Robert Feeney of Ringorang on How to Hire The Right Person

Identify what the prospective employee already does, including how they live their day-to-day lives. Are they caregivers? Do they volunteer regularly during “working hours?” Are they seeking upward mobility in their career or working a side hustle to pay off student loan debt? For my company, because we have significant flexibility in location and schedule of work, this is an easy question to ask. We want to know, so we can work together to make sure work balances with life — not against it.

When a company is looking to grow, the choice of who to hire can sometimes be an almost existential question. The right hire can dramatically grow a company, while the wrong hire can be very harmful to morale and growth. How can you know you are hiring the right person? What are the red flags that should warn you away from hiring someone? In this interview series, we are talking to business leaders who can share insights and stories from their experience about “How To Hire The Right Person”. As a part of this series I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Robert Feeney.

Ringorang’s Chief Vision Officer Robert Feeney spent his early career in entertainment, developing a story format that merged mobile tech with reality TV and sponsorships from game and toy companies. Now known as Ringorang, this software solution combines principles from advertising, modern technology and the learning sciences to deliver habit formation in the workplace. Robert holds six technology patents and recently moved his Silicon Valley-based business to Wichita, Kansas.

Thank you for joining us in this interview series. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’?

I spent my early career in Hollywood entertainment, and it was the loss of both my brothers to suicide that propelled me to Hollywood. I wanted to tell uplifting stories that could help people take on new and better behaviors when they were suffering. I met my business partner, BW Barkley, in Hollywood, and he had invented a way to engage people with storytelling through app-based nudges — and Ringorang, our software, was born. We took the prototype through clinical trials with the U.S. Department of Energy, partnering with national laboratories and millions of dollars in grants. The result was the first software solution that delivered behavior change at scale. Essentially, we developed the world’s first algorithm to change behavior — Ringorang’s underlying infrastructure known as A.S.K. (attitudes, skills and knowledge). Today, we’re in Wichita, Kansas, supporting global enterprises as well as the rapidly growing local tech community.

You’ve had a remarkable career journey. Can you highlight a key decision in your career that helped you get to where you are today?

It’s the decision to honor my word. I have been given advice, expertise and money from so many people — and I’ve failed them all more than once. So the key decision has been to honor my word no matter what. Even if late. Even if my initial plan or promise was garbage. What has made the difference is to actively discover the impacts I’ve had on others from being out of integrity, which is super uncomfortable, and then put integrity in place. We’re all tempted to let failures lie and simply move on — but there’s no power in that. There’s power in completing on that failure, by getting what impacts I had, cleaning it up, leaving no residual resentments lingering, and honor my word.

What’s the most impactful initiative you’ve led that you’re particularly proud of?

I am particularly proud of the grant-based projects we’ve done with the U.S. Department of Energy. I had no idea what I was doing when we started — with zero experience in grant-based work, with the Federal government, and in the energy industry. We were outsiders asked to oversee contractors who were outstandingly more experienced and to manage $3 million in grants, because we had something they needed and no one else had it. During these trials, we redesigned our software product to solve a nationwide issue: reducing energy consumption during peak seasons and times. Ultimately, the proceeds of all the work culminated in peer reviewed papers and Federal reporting that pointed to the groundbreaking advancements in behavioral technology, and what it really takes for a person to develop habits. And this is on a subject that is not very interesting to most people but is significantly impactful to the country — which is reducing energy consumption.

How about a mistake you’ve made and the lesson you took away?

The biggest mistake I’ve made — and I’ve made it more times than I can count — is thinking: If I can do it best, then I should be the one to do it. Whenever I think that, I always prove myself right, but I don’t grow. To run a business successfully, you have to grow. In building a business and a technology that has the kind of impacts that Ringorang has, trying to do things myself, or do things my way, has impeded the growth of my business every time. The opposite is just as true. When I have set aside the idea that I know how to do this best and delegated or partnered with others in a complex process, the result has advanced by business.

How has mentorship played a role in your career, whether receiving mentorship or offering it to others?

I have received great mentorship in my career and my life, and I’m finding myself in a mentorship position, which is a really interesting experience. I did not seek it out, but it is being sought from me.

When I was a teen, I hungered for mentorship. Reading about the Renaissance period with craft masters and their apprentices and having started my career as an artist, I thought: That just sounds brilliant. When I went to Hollywood, I immediately connected with someone who became my mentor for the next 15 years. He was a Hollywood guru — so well-grounded in the principles of great art, great business and living a balanced, spiritual life — and I followed him around like a duckling and absorbed everything I could from him.

During the U.S. Department of Energy trials, I was mentored by a very wise consultant, and — if I hadn’t been — it would not have been possible for me to be successful on that project. He took me through a rigorous five years of mentorship, pulling no punches in developing and shaping me into a business person who could deliver a highly complex program with integrity and effectiveness. Similarly, my time with Landmark Worldwide felt like being trained as an elite athlete, and I emerge from that program with a beautiful and powerful understanding of the coaching relationship. That relationship — where one person is being coached one-on-one by another person who is relentlessly supporting their performance — never feels good while its happening, but it provides extraordinary benefits that you just can’t get any other way.

Now I find myself implementing a coaching culture in my own company, and I’m in a position of being a coach, a mentor, and helping develop other coaches within my organization, so that everyone who works with us can experience those extraordinary benefits.

Developing your leadership style takes time and practice. Who do you model your leadership style after? What are some key character traits you try to emulate?

Mahatma Gandhi empowered a nation against death-defying odds and atrocities without ever lifting a weapon or word of hate. I am nowhere near him on that scale, but his way of clearing a space for people to show up in the way they want to see themselves, without losing themselves in fighting others, was incredibly inspiring. How that looks in the workplace, my arena, is empowering leaders and directors and managers to empower others in the organization, so that all of us emerge with our strengths shining, and with a willingness to address our weaknesses out in the open and with each other.

Thank you for sharing that with us. Let’s change paths a little bit. The pandemic forced many companies to adapt. Implementing remote onboarding and professional development — in addition to maintaining culture — challenged organizations. Can you share with us the challenges you have faced, with remote onboarding and hiring? How have your internal processes evolved as a result?

My company did less changing and more strengthening of its processes because of the pandemic — largely because we started from a fully remote position. Everybody worked in different places. We established a brick-and-mortar location — not a store front, but an office — but we had to have a lot of flexibility from the start. Our people expected it. Our work-from-anywhere position had us looking at “delivery” as a gauge of productivity versus “attendance” in the office from the beginning.

Something we’re addressing as a service provider is the imperative to break old models in the workplace. The processes and systems we’ve taken from school, from the classroom, they don’t work anymore — and for the workplace, I argue that they’ve never worked. Thinking that showing up to an office and sitting in our seats is how work gets done most effectively isn’t always true. Companies like mine that started remotely understand this better, I think, than more entrenched, longer-standing companies that have no memory of work-from-home.

With the Great Resignation/Reconsideration in full swing, many job seekers are reevaluating their priorities in selecting a role and an employer. How do you think this will influence companies’ approaches to hiring, talent management, and continuous learning?

As it happens, my company and our product aims at what I see as the center of this problem. The Great Resignation isn’t happening because of a new generation of people who “just don’t want to work.” At the source of the Great Resignation, in my opinion, is the dramatic disconnect between how companies train and prepare their people and how their people are expected to perform.

For argument’s sake, picture this: A person gets hired. They go through onboarding, which is just a firehose of information about the company’s mission, vision and values, brand guidelines, expectations, policies and rules — and then they’re sent to work. The company, the manager, the employee — they all know the employee is not going to remember all of that information, but the box has been checked. Now the expectation is that the employer has delivered the training and the employee should know it. This scenario — that happens all the time — sets an employee up to fail. When they do find themselves failing or out of compliance or whatever it happens to be, the company can then punish the employee based failing to meet expectations. To survive that dynamic — and it is a survival mindset — employees might cast blame elsewhere or hide their mistakes. Attitudes become entrenched. Siloes are shored up. Management can’t lead because, as they say, their organization is “hard to lead.”

There’s the set up for the Great Resignation. When employees and employers are on opposite sides of the table, each negotiating for their own survival — one of which is in a position of power… you bet the employee is going to reconsider all sorts of possibilities that might make the one-third of their life spent at work more enjoyable and less of a game of survival.

I strongly believe that the ways companies are trying to solve the Great Resignation — by throwing money at the problem and putting more burden on employees who stick around — will just lead to epic levels of burnout, health problems and turnover. Statistics show that burnout is greatly detrimental to the health and wellbeing of a person. People don’t want to work for companies who let them burn.

Super, thank you for sharing all of that. Next, let’s turn to the main focus of our discussion about hiring the right person. As you know, hiring can be very time consuming and difficult. Can you share 5 techniques that you use to identify the talent that would be best suited for the job you want to fill? Please share an example for each idea.

1. Identify what the prospective employee already does, including how they live their day-to-day lives. Are they caregivers? Do they volunteer regularly during “working hours?” Are they seeking upward mobility in their career or working a side hustle to pay off student loan debt? For my company, because we have significant flexibility in location and schedule of work, this is an easy question to ask. We want to know, so we can work together to make sure work balances with life — not against it.
2. Ask how the prospective employee wants to contribute to the success of your organization. Ask them about it before the interview — give them time to think about — and make sure they state it during the interview. If their interest is limited to doing the job as described and as required, you now know their ceiling. That’s as far as they’re interested in going, which won’t be a problem as long as you don’t expect something else from them.
3. Now, as that employee grows with your organization, continue to ask how they want to contribute and allow them to contribute that way. Set aside the temptation to judge people as fixed objects. People change, evolve and grow, and — as an employer — if you offer an empowering environment, this prospective employee might become the most dedicated person you employ.
4. Employers also need to get clear about setting measurable expectations for the role they’re hiring prior to seeking candidates — and then they need to share those expectations during the hiring process. You will waste so much time talking to prospective employees when you fail to communicate salary ranges, schedule expectations, benefits — all of it. Where companies really get in trouble though is failing to share expectations during the hiring process. How can a prospective employee know if they can meet your expectations if they don’t know what they are? How can they answer to them?
5. Try to disqualify a candidate during the interview. If the prospective employee really sees themselves in your organization, they will offer you exceptions to your disqualification criteria that will surprise and delight you. One way to do this is to say: “You do not have X years’ experience in X.” If they have a willingness to grow into the role and can articulate how their strengths can be applied to the role, this person may turn out to be a better fit for your organization than someone with the exact amount of years’ experience.

In contrast, what are a few red flags that should warn you away from hiring someone?

Resistance to adapting is one. Since adaptability is a natural trait, look for where that trait has become inhibited. Not only in the prospective employee, but also in the employer. Look also at how expressing the measurable expectations you’ve created for the role are received and responded to. Red flag behaviors appear as casting blame, defending and positioning — not adapting.

There are questions an employer can ask in an interview that will reveal how a person adapts, such as

1. How do you feel when expectations are not met in your work?
2. What do — or would — you do when you are told you’re not meeting expectations?
3. Share a situation in which you had to deal with a sudden change in expectations and how you handled it.

Because of your role, you are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.

This question just gave me a burst of serotonin because I’m already doing it — and I love talking about it. The movement we are cultivating is transforming learning and training as we traditionally know it — event-based sessions tied to school or work — into an ongoing phenomenon that happens throughout the flow of our day. Learning is available as we need, as its useful to us, and in the way our brains learn. Outside of the workplace, learning and training and achieving whatever we want to achieve in life is also important. What we want to do is enable any person to author their own path in their careers and their lives. What could be possible if such empowerment was made available to everyone all of the time? That’s what I want to see in the world.

This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!