Finding Motivation and Maximizing Productivity with Dr. Kevin Gazzara

Maximize productivity and find motivation in your workplace through a Task Quotient assessment, a revolutionary task management approach from Dr. Kevin Gazzara!

“Invest in yourself, right? And as you’ve mentioned, Jerry, it’s really about self-awareness, whether it’s taking an EQ evaluation, whether it’s doing this or Myers Briggs or strengths find or whatever is don’t just take them. You want to take them and do something with them.”

Dr. Kevin Gazzara is a professor, author, and leadership consultant with 25+ years of experience in the industrial and academic world. He specializes in helping companies and individuals analyze their task quotient to help them find their ideal balance of tasks and maximize job satisfaction.

We tend to work best when we are working within our strengths and talents.

His work as a leadership trainer and consultant led him to develop expertise around task quotients helping teams align tasks to best fit the preferences of those on the team. Imagine being able to put up for auction the things about your job you dislike and taking on the work you love in a way that mutually benefits everyone. That is what we are talking bout in this episode of Beyond the Rut.

In this episode, you will learn the following:
1. Invest in yourself to become more self-aware and have a plan to reach your goals.
2. Exploring the concept of task types and the importance of balancing them for job satisfaction and productivity.
3. Learning about the task quotient and how it can help you to structure your day for maximum motivation and engagement.

Table of Contents

Dr. Kevin Gazzara

Dr. Kevin Gazzara – CEO of Magna Leadership Solutions, Management & Leadership Expert, Executive Positive Intelligence Coach, Professor at 5 Universities, Speaker, & Author of The Leader of OZ. Kevin worked for 18 years at Intel Corporation in positions from Program and Product Management to Leadership Development. He holds a BS in Commerce and Engineering, an MBA, and a Doctorate of Management in Organizational Leadership.

Chapter Summaries

[00:00:00]
Invest in yourself, right? And as you’ve mentioned, Jerry, it’s really about the self awareness. The best way to have that happen is to have a plan and either have a coach. And then second is to get what we call capability partner, not an accountability partner.

[00:00:41]
This episode of beyond the Rut features Dr. Kevin Gazara. Kevin is a professor, an author, and a leadership consultant. He helps companies and individuals analyze their task quotient. In this episode, we take a look at tasks in a whole new way.

[00:01:56]
Jerry: Dr. Gazzara, you’re calling in from Arizona. You’ve got roughly 25 years or more leadership experience. Tell us about your early years of leadership, the lessons you learned around tasks and task management. Then go help smaller organizations develop their management and leadership development.

[00:05:12]
Jerry: My passion is helping people do leadership development. He says retirement doesn’t mean you don’t ever have to work again. It means that you’re just freed up to do the things you want to do, he says.

[00:12:15]
How important are tasks when it comes to keeping somebody in the job and keeping them successful? When I did my dissertation, I wanted to look at a relationship between motivation, engagement, productivity, flow, and task balance. And what I found out was that there are three unique mixtures of those three task balances.

[00:20:59]
The best managers, the best employees, the people that are most productive and engaged really schedule and block time. You want to pay attention to what I call your cadence. My mixture is about 50% project, about 30% troubleshooting and about 20% for routine kind of work.

[00:23:31]
We do something called a task auction so we get everybody to plot all their work on flip charts. With the manager in the room, they can offer to sell any tasks that they have. The big thing was, is we raised and retained the job satisfaction. For good managers, revisit the assessments on a regular basis.

[00:32:04]
A lot of people have a higher need for problem solving when they have a highly routine job. Once you’re aware of that, you can really restructure your day in a way that it’s much, much more efficient. Magna Leadership does both coaching for individuals and specific companies.

[00:36:05]
Invest in yourself. Have a plan and either have a coach, whether it’s internal or an external coach, to work with you. Get capability partner, not an accountability partner, is to partner with someone that’s going to do the same thing. The big thing is to keep your job highly satisfied, motivated and engaged.

[00:37:43]
Dr. Gazzara: I encourage people to go to the site, take the assessment, and if you’ve got questions, just send them to me. And my promise is absolutely no sales pitch. I hope you got a lot out of this episode in this conversation like I did.

[00:38:19]
What are you gifted towards? What are you really energized by? And then looking at the work and the tasks that you have in front of you and put it up for auction. You could streamline a lot of things synergize and really excel on the productivity of your organization.

[00:39:06]
Feel free to go to the show notes beyond the Rut. There you’ll find that link to the free assessment that Kevin offered you as well as more information about magna leadership. I’m glad you joined me in this episode, and I look forward to joining with you again in the next episode.

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Transcript

Kevin Gazzara 00:00

invest in yourself, right. And as you’ve mentioned, Jerry, it’s really about self awareness. Whether it’s taking an EQ evaluation, whether it’s doing this for Myers Briggs, or StrengthsFinder, whatever is, is don’t just take them, you want to take them and do something with it. And what we found is the best way to have that happen is one is to have a plan, and either have a coach, whether it’s internal or an external coach to work with you. And then second is to get what we call a capability partner, not an accountability partner, is the partner with someone that’s going to do the same type of thing. So you’re working together and you’re holding each other accountable for that.

Jerry Dugan 00:41

Hey, Rutter Nation. Welcome to another episode of beyond the rut, the podcast that shares encouraging stories and practical tools to help pull you out of your rut, into a life worth living, so that you can thrive in your faith your family in your career or business. Now on this episode, we’re going to be joined by Dr. Kevin Guevara. Now, Kevin is a professor and author and a leadership consultant who helps companies and individuals analyze their task quotient, what is that? Well, maybe you get some job tasks that you really excel at, and some other ones that are not your favorite thing to do? Well, there’s a whole way you can actually do the things that you love doing that fit your strengths and your talents, and give up the things to other team members that are their strengths and talents as well. It’s a very neat process. So if you find yourself individually stuck in a rut, with your daily routine at work, or as a company, you know that people are some spots that aren’t quite their seat on the bus that they really will excel in. Then you want to listen to this episode, because we’re going to take a look at tasks in a whole new way. So sit back and relax, bust out that notebook, grab a pen. Here we go. All right, I’m here with Dr. Gazzara. How are you doing?

Kevin Gazzara 01:59

Fantastic. Jerry, thanks so much for inviting me on your podcast today.

Jerry Dugan 02:03

Awesome. And you’re calling in from Arizona?

Kevin Gazzara 02:05

Is that correct? Absolutely. Phoenix, Arizona nice. I was a little bit closer to your state. Just last week, I went camping in Big Bend National Park. I mean, that other state, New Mexico was in the middle. But you know, I was closer. That’s the point I make it. And in the kind of terrain that is similar to what Arizona is known for, as well. But that’s not why we got you on here. We got you on here because you’ve got a roughly 25 years or more leadership experience. And you’ve worked with companies like Intel, I think University of Phoenix.

Jerry Dugan 02:40

And you’ve got this new assessment tool that helps people identify tasks and have this sense of task quotient, we’ll get to that later. But tell us about your your early years of leadership, the lessons you’ve learned around tasks and task management and, and that aha moment that you had over the years.

Kevin Gazzara 03:04

I’m born and raised in Philly, in Philadelphia area, I went to school there did my undergrad at Drexel University, dual degree in engineering and business, then did my MBA, and then eventually went off and did all my doctoral work in organizational leadership, right, so I’m a Doctor of management. And I’ve been both in the kind of industrial world as well as the academic world. But I started out, you know, with the technical side, you know, as a, as a project manager, and a product manager, and eventually, a general manager. And I had this fantastic opportunity in the 80s to go to work for Intel. And Intel was, I would say is very much a learning organization, right. So they really put a lot of emphasis, you know, as a senior manager, you had to actually had to train 40 hours a year. So that you could share your knowledge with with other people. And I was I did the technical stuff for for about seven years with them seven or eight years. And then the last 10 years I spent, I managed until university and then the last six years, I managed Intel’s management leadership development programs for the world. And we used to do 2500 managers a year in 10 different countries. Fortunately, I had a nice big staff, I didn’t have to do all of those. And when I retired from Intel, my personal goal was to retire at 50. And fortunately, I was able to do that. And then my goal was to to go help smaller organizations that didn’t have a $10 million budget to develop their management, leadership development. So that’s what we myself and two colleagues in 2007 left the corporate world and we started Magna leadership solutions. And that’s what we’ve been doing the last 15 years and it’s been fantastic to work with other companies to be able to give them high high value, low cost leadership training to help them grow. I love it.

Jerry Dugan 05:12

Well, two things stand out to me from what you just shared with us. The one is like a lot of people tend to think that retirement is, I never have to work another day in my life done. Whereas your take on it is I get to do whatever kind of work I want to do. And my passion is this helping people do leadership development where they get high impact from the dollar they spend, and they don’t have to spend a lot of those dollars. And you know, for someone else, it could be something completely different. Like I want to help save sea turtles, or I want to help children learn to read who live in the inner city and don’t get the kind of resources that are needed. So that was the first thing that stood out to me that retirement doesn’t mean you don’t ever have to work again, it means that you’re just freed up to do the things you want to do, because you’ve already built up the resources to do it. So that was the first thing. The second one is that. Now there are those folks who get into like organizational leadership, organizational psychology, because that’s what they’ve always wanted to do. They wanted to work in HR. But you’ve come into it from a technical side that now said, I want to help leaders grow and be better. And what was that aha moment when you’re like, that’s what I want to do I want to help leaders become better leaders?

Kevin Gazzara 06:21

Well, I can tell you the date, and the time. Wow. So So it happened in on the 29th of July 1994.

Jerry Dugan 06:33

Did it involve falling off a toilet and having a vision back to the future?

Kevin Gazzara 06:38

It wasn’t quite that. So entail how to program called managing through people. And once you got a staff, you are expected to go through this as a five day actually six day program. And this is an actually able to only this was the program I ended up managing and, and redesigning for Intel. And I was selected, you know, I move from I started in Princeton, New Jersey, Intel ultimately shut down the division. Just because it was growing too fast. They couldn’t get enough engineers to move from the West Coast to the East Coast. So the GM came in the VP came in one day and said, Hey, I got good news and bad news for you. The good news is, we’re going to offer you all jobs. The bad news is it’s not going to be here in Princeton. So so they offered us an opportunity to move to Arizona. And when we moved to Arizona, I got a bigger staff. And my boss came in one day and said, Hey, and you know, end of the month, you’re going off to this managing through people stuff. It’s like, okay, so when I was there, there was a brilliant consultant guy by name of Bill Daniels, who had a company called American training and consulting. And Bill did this, what was called the chain gang simulation. And it was all about running a simulation. So people could understand the importance of gaining clear expectations, having great communications, and being able to produce product, whether it was on the manufacturing line, or whether it was developing programs, or whether it was doing project management in a way that was just outrageously fun. It was incredibly intense. I learned so much and it stuck with me. And at that point in time. I said, Man, I want to I want to be able to my next phase of life, you know, Kevin 2.0, I wanted to be built. And from that point forward, you know, for the next is that 94 to seven, so the next 13 years. So that’s that was my focus. And ultimately, Intel has one interesting thing Jerry is is they every seven years they give you a sabbatical, and you get to take two months off your leader laptops or cell phones, everything with the company and you’re truly get the time off. Someone else steps into your position. And the intention is when you come back, you come back refreshed. And when I came back after my first sabbatical, after being the technical world being a product manager and a GM that I had done a lot of training at for Intel University. And the guy that ran Intel you for the world said, Hey, we need somebody to run this. I’ve seen you teach. Seems like that’s a passion of yours. Would you like to would you consider we have a need for someone to manage Arizona for the site, right? And I thought well, sure. How hard can that be? That’d be something interesting. Let’s go do something different with a lot of my technical buddy says move to the dark side of HR and doing that soft skill stuff. I think I think the advantage stuff for me was, as you know, I came from, you know, an engineering background, I really liked the techie stuff, you know, managing software and hardware development teams. I like I like that stuff. So. So we work a lot with technical organizations. And because I’ve been there done that, which is, I think the biggest difference with what I find with a lot of trainers, or people doing training and development and leadership, that kind of stuff, is they have awesome backgrounds. They haven’t from a technical perspective, they haven’t been kind of in the trenches, you know, doing the bits and bytes and, and being able to do that and do that with a roomful of engineers, gives you this incredible, instant credibility. And not only credibility, it’s just something I love, right? So my passion comes out as opposed to No, I’m going to teach you leadership stuff, all that techy stuff you handle. No, I want to show you how that integrates.

Jerry Dugan 10:57

Yeah, yeah, that’s a huge advantage. To me, I’m from the training side, where I don’t have the technical side, I’ve worked in training in healthcare for many years. Never get to tell a nurse how to do nursing because I don’t know how to do it. So yeah, you do rely on the sneeze. But when you do have that nursing background, or you have that engineering background, you have that I understand the work you do, because I was doing that work until x number of years ago. Like I speak the language, I know the culture, I know what’s expected of you. And I love that. Now, I’m familiar with the phrase like intelligence quotient, you know, like how quickly you can learn new things. You hear EQ or emotional quotient, which is the ability to like, assess and know your own emotions, as well as read the motions in the room in a sense. And in those are very important, because your ability to learn new things helps keep you current in your field or your job. Being able to read emotions and manage them. And even express them appropriately is what kind of helps keep a lot of people in their jobs, because they say what 86% Of the people who lose their job, it’s because of their inability to connect with other people. But then there’s this other thing where people get burned out, you know, they’re just overworked over tasks. And you shared something with me about task quotient, and task quotient assessment. So I think before we dive into that, even so we’re still just teasing you listening in right now. But I guess talk a little bit more about like how you’ve seen people get, you know, inundated with tasks, or maybe they’re getting the wrong tasks, like how important are tasks when it comes to keeping somebody in the job and keeping them successful?

Kevin Gazzara 12:33

Well, that’s an incredible segue from my last discussion about kind of how I got here was, when I met Bill Daniels, the guy that from Merck, and training and consulting, Bill had done his research around task types, right. And what he found was, there were really three types of tasks that you do, you do routine tasks, which are highly predictable, and you have to kind of do them in the moment. So kind of what he calls low delay tolerance, that’s a routine task, you have the troubleshooting task, which is you kind of have to do in the moment, right firefighting kind of stuff. And it shows up unexpectedly. And then you have project tests and project tasks are highly predictable. And you have a longer delay to do them. It’s kind of like getting your taxes done. It’s it’s a it’s a project or it’s developing. It’s developing a new product. And, and then there’s a fourth type than Bill, which is called negotiables. And Bill says, if you if you do negotiables, frequently, then you turn it into a project. And if it happens haphazardly, then you just turn it into kind of a troubleshooting task. So So what Bill found was is that, that everyone had that these are the, if you look at anything that you do in your job, it will fit into one of the three categories, routine troubleshooting, or project work. And that kind of always intrigued me. And when I was considering kind of going back from to do my doctoral work, I had this I had this idea that maybe there is a balance that each one of us has a different mixture that will be motivating to us. That could get us into what’s called flow or anybody that’s read the book flow by guy by name of me Hi, Chick Sing me Hi, Dr. Mihai chicks, and Mihai Mihai was Dr. Mihai was an advisor for me, and helped me develop the test question. So I developed didn’t call to task coaching. When I did my dissertation. I really wanted to look at was there a relationship between motivation, engagement, productivity, flow, and task balance? I thought there’s, there might be a key there and that was what I had to prove. Statistically in my in my quantitative dissertation, I don’t recommend anybody to read it, because it’s really pretty boring. If you wanted to have 180 pages of techniques, technical stuff was statistics, send me down, I’d be glad to send you my dissertation. Very few people have read it, I imagine. But, you know, what I was noticing was is when I was working at Intel, as I was doing all my doctoral work, when I was notices that I would go into, like a project manager’s office, and we lived in the cubicle world, as many organizations do. And I would walk into the first my, my first project manager, and he’d say, you know, Kevin, you know, I’m just just not engaged in what I’m what I’m doing. I really love doing this kind of stuff, you know, task A, and test B and CMT and not not so much. Now I walk into the next cubicle, and all the people, all the engineers, in particular, are very, very similar similar personality, if you did any personalities, studies like eye desk, or Myers Briggs, or anything like that, all pretty similar. And I walk into the second project managers, or the project engineers office, and he’d say, Hey, Kevin, I really like B, I don’t like a or c. And the third one would say, Hey, I like C. And I thought, Boy, these these guys, these people, you know, they are, they’re great engineers. I think I’ve given them really good work. And it seems like they’re not as motivated as possible. I’m wondering, is it? Is it with the TAs balance that they have? Or is it is it something else, so that was my quote, hypothesis. And when I ran all the statistics, we did originally 118 people to basically prove the concept and the theory. And then since then, we’ve run, probably close to about 10,000 of the the assessments. And what we what I found out was that there are 496, unique mixtures of those three task balances. And if I can I identify if you can identify your ideal task balance of what you’d like to do, and you can structure your day or week in that way, statistically, we know that I can guarantee that you will raise your level of job satisfaction, motivation. But that didn’t guarantee that you will go into flow. Flow is a whole nother topic that we’ll talk about maybe at another time. And we I actually had another doctoral student, Dr. Holly bornus, who extended my work. And she found that you could also raise your level of empowerment. So so once you can, once you can structure your day, so that you get more of what you want, and less of what you don’t want, we know that you can kind of close the day close the week out feeling really, really satisfied and motivated, and engaged. And that’s what we did, or that’s what I was able to kind of test out with the guinea pigs. Yeah, and in until all the project guys, and once once we, we looked at what they had for structure, and we did some modifications as much as you can, right? You know, in many, many organizations, particularly if you’re like, a line worker, it’s difficult to say, Hey, I’d really like to do this and this and this, and I don’t want to do machine a first I want to do machine B, you can’t do that. But if you have a job, that you have ability to kind of move things around from a time perspective, you’d still get the same amount of stuff done. But if you can move things around in a time perspective, you can really structure your job in a very, very unique way. It almost makes sense. I was thinking about Strengths Finder and even Marcus Buckingham, like working with your strengths. And it’s like working with your preferences, that if you do prefer more of the routine work things I have like this stable, predictable, these are the tasks are gonna be expected me Monday morning, Tuesday morning and Wednesday, it never changes. There are folks who love that, and they, they don’t want to deviate from it ever. And the best thing you could do to make them happy is deliver that as much as possible as a leader to your team. And then there are those that are like, if you want to kill me, just stick me in a routine that never ever changes. And I will I will create a window and I will jump out of it. And it’s like, well, we’re on the first floor still, I’ll make it hurts.

Jerry Dugan 19:36

And I could see where that makes sense because there are those who just they thrive off of projects. There are those who just handle crises really well. And you know, it’s like, when you know that about yourself. I think that does make sense and you’ll find either ways to restructure your work either how you schedule it, it sounds like but you can also have conversations with your manager and say I hate, I love this project stuff, this routine stuff, I can’t seem to wrap my head around it, the manager if the manager is doing his or her job and rounding with employees and doing this kind of thing with employees could probably say great because I have this other person who just loves routine stuff, and is not the greatest at the project thing. And that’s okay, that’s not that person’s primary job. Let’s let’s work something I could see that kind of synergizing happening is that kind of what happens with task quotient as well or in my way off? Now, boy, you are, you’re so right, on the money spenders.

Kevin Gazzara 20:32

You know, there’s the, there’s really like two steps, the first step is really understanding what motivates you, right. And then the idea is, is so for people listening, is, at the end of this podcast, I’ll give you a link for all your listeners a free link that you can take the assessment for free, normally, we, we charge $50 for the assessment, normal, but I’m gonna give you the link away just for people listening here, ice. So once you get your point, you identify your ideal task portion. The key is, is you want to pay attention to the work that you’re doing. And when you get that little voice in your head that says you want to go do something else and want to go get a cup of coffee or want to go do some quick email or make a phone call or whatever, that’s a trigger that says you need to switch to a different task type. And quite often what people will do is they’ll switch to a different task. But they’ll go from routine to routine to routine or troubleshooting, troubleshooting, troubleshooting, and they still don’t, don’t feel kind of fulfilled. The key is, is the best managers, the best employees, the people that are most productive and engage, really schedule and block time, there’s lots of authors that kind of are experts in this that you can read about kind of in time management is, is you want to pay attention to your what I call your cadence. And your cadence is, you know, when do those little red flags come up, and I’ll tell you for me, you know, so my my mixture is about 50% routine, sorry, 50% project is what I needed on a daily basis, about 30% troubleshooting, and about 20% for routine kind of work. So what I tried to do is I try to schedule my days, my block them out. And my cadence is, I have a tolerance for routine of about 30 to 45 minutes, I have a tolerance for troubleshooting. And sometimes you can, if you’re really getting in the zone or getting into that flow channel, it can go much, much longer. And that’s fine. Just let it let it go. I can do the troubleshooting stuff for about 90 minutes. And then the project work right around two hours, everything gets a little funky. And, and I want to go off and do something else. So So I scheduled things in those blocks. I know Monday mornings are typically when one problems having the customers call out, hey, this isn’t working, I can’t get into this assessment, you know, can you send me this information. So Monday morning, I block out the first 90 minutes, just in anticipation of that. And if I don’t get any of the calls, or I don’t have any urgent emails, I usually have a list of stuff that needs to get done that I problems I need to solve because the troubleshooting is problem solving. And I’ll I’ll go go and do that. And then that and then by the end of the day, I’ve I’ve gotten the same amount of work done, the differences are just scheduled it. So that’s the first part. Now where you are going, which is the second part of what we do from a team perspective is what we’ve recognized is that the people have different preferences. So we do something called a task auction. So we and I can send you the or send you the link for this that we did a awesome case study with an IT organization had a team, it engineers that were just turnover was not Turner was way higher than what’s necessary. engagement was down. You know, the managers just said, Hey, I’m at my wit’s end. I just don’t don’t know what to do. I think I’ve given these guys, these, all of the employees good work to do to get paid really well. Just something’s not clicking. So I said, okay, the name was Charlie. So Charlie, let’s do a let’s let’s do an assessment. I’ll look at the team from all the task balances. And generally, the thing we found I’ve done dozens of these. Generally what we found Jerry is that pretty much most teams have the right move collectively have the right people. And it’s not about doing a reorganization. It’s just about doing a rebalancing. And what we do is we get everybody to plot all their work on flip charts, using the flow diagram for any one that wants to read about flow and the task question. And then with the manager in the room, they can buy If they can, offer to sell any tasks that they have, they don’t have to buy anything. We capture everything on an Excel sheet, right? And somebody says I have, you know, two hours of troubleshooting work on the network server dealing with Unix that I just hate doing. It’s just like I’ve done Unix 1000 times. And I don’t want to I don’t want to deal with this. Right? So you put that up two hours troubleshooting Unix problems, right? And you go down, you get every, we got all 18 people in. And then once once you can see all the stuff that people don’t want to do, obviously, you’re looking at it from your perspective of what would I like to do? I would love to learn your next I know that that’s my next step, right? So what happens is, is once everything’s up there, anyone in the room can bid on anything that was that’s open. And sometimes people don’t want maybe somebody has 20 hours a Unix that they don’t want to do, or 10 hours, whatever the number is, you can bid on partial, or all of it. Like I don’t want 20 hours. But I could do, I could do a day, you know, so I can take eight hours, right? And then the thing is, is then you partner the people together that want to get rid of it, and the people that want to get it. So they become the kind of the trainers. They’re incentivized, because I’m getting rid of stuff I don’t want to do the other people are incentivized because I’m getting stuff I do want to do. And typically what happens is, on a normal task auction, we typically do like 60 to 75% of the task get rebalanced. So people really get get what they want. And then there’s this bucket of like, 25 to 30%, of stuff that nobody wants to do. And every time we do, it’s the same thing. It is all highly administrative. Wow. So so what we say with the what we did, particularly for Charlie was, it’s like, you’ve got a wreck, you know, which was probably right now, because this was done several years ago. You excuse me, you’ve got a wreck, where it’s gonna cost you $120,000 to hire the network engineer. What if we take all of that crap work that nobody wants to do, and you hire a temp for $30,000. And you take that extra $90,000, and you use it for for something else. And by the way, when the new projects come in, instead of giving it to that new hire that you’re trying to, to find, when you distribute it to the people that really want it. Yeah. And everything, we can do everything in eight hours. The case study that I can share, we were able to get the turnover to go to zero for it, we only measured 18 months, went to zero for 18 months. But the big thing was as we raised and retain the job satisfaction, I think it was 26.4%. And anyone that’s done any behavioral science stuff, the magic number is is if you can get over 4%, then it’s statistically significant. We were six times that. Wow. And, you know, so So in particularly today, you know, if you’re looking to really retain people, because that’s a problem. Paying attention to their task balance is probably the simplest, easiest, and and it doesn’t really doesn’t cost anything. It’s just have that do this. It’s minimal cost, I should say, because you have to still have to do the assessments on the pupil. So you do the assessments, you run the task auction. And and you maintain that and pay attention to that for you know, good managers pretty much revisit that on a regular basis. Yeah, did. Do they ever come across situations or scenarios where they realize, hey, there’s a bunch of tasks that we are doing that probably don’t even need to be done anymore? Yeah. And in in the task auction that we do, we give them five opportunities, you can either delete the task, you can delegate the task, you can divide the tasks, that’s where you partner, you can delay the task, or you can automate the task. Yeah, right. And a lot, a lot of times, there are many things that people are doing. I think one of the things that we found more so through the activity in the group activity that we do it, there’s not so much that there’s a lot of tasks that people that they should delete, it’s usually that there’s this kind of scope creep that’s happened, where they’re doing things that really shouldn’t be done by another organization. Yes, like, Hey, can you help me out with this? Can you can you run this code a little bit? You know, uh, for me on on these other servers, it’s like, wow, that’s really the other organism is really shouldn’t be doing that. It’s like, Ah, okay, I’m just going to take me 15 minutes and the next time it’s the 30 minutes. And pretty much by the end of the year, you’re, you’re essentially doing the other person’s job. That’s usually what comes to the surface. Because there are going to be a lot of things that the people don’t want to do, that they really shouldn’t be doing.

Jerry Dugan 30:13

Yeah, I’ve done something similar not to that kind of, like, we didn’t do a task on auction. But with like, one of my employees in the past, you know, just how much time do you spend doing reports, because I had never asked for a report from you and our VPS for like one or two every quarter, but he spent a lot of time doing reports. And so then we realized that these requests are coming from our customers external or internal company customers. But it was like, a lot of them were reports that could be automated, like you set it up once, and it goes to the person. And that’s it. And so we just started talking through like, well, what can you do that would free up your time from running these manually every week, updating the data and then sending them off. And she was like, well, I could teach the person how to do it themselves, as far as you know, cleaning up the data. And I just had this automatically send it to them every week. I’m like, I’m cool with that if you are because there’s a lot of stuff that we would like you to work on that does not involve these reports. And sure enough, it freed up hours and hours for the week. And it just it didn’t just work for that it opened up her eyes to other things that she does on a weekly basis that eat up a lot of time that can be handed off her automated. I think her her preference for those three types of works would probably be more routine, as opposed to troubleshooting or project work. So I think that was kind of the trap she would fall into is that she would get caught up in these routine pieces. But a lot of them not really aligned with what we needed to do. And so seeing her start to to make those adjustments, and create that alignment and knowing that it’s okay to hand things off, it’s okay to automate things. Getting the work done doesn’t mean you yourself have to manually do it in the 21st century.

Kevin Gazzara 32:00

Yes, yeah, absolutely. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry, I was just gonna say one other thing that we found was, you know, you’re talking about people that are doing routine or troubleshooting is when there’s a lot of people that have a higher need for problem solving. And when they have a highly routine job, what happens is if because you can really you can morph any of that one task to another task by adjusting the quantity quality or pace of the of the task itself. What we find is, when when people have a high need for routine for troubleshooting, and they’re not getting it, what they do is they take the routine task, and they wait to the last minute. And then what happens is so i Whenever I see a report where I looking at their job, and I’m looking at their their preference, and i I’ll i can go around the room and say, you know you three are the top pick up your incredible procrastinators, would you agree? Yeah. How did you know that? It’s like, well, you’re not getting what you need. So what you’re doing is you’re waiting for the last minute, and then all of a sudden, what should be routine, you know, creating those reports that take 45 minutes, you leave yourself 15 minutes to do that. And then all of a sudden, it’s it’s a problem. And you’re essentially kind of self medicating yourself. Once you’re aware of that, you can really restructure your your day in a way that it’s much, much more efficient. And it’s more satisfying. And that makes sense. Because you may not always be in a position where you can hand off tasks like, that’s your job, you got to do it if you want that paycheck. And that that could definitely be a helpful thing. Because now you’re making, it’s almost like EQ in a sense, like, now you’re aware, this is a need you have, it’s deeply rooted, it probably is somewhat emotional as well, because there’s typically an emotional tie to these things first, and now with that awareness, that self awareness, you can you also can self manage. I think that’s really cool.

Jerry Dugan 33:49

Now, if somebody says, Great, I’d really like to know where I land on this. Where can they go to take that assessment?

Kevin Gazzara 33:55

So, so I’ve created this shortened link, it’s a bitly link, if they go to magnet leader, ma G, and A Lea D er.co not.com.co. Forward slash, and this has to be in caps, g i ft. gift, right Magna liter.co forward slash gift incap. Just the gift of Serbian caps. It will take you right into the assessment. It’ll take you three or four minutes to take the assessment. And when you hit enter, you’ll you’ll get your full report emailed to you. instantaneously.

Jerry Dugan 34:35

Nice. And then if somebody decides great, I’ve got the report. I want to dive deeper. I want some more help. I know Magna leadership does stuff like this. What kind of stuff does Magna leadership do to help individuals or is it more geared towards helping specific companies? We do both. So we have something called our leading forward Academy, which takes lots of these concepts together. It’s a six month program, you know, talks around

Kevin Gazzara 35:00

Communication and behavioral styles task balance, of course, you know, dealing with conflict, project management, critical thinking, and you know, all with the leadership, Ben, so they can do that, we also do a do a bunch of coaching for individuals, right. So you can do individual coaching, as well as our other partners do the same thing. So it just depends on what you need. If you if you need just kind of one on one help, we can help you if you have a team that you’d like to do, you know, we can work with the team. And all of our stuff is modular, so we can structure it. So rather than just pulling it off the shelf and saying, here’s what you get, we really like to work with a small organization, so they get really what they, you know what they need.

Jerry Dugan 35:47

Nice, awesome. And before we go, and then that’s at Magna leadership.com, if I’m,

Kevin Gazzara 35:53

yes, great. That’s, that’s the, that’s our website. And you can contact me through mag leadership, or you can just send me an email, which is Kevin at magnet leadership.com.

Jerry Dugan 36:04

Nice. And then before we go, any final words of wisdom around task quotient, or just anything leadership related,

Kevin Gazzara 36:11

I think the thing I would say to the listeners is, invest in yourself, right. And as you’ve mentioned, Jerry, it’s really about self awareness, whether it’s taking an EQ evaluation, whether it’s doing this for Myers Briggs, or StrengthsFinder, whatever, is don’t just take them, you want to take them and do something with it. And what we found is, the best way to have that happen is one is to have a plan, and either have a coach, whether it’s internal or an external coach to work with you. And then second is to get what we call a capability partner, not an accountability partner, is the partner was someone that’s going to do the same type of thing. So you’re working together, and you’re holding each other accountable for that. And there’s some great studies that show that if you do that, if you kind of define what you want to do, and you and you announce it to someone else, and and they’re really going to hold you accountable for it, you can get things done. But the big thing is, you know, the to keep your job to keep your job highly satisfied, motivated and engaged. There’s lots of different things you can do. TQ are the test question is, is really easy to kind of understand because usually have good control over it. It’s free, doesn’t take a lot of time. And you would be amazed at the end of the day and the end of the week, how much better you feel about your job, even if you’re not doing the ideal job that you want. This, this will help you.

Jerry Dugan 37:43

Awesome. Dr. Gazzara, It was great to have you on here. And I appreciated this conversation a lot.

Kevin Gazzara 37:50

Well, it’s my pleasure. And I really encourage people to go to the site, take the assessment, and if you’ve got questions, just send them to me. Be glad to have a quick conversation with you. And my promises absolutely no sales pitch. I am here I am a helper type. I give you the same kind of good insight that I gave to my employees as well as the students at the different universities I teach.

Jerry Dugan 38:15

Now, I hope you got a lot out of this episode in this conversation like I did. I mean, we talked about task quotients. I mean, it’s the first time we’ve tackled that in this show ever. But it really has made me look at tasks in a whole new light, you know that there are times where I’ve just been told time. And again, this is just stuff that you just got to get done. And for the business for your team. That may be the case. However, if you’re looking at your work, as well as the work of your team members, from a strengths based perspective, you’re What are you gifted towards? What are you really energized by and then looking at the work of the tasks that you have in front of you, and put it up for auction, you can actually streamline a lot of things synergize and really excel on the productivity of your organization. So this is something really worth looking at. Feel free to go to the show notes beyond the rut.com/ 348. There you’ll find that link to the free assessment that Kevin offered you as well as more information about magnet leadership. Now I’m glad you join me in this episode and I look forward to joining with you again in the next episode. But until then go live life beyond the rat. Take care

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Finding Motivation and Maximizing Productivity with Dr. Kevin Gazzara – BtR 348

Dr. Kevin Gazzara

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