Why We Built The Crucible: The Missing Piece of Leadership Assessment

In this episode of the Leadership Quotient Podcast, we're sharing a recent conversation between Lindsay Guzowski and Dave Trueira from the GrowthLogic Podcast. Lindsay discusses why she founded The Crucible after seeing traditional leadership assessments repeatedly miss the mark in investor-backed companies. The conversation explores why leadership success is contextual, how team dynamics influence performance, and why evaluating leadership teams—not just individual executives—can lead to better hiring, stronger development, and greater value creation.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Leadership Quotient Podcast. This week, we're sharing a recent conversation I had on the Growth Logic podcast with Dave Truera. We covered why I built the Crucible, why leadership assessment needs to be different for investor-backed companies, and why evaluating leadership teams and not just individuals can dramatically improve hiring, development, and value creation. If you've ever wondered what makes the crucible different, or why we believe leadership fit is contextual, I hope you enjoyed this conversation.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

I am Dave Truera and really happy to be joined by Lindsay Gazowski today. Lindsey, let's dive right in. I'll tee you up a little bit and then uh I'll ask you to just talk a little bit about your organization and what you do and whatnot. Lindsay Gazowski is founder and CEO of the Crucible. Uh, they started back in 2019, and uh I'm excited to have a dialogue of uh all the trials and tribulations that have happened since uh over the last six years. So Lindsay, like I said, thanks for coming on board today. Tell the audience just a little bit about um the crucible, what you all do and what customers you serve.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Yeah, so the crucible is a behavioral assessment for individuals and teams. And we built it explicitly for the investor-backed portfolio company market. We've had some good use of it outside of that sphere for people that want that same level of rigor. But the idea was that there are a lot of assessments on the market, some of which are okay, some of which are very much not, not statistically valid, not predictive. But even those that are okay tend not to be specific enough to the skills and traits that are necessary for investor-backed spaces. These are usually scenarios where the private equity or venture capital owners want to hold the business for four, five, six years. They need really change-driven management or people that can take a business from one place and bring it to another. And there are specific behavioral traits that need to be emphasized within that sphere. So it came about because I was working in executive recruiting for private equity and kept using assessments that were not good. And I got particularly frustrated one day when I was working with a client who later we demonstrated that there was a negative correlation between that assessment and success. And they kept eliminating really excellent executives. And my background is quantitative sociology. I said to the people I was working with, why do you use this assessment? They said, Because there's nothing better out there. I said, if there was, would you use that? They said, sure, probably thinking I was going to recommend a different one. And I said, Great, I'll go build it for you. And so, and that was a conversation at the end of 2019, um, across the next two and a half years. Built, tested, validated, ensured that we weren't introducing bias, ensured the test wasn't biased, and then rolled out initially our individual level assessment. And now we also have a team level assessment, and we're looking to continue to expand from there.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

Wow. What an incredible origin story. I love that. I'll just go build it myself. And two, so two and a half years to to create and develop and really finalize this proprietary software.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

It's the biggest challenge when you're talking about assessments and other sociologically driven tools is that there are a lot of ideas about what could go into it. And not all of those things are are useful. And so you end up with testing for things that don't matter. And so we didn't want to have sections we were testing for that weren't relevant. And on the flip side, we wanted to make sure that everything we were testing for had not just measurability, but validity for the space.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Amazing. Very, very cool. How did you settle on the investor by P E V C type of uh vertical?

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Yeah, in part because that's where I was coming from. Okay. I'd worked on the deal side and private equity prior to being an executive recruiter for the portfolio company space, and it was where I saw the need. The assessments that are on the market, even the good ones, generally have a comparison set that says, I'm assessing this C level executive, and the executive comparison set in the market is includes people that are managers in Fortune 500 companies. That's not exactly the same population set. And we were also seeing that they were comparing people of a huge variety of sizes and experience levels. And it just didn't make a lot of sense because you cluster at sort of the upper end for the talent. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 4:46

Yeah, no, that makes complete sense. Inside of these portfolio companies, these catalogs of organizations that you work with, uh with these P or VC firms, is there like an ideal customer profile or is it all over the map?

SPEAKER_00 5:01

Yeah, we like working with groups that are still in a stage of growth and change.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

It's there are a few different um aspects to that question. I'll address first the the companies, the portfolio companies. Typically groups that are looking to continue to grow, continue to scale, go through sort of the next step change in their evolution. If you are working with a company that needs to maintain, that's not as compelling for me. And the assessment doesn't matter as much in that world because you're looking for a different personality type. But when you're talking about taking something from idea to initial market viability to growth and scale, and then into that next phase where you're truly expanding, those are all fairly unique profiles of someone who has to be driven to action and have a sense of urgency, have intellectual curiosity, have solid empathy in specific, sort of specific combinations as well. And so we like working with groups that are in those phases, not in the we've been operating as a market leader for a hundred years and intend to stay that market leader for the next kind of concept.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:17

Well, from the investor side, just to address that side of it, the people I want to work with, and granted we work with some others as well, but the people I want to be working with are those that are thinking about talent as a lever for their organizations. These aren't, they're not putting in C-suite leaders to be stewards. They're looking for people that are really going to be the difference makers and clients that want to invest in development and talent because they know that having great leaders who work well together will make for better exits and frankly just generate everyone more money.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Yeah, 100%. Uh, in addition to the phase of the business life cycle as it pertains back to the portfolio companies, are there any types of specific industries like, you know, your your biotech, your pharma manufacturing, or are you pretty vertical agnostic?

SPEAKER_00 7:09

We're pretty vertical agnostic. I can say what I haven't done any work in. We've not done work in oil and gas. We've not done work in pure, pure financial services that aren't related to investments. So I'm, you know, I'm not looking for the heads of banks and things of that nature. But we've done work across a huge swath of other verticals. And, you know, a lot of it tends to be in some of these more knowledge-based industries, services companies, multi-site. We've done some franchising, healthcare, lots of manufacturing, even food and food service.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

Great. That's awesome. I am a huge proponent of assessments. I'm probably candidly more familiar with uh a lot of the individual assessments, and we don't have to go through on our names here or anything like that. But I'm curious, you mentioned um a moment ago, like individual assessments versus group assessments. Could you just tell the audience a little bit about the difference if you have any, you know, additional thoughts towards that?

SPEAKER_00 8:08

Yeah, sure. So when people typically think of assessments, they do think of these individual assessments. It's something that you take to learn about yourself or that a company takes to learn or has you take to learn about you. And those are incredibly useful. It's part of why that's one of our solutions. You need to know what you can leverage from a strengths perspective, from a weaknesses perspective, places to develop, places to ignore, frankly, and supplement with others. And that last piece gets into why it's critical to also think about when you're building a leadership team, doing a team assessment. And so the way that the crucible works, and we're data nerds, um, we're focused on the data side of the fence and doing things that are really analytical in nature, not consultative in nature. There are some really wonderful organizational architects that can come in and talk to people and work with them over the course of weeks and months to ensure that teams are well constructed, culture is consciously created, all of those great things. What we do is we take these assessments that are done by individuals. And the crucible takes, you know, let's call it 30 to 45 minutes for people to take. It's 160-ish questions, and then gets into an archetype, five catalysts, 36 elements, uh, six contaminants that really specify, again, what people do well, opportunities for improvement, things they can leverage, how they react under stress, all that good stuff. We then take those individual results and do a conjoint analysis for that team to say when these people are going to work together, where do they have areas of group strength, group weakness, areas of imbalance? And imbalance isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes people are well lopsided as a part of a team. And then we also look at areas of group tension. And that last one can be, I think, the most impactful when you're talking about understanding a team. Because group weakness, you can generally mitigate. You add another person to the team, you know, figure out that there are structures you have to put in place to work around that. Fine. But areas of tension means that some people are operating over here and others are operating over here, and they're not gonna see eye to eye. So you can't advance any projects, initiatives are going to stall. There are components of how people are communicating where they're just simply gonna be on different pages. One of the things that we look at, and I'll tell a quick story where this came up in practice, was the hierarchy of that leadership team and both the way people process information and their bias for action. So, in some scenarios, if your CEO has a bias for action that's considerably lower than some people working for them, you can have people that butt heads pretty regularly and it doesn't work very well. You generally want your CEO to be at or near the top of the bias for action scale for that team. Doesn't have to be off the charts, it has to be relative to the rest of the team. But a scenario we saw recently was that there was a team that was made up of some truly fantastic executives. Each executive on their individual assessments did very, very well. But the team was broken. There was something fundamentally wrong with how they were communicating. And their messaging to the market didn't match their initiatives internally. People were regularly frustrated. There was even a person that had stopped showing up at meetings because they didn't feel they were being listened to. So we run this, you know, group team analysis, and it shows where there were areas of group strength, they were all extremely bright, they had strategic vision, they understood how to get into the details, had high urgency, all the things you're looking for on those respects. The challenge was that most of the team operated in such a way that they needed to process information through talking and tended to be reactive to information. Their head of marketing tended to process information internally and wanted to create plans before taking action. And with that, and she moved very quickly, but it was such a different style that that team didn't work at all. And if your head of marketing isn't on the same page as everyone else, you've effectively broken your ability to communicate to the market.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

For sure.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

And so they were seeing that everything they were trying was getting stymied, not because she wasn't a great leader, but because she was the wrong leader for that group. Yeah. And so the fund, to their credit, actually talked to her directly about that and found a place in one of their other portfolio companies to offer her a position because they recognized she was a phenomenal leader. It just wasn't phenomenal in that environment.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Wow. What a fantastic anecdotal story. I appreciate you sharing that. With the testing, whether it's individual or group assessment, what's a typical, I'm sure it varies, what's a typical frequency? Are you just implementing a test if there's a change within the team or is it a once-a-year type thing? What does that look like?

SPEAKER_00 13:05

Yeah. So our test is valid for roughly two years.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

And there are two reasons why that would not be the case. The first is that a major change has happened. If you tested people immediately before COVID and immediately after they all went remote and various things happened and people were stressed out, the scores may not be the same. Certain areas would be, but a lot of other things, people had dramatic shocks to how they viewed themselves, how they worked, how everything happened. Again, that'll normalize over time. But making sure that you're aware that it's not a high stress, point break kind of situation that you're testing a black swan as opposed to testing the normalized environment. In those cases, you want to test again when things have returned to normal, just to get a better baseline. But the other place that a two-year cycle is less valid is if someone consciously works on a given area. So we find that frequently people will take the test, identify an area that on which they'd like to improve, and go out and hire a coach or take classes or do something to improve that specific thing. And when they retake the test, they tend to do considerably better in that area because they've actively worked on it. Where they don't do better is on the rest of the test. And in some areas, might go down in compensation. For instance, if you're someone who wanted to work to become more metrics focused, more system and process focused, and your highlight previously was that you were a very relational human. Well, if you start diving into metrics and spreadsheets, some of those other skills may not be quite as strong anymore in a relative sense, but it tracks with what you were trying to achieve. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

And those two scenarios that are more against the norm, especially the the black swan COVID one that makes total sense. Um those are are pretty crystal clear. But kudos to the validity of the test and how comprehensive it is to be valid for two years. Seems pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

Yeah, it's it's one of these scenarios where if you test people too frequently, the numbers just don't change enough for it to be useful for them. Yeah. And so you really have to have that life or business experience and work with others and figure out who you're becoming because we all change every day. We're learning and growing, hopefully. And so it it really takes about that period of time to see enough of a movement for it to matter.

SPEAKER_01 15:27

I would agree. You just brought up, you know, life's life teams change. It's all constant, right? So six years ago, when you got this initial idea for the genesis of what is now the crucible and this ride you've had to where we are today point in time. Two-part question. What are some of the kind of defining success stories you've had? And what are some of the major hurdles and obstacles you've had to overcome?

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Yeah, I think, and I'll start with the second. The major hurdle is that we're new to the market in an area where people have been giving assessments like this since the 1920s. And some of these names have been around since then. Most of the ones that have been around since then aren't any good and don't have much more statistical validity than horoscopes. But that said, it's still there. So displacing what people are doing is difficult. What's even more difficult than that is displacing apathy. And so trying to convince people that testing for leaders and helping to develop leadership is critical and important for the next wave of value creation in these investor-backed markets. That's been one of the largest challenges, but it's a challenge that I'm excited about taking on. Success stories. So when we started, we were just an individual assessment. And then we wanted, and we, this was always a part of the vision, to be able to test teams. So being able to go from an individual assessment to a team assessment was huge for us because it allowed us to be more comprehensive. One of the other big things that we did, which is very exciting to me, is being able to generate enough interest and acceptance in the market that we can actually put people on subscriptions as opposed to just selling one-off tests. And that's that's a great validation of the fact that the tool works and works for those funds. And the last thing is that we can configure the algorithm for a given funds governance style. So what does good look like for fund XYZ? That might be very different than what good looks like for fund ABC. We work with one fund that cares a lot about execution, does not care nearly as much about interpersonal skills. There's another fund that tends to buy founder-led companies. They care a lot about the fact that people can bring people along with them, and they may not care quite as much about things like competitiveness. And so we need to make sure that we can be flexible for all of that. And we've been able to do that as well, which is very exciting.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

That is exciting. And we've talked a lot about teams today, too. And you have your your own team, correct?

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Have you put your own team to the to the test with the crucible?

SPEAKER_00 18:00

I have. We do pretty well. Um it's interesting because I make people take it before they're familiar enough with it. Because retesting us at this point, we're far too familiar with what the uh the answers could and should be, even in the context of one another, for that to remain valid. It that's uh it's hard to take off the analytical hat once you know what the how the sausage is made behind the scenes.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

But yes, we did put everyone through it.

SPEAKER_01 18:27

So that's good to hear. Are you and your colleagues within your organization leveraging artificial intelligence for the crucible software or just your own operational efficiencies or anything external with your with your clientele?

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Yeah. So our head of of data and technology actually has a master's in machine learning and artificial intelligence. So it's something that we do try to leverage for operational efficiency. We use it when we're trying to understand our data set in more depth. There are a lot of statistical things we can do, but there are a lot of bits of information that may not be obvious or it may not occur to us, you know, which set of things we should be analyzing together. A lot of that is human judgment, a lot of that is trying to figure out from the numbers. AI can help at least point a direction, which can help for operational efficiency. And when we write up the team reports and things of that nature, sometimes it's helpful to have some AI assistance in making that work. Where it's actually more useful, and this is not AI, but it is machine learning techniques, is when we are configuring the algorithms for given funds. Usually they don't have hundreds of people that we've tested. They've got tens. And being able to generate simulated data and understanding how to use advanced statistical techniques that machine learning can really help us do makes it more applicable and able to be extrapolated from a smaller data set, which is fantastic and has real predictive capabilities for these funds.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

Yeah, that's great. Let me ask you as we get close to wrapping up here, as you uh glance into the future, if if we were to talk, you know, 12 months from now, what is the Crucible setting out to accomplish? What strategic goals and initiatives do you have over the next year?

SPEAKER_00 20:13

So we are hopeful to be able to launch something we're working on currently, which is an assessment specific to salespeople and sales managers. Those are the hardest positions to hire for in the middle market and lower middle market companies. And the people who are the right people to sell your product may not be the right people to manage those that are selling your product. So, with all of that, we want to be able to help these companies figure out who those people should be and what those teams should look like and how they're gonna relate to their bosses. And so we're working pretty hard on that right now. Uh, we're also working on a couple academic papers to help get some publications behind some of the really cool things that we've seen over time.

SPEAKER_01 20:55

That is awesome. Well, seems like some exciting happenings on the horizon for your company uh in the the months and year to come. That's uh it's very cool. Um, as we wrap, what are some general advice that you would have for anyone in the audience listening in?

SPEAKER_00 21:12

Yeah, I think that there's a few things. The first is that every assessment gives some interesting information to people. Some are directionally accurate, some are fun to take, some can help highlight where you can leverage your strengths. Be a little bit critical about the assessments that you're taking, but use everything. It's all data and it it's all something that we can learn from. As you're doing that, do so in the context of others. Optimizing yourself is effectively irrelevant if it's optimizing for the wrong thing relative to those with whom you're working. And so making sure that you're not trying to become someone else when what really matters is to be a great teammate. And finally, I think that it's just that we can all learn and grow. One of the differences in how we constructed the crucible is that we did it from a sociological perspective and said, what does good look like, not what are people inherently like? And so it wasn't this is something I'm born with and something, a trait that I will have for the rest of my life. Everyone can develop skills. Everyone can learn to be better at things. Everyone can choose who they want to be in some capacity. And identifying what that is and figuring out how to construct your own path consciously is a really important part of being a great leader.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

Love it. Sound advice and very uh, you know, very great insights that you've shared. I love being a good teammate. I think that's incredibly important. And couldn't agree more with having a growth mindset over a fixed mindset. So we're very much unlocked up there.