool because when we talk and I hear everything you’ve done, it just reinforces the humility. I’m like, oh, you worked where you did what? You’re doing what now? It’s pretty cool. I have one more question. This is a quiz for you. Sure. So I looked up celebs and musicians who served in the military, and I want to see if you can guess which branch that they served in.

Victor LaGroon (19:37):
Oh, that’s a good one.

Scott Christiansen (19:38):
Okay. Jimmy Hendrix.

Victor LaGroon (19:40):
Army.

Scott Christiansen (19:40):
Correct. Adam Driver.

Victor LaGroon (19:45):
Marine Corps.

Scott Christiansen (19:45):
I swear he does not have this in front of him. How do you know? Well, let’s go through the rest and see how good maybe these are just lucky. Shaggy, not from Scooby-Doo Shaggy.

Victor LaGroon (19:45):
I believe he was a Marine.

Scott Christiansen (19:45):
He was a Marine. Morgan Freeman.

Victor LaGroon (19:45):
Army.

Scott Christiansen (20:12):
Air Force.

Victor LaGroon (20:12):
Air Force. I think it was Army Air Corps. Oh, what year was it?

Scott Christiansen (20:18):
Oh, I don’t know. Dude. I asked ChatGPT. Here’s my favorite one that I didn’t know. Bea Arthur.

Victor LaGroon (20:26):
Bea Arthur was a Marine.

Scott Christiansen (20:28):
She was a Marine.

Victor LaGroon (20:29):
Yeah.

Scott Christiansen (20:30):
You are good at this.

Victor LaGroon (20:32):
She’s a tough, I mean, if you think about Bea Arthur’s personality and how she excelled way back in the time when women really weren’t highlighted and elevated and doing their own shows, she had to be a tough lady. She really had to push through and have perseverance. And when you see Bea Arthur with all that energy, just think about what she was like at 25, right?

Scott Christiansen (20:54):
Yeah.

Victor LaGroon (20:54):
Yeah. Pretty amazing.

Scott Christiansen (20:56):
That is awesome. Three more. Ice-T.

Victor LaGroon (21:00):
Ice-T. That’s a tricky one. I’m trying to remember. I want to say

Scott Christiansen (21:07):
It was fun to look at this and realize some of these people that you just see ’em on the screen.

Victor LaGroon (21:14):
Was he in the Air Force?

Scott Christiansen (21:15):
He was the Army.

Victor LaGroon (21:17):
Army. I should have known that.

Scott Christiansen (21:19):
Okay, two more. Willie Nelson.

Victor LaGroon (21:26):
That one, I don’t know. I almost

Scott Christiansen (21:28):
Imagine him getting discharged for, well, think about Willie Nelson flies high.

Victor LaGroon (21:35):
Yes. Air Force.

Scott Christiansen (21:37):
Yes. The last

Victor LaGroon (21:40):
I mean Willie Nelson and Jimi Hendrix. It’s hard to imagine those free spirits in a conformed uniform with a haircut standing in formation doing their thing. Yeah. We produced some good folks.

Scott Christiansen (21:56):
The last one, the toughest person that’s ever lived. Chuck Norris. Wow.

Victor LaGroon (22:03):
I thought you were going to say Mr. T, who also, by the way,

Scott Christiansen (22:05):
Mr. T was right. I did see him.

Victor LaGroon (22:07):
He was an MP in the Army. Should

Scott Christiansen (22:08):
Put Mr. T in there.

Victor LaGroon (22:10):
Chuck Norris, I’m hoping it’s Army.

Scott Christiansen (22:15):
He was Air Force. He was in the military police in the Air Force.

Victor LaGroon (22:18):
Okay. So he was really,

Scott Christiansen (22:21):
That’s

Victor LaGroon (22:21):
Nice. Yeah.

Scott Christiansen (22:23):
You learned something on this. See,

Victor LaGroon (22:25):
I did. I Aren’t you glad you got great folks like Morgan Freeman, so many people who served in the military before they went into their great careers in entertainment. I’m honored to be a part of that fraternity, and it’s such a vast, diverse group. It is really reflective of who we are and what we’ve done in different spaces. So Drew Carey, another one.

Scott Christiansen (22:52):
Drew Carey.

Victor LaGroon (22:53):
So I mean, there’s a ton of folks out there you look at today. Fred Durst, another one, right? Fred Durst. Sinbad the comedian. There’s another one, right. So it’s a really weird kind of fraternal organization of mixed bag of nuts. But we all found a way to fit in.

Scott Christiansen (23:12):
Your point on you’re going to be thrown in with people that probably weren’t from your town, weren’t from your street. It’s well represented. When you look at this list of people.

Victor LaGroon (23:23):
It is, and I think it’s more representative of how society plays out. No matter where we start, we kind of end in a very common space. So I’m just really appreciative of one, folks who’ve been able to exercise their best foot forward when they’ve had an opportunity. And two, the people who’ve given us opportunities to grow and to make mistakes and to fail forward. I think that’s important as well.

Scott Christiansen (23:53):
Well, we’re recording this right now. It’s right around Veteran’s Day, so it is appropriate to say Happy Veteran’s Day. But Victor, thanks so much for coming on and sharing some of your knowledge about the workforce is so important

Scott Christiansen (24:06):
Right now we’re in the middle of a big shift, and people are going to have to be very nimble on both sides of the businesses and the team members. So thanks for your time.

Victor LaGroon (24:16):
No, man. And I’m appreciative of what Root3 does across markets. But more importantly, you guys are great at helping people tell their story, and I think that’s a skillset that if I could master any one thing, the ability to tell a great story about myself, about my company, about our product, that’s always going to be a winning skill. So kudos to you guys and what you do and how you help your clients. I really appreciate it.

Scott Christiansen (24:43):
Thanks, Victor.

Victor LaGroon (24:44):
Absolutely. Thank you, man.