Adam Larson: 00:05

Welcome to Count Me In. I'm your host, Adam Larson. Today, I'm thrilled to sit down with doctor Todd Thornock, associate professor at the University of Nebraska Lincoln and academic research fellow at IMA. In our chat, Todd explains why we're people first even in the accounting world built on structure and numbers. He breaks down how personality shapes decision making, reveals the unexpected positives of traits like physiological entitlement, and shares practical strategies for managers looking to get the best out of their teams.

Adam Larson: 00:34

Todd also speaks candidly about how personal experience drives his approach to leadership and why curiosity and servant leadership matter more than ever. Whether you lead a team or just want new ideas for building a better workplace, there's something here for you. Let's get started. Well, Todd, I'm really excited to have you on the podcast today. And the reason I wanted you to come on is is at our conference just, over little over a month ago, you spoke about people power, the art of understanding and motivating your team.

Adam Larson: 01:07

And it's a conversation that comes up a lot, especially when I'm talking with different individuals, talking about cultures, talking about leadership. But you come with a very unique perspective of you have a lot of the research side and the academic thought process behind a lot of these things that that people go through. We're all accountants. You know, we're accounts who are listening to this podcast. But one thing you just said just just just before we started recording, you said we're people first.

Adam Larson: 01:31

And maybe we could just start there. We're people first. And what kind of got you interested in in looking into this topic?

Todd Thornock: 01:37

Well, it's such an interesting thing. I'm gonna step back just a touch because I'm such an accountant. Know? High school, I loved the order of things, and my brother and mom were accountants, and so I thought, I thought, oh, I'm gonna do accounting until I don't like it. I just loved the debits and credits, the order, the structure, the correctness of a lot of parts of accounting.

Todd Thornock: 01:59

But as I got more and more into it, I realized accounting isn't just that. Those are some tools we use. But accounting is more about communication, about people, about having someone on either end. And as I decided to get into research and do my PhD, it was the psychological side of accounting and decision making that started to grab my interest and really pulled me into, you know, the studies that I was going to partake in, and it naturally drew me to these differences in individuals. And we are people first, and my adviser had a had a quote in a discussion that he did, you know, that organizations don't make decisions.

Todd Thornock: 02:40

People do. And that those decisions are gonna be formed by the and, like, I'm slaughtering the quote, but but gonna be formed by the personalities of those people. So that's all of those decisions are informed by who we are as individuals, as people first. And so for me, it's been a very natural progression, but I think I don't think I saw that if I in practice, when I was in public accounting or even if I'd gone to practice, I don't know if I would have made that connection of how important per people and personality is to accounting and decisions that we make within organizations.

Adam Larson: 03:15

And I can just imagine, like, somebody listening to this podcast and saying, wait. What about personalities and the people for decision making? Because when you're hiring somebody or you're looking to build your team, you're always looking at, will this person fit? Do they have the skills that work? But in that making sure that person fits, that's looking at their personality and looking at how they interact with you and how they might interact with the team.

Adam Larson: 03:37

What are some things that people should start keeping in mind when they're thinking about personalities? Because it's when you say the word personality, maybe maybe we can start by what do you mean by that? Because it's like somebody might say personality and say, okay. Well, that that person is is nice to me. That's their personality, but it it means so much more than that.

Todd Thornock: 03:53

Yeah. Personality has, a we have our connotations to them. Usually, you say, oh, that person's a personality, well, then you're like, okay. Well, they're they're they're gonna be very unique or whatever. Well, we're all unique, and we're we have a combination.

Todd Thornock: 04:07

We're formed of a combination of of personal characteristics. We have obviously those immutable characteristics. But really, personality, as defined when we talk about it from a research or very specific side, these are dispositional characteristics of an individual. How do we think and feel? These are usually enduring, stable type traits that don't go any anywhere, and these influence how we perceive situations, maybe how we adapt to things, adapt to challenges, and ultimately how we behave.

Todd Thornock: 04:35

So, you know, I might care a lot about something specific, and that is is driven by a personality characteristic. Now these constitute ourselves, these qualities and characteristics, a combination of them will constitute who we are. We might have one personality characteristic, and we have another one that might help offset certain things. I shared at the talk a month ago at the conference that, you know, I'm I'm relatively high in psychological entitlement. And if I go walk around saying, hey.

Todd Thornock: 05:05

I'm entitled. I mean, it sounds really funny, but when I think about other characteristics that might help offset some of the negative sides of entitlement, maybe. Mhmm. But we're a combination, and so it's really hard to look at somebody and say, I know exactly who they are. But there are certain traits that we can detect that have consistent that interact with the environment in a very consistent manner.

Todd Thornock: 05:27

And so when we're meeting people, we're getting to know them. Yes. I think one of the key things and maybe the question that you were asking was, well, what what can we do? I think being open and curious, being aware is probably one of the biggest ways. Oh, oh, I'm coming into a situation.

Todd Thornock: 05:43

I'm interacting with someone I may or may not know. Let me be a little curious about who this individual is. Let me observe. And I know that's not natural for me. It's something I've had to learn over a lot of time, but that is one of the things to be aware, and differences in people do not create problems, really.

Todd Thornock: 06:00

We talk about fit when we're hiring, but fit comes in a lot of different different manners. Is that fit meaning they're similar to other people on the team, or is that fit meaning they bring a certain skill set that the team actually needs that doesn't currently have? Both of those could be considered fit depending on the goals or what the objective is. And so being aware of that is important. And what I think often we're not very informed, I guess, on the benefits of different personalities.

Todd Thornock: 06:30

I think there might be a natural tendency to get to the negative side of certain personality characteristics that we do observe, because research has shown that we are actually really good observers of personality, especially the outwardly expressed ones. We're very good at it as human beings. But do we know what the the good sides are and the bad? And that was something that's driven some of my researches. I'm like, I know this has got a negative side to it, but what about the positive sides?

Todd Thornock: 06:57

I'm really digging into that.

Adam Larson: 06:59

So it's interesting you say the the positive and negative sides because you you mentioned about, you said entitlement, academic entitlement. Like, you have this you have this psych like, sorry. The wording you use

Todd Thornock: 07:11

Psychological.

Adam Larson: 07:11

Yeah. Psychological entitlement. It's this it's interesting that you say that because when somebody says the word entitlement, somebody thinks that person thinks so highly of themselves. I don't wanna deal with them or, like, you automatically go to the negative side of that. Absolutely.

Adam Larson: 07:24

But there's also positive sides. Right?

Todd Thornock: 07:27

And that yeah. So I'll talk a little bit about entitlement. So entitlement Yeah. I have a friend who does research in this in in personality and did has started way before that. And I was sitting at a conference, listened to this.

Todd Thornock: 07:39

This is right after I had graduated. I'd done a lot of research on performance feedback, something I find really interesting for a number of reasons. And he brought up the fact that, you know, one of the sub traits of narcissism is psychological entitlement and that something he said linked that to feedback, that they might be different in how they receive and respond to performance feedback. And that really struck me as, oh, I'd like to learn a little bit more about that. And so as I dug into psychological entitlement, we often think about the entitled generation.

Todd Thornock: 08:10

It's all about me, me, me. It's the me generation. I think the millennial generation was the first one where entitlement was supposed to be, like, one of those characteristics that seemed to be different than other generations. And as we dug into it, psychological entitlement is is a little bit more common than we think. It's the believing that we deserve more just because of who we are.

Todd Thornock: 08:33

Right? So that could be an entitlement like I it's not the deserving. Like, I did something, therefore, I'm entitled to receive. You know, that's kind of transactional and very understanding. This is more I'm of value.

Todd Thornock: 08:45

I think I should get something because I'm just who I am, and that has both positive and negative sides. But it's when you think you can deserve something regardless of your actions, in a work environment, that can have some really, really critical tensions. So one of our studies, we looked at that side of things where people could self report their performance, and we found individuals that were higher in entitlement unsurprisingly overreported more, and that means that they got paid more, and it wasn't because they were necessarily lying, they just gave themselves the benefit of the doubt when they were evaluating their performance in a way that was a bit selfish, to be honest. And so there's that negative side, for sure, that can manifest in a lot of ways. And we also have seen other things with psychological entitlement, where they don't necessarily have as much respect for their peers.

Todd Thornock: 09:39

They think themselves above their peers. And so our first study we looked at was performance feedback and entitlement. And we found that for feedback provided by a peer that the psychologically entitled, the higher you were in that, the less you responded to that negative feedback. We focused primarily on negative feedback because that's one of the harder things to give is you didn't perform as high as your expectations or the goal or benchmark. Not negative like being mean or anything, just saying, here's the benchmark.

Todd Thornock: 10:09

You performed lower than that. And we found that with the peer feedback provider, the high psychologically entitled responded very poorly to that versus the low psychologically entitled actually responded really well to a peer. The flip side of that was a more authoritative supervisor like feedback provider. That's where the pattern actually flipped entirely. The high psychologically entitled responded way better, worked a lot harder, improved performance more versus the low psychologically entitled.

Todd Thornock: 10:38

And we argued and had some evidence that this had to do with psychologically entitled individuals' views of their peers, that they felt superior to them. And this kind of led to our second study. They cared about how they were viewed in the eyes of superiors, a little bit of ingratiation.

Adam Larson: 10:58

It's interesting. Like, you say you're saying that, you know, where the the psychological entitlement, it's there's that when a peer gives you feedback, you you're not more apt to hear those things. But sometimes the peer is probably the most valuable feedback because they're the one doing the same work or doing similar work to you that they can really give you that feedback. And I I wonder why that is. Why is it that we have and whether your cycle I wonder if we all have a little bit of that psychological entitlement in us because when when when a peer when somebody who's a peer gives you feedback, it depends on the day.

Adam Larson: 11:32

Like, I I just I'm gonna reflect to myself. It depends on the day. If I've had a really rough day and somebody and a peers come to me saying, you did this and, you know, and that's all the how they deliver it, ever all that stuff. But if a peer comes and gives me feedback, on on some days, I'll be like, oh, yeah. Thank you.

Adam Larson: 11:48

This is great. Like, I can really improve upon myself. But then other days, it's like, why are you talking to me? How how do you feel? Like, suddenly, you have this emotion and it all like, so why do you think that is?

Adam Larson: 11:57

Why do you think there's that there's a up and down so much with those?

Todd Thornock: 12:00

Well, that's a really great point. And this is varying a little bit off of my research, but I think from what I've kind of garnered. And that's okay because this is a discussion. I don't need to be an expert to my academic peers. But I've seen a lot.

Todd Thornock: 12:13

And when it comes to how we respond to peer feedback, I think a lot of it depends because it depends on the day, there are so many other factors that come into it. It's not just the source telling us something negative, but it's also, well, what does that mean in the context of how our project is going? Or what about will the manager see? Or, you know, do I have rapport with this one? Have they given me positive feedback in the in the past?

Todd Thornock: 12:37

You know, to balance that out, do I trust the individual? Trust is one of those things, especially for peer feedback, I've noticed is often really important. I get negative feedback regularly. I'm gonna use my like, my wife gives me negative feedback. Hey.

Todd Thornock: 12:53

Here's something that we expect. You're here, and she's very but there's trust. There's a level of trust. And so while it might not be fun to hear it, I also am much more willing to incorporate it to do something different in our family organization. And I would say that that that mirror in there in a in a, you know, a a for profit or even just really in any other kind of organization.

Todd Thornock: 13:15

I don't think profit is the only thing there, but if there's that level of trust with that peer and that trust can be built up in a lot of ways, then I think I think we can get to respond more consistently and better. But, yeah, a lot of factors, Adam. I think that that's a really interesting thing. One thing I failed to mention with the good sides, and this one blew us away when we were doing the second step, And I kind of alluded to it a little bit where high psychologically entitled misreported more and worked less when they could self report, and there was no evidence that they that would ever be seen. We had them, like, filling out mazes.

Todd Thornock: 13:50

So I know this is kinda funny, but we do this in experiment for control. We hired them. We paid them for every maze that they completed. Better put, we paid them for every maze they said they completed correctly. And so we they had to fill out the mazes and then put the number into the computer.

Todd Thornock: 14:07

And there are a lot of work environments where we can't verify performance. We have to rely on some self reports that someone did something. Whether they did it right or not may come to light at some point, and it may not. And so in one of the conditions, there was no evidence that these MACE packets would ever be looked at. And so all we were gonna do is we were gonna pay them based on what they reported and not there's no deception or anything associated with that.

Todd Thornock: 14:31

And that's where we found that initial finding, and that is consistent with the personality. Personality is I deserve more just because of who I am. Therefore, I'm either going to cheat or give myself the benefit of the doubt when it's kind of hazy or, you know, maybe not be as careful when I'm auditing myself. You know, there are a lot of different ways that that can manifest, and we show a little bit of all of it. But the the flip side, and this blew us away, is once we introduced for the other conditions, it's just subtle monitoring.

Todd Thornock: 15:02

We said these packets will be looked at at some point in the future, and there were no markings on the packets to say this is, you know, Joe or Jane's or whatever. They're packets. So there's no, like, interaction there. I mean, these are students, and they kind of knew who we were as professors, but they weren't our students. And so Mhmm.

Todd Thornock: 15:23

Maybe we'd see them in the building or whatever. So there's no real reason for them to care except for this is one of the personality traits, like sub traits within a psychological entitlement. It's called sociotropy. They have a desire to be seen well by others, for others to think well of them. And I think about that and go, oh, yeah.

Todd Thornock: 15:44

I have that probably in spades, maybe a little too much, where I do some things to be seen.

Adam Larson: 15:49

Mhmm.

Todd Thornock: 15:50

But that that motivates me. And so we, you know, predicted that it would just kind of reduce psychological entitlements' desire to get more without the work. Right? And what we ended up finding was it not only reduced it, but their misreporting dropped to extremely low levels below the low psychologically entitled group. They continued to misreport about the same level.

Todd Thornock: 16:12

And remember, that's not just stealing. That's also just being wrong, not auditing yourself very well. But they were extremely careful. Their misreporting dropped, and their actual true performance, how many of these mazes they completed properly went above the low psychological entitle. So not only did it just kind of, like, reduce the bad, it actually magnified a good within that personality trait to respond with greater effort and diligence when there's some level of accountability.

Todd Thornock: 16:43

Now this isn't, like, harsh oversight, and we're very careful because there is research that shows that psychologically entitled actually do buck at authority. You're kind of, like, looking down on them and very but it was just more accountability. You know what? We're gonna be looking at this at some point in the future. There was no penalty attached to it.

Todd Thornock: 17:00

No anything. It was just your work will be visible to other people. And we found that that that not only reduced the bad, but, manifested a really important trait of psychologically entitled that if managers can can access that trait, their performance is gonna be higher in pursuing your goals and objectives of the firm. So I wanna that one one blew us away. The first one was like, oh, that's kind of understandable with feedback and things and stuff, but this one really surprised us.

Todd Thornock: 17:31

We were not expecting that.

Adam Larson: 17:34

Yeah. That it shows the positive side of the psychological entitlement because we all have an element of it. And how can you respond to it as a manager even just, like, just that little bit of of accountability? Because as you said, you know, when somebody had like, when you get to that micromanager level of accountability, a lot of us kinda bucket that because that's a Yeah. It's not it's not a fun environment to be on.

Adam Larson: 17:57

It's not it's not collaborative, and you're you're spending all your time just updating your boss on things and actually getting work done. But that low level accountability because that what I was thinking when you first started talking, I was like, well, are there positive benefits? And then as you were chatting, of course, you kind of kind of show those positive benefits. And it's kind of got me thinking where how how can we how can we help understand the personalities of people who we work with a little bit better? Like, because there's all those, like, there's all those tests, like, personalities tests, but those those are cookie cutter put you in some sort of a box, and and I don't know that those are the best form of of finding that out.

Todd Thornock: 18:35

And, honestly, when people are filling those out, they also know that they're being monitored. And so if I'm in a screening because a lot of firms do do screening personality tests. Right?

Adam Larson: 18:45

Yeah.

Todd Thornock: 18:45

And, you know, how accurate are they if I know that I'm gonna be evaluated and maybe assigned on Teams based on one thing or another, and it can be turned into a game of some sort. That is one way.

Adam Larson: 18:58

Yeah.

Todd Thornock: 18:58

Right? And it's a legitimate way, especially those who are in the market of selling those kind of assessment products are very cognizant of a lot of that. I'm a little more skeptical as an academic, but at the same time, what measure what ways do we have? That's a great question. And so I've done I've done quite a bit of just kinda looking into it.

Todd Thornock: 19:17

So these kind of screening tools are used. There's a lot of them that get at some personality characteristics or others. In the academic world, we have these metrics that can be used. But, again, if they're linked with employment, are people gonna be as honest with that? And so these self reports for personality can have their downsides.

Todd Thornock: 19:36

There's no doubt about it. They are surprisingly robust when you look at broadly, but once you bring it into an organizational environment, then they might not be as accurate. Some of the things that we've thought about because we had to think about this a lot. In our research, we often get, well, how is this applicable? Like, you found this thing in a lab.

Todd Thornock: 19:54

Okay. Great. Well, how is this useful for managers? And so we've been thinking about this since that first paper eight years ago.

Adam Larson: 20:01

Yeah.

Todd Thornock: 20:02

Like, how are we able to figure out personality? I think the step one, we talked a little bit about it offline, this this idea for being curious. Right? We need to be open and aware. Be aware of people is what I said, and that requires a little bit of curiosity, pulling back a bit on judgment, which is hard to do in a very corporate, goal centered, high speed, high pay you know, the fast paced world to kinda step back and go, how can I understand my people?

Todd Thornock: 20:32

Like, what are some ways that I can understand who they are? And that requires a little bit of self reflection. So if you don't wanna understand yourself, why would you wanna understand another individual? And this is something that I've learned over the last five or six years. I start to understand my people, the people I'm around, whether I'm supervising them or working with them or not, understand them better as I come to understand myself better.

Todd Thornock: 20:53

So probably step number one is being curious, kind of at the self level first, withholding some judgment. It doesn't mean that we can't make judgments about behavior, but I think just putting on pause all of our preconceived notions, I would say, of who people are, maybe even putting aside some of our preconceived negative parts of personality traits, and I'll get to that in a little bit. But, you know, we do have an ability, like research has shown that humans are very good at detecting personalities that are very outwardly expressed. Like, the inwardly expressed personality variables, those are a lot harder to get out from just interacting with somebody, but I'm sure anyone anyone listening to this podcast knows that they they can pick out a situation where they've met somebody for the first time, and within, you know, within thirty seconds or less, whether that's through a body language, through some of the words they say, certain personality characteristics start to manifest. Right?

Todd Thornock: 21:54

And so Yeah. Yeah. Those are not inaccurate assessments of personality. And they might not be perfect. I mean, we don't we don't you know, the the first impressions, because that's kind of a first impression thing, those typically are are are more accurate than we give them credit for.

Todd Thornock: 22:10

Although, would say not 100% accurate. So you always gotta be a little bit careful with that, but it is a way that we can start detecting personality and personality traits. And if I get if I ever got a sense that I have an entitled employee, I would be I would try to take the lessons I've learned on that to go, okay. How can I use the lessons I've learned to help get the most out of this employee? There might be some negative sides for it that are not suitable for the job, that, I mean, of course, trying to find the right fit, we'd have to consider that as well.

Todd Thornock: 22:41

So it's something else that so how else do we see these things? So I think we can observe things. This really hit home, and I shared a story. It wasn't planned. But when I was doing the talk at the conference, it clicked to me that it something about my son.

Todd Thornock: 22:55

So there's a quote that I shared. It says, how knoweth a man the master whom he has not served and who is a stranger unto him and is far from the thoughts and intents of his heart. So how do we know an individual that we haven't served? So this really hit home to me about eight years ago. I changed jobs.

Todd Thornock: 23:19

I moved from Iowa State University to University of Nebraska, and we had just bought our dream home in Iowa, and we couldn't sell it right away. So it's about a little over a three hour drive between the two. My oldest son was about to enter high school, and it just made sense for us to find an apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska. And during the week, we'd live together, and he'd go to school, and I'd do my job. And then on the weekend, we'd go back home to the rest of my family.

Todd Thornock: 23:44

So a little bit more backstory. This is my oldest son at the time. He was 15 or so, and I never connected well with my son. I mean, just frankly, I didn't understand him. We actually didn't know this until right about that time, but he was autistic, high functioning autistic.

Todd Thornock: 24:02

We could never figure it out as new parents, why things were a little bit different for our son. And after talking to some professionals, we were able to officially get the diagnosis that made everything click. Now autism is not exactly personality, but any of the listeners know, and any of you guys that know an autistic individual, there are characteristics that are similar across autistic individuals. And, you know, my son is very high functioning. He lives on his own now.

Todd Thornock: 24:28

He's 23. He lives on his own, but he's there are a lot of characteristics of his personality that are there. And and for me and this was really something I needed, I needed that year of just me and him working together, serving together. I made food for him. I made sure he had all of his school appointments done.

Todd Thornock: 24:50

I was the sole provider for my son who I did not understand his personality at all. I mean, knew him as my child, but not some of these deeper characteristics that if I knew then or before then what I know now about autism, how much better of a father could I have been, how could I have done better? And I am not doing that to, you know, beat myself up, but that opportunity to serve him for a year helped me understand my son and be able to help him get the most out of this life that is is very difficult for that for for autistic individuals. And so that connection of serving our people and getting to know them through that service can then help us better be able to get the most out of who they are as individuals. And so, yeah, that that changed my life, and I never would have seen it happen, and it it's a big deal, that we get to know the people by serving them.

Todd Thornock: 25:52

And that's where servant leadership comes in. That's not the point of this podcast, but I think we get to know people as we serve them.

Adam Larson: 25:59

I appreciate you sharing that that that that story because there's there's a lot of elements to that that when you're when you apply it to the workplace, it's it's it's it's hugely important because a lot of times we work with people, so we're side by side with them, but we don't ever actually take the time to get to know them. We don't take the time to understand them in a lot of ways. And I think that's why it's so important to have activities that maybe are not work focused, to have times where you kind of have that personable side. Because unless you have that personal connection, can't really it's hard to build trust with people. It's hard to move beyond just the straight, you know, I'm just doing these things to meet these numbers and to meet our bottom line, and that's it.

Adam Larson: 26:42

But like we said when we first started the podcast, like we said when we first started the podcast, we are we are we're humans first before we become accountants. We're humans first before we become somebody's employee, before we become somebody's boss. And remembering that and being curious seems like it it it seems like it's an important aspect of leadership that is not always taught. Like, you teach it like, if if you learn about servant leadership, you know, you kinda hear about it from that side of things. But when you're looking at typical leadership courses, they don't say, hey.

Adam Larson: 27:11

You know, sit down and get to know your people and serve them a little bit. And and when you say serve them, can you maybe you could talk a little bit more more about what you mean by that.

Todd Thornock: 27:19

I think that's a great point. At the outset, it's something I'm I'm very aware of. When we are in these environments where we have goals that we have to meet and we're trying to achieve the objectives of the organization, those can be I mean, those are the driving force for why we get together.

Adam Larson: 27:35

Yeah.

Todd Thornock: 27:36

And I'm not saying put those aside completely to just get to know people and become friends with everybody because that's not gonna be the case. There are a lot of people that we just won't be friends with, but the point is trying to figure out how who these individuals are, being open to that. Maybe you become friends, maybe you don't, but if you can understand where they're coming from, you'll have a better idea of how to get the most out of them, how to have help them have a better experience, and it's not just trying to use our employees, but trying to get the most out of them in these organizational settings. So when you said the serving, on the serving side, these can come in lots of different ways. I mean, obviously, a parent child serving that service with between a parent and child are very different than employees.

Todd Thornock: 28:25

But I think what you're saying is openness to other people, seeing people for who they are. That could be that is so simple to just ask them a question. Be kind of outside of yourself, and there are a lot of, you know, lot of tips and tricks to how to do this. It comes more naturally to some than others, and and it could just be in the little things. Right?

Todd Thornock: 28:45

Mhmm. You know, you see that somebody needs help with something, and you just go, hey. You know, let's let's help them out. And I service comes in a lot of different ways. I think where it starts is just being mindful of others.

Adam Larson: 28:58

Mhmm.

Todd Thornock: 28:58

Being mindful. Just being outside. I'm often in my own head, and I'm walking and doing my thing, whether it's, you know, in the morning trying to get ready for the day or otherwise, but it's just stopping for a second and being a little outside yourself to go, oh, okay. There are others around me. What can I do?

Todd Thornock: 29:14

And I think there are small things. Some people, that comes very natural. Some, it doesn't. It's not the only way to get to know your people, but it is a very quick way. And so I think servant leaders come in a lot of different ways.

Todd Thornock: 29:26

You gotta get that leadership job done. There are objectives and goals, but along the way, what are are those characteristics that you're demonstrating to get to know others? And I think it's more of a mindset. I would call most of that the serving side a mindset because if you're aware of other people, you are gonna see where their needs are, and it doesn't mean your needs can't be met because that awareness doesn't have to be a 100% of the time. That awareness can be, you know what?

Todd Thornock: 29:53

I'm gonna take a little bit of time to just think about my team and think where I mean, I don't even know how to spend that much, but let me think through each individual. And there have been times where that has been super helpful in organizations I've worked in of just taking time, and let's talk about each individual, not very long, not in gossipy, just what are their needs, what are they doing, what can we do to help? And that might be that that's an awareness that is not a time consuming awareness. That's just being Yeah. Deliberate and intentional about thinking about your people.

Todd Thornock: 30:21

And through that, you'll be able to have those opportunities to serve and get to know them better.

Adam Larson: 30:25

Well, and and if you find if you if you do those activities and you're successful at kind of being aware and being mindful of the people around you and the people you work with, it ultimately will affect your bottom line because people will be more helpful. They'll be more satisfied in their job. They'll be more excited and more engaged because they're connecting with folks, and they have the proper motivation. Because that's the hardest thing is getting that proper motivation because there's so many aspects of our jobs and our lives that are happening that affect how we do our daily job. And so making it an easier transition for people because we have a lot of things that we deal with outside of work.

Adam Larson: 31:03

And when you come to work, there's more things you have to deal with, and you and and so being able to balance all those things in a proper way allows us to be better employees, it seems.

Todd Thornock: 31:12

Yeah. I I you know, at the outset of this of understanding and motivating your people, the point is every organization has strategies and goals that need to be achieved. If it's a for profit entity, that I mean, that's making the shareholders happy. Right? That's that's making the sale.

Todd Thornock: 31:27

It's doing all of those things that are really important. And if it's a not for profit entity, there's still constituents that need the services or whatever's being provided. So whatever organization you're a part of, there are goals that need to be achieved, and those need to be achieved through effort, coordination, all of these things that we do because no organization is, I mean by organization, depends on how you define it, but it's gonna be made up of more than one person. So then you have different values and objectives and goals that need to be brought in unison. As management accountants, we're particularly good at helping develop control systems, tools, and other things that help bring those incentives, align those values close enough together to be able to get the job done.

Todd Thornock: 32:11

And so, yeah, that drives a lot of what we're doing. But then once we're in that space, what more can we do to amplify that motivation, to achieve those objectives? How can we achieve more together? And it's often maybe taking a step and thinking about these personality that what each of us bring to the table as unique individuals, who are a complex combination of personalities together, and we're trying to come together to meet a greater purpose. It's actually a really beautiful thing when you step back, but it comes with a ton of work.

Todd Thornock: 32:43

It really does. And maybe the first step that is, in my observation, the hardest is just that awareness of other people, just taking that little bit of time to be curious and aware, not that much. And for me who that's not natural, I actually schedule it in. So I actually take time to go, this is my structure. I need to stop and think about this in my family organization, at church, at my my coauthors, in my students, you know, those things.

Todd Thornock: 33:08

I take time to stop and think about that, but I I often have to book it because I'm too busy working on the other things that need to be done.

Adam Larson: 33:15

Yeah. I like that. Well, Todd, this has been an amazing conversation. I really appreciate you coming and sharing with the with our audience today, and it's just it's just been it's been wonderful. And I will definitely gotta have you back as you do more research and we have more chats.

Todd Thornock: 33:28

Anytime. I I mean, this just scratches the surface of a lot of things that we're interested in. And as a researcher, I'm always interested in what people are seeing. What notes are out there, what are they seeing? I asked questions of the group a month ago at the conference and got some really interesting insights about other things.

Todd Thornock: 33:44

I I feel quite blessed that I can you know, I teach my students, but my ability to go and just spend time thinking about this, I mean, it's a privileged position I get to be in to do research and to think about this, and I feel a strong obligation to be able to turn around and talk about it, to go, okay. What does this mean for the real world, for people who are having to live and and make decisions in the real life where I I get to kinda hang out in my my little privileged seclusion, call it the the ivory Tower a little bit, but I don't like it up there by myself too long. I like talking about it. So anytime you want me there to talk about these things, I I really appreciate it. And any of the listeners, if they have any questions, is there a way that I mean, I they can always look look me up, reach reach out to me directly if they have any thoughts.

Adam Larson: 34:26

Yep. Check the link in the in the podcast notes. You can connect with Todd on on LinkedIn or anywhere else.

Todd Thornock: 34:31

Because I I love talking and continuing this conversation with anyone who's really interested in what we found and how to apply it. I mean, I would love to help. So thanks, Adam. Appreciate it.

Announcer: 34:42

This has been Count Me In, IMA's podcast providing you with the latest perspectives of thought leaders from the accounting and finance profession. If you like what you heard and you'd like to be counted in for more relevant accounting and finance education, visit IMA's website at www.imanet.org.