30 Points of Engagement in Six Hours

Omar L. Harris ran a 900 person organization in Indonesia and nearly sank it with a handful of bad hires. He explains the character framework he wrote to save himself, why a resume predicts almost nothing, and how six hours with a team moved engagement 30 points.

Omar L. Harris ran a 900 person organization in Indonesia and nearly sank it with a handful of bad hires. To dig out, he wrote himself a manual. That manual became a book, the book became eight more, and the whole thing became a framework for the part of a business most founders treat as an afterthought.

Matt builds operating systems out of software. Omar builds them out of people. Same word, opposite raw material, and the conversation goes straight at where the two meet.

In this episode

• Why a resume is a marketing document, and what actually predicts how someone shows up
• The difference between a personality test and a character test, which is what you choose under pressure
• Six hours with a team, fourteen teams, and a 30 point jump in engagement six weeks later
• Why culture built with a team sticks and culture handed to a team does not
• The three things that send any team back to square one
• The person who knows everything, and the incentive quietly paying them to stay that way
• Where AI stops being useful and human judgment takes over

Timestamps

1. 00:00Intro
2. 00:49Nine books, and a novel that took twelve years
3. 01:34Rebuilding a 900 person organization in Indonesia
4. 02:25Grow With W.H.O.M., eleven years in the making
5. 03:08Why pedigree and references predict less than behavior
6. 04:29Character assessment versus personality assessment
7. 05:17Walking away from the corporate job, twice
8. 06:27What carries across every market he has worked in
9. 08:26What a culture operating system actually is
10. 10:43Forming, storming, norming, performing, and how to speed it up
11. 11:43The three things that send any team back to forming
12. 14:30Fourteen teams, six hours each, 30 points of engagement
13. 16:19What happens after the first engagement ends
14. 17:20Where AI stops and judgment starts
15. 20:24Who should not install a culture operating system
16. 22:09Tribal knowledge and the incentive behind it
17. 24:29The assessments he is certified on and how he uses them
18. 26:10Where to find Omar

Omar L. Harris

Founder of Intent Consulting and author of nine books, including Leaderboard: The DNA of High Performing Teams and his latest, Grow With W.H.O.M. Former general manager for a pharmaceutical business in Indonesia, with earlier roles in Brazil and Turkey.

W.H.O.M. stands for Work Ethic, Heart, Optimism, Maturity. The book and the free character assessment are both at growwithwhom.com. He is on LinkedIn as Omar L. Harris.

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