Bart Justice WINS by Mastering Decision-Making with the Judgment Index and Aligning Core Values

Discover the keys to unlocking stellar decision-making in the corporate world with me, Carrie Richardson, as I sit down with Bart Justice, an innovator at the helm of Arise Forums.

Prepare to have your mind broadened as we traverse the landscape of the Judgment Index, an assessment tool that transcends your typical personality quizzes. Bart, with his deep roots in EOS and Traction, shares a treasure trove of experiences that harmonize the roles of visionary and integrator. He also uncovers the criticality of aligning personal values with job-specific necessities, a strategy that ensures businesses achieve their highest potential. This is an episode rich with insights on the delicate balance of core values within a company, and how these should mirror more than just aspirations, but the actual deeds shaping an organization's culture.

Then, we shift gears to look at how life's pivotal moments can drastically alter our values, examining through personal stories the evolution of my own principles in response to parenthood and the entrepreneurial journey. You'll hear a moving account of redemption and the potent effect of living out one's foundational values, a narrative that demonstrates the profound impact these ideals have on both personal growth and professional relationships. While we only scratch the surface on the future of AI in sales and marketing, you can anticipate a follow-up discussion that promises to delve into the innovative use of technology in streamlining business practices. So, if you're after a conversation that combines practical business wisdom with the transformative journey of personal values, then join us for an episode that's both enlightening and compelling.

Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?

Carrie helps businesses improve their sales and marketing teams.

Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.

Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com

Book time with them here: https://randr.consulting/connect

Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.

Transcript

 Good afternoon everybody.

My name is Carrie Richardson and I'm the host of WIN. What's important now?

With me today is Bart Justice and he's the founder of Arise Forums. I was talking to Bart about some different AI applications that Consultants and business owners can use in their day to day tasks.

And he mentioned The Judgement Index, which I have never heard of before. So the judgment index is, tell us about it Bart.  

Yeah. So it's a fascinating thing. I got certified in a few years ago.  It is a values assessment. So it's not a personality profile.  It's not something like the Myers Briggs or the disc that tells you different things about your personality,  or the six types of working genius that gives you insight into things that make you click at work or whatever.  It is actually a very complex formula that was developed by Dr. Robert Hartman, who escaped Nazi Germany back in the 30s when he saw what was happening with Hitler coming into power. He had his PhD in axiology, which was the study of values, and it was a pretty subjective. 

Philosophy  back when he was in there and he felt like he could quantify it. So he actually worked with Einstein's mathematicians over here to come up with the math that would allow people to quantify judgments. And the best way to explain it is if you take.  To make good decisions, you need to have  three different types of insights.

You need to have relational insight, you need to understand people, right? You need to have tactical insight,  your work, and you need to have strategic insight. So ideas and things like that. But you need those three insights in proper balance with one another. And depending on the situation and scenario you find yourself in, you, you have to balance those things out different ways.

So a good example would be, it's pretty easy to say that a person's life. Is more important than a barrel of oil, right? But if you're talking about a million barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf, you might put some people's lives at risk to try to prevent that from happening. And so the, judgments that you make are really a combination of the three different insights that you have, and where you place those values is gonna tell you a lot about your motivation, your dependability.

Your work life balance and so forth. So it is a tremendous tool, for pre hire situations, for engagement situations to see how engaged a work team is. And also to see if you're hiring a real strategic hire, a C level person  for a very important position, you would want to do like a full blown analysis and take a look at. 

Does this person have the kind of judgment that I'm looking for in that position?  

You're experienced with EOS and traction, and would you describe yourself as a visionary or an integrator? 

I am probably a pretty good blend of both. 

I was a visionary in my previous business. We implemented EOS.  We self implemented EOS  which was, pretty hard. And I was the visionary, and I had a phenomenal integrator, and she really taught me a tremendous amount over the five years that we worked together  in my role as a business consultant, I end up stepping in to more of an integrator kind of role with people until they can find someone that can be that integrator for them, so it's more like a fractional kind of integrator situation  When I did the judgment index, I scored strongest in tactical insight.

Which is what you would want out of integrator. 

So you're not necessarily looking to see if their values and yours are the same. You're looking to see if the values are in alignment with the role that you're hiring for?

Both.  You can see a lot of things in the judgment index that would tell you, Hey, this person might not be as dependable as I want, or they may not be as tolerant.

You can actually see if a person is intolerant, with this assessment and  that's probably not going to fly in your organization, especially the higher up that you go. You're looking for red flags there that signal that, hey, this person may not make strong decisions in the way that I want them to.

But then you also want to match for the role.  If you're in an R& D situation, you might want to hire somebody with more strategic insight, than the tactical or relational insight. 

So how does this compare to something like the, Kolbe test or the CliftonStrengths test?  

Those things do offer a lot of insights. into the different strengths that you bring to the table. Again, a lot of those are based in personality,  the judgment index is  purely a mathematical ordering of, the insights that you have into things that you would consider good and things that you would consider bad. 

So would you recommend an organization do both? Should they do a personality profiling and a values profiling? 

Yes.  A personality profile will tell you a lot of times if  someone's going to be suited, you're probably not going to put an extrovert that bounces off the walls on an assembly line doing the same thing over and over again for two hours before they get a break. 

And so I like to give the disc personality profile in conjunction with the the judgment index. There's a real simple very inexpensive version of the Judgment Index that just does pre hire and so very quickly, you can say, yes, this person you can immediately scratch people based on it, but then it may come back and say, yeah, this person's okay, so then you might want to do a personality profile and maybe even a larger Judgment Index.

A disorganized company with an executive team that hasn't implemented something like traction or any of the other branches of strategic management, Where would you recommend they begin? Where does this fit  when you're determining, adopting core values or deciding what your core values are?

The thing that our facilitator said that has always stuck with me is values cannot be aspirational. You have to be doing them now. And when we chose, when I chose mine, my team called me out and said, no, you're not doing any of those things. And they said, if you can go back to the office, And exhibit all three of these core values every day for the next quarter.

We can talk about having these as our core values and we'll finalize them at the next quarterly. So I had to go be on my best behavior for an whole quarter.  . 

Yes. So Patrick Lencioni has a great article, I think it's in the Harvard Business Review. You can Google it  on aspirational core values.

He really paints a good case for not having your core values be aspirational. They've got to be things that you exhibit in your company right now.  I always start with a leadership team with vision, mission, and core values. Until those are defined, it's really hard. You don't know where you're going.

You don't know why you're going there and you don't know how you're going to get there. It's really hard to, get any kind of traction to use  an EOS term there.  You have to have common vision and mission and. People have to really buy into the core values. They can't be just things you put on the wall. 

My husband calls that the strategy hat trick. 

Yes, it is. And people gloss over it, so many times and they don't see the importance of it. But once you have a team that is bought into where you're going, why you're going there and how you're going to get there.  That, that tells me you've probably got the right people and they may be in the right seats.

There is a judgment index report called the engagement report. And it tells how engaged people are in their work environment, and they bring a lot of stuff from home, into the workplace, and that's going to show up in this report. So it divides things up into 12 different categories and gives you a score on how close you're going to hit the bullseye in each one of those 12 areas, and it will show very quickly if your team is engaged or not. 

Because once you have a vision, mission, and core values you, have to have an engaged team or you're just going to spin your wheels.  

Since we're on the EOS track here, when you look at the GWC or gets it, wants it, has the capacity for anybody who's not familiar with traction right now,  where does the judgment index align with the GWC of an employee? 

The, formal way to do it is to take all of your core values and you say, yes, this person exhibits this core value most of the time, or sometimes he does, sometimes they don't, or no, they don't exhibit it most of the time, and you, grade those things in the people analyzer, and then you just say, does the person get the job, want the job, have the capacity to do the job. 

The judgment index, gives you a baseline. Unlike personality  or natural strengths, you can hone a skill, but your personality is your personality,  but the thing about judgment is your judgment can improve. Your judgment can improve. You can change how you value things. 

You can start valuing people  over ideas, and where you see you're deficient, there are things that you can put into place that help you overcome those deficiencies in your judgment. And so it is a phenomenal coaching tool to use.  With an individual to help them grow in their leadership  and in their management of people  

When I think about adjusting your values.

I think about parenting.  And how you may have behaved before you had your own children and all of a sudden your parents weren't so dumb and maybe they weren't as bad as you thought they were. When you have your own issues to wrestle with and you're trying to parent like I would say that my values have changed becoming a parent.

They changed when I became a business owner.  For example lots of new entrepreneurs struggle with managing people.

I definitely struggled. So I think about how I was able to. Approach situations differently with less judgment and more empathy. And even if I didn't feel it. I was able to say the right thing, and the more often I said the right thing, the closer I got to believing those things, then all of a sudden it became natural. 

Would that be a value change? 

Yes. When we had our first child, I started driving through residential neighborhoods a lot slower.  It, was a, bad decision on my part to drive. Over the speed limit in residential neighborhoods. But until I realized how important it was to do that with little kids that might run out in the street and stuff, it was like, wow. 

That's  a simple way to do it, but in business, like I, as a business owner, I learned that  I could value people and really have empathy for their situation and call them to a higher place and.  Really before them, and even extend them grace when they screw up, or  even if it, like some person I might have to let go for the same thing, another person I might extend grace to, that and, people know that you care about them, but then you hold them to what they said they were gonna do, the tactical part of it  and then you cast the vision for where we're going and  why we're going there, they want to jump on board and they want to stay on board.  I had an employee  that was just helping me out in a pinch. He was an older gentleman that had taken an early retirement  from a job. And I needed a driver for my document destruction business. And he offered to help me for a couple of weeks.

And  so anyway he, was supposed to weigh each container at the stop and write it down. and give it to the lady or the gentleman that was at the,  at the bank or wherever we were. This is how much we're going to be shredding for you today and so forth. And so he took off and was an hour away in the truck.

I went out to the other truck and found both of my scales in that truck, which meant he didn't have a scale in his truck.  So I called him  and I was like  Hey, how's it going? And he's Oh, I just finished at the bank. And I was like, great. How much did they have? And he said, Oh, they had 153 pounds. 

And I said how did you arrive at that number?  And there was just dead silence. And he said boss I'm pretty good at estimating these things. I've been doing this for a couple of weeks now and I pretty much know about how much it is. I was like that's not how we do business here.  It didn't line up with our core values, right?

So I just said, why don't you come on back to the shop? He's boss I'm an hour away. I got all these stops to do. And I was like, no, you're coming back right now.  And I hung up the phone and I thought I was going to fire him and About 30 minutes into kind of contemplating what I was going to do.

I had this idea.  Why don't you share with him? Why you do what you do and just cast a vision for doing it the right way so when he got back I  him  The lady that started the shredding business before I bought it.  She had a prayer group That I was in and she prayed and prayed over whether or not she should start this business.

And after a couple of weeks of praying, she felt like God had spoken to her and said, if you do this, I will bless it.  And it was a tremendous blessing for her family for.  And she sold it to me  and in deciding on whether or not  I was going to take it and buy it and run with it. I said I'm going to do the same thing she did.

And so I got a group of people together and started praying. And I was hoping for the same kind of thing for God to say, if you do this, I'm going to bless it.  He didn't, do that.  He said, instead. He pointed me to a verse that said the lord abhors an unbalanced scale 

whoa Because everything at that time we weighed everything we charged by weight the lord abhors an unbalanced scale So I knew what he was telling me was if you do this, you better do it the right way  i'm calling you to do something the right way and all of our core values had to do with excellence and diligence and  just  being truthful in what we, in our dealings. 

So I shared that with this gentleman, I shared the story and I said, it's very important that we do things the right way. I said, we're going to call that client and we're not going to charge them for the service. And we're gonna  we're, gonna,  we're going to do that for every client that you've done this to over the past. 

A couple of weeks  and I said, you still have your job.  I just want you to know that we want to do things the right way.  And he was floored.  He came back to me a few days later and he was like, boss. I want to work here.  And I said okay. And he said, no I want a job. I don't want this to be a temporary thing.

I want you to offer me a job.  And for the next 10 years, he was the best employee I had.  And he was the biggest cheerleader for our company. He was a phenomenal,  advocate to the rest of the staff on behalf of me. He turned into a phenomenal salesperson. And,  but I cast that vision.  And told him why and emphasized our core values and gave him another opportunity.

And he changed the way that he approached his job. He, changed the, where he placed value. And it was a great,  experience for both of us.  

I can't think of a better place. To stop then right there, but I would like to learn how somebody would implement the judgment index in their business. How do they get engaged? 

Yes, they can contact me for sure, and I can give them the  the codes and the links to get in and take the assessments.  The judgment index itself is a. It's two sets of 18 items that you order  in, order of how you place the value on them, whether they're good or bad, or,  so  from that, you can run a variety of reports, a pre hire report, or an engagement report, or a blue diamond  personal narrative,  full blown kind of thing you can look at compatibilities with other people things like that. 

While you can go directly to Judgment Index,  If you go through someone that's certified like I am, we can give you some extra,   walk you through the different nuances that are available with the reports.  So all 

of that information will be in the show notes. You can check out the judgment index.

I'll also have Bart's contact information. And we're out of time on wind today, but next time we talk to Bart, we're going to talk about his new peer group, which is focused on AI and how people can use AI better in their businesses, specifically around sales and marketing applications in AI. So thank you very much for joining us today, Bart.

I really enjoyed speaking to you and I hope you have a wonderful day and keep winning. 

Thank you.

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