#WeGotGoals by aSweatLife
Raman Chadha Empowers Entrepreneurs Through Emotional Intelligence
December 12, 2017
File this one under "things you don't want to hear while recording a podcast entitled #WeGotGoals":
We've actually stopped using the word "goal" at The Junto Institute.
"Cool, cool," I thought to myself, as I mentally face-palmed during my interview with Raman Chadha of The Junto Institute. "This is fine. Everything is fine."
Chuckling a little at my dismay, Chadha went on to explain that his team had shifted towards using the word "priority" in place of goal. They'd found that their apprentices viewed goals as "far out in the distance," while priorities had a greater connotation of urgency, and gave their apprentices something to work on that very day.
The language nerd in me sat with that thought for the rest of the day, debating the hidden meanings of goal versus priority, and how using one word over the other shifted your focus on a daily, weekly or annual basis.
It's what I call a "fuzzy concept" - an idea that you can grasp, but that doesn't always have tangible, actionable deliverables attached to it. And fittingly, that's exactly what Raman Chadha specializes in every day.
As the co-founder of The Junto Institute, a leadership revenue accelerator for growth stage companies, Chadha helps leaders and entrepreneurs improve their leadership skills and their companies' bottom lines by developing emotional intelligence skills, which they then apply to their companies for a higher probability of success.
And as anyone who watched Nick Viall's season of The Bachelor knows, emotional intelligence is another fuzzy concept that's difficult to understand, let alone apply in a high-stress environment like a growth stage company. (FYI, Chadha and Junto define emotional intelligence as "the ability to recognize and regulate the emotions in ourselves and in others, and how we use that information/data to guide our thinking, actions and behaviors by progressing through self awareness, self management, social awareness and relationship management.)
The Junto Institute is based on the belief that emotional intelligence is the single biggest contributor to leadership effectiveness and job performance - crucial factors for growth stage companies in the "sink or swim" phase of entrepreneurship.
Chadha also highlighted two common traits of leaders that he's observed throughout his time working with entrepreneurs: tenacity and the ability to cope with ambiguity, uncertainty and chaos.
"In entrepreneurship, there are more lows than there are highs," Chadha said. "So [you need] the ability to bounce back on a regular basis, the ability to power through a rough day."
Similarly, since no two days of running a company are the same, you need to get comfortable with the unknown and operating without a fully-fleshed out path of how you'll get from Point A to Point B.
For those of us not at the helm of a growing company, we can still develop emotional intelligence in our everyday lives. One specific way to do that: work on becoming increasingly aware of how you're feeling in as many moments as possible throughout the day.
Try it right now: how are you feeling? Push yourself further than "fine," "tired," "happy" or any other generic adjectives; try using the most specific word you can find (need inspo? Check out this emotion wheel for ideas). By becoming uber-familiar with your own emotions and feelings, you develop self-awareness AND empathy for those around you (which in turn helps you become a more effective leader).
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Show transcription:
JAC: Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen; with me I have Cindy Kuzma and Kristen Geil.
KG: Hi Jeana.
JAC: Good morning Kristen. You talked to Raman this week, right?
KG: I spoke with Raman, who founded the Junto Institute, which is a really interesting company here in Chicago that helps growth stage startup companies and takes their leaders and their key employees and helps them develop their emotional intelligence skills through a sort of nine month cohort program. So it's really interesting because they're learning about their emotional intelligence, how it's important in the workplace, how to become better leaders and better read the emotions of other people—which is a very what I call a fuzzy goal right? It's much more of a process oriented goal. But he and his co-founder have found that in doing so they're really helping these companies with their outcome oriented goals, you know, increasing their bottom line and improving their profitability and lowering employee turnover. So I thought it was really interesting, the juxtaposition of the vagueness and sort of intangible quality that I think of emotional intelligence as and how it contrasts with the black and white numbers on a page.
CK: And he had some really interesting insights about how this applies on a personal level too. Right. And I loved his tangible tip for squaring up with someone when you're listening to them. What else did you get out of that transition from what they do on a corporate level to how you can apply things like this to your personal life?
KG: Yeah, one of the things Raman talked about that I love and like, need to apply more in my everyday life is just the practice of being self-aware, really being aware of how you're feeling in every moment. And he pointed to the use of something called an emotions wheel. Where, instead of just saying yeah I'm doing fine when someone asks how you are you can use this emotions we to actually point to a very specific adjective whether it's tense, surprised, excited. And that really helps you ground yourself in your emotions and in turn prompts the other person to be more empathetic which I think is great just being a little more in tune with your emotions through the power of language. He also talked about the skill of listening and how you can become a better listener and how important that is with leaders especially. And he gave some really tangible takeaways through just making eye contact putting down your device squaring your hips pointing your toes in your knees towards the person that you are paying attention to, all these small non-verbal cues that really signal to the person you're having a conversation with: You have my entire attention, I am focused on you. Let's go.
JAC: And so these skills that he's teaching others and practicing himself haven't always been sort of a part of his life. He learned them along the way. Can you talk a little bit about that?
KG: Yeah. One of the things that we talked about I asked about qualities and personality traits that are common in leaders. And he immediately pointed to tenacity and in a sense being comfortable being uncomfortable right? Being comfortable with that you might not know the exact outcome of a situation. And he said that these traits can be both inherent, he's seen them straight up and people. Or you can work to develop them over time and how that sometimes happens with certain sort of entrepreneurs. He pointed to himself—he said he didn't think that he had always been a tenacious personality but he learned it just by getting thrown in the fire over and over again and realizing, hey, this is a situation where I can't give up, I have to persevere. And in that way he was able to develop a certain personality trait which not everyone thinks is possible.
CK: Well it was a fascinating conversation and I'm can't wait for everyone to hear it. So here is Kristin with Raman.
KG: Welcome to #WeGotGoals. I'm Kristen Geil here with Raman of the Junto Institute. Hi Raman.
RC: Hi Kristen.
KG: Raman, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what the Junto Institute does and your role in it?
RC: Well I'm a lifelong Chicagoan; went to college here at the University of Illinois, went to Kellogg for my MBA. I've spent my entire career in Chicago. I founded the Junto Institute in 2012 with my co-founder Catherine. The Junto Institute is a leadership and revenue accelerator for growth stage companies, and we believe that companies and their leaders can become infinitely better at who they are and what they do through developing skills that relate to emotional intelligence and business savvy and so we designed a program through which they can learn those and ultimately apply them to their companies for a higher probability of success.
KG: On the #WeGotGoals podcast we start off by asking a couple big questions of every one of our guests. First one, and we'll start with thatm is what is a big goal that you've achieved in the past? And why was it so important to you and how did you get there?
RC: Yeah that's a really interesting question. I don't know if I can say that I've had a big goal that I wanted to achieve but one thing that I'm very proud of recently is, my wife and I have two daughters 19 and 17. And about 20 years ago I remember sitting on the couch when we were expecting her first child. And I read a column that described the difference between career oriented families and family oriented families and asked my wife what she wanted us to have. And she said family oriented and I said, me as well. Didn't mean that we weren't going to have successful careers or want to have successful careers it was just which one were we going to choose over the other. And at the time I remember saying to her, we're only going to have 18 years to be parents but we have our whole lives to build, so to speak, a career. Most recently in the last year and a half our oldest has gone away to college.
So she's you know becoming a young adult. Our youngest is a senior in high school. And to see what they have become as young ladies has been incredibly gratifying and fulfilling and more so because it was an outcome of us paying attention to being family oriented and devoting as much time as we could to being active parents with them, being in a position where we feel really good about where our kids are knowing that there's still obviously a long way for them to go. So that's as close as I can get to a big goal.
KG: That's wonderful; I’m sure you guys have had so many strong family memories made because of those choices that you and your wife made. Can you think of any specific examples of when you knew that you were choosing your family over career? And do you have any plans for how that's going to change now that your youngest is almost out of the house and it's maybe time to shift towards that career focus again?
RC: So again we've always been very career driven. Both of us went on to get our graduate degrees. We both have what we would like to think are successful professional careers, but we've been very mindful of the need to devote time to our kids and for us that has been the single biggest metric is, is not the amount of time just time in general. We don't believe there's such a thing as quality time we just believe there's time. And so it is little things such as even when there was a pressing issue at work at 5:30 or 6:00 knowing that we had to delay addressing the pressing thing because it was something else and need to be paying attention to and then holding each other accountable. My wife has traveled pretty regularly over the course of her career. So part of it is for me to let her know when there were times where it was important for her to devote time to the kids.
But then also for her to ask me to hold her accountable too. So those are a couple of little examples. Maybe not you know very specific and concrete ones but kind of general practices that we followed.
KG: It sounds like a true partnership. Right. Working with someone else to achieve those even if it wasn't outwardly an explicit goal. You know you were doing it for the best of your family. Of the things we were talking about before we actually started recording was the difference between process oriented goals and outcome oriented goals and I can see how putting the conscious choice to put your family first above your career is more of a process oriented outcome. You also work with Junto about developing emotional intelligence in business leaders. And that seems like a process oriented goal to me because it's a little more hazy, it’s a little more fuzzy not as tangible in terms of results but you're working with business leaders who care about the bottom line. How do you take such an intangible quality like emotional intelligence and deliver measurable results to those business leaders helping them to further their business?
RC: Yeah that's a big question and a great question. It's not unlike how we take care of our health. Many of us have tangible metrics to measure our health, whether it's our weight or whether it's our body fat whether it's our heart rate that I think most of us know that it's going to take a process for us to get there. And that's what developing emotional intelligence and leadership is also about. That yes, do do these companies and their leaders want to be more profitable? Absolutely. Do they want to have lower turnover? Yes. Do they want to have more credentialed people coming to work for them? Certainly. But they recognize that there is so much work that has to be done in order for them to start seeing those types of outcomes and they recognize that it all begins with them as leaders.
So they—it's not so much about what we do for them but more about their willingness to enter into an experience where they are going to be learning new things, being made uncomfortable, being forced to be vulnerable. And again I run a parallel to us becoming healthier as human beings, that we all know that it takes so much work and effort and devotion and time to work out on a consistent basis, to eat healthy on a consistent basis. And hopefully if we demonstrate that we're able to do that and we do do that, we start seeing those outcomes occur. So it's not unlike that in that regard. It's not for everyone. You know we like to say that Junto is not for 90 percent of the companies that are out there because they're looking for more shorter-term results and shorter-term outcomes.
But most of our alumni tell us that where they start seeing the real results of Junto is the year after they graduate because they're able to put into practice everything they've learned.
KG: Before we get too far in this interview I think would be great to hear you define emotional intelligence. Again like I said earlier it's kind of a fuzzy term. Everyone might have a slightly different idea of what it means but what has the Junto Institute defined emotional intelligence as? And how do you apply that lens to what you do everyday?
RC: So we actually have adopted a common definition of emotional intelligence, which is our ability to recognize and regulate the emotions in ourselves and in others. And then perhaps even more importantly is how we use that information, how we use that data to guide our thinking, actions and behaviors. And that I think is the part that most people in my experience don't pay enough attention to. It's one thing to recognize and regulate our emotions personally and in other people but then to do something with it especially in the workplace is where the rubber meets the road. And that is where we also see its relevance to leadership. So that's how we define it at Junto and how we kind of wrap our program into, how we use emotional intelligence to kind of put a wrapping around our program.
KG: Junto works a lot with leaders in developing emotional intelligence in the workplace. But do you have any suggestions for how listeners could apply emotional intelligence practices to their everyday lives, whether it's in the workplace, out of the workplace, in their relationships with their family and friends anything like that?
RC: Absolutely. We have a whole array of leadership skills that our apprentices learn and practice and the programs so I’ll kind of refer to a couple of those. Well first of all let me also add to the definition that I referred to that we also have adopted Daniel Goldman's construct of emotional intelligence, which is four components: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. And we have also taken the liberty to almost use them in a linear fashion that developing our emotional intelligence starts with self awareness. So part of it is to simply increasingly become aware of how we are feeling in as many moments as possible during a day. At Junto we use something called the emotion wheel as a prompt for that. Someone like myself, I used to not be able to get very specific about my emotions. I was someone who would say I'm feeling fine I'm feeling good.
I'm not feeling good today. The emotion wheel allow me to pinpoint very specific words that otherwise wouldn't come to mind on my own. And so that's the beginning. That's one thing that people can do and you can find an emotional wheel on the Internet. People download them, use them. They're very effective. We use it in my own home. We've got a bunch of companies that use in their homes around the dinner table. It's a great place to initiate conversation. It also then allows us to by doing that have empathy for other people because if you tell me that you're feeling surprise right now or angry or you're feeling a lot of love I can then understand where you're coming from. I may not know why but now I know how I can guide our interaction as a result of that. Second tip that we can all do better at In my opinion is just listening better. We live in a distracted world. And so yes putting away the devices is real helpful. At Junto we use a very simple framework of Stop Look and Listen. Stop everything that you're doing. Look at the person because the only way that we even have a sense that someone might be listening to us is by eye contact. So therefore it's important for us to give that signal to other people. And then listen with your full mind and body. And what we mean by that is we talk about squaring up in Junto, whereby we are squaring up our shoulders and our knees to people so that way I'm less likely to be distracted by something else and the other person again is receiving a signal that they have my full attention.
KG: You have a background in entrepreneurship and building companies from the ground up. What have you observed from leaders and other hustlers trying to reach their goals? Have you seen any strategies that work out particularly well, any common obstacles that come up, any personality traits that leaders tend to share personality types that they tend to be?
RC: Yeah absolutely. There are two that are in my experience are most common—I won’t go so far as saying essential but I've found them to be very important. One of them is tenacity, is just having that ability to not always take no for an answer. Having the ability to pick yourself up when you've been beaten down. In entrepreneurship there are more lows than there are highs and so the ability to just bounce back on a regular basis, the ability to power through a rough day. So tenacity is one import one. The second one is a little bit longer and that's the ability to cope with ambiguity, uncertainty and chaos. Our days are completely unpredictable. We also encounter like I said more lows than highs and so just that uncertainty of what's going to happen tomorrow or the next day, despite our best efforts just being able to cope with that is an important attribute.
And then once companies are up and running and the founders are starting to hire other people. That's where leadership becomes perhaps the most important trait or attribute. And at Junto we define leadership as moving people in the direction you're going. And that's really hard. It's really hard to inspire people, to influence them, to communicate effectively to encourage teamwork and collaboration so that people are achieving common objectives and that's what where emotional intelligence comes into play because the whole idea of recognizing and regulating emotions and other people and then using that information to guide our thinking, actions, and behavior comes into contact then with moving people in a direction you want to go. So that's why as a part of our program but you know back to your question of the attribute that leadership becomes so critical during the period when companies, when founders are starting to hire more and more employees in their businesses because they're growing.
KG: Do you see a clear difference between being a leader and being a manager?
RC: Yes. In fact we rarely even talk about managing, managers or management in Junto. Management in my view and in our view is something that is dealing with more of the known and has constraints around it. Management then in my experience and in my view is more relevant in larger organizations where there's plenty of history there's more predictability there's more definition. Leadership is more related to the unknown the uncertain. And back to our definition of moving people in the direction you want to go. We believe that leaders can't motivate people but they can inspire people. Motivation is an internal, is an intrinsic characteristic. But that inspiration can actually occur extrinsically and so that's a key distinction is management in our view doesn't incorporate that element of inspiring people or pulling them in the direction that one wants to go.
KG: The two traits that you mentioned earlier, the tenacity and the ability to cope with the unknown. Do you find that those are just inherent in people? Or is it something that you can work to develop if you recognize it as a weakness in yourself?
RC: Yeah, both. I think some people are wired and I'd like to think that I'm wired with the ability to cope with ambiguity, uncertainty and chaos. But I wasn't born with the tenacity. That's something that I acquired over time and I've seen other people flip, I've seen people who are what we call the accidental entrepreneurs that they lived a life that was very privileged and comfortable, they had everything they needed and wanted. They then entered large organizations where things were fairly predictable and stable and then boom all of a sudden at the age of 35, 40, 50 they became entrepreneurs and they all of a sudden discovered they had to have tenacity. They had to deal with the uncertainty and ambiguity and they've been successful. So I think that yes it can be acquired. It's a little bit harder perhaps, it's a big transition, it's far more uncomfortable but it can be both something that you're born with or something that can be developed.
KG: And if you're developing it is the only way to do it to just get thrown in the water and run with it and swim with it as it is?
RC: Certainly I think that is without a doubt one of the ways if not the most important way but the other one also is to recognize that this is normal and the only way to do that in our view is being around other people who are also experiencing it because we talk about how being an entrepreneur, it’s lonely at the top and there's so much truth to that. And so all of a sudden when one surrounds themselves with others who are going through the same thing no matter what business they're in or how old their businesses are or how big it is they realize that we're all going through the same things.
And so that all of a sudden gives us greater encouragement and drive to power through and it helps increase our tenacity because we're inspired by other people who've already done it.
KG: You just touched on the importance of leaders having people around them and how that can help make it a little less lonely at the top, help you go further than you would alone and that seems to be a big principle of the Junto Institute. Junto means together in Spanish, correct?
RC: Yes.
KG: One of the things we say at aSweatLIfe all the time is, everything is better with friends. Seems like a similar principle. Can you speak a little bit to how bringing these different companies together in a cohort for nine months really benefits each of them more so maybe than it would if you were working one on one with them?
RC: Back to this whole idea of lonely at the top is that any time that we're doing something on our own we're in our own head and sometimes we develop a narrative that is self-defeating. And this idea of doing it with other companies, this idea of doing it with your full team and then the idea of doing it with people who've been there and done that we have found to be just exponentially powerful. First of all they're just learning more and they're learning more because of the diversity that everybody brings to the table and I don't mean diversity in the common sense, I’m talking about diversity of industry diversity of product diversity of backgrounds in the people diversity of backgrounds in the companies. A tech company actually can learn a lot from a food company, or a food company can actually learn a lot from a manufacturing firm, and a manufacturing company can learn a lot from a services based company.
And we validate to that because they've all told us that. And then to add to that the fact that they learn together we call it growing together that this program is not focused on just the CEO or just a founder, it's the whole leadership team as well as key employees. They are building alignment and cohesion as they're going through this program together which then leads to greater alignment and greater cohesion in the future, which allows them to make better decisions faster ultimately leading to accelerated growth for the business.
KG: Though Junto you've had the chance to mentor some amazing entrepreneurs and watch some really incredible companies grow. Do any particular stories or companies that you've worked with stand out maybe in terms of what they learn from the program or how they changed after completing the nine months?
RC: Well I'm not going to name specific companies because everybody has their own stories. So I'll share maybe a couple of things that have been said by our graduates which we find to be fairly compelling and oftentimes humbling for us, needless to say very fulfilling and gratifying. In our very first cohort, our first graduation ceremony, we had a CEO get up on stage. At the time I want to say he was about 40 years old and his line, this is verbatim because I've repeated it so often was not only did Junto make me a better CEO, it made me a better hockey coach, a better husband, and a better father. Another one has said that Junto didn't change who I am but it has allowed me to become who I was supposed to become sooner. Another one has said that Junto—literally these were his words—literally saved our business.
We didn't know if we were going to make it and we didn't know that until we were in the program. And then we've discovered since then that some of the things that we did as a result of the program allowed us to not make mistakes we probably would've made otherwise. And that was two years ago and the COO attended our session this morning and they have almost doubled in size since the time they graduated. They have no worries about their survival. Now it's more about growing and optimizing their success.
KG: Raman, you just mentioned the graduation program you have for the cohort. I noticed on your Web site pictures of people wearing leather aprons at a graduation ceremony. What is the significance of that?
RC: So even though Junto means together in Spanish the name is actually inspired by Benjamin Franklin. And so Benjamin Franklin had a group of 12 artisans and tradesmen, when he was 21 years old in the year of 1727 and they would meet every Friday night for the purposes of mutual improvement and philosophical debate. And he called this group the Junto it's believed he called it the Yunto, almost like a Y. But the alternate but he had for that group was the leather apron club because back then, 1700s, these were blacksmiths and cobblers and lithographers. Men—and at that time it was all men—who literally wore leather aprons to work. So when we were planning for our first graduation ceremony I told Catherine my co-founder that I didn't want to kind of give conventional diplomas and certificates to our graduates.
So we were debating for a couple of days on what we could do and you know let's do a trophy let's do a plaque and those were all boring. And then one day just out of the clear blue I said to her let's see if we can find leather aprons, in a nod of Honor to Benjamin Franklin. And sure enough Catherine found this incredible organization in Guatemala where these women artisans hand stitch leather aprons. So it's a social venture to boot which makes it even more special. And we get them in laser engraved with the company's logos and our logo. And now it's become a thing. People, we’ve had, I’ve had several people ask me how they can buy them. I've said sorry they're not available for purchase, they're only bestowed to the companies that graduate from the program. So that’s story.
KG: I love that that is way more exciting than my diploma which is gathering dust at my parents’ house in Kentucky as we speak. But I love this idea that you mention of Benjamin Franklin bringing together you know a dozen different people to talk about all different topics and it makes me think about how whenever we're faced with a big decision or you're trying to reach a big goal you maybe tend to go to the same people over and over again whether it's people in your workplace or friends that have similar mindsets and similar personalities to you. And I'm wondering what you think about the value—when reaching for a goal or making a big change in your life of reaching outside your comfort zone or your normal circle of go-to people and getting a little more diversity in your inner circle or in your tribe.
RC: Yeah there's a lot of power to that. We actually in a very direct way we address that through our mentor program and our mentors are volunteers, they're not compensated by us nor are they investors in the companies so they're not being paid to be there and they don't have skin in the game. And that's a reflection of what we believe is true mentorship which is purity and objectivity in the learning and discovery process. And so I believe that even on an everyday basis while it's important and valuable to get insight and input from friends and family members or loved ones it's also invaluable to get it from people who don't have any vested interest. They don't love us like our friends and family do. So they can see an issue for its truth, for its purity and offer up experiences that relates to that.
And on that note I think that's another important thing that I want to emphasize is we don't allow advice giving in Junto, we only allow shared experiences and questions. And so the idea is that who am I to be telling you what you should do. Instead it's far more helpful to you in our opinion if I tell you what I've done in the past or what I know has worked or hasn't worked in the past or to ask you questions because that helps spurs your thinking ability and allows you to make a decision of your own based on what you're hearing from me as opposed to you doing what I tell you to do. And I think that that's something that's real powerful with people who are a little bit removed in our lives who aren't you know who don't love us who we don't know as well is if we rely on their shared experiences or ask them to ask questions they're going to be coming from a much more genuine place in wanting us to just address the issue and overcome our challenge versus wanting us to just feel better because they love us.
KG: Are there any other specific qualities that you think are crucial in a mentor-mentee relationship, for anyone who's looking to maybe find someone to act as their spirit guide, so to say?
RC: I’ll go back to what we were referring to earlier with regards to emotional intelligence. I believe that the mentor-mentee relationship is built on questions and listening. And I believe true mentorship is when the mentee brings really big important questions for that person and the mentor is able to ask big questions that he or she believes are important and that each side listens to the other. I don't believe mentorship is advising or counseling or coaching which to me is more directional and instructional and prescriptive. I believe mentorship is a discovery based activity and so that it helps being fed by questioning and listening.
KG: Through your work with Junto you spend a lot of your time mentoring other entrepreneurs and focusing on their goals. Do you ever have a hard time keeping track of your own personal goals in the process? Or would you say that you've learned anything about your own goal setting strategies through working with others?
RC: Yeah it's funny we in the last two years in Junto have stopped using the word goals.
KG: Really. Were you like, why am I on this podcast?
RC: No, no. And the reason is is because we learned that everyone defines differently, defines goal differently. So we actually started using the word priority.
KG: Interesting.
RC: Part of it also is from a timeliness standpoint that we discovered that a goal tends to be something that's far out in the distance whereas just changing the language to it, it could be the same goal. So my goal could be that I want to achieve 50 percent more profitability this year. But goal, from what we learned it just conveyed something that was further out in the distance versus a priority being 50 percent greater profitability gave me something to work on today and it made it more, there was a greater level of urgency around it just by changing the language so the idea is the same, that metric or quote unquote the goal is still the same. It's just using a different word created a different sensibility in people around us and it's worked. That's what we're hearing now, people use more than goals or objectives is the work priority.
KG: That’s really interesting to me as someone who is a former communications person and language nerd. The way that you choose a certain word can make all the difference.
RC: Yeah. Now I don't think I answered your question though right?
KG: Continue please.
RC: I don't have a hard time keeping track of my goals. And that's also because one of our core values at Junto is we practice what we teach and preach. And we've become very good as a business at developing our strategic plan and our annual plan that is built on priorities and we have a very limited number of priorities. And then each person has his or her own priorities that are tied to the company's priorities.
And because every week we review our progress against those, it's embedded in our day to day operations. So I've become much better at that I no longer have an issue like a lot of people I have in the past. I have become as a result also better at my personal priorities if you will just because I spend obviously like most people more of my waking hours working. So it bleeds into my personal life too.
KG: Well you could not have led me into our last question any better and I will shift the wording a little bit to reflect your language preferences. But what is a big priority that you have for the future and how do you plan to reach it?
RC: So actually I'm going to borrow something that has the word goal in it. You’ve probably heard of BHAGS before?
KG: I have not actually.
RC: So this is a term that's more in the business in the business world but it refers to a big hairy audacious goal.
KG: Oh I've heard that, I just hadn't heard it termed BHAGs.
RC: And so we have at Junto our vision is to be a global ecosystem of growth, humanity and virtue. And our BHAG is to have a tribe 1 million strong and our tribe consists of people who are alumni apprentices and mentors in our program. So as of today I think our tribe our tribe is about 230 or 240. I haven't counted it recently but it's in that range. So we have a long way to go. But what was really inspiring was yesterday we had a group of mentors come together for a meeting and one of them said, you will achieve that BHAG. With where you guys are at and it was great to hear that because this is someone who's far more experienced than any of us are. So that's our big hairy audacious goals is to have a tribe 1 million strong.
We're not hung up on it. Our big thing is focused on the priorities that are in front of us right now and if we keep staying focused on those and keep hitting those we know that BHAG will take care of itself.
KG: That must have been incredibly validating to hear someone else just say oh yeah you can do it. Have someone else in your corner. Well thank you so much Raman for being with us today. Before you go, can you give us a little more information about anyone out there who's interested in Junto, how they can learn more about it, maybe a little bit about what they would need to do to apply if there if it came to that, anything else we should know?
Sure. We currently operate in Chicago and we are launching in Los Angeles in 2018 as well. So those are the two markets that will be running our program. Our Web site is thejuntoinstitute.com and Junto is JUNTO, there is a link to apply to the program. And so we encourage anybody who runs a company that has 10 to 100 employees, one to 10 million in revenue. And they've been growing and want to grow. They also acknowledge that what got them to where they are isn't going to get them to where they want to be. So back to this idea of goals and priorities, they have an idea of where they want to be but they've recognized their limitations and now they want to tap into something that's far bigger than themselves. So we'd love to be able to talk to them and see if it's the right fit.
KG: I love that. All right well thank you so much for being with us today Raman and thanks for being on the #WeGotGoals podcast.
RC: You’re welcome, thanks for having me. I
CK: This podcast is produced by me, Cindy Kuzma ,and it's another thing that's better with friends. So please share it with yours. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and if you get a chance to leave us a rating or view while you're there we would be so grateful. Special thanks to J. Mano for our theme music; to Raman Chadra, our guest this week; and to Tech Nexus for the recording studio.
#WeGotGoals hosted by aSweatLife
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