Using Psychology in Thought Leadership | Dan Hawthorne

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Using Psychology to develop scientific Thought Leadership

An interview with Dan Hawthorne about using science and developing assessments to help people with their careers.

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Today, Bill Sherman, COO of Thought Leadership Leverage takes over the topic Organizational Thought Leadership; in future episodes both Bill and Peter will tackle the subject. Bill’s first guest is Dan Hawthorne, Director of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at PAIRIN. PAIRIN is a social enterprise software company using science to help people get the answers they are looking for as well as making education relevant and hiring equitable. Dan explains how they use data and science to back up their thought leadership while building behavioral assessments to help people find jobs, advance in their careers and move into their next stage of life. We also talk with Dan about how the world has changed in recent months, how he is adapting to it, and how his company is doing their part to bring validated information in a way people can understand.

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

• How to use good science and data to back up your Thought Leadership.
• Why using the right language in your thought leadership is key to the audience being able to grasp the subject.
• How to celebrate the success of thought leadership.

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Using psychology in thought leadership can help you discover the areas where you can remove the barriers that prevent people and organizations from reaching maximum effectiveness. Do you need help validating your content? Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you with analyzing the metrics, providing data you can use to support your ideas and strengthen your conclusions.

Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.

And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!

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Transcript

Bill Sherman Hello and welcome. I’m Bill Sherman, CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today we’re going to focus on a topic that’s a passion of mine organizational thought, leadership, that is, people who use thought leadership in their work to help their organization reach its goals. My guest today is Dan Hawthorne, director of IO psychology at Perron. Dan has a Ph.D. in organizational psychology, and she’s an expert in personality, workplace assessment statistics. But he reached there by a little bit of a nontraditional route. He served in the Army. He worked in a factory floor for a period of time. He then went back to school, got a Ph.D., consulted with Fortune 500 companies, and is now working with parent. So, Dan, why don’t we start there? What is your role at parent and what does parent do?

Dr. Dan Hawthorne It’s a good question. Parent is a social enterprise software company, and we use science to help people personalize things like career exploration, job matching and then professional development. And to give you a really good idea, one of the products that we rolled out, that’s one of the bigger ones is the My Journey platform. And it uses like an intelligent matching system. Things like behavioral desires, assessment and a customized needs assessment. And then we personalized those recommendations for people based upon the life stage that they’re at and the abilities they have. And then we work with state networks and really large workforce networks because those are places where their resources are usually disparate and disconnected. And we kind of help them connect them and help people find those resources a whole lot easier. So my role there is I am kind of a I’m the science end of it. A big part of my role is to make sure that we’re using the best practice science of science in everything we do, so that all of our assessments are validated and that we have good science backing everything up. Keep a good research agenda. So we get we’re able to answer some big questions. And then I collaborate with the product and marketing teams to basically implement my research results as well as like ideas I come up with, with how things we could take scientific pieces and use them differently in the system. And then the other part of my role, which is kind of what we’re talking about today, is I actually have something in my roles and responsibilities that is to advance our thought leadership agenda.

Bill Sherman So and if I understand this correctly, you’ve got people who will use your products who are looking and saying, what is the next step in my career, whether I’m a student or if I’m someone who is looking for a job or trying to transition. And then you have buyers for these products, which might be a stage, a organization, etc.. And so you have a little bit of a disconnect there between the person who’s using the product and the person who’s buying the product. Is that a fair summary there?

Dr. Dan Hawthorne Yeah. Yeah, because we basically like one of the big one of the very first and very big ones we have. Hence, the reason I’m in Denver now is my Colorado journey, which is an entire it’s the entire state system. So if you are in this state and you are looking for a job, whether you’re a high school student, a college student, or just somebody who’s out of work like a lot of people are right now, you can go to that site and it will guide you through a system of finding out what kind of what your next steps are like, what job you might want and where you will find the training to get that job.

Bill Sherman Got it. Got it. So I want to go back to a question or two, something that you said in terms of you, one of your roles is using thought leadership. So how is thought leadership defined at pair and how are you guys looking at it? Because there are many different definitions out there. How are you guys defining it? And then what are you trying to achieve through thought leadership?

Dr. Dan Hawthorne Primarily what we’re trying to do is we are very we’re very like, you know, a set of the social enterprise software company. What that means is we’re really looking to engage in important topics that help people. We’re a for profit company, but we really want to help people more than anything. So we want to use our thought leadership to help people who to get answers that they’re looking for. So I want to take my knowledge and put together pieces that people come away from going. I really know about that topic even more. And in most cases, for me, it’s going to be things like behavioral assessment, personal development, career planning, job focus, things how people can find and better their lives and better understand how those things work so that they feel more confident going to use them. So in general, our thought leadership is kind of based upon that whole idea of doing really good things for people who need that assistance and that knowledge.

Bill Sherman So is your audience for the thought leadership, the people who would take the assessment or the folks who would be deploying it and implementing it?

Dr. Dan Hawthorne It’s a little bit of both. A lot of what I do is give explanations around how people can use that as an end user as well as how people can deploy those things. And the other people who work alongside with me who are doing the same kind of blogs are doing a lot of the same kind of thing and trying to create pieces that will explain how a person’s behaviors translate into actions and what they do throughout their day and as a part of their career.

Bill Sherman Now, earlier on, I mentioned that you’ve got a background not only in workplace assessment but personality, and you’ve talked about behavior here, and I’m sure many of our listeners have experienced some sort of assessment online in terms of personality behavior, whether it’s something they saw on their Facebook feed. Or they took an assessment for work. What is it that you do and what is it that you’re trying to measure there?

Dr. Dan Hawthorne Yeah, there’s a lot of different assessments out.

Bill Sherman Yeah, exactly. So it’s sort of like dial down. So we’re clear on what we’re talking about here.

Dr. Dan Hawthorne So basically I’ve done work in on the personality side of things and this is more behavioral assessment. So basically on the personality side of things, you have a set of traits that are very immutable. They don’t change very much. So generally, if you’ve taken a personality assessment, you probably will take it multiple times in your life and it’ll all almost always come out about the same. Pair looks at behavioral assessment. So we’re looking at more the things that you. Are more associated with how you act most days. So we can actually see change over time for people. Which is very useful in things like professional development. If you’re doing some kind of a coaching program, when you take the assessment in the beginning that can be used to guide what things you might want to work on and what things you might want to change over the course of time. And then after you’ve done some kind of mentoring or coaching program at the end of it, you can take the assessment again and you should see changes in the places you’ve been working on. Got it.

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So now that we’ve calibrated a little bit around what the offering is, let’s talk about some of the work that you’ve been doing with Perrin and the product team in the marketing team. So let’s flashback to January of 2020. What did you think your world was going to be like in terms of thought leadership for 2020? Right?

Dr. Dan Hawthorne Well, honestly, I was I was in the I was in the space of actually moving from New Jersey to Colorado. And there was a lot of things in the in my mind about thinking about what my next what my next year was going to look like. And honestly, it was focused on supporting the platform that we had out there as well as we’ve got another thing we’re working on with a pathway. It’s called Pathways and it’s to develop an algorithm that will allow a person to take the survey, put in their hard skills, give us their resumé and extract all of that information and use that to basically give somebody a guide to, okay, well, if you want to be a software developer, here are your steps to go from where you are right now to a software developer and then beyond. So a lot of what I was planning on writing about was that and I do still plan to do some of that, but yeah, then the world changed.

Bill Sherman Right? Right. So how have you and the team adapted? What are you doing now to get your message out? What have you changed in terms of modalities or methods that you’re using?

Dr. Dan Hawthorne One of the things that I’ve been putting together has been and I started thinking about this about a month ago and we’ve just released the first part of it is a prospective blog or a blog series around what the world looks like after we start going back to whatever normal is. So to give some ideas around, like the very first one kind of talks about the next one that’s actually going to be released. The first ones were an intro into the topic. But the first one really talks about like the world of telecommuting. Virtual work was not that big a deal, you know, like it was kind of picking up little bits and bits and bits before this and it’s exploded. So I’m looking at that as well as like the very next one that I started outlining yesterday was what the world of health care looks like in the future. And then with the world of tech work looks like. So really just taking and giving people some ideas of what the world looks like after, you know, after we stop quarantining, primarily because one of the big challenges with human psychology is human beings hate ambiguity. We start filling in pieces that we don’t necessarily know the answer to with whatever information we can grab. And sometimes that’s accurate information. Sometimes it isn’t accurate information. It’s kind of why people see the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast, because we see a pattern and we start trying to figure out what the other parts of the pattern are. So right now, there’s so much ambiguity that it’s all the pieces of information are kind of scattered all over the place. So one of the things I’ve been trying to do is go out and find those pieces of information out of different blogs and papers, news articles, and pull them together into a cohesive place that starts to make sense for people so they have a better understanding of what their world will look like.

Bill Sherman And I want to build on that because I think this is something that’s very important. So in the world of thought leadership, one of the things that people who are looking for thought leadership is they want a vision of the future. They want to know what is coming and how can I prepare for it. But at the same time, that, like you said, requires a lot of reading, a lot of thinking, etc.. And one of the things I think that you’re good at and that I want to probe with you is that process of translating information. You’ve got a deep background in academic research and statistics and think journal articles that are possibly only barely written in English. Right? They’re more statistical formulas than they are, you know, sentences. Right. You need more.

Dr. Dan Hawthorne Understanding of Greek than English.

Bill Sherman Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So if you’re thinking of someone who’s in the workplace, someone who’s in your target audience, right. How do you go about curating the information that’s out there that’s valuable knowledge and translating it in, making it a way that’s digestible for them?

Dr. Dan Hawthorne Really kind of there’s part of it that goes back to I mean, you mentioned in the beginning about that I came up from the Army. I was not an officer. I was a soldier. I was just, you know, I was driving a truck and doing nuclear, biological, chemical work. And then I worked in a factory and then I started working with and I worked on an assembly line in a factory. And I worked in other different manual labor jobs, really for a large chunk of my life. So the people I talked I have talked to across the broad spectrum of my life have been many different levels of people who might need to take in knowledge. So if I’m talking to somebody I know who is generally an academic, I’m going to use a different set of language. If I’m talking to somebody who’s in a business role and I talk to them in a different set of language, and if I talk to somebody who’s a layperson, who’s on an assembly line, I’m going to talk to them in a different way. And it’s all meant to bring that understanding to them in a way that they get it. Because I also remember being that blue collar employee who I felt like I was pretty smart, but I didn’t really have the right language to understand concepts that are written in Greek characters. So a lot of what I end up doing is picking up on who I’m talking to and then forming that into metaphors that will make sense to them, using experiences that I think will be relatively close to something that they will understand and grasp. So really, it’s a matter of I have to know who my audience is and then speak to them in a language that is most comfortable to them. So really, I feel like a lot of the times in my thought leadership, I work as a way to synthesize information from different areas to another place to make it more understandable for somebody to grasp. So I, I like to take very difficult concepts and turn them into things that people can understand regardless of where they come from and what their knowledge base is.

Bill Sherman So then you go through and you’ve identified, Hey, this is a piece of knowledge that is useful for this audience. Talk to me about how you’re interfacing with your team and product and marketing for getting the message out there. That right. So how are you getting that information to the person who needs it?

Dr. Dan Hawthorne A lot of what I do is I’ve got a couple of different people. Like I have I have people who do my who do my editing for me. So if I write a if I write a blog or anything, I have people who take my blog and will tear it apart for content. And then why would somebody else who will tear it apart and make sure that it all sounds grammatically right? Because I also tried to go down an English major path. That means I tend to like to write in very long sentences instead of, you know, nice compact technical sentences. So consequently, I have some I have those people to be able to take my writing and really keep my voice, but pair it down so that if I write something, I have some people that can look over it and tell me, okay, what you’re saying right here. I don’t get it. This doesn’t make sense to me. Then I can reword it. So I try to even take what I think is the right thing to say and filter it through some other people to make sure whatever comes out the other end that other people are going to read on the web. Or if I’m using a script for a webinar, that it still resonates and makes sense with those people.

Bill Sherman Got it. So how do you and the team at Parent celebrate success in terms of thought, leadership in terms of what do you. What are what are you tracking? You know, there’s KPIs and measurements, but what are your measures for success and how are you celebrating them?

Dr. Dan Hawthorne I know that we’re looking at North Star metrics to follow kind of the data, the currency data side of it, and most of that is on the marketing side. So they tend to look at that. But I think one of the things I would love to talk about, just because it’s very different from most companies, we have a really interesting set of values. The very last one is called Bird Dog Joy.

Bill Sherman That is one of our exploits. Explain that a little bit for me, Dan.

Dr. Dan Hawthorne I had to learn this one too, when I first got here, and I’m still like trying to grasp it. But basically if you think about a bird dog. You know, a hunter gets a bird and the bird, the dog rushes out and grabs it and comes back and brings it back and drops it at the hunter’s feet. And at that point, the dog is just thrilled. So for us, we embrace that by we make sure that we go out and we find the things that are really happy wins and we share them. So we are we make sure that we’re deeply critical about everything we’re doing. And I don’t mean to criticize, but I mean but to really look deeply at everything we’re doing to make sure we’re doing it right. But when we have successes and wins, we share them with one another widely.

Bill Sherman Wonderful. So wonderful.

Dr. Dan Hawthorne That gives you that’s kind of my metrics, is when I win something or when I get something published, I immediately go back and tell the team and there’s lots of cheers and celebrations.

Bill Sherman So, Dan, I think you’re a great example of someone who’s working in-house as the guru for your organization and using thought leadership to help your organization reach its goals. So thank you very much for your time today. This has been wonderful.

Dr. Dan Hawthorne You’re very welcome. I was happy to do it and had a great time.

Bill Sherman Thanks.

Dr. Dan Hawthorne Thank you.

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