Eric Guy is the Founder and Chief Victory Officer at Center for Victory, which offers leadership coaching and training for professionals who seek ultimate success. Eric is a licensed social worker, author, and internationally acclaimed speaker. He works with individuals and organizations across the country and around the world to help them unlock their personal potential and achieve their greatest success. In his role as Chief Victory Officer, Eric designs and facilitates training and retreats to assist families, educators, mental health providers, and business professionals to embrace their personal genius and discover the power of their relationships.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Eric Guy discusses the Center for Victory and their offerings
- Eric talks about the Predictive Index and the four main factors to consider when hiring
- Why you should use Predictive Index across the board — not just on the management team
- Other services that the Center for Victory offers to its clients
- Eric’s journey starting the Center for Victory
In this episode…
Want to align your business goals with your business strategy, hire the right people, retain and inspire them, and keep them engaged and accountable?
Studies show that 20% of employees quit within the first six months. How do you eliminate this issue? The answer is talent optimization. The Center for Victory is using Predictive Index software to help brands optimize talent. Their assessments help you hire people that fit the job, team, and culture. They also help managers understand their role in the company, interact, and relate with the team — because gone are the days of yelling, screaming, and forcing people to do things. Most people don’t quit their job…they quit their boss.
In this episode of the Project Dynamix Podcast, Brian Chastain sits down with Eric Guy, the Founder and Chief Victory Officer at Center for Victory, to discuss talent optimization, hiring, and employee retention. Eric talks about the Predictive Index and the four main factors to consider when hiring, how leaders can best utilize the Predictive Index, and other services the Center for Victory offers.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Dynamix ESG
- Brian Chastain on LinkedIn
- Center for Victory
- Center for Victory on Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Twitter
- Eric Guy on LinkedIn
- Eric Guy’s Email: eric@centerforvictory.com
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Dynamix.
Dynamix is an engineering and services group on a mission to help companies achieve peak operational efficiencies with the smallest environmental footprint.
At Dynamix, we make sure the companies we work with do NOT make the news. Nobody wants their name in articles due to mishaps, but sadly, it happens all too often.
We have a team of experts that have been in the field for over 45 years. We take care of our clients and get them back up and running as quickly as possible by providing expert turnkey consulting services for their security needs.
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Episode Transcript
Intro 0:04
This is the Project Dynamix Podcast hosted By Brian Chastain, where he features top leaders in the energy markets to talk about innovation and impact.
Brian Chastain 0:16
I am Brian Chastain here host of the Project Dynamix Podcast where I feature top leaders in the energy and broader markets to talk about innovation and impact in the workforce. I am here today with Eric Guy, his Center for Victory. And we’re here to talk about predictive index and his company Center for Victory and see what he’s doing. Eric, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about what you do, what you have to offer. I know we use you for predictive index primarily. But I know that you have a variety of things going on right now.
Eric Guy 0:53
Sure, I mean, first off, thanks for having me. Eric Guy, Chief Victory Officer Center for Victory. What we do personal professional development. One of the ways that we do that are through assessments, we have a handful of assessments, one of the biggest ones that we utilize with our clients is the predictive index, which is a one a software platform. And then as we immerse our clients, it becomes training with their leadership with their management. And ultimately, when you look at what we call talent optimization, it’s kind of when you look at what’s going on with many companies right now. They’re trying to one, get people. And then the bigger area is, once we get them, how do we keep them? The stat that just came out, I think it was last week, or the week before where I read, Brian was that, I think is one in five people right now. So 20%, are quitting within the first six months. So it’s an issue, it’s hard getting them in the door already, you know that everybody knows that the people that you and I talked to know that. But it’s really difficult when you get them and have them for a few months, and then they decide, hey, I’m not going to do this. It can be devastating to the psyche, sometimes, we put all this effort into a person, and now they’re just walking out the door. And sometimes they’re walking out the door to a competitor, it’s even worse. But that’s what we do is really talent optimization. Really looking at helping companies align their talent strategy with their business strategy, hire the right people, keep the right people, inspire them to do great work, keep them engaged, and then constantly diagnose that machine and keep it well running and running smooth, so that people stay and contribute to the company.
Brian Chastain 2:55
Yeah, that’s crazy. I mean, really to think about that many people, as company leaders, you and I, we both interact with other companies and clients or both. And I knew that the turnover was high. I did not, however, know that the statistics were that high, really. And so what we’re trying to do here, and I know that what you’re trying to help companies do, is we’re trying to get to the point where I mean, I think that it’s honestly we’re trying to get to a point where culture is over the dollar. Because, say what you want about people moving or leaving or jumping. But I think in today’s, especially in today’s market for employees, and the hurdles that it takes to just get somebody on-boarded, if you don’t really have the right culture fit upfront, then that’s just going to go to increase that six-month turnover. I mean, you can pay people as much as you want to, but if they’re miserable on day one, or if you didn’t take the time to do that upfront assessment you offer, then when they get there, then they’re immediately they’re mismatched with management, or they’re mismatched with other team members. We’ve gone through and we’ve used PI a lot. I mean, we’ve now I think we’re on like year two or something of using PI on our end. And we’ve had pretty much every employee that’s taken it at this point. And we’re using it we just use it again, I hired a vice president of operations recently. And it was really nice to be able to see each candidate as they came in, we get to look at their resume and their skill set. But we also get to look at how is this person going to interact with the team members above and below this individual as soon as they start? And you know what, we narrowed down based on a resume factors up front. But then we took a real hard look at that PI index, and we had a couple that came in as, like a job fit too. Well, clearly, that’s probably not going to be an ideal situation. And the candidate we did hire ended up being a job match a nine out of 10 of all the markers across. I mean, can you talk a little bit more about the predictive index, and really how that goes, we love it, because you can do it in about 20 minutes. I mean, some of these tests are two, three hours that I’ve had to take, and that from my attention span, it’s too much.
Eric Guy 5:39
Yeah. Especially nowadays, when you have to commit, when you have candidates that can go literally five to 10 different places in just one day to get a job offer, you can ask them for something long and drawn out, right?
Brian Chastain 5:57
Nobody’s going to do it, right. Like, nobody’s going to sit there for three hours. And then they feel like they’re begging for the job or they’re on the stand, like under interrogation. So it’s crazy.
Eric Guy 6:08
And then the other thing is, some assessments do, we equip our companies to be able to read these analytics themselves and get educated around them, obviously, we’re sitting on the bench, helping them out. But it has to be quick. If you’re bringing people in, you have to be able to administer this quick, get them in quick, interview quick, make sure that process goes quick, from the moment they come in the door or contact to the moment you kind of shake their hand and give them the job offer. But with predictive index, I mean, the four main factors, and it’s just not with predictive index, but across the board in companies, the four main factors that lead to that disengagement, and out, are job fit. So when I don’t fit the role, it’s not good for the person, it’s not good for the company. The second piece is the manager, right? The manager doesn’t understand the person or persons. The third is team. And then that rolls into what you were just talking about as culture. Those are the four main factors not all the factors, but those are the four main top factors that contribute to disengagement, what we say the difference between I have to come to work, and I get to come to work. Like when you have people that are motivated that have that, oh, I get to do this. It’s not hard to get there on time. It’s not hard to do go a little extra. It’s not hard to work a little bit more. And I don’t think it’s a generation thing. I really don’t. Years ago, we started off on the Millennials. Now we’re hard on the next generation with this disease and my kids, right? I have to go-getters that are already they graduated in May. I mean, here we are the first of July that both have jobs both wanting to get after it. And I see a lot of other I don’t want to use the word kids now. But a young professionals they really want to dig in, but they want those things, they want to fit. They want a good manager, they don’t want to dud, right. And there’s a lot of dud managers out there. They want to be part of a team and they want to love that culture.
Brian Chastain 8:21
I mean, you said it right there. People want to be engaged. I mean, our workforce spreads, we’ve got individuals that work for us on our end that are early 20s, all the way. I mean, I’ve got an individual that I mean, mid-70s. So this is not a generational thing. I think that it’s more of an eye-opening. And the technology and the services, both that your company Center for Victory is bringing to the table is helping people like me, and many other leaders and middle managers, and even supervisors at a lower level better engage and interact. And I think that that’s really important. So I mean, I said a minute ago, we had all of our employees run through this and started looking at it. Have you had similar experiences with other companies where they stick strictly to management, or is this across the board? I mean, is there any limits for a potential user of PI or any of your services that says, oh, well, maybe somebody said, I can’t do that, because of my employees don’t interact at that level or anything. I mean, I would find it hard for that to be a reason. But I mean, what would you say to something like that?
Eric Guy 9:44
Some people do use that as a reason. I will say, I can only think of two of our clients. So you’re looking at less than 1% of our clients only use it for management.
Brian Chastain 9:59
And that’s what I would have thought, right? I mean, using it for your managers, that’s like, making sure you got tires, but no steering wheel on your car, almost. I mean you got to make sure that the whole team fits. And just because your management team fits, that’s fantastic. But what about the people they’re managing, right?
Eric Guy 10:21
Well, then those people that you’re managing are the face of the company. Nobody sees you a lot, maybe behind the scenes as the leader, they see your frontline workers all the time. And that’s your brand. And that’s your culture. And when people see that, and that’s bad, that’s directly attributed to how we’re managing people and not doing those things with folks to make sure they’re in the right roles. And doing that, but when we make sure that those fit, they become your brand ambassadors, and they become those champions that people say, hey, that’s a good company to work for. I’ve seen that employee, one person that we know, walked into the one of his places, he uses it. And I mean, I had the best customer experience. As soon as I walked in the door, and that’s how it’s supposed to be right. It wasn’t like nobody make eye contact with me. Nobody addressed me. As soon as I walked in that door of his place, I was greeted, hey, how’s it going? Is there anything I can help you with? Sir? I was like, wow. I mean, literally, as soon as I pulled that door back, this person was on it. But it left me with a good feeling and then go back.
Brian Chastain 11:49
Yeah, I mean, that’s really what you want, you want a good feeling for your clients, potential clients, just the generalized public. I mean, somebody may never buy one of your services, by having that team that is, well, here’s what we’ve used and kind of adopted around our office and our workforce, is we want team members that are engaged and accountable. That’s what we’re looking for. And the way that you get people that are engaged and accountable is put the right people in the right seat, you give them the right job, you give them the right team members, they may be amazing at doing a task, but you can move them to one different team and triple their level of fulfillment and productivity, both because now they feel like they are actually engaging. And then they’re more likely to be accountable, because they want to help that team succeed. I mean, that’s what it’s about. And that’s what we try to tell our clients the same things. It doesn’t matter to us, if you buy from me or not, at the end of the day, I want to make sure that we provided a service, I want to make sure that we provided a good impression, because the next time, you still give us a call, because we’re all in this for that second, third or fifth callback, and you can’t get those callbacks down the road. You can’t get employee referrals. I mean, good grief, half of my workforce came from employee referrals. So you know what I mean, nobody’s going to want to refer their friend to come work there. If they’re miserable every day. Try growing your workforce if glass doors got a bad review on you or something because you paired up with the wrong team members. So yeah, I think that that’s absolutely great. Well, other than PI, what else does Center for Victory offer? I know you were mentioning that you guys are managing software, some consulting pieces, you got a bunch of different things that you guys offer as a company.
Eric Guy 13:57
So there’s a couple other assessments that we do that give us even a deeper look than just the behavioral and cognitive pieces of the predictive index. And that’s what we really use in our coaching. So we do a lot of coaching, especially with management and executives, personal professional, intertwines, we do have an assessment that is called the organizational health check. Which is, it goes along with some debriefing and training, but what it does is it measures the 11 areas inside a company that are really generating revenue, and it looks at that so we’re more objectively aware and targeted on what that company needs. So if your leadership took it, and it came back and we debrief and it’s like, hey, look, you’ve got things going on in all these areas. What do we need to target? What’s going to give us the biggest bang for our buck this year? And let’s focus on it. So it helps To the company get targeted. But it also helps us, especially for using the predictive index. It helps us get in line with what that leadership might need as far as employees and setting their talent strategy as well. We do do a lot of trainings, leadership, things like that, we’ve got a couple companies as part of their engagement and retention program, are starting cohorts internally in their companies, which are typically a year long, and some of them have had them staggered, but it’s just a group of high potentials. They get together typically once a month. And these are potential leaders inside the company that they’ve been pinpointed the hey, look, we don’t want to lose them, we want to develop them. And yeah, I was just at a celebration for one, we’re bringing a new class for graduating in 2023. And lots of new faces, very excited about getting started. They don’t know everything that they’re going to be doing what they’re excited about learning more, pushing themselves more, just getting more involved in day-to-day processes within the company. But that drives again, your back to purpose again. It gives them purpose. They’re excited to be there. They wanted to be there. And they’re highly engaged, which is going to make them as all that group is already highly productive.
Brian Chastain 16:37
Yeah, no, I mean that sounds great. Like I said, we’ve known each other for a couple years now. And we I mean, pretty much almost instantly started using your services and getting to know more about you. I want another question, if you don’t mind. Like how did you get started? How to Center for Victory kick off here?
Eric Guy 16:59
It’s a great question because I didn’t want anything to do with business actually. I am a licensed therapist, psychotherapist. All right. That’s what I went to school for. And back in the day when I was doing insurance, so just billing, like a doctor would bill and things like that I just got really frustrated with it, and wanted to do my own thing tried to work with some of the insurance companies they kind of went, we’re not going to do that. And I said, well, I’ll do my own thing. And my own thing was private pay. And what I do, and I still do it, probably only a couple of times a year now because it just time bandwidth. But I go and I stayed with people, I stay with families in their homes, they were having issues with relationships and things like that. Stay in their home for a period of days, had a lot of good, actually a lot of great results with that. And being that it was private pay, they were folks that were sitting higher up in companies. And those folks that like you, if I would have done one with you, you’re like, what I was hearing was, hey, look, you did this in my home, why don’t you just come and do this in my company? Okay. And at first, I was like, man, I want to do that. And then when I was like, yeah, I’ll go do that, because then I saw all the similarities. Right? But I couldn’t get them. So that’s when I needed some of the assessments that we do. I went and got trained and credentialed now almost 20 years ago in these things, and then it has just grown to where, the biggest piece of our business is businesses. Still like to work with family, still like to work with kids, especially that teenage group and young 20s because I think when you get them on the right track, and you help them find their purpose. I’ve got one young gentleman now that is in charge of a nuclear sub. And his family when they called, they were like if you just can get him through high school, it’ll be a miracle when he went on and got his act straight. Graduated sigma Kuhn Laude from a university went on and he’s a great kid, just need to be directed in the right way. And long story short, that’s what we see a lot in companies. Is the same dynamic, it’s relationships. It’s all the things that we talked about, it’s culture, gone are the days of just forcing and yelling and screaming at people to do things. You have to be able to interact and relate. And that goes back to one of the points we made earlier about having a good manager, because most people don’t quit their job, they quit their boss. And if it’s a good job fit, and they leave, a lot of times, it’s their manager. And you talked about the accountability piece, engaged and accountable after we have to start holding our managers accountable. But with that being said, we also have to train them how to treat people.
Brian Chastain 20:33
That’s right. If they don’t know how to talk to their team, they’re not going to know how to talk to you or their team or their other fellow colleagues and other managers. And I think that goes a long way. Hey, Eric, I really appreciate your time today. And I thank you for sharing your story, and more about your company. I want to make sure that people do have an opportunity to get in touch with you. I know how to reach you, eric@centerforvictory.com. Is there anywhere else that we can find you, anybody listening can look you up, find a website, best email, anything like that?
Eric Guy 21:05
Yeah. centerforvictory.com. My email is eric@centerforvictory.com. That’s the best way, we’re on all the social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, all that stuff. We’re on there, so you can follow us there as well. But appreciate the time, Brian, thanks for the interview. Always good talking to you.
Brian Chastain 21:25
Absolutely. Thanks, Eric.
Outro 21:28
Thanks for listening to the Project Dynamix Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
