Mikey Trafton: Finding Your Super Powers

Super powers are the unique abilities we have used all our lives to excel where others have struggled.

The more we use our super powers, the more energized we feel and the better the results we achieve. Conversely, when we are deprived of using our super powers, we feel drained and miserable. But most of us don’t know what our super powers actually are. In this talk, three-time BoS speaker Mikey Trafton shares his recipe for identifying your own super powers and organizing your company to maximize the opportunities to use them.

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Transcript

Mikey Trafton: Thanks for cleaning up the stage of your cutlery mark.

Mark Littlewood: No problem.

Mikey Trafton: Thanks everybody. Before we get started, please like and subscribe. It really helps out my channel here today.

So my name is Mikey Trafton, and I’m super excited to be here at Business of Software. This is my favorite conference to attend. I’m really honored that you would have me back. I have presented, this is my fourth year to talk here, and usually I talk about how to build a company that is a great place to work, and how to build a company where other people will enjoy working. But today I want to talk about YOU. And I want to talk about how to build a company where you want to work, because I don’t think this gets talked about enough.

You know, I think most people who start companies, they start them because they think that having their own company is going to make them happier. It certainly was the case for me. You know, when I started my first company, I thought all I needed to do was to be in charge, then I could make all the rules, then I wouldn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do, and that would make me happy. And boy, I got a big slap in the face. You know, while all I really succeeded in doing was creating a company where nobody wanted to work, and about six months in, all my employees, they quit on me. I had to kind of reboot the company. And so when I restarted, I spent a lot more energy on trying to make the company a good place for other people to work, so that wouldn’t happen to me again.

And so in thinking about how to make your company a place where other people are happy, you can’t lose sight of your own happiness, because as a founder or an executive in a company, I mean running a freaking company is hard, right? I mean it, sometimes it just downright sucks, and it can make you miserable. So I think that what I want to do today is teach you a little bit about how to be happy at work.

And I want to tell you this story about when I was a little kid, not a little kid, a high school kid in my hometown of Alvin, Texas, more cows than people in Alvin. And when I was 17, I was in high school, I had a job at this pizza place. And I had three different jobs there – I was a cook, I was a waiter and I was a delivery driver. Now, as a cook, of course, my job was to make the pizza, and this was a very mechanized job, right? When we made the pizza, we had to follow a very strict recipe, and we didn’t like roll the dough out by hand, like you see in the movies. We took the dough, we put it in this machine called a dough sheeter, and it rolled the dough out to the exact perfect thickness every time. And when we put the sauce on the pizza, we used a custom ladle where the volume of the ladle was exactly the amount of sauce required to put on the pizza. So you couldn’t make a mistake. And when we weighed out the cheese, we had to weigh it out on a little kitchen scale. That’s how we made sure we put the right cheese amount on the pizza. Even the oven was foolproof, because it was a conveyor belt, and so you just put the pizza on one end of the conveyor belt, you ignore it, and it moves slowly through the oven and comes out the other side cooked.

And I have to tell you, I hated this job so much.

Yeah, it was just way, way too regimented for me. There was no variety. I probably made 20,000 large pepperoni pizzas as a cook there. I mean, I wish somebody would order something different, but they never did. I had no feedback loop. I never heard whether the pizzas were tasty or not, and I was, like, highly supervised. The manager literally stood in the kitchen, kind of watching us everything we did. So this job was absolutely awful for me. I hated it.

So eventually, I convinced the manager to let me take a turn and try my hand at being a Waiter. Waiter was a way better job for me. It was less mechanized. I mean, I still had a whole bunch of steps I had to follow. You know, you had to greet the customer and take their order and wait on their table and check on them and things like that. But how I did each of those steps that was more up to me. So if I wanted to greet the customer with humor, I could. If I wanted to be more formal, I could. I got to decide how often I checked in on the table. If I thought they were good tippers, I might check on them more often, and I got a really nice feedback loop, right? Because I could see the smiles on the customer’s faces, and of course, I got a cash tip if I did a good job. So I had a really good feedback loop. So this job was better than being the cook.

But the absolute best job that I had growing up was as a delivery driver, delivering pizzas in Alvin, Texas. And the way this job worked is I would walk into the kitchen and there was a warming shelf, and sitting on that shelf would be a bunch of pizza boxes, and there’d be little tickets sticking out of the pizza box that said the address of where the pizza needed to be delivered. And in my little town, about half the people grew up or lived in town kind of relatively close to the pizza shop, and the other half lived out on some country road, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. So there was this competition between the delivery drivers to all try and take the orders that needed to be delivered in town, because I could deliver three or four pizzas in town, and therefore get three or four tips in the amount of time that it took me to deliver one pizza out in the country. So all the delivery drivers are like fighting over stealing the best orders for themselves and trying not to get caught.

And of course, this was 1987. This was back before the time of Google Maps and smartphones and GPS. So if you didn’t recognize the address, we had a giant map on the wall, this giant map of the city, and you could go over there, you could find your address of where you needed to deliver the pizza, and you could plot your route, because we would take two or three orders at a time, and we would try to figure out the most efficient route to take.

And here, 17 years old, and I was making a lot of decisions for myself about this job, I basically decided what orders I was going to take. You know, what route I was going to plot and take, what order I was going to drop the pizzas off. And most importantly, I got to decide what radio station I was going to listen to when I was driving around in my 1980 Chevy love pickup truck, black with orange stripes and an aftermarket car stereo that I installed myself after picking it out in the venerable Crutchfield catalog. And so this job was my dream job. I loved this job. All I wanted to do was drive around town as a 17 year old listening to music, and here I was getting paid to do it. Plus I had almost complete autonomy. I wasn’t supervised at all, and I had an amazing feedback loop, because the faster I delivered my pizzas, the more money I made, the bigger tips I made. So this job really was great, and one of the best things was I got to listen to as much classic rock as I wanted, which back then we just called rock, by the way.

So this moral of the story that you might be taking away is that a mechanized job is a crappy job, and a job with a lot of autonomy is a great job, but that’s not always the case. That was the case for me, but there were lots of people who hated being a delivery driver. Some people didn’t like being stuck in a car by themselves for the whole shift, and they performed better when they were surrounded by people, or they didn’t like plotting the route because they might get lost or take too long, whereas I kind of found the route to be a puzzle, and the better I saw the puzzle, the more money I made. And on the flip side, there were people who loved being the cook, the job I hated so much. There were people who loved that job. In fact, we had these two brothers who worked at our who were cooks in our pizza shop, and they lived in the next town over. And I asked them one time, why do you always drive into our town to work here when there’s a pizza shop in your own town that you could work in? And one of them told me, Well, Mikey, see the kitchen here, it’s got this big plate glass window that looks out on kind of the main street in Alvin, which we called the drag. And on Friday and Saturday night, people would drive up and down, slowly showing off their cars, just go to the end of the street, turn around to drive back. And these guys were car nuts, and they liked looking out the window and watching the cars go by, because this is what passed for entertainment in 1987 in my hometown.

So the moral of the story is not that mechanized jobs are bad jobs. It’s that some jobs that are great for you are going to be awful for someone else, and vice versa. And so my goal here today is to teach you a little bit more about yourself, so that you can avoid the parts of your job that are that make you miserable, and you can lean into the parts of the job that you love.

The four types of skills

And so to do that, I want to kind of give you a little framework to think about. And I learned this framework from this guy, Dan Sullivan. Dan owns a company called Strategic Coach. It’s like a worldwide entrepreneurial coaching company, and he was my coach 15-20 years ago. And a lot of what I’m going to talk about today is based on stuff I learned from Dan all those years ago. And what Dan taught me was that there are four types of skills that we use in our everyday lives.

There are skills at which we are incompetent, right? So for me dunking a basketball or trying to convince my wife to do something she doesn’t want to do, these are things at which I am incompetent.

Then there are things at which we are merely competent. With these skills, you’re average, you’re not awful, you’re not great, kind of middle of the road, you’re merely competent.

But then there are your excellent skills, the skills at which you are pretty freaking good. And you actually know you’re pretty freaking good at these, because people come up to you all the time and they tell you how good you are, and you worked hard to get good at these. You put in the hours you practiced, you sacrificed most of the promotions that we’ve all received in our lives probably came because of how good we are at our excellent skills.

But then there’s the fourth kind of skill, which I call your superpowers, and your superpowers are just like your excellent skills, except when somebody comes up and tells you how good you are, you kind of downplay it. You say, Well, I didn’t try very hard at that, and it doesn’t feel like something that you should be proud of.

Another thing about your superpowers is that after a day of using your excellent skills, you’re going to be wiped out. You’re gonna be exhausted. You need to recharge your batteries. After a day of using your superpowers, you’re full of energy. In fact, that day probably just zoomed by. Also, your superpowers are things that you tend to bring everywhere with you. They’re almost like a habit. Your you use your superpowers at work, you use them at home, you use them with your friends, you use them at church. You’re using them all the time. Your excellent skills may be those are just work skills or just in one part of your life. And my contention is that because using your superpowers give you energy, using your superpowers makes you happy, the more you can use your superpowers, the happier you are going to be. So point of my talk here is to make you happier at work. The way we’re going to do that is we’re going to help you figure out how to use your superpowers more.

Tools to find your superpowers

So if you’d asked me, Mikey, 20 years ago, you know, What were your superpowers? I probably would have said I don’t have any. I certainly didn’t feel like I had any. I mean, I knew I was kind of smart, but there are tons of people who are way smarter than me, and my guess is that there are a lot of people in this room that are kind of in the same boat. You may have a general idea of what you’re good at, but you probably can’t articulate it with specificity. And you probably have, you almost certainly have not, like designed your whole life around this. So we got to figure out, you know, what are my superpowers before we can use them. And the way we’re going to do this is, I’m going to give you four tools for helping you to figure out what your superpowers are.

Clifton Strengths

And the first tool is easy. It’s an online test, and this test is called the Clifton Strengths. This used to be called the Strengths Finder, but I think apparently, Clifton wasn’t getting enough credit, so they changed the name of it. And this test is 50 bucks. But if you buy this book, the book comes with a code in the back of the book, and you can take the test for free with the code. The book only costs 20 bucks.

So that’s what you should do. You should buy this book, get your 20 bucks, buy the book, take the test, and what you’re going to get out of the test is you’re going to get your top five strengths out of a list of 30 or 40 strengths that the that they’ve identified like exist in all of humanity. They’re going to tell you what your top five strengths are after you take this test, and it’s going to look like this.

These are my top five strengths that I got when I took this test 18 years ago. And if we zoom in to say the first one Maximizer, you get a pretty beefy paragraph that describes just what the heck this strength is. And when I read this, I felt like: wow, this is, this is really accurate. I mean, it says right here that I am fascinated by strengths, which obviously I am standing on stage talking to you about them. So it nailed that. And but more than being accurate, this test, I felt was, like really insightful, because another thing it told me was that I have a passion for taking something good and making it great, but I don’t have any energy for taking something mediocre and making it good. And I got to tell you, that is so absolutely true about me, but I never would have been able to articulate it myself, and if I had figured it out, I probably would have thought it was a weakness.

But here I took this test. It’s called the strengths finder. This test is telling me the computer is telling me this is a strength. So that made me think about it a little more deeply, and what I realized was, you know what, I do my best work on projects where the client has really high expectations and where they need like a custom solution to solve a really hard problem, and I’m really good in that setting. But if the client just needs, like a cookie cutter off the shelf solution, I’m actually detrimental to that project, because I will add a bunch of bells and whistles to the solution, and I’m going to blow the budget out of the water. So when I figured this out, I just started assigning different people. If the client needed a cookie cutter project, I signed a different team. I wouldn’t work on those projects. And then years later, when kind of the market shifted, and my whole company started doing way more custom projects because clients didn’t want to. I mean, they we started doing way more cookie cutter projects, off the shelf projects, because clients couldn’t afford custom well, then I realized I’m not even the right person to run the company anymore. So I turned the company over to my team. I let them run it, and I went and started, started with startups that didn’t work out.

But I never would have had the courage, heck, I never would have been able to diagnose the problem if I hadn’t spent 20 bucks on the book and taken this online test all those years before. So this is a super, super, great way to get started trying to understand what your strengths are. So get your 20 bucks, buy the book, take the test, get your scores, and then set them aside, because we’re going to come back to them later.

Your guiding question

And that brings us to the second test, or, sorry, the second tool in our toolbox, and that tool is what I call Your Guiding Question.

And your guiding question is the question that you ask yourself whenever you in a new situation and you’re trying to figure things out, right? And so it’s like your inner monolog and your guiding question. It could start with a who or a what or a how or a when or a why. So let’s imagine that you, your guiding question is a who question, a question that starts with who.

So you are in a new situation, you are probably asking, who’s in charge, right? Who’s influencing, who? Who do I need to get to know better? Who’s going to be my allies? Who do I need to avoid? You are very people oriented if your guiding question is a who question. You probably make a good relationship salesperson, right?

What if your guiding question starts with a what? So you’re probably more thing oriented. The questions that you’re asking are: what is this? What feature should I add to this product? What does the competition have that I don’t have? You’re probably a product manager or maybe a mechanic or a technician or something like that.

If your guiding question is a how question? Then you are probably like a solution architect or a strategist, something like that. You’re asking questions like, How does this thing work? How do I accomplish this goal? How do I overcome this obstacle?

If your guiding question is a when then you love yourself a schedule, man. When people love themselves a schedule and these are your project managers, right? They don’t have any clue what we’re building. They have no clue how it works, but gosh darn it, they need to know when it’s going to be done.

Then there are the why people. The why people are your philosophers. I just have to assume. They’re miserable all day. They’re wondering why the universe isn’t giving them what they want. So I don’t have any advice for why people.

So Mikey, what’s the point of all this? Well, the point is that your guiding question is something that you’re asking yourself all the time in all situations. It’s the first thing that you have to figure out if you’re going to understand the situation, and you should try to align the job that you’re doing to the question that you have. You should, we shouldn’t be sending like a when person to a networking event to go generate a bunch of leads and come back with a handful of business cards. We should send a who person to do that. This is why a lot of technology companies have a two person sales team, right? They have a who person, sales guy who schmoozes the customer, and they have a what person, sales engineer who actually knows what the freaking product does, right? And they got to go together to accomplish the goal.

So how do we figure out what our guiding question is? Well, you should probably be able just to eliminate a few of these options just because they don’t fit. Like for me, I know I am not a who person. I know I am not a when person. I’m actually a how person. My guiding question is, how do I do it? And I’m always thinking about, what is the goal of this situation. How do I accomplish it?

So once you’ve eliminated the options that don’t fit, then to figure out what option does fit, just you got to pay attention to yourself when you’re in a new situation. So good news is, at this conference, you’re going to be in a lot of new situations, right? You’re going to meet a lot of new people. You’re going to hear a lot of new concepts. And so all you have to do is really just pay attention to yourself, to either your internal monoize, monolog, if you’re an introvert and you’re not talking to people, or your external monolog, if you actually communicate with humans. And so when you meet somebody, and you here at this conference. If you ask them questions like: Hey, tell me about your journey in software, how did you get where you are now? Do you have a business partner? What are they like? How does your spouse feel about the fact that you’re away from the house for three days? Well, then you’re a who person. But if you ask questions like, tell me about your product, what industry is it in? What’s your pricing strategy? Who’s the competition? What makes it special? Then you’re a what person. If you’re chasing the speakers down after we get off stage and you have 10 clarifying questions about their talk, you’re probably a how person. If you’re just miserable, crying in your beer all day, then you’re a why person. I can’t help you, so just pay attention over the next few days, as you are encountering new situations, figure out what your guiding question is, and then set it aside and we’re going to come back to it later.

Kolbe index

And that brings us to the third tool in our toolbox, and we are software conference after also it’s another online test, and this test is called the Kolbe index, and the Kolbe index is super freaking awesome, especially at helping teams figure out how to work together. This test is 50 bucks, and when you take the test, it’s going to help you understand how you take action when you are striving to achieve something. That’s the purpose of the Kolbe index. It’s not an IQ test, it’s not a personality test. It’s how do you take action test and what the way the Kolbe index works is that it gives you a one to nine score against four different dimensions.

So the first dimension is called Fact Finder, and Fact Finder has to do with how much information you need in order to take action. So someone who scores high on Fact Finder, they need a lot of information to take action. Someone who scores low on Fact Finder, they just need the bottom line. Don’t give me a lot of information. I can’t handle it.

The second dimension is called Follow Through. This has to do with how much structure you need if you’re going to take action. So someone who scores high on a follow through, they like to follow a process. They like to have structure. Someone who is low on follow through, they are more adaptable. They are comfortable winging it.

Then there is quick start. Quick Start has to do with risk and how comfortable you are with risk. Someone who’s high in Quickstart, they can handle a lot of risk. They probably start a lot of things, but those things don’t all work out so they don’t finish them all. Somebody who is low in Quickstart, they don’t like risk. They like to minimize, mitigate, manage the risk. They like to finish one thing before they move on to the next.

And then the last one is called implementer. And implementer has to do with how we kind of interact with the physical universe. So somebody who scores a high score on implementer, they like to touch and feel things, to figure them out. They like to use their hands. Someone who is low on implementer, they like more abstract concepts, and they like to figure things out in their head.

So you take your 50 bucks, you buy the test, you’re going to get scores, and the scores are going to look like this. These are my scores from when I took this test 18 years ago. And you’ll see here that I’m a high Fact Finder. So I like a lot of information. I need a lot of information in order to take action. I’m a low follow through. I’m adaptable. I like to wing it. I’m a high quick start. I start a lot of things. I don’t finish them all. I’m comfortable with risk, and I’m a low implementer, which means I’m comfortable with abstract concepts, which, by the way, software being such an abstract field, most people I’ve found in software are low implementer. High implementer careers would be things like being a surgeon or a carpenter or something where you use your hands.

So this test is pretty great understanding yourself a little bit better, particularly in a work environment, because taking action, that’s what we do at work. So what it’s really amazing at is helping you figure out how to take action with your team, with your coworkers. And so if I were to put the scores up of one of my colleagues, Lisa, you would see that she is almost the opposite on two of these dimensions. So she is a high follow through, which means she likes a lot of structure and process, and I’m low follow through, I don’t like that. And she is a low, quick start, which means she does not like risk. And I’m high quick start. I’m very comfortable with risk, so you can imagine that if Lisa and I were trying to get something accomplished together, we’d probably have some tension, because she’s going to want to follow a process, and I’m just going to want to wing it. But because we took the test and we have a vocabulary to talk about it. We figured out how to work together. And so imagine being in a meeting and they’re handing out action items, and somebody assigns an action item to me, Lisa’s going to say: Hey, don’t you dare give that action item to Mikey. He is low follow through, that is never going to get done. Give it to me. I have a high follow through. I’ll get it done. And on the flip side, imagine a client calls and says: Hey, I want to have a meeting tomorrow. Well, Lisa is immediately in panic mode, right? Because that sounds risky. What did we do wrong? Are they going to fire us? Did we mess something up? She’s freaking out. Plus, she has a process that she follows to prepare for a meeting. She doesn’t have time to follow that process, so she’s fully panicked, but she’ll just come to me and say: Hey, Mikey, would you mind running this meeting tomorrow? Because she knows I’m very comfortable winging it and the risk doesn’t bother me. I’ll handle it.

So that’s the magic of the Kolbe index. These dimensions are complementary. Like, you need someone on your team who is high Fact Finder, because their skill is in justifying they’re going to do a bunch of research and make sure you don’t make a bad decision. But you also need someone on your team who is low Fact Finder, who’s going to push you to make a decision and move on and keep you from landing in analysis paralysis. So all of these dimensions are complementary, and they really this test really helps you organize your team, figure out how your team works together. It’s absolutely wonderful. I think it’s the most impactful thing that I’ve done in my whole business for getting the teams to work together. So take your 50 bucks, buy the test, get your scores, and then set them aside, and we’re going to come back to them later.

Asking for help

So now that leads us to our fourth tool in the toolbox for figuring out what our superpowers are. This one doesn’t cost any money, but it does make you have to put yourself out there a little bit, because what we’re going to do is we’re going to ask for some help, and we’re going to ask for some insight, and we’re going to ask it from our friends, our colleagues, our friends, our family. And basically what we’re going to do is we’re going to send them an email and we’re going to ask them what they think our strengths are, and what do they think our superpowers are. And you might say: okay, Mikey, that might be pushing it a little too far. I’m not comfortable with that, but I guarantee the people that you ask to do this, they’re actually going to be appreciative. They’re going to feel honored that you’ve asked them to participate in this, and they’re going to appreciate the opportunity to give you this feedback.

So what you’re going to do is you’re going to find eight to 10 people that know you really well, people you admire, people you trust for sure, and give them a call, talk to them before you send an email, give them a heads up. This is what’s going on, and then send them an email. This is the email that I sent 18 years ago. Take a picture of it. Change it however you like. And basically what we’re doing here is we’re saying: hey friend, what do you think my strengths are? You know, that could be my talents, my abilities, what you think I’m good at, what you count on me for, you know, anything that impresses you or that you admire about me. And then you’re going to start to get responses back, and the responses are going to be a hodgepodge, right? You’re going to get some that’s just a couple of sentences, and some that are like copious paragraphs, and you’ll get a bulleted list or two. The format doesn’t matter. We’re going to change the format later. But I got to tell you, when you start getting these responses, it’s going to feel good. It’s going to feel great, because we never get this kind of feedback. Right? When was the last time you got focused, thoughtful, positive feedback from people that you trust and admire, and you definitely didn’t get eight to 10 different versions of that all at the same time. So you should just revel in it, right? I mean, you get this great feedback tells you what your strengths are for the next few days. Just revisit it several times, really internalize it.

And then what I want you to do is I want you to summarize it, so go through each response and pull out like a single word or a short phrase that kind of captures the point that they’re trying to make. And when you do that, it’s going to look like this. This is the actual feedback that I got 18 years ago, when I sent this email off to people and I sent, I think, 10 different emails, I got like nine responses. I just put six on the screen here to demonstrate the concept. But what you’ll see, if you look at it, is that there are some key themes that just jump off the page, like these are all the people who gave me comments that said I had a strength in solving problems, and these are all the people who said something about how I communicate my ideas and some of the themes that you, that you find here, they’re totally going to surprise you, like this. This is all the people who said that they count on me for my confidence, and I’m like, my confidence. I don’t have any confidence. I was like, I couldn’t believe it. So it really made me stop and think, and it really laid made me kind of lean into being more confident around my team, because they were telling me they count on me for it. So this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to go through and you’re going to pull out all the themes. These are anything where you know more than one person kind of said the same thing, and stick those on another piece of paper. So these are all my themes, and then the number of people who kind of commented on each one.

And then now all those things we learned about ourselves that we set aside, let’s bring those back into the picture. So you bring in your strengths from the strengths finder. You bring in your Kolbe index results, you bring in your guiding question, and now you have everything that you need to synthesize your superpowers, because everything on this page is a strength, but not everything is a superpower.

So let’s just remind ourselves what is a superpower again? Okay? Superpower is something that other people tell us, we’re really great at it. We tend to downplay it. It gives us It comes naturally. It gives us a lot of energy when we use it, and it’s kind of a habit that we always do, right?

So now let’s go back to those themes, and let’s evaluate one of them against this criteria to see if it fits right. So let’s pick the first theme, solving problems and evaluate it against the criteria of a superpower. So people, I had six people out of nine tell me that I was great at solving problems. So I’m going to give myself a check mark on: Do People tell me I’m great at this. What about me? Do I tend to downplay it? Nah, I don’t, I gotta agree with these people. I am freaking good at solving problems. So that’s, that’s an X on that. What about: does it come naturally? Well, this one, this one is tricky for me, because I feel like sometimes problem solving comes naturally, and sometimes I really struggle. And I feel the same way about getting energy, like sometimes I’m super energized if I’m in a problem solving session, and sometimes I’m completely worn out. So I don’t know what to do here. What about the last one? Is it a habit that I always do? Do I always solve the problem? No, of course not. I’m awful. I’d probably have a 50% success rate maybe at solving hard problems. So I look at all of this and that tells me, nope, I am not. This is not one of my superpowers, solving problems, not a superpower. Doesn’t meet the criteria, but it does make me think a little bit, because it feels like it’s like half a superpower. I mean, I get energy half the time. It comes naturally half the time.

So it made me think a little deeper. And I went back and I looked at my raw feedback that I got from my super friends and one of my employees. He didn’t say I was good at solving problems. What he said is, I have a deep understanding of problems, and I’m like: ooh, that feels right to me, because I got that high Fact Finder right. And my high Fact Finder almost compels me to do a bunch of research on the problem. And I’ve got a low follow through, which means when I encounter something new, I don’t need a roadmap. I’m adaptable. I can wing it, and I’ve got a low implementer. I’m very comfortable with abstract problems, so I don’t have to touch and feel it to understand it. What about my guiding question? My guiding question is, how I’m always trying to figure out, how does this thing work? How do I accomplish it? I’ve got one of my strengths was ideation. This strength means I have a fascination for new ideas. Well, new problems are full of new ideas. I love new problems.

And one of my other themes that came out from my Super Friends was that I have a big attention to detail, a strength and attention to detail, and I think that allows me to find the little nuances, the details in a problem that are the really tricky things that make it super hard to solve. What about energy? Do I get energy from understanding a problem? Well, I do some coaching and mentoring of startups, and I’ll spend hours with them, understanding their how their business works, where they’re struggling, what are their challenges? I’ll wear them out. You know, they’re ready to go home. I’m ready to keep talking. I get a ton of energy from this. So it’s not that I always solve the problem, it’s that I always try to understand the problem and to understand it deeply, and that, I got to tell you that really rings true for me, and it turns out that is one of my superpowers.

Figuring out what your superpowers are

So if you’re asking yourself: How do I figure out what my superpowers are? Well, there’s your answer, right? You’ve got to take your themes that your super friends gave you and analyze them against the criteria for a superpower, figure out what all the other things you know about yourself, how that supports it or doesn’t support it. And I think when you’re done, at the end of the day, you will have maybe two or three of those strengths that you can legitimately call one of your superpowers where you’ve decided where it gives you energy when you use it, and it’s like a habit that you always bring to every situation.

Activating your superpowers

And so now you know what your superpowers are, you might be asking, Well, how do we activate these superpowers? Well, you don’t; they come naturally. You don’t have to activate your superpowers. In fact, you couldn’t turn off your superpowers if you tried. They are so natural to you. In fact, you shouldn’t be thinking about activating your superpowers. What you should be thinking about is, how do I put myself in more situations where I can use these powers, or the opportunity to use my powers is greater. So for me, for example, I started going on more sales calls, because once I knew that understanding the problem was my superpower, I realized that even though all the parts of the sales process that require a lot of follow through. I’m totally incompetent at that one meeting where I’m meeting the client and we’re finding out what are their goals, what are their challenges, what’s the problem they’re trying to solve? I’m great in that freaking meeting, because that’s my superpower, and the more that you are, once you’re able to articulate what your superpowers are, these opportunities to use them, they’re going to get greater and greater. And so I want you to lean into those opportunities, right? Because the more you use your superpowers. Is, the more energy you get, the more energy you get, the happier you’re going to be. And after all, that’s why we started our companies in the first place. Thanks everybody for listening. I really appreciate the opportunity to share my ideas with you today and have a good rest of the conference.

Q&A

Mark Littlewood: Thank you very much. Mikey, hang around because I’m sure we’ll have questions. Do we have mics? Great. So the way that we work with microphones to try and keep questions coming thick and fast. So if you have questions, stick your hand up, and once I’ve seen you, I will make sure that there’s a microphone. We’ll get to you as quickly as possible. So we’ll start with Thomas over there.

Audience member: So I wonder, what were the things which you found did not help you figure out your superpowers that you thought would, and specifically, what do you think about, for example, the Myers Briggs test.

Mikey Trafton: Yeah, so I don’t know if everyone heard that question, but I think the Myers Briggs test is great. I think I’ve heard some psychologists say that it’s one of the only tests that actually sort of accurately predicts your your personality. What I find is the Kolbe index is better for understanding how you take action. But I’m a sucker for a freaking online personality test. I got to tell you, I’ll figure out what you know, housewife I am on Buzzfeed or whatever. So I definitely like the Myers, Briggs. I know what you know. I’m an ENTJ, and so the more you can know about yourself, I think the better at helping you figure out your superpowers.

Mark Littlewood: Ricardo.

Audience member: Hello, Mikey, how do you apply this to your company and your team.

Mikey Trafton: If you are, you know, getting started, you got to take care of yourself, figure out what your superpowers are, and particularly if you’re the owner or the, you know, founder, or you’re in some position of authority, then you can just impose your will like me when I’m like, I’m going to assign these projects to these other people because I’m crappy at that. Not everybody in the company has that, you know, luxury, right? So the higher you are in the organization, the more you can tailor your job, you know, to using your superpowers.

One of the cool things that I’ve discovered is that you don’t have to do the whole job like me. I didn’t take over the whole sales function. I just we added a step in our sales process, which is which we called the discovery meeting, and after the sales guy had schmoozed the client sufficiently, and they were actually, and, I mean, the clients know, dummy, right? They know the sales guy is a who person and can’t understand any of the words they’re saying about what their problem is, right? So they eventually are like, Okay, I’m ready to talk to somebody who can understand, you know, who’s actually going to be in charge of solving the problem. Then I show up. I do that one meeting. Client falls in love with me, because nobody has ever understood their problem as well as I have, right? They’re like, holy crap. So it helps us win our projects better. It helps the team back home is knows that there’s not going to be anything left out. There’s going to be no feature that got missing in the, you know, project scope because we didn’t catch it on the front end. Mikey’s going to catch it. So the but you can, if you have the kind of authority or the power, you can just by edicts, say, we’re adding another process to the sales, you know, another step in the sales process, and this is for my superpower, and it’s going to make everybody happier. And everybody is happier, because, don’t forget, your superpowers are things that you’re basically better than everybody else at right? So they’re happy to have you doing it. Okay?

So that’s you taking care of yourself, if you have power, if you’re really Jedi. Imagine a company where everybody is using their superpowers all the time. Holy shit. That would be the best company ever. So the reason that I give my team the Kolbe index, and you know, I spend so much energy on this kind of stuff, is a because I’m selfish bastard, and I want to be happy, but also I want my team to be happy, and I know the same things that make me happy, using my superpowers, getting energy from that that’s going to make my team happy. So just cast. Gate it down in the organization. And one of the things I try to do is understand, particularly folks who are earlier in their career, who really have no idea what their career is going to be or what it should be, and they probably picked their major because, I mean, I know I picked my college major because of what class I was best at in high school. I didn’t have any clue that that was going to determine the rest the whole rest of my life.

So pay attention to your team and help them move into a spot in the organization that matches their guiding question better, that matches their superpowers. Put them in a team where their Kolbes are complimentary with other people’s Kolbes. One thing I didn’t tell you is the inventor of the Kolbe index. Her name is Kathy Kolbe, and what she says is that four, if you are four notches away from someone on any of those dimensions. And so if, like, I’m a number one and you’re a number six, we’re five away, we’re going to have conflict if we try to get something done together, and it’s good to have somebody who’s in the middle to act as a mediator. In fact, my Kolbe index, as you notice, is super extreme. It’s super high and super low and super high and super low. I’m a nightmare to work with. I’m glad I’m the boss, because I couldn’t get hired by anybody because I’m so difficult to work with. My number two at my company, he was like, 55-42, he was right in the middle. He was the mediator between me and everybody else. So you can really use these tools to build your team so that your team is, you know, projective and enjoying, you know, their work.

Mark Littlewood: Yeah, great. So, Ray, this is your first question to the conference. You, I think, over the years, have asked more questions than anybody else. It’s no surprise. He’s sitting at the front. For those at the back, you’ll notice that lots of the people at the front have asked lots of questions. I’m sure there’s a correlation between intelligence and the number of questions you ask, so this is going to be a good one, right, right?

Audience member: Mikey, if I recall until last year you were you’re at Alamo Drafthouse, right? Yeah. I imagine that particularly given was going on the last couple years that could have had more stress than average in terms of the organization. I was wondering whether you could discuss your superpower framework in the context of when the chips are down and where stress was high in the context of that story.

Mikey Trafton: Sure. So for those who don’t know my background is, as you know, technology entrepreneur. I’ve owned one reasonably successful technology company, a handful of failed startups, and then I joined the executive team at this super cool movie theater called Alamo Drafthouse cinema. And I did that for six years until just, you know, last year I left, and now I’m starting my own movie theater, but at Alamo, I wasn’t, I didn’t start that company. It’s my buddy’s company. I kind of joined to help out, but I still had a team. And you know, the first thing I did when I joined, I think I probably talked about this in one of my other talks, but I have a document that’s called how to work with Mikey, right? And it basically says all this stuff that I told you about me and what I’m like to work with, and I kind of write it out so that people know what they’re getting into. And one of the things it says is, if you’re trying to convince me of something, you better bring data. I’m a high Fact Finder. I will kick you out of my office if you just have an idea and you don’t have any information to back it up. So I think within any context, right? It’s this, these powers, these things about yourself. This is who you are and how you work. And it’s even more important when there’s a global pandemic and all movie theaters are closed and you have to declare bankruptcy, and, you know, it’s the most awful situation ever. And I think, you know, lean into your superpower. So you got, you can’t keep every, like in that particular case, you can’t keep everybody we had to lay off, I don’t know, something like 90 plus percent of the company. So who’s who are we going to keep that’s going to help us through the bankruptcy and looking at their superpowers and helping, you know, to figure that out?

Mark Littlewood: Yeah, thank you, Carl.

Audience member: So at the risk of being the glass half empty person, it seems like once you figure out your superpowers, and see all the data that you have around that, there’s a little bit of kryptonite like that reveal your kind of super weaknesses as well. And the things you touched on this you have to cover up with the team you build around you. For example, you may you. Love exploring a problem deeply, but you might fall in love with problems you can’t solve, or that you shouldn’t solve, or that you’re not the right person to solve. You need someone to bring that back, and I’d like you to talk about that as well in terms of, once you see your superpowers. Okay, now, what’s my kryptonite? And how do I manage that?

Mikey Trafton: I think that there’s some people who were taught by their parents as they were growing up to keep working on their weaknesses, right? Hey, you, you’re bad at this. You got to get better at this. And, you know, it, that was kind of me. I was taught that I needed to get her get better at the things I was bad at. And at some point, as I kind of went through this journey, I realized that I’d been working on my weaknesses, and now I had some, like, mediocre weaknesses, and if I had spent all that time working on my strengths, I’d have some freaking badass strengths. And that was a mentality shift for me. And I think you know what I like to say is Michael Jordan probably doesn’t know how to fry an egg. He doesn’t need to know how to fry an egg. When you’re the best basket player on planet Earth, you can make enough money making playing basketball that you can pay somebody to fry your eggs, and you can get the best egg fryer in the world to fry those eggs for you, right? I like to say that there’s not a big demand for blacksmiths, but I’ll bet the queen now the king of England, has one right they only need if you’re the best, there’s a spot for you. So I don’t like to dwell on weaknesses. I much more like to put it around, put it towards what are my strengths and whose strength is right for this situation? If it’s not mine, then who do I put in this situation where their strength is going I can rely on

Mark Littlewood: Amazing we were gonna have a question there, but I think you answered it. Okay.

Audience member: Mikey, the question really is, is like when I get put on a pip because of my weaknesses. What do I do?

Mikey Trafton: Yeah, God, that’s a great question. All they do is, is like that. They want me to do more and more of the work that I suck at, yeah, as opposed to the work that I’m really good at, and I don’t, I don’t know how to make the twist.

You got to get out. You got to get out if you are put on a pip performance improvement plan, because you have a job and you have a boss, and your boss has some expectations of what you are going to do in this job, and you are failing to meet those expectations because of your weaknesses. You got to get out. You ain’t going to make those weaknesses better. You got to find the job in that company, or a job in another company, or a tweak to the role that relies on your strengths when your strengths are so good, nobody cares about your weaknesses that you that’s the Michael Jordan rule.

Audience member: The only follow up I have is I’m a why? What do I do?

Mikey Trafton: I can’t help you, buddy, I can’t help you. That’s awesome.

Mark Littlewood: I can feel the collective intelligence of the audience. Where are we? Jack? Final question, and yeah, don’t just because you’re at the back doesn’t mean you can’t put your hand up, put your hand up. You’ll become more intelligent, you’ll become wiser, you’ll become more too late.

Audience member: I’m Batman, but I want to be the flash. So what are you what are your thoughts on? Are we stuck with our superpowers, or can we develop some new ones?

Mikey Trafton: No, I think we’re stuck. That’s my take. I think these are who you are, and the secret is figuring out how to bring them into situations like so once you figure out what your superpowers are, then your job, basically your full time job, is you’re looking for situations that need those powers. That’s what is going to make you happy. You know, I hate 98% of the sales process. That one, that 2% meeting is, I’m on cloud nine. I’m super happy. So that’s the secret. Is figure out, how do you put yourself in a situation where you can use those superpowers? Because I think they come naturally. I think they’re, you know, Clark Kent, you never saw him in a weight room, right? Aquaman, he’s not on. Duolingo, learning swordfish, right? He just knows how to speak swordfish. So these are innate qualities, and it’s really discovering them, maximizing them and putting yourself in the position where someone gets value out of them. All right, everybody, thanks so much for your attention. Great questions. I’m here all week. So happy to talk about you.

Mikey Trafton

Founder CEO

Mikey is an entrepreneur from Austin, Texas currently working on a stealth startup coming to cinemas near you soon. Previously, he was CTO and Chief Brand Officer at Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas and founded, run and sold multiple tech companies. He’s most proud of Blue Fish Group, a consulting firm providing custom software solutions to Fortune 500 companies like Southwest Airlines, Wells Fargo, and Bausch+Lomb.

A serial entrepreneur, Mikey is an expert in building high-performance teams with amazing cultures. He has a passion for helping entrepreneurs through mentoring, coaching, and investing.

A regular attendee at Business of Software Conference, he is also one of the most gifted communicators you may not have heard of. He has spoken on, ‘How to Build a World Class Culture in 3 Easy Steps’, ‘Recruiting a Badass Team’ and ‘How to Manage Your Badass Team’

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