Welcome to the HR Tech Spotlight Podcast. I’m Deanna Shimota, CEO of GrowthMode Marketing. The HR technology market is crowded, and we know it can be hard to find the best software solutions for your business in the Sea of sameness on this podcast, we shine a spotlight on some of the best up and coming technology options out there. Check it out if you are interested in learning about new, innovative solutions available in the market, and if you are with an HR tech company and interested in being considered for a guest spot, stay tuned for details at the end of the show.
0:00:05 Deanna: Hi, everyone. I’m excited to dig into Rallybrite on this episode. The Rallybrite Platform is a behavioral, science backed software that helps businesses identify and target the hidden factors that supercharge team success. Through the platform, companies can measure and diagnose points of weakness in a team, enabling team members as well as team leads to understand required actions in different situations and pinpoint the areas where they can make high impact improvements.
0:00:35 Deanna: Joining me to talk about the platform is Mike Sweeney, chief Strategy Officer of Rallybright. Mike, welcome to the show.
0:00:43 Mike Sweeney: Hi, Deanna. Thanks so much for having me.
0:00:46 Deanna: So tell us about your background in the HR tech space. I know when we were talking before we hit record, you mentioned that you actually have experience on the other side as an HR tech buyer.
0:00:57 Mike Sweeney: Yeah, it’s been a long road to LND. It started really as a practitioner in the operations world, where I was using tools to try to build teams, improve leadership development, and drive business results. And it migrated over time. Once I found that I really liked working with teams and with executives, and my parents are both teachers. So I found my happy home in L. D. And for the last six and a half years, up till this past May, I was the VP of Learning at Bain company. Really building out their HR tech on the learning side and making sure that it integrated. So I often found myself in the buyer’s seat where I was evaluating technology up and comers and trying to figure out how to fit it all together.
0:01:43 Mike Sweeney: So I’m very sensitive to the volume of tools out there, and I think for your listeners on the HR and finance side making tool decisions, I’ve had my share of vendor conversations and reverse demos, so it’s fun to be on the other side now. But I do have some empathy for the difficulty in making the choices.
0:02:02 Deanna: Right. I mean, it is a very crowded market and there’s so many options out there and so many integrations. It’s overwhelming for a buyer. And so I think coming in and having that perspective and now being on the other side where you’re in an HR tech company, you probably can bring a whole perspective to how it feels to be a buyer and help them navigate that.
0:02:29 Mike Sweeney: There is an almost over proliferation of tools. I remember when we were doing some LMS research while I was a banning company. We started with a list of 504 that were possible, and narrowing down was very tricky, I think on the platform side or the software side, the most important thing is just to understand the client’s context and what the situation is and what they’re really looking for. Rather than trying to push features and functions, spend some time understanding and diagnosing and then seeing if there’s a right fit.
0:03:03 Mike Sweeney: So hopefully that gives me a lot of curiosity to what they’re trying to solve for and it helps understand when it’s a fit and when it’s not a fit. To save time for the buyer, let’s.
0:03:15 Deanna: Talk a bit more about what Rallybright does. Can you dig in more beyond how I explained it?
0:03:21 Mike Sweeney: Sure. Basically, if you think about HR tech software, especially on the development side, you’ve got performance management software, which is an entire industry in some ways that are built to tell special people that they’re average once a year. And I don’t want to overplay that hand, but I think sometimes the manager doesn’t love it, the employee doesn’t love it. But performance management is something that we’re not.
0:03:48 Mike Sweeney: There’s also employee engagement software, which gives a good read on culture. Sometimes it doesn’t get down to the action level or the team level. So we sit in between those. We’re a team intelligence and performance platform. So what that means is that we’ll get a very high impact, low effort assessment of teams impact and engagement and then help them measure, diagnose and improve based on that assessment with the team. So 15 to 20 minutes you get a read on the team.
0:04:20 Mike Sweeney: We take a look at how is the team, how connected is the team, how’s the team’s direction are they adaptable, and a couple of other dimensions. And then we give them a playbook for how to improve on those specific dimensions. So if the psychological safety, for example, is low, we have a playbook to help improve that. And I find that more and more teams are the core operating units within organizations.
0:04:43 Mike Sweeney: But we teach leadership development at the one on one level. So I learn how to provide feedback to an individual, but I don’t learn how to make group decisions. When should it be consensus? I don’t learn how to build psychologically safety within the team and that’s advanced level leadership. So our platform tries to demystify that and give them a playbook so the team can quickly identify where they are, pick a couple of actions to improve on, and then a few months down the road reassess.
0:05:11 Mike Sweeney: We talk a lot in learning and development about personalized learning. Well, this is almost personalized learning at the team level. So one team in your organization might need to improve their direction, mission, vision, values. Another team might need to improve their accountability. We let them have that variation so one team can work on the specific things that are important for them. Once we get into multi team situations where if we have an engagement where we’re working with multiple teams, you can look at themes across the different teams.
0:05:43 Mike Sweeney: And I know in the L and D world, it’s really hard to do a broad, organization wise needs assessment. Well, we can identify some of the behaviors that are challenged across the organization and give that information to the L D team. So we provide a set of resources and an engagement and impact assessment to help leaders identify precisely where they need to improve and then provide them the scaffolding and support to help them improve.
0:06:13 Deanna: How did Rallybreak come to be?
0:06:17 Mike Sweeney: It started with our two co founders. One was an embedded executive psychologist and coach at Microsoft, and our CEO and founder John was on the platform side. And there was some work to identify the behaviors that created high performing resilient teams. And so they continued to build team tools and then they pulled out that science based assessment and put it into our resilient team assessment. We’ve had some changes to it over time, and those changes have really added in the dimension of adaptability where how do you approach failure, what’s the test and learn? And we had a 2.0 assessment that we had a couple PhD level psychologists revalidate.
0:07:00 Mike Sweeney: My experience with Rallybrite is relatively new. I joined because I was a former customer and really loved the software and felt after looking at the market, that it’s addressing a gap that I hadn’t seen before in something specific for teams. And I was an excited team leader who was using the platform and loved it and called the CEO and said, god, I love what you’re doing, I’d be really excited to join.
0:07:27 Mike Sweeney: And the fact that we bring the science software and the skills to help build high performing teams, I just haven’t seen that around. And I was looking for it actively because there were a lot of teams at Bay and Company and I found that the story of providing tools to help not only leaders, but HR teams, we offer some certifications so HR teams can run their own. We almost stand as team development augmentation.
0:07:55 Mike Sweeney: There’s a lot of HR teams that are focused on employee relations right now. They’re probably focused on benefits changes and open enrollment. Some experience in LND, but not necessarily how to support an executive team in heavy conflict, how to support a new leader with an existing team, how to handle when there’s conflict within a team. And we provide some support for those HR LND teams that are very busy so they can call the experts and bring in some specific pointed interventions to help teams develop.
0:08:30 Deanna: You’ve kind of touched on Know that you found Rally Bright was different from the other solutions out there. It’s obviously a very competitive market and there’s a lot of different solutions out there to solve some of the problems that you’re talking about. Can you tell us a bit more about what you believe rally Bright’s unique point of view in the market is when someone is evaluating it against other options that maybe do something in the same vein as what you guys are doing.
0:09:01 Mike Sweeney: Right. I’m going to talk to think a little bit here because it’s hard when you move from Raving fan to Chief Strategy officer, you have a lot of fun feelings about the platform. So I think first is low effort. So 15 minutes and you get a pulse of the team. Second is we provide the Scaffolding after. So a lot of times we all know in the LND world or HR world, when you do something with a team, they lose 60 70% of it within three days.
0:09:33 Mike Sweeney: So we provide resources to help that team grow. So I think that longitudinal approach to team development, assess, provide support, pick a couple of actions, reassess makes it different than other team interventions or team training, I think. Third is we’re evidence based, so we know based on the science of team performance, that there are a few interventions, for example, clarifying roles and responsibility, making sure there’s shared purpose, there’s some science around how to do that and that’s what’s built into our resources and our tools.
0:10:05 Mike Sweeney: And I think the fact that the data is one thing that a lot of our customers are excited by. I just recently spoke at a Women in Tech conference because I found that a lot of times in the markets we serve computer software, it HR, Tech, Fintech, finance, Engineering, Agile. There tends to be a real excitement for data and dashboards, but not as much willingness to have a conversation about communication and team dynamics and team norms.
0:10:43 Mike Sweeney: So when we’re able to show the data on how the team has a variation of responses in certain different dimensions, that gets people who are maybe more data focused and technical open to having a team performance conversation. So I’ve found that once you get leaders excited about the data of their team and how you can track that performance, over time they start to say wow, I wonder what’s going on and why people are having such a different experience.
0:11:16 Mike Sweeney: It seems like there’s a different point of view and then they open that up. I think the data and dashboards as a way to facilitate the opening of the team performance conversation, that’s a differentiator because a lot of times we’re showing these leaders, these dashboards, and they get all excited about it, but what they end up doing is talking about how to make the experience more inclusive, how to make the experience more safe for people to share their point of view.
0:11:40 Mike Sweeney: And I think we do that in a way that sometimes has a little bit of humor. Like for example, we have a team promoter score which is based on Net promoter score methodology, but we basically offer a TPS report. And if you’ve ever seen the movie Office Space, everybody loves a TPS report. And so those who have seen it before, we add a little bit of humor and a little bit of fun and levity into the conversation. And I think that culture of our team sets us apart.
0:12:07 Deanna: Very cool. So what would you say from your perspective is a big challenge or problem that HR departments are facing today? That rallybright can really come in and help them resolve.
0:12:23 Mike Sweeney: I think over COVID a lot of teams have starved their leadership development efforts, especially as the macroeconomic conditions have changed and there are more leaders doing things at a higher level of difficulty. So you’ve got hybrid teams, you’ve got remote teams, it’s very hard to build that same connection that you used to be able to build. So team performance is suffering. Not only is team performance suffering and connection suffering, but that inter team connection. So staying aligned within an organization involves one leader talking to another leader and staying aligned toward the organization’s mission.
0:12:59 Mike Sweeney: When we do interventions with multiple teams, we find that we start to get that alignment stronger. So lack of alignment, lack of connection, we’re seeing in our data almost like fault lines or a barbell effect starting to show up where there are teams who went through COVID together, those team members are very tight and the new team members are having a difficult time getting engaged. And then we also see more diversity on teams, which is making people we really need to lean into that sense of belonging and finding a way to bring the best out of everyone who’s on our team. If they have different points of view and diversity of thought, we tend to find specific team moments of truth where we play well.
0:13:43 Mike Sweeney: So, new leader joining an existing team and taking over for someone post riff, rebuilding the organizational culture attrition on a team, new team members, a team that’s newly formed that is designed to build a strategic initiative. And I know one of the things in Josh Burson’s recent report was leadership and management development is at the top. We focus specifically on leadership and management development at the team level and that’s a piece that a lot of leadership development companies are missing. How do you do it at the next level when you’re dealing with high pressure, high stakes, some people burning out remote, never in the office together?
0:14:24 Mike Sweeney: We play very well in those sort of situations for teams.
0:14:28 Deanna: I can see where Rally Bright would fit in really well with teams, especially larger organizations where there’s this constant changing dynamic on teams, right. And we’ve all been in situations where you have either a really great team culture and one event can change that or vice versa. It wasn’t good and one new person comes in, the whole dynamic changes. And so I think that is a reality for many organizations. Like your great culture today might not be your great culture tomorrow, and you’ve got to stay on top of that because it’s ever evolving with each person that steps in and out and all of the events and factors that impact a person’s mindset on the team and how it kind of rolls across everybody.
0:15:18 Deanna: Right. It’s amazing how dynamic teams become and how much it fluctuates from day to day and month to month.
0:15:29 Mike Sweeney: Absolutely. You change the context, you change the team, you change the leader, you change the team. You change a team member, you change the team. And if you think about there’s an individual and how that person shows up and how self aware they are, right, that individual’s EQ. So we do have some psychometric assessments built into the platform, our own version of disc, however you feel about that particular instrument, conflict styles, people can upload their strength finder, they can upload predictive index.
0:15:56 Mike Sweeney: So there’s some awareness of how I show up within the team and then we offer a profile comparison. Because if you think the strongest atomic unit of a team is a duo, so how are the individual relationships? So if Mike and Deanna are going to have a one on one, are there some things that I should change and adjust to make that relationship stronger? So building intimacy at the individual level and then you think about the team cohesion we kind of work at multiple levels and offer the individual assessment, the duo comparisons and then you have the teams.
0:16:28 Mike Sweeney: And I think you’re right that because things are changing. We think there’s a lot of people working in the team, but not a lot of people working on the team. And so if you look at the assessment data, over time you can start to see changes based on membership changes. I showed an interesting example at the Women in Tech conference where it was basically my topic was that women leaders build better teams.
0:16:53 Mike Sweeney: And I have a lot of data that shows that some of our best customers and some of our best leaders, at least by measured by our platform, coupled with data from Gallup and all sorts of places that I won’t go into now, we were able to look and see what happened when this particular leader joined the team. When a woman took over the team, we saw what happened. The engagement scores, I’ve now since revised that to maybe more feminine energy, knowing that there are broad gender.
0:17:26 Mike Sweeney: But the key is back to your point that there are a lot of changes and so looking at it longitudinally is important. I know in the agile world they talk about happiness as a leading indicator to productivity. If you think about your typical KPI metrics, we offer the team’s behaviors around performance, the behaviors around adaptability, the behaviors around connection and if there’s a certain area that needs to be adjusted because a new person joined the team, we’ll give you that visibility. So you have almost the team health dashboard.
0:17:58 Mike Sweeney: I know that we drink our own champagne at rallybright. So we ran our assessment and it was the first one we had done since I joined the team. Well, some things got better. Well, guess what? Some things got worse because we did change and added a new person to the executive leadership team. So we have different things that we need to work on and I think that visibility to your point around when things change can be very powerful to see it before the organizational performance is interrupted.
0:18:27 Deanna: Yeah, that makes sense. So what type of company would you say is an ideal fit for Rally Bright?
0:18:35 Mike Sweeney: I mentioned some of the industries and I watched some of your videos too. So I think ICP not persona right. So if we’re thinking that it’s a data focused company, let’s say 50 to 5000 people, although we have service larger, tend to be data focused computer software, it HR tech fintech. We found a lot of challenges in the healthcare market recently. So we’re not necessarily working with frontline folks, but folks maybe on the technical side supporting them. That tends to be where we play the best.
0:19:08 Mike Sweeney: But we’ve also found that there’s some when I look at glassdoor, companies that are scoring 70 or higher with CEO approval rating of 75 or higher, tend to be looking for solutions like ours. They have high performing teams on their agenda and they’re looking could go from good to great. We tend to work really well with those folks because they get it already. And then they see our dashboard and say, oh, we’ve been looking for something like this.
0:19:36 Mike Sweeney: I have found that we can scale larger. We work with a couple of very large companies. We tend to work with them a little bit differently where instead of using, let’s say, like a computer software and It benchmark, we’ll give them their own so we can scale larger. But that sweet spot seems to be about 50 to 5000 in those tech focused, engineering focused, data focused industries. As I’ve come on board as the CSO, I tend to learn by hypothesis.
0:20:06 Mike Sweeney: So there are sometimes where we’ll do certain tests to see is there an adjacent market we could also serve. But those tech focused, data focused teams that have intact teams of five to twelve people that tend to have some interdependence in their work, like not necessarily a sales team because they kind of operate on their own, but teams that rely on each other a little bit more, that tends to be our sweet spot. But I’ll be honest that’s some of the work that I’ve done since I’ve started and the computer software and It market has been hit pretty hard with layoffs. We’ve all read the news and so we’ve adjusted a little bit to pick up some more adjacencies and we’re continuing to find folks that are looking to improve team performance that have a data lens. And I don’t think we’ve uncovered all the adjacencies, but that tends to be the market where we can be most successful.
0:21:02 Deanna: So you’ve been on the client side, so you could probably get some good perspective on this next question. But what impact have you seen organizations that work with Rallybright Experience and maybe what did you personally see being on the client side working with?
0:21:18 Mike Sweeney: You know, when I was looking for Rallybride, I was looking for something that could help me determine if we were living our organizational and team values. That was my specific search. So are we a high performing team? We believe in these things. Let’s have a mechanism to check that over time. And I helped hire a successor and the team is I just talked to one of the team members, say the team is performing well, meeting their organizational goals and their impact engagement scores have gone up as that new person came on board. So the idea of having a team that can be sustainably great over time and continue to perform well, we have come in at times.
0:22:04 Mike Sweeney: I’ll think of one client story, for example, woman who had used us before, came into a high pressure situation, post reduction in force, very tough culture, stakeholders were angry. And she said, look, I got to get a quick read on what’s going on within the team, ran an assessment on her team, gathered baseline data, and then sat down with the team and said, hey, this is where we’re scoring. What do we want to work on? First, they picked two specific actions. They worked on them, they saw their throughput increase, they were an agile team, they saw their defects go down, and they were using some net promoter score feedback with their stakeholders and they saw that go up significantly, and they did that in a relatively short amount of time. And now they’re one of our highest performing teams. So she really was able to turn that culture.
0:22:52 Mike Sweeney: We’ve seen small capacity constrained HR teams. For example, an HR team of four people who had to service 60 teams very quickly, got scale. So they could have gone and run team interventions with each team, but that would have taken a lot of time. We gave them the mechanism, the tool, and they were able to service all those teams and see organizational performance improvements without necessarily them having to go out, do qualitative interviews, come up with an assessment, run a team workshop. We kind of gave them the platform to do that and that gave them scale, so they’re able to do more with less. And I haven’t run into any HR executive these days where they have a lot of free time.
0:23:37 Deanna: That is very true. So what is the future vision for Rally Bright?
0:23:46 Mike Sweeney: We’re moving to a place where I see us doing more team intelligence work. So right now we have some data that’s coming in from team assessments, but we’re starting to play around with using AI to summarize the qualitative insights. So we have a few qualitative questions, but we’re able to get pretty good accurate read very fast using Chat, GPT and other type solutions. I think down the road there are some things that I see with Microsoft Analytics where you can see talk time in meetings, response time between people to make sure that people are getting equal treatment on teams. So what are the APIs where we can pull in more intelligence so you can look at how the team’s performing over time beyond the assessment.
0:24:35 Mike Sweeney: And then if you think within a company, there are three typical personas that we’re talking to. Of course, there’s the HR, L and D executive to help them get scale and improve team performance. There’s also the CEO who wants to get a high level view of how the teams are performing and when they place new leaders, whether that was a good move or not a good move, but that individual team leader. One of the things that we’ve heard is that there’s so much data that they want us to thin some of it out.
0:25:06 Mike Sweeney: And so we have a whole new UI that we’re working on currently in testing that is much more mobile, friendly and much faster at getting to action for the teams. I think we’re already quick to action, but we give the team leader a lot of information and most team leaders are extremely busy, so we’re going to thin that out. So I’d say new UX that’s coming over time, more intelligent data and those are some of the pieces that we’re working on. There is one other piece too, is that now that we’ve worked with over 500 teams, we have a lot of data and can start to predict where teams are going to struggle. So for example, when we talk to teams and we say, look, 90% of the teams that we’re working with are low on this dimension, this might be something you should take a look at. Even if we don’t assess them, just in sharing those insights on calls, we are finding certain dimensions are getting stretched in this hybrid world and we can start to share some research and insights on that.
0:26:08 Mike Sweeney: So I think more insights coming out from us and some of those other pieces that I mentioned on the roadmap. Long answer to a short question what.
0:26:20 Deanna: Final thoughts do you want to leave our audience with?
0:26:23 Mike Sweeney: I think if you’re a team leader or HR executive that is seeing some team dynamics that could be better and you don’t know where to turn, we can bring the science, software and skills to help move forward. And I think that we can be an extension of the HR and LND team that lets you become an expert at team development without necessarily having to bring on a staff or organizational psychologist. If you think that your performance management systems aren’t quite doing what they need to do, if your engagement surveys aren’t getting quite down to action, give us a call. Let us show you what we have.
0:27:04 Mike Sweeney: And I think that given how important teams are to organizational performance, it’s time to start focusing on the team as the core operating unit.
0:27:16 Deanna: Where can our listeners go to learn more about Rallybright?
0:27:20 Mike Sweeney: Easiest place is rallybright.com. You can find us on LinkedIn also by the same name, but that’s probably the best place to start.
0:27:29 Deanna: Excellent, Mike. Thanks so much for being a guest on the HR next spotlight. And for those listening in on this episode, be sure to check out Rally Bright. We’ll include the links in the show notes. Have a great day, everyone.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Tech Spotlight Podcast where we showcase some of the best up and coming HR technology options in the market. If you are an HR tech company leader who would like to be considered for a guest spot on this program, please contact me via growthmodemarketing.com or reach out to me Deanna Shimota on LinkedIn and if you found this show informative, subscribe, connect with us on social media and leave a review.
This is Deanna with GrowthMode Marketing signing off. Thanks for listening. We hope you’ll tune in again next time.