Guest Samuel Norton and I discuss several emotional intelligence hacks. SlideTech and The 5-Star Approach both work on the premise that real time quantitative feedback is a game changer when it comes to getting stuff done.
Tyler Small: Hey everybody. Thanks for joining us. I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence. Today, we have a special treat. We have Samuel Norton with Slide Tech joining us today and Samuel has a degree from Brigham Young University as do I. He also is in a really cool program at the University of Utah David Eccles, School of Business, and he's doing his Masters of Business Creation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategy. So super cool. He's had a really cool career in strategy and marketing and how it's amazing positions.
[00:00:40] It really awesome companies. Recently, he was at Pluralsight as the senior business strategy analyst and customer success. And now he is he is the co-founder of SlideTech. So we're going to be hearing from him today. I just wanted to give you a couple of interesting fun facts about Samuel here. And one is that he used to go by Sam growing up that is until he married a woman named.
[00:01:09] Sam. So it was Sam and Sam, right?
[00:01:13] Samuel Norton: Yeah, that's right. That's definitely exactly what happened.
[00:01:17] Tyler Small: And so he started going by Samuel. Second fun fact for you guys, is that in high school, Samuel was, I guess he was Sam or Sammy at that point was in a Superbowl commercial. Google Chrome, right?
[00:01:31] Samuel Norton: Google Chrome make it happen. Commercial. You could still find me on YouTube. I'm this tiny little pixel that jumps up as the last shot is sunk at a basketball game and kind of see my face and my little hat and stuff. So pretty fun.
[00:01:46] Tyler Small: Well, very cool. Very cool. And Samuel and I met at a random networking event, some guy on LinkedIn reached out to both of us.
[00:01:56] And was like, Hey, come to this networking event. It's going to be cool. And somehow Samuel and I both said yes, and we ended up in the same group and it was awesome. So
[00:02:06] Samuel Norton: yeah, it really ended up being an awesome day. I'm sure. Most people on LinkedIn it's like half of your inbox is just hello, insert name.
[00:02:15]Try this, we're going to do this networking event or we're going to, listen to my pitch or something like that. And this would actually like really worked. It was actually pretty cool. We've met some cool people and we're lucky enough to find out that we had mutually aligned interests and wanting to make things better for L and D.
[00:02:34] Tyler Small: Yeah. And I think in our group, the four guys that were in our group, we were like, I think someone mentioned like, Oh, I feel bad because. All the cool people ended up in our group and all the other groups couldn't possibly have lucked out. So
[00:02:49] Samuel Norton: Yeah, maybe they just had an extra screening or something.
[00:02:53] Tyler Small: Yeah, it was great. It was great. And so the title of today's episode is Data Assisted Emotional Intelligence. And so w we're gonna, we're gonna. How Samuel tell us some super cool things that Slide Tech is doing to help people get feedback both in real time, and after the fact I'm using his super awesome technology. He actually wanted to show it to me and I was like, Oh yeah, I've seen everything.
[00:03:21], I didn't tell him this till now, but when he was like, Hey, can I show you this? I was like, okay. We had been in this group and it was this really awesome conversation. And I wanted to help him, but I was like, Oh yeah, I've seen everything. I've seen it all. I've done, I've facilitated all kinds of virtual environments and this guy's not going to show me anything I don't already know.
[00:03:41] And then , my mind was completely blown when he actually showed me what it does.
[00:03:45]Samuel Norton: Oh, good. I'm glad. That's amazing. You just kinda. Undersell and over-deliver, I guess that's the, I didn't intentionally do that, but I'm glad that that, that was your experience
[00:03:56]Tyler Small: I'm telling you, you have license, I'm giving you permission Samuel to, to sell this a little more.
[00:04:03] I don't know if it was just my ego that got in the way of that or or you're underselling, but I highly encourage you to. Talk about it for what it is. It's a major, it's a major evolution in facilitation technology, especially in this. Like we find ourselves in a world where travel budgets have been just basically cut out and people are used to drive across town to an appointment and no longer.
[00:04:26] So the virtual facilitation space is just this really critical area. And I feel like a lot of the people listening to this will be interested in knowing how they can improve their emotional intelligence using the platform that you provide.
[00:04:44] Samuel Norton: Yeah it's such a good point. I, we really feel at Slide Tech, that the virtual thing is here to stay a lot of convenience and cost advantages to having this virtual situation that was thrust upon us.
[00:04:59] I don't think like nobody would have voluntarily run this experiment. There we are. And we really think that this is kinda here to stay and. As we speak I'm in my basement, just kinda hanging out, and it can be a weird situation where like, all of your interactions are now virtual and you're trying to figure out okay, how do I have the same level of interaction with people that I did before?
[00:05:25]Is that even possible? Is it possible for me to feel connected? Without just scrolling through endless social media pages and things like that. So we're really intent on making better connections in facilitation events, making better experiences in facilitation events and then gathering all of that data that's happening in these events.
[00:05:51] And sending it back to the presenter, back to the facilitator, back to the sponsoring organization so they can know what content really resonated and bringing that, that data element to their facilitation, to their workshops and things like that. You'll never replace the human connection, but what you can do is augment that human communication and human connection.
[00:06:20] By being able to understand, what actually matters to people. Being able to read what matters to somebody in a virtual recall can be kinda tough, especially if you're talking to, 20 plus people and half of them have their video off. Like how do you know what actually resonates with somebody?
[00:06:36] Tyler Small: Yes. It's a chronic problem. So as I was listening to you, explain this again to me.
[00:06:42]I think originally after I saw this, my mind was blown. I was like, Oh my goodness. You can actually have information about. Who's paying attention and who's not, who has clicked away and is on some other tab or whatever. And is, who's actually actively on that screen looking at the presentation and what they're doing, whether they're taking notes or whether they're whether they're doing screen captures and marking them up just as somebody could have in a book, all this happened digitally, but.
[00:07:08] But I thought, okay, that's super cool. And then I thought, Oh, and for a sales presentation, like that's also cool because they have to know if people are on board with them through this process or not, so that they can know like how to , crank it up. Like what did they know that there's probably objections that they need to resolve?
[00:07:28] Like they need to get people's attention back in order to make the sale. So whatever the purpose is, I was thinking, for the purpose of the presenter, but. But when you talked about that human connection, again like that I realized that there's actually a value here with connecting with humans, connecting humans together and giving them an experience where after their workday, they don't feel as equally detached from the human race as they did before.
[00:07:54] Samuel Norton: Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly. That's exactly right. Our aim here is to improve and then measure. The experience and it's in that order, we want people to be able to interact. It's why you can upvote comments and save comments to your notes and do that kind of thing in the actual platform was because we want there to be this interactive element with each other too, not just with the presenter
[00:08:19] Tyler Small: I was so impressed with that, the threads. So that when somebody comments like other people can, and usually in zoom or whatever, you're on there.
[00:08:26] And it's There's kind of one long feed and you can't really comment on someone else's comment, but I really liked that feature.
[00:08:33] Samuel Norton: Yeah. Thanks. We really liked that too. The thing that is really valuable, I think from an emotional intelligence perspective you nailed it on the head with the sales example, right?
[00:08:46] So much of what sales is and what training is and what basic people interaction. Is knowing what to talk about with them. What are their triggers that are positive? What are the triggers that are negative? And if you stop and think that, there's the saying 'cada cabeza es un mundo' and that's something that means every head is a world.
[00:09:06] And it's something that we used to say all the time and it's so true. It's Yeah. Every person brings their own context and somethings, mean certain things to one person that, it might mean something totally different. I have this professor at the university of Utah who says words, don't convey, meaning you just speak words.
[00:09:26] And then people listen from their context and you speak it from your context. And hopefully there's some shared understanding, right? Yeah. So I think that, knowing what to talk about, knowing where to press, knowing what to stay away from those are critical things in terms of emotional intelligence.
[00:09:43] If I know that you love the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I'll talk to you about the Red Hot Chili Peppers. If I know that you don't like broccoli, like we're not going to do. Talk about how I love broccoli,
[00:09:55]Tyler Small: So this is so cool. So I don't know if we've painted this picture well enough for our listeners, but if you can imagine when the facilitator goes through using Slide Tech, they can actually see who is paying attention and who is not.
[00:10:12] And and then after the fact they get this post presentation analytics, and they can then see if you've got 12 or 20 slides in your presentation, you can then see how many people were actively engaged in each slide in different ways. Slide by slide. So you can see if you're going to be giving this presentation more than once it's even more valuable, you can go back and be like, okay.
[00:10:36] Like I saw people were up and down through it and I was trying to bring him in and stuff like that, but which slides were boring people or, causing them to be, disengaged in which slides were like super interesting to people. And you can see that output it's so rich and granular, and that's the kind of feedback that we need, in order to be in order to boost our emotional intelligence in order to really hack it. I think it's just a great shortcut. Especially like you said, when we can't really see people, they're all somewhere else distributed, who knows where, and we really need to know who's with us and who's not.
[00:11:10] And when exactly those transitions take place so that we can work on those specific parts of the presentation where people are in and out.
[00:11:18] Samuel Norton: Yeah. That's exactly right. After a workshop and if you want to get feedback from your audience, you basically ask them right now, either send a survey out or you say, Hey, I just want to follow up with you.
[00:11:33]What did you think of my training? And they'll give you a good generalized overview typically, but they're not going to say. Oh, you really lost me at this point. And I was really engaged at this point. Maybe, sometimes that happens generally in my experience, after you give a workshop, they'll either say it was good.
[00:11:54] I liked this or it was bad and that's all. You know
[00:11:58]Tyler Small: I completely agree. It's super vague. And if you've ever researched self-report like, It's a horrific way to gather information especially when you have something as dynamic as a facilitated conversation with a group, there's so many different points and it doesn't give you that much information.
[00:12:17]Samuel Norton: Great point. Facilitations like workshops are nuanced,
[00:12:21] Tyler Small: so nuanced.
[00:12:23] Samuel Norton: And so being able to say. It's on that, that follow up. If you know what somebody's positive triggers are from the conversation, you can say something like, Hey, thanks for coming to my presentation. Let's talk about X. And that they're interested in X, they had high attention, they had high comprehension, they were asking questions about it.
[00:12:46] They were interacting with the content. That's something that matters to them.
[00:12:50] Tyler Small: Yes. Yes. So let me ask you this. Samuel, let's say I'm using Slide Tech and I noticed that one particular slide, I, that I share it's slide nine, for whatever reason, people just check out on slide nine.
[00:13:03] Normally I couldn't see that. But I've always known that slide nine was critically important to my audience. Like maybe it was boring for them or the way that I was. Presenting it wasn't amazing. But for whatever reason, like I know that it's important to either close the deal or to help them understand so they can accomplish the learning objective, but they don't know that, or maybe they do, but they're just not interested in what do I do on slide nine?
[00:13:28] How can I change that if in the future, if I'm giving this presentation a second, third, fourth time, et cetera.
[00:13:34] Samuel Norton: Yeah super awesome question. There are two ways that you can address it. The first is by moving that content to an earlier time. So people have, this is a psychological phenomenon where it's called aware and wear out curve.
[00:13:51] And basically what happens is it takes a couple of times. For somebody to see something for it to register, it takes on average three times for something to wear in and then it'll take three more times to wear out. So if you have a bit of content or you have something that's critically important and you want to, tease that at the beginning and then tease it again a little bit later and then deliver that.
[00:14:20]That would be a really good way to do that. So the first way is moving that content around and using repetition to your advantage and teaching the same thing in a different way, multiple times, that would be a good way to do that. The other thing that you can do and Slide Tech really helps with this is you can force an interaction point to bring them back.
[00:14:43] So this would be, yeah, one of the things you could do, for example, Let's say everybody checks out on slide nine. You say, okay, what can I do on slide nine? That will basically force the audience to come back and be with me. One of the things you can do is add like a poll, for example. So you get your slide, deck results back, slide nine is super, super low engagement and you recognize that.
[00:15:12] That needs to be high engagement. That's a valuable concept on there. Why not put a poll? Why not embed a poll. directly in the slide on side nine and say, Hey I need you all to respond to this poll. Or let's put a discussion point on slide nine and really talk through that and have everybody type their answers in and all the while the advantage of using Slide Tech for that.
[00:15:39] It is when you're doing that stuff. Slide Tech is collecting that information and we'll be able to surface that back to you to see which people are still engaged. So let's say like you put a poll back here and, you only get four or five results on the pole then, that it's not just the fact that people are checking out.
[00:15:59] Maybe they're checking out for a much deeper reason than simply distraction.
[00:16:04]Tyler Small: And what are some of those reasons like it's like lunchtime
[00:16:07] Samuel Norton: yeah, that's a good question. There are a lot of reasons that people disengage clear in a way the most common one is distraction. And it's a very superficial disengagement where it's just your mind starts to wander.
[00:16:21] You think about something else, you get a notification and you. Never intended to leave the content, but you did for the most, most common one.
[00:16:31] Tyler Small: Oh, okay. So that's, that sounds like great news. Cause that's easier to grapple with then it's lunchtime.
[00:16:37] Samuel Norton: Yeah. Yeah. The thing that, the one that's really hard, and this is critical to understand the difference in your audience is this doesn't resonate for me.
[00:16:50] Right trust between somebody being right. Oh, I'm just distracted in a fleeting way. There's a huge difference between that. And I don't believe this guy just doesn't make sense.
[00:17:04] Tyler Small: This guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
[00:17:07] Samuel Norton: Yeah. That is a much deeper thing. And a lot of the times.
[00:17:13] That's the thing that you've really got to understand, like that's the real worry for traders, right? You're up there doing your thing and how many people are just distracted versus I don't believe this that's a really important ratio today.
[00:17:27] Tyler Small: And how do you figure that out?
[00:17:28]Samuel Norton: So Slide Tech, one of the ways that we do that slide deck and with the product.
[00:17:34] Is, we have multiple dimensions by which we're tracking engagement. So it's not just attention. It's not just where they with me. Did they click away? Are they no on Gmail or Facebook or whatever? Yeah. It's also comprehension. It's also the questions that they ask, the things that they mark, the
[00:17:57]screenshots that they take all of those things work together to create this whole more holistic picture of what engagement actually is during a workshop.
[00:18:10] Tyler Small: Very interesting. So in my mind though, I'm like, Oh boy, that sounds like a lot to hunt through especially. If I had 30 people on the call and there's 50 slides like how does one kind of ingest that and understand it?
[00:18:26] Samuel Norton: Yeah. Great question. Great question. The post presentation analytics dashboard is I would say automatically curated, in a way that makes it pretty. Usable and pretty digestible. And we start with, we the way it works is it's like a pyramid. So if you imagine a pyramid at the very top of the pyramid is the most important aggregate information.
[00:18:55] And then as you dive deeper, a pyramid gets wider. You can get more and more granular and specific. So if you wanted to see you you know what. Prospect or customer or participant X did on slide three, you can do that. That's at the very bottom of the pyramid. And the way it starts is when you open up the dashboard, you get, you first get a high-level view of what the overall retention was, overall participation, that kind of thing.
[00:19:28] And then you can get more and more specific and build that story yourself in a way that's much more digestible. It's like reading a newspaper, you start with a headline and make your way down to the details.
[00:19:41] Tyler Small: This sounds so much more valuable. Cause I was imagining this mountain of work like, Oh no, I'm going to have to look through every slide.
[00:19:49] Hey, every one of my participants,
[00:19:55] Samuel Norton: we also have the ability it's an additional service that we do, but we have the ability to export all of the data that we collect and then visualize it ourselves. So we have a team of analysts. Here at Slide Tech that can look through some of those insights for you and surface those back and make recommendations to a little bit of a professional services type offering.
[00:20:23]Tyler Small: I can just imagine though, anyone who does the same presentation over and over, especially if it's like a high stakes presentation. Look, you're looking for investors sales compliance training. That's just like critical in nature. Yeah. That would be really valuable.
[00:20:43] Samuel Norton: Yeah. You're exactly right.
[00:20:45] All of those situations, I would say can be augmented by Slide Tech.
[00:20:52] Tyler Small: That's very cool. I'm super impressed, Samuel. Thanks for coming on today and teaching us about this, I feel like you're pushing the. You're pushing what facilitating online has been like for the past 10, 15 years.
[00:21:08] Samuel Norton: Yeah. Yeah. We want to change the game from having slide decks, be these one way billboards and information to a real interactive and measurable experience which is only enhanced, not taken away from now. The fact that everybody's virtual, we actually are spinning that through.
[00:21:29] Tyler Small: Very cool.
[00:21:30] I'm super impressed with your work Samuel. And I encourage you. If you're listening to this to go check out slide tech.io and see what it's about. Amazing experience there.
[00:21:43] Samuel Norton: Thanks Tyler. It's awesome. Being on here and I love what you're doing with the Five-star Approach.
[00:21:47]To plug you back, I would love to encourage everybody to also check that out. If you're listening to this podcast that probably familiar with Tyler's work some big things happening in the L and D space. Tyler,
[00:21:59]Tyler Small: I know it, things are changing. Things are changing. It's not the fluffy ethereal space that it used to be.
[00:22:07] Samuel Norton: Yeah, it doesn't need to be, think about it this way. Like why should HR leaders. Be the last people to be empowered by data. Is it accelerating the human potential, everything that HR stands for and like, why would we not have data to try and help that and try and back that up.
[00:22:25]It's, there's data is so incredibly powerful and it's so important that everybody knows it. It's just a matter of. Figuring out how to get it, to apply to you. And, we're happy to help HR learning and development people who, have a really noble cause empowering employees and empowering people to live their best lives and do their best work.
[00:22:45] I think that is worthy of the power of data.
[00:22:48] Tyler Small: It's inspiring. I didn't think that I'd be sitting in a conversation talking about how data was inspiring, like 10 or 12 years ago, but. But yeah it's fixing a lot of the problems that, that HR and learning and development has have suffered from for decades.
[00:23:05] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:23:06]Samuel Norton: Think about it this way. Like when you go to your boss, so you're an L and D director and you go to your boss and you say, Hey, we need a little bit more budget for our training we've all kind of been in that situation. And they say, yeah, that's true. But. I don't know if I want to pay a bunch of money to have somebody come and we all sit around and come by off or half a day or two hours in one day and two guys the next day or a three-day workshop or something like that.
[00:23:37] And then we all feel good and go back to the way things were. I don't think anybody wants to do that. Like the facilitator doesn't want to do that. The L and D director doesn't want to do that. Like the CEO definitely doesn't want to do that. And. If you can quantify the value of a training through engagement data, you're going to get more money to do the trainings that you want to do and further to cause a human potential in your organization, which is critical.
[00:24:08] Tyler Small: Absolutely. Being able to show a report like here's how this went. Here's how many people were participating and. I hadn't realized until this moment, how interesting is Samuel how the two programs that we do can work together. Like you're doing this on this very technical level during a facilitated event.
[00:24:28] And I do it offline. I just say offline, but often happens in video chats, but just through these conversations, grabbing the data from each other. Usually vocally, but that it could be very complimentary.
[00:24:42] Samuel Norton: Oh, I agree. Absolutely agree.
[00:24:45] Tyler Small: Yeah. Very cool. Thanks again. Thanks for coming on today, Samuel.
[00:24:49] Samuel Norton: Yeah. Thank you, Tyler. It's always a pleasure to talk to you and wishing you the very best my man.
[00:24:55] Tyler Small: You too. All right. Take care. Thanks everybody. I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence.