Paula Sáenz López:

Welcome to the LS International Career Success podcast. I’m Paula Sáenz López. And today I am pleased to introduce you to Bruno Lubeigt. Bruno was a global director at Cadbury, now Mondelez when he felt something wasn’t right. After over 10 years of a successful corporate career, he decided to make a radical change and become a certified coach in business and personal development. In this episode, we’ll discuss, how did he know it was time to make this transition and how he came across SuccessFinder, the career assessment tool, the change to his life. Welcome, Bruno. Thanks for joining us today.

Bruno Lubeigt:

Good morning, Paula. My pleasure.

Paula Sáenz López:

Yeah. Excellent. A pleasure. As I said before, you had a very senior role in a successful corporation and you decided to make a radical change and start something new. So I wanted to ask you about that because of course, it was quite a bold move. When did you know it was time? How did you know it was the right decision for you?

Bruno Lubeigt:

Frustration really. Displeasure, I guess. I gradually came to realize that I was really feeling miserable most of the time, doing things I didn’t believe in anymore. Out of habits, when you’re caught in movements, stuck in your initial choices and life programming and things I had chosen and wanted to do when I was a young student had lost their meaning along the way. And I was just feeling I was not myself anymore. And my intuition kept telling me that my career calling was elsewhere, specifically in counseling, helping others.

Bruno Lubeigt:

But the rational parts of me was keeping me in the current reality that of an executive, hell-bent on growth, vertical growth, power, wealth, and et cetera. When I did come across SuccessFinder at one point, just an extraordinary career orientation tool, it actually puts numbers and facts behind my intuition. And I knew then I had the confirmation that I needed to change.

Paula Sáenz López:

Now that you’ve made the change and that you’re happy with your change. What advice would you give to people who maybe are thinking or are in the same position as you were and are thinking of making a change in their career path?

Bruno Lubeigt:

I’d like to say that change is probably the most talked about concept in the professional world nowadays. We’re not in times when change was happening over the course of years, decades, or even centuries, it’s now exponential in scope, in speed. 20 years ago, telephones were still attached to the wall and you had this little toy thing attaching the handsets to the main sets. 10 years ago, sequencing the human genome, people thought it was going to take 13 years and cost a billion dollars to complete. And now, it’s less than $2000 and it takes less than two days to do it.

Bruno Lubeigt:

Really change is happening all the time, accelerating all the time. But real change, especially in human behavior is very hard. I think the keyword here is it’s very hard. There’s two types of change I believe. In psychology, there’s the type one change, called the soft change. And then there’s the type two change, the heart change. And that’s the one that’s really a complicated to go through. If you’re asking me, is it complicated for an individual to change? I want to articulate a bit more specifically why that is.

Bruno Lubeigt:

The soft change is really what we call an [omeo 00:03:42] static change, meaning that it does not change your whole system, it’s more like an internal adjustment, to help overcome the little hardships that you have in your everyday work life. Like the fear of public speaking, for example, it was one of mine. Learning to better manage conflicts is another example. So you can have improvements, they can be significant and then really help you, but they don’t challenge the very foundation of your life. This is what type two change, the heart change does.

Bruno Lubeigt:

This one does modify the whole construct of your life. It’s not about just changing a habit or even a job, it’s about changing your entire life too, your lifestyle, the whole system, the whole thing. Meaning also the life of people who live in this system with you, with whom you have a dependency relationship. That one’s hard because humans are animals of habits. And we tend to resist change. Believing that it’s more comfortable or safer not to change because to change is to face the unknown.

Bruno Lubeigt:

Well, what’s SuccessFinder does is shed a light on the unknown in a very concrete and convincing way so that the unknown becomes now known. It’s like having to enter a room. It’s all dark. You can’t see things. And to navigate into the room without bumping into obstacles and hurting yourself, is difficult. But if you switch on the light, then the obstacles are still there, but now you can see them. So you can navigate to avoid them. You can walk around them and you can live in that new room without hurting yourself. And that’s what’s even better is that you can light many different backrooms and choose which one is the one that you prefer, which one is the one that’s nicest for you to live in? So that’s what SuccessFinder does.

Bruno Lubeigt:

The last thing I want to say on this is research shows that two people in three are not happy with their jobs and professional life. It certainly doesn’t mean that two people in three needs to change, but it certainly hints that there is a necessity to challenge one’s current reality and frustration and consider the changes to live a better life. I did it for myself.

Paula Sáenz López:

Okay. So, yeah. As you mentioned, you did a hard change around nine years ago, you founded, WE MAP, a personal development and career consulting firm. And as you say, you chose SuccessFinder, a career assessment tool as your method. You mentioned that SuccessFinder was quite exceptional. I wanted to ask you about that. Why did you choose this assessment tool and why did you choose it over its competitors?

Bruno Lubeigt:

I experienced quite a few of these tools in the past, and yes, this one was by far the most impressive. There’s many reasons, scientific, technical reasons to why it is such an … I don’t want to get into too many details because I might make a fool of myself. But let me tell you a few things why it is actually the best tool on the market.

Bruno Lubeigt:

The first thing is human behavior is very complex and just measuring 20 or 30 things is not enough to report and predict accurately human behavior. And that’s what most tests measure, less than 30 items. SuccessFinder measures 85 different behaviors and 35 career interests. So that’s 120 measures in all and they’re all statistically non-correlated, they’re all independent.

Bruno Lubeigt:

So if you compute all the different possibilities of profiles, I have like 15 billion different profiles possible with SuccessFinder. So the probability of getting exactly the same scores for two different individuals, exactly the same scores. It’s just close to zero. So in terms of accuracy to use an image is if you had to paint a portrait with 120 colors, obviously what you’re going to paint is a lot more accurate than if you had only 16 colors, for example, to paint the portrait. That’s why having more points of measures and more subtlety and complexity to it is what makes it more accurate.

Bruno Lubeigt:

The second thing is the algorithm, because then now you have all these data that you need to process and to crunch. It’s complicated to do just by hand. So what really changed the name of the game was the advent of the computer age and possibilities of manipulating, processing, crunching huge amounts of data in a very short period of time. The algorithm that runs a SuccessFinder is the same algorithm that runs the weather forecast, for example. Special algorithms that are capable of managing many different complex variables. It’s actually also the same algorithms that are used in the insurance industry, the actuarial data science. The very best statisticians and the mathematicians and psychologists worked together to put this algorithm together. That’s what makes it very powerful.

Bruno Lubeigt:

The third thing that makes this test better is that it was one of the first ones to use the Ipsative methodology to collect information from candidates. Ipsative is a scientific word that simply means forced choices. You have to choose between two statements, the one that describes you best. And this was made to reflect the choices that we have to do every day in our lives. For example, I must choose between marrying Jane or marrying Mary, even though I may be equally attracted to both, I have to choose one. Can’t have both. To choose is to renounce.

Bruno Lubeigt:

If I choose the same thing for an important committing life choice, that’s of a postgraduate studies. If I choose to major in chemistry and minor in psychology, then I cannot major in finance and my minor in marketing. These choices are mutually exclusive and that’s what life is. Life is Ipsative. When you make a choice, you have to renounce something else. SuccessFinder uses preference to discriminate between the options that we have when we make choices to adapt to behaviors in our everyday lives. If I prefer something, then there is obviously something else that I don’t prefer.

Bruno Lubeigt:

So what the test does, is it pairs options. It puts options together that are equally statistically desirable or undesirable. And this avoids the bias of asking the respondents to rate themselves on a 10 point scale. Let me give you an example. If you’re a director in a big corporation and you want a promotion to go even higher and you’re asked to rate yourself on leadership, what do you think the score is likely to be? Probably about seven or eight on the 10 point scale, most certainly.

Bruno Lubeigt:

But if you ask me now to choose between leadership and profit orientation, then between leadership and power, then between leadership and assertion, then I’m going to have to, between things that I equally one would expect want as a talent of a director, and now I must discriminate and I must make choices. So the reality that is going to emerge from those different choices, is a lot closer to the reality of what my hierarchy of preferences is. Ipsative tests are the most difficult assessments to answer because of this. It raises if you want the discrimination level to a much higher level and that’s what’s absolutely necessary when you’re measuring and differentiating between so many variables. I remind you, 85 behaviors, 35 career themes that you can then interface with the huge data job, database of jobs that we have.

Bruno Lubeigt:

So the resulting map of our behavioral preferences and career attractiveness is amazingly accurate. And that’s what helps predict how we’re likely to perform when confronted to certain situations or in certain jobs, which is probably a fourth thing. Sorry, if I have a few minutes more, that makes the SuccessFinder a better test. The fact that interest alone does not predict performance. If you had the same interests as Albert Einstein or Pablo Picasso-

Paula Sáenz López:

Doesn’t mean you’re going to be them.

Bruno Lubeigt:

Exactly. It no way indicates the success level you would experience, if you did become a physicist or an artist. In a similar way, pure behavioral competence in itself is also not the best predictor of performance. It does predict, but not that well. When you put both of them together, interest and competence, when you integrate them together, you get the best prediction of success in a given job. And I think that’s what SuccessFinder does. And it’s, I think the only test that does that is to measure both and integrate them into a predictive score.

Paula Sáenz López:

Yeah. By what you’re saying by these four points, I think that it’s quite clear why the benefits and why an individual should take the test, but regarding a company, why would you recommend them to SuccessFinder and into their hiring processes or when finding the right talent? Why do you think it’s beneficial?

Bruno Lubeigt:

Seriously? How could it not? Sorry, I don’t mean to presume, but it seems to me that the return is immense in many different ways, both in terms of organizational strategy, people development, you hire better fitting candidates, both for the job itself, but also for the culture of your company, you can also hire for a specific lesion of a team of making sure a team works well together. Which internal candidates to promote? You can do bench management where and how to train them, highest potential, you can solve a particular problem or overcome a key hurdle that one particular individual has in his performance, recruitment, bench management, performance improvement, team effectiveness, SuccessFinder can do all of that.

Bruno Lubeigt:

And what I like about it is that it feels to me that it brings the same degree of science and accuracy and rigor to the human resources field of activity that marketing surveys and financial analysis tools are bringing to their respective fields of marketing and finance. And that’s what I like about it. You can really use this tool as an aid to the decision, with the same reassurance of scientific rigor than you would other tools in other areas of the business. So for me, that’s what key, you can really use human resources as a growth strategy and not as an intuition or simply based on previous experience making decisions. I don’t know. It feels obvious to me.

Paula Sáenz López:

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s quite clear. And also you were mentioning leadership development. So I was wondering, when would you say that in a career, in someone else’s career, when would you advise them to take SuccessFinder? Is it more useful at the beginning of a person’s career? Is it more useful when they’re more senior so they can develop certain skills? When would you recommend it’s the best time to do this assessment?

Bruno Lubeigt:

Yeah, you’re right. Which is why it’s beyond leadership development. It’s personal development. Leadership is just one aspect of that. So if you’re at the point in your career, when it’s about developing the leadership, then yes, it will be about leadership development, but really it’s more about personal development and making those big life committing choices that, of course they can be undone. Nothing is ever cast in stone forever, but it’s harder to undo them once the moment has passed and you’ve committed yourself over the long haul.

Bruno Lubeigt:

What are the best moments? Well, postgraduate students making choices, having to choose on what types of studies, because it’s going to inform what career most likely is going to ensue after graduation, after the diploma. So at that point, I think quite nice to have such a tool, both my kids, two kids for that reason.

Bruno Lubeigt:

And the other moments for the individual where it’s important is for people like me who have been spending quite a lot of time in one career and suddenly decide or come to the point where they want to change. They’re not satisfied anymore. And because it is a hard change, you can’t just snap your fingers and make it happen, you might have a lot of responsibilities. It’s nice to have then the reassurance, again, quite a high degree of certainty and accuracy that the choice you’re going to make is going to be fruitful, adequate, and it’s going to make you both successful and happier. So I think for those midlife crisis moments, such a tool really takes a lot of value. It did for me.

Paula Sáenz López:

Sure. Sure. Well, Bruno, thank you so much for sharing your insights on SuccessFinder, and also thank you for sharing your personal story.

Bruno Lubeigt:

My pleasure. Bye-bye to all of you guys. Good luck.

Paula Sáenz López:

It’s been a pleasure having you here. And of course, thank you as well to our listeners and see you in the next edition of the podcast.