#135 - Nathan Ott, Co-founder of The GC Index - On enabling game changers to maximize their impact

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to empower organizations to deliver remarkable impact by creating game-changing teams and cultures. My guest is Nathan Ott, Co-founder and Chief Polisher at The GC Index

Nathan has over 20 years of experience working with business leaders to get the best from their talent. He is the co-author of two studies: The DNA Of A Game Changer and The DNA Of A Game-Changing Team, and published ‘Coaching Me, Coaching You’.

Today, he is the vision and driving force behind The GC Index. He has a fundamental belief that everyone can make an impact in their world and has created a global community of GC Partners and GCologists.

They are working globally with a diverse range of commercial and non-profit organisations, and help their clients understand how their employees can make an impact and helps leaders create game-changing teams and cultures.

The GC Index framework is disrupting the way people manage talent. It’s not only being used to help individuals be the very best they can be, but it is liberating organisations to embed their diversity and innovation initiatives to impact tangible business outcomes. And that inspired me, and hence I invited Nathan to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the world of managing talent. Too often, we look for someone’s personality and academic background, rather than connecting people to business outcomes, and in particular, what type of outcomes people can have maximum impact on. We also dive into ways we can fix this challenge and deliver remarkable impact by blending people and technology in the right way.

Here are some of his quotes:

A lot of organizations would come to us and say: “We need some people to make a change.” We would sit down with them and use their traditional frameworks for assessing these people. And then they would say to us, these senior leaders: “Just get me some people that ‘get it’.”

That started me thinking of what is this thing that everyone can recognize, but can't explain?

The things that the business leaders were describing to us was something different. They wanted people that were different to what they were getting. And so, we termed those individuals game changers.

The GC index got formed as a language and a framework for impact. So it’s a piece of software that aligns people's impacts to business outcomes and roles. And that's when the magic really started to happen.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. That too often we focus our software solutions on optimizing the impact of an individual doing a specific task, without looking at the exponential leverage they can create in a setting with the right people around them.
2. Why it’s key to make the distinction between innovation and invention – as a software business you need to find the right balance in order to stay relevant in your category.
3. Why alignment and collaboration are key to create breakthroughs – and how to orchestrate that by addressing the tensions in the boundaries
4. How one solution can be marketed through multiple business models concurrently

For more information about the guest of this week:

• Nathan Ott
• The Game Changing Index