Using Talent Development for a Company Turnaround w/Mendel Erlenwein
Episode Overview
Join us on Making Better as we sit down with Mendel Erlenwein, the CEO of Previva Health Group, who shares his transformative journey in healthcare leadership and talent development. In episode 064, Mendel discusses the delicate balance of responsibility and authority, the early challenges of hiring and learning from mistakes, and the significance of aligning individual strengths with organizational roles. We delve into the use of AI in enhancing the efficiency of care coordinators and explore the potential of AI co-pilots in healthcare. Mendel's entrepreneurial insights, alongside Matt's thought-provoking questions, provide valuable takeaways for anyone looking to improve their business perspective and talent strategy.
Make sure to check out the book recommendations from the episode:
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: https://amzn.to/3SjFuL8
The Extended Mind: https://amzn.to/3OfjMX7
About Mendel Erlenwein
Mendel Erlenwein is a visionary leader in healthcare innovation, with a passion for driving positive change through value-based care and artificial intelligence. As the CEO of Previva Health Group, a leading preventive care management company, he empowers providers nationwide to optimize patient care and reimbursement opportunities through innovative VBC programs and services.
You can connect with Mendel through:
Website: https://soapnotes.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mendel-e/
Full Transcript
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Mendel Erlenwein [00:00:00]:
One of the most important things to keep in mind in any relationship, and definitely when it comes to your workplace relationships, is that people's biggest advantages are equally their biggest disadvantages and, and vice versa. People's disadvantages are always their biggest advantages. And if you can remember that, then you can mitigate kind of that. You know, you can mitigate some, some bad things. But also when people do something that maybe pisses you off or you think is wrong, you can think for a second and be like, well, I wouldn't necessarily trade out that character trait for this person because that would take away all this value on the flip side of the coin. And so better being able to understand that really well so that you can manage that.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:40]:
Hello, and welcome to the Making Better podcast, where we talk about making ourselves, our teams, and our organizations better. Whether you are a business leader, a talent development professional, or an individual contributor, this show will give you actionable insights to help you improve your own performance and the performance of those around you. Our guest today is Mendel Erlenwein. Mendel and I met recently on LinkedIn, and it didn't take me long to realize that I needed to have him on the show. He is the CEO of Previva Health Group, a leading preventative care management company, and a big part of our conversation today focuses on how he turned around that company and how talent played into that turnaround. During the conversation, you will learn how sometimes you need to take a leap if you really want to move forward, why so many leaders struggle with scaling, and how AI copilots are going to change the talent development landscape forever. Before we get into that discussion, if this is your first time listening to the show, I want to recommend that you make sure to subscribe to the show so you never miss a future episode. And if you were already subscribed, then I would like to ask you to share this show with at least one other person.
Matt Gjertsen [00:01:54]:
That is how we grow, and I can't tell you how much it means to me. So with that, let's get into the conversation with Mendel Erlenwein. So this is a really interesting story that I think we have to get into. How did you become the CEO of Previva health Group to begin with?
Mendel Erlenwein [00:02:14]:
Yeah, great question. So, bit of a trip down memory lane. So I had started in healthcare marketing, and I was running this company for this guy who had kind of like a conglomerate of healthcare companies, and he needed marketing support for all his companies. And so he said, why don't you stand up this marketing company, you'll support my stuff and then whatever clients you can get on top of that, you'll make more money. And I was like, cool. So I was doing that and I really didn't like it at all for two reasons. Mainly. The first reason was I didn't really know what I was selling.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:02:49]:
So I was, like, trying to look out there like, what are these services? Like, what am I selling? Didn't really understand it. And the second thing was that I was selling to doctors. And turns out, contrary to popular belief and contrary to what you might get sold on some Facebook ad, most doctors are not swimming in cash and are not looking for, yeah, they're not looking for random ancillary services to spend money on. Maybe the plastic surgeons and the chiropractors, but not much of anyone else. And so I didn't sell anything. That business kind of went down at a certain point, just wound it down. And soon after that, around that same period of time, mind you, at that point, I was married, had just had my first child as well. And I got to know this guy who's kind of like an angel investor.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:03:42]:
He has a couple of successful large companies, and he's an angel investor in a couple of different companies. And I always enjoyed, even from a very young age, I would try to find people that are really successful and just talk to them, pick their brains, try to get to know them a little bit. And so I was doing that with, so I got to know him, and we had some good conversations around my aspirations, what I was doing. And one day he shot me a text and he was like, hey, I might have an opportunity for you. Do you want to chat? And my exact response was, I love opportunities. Sure. And so we sat down and he told me about this company that was doing these clinical services, but it wasn't really scaling and it wasn't scalable. And as such, the guy who had founded it, to his absolute credit, had to move on.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:04:31]:
And he had a family with, I think had four kids at the time, had to pay the bills, and so he had to move on. And my friend, the original investor in the company, was kind of left holding the bag. And so he said to me, if you want this, you can have it. And I was like, sure. And so I took over the company. And when I say I took over the company, what I was taking over was a company that had a couple of hundred patients. All the actual care was outsourced to a third party company. So I like to call it was just an invoicing company because you essentially just sent invoices to clients and paid bills.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:05:01]:
And it was losing about $4,000 a month at that point. And I took it over and turned it around pretty quickly. I never took a cent from the investors from the second I took over. And a couple of years later, now everything. The original goal was to do this, and we did it pretty quickly, where everything now is in house. We have about 25 employees, we're talking to about 5000 patients every month and growing. And it's been a hell of a journey.
Matt Gjertsen [00:05:30]:
I can only imagine the whirlwind that that would be. And just to highlight a few points from that story, because this is primarily a talent development podcast, we're talking to people about how to improve performance. And it probably sounds to them like, wait, why are we talking about healthcare? I mean, sure, healthcare needs to be improved, especially in the US, but where does this fit with talent development? But from that story, the two things, or the couple things that really come across are, first, this idea that you turned it around, right, that it was losing money and it became a profitable company and a growing, profitable company. And then secondly, that you did that because it used to be an invoicing company. Like they didn't have any particular talent within the company, and you brought all of that talent in as a way to turn organizations around. And I think that is the deeply held belief that I have. Why I'm so interested in talent development is because I do believe that it is a way to truly transform organizations and help them do more than they thought possible. So when you started it, so you get there, you're outsourcing everything.
Matt Gjertsen [00:06:42]:
You realize, hey, this is probably the thing, bringing things in house is what we need to do. How did you think about what were some of the steps that you took of developing that talent? I mean, obviously, I'm sure hiring was a part of it, but what else was there?
Mendel Erlenwein [00:06:56]:
Yeah, well, even the hiring itself. And I think even for talent development, you kind of have to be at the point where you can actually take that step. And I think for a lot of young ceos or young executives, people that are starting out, the hiring process can be very intimidating. And it definitely was an interesting journey for me. And so I'd really start there because if you're not going to take that jump, you have nobody to develop. You know what was about. So a couple of months after I took over this company, I moved to a little town in Pennsylvania because there was no employees. There was nothing tying me down to New York, where I was living at the time.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:07:35]:
And so I moved out here and I was really bored and I was sitting in my home office and not much to do, and that doesn't do very well for me. And so around that time, I was talking to different extraordinarily successful people, and what were kind of the secrets to your success? And the pattern that came across from everyone that I spoke to is they just had guts. Like, they just took the leap in whatever, and that expressed itself in different scenarios through different people's careers. But that was kind of the medium. And the way I took that was that, you know what? It's finally time to take this leap to actually start hiring and start taking on these employees. And I remember speaking to my now partner and mentor, this original investor, and saying, listen, we've been profitable. We've been successful kind of at level one. But I really think it's time that we, my exact words to him was, I said, we've been successful at level one.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:08:29]:
Wouldn't it be more fun to fail at level ten? And I said, let's do this. And one of two things is going to happen. Either we're going to make it big or you're going to lose all your original investment and whatever. And to his absolute credit, and he's been such an incredible mentor to me and partner in this regard, where he just absolutely backs me 100% all the time. And he's like, yeah, just do it, whatever it is. So I started looking for talent, and I've never hired anyone in my life. And I didn't even have offices at the time. I was finding people.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:09:00]:
I think I put out ads somewhere. Not ziprecruiter, the other one. Indeed. And I was putting out ads and I was literally sitting down with these people at local Starbucks because I didn't even have an office where to interview these people. And finally, after a couple of interviews with a couple of different nurses, I basically decided, I'm like, you know what? I think I got to get an office. This is just weird. And so I got this office space. It was totally empty, which in a way was even more weird because now I'm asking people to come up to this pretty large office.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:09:31]:
I don't remember, it was like 1700, was just one desk, wait, in the corner and like a sub office. Anyway, had people come in for an interview, and that's how I ended up hiring. My first employee, who became my chief nursing officer, has been really one of the most key employees, and today she's a huge part of the success and growth of our company. But I think it's important for your audience to understand that. I was thinking about this a little bit ago, and I was thinking how that first hire became, like, literally my right hand person. But then I thought a second later, but you know what's interesting? A couple of years down the line, I look back, yes, my first hire, I completely lucked out. But my second hire is no longer with me. My third hire, no longer with us.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:10:23]:
Fourth hire, no longer with us. I think from her, the next five or six employees are no longer here. And we obviously rehired multiple times from a lesson perspective. And this was something that my partner drilled into my head time and time again. You are going to screw up at the hiring. You are going to make mistakes. You absolutely will. How would you not? You've never hired before, and so you're absolutely going to do that.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:10:52]:
And that's totally fine. That's the only way to actually get good at hiring and get good at firing, by the way, and get good at development. And so it's really been a bit of a journey. But that's how I kind of got started with hiring people.
Matt Gjertsen [00:11:07]:
That makes a lot of sense. I think one thing that I have to call out from the beginning of what you were just saying is this idea that would we rather be okay at level two or fail at level ten? And definitely for so many organizations, whether it's hiring, talent development or just the business itself, we can get into safe mode, right, where it's just about being safe. And, oh, man, would I suggest more people think exactly what you did of like, let's break the mold a little bit. Let's actually try to do something instead of just remaking the standard elearning that we always make and put it out there because people expect it, we can all do better. But then specifically, your story, one thing that I would be interested in when you were hiring, because I think whether you are hiring or developing, one of the things that you have to do is figure out what talent you need. Right. And the order in which you put those can really impact things. For that first hire, was it really clear who you needed to hire or what talent you needed, or did you have to think a little bit about identifying do I hire an office manager versus hiring the nurse like you did?
Mendel Erlenwein [00:12:16]:
Yeah, it was kind of both because it was very clear what I had to hire, but I didn't necessarily even have a full workloader. On the one hand, it was clear, but on the other hand, the actual what you're going to be doing day one. Okay, now you show up. Wasn't clear at all. We laugh about this years later. So back to my business. I was trying to bring something over in house that until that point, I knew what we were selling very well, but I did not know how it was done because it was actually outsourced to third party. And so it was really comical those first couple of months, and it took a lot of patients on both of our parts, mainly her part, to really get there.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:13:00]:
One funny story. So we provide these services to healthcare organizations around the country, and we call their patients on their behalf. And so we kind of white labeled these numbers because we're extensions of various offices. I knew that that's what we did. I had no idea how to do it. So she literally downloaded an app on her phone to mask her caller id to try to mimic these various couple of clinics. And the best part was, I remember this one point where she literally, between every ten or 15 calls, she had to watch an ad in order to continue making phone calls. We were that green, we were that level of, we had no idea what was going on.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:13:40]:
But to your actual question, it did take a lot of patience on her part, a lot of flexibility and willing to learn. And I'd say that's definitely one of the super key traits that you want in an executive employee. Somebody that you're looking at not just to pack boxes, somebody that you're looking at for really kind of a leadership role, someone that's going to have a meaningful part of the company and a part of that company story. You really want to make sure that it's somebody that is willing to learn. If you're a young company, you don't have the money to hire top talent. You don't have the money to go out and pay these huge salaries for somebody that has a track record, somebody that's coming with a huge resume. And so it's really important to know, okay, what are some key character traits that I know that even though this person doesn't necessarily have the right experience right now, they will get there. And that's how you can kind of find a diamond in the rough.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:14:39]:
And for me, one of those really important things is, are you willing to learn? And if you're willing to learn, then you absolutely don't have to have all the experience in the world. And the opposite, I think, is true as well. If you have all the experience in the world but you're not willing to learn, then there's really no amount of money that's worth paying for. That kind of employee, because they'll never be able to evolve past their previous experiences or previous knowledge.
Matt Gjertsen [00:15:01]:
It's so true. Yeah. I think it tells a lot about building any kind of team, whether it's in a company or whether it's the company. You're building the company or building an individual team. I've had discussions about this with some other people before, but, yeah, those first few hires, you really are hiring the jack of all trades. Kind of like, it's just they have to be super flexible. And then as the team gets bigger and bigger, then you still have to get that learning piece, but they can become more and more focused. Did you see that? I mean, you mentioned how the couple hires didn't work out.
Matt Gjertsen [00:15:34]:
Well, I'm guessing from that first or second or few hires, the model of talent that you were looking for changed a little bit. When you're talking about, like, number five or number six or things like that.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:15:45]:
Yeah. So I'd say there's two points there. Point number one is usually there's two types of roles. There's kind of what you can call a rinse and repeat role, which means that if you create a really good system, you can move people in and out of that role and the end result won't change much. Right. And then there's kind of key leadership people, and that's a very different talent that you're looking for. And it's really important to understand those key employees strengths and weaknesses. One of the most important things to keep in mind in any relationship, and definitely when it comes to your workplace relationships, is that people's biggest advantages are equally their biggest disadvantages and vice versa.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:16:28]:
People's disadvantages are always their biggest advantages. And if you can remember that, then you can mitigate some bad things. But also when people do something that maybe pisses you off or you think is wrong, you can think for a second and be like, well, I wouldn't necessarily trade out that character trait for this person because that would take away all this value on the flip side of the coin. And so better being able to understand that really well so that you can manage that. And I think that, to your point, this is a really great example because the personality of that key employee that is going to be able to be really versatile, and just whatever you throw at them, they'll take it, they'll run with it. They get things done. Very often, that same type of personality doesn't know how to not do that and doesn't know how to. So when you scaling your team and now it's like, well, that is a waste of your time.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:17:24]:
And we have all these employees that should be doing XYZ, but because you're that type of personality and you're such a good person, and you're incredible at just taking whatever's thrown at you, you're being taken advantage of because you end up doing a bunch of stuff. And it literally got to the point I remember. So I think it's our responsibility as team members of an executive team to watch out for one another. And you have to be there sometimes and almost do like an intervention with your teammates to say, listen, this is not worth your time. I remember at a certain point telling one of my key executives.
Matt Gjertsen [00:18:00]:
I think.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:18:00]:
It was actually servicing patients. And at that point, we were much bigger and we had a team under, and that wasn't this person's key function anymore. And I remember telling her, I will literally fire you if you do the thing that you think is making the company money. Because in this person's mind, it was like, I need to make the company money. That's my job. And when they came into the company, they were the first, 2nd, 3rd employee or whatever it was. And so it was like everyone has to pull their weight. And now as the company grows, you start having these roles that are kind of second degree really important.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:18:31]:
So as someone that's a manager or like an HR role or something like that, your role is extremely important for the company to operate. But at the same time, what you do doesn't equate to invoicing, right. Because you're not the person that's actually doing the service. And so this one employee is one of those where she kept trying to do the thing that would make the company money. And I was like, you are above that now. Not in a better than that, but that is not your role anymore. And it actually continues, by the way. Like every couple of months, more and more things will pile up and my key executives will just catch, catch, catch, catch, catch.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:19:07]:
And then it just becomes too much. And then every couple of months, like clockwork, we have a meeting where we're like, okay, now we got to move things off your plates. Delegate, delegate, delegate, delegate, delegate. And I have to do that for myself as well.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:21]:
Yeah. It's such a key reason why I do think a lot of startups struggle with talent development. And apologies for listeners if you hear anything. It's garbage day behind me. And my neighbors decided to cut a tree down. So if you hear anything, that's what's happening. But it's such a key reason. I've seen this at many startups, and it all stems from exactly what you said of when many of those first hires people on the executive team, they are people who just like to innovate solutions.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:50]:
They will handle anything, they'll come up with the new processes, but because that is their primary skill, it doesn't even occur to them to document solutions and come up with standard practices, because if it was their job, they wouldn't follow those practices. They'd want to come up with a better way. And it doesn't even apply to them. It doesn't even occur to them. And I saw this all the time at SpaceX, where this super innovative company, so we have all these innovative minds, and somebody might make a great manager for figuring out how to land the Falcon nine, but then once they've figured out how to land it, you probably want a different manager in charge of the team who's just going to rinse and repeat, do it again, do it again. And it's something that, it's why I think a lot of startups fail to do that initial groundwork, laying of laying out those processes. So it sounds like one of the mechanisms that you had, or that you have to this day, is to kind of, you let things build up and then you just kind of try to clear it all out. Was there anything else that you implemented early on, especially in an organization that's doing a lot of outreach? Is there anything specific you did to develop those standard practices so you could hire people that were in more like rinse and repeat roles?
Mendel Erlenwein [00:21:15]:
Yeah, great question. And you're absolutely spot on. And the evolution that you described is exactly true, where you start off, where everything's an entrepreneur in this little startup, and then it starts becoming, no, you can't be an entrepreneur. You have to be a manager, you have to be an employee, you have to whatever. And so I'll just shout out a.
Matt Gjertsen [00:21:32]:
Couple of tools and others can't.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:21:34]:
Yeah, exactly. And so there's a couple just tools that we use that have become really an integral part of our company. Loom has been one of them. And so I instituted a rule with all of our managers at a certain point when it was becoming like, there were so many repetitive questions, I said, if somebody sends you a question, you're not allowed to answer them. You must go in, do a loom on the answer, and then send them the link to the loom, because now we can start building out a library of solutions. Right? And so that was, I think, a good one. There's another tool that we use that I don't recall off the top of my head, but it's basically similar where it's a chrome extension and then you can just do something and it will create screenshots of the step by step instructions automatically. I don't recall the name off the top of my head, but that's another one that we've used.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:22:22]:
And so instituting some of those things, we're saying, like some of those counterintuitive things, like, you want to be helpful to your team? No, you can't be helpful in the way that you think is helpful. You have to be helpful in a way that's actually going to benefit the company and benefit yourself. Because you can't scale past answering the same 100 questions every week, and you need to be able to scale past that. And so, yeah, those were some practical things that we've done.
Matt Gjertsen [00:22:44]:
Yeah, I think that's 100% been my experience. By chance, was the tool that you used before Iorad?
Mendel Erlenwein [00:22:52]:
No. Really simple, but I'm sure there's bunches of them out there.
Matt Gjertsen [00:22:58]:
Yeah, there's many of them out there. I have a friend who works at Irreb that does that kind of, you click through and it makes those screenshots. Interestingly enough, I just got, because so many of these tools, the tools that you just mentioned are very kind of like computer focused. And I just got the meta ray band sunglasses.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:23:18]:
Okay.
Matt Gjertsen [00:23:20]:
So they have a speaker in them, really good quality sound, and you can live stream from them. And I want to run some experiments with some clients because I think potentially these kinds of glasses will do the same thing for more like hands on manual labor kind of stuff where somebody saying, like, I can't figure out how to put this part together. And you're just like, okay, here you go. And you just record yourself doing, it's like first person point of view, super easy way to seamlessly record yourself and set it on.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:23:50]:
I don't know, that makes a lot of sense.
Matt Gjertsen [00:23:52]:
Sidebar. But I think there's a lot of potential there.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:23:56]:
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.
Matt Gjertsen [00:23:59]:
Awesome. I think those are great tips, I think, for helping to scale that company, or scale any company, when you think about it, really does come back to, don't just answer the question. It's that whole old adage of show somebody to fish, don't give them a fish kind of thing. And now you're taking that to a whole other company. You're building this new company called Careco. I really want to spend some time on this, too, because I think so many people are interested in AI. And as we get into this, I think I'd love to steer the conversation about the particular way you're using AI and how I think it can apply to all things AI, especially in talent development. But if you could take a second, what are you trying to do with Careco now?
Mendel Erlenwein [00:24:46]:
Yeah, so Careco is a really incredible tool. So I've spent a large, good number of years really invested in the care coordination space. Like I mentioned, we have 25 care coordinators. We're talking a couple of thousand patients a month. And so really understanding some of the pain points, the opportunities that are unique to the space. And then I've been developing the solution that is really hyper geared towards this very specific use case. So it's a copilot that is for the care coordinators. And so it's actually for a lot of those rinse and repeat type roles that you mentioned.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:25:27]:
It's really about creating a platform that can standardize all the education around it, can standardize all the task management side of it, and really just take away a lot of the tedious things that usually ends up becoming the differentiator between a successful care coordinator, in my case, and a non successful care coordinator. So if you don't have good experience with documenting or knowing everything there is to know about care coordination, we're really building out the brain of the care coordinator and then allowing them to just do what they're good at, which is just take the information given to them and really present it over to the patients in a very meaningful way. And so it's about really going back to kind of the strengths and weaknesses thing, really understanding my team's strengths and weaknesses, and then just trying to build a solution that would allow them to amplify their strengths and get rid of their weaknesses. And this goes back to talent development, by the way, and I do this with myself when I hire people. When I used to hire people, thank God, now HR does that, and it's been incredible. But when I hire people, I ask them what they enjoy doing. I don't ask them what they're good at. And I've found a 100% correlation between what people are good at and what they enjoy doing.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:26:46]:
And not always are the things that people think they're good at, what they're actually good at. But if you ask them what they enjoy doing, you'll probably get that answer a lot quicker. And nobody wants to put somebody in a position of something that they're not good at. That's just inefficient from their perspective. From your perspective, they're not going to enjoy working there. You're not going to enjoy having them there. They're not going to be productive. And so it's kind of like I started taking flight lessons for a little bit.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:27:10]:
It's a very basic example, but there's this battery in the plane, and one of the things on the checklist that you have to check is if the battery is charging. And so it's this little screen that basically would show a discharging or recharging of the battery. And I think that every interaction that we have, this is, in general, a social lesson. But specifically, when it comes to employees and work, it's a binary choice between those two. Discharging or recharging your battery. There are certain things that you do that will drain you, and there are other things that you do that energize you. And as much as you can, you should try to only do the things that energize you. Not one of these Gen Z, like, do what you love type messaging.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:27:50]:
It's just about efficiency and productivity. Chances are, if you enjoy doing a thing, then you're going to be good at it because you're going to enjoy it. And if you hate doing a thing, you're going to procrastinate. You're going to suck at it. You know what I mean? And so I found that to be, we kind of looped back, but I found that to be a pretty good metric as well to use.
Matt Gjertsen [00:28:13]:
It totally makes sense. And I think really what something like a copilot does is it allows you to fully lean into the particular skill or talent because the copilot is, like you said, picking them up on the other side. I'd be interested for these particular roles, these care coordinators. What does this allow you to do of, like, what are the skills that this copilot can now take on? And then what are the skills that remain the core human element that you want them to be good at?
Mendel Erlenwein [00:28:42]:
Yeah, so in my instance, it's basically anything that requires your brain. So anything that requires knowledge, anything that requires memory, anything that requires other administrative things like documentation and things like that, all of that is wrapped up in the brain side of the memory recall. Yes. And then what I'm trying to just keep the human is what the human, I think, is really good at, which is the actual delivery of said care. And so you, as a patient, you don't want to talk to a bot, you don't want, contrary to what a lot of people think, at least for the next 20 to 50 years, and I would argue even beyond that, you don't want to be talking to some sort of system. You want to talk to a person. And until, I don't even think there's a conversation to be started until AI somehow hacks empathy, but specifically in care. Healthcare is a human enterprise.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:29:41]:
It's a human business. It's a human to human thing. And so, yes, patients don't enjoy interacting with humans. If it's going to be extremely inefficient and very difficult for them to get what they need done, that's always annoying. No one likes being put on hold, and no one likes, but that's the point of merging these two things together, because on the flip side, patients don't, like I said, I don't think they want to be talking to a bot. And so if you can create a scenario where the human being does nothing more than what they're good at, which is deliver the care and coordinate the actual care, then you can really get the best of both worlds.
Matt Gjertsen [00:30:21]:
Yeah, totally makes sense. There's an author, her name is Annie Murphy Paul, and she recently came out with a book called the Extended Mind. And it's exactly about this kind of thing. I think for anybody in talent development or in business, these co pilots can do so many things, or AI in know. I think in the learning development space, so much of what we've been focusing on with AI is the creation is rapid creation, right? So it allows for generative creation, allows us to create an outline on such and such topic, or create quiz questions based on this document or things like that. And that has its place. And it's interesting, but everything that you're saying at a much more fundamental level, bringing, strategically bringing in AI copilots into particular roles in your organization, is going to be a fundamental part of talent development in the future of identifying, finding the tools out there if they exist, potentially building them if they don't exist, so that you can do exactly what you just said of changing what the key skill is. Because right now, previous to this or in the current world, there's probably lots of need to hire care coordinators who aren't super empathetic, but man, do they just have a memory, like, they're never going to get the process wrong, and that's potentially leading to worse care.
Matt Gjertsen [00:31:47]:
Whereas if you can just focus on the empathy piece and let the machine, again, that extended mind idea of put the skill over here, I think it's going to unlock a lot of new talent in organizations and really transform the way people continue to work. So I think I just love, when we were chatting the other day, I loved that you focused on this idea of, you could call it augmentation rather than replacement, because so much of the AI conversation has been on replacement. And like you said, we're just a long ways away from that being possible. Whereas the augmentation piece is arguably, you.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:32:27]:
Know, Matt, if I may, there's one other piece that, not to disjoint the conversation, but there's a piece to talent development that I've been rolling over my head for a bunch of months, and I don't think I found the right wording and packaging for it. So maybe you can help me out. But I really believe very strongly because I've seen a lot of success. This has come natural to me, and I've seen a lot of success with this method of leadership. This is kind of like, from a leadership perspective on the talent development. And I've also seen in other organizations, I'm on the board of a school and a couple of different things, and I've seen through some other organizations where they lack this core concept and how detrimental it is and how it literally runs through the entire organization and just kills everybody from top down. And the framework that I've used, and I don't know if this translates well, so you'll help me. But the framework that I've used is that when you're delegating responsibility, there has to be an equal parity between the responsibility delegated and the authority delegated to that person 100%.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:33:32]:
And the biggest problem that I've seen in organizations is where there's a mismatch. And you might have the responsibility to get XYZ done, but you don't actually have the authority to make that happen. And in a worst case scenario, often is like your typical middle management person is when they have the authority over a certain thing, but they don't have the ultimate responsibility over that thing. That's like the biggest problem with middle management. They have the authority to boss around the people under them and to really destroy their lives and make them whatever, but they don't bear the responsibility of what that does to the larger business. Right? Or the opposite. When you have an executive that is too nitty gritty, and so they give you the responsibility to get XYZ done, but they hold the authority to actually implement, to hire, fire, whatever that might be, they hold that authority. And so I'm looking for a good framework, some good words to have it.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:34:20]:
But I think it's so important, that concept.
Matt Gjertsen [00:34:25]:
I couldn't agree with you more on that. Some of the words you just said, it's like you pulled them right out of my brain. And I think this really factors in, in larger organizations. I like to think when I was in the military, I think this is one of the biggest challenges in the military and in any large organization, in that many of there's this weird mismatch. And I think this drives the disconnect between. There's often some strange disconnect between the CEO level or the top level and the, and the worker level, and sometimes it's the manager level, at the director level, but there's always a mismatch. And what often happens is the things that most annoy people in the organization are too trivial for executive leaders to handle, but too big for the level below them to handle. There's really no one in the organization who has both, like you said, the responsibility and the authority.
Matt Gjertsen [00:35:26]:
For some reason, it just breaks up. So I don't know if I have better language than you, because I always use that same language that you use of that distinction between responsibility and authority. I think, to your point, it drives a lot of the challenges of middle management of really, anybody in any organization. It's one of the most frustrating things for an individual, of knowing you're tasked with doing something, but you can't actually do the things you need to do in order to make it happen. Being in small business, have you ever read or heard of eos? So eos, it stands for the entrepreneurial operating system. And there's a book called traction that walks through the whole thing. And one of the things in the book that they do that I thought was interesting, one of the points that they do is rather than building an.org chart, they build an accountability chart where they think about a company and pretend you remove all the people from the company and just say, what are the things that have to get done? And there's usually like five or six things at the top, like finance, sales, and then those can break down into smaller and smaller organizations. But I think the challenge that happens at organizations, especially as they're growing, is that you hire and develop the structure based on personality, just based on either who was there or who's good at something.
Matt Gjertsen [00:37:05]:
And that's why you will get leaders who, for some reason have two responsibilities that are completely different from one another, or why you have engineers in two different parts of the company or something like that. And so that's why they have an exercise in the book traction, which says, pretend nobody works at the company and build this accountability chart, and then take all the people in the company and go back to what you just said, what do they enjoy doing? What are they best at? And slot them into those positions.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:37:35]:
I love that.
Matt Gjertsen [00:37:36]:
Yeah, that's awesome. I would check that out because I think 100% agree it's a major problem. And I think some of it stems from this organic growth that companies have where they don't think, they never get the opportunity to just step back and just be like, what are the things that need to get done and who should be doing?
Mendel Erlenwein [00:37:55]:
Yeah. And for your audience, I'd have to imagine a lot of them are probably in management or leadership positions. It's very easy to see this go wrong in other people, but it's really important to focus in on yourself, because if you're the person delegating, typically the middle management problem is the person that has more authority than they do, responsibility. But when you're going from founding a company or starting a company or being in a really crucial role to having to delegate, it's so easy to slip into that role where you've given somebody the responsibility to do something, but you retain the authority. And so make sure you're looking in yourself and say, institute those small things. It could be as stupid as telling your employees. Yeah, when there were three employees, they used to come to you to ask for PTO or something like that. But no, now you have a manager.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:38:41]:
You don't get to give them that permission, even though you're the boss's boss or whatever it is, you don't get to do that. If you want a healthy organization, make sure that if you've told somebody that your HR or whatever that role is, they actually have the authority to make those calls.
Matt Gjertsen [00:38:58]:
Yeah, I think that's 100% agree with that. Awesome. Well, to wind this down a little bit, there's a couple of questions we kind of try to end with, and I'll probably just focus on two of them. The first one is, what is one book or podcast that everybody should read or listen to and why?
Mendel Erlenwein [00:39:15]:
It's a great question. I'm biased because I happen to be middle of founders, which is your boy Elon Musk and his story of creating and that whole story. So I happen to be middle there, which I find to be quite riveting. And I'm a listener. But I'll tell you a fun one, a really good read. That's a fun one, which is a book by Scott Adams, one of his early books called how to fail at almost everything and still win big. I found it to be a very enjoyable read, very comedic read, but also very important. A very important read because it kind of gives you this perspective and this understanding that life is about steps and you're going places and you don't have to succeed at, like, it spaces it.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:40:02]:
Do you have it?
Matt Gjertsen [00:40:03]:
No, it's a different book, so I finish it all. Okay.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:40:07]:
So anyway, it's something I read a couple of years ago and still comes to mind. So I'd say that's a great book. There's obviously dozens of various different business books, psychology books and things like that, but I think that's a good, fun, easy call out.
Matt Gjertsen [00:40:20]:
I love. I just as you were talking about that, it reminded me this was actually. I've never seen anybody else who read this book, but it was kind of pivotal to me. It was a book by, he's a dj called Bobby Bones.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:40:31]:
Okay.
Matt Gjertsen [00:40:31]:
And it's called fail until you. Great. Very, very similar kind of idea, I think probably chances are. Yeah, that's great.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:40:41]:
Podcast wise, I'd say. Obviously making better by. Thank you. Yeah, podcast I mean, I tend to listen to. Recently I listened to like the all in pod. I've been doing that for a couple of months, just kind of keep prize the situation. Big Ben Shapiro guy for politics. But, yeah, I don't know.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:41:03]:
There's a lot of them.
Matt Gjertsen [00:41:05]:
Yeah, there are a lot of them. Awesome. So then when you reflect back on all of your successes, what do you think is one skill that's most helped you be successful?
Mendel Erlenwein [00:41:16]:
Yeah. And it's funny because nobody actually thinks that they're successful. The question came with an assumption, but I'd say two things. The first thing is that I have this theory, which is that it's impossible for you to think ahead of yourself in business farther than the amount of time you have behind you. It's a perspective game. And so many people are starting businesses, it's impossible for them to think even a year ahead. If you're 20 years old and you're starting a business, and I tell you, here's a really good lead. It's going to be a big account or a medium sized account, but it's going to take you two years to land them.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:41:56]:
You're going to be like, dude, get out of here. If they're not closing next week, don't talk to me. Right. But then once you've been in business for ten years. All of a sudden, a year doesn't really seem like much. And you're like, yeah, that's like, par for the course. And so I think the first thing is to recognize the fact that we have that issue. And then the second thing is then finding people that are ahead of you in life and then taking their advice, listening to their perspective, but then actually believing them.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:42:25]:
And I think that for a lot of people and actually listening to them. And I think that for a lot of people, since we don't see the things happen fast enough, and this is myself included, and this is something that I continue to tell myself, but I think I've been relatively successful at it, which is, it's so hard to not see things move at the speed that we expect it to. And in hindsight, things always moved quickly, but in the day to day, it always seems really slow. And so being able to get out of your own, on the ground perspective and go trust somebody that's got their eyes a decade, two decades, three decades ahead of you, and then actually believe them when they say you're on the right path or you're on the wrong path, actually trust them and then take those actions instead of just jumping from thing to thing, from bitcoin to this to that, to whatever's the next shiny thing. I think that's something that, despite my strongest instincts, I've been somewhat successful at.
Matt Gjertsen [00:43:18]:
That is such a great one. Because you're right, the instinct is to just, oh, it's different this time, or, oh, maybe that was true when they were growing up. Times have changed and they don't. And if you wait five or ten years, you find out that they didn't. That's an interesting or really great one. It's not just the typical advice that you get of, oh, go find people who are more experienced, go seek out mentors, but just the sheer believing them is a big step. That's great, Mendel. So I think that's a great place to end.
Matt Gjertsen [00:43:53]:
I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. I think we touched on a bunch of stuff. All the success I wish all the success for you as you build up Careco and get that going. So thank you so much. And we'll make sure to check in 612 months to see how it's all going.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:44:10]:
Thanks for having me. This was an absolute pleasure.
Matt Gjertsen [00:44:13]:
Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you liked the discussion, make sure to hit like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. As a reminder, if your team is struggling, keeping up with the training development demands of your organization. We want to help better everyday studios is a full service instructional design team that can help you with everything from ideation to actual content creation and delivery. Please reach out to us using the link in the episode notes below.
Mendel Erlenwein [00:44:38]:
Have a great day.
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