Wrong Fit, Right Fit: Discover Your Perfect Fit In The Workplace With Andre Martin

by Patrick Veroneau

Companies are looking for star employees, and employees are looking for a place to thrive, and that is the crisis of commitment we tend to see today. And that struggle to find the right fit is difficult, but don’t worry because this episode offers a solution for you. Today, Andre Martin, the Author of Wrong Fit, Right Fit: Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever, shares his insights on how organizations and employees can find the right fit. It is important to note that strong compatibility is important for mutual success between employers and employees. Andre takes the standpoint of employers and employees and shares what each can do to find the right fit. Now is the time to find the right compatibility. So, let’s join Andre Martin as he flips deeper into Wrong Fit, Right Fit in this episode.

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In this episode, I'm going to be interviewing Andre Martin. If you are either looking for a job or maybe you're an employer that is trying to identify who's the right fit and who's the wrong fit, this is a great book for you, which is what we're going to be talking about Andre’s book that was published is called Wrong Fit, Right Fit: Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever. Truly, it does matter more than ever. I mentioned in the interview that I wish this book had been around many years ago in terms of some of the mistakes that I made again. Whether you're an employee or an employer, this book has much value in terms of helping you work through what are the things that are going to make you successful in hiring or successful in your career at the company that you're with. Let's get into it.

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Andre, I want to thank you for being on the show. I appreciated the opportunity to read your book first. I said to you before we started this that I wish I had this book many years ago because many of the things in terms of you were speaking to, I was thinking, “These were challenges that I was having an organization that I was with.” Maybe if I had the exercises or ability to process some of these things in the way that you draw them out and the exercises, I probably could have made some better decisions in terms of how I navigated my career.

It was very much the reason I wrote the book. I did these 110-plus interviews with talent from CEOs all the way down to the next generation entering the workforce. They shared the exact same sentiment you did, which was, “Finding a place where you fit is hard. It's nuanced.” There's not just one best place to work. It depends on whether or not the company you're going to fits who you are, how you work, what you value, and what you're solving for. It was fun to hear those stories pick up those best practices and a lot of people say, “If only I would have known this back then, I’d be able to pass on a lot of those best practices.”

We'll talk about Wrong Fit, Right Fit: Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever. We hear a lot of things that are changing. It's interesting. There's an evolutionary lag in terms of how organizations have dealt with many of the changes that are happening. There's not a full appreciation for what this is going to look like. There is that lag that we're dealing with and that's why I thought your book is timely as it relates to that.

I appreciate that. You started the podcast in 2018 before COVID. It wasn't the cause of all these changes, but it was a tremendous accelerator, from the individual standpoint a lot of people are looking for more meaning, they're looking for more flexibility in their lives, all the way through to the way organizations had to work. I was at Google at the time. We had to go from being mostly face-to-face five days a week to having no one in an office. If we can continue to mind those lessons and appreciate that it's easy to get through a crisis, it's hard to hang on to the innovation that we did to get through it. That's where we are now. We are looking for companies and employees to say, “How do we hang on to a lot of what we learned and just not take our foot off the gas now that we're through the crisis?”

I spent a lot of my work working with organizations and it was interesting having some of the conversations where, all of a sudden, people were talking about, “How do we get people to come back into the office two days a week?” People are like, “Two days a week? How am I going to come back to where they had been five days a week?” A few years before, it never even was a thought that you didn't come in every day. Now we're like, “How do we do two?”

We're still at the beginning of this because a couple of things are still in our frame of reference as we design work. The first one is no one's gotten over COVID. I’m reading this great book on burnout now that reframes this concept and it talks about burnout not as having too much in your day that it overwhelms you, but about the idea that the reason we are feeling burnout is because we're not getting to go all the way through the stress cycle.

The reason we are feeling burnout today is that we're not getting to go all the way through the stress cycle.

That is we have all these things that are happening to us, these traumas big and small. We push through them and we don't get all the way through, and because of that, they just keep compounding. Eventually, what was a life that was familiar or maybe even better than it was before feels hard to be successful. That's one thing we're seeing. A second one is that people are becoming much more discerning about what they expect out of the place that they go to work, and they should be because we're going to spend 13.5 years of our adult life every second, every minute, and every day at work. It's second only to sleep.

My whole point of the book is to be more choiceful. When you have the chance to choose, don't rush it. Don't run from something. Don't mistake what is essentially comfort for boredom. Do some deep-looking because one of the things that came through the interviews was I think people spend more time thinking about the toaster they're going to buy for their kitchen and they do the company they're getting ready to join.

We're going to hop around then because job hopping, to me, falls into this. We talked about that previously to start in the interview that you're seeing this. I do think that it's an important thing to discuss. I will tell you, I can look at myself as somebody that I feel like I was a job hopper. In the industry that I was in, the biotech Industry, if I look back on why I was job hopping, to me, it goes back to values. I was trying to find this place that fit. I was hoping the next place would be it and I would be there for a little bit and realize that this didn't feel right either, but it was almost like running away from something rather than running towards something which, to me, speaks to not doing enough leg work upfront of, “What is this going to look like?”

You put that probably more eloquently than I could. One of the things that does happen to people is they often run from something and they're no smarter and no more filled with intention than they were before. There is one of the big things in the book you brought up. We have these eight excursions in the book that are meant to say, “If you complete those excursions at depth, the one thing I can promise you is that when you go into an interview process, you're going to have your eyes wide open and you're going to be able to see so much more than you see if you're running hoping to get the next gig, a bigger title, and more pay in some other place.”

I wish I had that same tool and maybe it's a reason I wrote the book. I made some of those missteps too. Upon reflection, it's because I didn't first of all have any way to do that deep reflection. Secondly, I didn't take the time before I started looking for jobs. The minute you open that first job ad, you're in a giant marketing machine. It's built to entice you to go. We have to understand that there are some real costs and real concerns about job hopping or transitioning out of the company that you're at.

Speaking of that, what have you found? What are some of the costs? We hear a lot about the employer costs in terms of 1.5 or 2 times somebody's salary to replace that person, but I thought you had an interesting comment in terms of saying that there's a cost to the employee in terms of job hopping. We don't normally think about that or at least I didn't.

We don't. I will start with this. One of the myths around work is that your creative energy sometimes gets blocked. The truth is your creative energy is always flowing. You've always got your creative energy flowing. It's a matter of what it's flowing to. If you're in a bad situation, your creative energy is flowing to negative stories. It's flowing to narratives that allow you to cope that make the day okay. It's flowing to anything you can do to not fall over in a big fetal position crumple a ball and keep going with your day. That's where your creative energy is going.

Learning from Leaders: Because Leaders are Learners | Andre Martin | Workplace Fit

Workplace Fit: You always got your creative energy flowing. It's just a matter of what it's flowing to.

Your creative energy when you job hop or transition is important. When you move companies, three things happen to everybody. The first one is you set your network back to zero. The second one is you set your reputational capital back to zero because nobody knows you. The third thing is you have to learn an entirely new work system, a new work language, and a new way of doing things. For about the first twelve months, most of your creative energy is going to the transition. It's going to the job hopping.

The cost of that is threefold. One is your creator energy isn't flowing towards your craft. You're not getting better at what you're here in the world to do. You're getting better at the transition. The second thing that happens is it puts you in a place where you end up going back to very basics in terms of the work that you take on because when we're under stress and when our creative energy is flowing somewhere else, we do what's easiest because we're working with fumes. The third part of this is the more you move, the more that compounds. If you're moving every year, all you're doing is transitioning. You're getting good at it, but you've lost a lot of pace against those other people in your field who have stayed put and gained depth of expertise.

You spend a lot of time building your brand and rebuilding your brand. To me, it's interesting looking at many of the surveys that had come out, especially right after the Great Resignation where they interviewed people who had left six months prior and were finding that almost half of them were regretting that they made a shift, which speaks to this.

A lot of us made a lot of bad decisions during COVID because the world had opened up. Here's the deal. The things that tend to happen when we are not a right fit or when we're in a period of change or transformation in our company or disruption is we get our head up. Because of social media, it looks like everybody has a way better life than we do. We got tricked a little bit because you could go on social media and say, “I got this great title. I got this big paycheck. I got this.” Everyone's thinking, “Why not me? Am I missing some big movement?” Those things start to gain pace.

The second thing that I saw happen, which was interesting is we got seduced by bright and shiny things that have nothing to do with long-term job satisfaction. Pay above a certain level doesn't matter to your job satisfaction. The title doesn't matter your job at satisfaction. We left the things that do, how we work, how we collaborate, solve problems, give feedback, develop, who are manager is, and what team we're working on.

We got enticed and bought something that wasn't going to sustain us. The last thing that was clear at this time is that when people were interviewing they weren't doing deep work. The company wasn't looking hard at, “Who I'm bringing in?” The people weren't asking difficult questions about, “What is this going to feel like on a random Thursday morning in December?” They got there and everyone was like, “I don't think I like you that much.”

The employers were like, “I don't think I like you that much,” and then we're all stuck. It was an interesting time. Probably, the part of why the book was born is because you saw all these people struggling with the choices they made. It's interesting. There was a job bite piece of research that said 1 in 3 new joiners leave within 90 days citing the number one reason as a mismatch of expectations. What they were sold coming in didn't match what they got once they got there.

Workplace Fit: One in three new joiners leave within 90 days, citing the number one reason as a mismatch of expectations. What they were sold coming in didn't match with what they got once they got there.

Along those lines, I think onboarding has become something that is so much more important now from the standpoint of onboarding before somebody even comes on board as part of the interviewing process that was onboarding from that perspective so that when people show up, what you were told and what you were receiving is the same thing for both sides.

We do a disservice to people. I talked to a lot of CHROs and I asked them like, “I read the stat that 40% of managers flat out lied during a recruiting process either in the job description, in the interview itself, or the paycheck.” Why are we doing this? It's not malicious, but why do we feel like we can't tell the truth? A lot of them say because we're afraid people won't comment. They know what it's like to work your day-to-day.

The thing I would say to everybody is there's a partner for everybody in the world. There's absolutely a company for everybody too. It always boggles my mind. I'm like, “Why create this big unrealistic aspiration view of your company? Why not just tell people what it's going to be like because they're going to find out once they take the job anyway? They're going to find out and it doesn't pay off because you end up eroding their engagement from literally day one.”

As I was reading part in there, I was trying to take a look toward the end of the book. It speaks to this. An interesting question if I brought somebody on board would be, “How is what they thought they were going to be doing aligned with what they're doing or what they expected to do?” We start to get some understanding early on, “Is there a mismatch here?”

I'll even go a step further. There was this interesting company and I can't remember who was. Literally, everybody who went to their website to apply for a job, they had them take a conjoint survey. Imagine you're applying for a job. You hit the career page and it says, “Would you rather have Fridays off or 20% less on your insurance? Would you rather have more unlimited vacation or a higher year-end bonus?” They did all this research.

What was brilliant, and I'm surprised more companies don't do this, is they were essentially finding out what anybody looking for a job is looking for. I'm like, “What a great way to build a company.” Imagine how smart we would be around, “If you're out there looking, come take this survey, and then we can build you the thing that's going to make you happy or at least keep you satisfied, highly engaged, and committed to this company over the long term.”

I think about this from the employer standpoint. You hear all the monetary issues of someone leaving. The thing we don't talk about is if you stay 2, 5, or 10 years, the compounding interest you get is phenomenal. The longer someone's in the company, the more value the company gets from them, and frankly the better the person gets at their job that they're trying to do. I think there are all kinds of reasons to do onboarding all the way through.

If you're an employee reading this or someone looking for a job, the other thing I'd say is to realize that the interview process is going to tell you everything you need to know about the company. The interview process is the company. Here's the instance. You probably all had this. Imagine you are interviewing for a company and it takes you six months to get all the way through the process. I can bet 9 times out of 10 that decision-making in that company is super slow. You can watch how the company does interviewing and it'll tell you a lot about how the company is going to do work.

You talk about a fit assessment, which I think is important. That was pretty involved. As I read through those, I thought, “That to me could be a good tool to use for an employee of conversations with who they report to in terms of, ‘These are the ways I like to be recognized. These are the ways that I operate best, so now we get a better understanding of how I operate.’”

I took a lot of time with that assessment because a large part of the book says, “The one thing we don't talk enough about, either as an employer or as an employee is how we work, how we set strategy, how we collaborate, how we solve problems, and how we socialize ideas,” I want to talk about that one in a minute, “How do we collaborate, kick-off team meetings, develop, give feedback, and socialize? What's our relationship with time? How do we recognize people?”

All those things are what make up our connection to work, yet often companies don't know. Most companies, I talk to them like, “Tell me how you do these things.” “I don't know. We just do.” Most employees don't think about how they prefer to get work done. Socializing ideas is one of the easiest ones to talk about. I've been to these big brands. I can tell you that Nike works a lot differently than Google, and works a lot differently than Target or Mars.

When you socialize ideas, sometimes there are companies that, to get an idea across the line, you have to build a beautiful brand deck. It has to have awesome photos, poetry, and storytelling. That may work and you may love that, and then there's another company that's like, “All we care about is data. You have to write a 24-page research report to get an idea overline.” There are places like Amazon that use the two-page memo, “We want full sentences. We don't want any pictures and we don't want you to blather on for 26 slides,” but we never think about, “How do I, at my best, like to socialize ideas.” I was at one of those companies that did beautiful brand decks. I can tell you I like making it, but I don't love it. Over time, it takes my energy, erodes my engagement, and makes me feel less connected to the company because I'm having to work harder than I naturally would if I were socializing ideas the way I'm built to.

This goes back to Work Done by Marcus Buckingham. Years ago, when I first broke all the rules, one of the questions that I still remember him asking was, “On the best day of work, what were you doing?” To me, that fits that like building these presentations or a better idea because I'm going to be miserable if I like doing the real flashy decks, and I'm now in a position where it's just the data.

One of the things, if we are thinking about practical tips for people, is when you're interviewing and you have that last five minutes to ask a question, don't serve up a softball. Don't serve up the, “Why do you like to work?” their question. Ask a question that gets it that says, “In the next six months, tell me the three projects that are going to be sitting on my plate,” because a large part of your connection to work is going to be the work you do every day.

A large part of your connection to work will be the work you do every day.

When you take a job as, let's say, head of marketing. your job description is 45 bullet points. The truth is your job is only probably two of those. If you get clear about what those first projects are going to be, you're either going to accelerate and see your commitment go up because you're doing something you love, you're good at, and something that's in your wheelhouse, or you're going to get projects that don't feel meaningful. It's going to chip away at you day after day. It’s important to find out what those first projects are before you accept the job.

You talk about these eight excursions. The first one was value. I mentioned this in the beginning. When I was reflecting back, I was reading that. It was even interesting that some of the assessments that we did at different organizations, and I spent most of my time in the biotech industry, would come back as when we would do exercises around values, that family was an important value of mine. I found that oftentimes, I was in situations or when things went in the wrong direction, it was because that value I felt was being compromised, or I was being asked to compromise that value and it didn't sit well, and ended up leaving.

This exercise was born out of this question of, “Is what we say we value actually what matters to us in big decisions?” You're getting at something that fundamentally I saw interviewee after interviewee trip over, which is if someone asked you what you value, you're going to give him the greatest hits. If you're like me, I'll say, “I value innovation, creativity, collaboration, and teamwork.” Truth be told, if my wife walked in here and you asked her, “In our last three big decisions, moving to a city, buying a house, and taking a job, what do I value?” she would say three things universally, no questions. She'll say like, “Family matter is a great deal.” The other two are financial security and stability. I laugh now because I'm like, “Every decision I've ever made has been those three values.” The exercises are meant to separate what you would say to somebody if they ask you the question from what is grounding you as you make the big decisions in your life.

I'll go on excursion four. You talked about company craft or cause. I thought about that a lot, and I thought for my family to be that important, I definitely went to the cause and craft. It wasn't about the company. I believe in going out on my own to feel as though I was going to have full control over the value of a family.

This is my favorite excursion of all of them. In career conversations I have with anybody, this is probably the one universal question I ask and have spent a lot of time on because this excursion helps you answer the question of how you build a great career for yourself. I'll give you a couple of examples. If you're a company, these are the people who are literally obsessed with the brand that they work at. They love the product. All the sneakerheads I used to work with at Nike, they're a company. They can't imagine not being surrounded by sneakers and the swoosh every single day.

They will be there for twenty years. Here's the trick. Most of them don't know that's what's driving their career. Because of that, they don't necessarily make the choices of jobs that help them be most successful at the company. If you're a company, the one thing you have to do is build the biggest possible network you can and get exposure to as many parts of the company as possible because then, you're invaluable. Most people think, “No, I'm going to stay in HR my whole life in Nike.”

That's not going to do it for you. At some point, you're going to run out of runway and you're going to be less valuable because you're too narrow. If you're of craft, it's a different pursuit. If you're of craft, you are saying to the world, “I want to be an expert in this very narrow field. I'm going to go deep in this one area.” If you think about your career’s craft, I'm a craft person. No doubt, maybe cause now after the book, I've been a craft person for a lot of years. The one certainty in anyone who's chasing craft is you can't stay at one company because for me to be great in the culture and talent space, I had to beat Google, Nike, Target, or Mars. I had to see as many systems as I could in order to pick up all the ways that this thing could be done and it served me well.

It’s interesting. If you're a cause, the only thing you're chasing is the injustice or problem that you are obsessed with solving. A lot of entrepreneurs come to their ideas because of cause. If you're of cause, two things have to happen. One, you have to go where the energy is. If you're living in the middle of Missouri in the Ozark Mountains where I grew up and your cause is the erosion of beaches in California, you're not going to be able to stay in the Ozark Mountains, you're going to have to go or you have to be around the people who are doing the best most cutting-edge work around that problem so you can help solve it. The point of that long story is that often, we make short-term job decisions without referencing the actual type of career we're building. It can change over time, but one of those three things is always primary.

I had never seen it that way. As I was reading each of those definitions, I started out saying this is craft, but it was cause, and going back to thinking about organizations that I had worked in, I saw poor leadership behaviors and an opportunity that was missed in terms of how to leverage talent in an organization. That was the cause for me. There's a better way to do this.

That's exactly right. You put it very well stated.

In those eight excursions, there are exercises in each of them that go deep in terms of figuring out. It's like a book and a workbook in one. The last one that rang true to me as well was, “What is your talent story?” I've got a quote on the wall over here that does the Cherokee birth blessing. It says, “May you live long enough to know why you were born.” As I read that, I thought of it. To me, it's like when you get to that point of what's your story and what you want to tell.

I love the quote. Be that excursion was a late ad to the book as I was testing out that work, but that's what it is. One of the things people were starving for was, “How do I bring all this stuff together?” Giving them a framework to create a narrative that then was useful enough to become a bio, the front end of your LinkedIn, and the top of your resume, but most importantly, it becomes the lens that you use as you're looking at different jobs, careers, and companies.

By having that, it becomes this litmus test. Do all the digging but don't leave your brain to make that decision because we have faulty wiring. The minute you get interested in wanting to make a decision, confirmation bias narrows all the information down so you'll only pay attention to things that are aligned with the decision you want to make. This story becomes your litmus test in saying, “Is this the right thing for me? Does this click my boxes in terms of what I'm trying to build?” Often, you're going to be sitting in a place where you're going to say no, and that's okay.

As I was working through this workbook, as I was reading through these, it validated me in terms of the course that I've been on. If I had this opportunity to do this at that point, it would have driven me right to where I am now. There's some confirmation bias there. I'm not sure about it. I'm going to go with that. The pieces came together in terms of why I probably made the decisions that I made.

You bring up the most beautiful part of this book. It's good for people who are on a job search. It’s helpful to understand a little bit more about how to do it. It's equally as important to those people who are situated. It might be in the right fit and doing exactly what they're supposed to do because you won't have FOMO. You get your head up and go looking for a job that you don't need because you've got everything sitting in front of you. You're a little bit jaded or maybe less clear about it because of the monotony.

One of the other things that came through the book was when you're searching for a job or a new company, what gets us? We love to be valued and seen. Somebody wants us and that feels good. That's dopamine. That's the excitement part of your brain. When you're in a committed relationship, whether it's with a company or somebody else, it's a different neurotransmitter. It's oxytocin. It's this warm hug of comfort that we often can mistake for boredom.

Those excursions for someone who's in the right fit are going to keep you in your seat. This is clear advice everybody gives, “You should always pick up the phone and talk to a headhunter when they call because you can confirm that you're in the right place.” I'm like, “That's a terrible idea because it's going to play to your dopamine.” “There's this great brand and title. Look at the paycheck,” and you're going to get sucked into that process. It is better that every quarter, sit with those excursions, either read the work you've done or do them again and go, “I'm in the right place for me, my values, and for the life I'm trying to build.”

I'm wondering if that was some of me, that dopamine, the quick moves. There were a couple of quotes that I thought were interesting. One, “Start as you intend to continue.” It was a quote in there in terms of helping people understand how you show up. We spoke about that. As I read that, that one resonated with me, this idea of, “Show up with who you are and who you want to stay. Be true to yourself.” Get away from this, “I can't be who I want to be.” That one stood out to me.

This one came into play in two places. In the interview process, I realized that that's basically like a big first date. When we show up in our best clothes with our rehearsed answers with our shiny resumes, ask yourself if you're presenting who you are because part of getting a job is you got to choose the company. The other part is they have to want you. If you're not showing who you are and you're not starting as you intend to continue, there's no way that they're going to make the right choice by you.

There's no way that they will make the right choice by you if you're not showing who you are and not starting as you intend to continue.

The second place is onboarding. When you get into the company, our immediate inclination is to start assimilating. We start becoming whoever everyone else is. We start to work our way in the company. The more you do that, the more you're trying to fit in instead of assessing for fit. One of the things I tell people is, “If you're the person that wants to be home every night for dinner at 5:00, in your first three weeks, don't stay late at work.”

If you're the person who doesn't like to go to happy hour, doesn't like to drink, or doesn't like that environment, don't go to the happy hours because the minute you do, that's who you become in this brand new company. Remember, your reputational network is set to zero. Nobody knows you. Every move you make tells someone about who you are. Start as you intend to continue. Be who you're going to be, otherwise, you're going to get trapped by trying to be something you're not. That takes a ton of energy. It's like riding with your non-dominant hand every day. It's hard.

You think of the resentment that starts to be built in, especially if it's at somebody like, “I stayed late to get this done.” All of a sudden, this becomes you train people how to treat you.

This sidebar is funny, but I always get this question from leadership teams, “How do we get people to take a break over the weekends? We're going to set a no-email policy.” I'm like, “Great, go ahead and do that, then the minute one of you sends an email, that policy is out the window.” The only thing you have to do as a leadership team is if none of you send an email or respond to an email over the weekend, in about three weeks, no one is going to send them any longer. We create those habits, not policy. It's not some mysterious company doing it. We all create our culture. It's the aggregation of all of our behaviors.

It doesn't matter what you write in your policy books. It's your behavior. That is your culture, whether you like it or not. You teed up this next one because this was one of the questions in terms of the investigation. How does your company view rest and recovery? It was one of the questions. It's interesting. What stood out to me, too, is that I read an article on Patagonia. Patagonia shut down for the week between Christmas and New Year for that exact reason. They’re like, “We're going to walk the talk. Everybody gets a paid week off because we feel our people need this time for rest and recovery.”

It matters. There are a lot of companies out there that give you unlimited vacation, but you're not taking any of it. There are a lot of companies that say, “Your family matters,” but you probably won't be home for dinner most days. You have to ask some of those questions. One of my favorite questions to ask is, “Walk me through a day in your calendar. Tell me everything that's on your calendar tomorrow.” It tells you a lot about a company. If there are back-to-back meetings, they don't care about recovery at all because, frankly, humans are terrible at context-shifting. We're awful at moving from one thing to another very quickly. If you're back to back, it's a race of time and you can guarantee that downstream somewhere. You're not going to have that recovery if that's something you need.

I'm trying to look at some of the quotes I had written down. The last one here, where do people go when they leave this role? I thought was a great question.

It matters. There are a lot of teams that if you go there, you might be spending your whole career there or a lot of people go straight out. This is a question I often ask the other stakeholders who aren't on the team to get a sense of what people do. There's an unsung hero. I want to credit a counterpart of mine, the Center for Creative Leadership. She quoted this idea of star makers. These are the managers that don't progress up through the company but everybody works for them. You want to look at your manager and say, “Am I getting one of those star makers? Do people come to this team and then go up and do many other things in the company?” If so, you can probably bank on the fact you're working for a good manager. That's going to give you opportunities to grow. This one matters. It's one of those things we don't talk enough about.

It was interesting. I used to do some volunteer work in terms of helping people interview. Years ago, one of the questions that I would pose to them for the position is to ask if it was a newly created position or if it was one that was vacated as an opportunity to see, “Is this a company that promotes from the inside?” so you can find out that if it's somebody that moved somewhere else in the organization or left, it gives you clues in terms of, “What's next? Where can this go?” and some other questions you can ask off of that.

I love that. That's a great one. No doubt. I’ll add that to the list.

I appreciate this. Your book is timely. There are many pearls that reaffirmed for me many years later that I feel like I've made the right decision in terms of where I am, but it was a great process to go through. I would highly recommend not only the exercises but also the research that validates a lot of the concepts that you talk about. It is all there which are all things that, to me, I find so important, and what data backs this up.

I appreciate that. That was a labor of love. It was a year of my life. I'm so much smarter. This is the thing I would tell anyone. Even if you never published, write a book because you get so smart in a very small amount of time. I've loved thinking about it, talking about it, and wanting it. My cause is I want to be able to be in a place where they can show their brilliance because there are amazing people out there who aren't doing all the great things I know they could do it.

We can get the book from Amazon. Any other places that you'd like people to try and reach out to you?

You can reach out to me and Linkedin. @DocMartinPDX is my handle there. You can go to my website www.WrongFitRightFit.com. I run a weekly newsletter called Monday Matters. It's MondayMatters.Substack.com. The purpose of the newsletter is with your first cup of coffee on Monday morning to give you some practical tips to make the week a little better.

I appreciated this. I’m wishing you all the best and I'm sure it will be a huge success.

You, too. Happy New Year. Thanks for doing the show.

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About Andre Martin

A growth-oriented talent management executive with 20+ years of experience in talent development, executive team development, , strategy development, employee engagement, organization development, culture change, c-suite assessment & succession planning, innovation/design thinking, and employee experience design. And, a father, a husband, and a wildly curious learner who is dedicated to ensuring iconic brands become iconic companies.

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