The Key To Building A Team Of Pure Genius With Tracy Hazzard From Get Fundable Podcast With Merrill Chandler
In this episode, we have got such an amazing guest. Tracy Hazzard is what has become a dear friend, a genius of a mentor. She has facilitated the growth of the Fundability Movement in ways. Her team produces all of our shows. She is a giant in my heart and business and industry. We are here to talk about her day in celebration of Women’s History Month, how she has navigated the shoals of gender, and her full genius in this episode.
The key to building a team of pure genius? Create a culture of empathy and efficiency. Tracy Hazzard talks with Merrill Chandler about how she color-codes her team into four quadrants. Each color refers to unique skills. We need people with these different skill sets, but they have to be able to listen to each other. To reconcile what they hear against what they learned. Open-mindedness has to be present to help the team move forward. Tune in!
Listen to the podcast here
Short Blog Content:
Q: The reason why this is up for me is you’re building a culture in your organization of how to collaborate. That’s a creative quality. That’s cohesive and conjoining, receptivity, and openness. Those are all feminine creative traits. The cut and dry check box listing, that’s the masculine and strategic way. How do you marry those?
A: We do something slightly different. It’s a little more nuanced than two sides to it. It’s four quadrants. It’s the Herrmann Brain Dominance Model. We do that. We work with corporate culture development, Bill Stierle. You know Bill, probably. You’ve met him before. We work with him, and our entire team trains with him. Tom trained to do sales languaging with him and read people better. What you do when you study it is there are four quadrants. When we start to put feminine masculine language into things, it starts to get people’s shackles up.

Team Of Pure Genius: What we strive for is harmony with the four quadrants
They start to be like, “That’s not me. I don’t want to be known as that.” It’s the same thing when you study DISC or anything like that. I was like, “I don’t want to be that.” You’re preventing yourself. This aligns you with colors so that they never had this association with any names or labels. We’re removing the labels except for color. If you hated yellow, you’d be in trouble. We’ll say, “Merrill’s yellow.” What that usually means is you’re a visionary. You have a lot of creativity in your process, and we’re looking toward that.
You also got a lot of red. Red means you need human interaction. You’re good with people. You’re empathetic in that way. You crave that human touch. You might prefer a phone call versus an email. It’s an embodiment for you. We look at those yellow and red on what you would consider to be that feminine and creative side. The blue and green are all about checkboxes, to-do lists, and analysis. The interesting part is in my team, there are a lot more blue-green dominant women in my company who are all about the systems, checkboxes, and procedures.
We need people with different skill sets who can talk to each other and not upset each other. #TLH GI - Tracy Leigh Hazzard-Getting Interviewed #Tracy Leigh Hazzard #podcastinterview Click To TweetQ: As we move to our conclusion, name it again, that quadrant thing so they can go to the website or subscribe. Who’s the author or inventor of it?
A: It’s Herrmann Brain Dominance Institute, HBDI. He writes and talks about it all the time. It’s BillStierle.com. He writes and talks about communication languages in politics and companies. He’s done things like the Flint, Michigan water issue. The City of Flint did not do a good job of communicating with the community. They were getting death threats because people were so angry.

Team Of Pure Genius: There might be something new, and we can collaborate instead of feeling an opposition.
He was brought in to help mediate, but that’s not what he did. He taught them how to empathize and communicate back and forth so that they could change the languaging. He does that down in San Diego and some other water boards and other places like that. This is where we all can benefit from that when we can sit back and say, “That was a tragic use of language. You’re angry about this.”
Sometimes we say it like, “You pulled the pin out and just dropped that grenade right there.” It’s the word grenade. That can be the case. We want to watch those things, but if we see and recognize them for what they are, then we can move into a place where we don’t have to be using them. We can say, “Speak to the pain and the need.” This is where you can be great at sales if you know this because you can start to understand what they’re saying.
We need to give ourselves the grace to keep making progress and stop saying this isn't worth it. #TLH GI - Tracy Leigh Hazzard-Getting Interviewed #Tracy Leigh Hazzard #podcastinterview Click To TweetYou can also understand what their default mode of communication is. In my particular case, they’re looking at podcasting as an authority and ego boost. They want it for all of those reasons. The last thing I want to do is give them the checklist of all the things they’re going to have to do because the chances are that it’s going to shut them down, and I’ll lose the sale. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have that, but that’s why they’re coming to me because I have this checklist for them. Not because they want to know what it is.