L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Highlight Episode: L&D's Changing Identity, the Pace of AI Adoption, and Connection-First Leadership

Episode Date: August 22, 2023

This week, we’re wrapping up our first 4 months of interviews with a selection of highlights. So far, we’ve featured Learning and Development legends, renowned futurists, global leadership consultants, visionary content creators, and bestselling authors. We look back at the hottest takes on the changing nature of L&D roles, the unprecedented pace of technological progress, and what leaders must do to adapt to an ever-evolving world of work.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. Hello, and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today, dear listener, we are doing something a little bit different. As we've reached episode 20, which I find to be a suitable enough milestone, we're going

to do a highlight episode. So what follows will be a series of important snippets from each of our first 19 episodes. For those of you who have yet to listen to every single episode, this will be a good introduction to some of our wonderful guests. And ideally, you will be inspired to go back and listen to some of those episodes in their entirety. So let's dive in. First off, this is from my conversation with Nigel Payne. Right now, what I've seen from you and your recent writings and in an upcoming talk that you're going to be giving is you are addressing how we need to reframe L&D. And I would love for you to just quickly give an overview as to what you mean by that and which

direction you think we should go in learning and development. I don't think we need to reframe L&D because I think it's a good idea. I think we need to reframe L&D because organizations need to adjust to what I consider to be almost a different age, an age of insecurity, insubstantiality, massive change, and forces unknown operating in our world with a breath of air, things fundamentally change. And the idea that L&D, in the face of all of that, of all these huge organizational needs, sits back and offers a program of courses managed on an LMS, counted by statistics, and that is their job, seems to me to be increasingly wildly inappropriate. So I think there's a divergence at the moment, and I want to get back to convergence,

a divergence between what organizations really need in terms of learning and understanding, and what a lot of conventional L&D offers, I think things need to be aligned. Because I have naive and big thoughts. And one of them is that this is the century of people, organizations will improve, not through buying more technology, that's just there, you know, that underpins everything we do. But by getting more out of people, and to get more out of people, it's not just about their competence, their skills, it's about their comfort, their belief, their engagement, their motivation. And all of those things are at the heart of what I think a contemporary L&D operation should be involved in,

part of what I think contemporary L&D operation should be involved in. And many are not. That's my mission. Next up from when I spoke with Donald Taylor. So what about proper learning analytics then? Learning analytics and consulting more deeply with the business saw small but noticeable bumps in the survey results that you had. And VRT, which is a European, I think VR provider, did a survey as well earlier this year, about 150 L&D pros is their market. And they said only 9% of those folks are actually trying to measure a direct ROI of learning. So, you know, less than one out of 10 are actually looking at ROI. And to nobody's surprise, most analytics, most data that's collected is still just sort of like satisfaction surveys, whether it's from the actual learners or the

leaders who are kind of overseeing the learning. So based on your survey results and everything, do you think that we need to work harder at establishing how to find an effective ROI with learning? Yeah, we absolutely do. And it isn't difficult, and it is very difficult. And I'll come back to the survey in a minute, because there's an interesting series of data points around this from the survey for the past 10 years. But it's not difficult, because all you've got to do is do what the business needs. And that's why it's difficult, because you have to find out what the business needs, not what the business says it wants. Very often the business says, oh, I need new time management course for my people. Actually, no, what you need is better management from the person who thinks they have people need the course. Going and having the

conversations with the business that establish the exact need is an area where L&D is undoubtedly lacking, which is why consulting more deeply with the business is one of the options on the survey, because that's actually what is crucial. You've got to consult with the business, and then you've got to come back and show value. Oh, you've got this issue, but when it did something, and look, we managed to produce a result. That is where L&D needs to start with everything. And it doesn't. It's still learning development sees its role as being largely the creation and dissemination of content. Coming back to the survey, if you look back to 2016, the survey results for both showing value and consulting more deeply with the business have pretty much been a flat

line for the past five years. And the numbers are important because for the past five years, each year, we've had more people joining the survey. For the past five years, the numbers are important because for the past five years each year we've had more people joining the survey for the past five years the numbers have increased for those very slightly it wouldn't matter that it's if it was only a very slight increase normally you might say well that's just statistical variation it's just your sampling but the thing is that over time every other option on this survey has descended in value. It's just what happens. People get excited about something, and then the excitement dies away. But not with these two. With these two, they have failed to die away. Now, that gives me hope, Tyler, for the future. It makes me think

that there is a group of people out there, and it's typically around 6.5% of the people vote for these things, and the top value is roughly 12% on the survey. So there is a core of people who each year are backing this and are saying it's important to them. And it's slightly increasing each year. So that makes me feel that there is hope for the future, but we might take a long time getting to the point where it's absolutely normal to start with consulting with the business. This is from my conversation with Ravindra Jaisuthasan. So let's dive in as to how to address this quantum of change. You use the term letting the talent flow to the work. I'd love for you to expand on that and describe a little bit more what you mean by that term. Yeah, absolutely. And it ties back, Tyler, to that fourth principle where I talked about perpetual reinvention and reducing the frictional cost of work.

In the book, we talk about three models for work. Think of them as fixed, flex, and flow. The fixed model is the one that we've had for the last 140 years. A one-to-one relationship between a person and a position, things like job architectures being used to connect people to work. What we're seeing with many large companies now is this flexible model of emerge where you and I might be in jobs, but we have the flexibility to express our skills in other parts of the organization where those skills are demanded. And we have the opportunity to go acquire new skills by taking on projects and assignments and gigs. And so we have space, if you will, within our existing jobs to flexibly acquire or express skills. It's one of the reasons why we've seen so many companies introduce talent marketplaces. And then the third model, the flow model, if you will, is one which I think of as

being agile on steroids. And what I mean by that is everyone might be an employee, they might be a gig worker, you know, the form or the construct of the relationship doesn't matter. But the way they connect to work is by continuously connecting to work through assignments and gigs and projects. And this is where you have algorithms continuously matching your skills and your developmental needs to opportunities to express those skills and acquire them. It's where we're seeing this really take off, Tyler, is for within organizations where you have demand for certain skills across the company.

Think data scientists, think digital talent, think program managers. I don't want them confined to IT or finance because I need their skills in marketing. I need their skills in HR. I need their skills in, exactly, product development, in sales, in customer analytics, in, who can think about redesigning work to enable this as we want to be with AI and just, you know, as organizations and as business leaders and that sort of thing in the world. And I want to know, how do you feel right now? It's been a couple years since you wrote the book. Are we on the right path when it comes to HI and AI? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, first of all, I just want to thank you for the compliments and also for noticing, yes, I did coin that term HI. I was actually really excited to discover that it wasn't in use and actually very excited

to sort of talk about it in the context of the rapidly evolving landscape around AI technology. I just thought it was just so timely and lucky. I knew that as I was writing the book, AI tech was evolving really rapidly and all the experts and signs were sort of starting to point in that direction just as a result of the pandemic. A lot of companies were adopting AI technologies very rapidly. And now that has accelerated even more, as you pointed out. And you probably noticed that I brought in a lot of economic concepts into my book. I think economics provides just really great frameworks for us to think about things and see how decisions are made. And one framework I thought was really helpful to understanding sort of these trade-offs with AI and HI was this

concept of production possibilities frontier. So a PPF, and some of you might remember from Economics 101, it's basically a graph. And so it's just a curved graph and it shows all the different combinations of output based on investment trade-offs. And so I like to actually just give a good example. I can't remember what I used in the book, but a favorite example of mine is the trade-off between shelter and food. And I think that's just one we can all relate to. We spend money on our home, we spend money on food. We understand that spending more money on our home leaves less money for food and vice versa. And there's an optimal point for most of us at which we're balancing the possibilities and we have the right house for us

and the right food that we want to eat, whether we like to dine out frequently or whether we like to make frugal meals at home. Those differences all depend on our own individual preferences. And really, it's kind of interesting that the concept of diminishing returns comes into play here too, because having a bigger home may result in increased pleasure, but there's a point in which having a nicer home starts to matter less, particularly if you're not able to eat because of it. And so if you think about AI and HI, the PPF is just a really great framework to think about how we're making investments in people and technology. And one of the questions

that struck me is, really, are we investing enough in HI given the investment in AI? And I think the philosophical underpinnings of this is just very compelling. You know, I think that we are investing in helping computers learn with AI. And so what are we doing to help employees learn? And I do think we are making investments in helping people learn. And I'll talk about that a little bit later. But I think it's important that we think about how we're pacing our investment in AI really thoughtfully so that we're aligning human advancement with technical advancement. A report actually was just published today by McKinsey today on June 14th that it highlighted four areas of occupations that would be disrupted by AI. And the article actually said that 850 occupations

are going to be disrupted and that AI is going to automate 60 to 70% of what employees do today. And so that is just unprecedented disruption to work. And it's really important that we take a step back and make sure that we're pacing that in a way that people have the right skills to manage through that change and also navigate their careers as well. And then also we have to understand how that might adversely impact people and result in inequality and things like that. Next up, you'll be hearing from Michelle Weiss. In some cases, we're talking about the potential to have 20 to 30 or even more career changes for those who are living longer and working longer. Do you think this will result in even more competent workers? Will it result in just greater stress?

What is the ultimate outcome going to be of those who are changing careers so much? And how do organizations handle that? If we keep moving down the route we are on, yes, it's inevitable that this is just gonna be a more stressful experience for all of us. And this is the point of the book is in order to begin building this better functioning, healthier learning ecosystem

where we begin to pull together these five elements around really trying to understand how we help people navigate to the next career, how we support them and kind of wrap them with 360 degree support services and give them just what they need or integrate it into their earning experience. And then how that manifests in kind of more fair, transparent hiring practices. What I've tried to do with this book is to articulate, these are the major pain points we're seeing for people who are currently not thriving

in the labor market. But if we can solve for these pieces and begin to stitch this together so that anyone that we pull off the sidewalk and we ask them, hey, how are you gonna navigate your next job change? They're gonna know exactly who to call, where to go for that trusted advice, which learning provider will launch them into that better economic opportunity, and which employers are really thinking about

internal mobility pathways and are going to give me a fair shot to prove that I can do the work ahead. If we can start to begin to pull these pieces together, it basically opens up this better functioning ecosystem for all of us, because degrees today, it's not going to matter because we've already seen it. I think all of us, when we're in the workforce, we see the gaps suddenly that we need to fill. We're seeing, oh my goodness, I better start learning a little bit about data analysis, or I need to understand how AWS works, right? Or I need to understand what's involved in this Salesforce implementation, or wow, I'm realizing I'm not great at giving feedback to my direct reports, right? Or I need to understand what's involved in this Salesforce implementation, or wow, I'm realizing I'm not great at giving feedback to my direct reports, right? We're

learning that we have these gaps to fill. So how are we going to actually begin to build those skills? Because it's going to happen more and more often. And we're going to be thrown more strange things like chat GPT, right? That's just sort of the beginning of what we're going to see. And so how do we contend with that? If we actually begin to sort of unlock these five pain points that most people are kind of bumping into today, we will unlock it for the rest of us and it will be a little bit less stressful in the future. But if we just kind of try to ignore what's going on and keep fumbling our way through and just sort of praying and hoping that we're going to be able to get that next job, this isn't going to bode well for our future of work.

And moving on, you'll now be hearing from my conversation with Simon Brown. One of my favorite things about Novartis is that you have some sort of a quota, would you call it a quota, where you expect all of your employees to spend about 5% of their time or about 100 hours of learning every single year. Is that right? Is it fair to call it a quota? Not so much a quota. So we refer to it as an aspiration. And so it's really encouraging people to commit time to their own development and to be building the skills that they need to be successful. We, about three or four years ago, we were looking at what some of

the barriers were to people actually building their skills and undertaking learning. And what we heard was that I don't have time to learn and my manager doesn't support me in my learning. I don't have time to learn and we're all busy, but ultimately some of that comes down to prioritization. How much do we prioritize our own development? How much do we prioritize learning new skills? And actually, if we prioritize our own development how much do we prioritize learning new skills and actually if we prioritize everything else above that that may be fine on any given day but when that goes weeks and months and maybe years before actually investing in our own skills then that starts to become a problem so we wanted to send a clear symbol essentially that we want

people to be spending time on building their skills and making sure they have the most up-to-date knowledge. And therefore, we arrive a number of 100 hours. There's nothing scientific about that. It's more symbolic. It's about 5% of people's time. And we took the view that we can give people access to great learning opportunities, great learning resources, and encourage people to be committing time to be able to take advantage of those. It takes away that at least helps with that challenge of prioritizing time. The other piece was around my manager doesn't support me. And if we give a clear symbol from the company that actually we do want managers to support people in their development, because having the latest skills, having the latest

knowledge is critical to our success. So it's very much an aspiration rather than anything else. Are you able to explain or describe how much of this learning is autonomous versus maybe like, you know, compliance related or group managerial related mentorship? Do you have data on those sorts of numbers? Yeah, so we look at what's assigned learning or mandatory learning, and we look at voluntary learning, as we call it. And what we've seen is a gradual increasing in the amount of voluntary learning, which is great because that means that's people committing out of their own free will, if you like, to be developing themselves. And so it's that voluntary learning that we really want to be encouraging more and more. Ironically, and a bit paradoxically

to setting an aspiration for people spending more time learning, we're also working really hard to reduce down the amount of learning that we're doing from a mandatory perspective. And so we work hard on actually certain things, how do we make sure that they're done really efficiently, and that we can get the message over in the least amount of time, while at the same time encouraging people to also be spending time to develop their skills. So in a way, we're sort of working against ourselves. But that's right, we should be efficient to make sure time spent learning is time well spent, and is done in the most efficient way. And therefore, the time spent actually get the greatest return on it by building those skills. This next clip features Christopher

Lind. My question ultimately here is, what is your sort of ideal learning architecture between this option of new tech, even just your standard sort of learning tech LMSs and LXPs, of new tech, even just your standard sort of learning tech, LMSs and LXPs, but also the combination of AI versus or in combination with the interpersonal communication component of learning, which is your leadership encouraging you to learn this and that and to move in certain directions. Based on all the data out there, consistently, we see when AI is paired with humans, it always does better than humans alone. And it always does better than AI alone. You put the two together. It's the sweet spot.

So when I start to look at this stuff, I don't necessarily see AI replacing that human component. So even let's go back to your use case. So would that mean that, okay, well, we'll just let AI do this work for us. And now managers just disconnect. They don't even have to worry about what their people do because the AI is telling them what to do and where they should go. No, I don't think that's the case at all. But what it can do is when you talk to most people managers, while they may have a desire to want to know the intricacies of their teams and what they do, they don't have the capacity. They just don't to actually know what's actually going on underneath the curtain type of a thing. And so

it's not so much you go, well, just let AI take that. But how can it analyze that and then present you with different things that you now have the ability to make choices and decisions on and have dialogue with your people. And I think that's the really empowering part of this tech is that it can start to see what your people are doing, combine that with options of where might that match with learning, and then present that to both people and leaders, which the important part is there needs to be a dialogue on that then because there's so much nuance and contextual stuff you can't just be like well the algorithm told me i should apply for this job well your boss probably knows the politics and the dynamics of the organizational thing and your personality go listen like you may think you'd really like it

over there i mean i can think of a recent example of this, where somebody's like, I really want to go work in this group. And I'm like, actually, no, you don't. And here's why, right? Like, here's why let me give you these other contextual pieces of information that yes, on paper, that looks good. And I think that's why you can't ever take people out of the loop you do. It's a mess. And I think this is one of the biggest risks with AI, if we're not careful, is when you really think about what AI does best, it presents you with what you want. That's not always a good thing. I mean, I don't know about you, but I know that sometimes the things I want aren't always what's best for me. And I think that's one of the risks that we're even already seeing to rise as AI starting to take things off. It's presenting you with more of what you think you want, well, that is not always a good thing. And you think about even, I don't know about your journey, but for mine, some of the best pivotal moments in my career is where someone told me the thing I didn't want to hear or pushed me in the direction I didn't want to go. And moving on to my conversation with Toby Newman. Do you actively create avenues for the feedback that psychological safety represents, because what

I've learned over time is that a lot of the default seems to be that it's assumed that you can give feedback to just about anything, which is never true. Obviously, it's never as simple as that. But then the next level is, you know, you can say that there is this is a safe space for giving feedback and presenting your ideas, even if you're a new person or if you're relatively new in your position. But if there isn't any sort of a clear avenue for doing that or a person to whom to do that, it still can be a bit of a challenge and a little bit of a nerve wracking process. Do you have like systems set up for that feedback? So there's a couple of things that we try stroke do. The do is we have two forms of feedback process. So we use Workday as our HRS and learning

system. And built inside that is what they call anytime feedback. So you can request feedback from anybody in the company at any point. But the downside that is not anonymous. I know other companies and other platforms that use anonymous feedback. So that 360 feedback tool where you get that it's anonymous feedback that's just randomized and then you get that. We also use companies such as Hogan360 and that's a really great kind of standardized tool where you get feedback from a load of different people and it gives you scores and ratings based on all that feedback. But I am a strong believer that when you talk about feedback, it's an art. And I don't think enough people talk about it as

an art form because it is. Both giving and receiving feedback is not a black and white thing. It's not like you do this and this is how you do it and this is how not to do it. It's a nuance. It's kind of like it's understanding, asking the right questions, being open to feedback, acting on that feedback, show that you're acting on that feedback. So many different elements to that. And I think aside from the technical piece of kind of where do you give feedback is, for example, I'm sure you're familiar with like the agile methodology and scrums and retrospects and stuff. As an industry, as companies, do we do retrospects?

Most of the time we don't, unless you're in a software company that is specifically running that. But after a project is done, and I'm going to put my hand up as well and do this, how many of us go, right, great, move on, next project. And not to say you need to think back and go, you know, was this a success? Because that's what you normally do as part of a project. But it's what went well? What didn't go well? What do we need to change? What do we break down? What was our communication like? That nuanced piece of feedback that needs to be built in to these projects. And I'm not just talking about a survey that you send out through Microsoft Forms or Survey

Monkey or something saying, hey, did you enjoy our session or something? It's that, have you built into a learning program or doesn't matter what it is, that time to give the feedback, receive the feedback, act on it, and then give your gratitude to the people that have given it, because that's an important piece to say, thank you very much for your honest feedback. I really appreciate it. And this is what we're going to do. Because there's too many times when it comes to corporate surveys or engagement surveys is that they say, thank you for your feedback, and you hear nothing else. Like, well, what happens to all those pieces that I gave?

Not as an individual, but at least generally. And so that's the space to give you feedback, the acceptance of feedback and the gratitude of it. And then the ability to say, this is what we're going to do with that feedback. All right. Next up is Carl Kopp. There's a cool nudge example that you give in the book, which is the musical stairs. Do you want to just give an overview of that and how maybe that can be implemented as a component of gamification? Yeah. So there was an example of a subway system. You have stairs that you go up the stairs on one side and you have an escalator on another side. And this group decided that we're going to paint piano keys on the stairs and we're going to make them musical. So if you climbed up the stairs, you could make music. You musical. So, if you climbed up the stairs, you could make music. You know, people know they should exercise, but who wants to

exercise when there's an escalator right there? So, that little bit of nudging got more and more people to walk up the stairs, sometimes sprint up the stairs or dance up the stairs because you gave them that little bit of external or extrinsic motivation. And so one of the things that we talked about, the internal-external, is external motivation can be helpful when it works with internal motivation. So one of the things when I did research for the book that really surprised me was a lot of the earlier research in motivation said you can be internally motivated or externally motivated, but you can't be both, right? Pick one, right?

The scales they created actually created a dichotomy. It turns out in real life, it's a combination of both, right? You might go to get your master's degree because you want more money, that's external, but you also are really curious about the subject, that's internal motivation. So, these nudges can be just the right. So, for example, I like the app zombie run, right? And so you're escaping from zombies and you know, you don't feel like running, but you've had 10 missions in a row. You don't want to give up on your 10th mission, or it's kind of fun because you're out running by yourself and all of a sudden there's a zombie behind you and you have to kind of

sprint, right? You know, there's not a zombie behind you, but you look anyway and you verify. So the idea is these little nudges can be very helpful. And it's a little bit like good UX design, right? It allows you to have that little bit of encouragement to do something that you know you should be doing. Now, if it's something that you shouldn't be doing, then a nudge isn't really going to move you in the right direction, right? You really would need a huge push, maybe not a nudge. But for things that you know you should be doing, nudges can really be helpful for moving an individual forward. And advertisers use this all the time. When they create a website, they nudge you to click on buy, they nudge you, you

know, order before midnight is probably one of the most famous nudges ever, right? Limited supply. Time is running out. Like these aren't new techniques, but there are new ways of employing those kinds of techniques and clever, like creating a piano is clever, right? Or there's another example where they gave you high praise for driving the speed limit, right? You know, that's a nice little nudge, a nice little reminder. So they all paid extra attention so they wouldn't have to

do the five extra questions, right? In the long run, it's not a big deal. And there's other gamification examples of people spending literally hours learning new material so they could be successful, so they could win a Starbucks gift card. But the fascinating thing about that was the amount of time they put in to earn that Starbucks gift card was so disproportional to the value of the gift card. You know, what you make in an hour, you could buy 20 gift cards,

yet you spent 17 hours learning about that so you get a free gift card, you know? So those kinds of things, those kind of little nudges really can move us in the right direction and really are an exciting way to motivate people to action. I did a workshop one time and I said, whoever answers this question gets a candy bar and you would have thought I was giving away gold, right? So little nudges are really important. This next highlight features Vanessa Alzate. I want to ask one more question. I want to finish up on the topic of

workflow learning because this is so critical in every L&D conversation I've had, but I want to hear about it from an instructional design perspective. So what are your best tips and tricks and hacks for incorporating learning in the flow of work from your perspective as an ID? First things first, where are your people? Where are they? Where are they hanging out day in and day out? We spend our entire day in Slack. If I'm going to do something where I want them to work to, you know, learning the flow of work, you bet your bottom dollar, I am creating a Slack channel.

And that's where we're going to be. If we're in teams, that's where you're going to, that's where you're going to be. And I'm also very strategic about, you know, what I'm learning from marketing and being, you know, some of it will be like a testimonial or like, you know, just really encouraging engagement. So people really learn more about, you know, what it is that we're trying to initiate and what we're trying to get out there. That is definitely my number one, short, sweet, simple, hook, content, call to action. That's all I want to know.

Take out all of the fluff i don't need all of the things just really what do they truly need to know and the other thing about learning in the flow of work is really being honest with yourself do they need to know that right now a lot of our content we put out there they don't even need to know that for another like let's say six months so i'm not why am I putting that content out there now? Why don't I again, take a page from marketing, right? Set a content calendar and, you know, use email automations or use automations in Slack. Like today, I just scheduled a whole bunch of Slack messages for my team, you know, daily check-ins, Monday, what you're going to be working on, Friday wins.

I'm not going in every single day and doing that. I automated all of that. So it automatically gets sent out, I can customize the message, which is really great. And you can utilize that too. So instead of getting that piece of content that they need, you know, six months early, when they're going to forget it, and they have to search through their email to find it, you can send it out right in the moment of need. I was talking to someone last week or the week before, and we were working on reviewing some content and there's this report that these VPs have to pull on the 10th.

And I'm like, so are you texting them? I'm like, you're sending them through training to remember they do this 10th of the month report. That's great. But also, are you texting them? Because once you text them, like let's say seven times, because you remember things after seven times, once you text them seven times, hey, don't forget to pull the report today, this is what I need from you by tomorrow, it eventually can become a habit. So it's those little things. over. The moniker that you've given the style of leadership that you're loosely describing now, or your preferred style of leadership, bluer than indigo leadership. I like that term a lot. Would you mind just explaining that real quick? It's built on this idea of servant leadership.

So many listeners may be familiar with that. Bluer than indigo is a Korean proverb. So I've spent a significant amount of time living abroad in different countries, but particularly I spent about three years in South Korea. I wouldn't say I'm fluent anymore because it's been a while, but I was pretty the embedded cultural elements within the language itself, right? And in these proverbs are really rich in meaning, bluer than indigo. If you think about the color indigo, that's not a color, you know, we don't often, it's not in the rainbow, right? We don't always talk about indigo as a primary color or whatever. And so people may not always right off the top of their head, even think about what color indigo is, but indigo is a really deep, vibrant blue, the bluest of blues, even almost purplish, very vibrant. And in the Korean culture, and it's this way in many Eastern cultures, they have a lot of reverence for the elders. They have a lot of reverence for teachers and for leaders, a lot of deference even to them. And so the idea behind this proverb is that the best teacher or the best leader

is not the one who is always trying to get ahead themselves and make themselves look good, you know, and perhaps even at the expense of others around them. But the best teacher and the best leader is the one who invests in their people. And their goal is to help those around them become better than themselves or bluer than indigo. So the teacher or the leader would be indigo, the deepest, most vibrant blue, the bluest of blues, which we're holding up as like the ideal, like that's amazing. But the teacher doesn't see themselves as it's not about them. It's not, they're not amazing. It's about how do they help the next generation become better than they are? How do they help them to become bluer than indigo?

And that's, you know, how I would like, I mean, I know that's a bit of a pie in the sky ideal, but I would like to at least strive for that, have that kind of aspirational goal in my own leadership. And I would love to see that more in people around me that, you know, it's not about me. It's about my people. And if the reality is, if I invest in my people that way, if I put their needs first and I help to develop them and support them and empower them, they're going to make, they're going to succeed and they're going to make me look good. So, you know, through that approach, I actually look amazing as a leader, but the whole point is it's not really about me in the first place, whether I look amazing as a leader or not is not the most

important. What really matters is that my people have the opportunity to be fulfilled, to find meaning and purpose, to maximize their own potential and ultimately accomplish great things far more than I could ever accomplish. And I think many, you know, for anyone listening who has children, I mean, that's what you hope for with your kids, right? You want to develop your children, love them unconditionally, support them and help them to have a better life than you ever had. And sometimes that means there's a little bit of tough love there. Sometimes that means, you know, you're listening and supporting. Sometimes you're paving the way and you're, you're removing obstacles. Other times you're supporting them as they're moving through their own obstacles. Like it depends on the

situation. It depends on the individual, but the whole point is I want to develop this person and I want them to have more opportunity than I ever had. It's a fundamentally kind of leader, servant leadership mindset. And I believe the, the Korean proverb just kind of leader servant leadership mindset. And I believe the the Korean proverb just kind of enriches kind of how I understand that approach in that mentality. Next on the list is Ariel O'Farrell. Do you think that you know, maybe like a multimedia multifaceted type of education approach is best because you have an individual contributors ability to choose what they want to learn, but then the leadership at the end of the day above them is always responsible for really making sure that they're not only learning effectively, but applying. So there's always

sort of, you know, two components to education. It's what does the individual do? And then how does their leader help them apply? It is definitely multi-pronged. First of all, I think the organization almost needs to give the framework as to what the roles are and what's expected of them and what some of the skill sets are. I think that's what often people are looking for. There's a lot of people who are quite happy to learn and to master things or whatever, but they don't necessarily understand how it fits into their wider development. So I think it's incumbent on an organisation to actually provide that framework. And I think as well, when we look at performance management and performance development, if we look over the last 70, 80 years that we've had this

concept, the types of roles people do have changed so substantially. An awful lot of the work that people do is now happening in their head. It's knowledge work. And so it's very hard to understand, well, what's going on in your head? Tell me, Tyler, what is going on in your head that makes you successful at what you do? And then how do you systemize that in an organization? And how do you develop people up, more junior people up to understand what that looks like? So actually, you need a whole system, you need a framework by which you say, actually, these are the step ups, these are the skill sets, these are the knowledge, this is what we expect in these areas and these different dimensions. And I don't think organizations, they don't have a handle on that for an awful lot of organizations. So it's very, very difficult

to provide that guidance to people to say, you need to develop this because of this reason, you need to develop this because of this, this other reason. And you know, why do you need to develop good problem solving skills? Well, if you want to progress up the organisation, you're going to need to solve problems. And so you're going to need to have that skill. But most people can't articulate that. And most people can't differentiate between what do I expect in problem solving in a junior role versus more senior role versus a high, you know, a high level individual contributor versus a head of function, they can look quite different. And so oftentimes, we're not even having those conversations to know. So people are blindly almost kind of going, I'm going to develop this because it's of interest to me, but I have no

idea if this helps me or not. So I think we need the framework to understand that and then people can pick and choose as to and see the step ups and see where their career can go within the context of understanding what different roles look like and what skill sets are required in different roles. Okay, moving on, we have a clip from Shane Snow. One of the things that you advocate for is one of your central tenets developing your teams is cognitive diversity. This refers to the many ways that one sort of sees and thinks about the world based on their past, their identity, their experience, and that sort of thing. And we'll talk about that a little bit. A term that I like that kind of describes all this is, is it cognitive mosaic? And I guess let's jump into the topic by maybe defining that and just talking about what this ultimately means, cognitive diversity.

So we all think differently in some ways, and many of us think very similarly in some ways. And the reason we think differently about certain things in our lives or in the world are based on who we are and what we've experienced. And in many ways, who we are shapes what we experience, how people treat us, how we navigate the world ourselves. But that basically anything you see

or encounter in the world is going to go into your brain and be interpreted in a certain way, and that will be subtly or very unsubtly different based on who we are and what we've been through. And that's what cognitive diversity kind of at its core is, thinking different, slightly different,

or very different. And really where that comes into play is when you combine, if you have one person who thinks a certain way, it's only different if you have another person who thinks a different way. Within your own head, you can have had multiple experiences that cause you to see something in two different ways. So I spent a lot of time in Latin America, and I've spoken Spanish for 20 years. So I can see certain words or certain

ways of putting things in two very different ways ways kind of automatically in English and in Spanish, a simple example. And so in my own head, there are certain areas, one being language, where there's cognitive diversity. There's different ways that I can play with ideas or interpret or see things. And I think about wise people. Whenever you think about someone who's truly wise, often they're older.

That's kind of the stereotype. And yeah, that's usually the case because older people have been through a lot more and wise people have used that to be able to turn things around in their heads and think, you know, to use more wisdom. And wisdom, I think, is a function of being able to look at things in different ways. So cognitive mosaic is my analogy that I like to use, the visual analogy for how are you seeing this thing, whether it's a debate or it's a problem to be solved or just the world or a person that you're dealing with. You're kind of looking through a pair of glasses and I almost think of it like stained glass. There are all these little pieces kind of a glass of different colors in front of

you that affects how you could look at this person or situation. And you can close one eye and kind of look through one piece and say, hey, based on my experience doing this and whatever, like, let's look at it from this way. Or you can look at the whole thing and have a different picture than anyone else who's looking at it. So people who have largely been through very similar things will have a similar kind of mosaic about things that are relatable in that way. So my family, we grew up in Idaho in the same house and we went through a lot of the same things. We'll largely look at various things through the same kind of mosaic. However, my sisters will look at that mosaic differently than I will because of how we operated, what we were

into, how we were treated at school and at work. And so we will have some differences in the way we look at things. Most of what we have in general about navigating personal family life is going to be the same, but we do have a different spot than that mosaic. So that's my metaphor I like to use when I think about who is it that's going to help me think differently

about something I'm working on or the world. Usually I think of it in problem solving. Who could I add to the team that has a different mosaic so we're all not looking at things the same way so we can explore different ways of looking at things. That's what cognitive adversity is about. This next one features Adrian Balardian. Theoretically, is this possible, do you think, to increase the number of people who really experience that center of the trifecta by making our teams better, by having leadership that better communicates purpose or communicates purpose differently? Is it just by focusing on that team purpose that really brings it all together?

What do you think? Yes. When it comes to purpose, is it possible? Absolutely. Right. And I think this is what organizations, leaders, and individuals all have to work towards together. It's not just the responsibility of the company to make sure that the purpose aligns to each individual.

On the flip side, it's important for the organization to be able to articulate their purpose in a clear way, because what that will allow people to do is to find their connection to that. So when it comes to individual purpose, there's different ways that people can do it. And I think this is where some people feel this is a little bit fluffy, or it's like, well, how does my purpose get aligned to, I don't know, if I had to work for a tire company, I might struggle. But if I double click on that, I actually think I could find a way that would get me excited. But at an individual level, there's a number of different ways you can

find your purpose, right? You can choose it. Some people feel like there's a calling. So for me, my purpose is to help create a sense of belonging. And I feel like that's been a theme throughout my life. And for me, it feels like it's the right thing to do. Others might have something particularly that they enjoy doing, or they get a particular kick out of, and that's how they choose that. I think with organizations to help create that trifecta of purpose is to ask their people, is to say, here's our organizational purpose. How is that relevant to you? Which part of that do you think is important? Which part of that do you think you can contribute to?

And Google did a piece of research, I think it was about 2015, 2016, called Project Aristotle. And there was five key findings that they found in the highest performing teams. And Dr. Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety got a massive boost from that because she's done some great work in there. But in that piece of research, Google identified psychological safety as one of the biggest factors impacting or being able to differentiate high-performing teams and low-performing teams. The best teams had high levels of psychological safety. But one thing that gets overlooked here, Tyler, is one of the other findings was that the teams that performed the best, the people in those teams, A, it had personal meaning. They could find that personal meaning in the work that they were doing. So they believed in it.

And the second thing is that they could see the impact of the work that they were doing. So if you're an individual or if you're a leader and you're struggling to, your people are struggling to find, where's my purpose? How's my purpose aligning to this? Maybe get off that word purpose and think about impact. Try to make sure how can you demonstrate the impact that those people are making? How can they see that what they're doing day in day out for seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 hours, what's the outcome of that work? And if you can actually be able to draw that out and give the people the opportunity to see the impact,

that actually starts to align to purpose. This next highlight is from my conversation with Michelle Gibbings. A really cool concept in the book. I love matrices. These are very common in books like this, actually, where there's sort of a quadrant that has different axes that represent how well you're doing with something. But in this case, your quadrant is, I believe it's knowing and unknowing and selfish versus selfless. And you have the four different types of leaders and the ultimate goal is to be the liberator. That's sort of like the ideal type of boss, essentially. So would you mind just going over that quadrant and how we can use that from the various perspectives, whether we're assessing for ourselves, whether we're assessing

for our boss or sort of as a higher up leader. So it is that classic kind of four by four, I think, you know, the old BCG sort of matrix. And it's very much going when I'm looking at the leader. So you can do this from the perspective of a person who's working for the boss or that boss is working for you, or you can actually self-assess it yourself as the boss. Where's my focus? Is it selfish? Is it all about me? Is it all about my needs? Or is it selfless? Am I actually genuinely interested and concerned about the needs of the people who work for me? And I've had people who have challenged me and, how can that person be a bad boss? I'm like, wait, I will get there. I will explain. And then the next part is the knowing and unknowing. So this is the self-awareness.

will explain. And then the next part is the knowing and unknowing. So this is the self-awareness. To what extent are they aware of their own behavior, of their gaps, of the impact that they're having on others? And so that's the unknowing and the knowing. And if you are purely focused on yourself, purely focused on your needs, but you may also actually be unaware of the impact because you just actually really don't care. To me, that's the mercenary. And they're the sort of person who it's like, just don't get in the way of my success. They're blinkered. They know exactly where they want to go, but they're not interested in learning about themselves. They're not interested in learning about others. They are purely focused on what they need. But you can also have bosses, and I've worked for someone like this, genuinely nice person, but oh, they were

a nightmare to work for. And they genuinely cared about their team, but they had no impact, no idea of the impact. They were disorganized. They were late. They didn't know how to schedule. They didn't know how to allocate work or resources. And to me, this is the believer because they're the type of boss who actually think they're doing a really good job because they care about their team, but they're not going to step into difficult issues. They're not going to manage conflict. They're disorganized and they just want people to like them. And so they're very often very hard to work for, although there are ways that you can work around them. Then you've got the person who, once again, they're selfish. It's all about them. So,

they're on a similar level to the mercenary, but they know what they're doing. They are fully conscious of how they are positioning themselves and what they're doing. They are also fully conscious of the impact that they have on others. They just don't care. So, to me, they're the illusionist because they're also very, very good at managing up. They're the sort of person that all the senior leaders and the executives go, wow, that person is amazing. They are awesome. They are on the talent highway. They are on track. Everyone who works for them goes, they are a total nightmare to work for because it's all about them. And if you make a mistake, they will throw you under the bus. They are not going to support you.

And then as you said, the last one is the liberator. This is where you've got someone who genuinely cares about the team, but they have high self-awareness and they're the ultimate good boss. That doesn't mean they're perfect. That doesn't mean they're going to get it right every day because I think that's impossible. Everyone as a human makes mistakes. Good bosses though go, hey, I messed up. I missed that. And I'm going to take accountability for that. And I'm going to apologize and I'm going to own my part, but I'm also going to take the time to reflect and work out why, what happened? What was it that happened to me in that moment that created the environment for me to be able to do that?

Was it stress over work? Was I feeling pressure for something else or was I just oblivious to what was going on? And did I need to have more self-awareness in that moment? Moving on, up next is Bill Treasurer. A point that you make in the book is that plenty of people have different backgrounds coming into leadership roles. Plenty of people were brought up with plenty of wealth and access and probably traits that allow them to sort of embrace that more quickly. So what do you say? Is there always a modicum of taking time and embracing your sort of leader authentic self? Are there ways that you can expedite that? Does it really just come back to your background and that is sort of the rate at which you can pick this sort of approach to leadership up? Right. And also, how authentic? I'm going to make a confession right now to your listeners.

Sometimes if I'm at home and I'm eating dinner by myself at the dinner table, maybe looking at my phone while I'm doing it, it sometimes happens I might not eat with my mouth fully closed for every bite. And I will get called on it from my family members. But when I'm at a business lunch, I am. I don't need to let it all hang out with my authentic self. You don't want to see me eating with my mouth open when we're having a business lunch. Business Bill makes sense in that environment.

To your point, as a leader, it is a journey, right? That we get comfortable in our own skin with who we are. And I do think that for a person, any person, a place to start is where do I get positive energy? Like what fills me up in terms of the interest that I have, right? Do I love working with numbers? And boy, I can lose track of time because when I'm working in the numbers, man, I'm in my zone and it feels like a passion thing for me. Or the opposite, man, when I'm in the numbers thing, it is drudgery for me and that is slow time. How does time move, fast or slow, during which tasks that you're doing? Because when it moves fast, generally, that's the stuff you have the creative engagement with, the flow with. It's where your passion generally is. Does time move fast or slow?

And that will start to point you in the direction of the stuff that you probably should be trying to figure out how you can do more of that stuff, because it doesn't feel burdensome. It doesn't feel laborious. All of us have to do some labor. That's why it's called work. But if we can do work that energizes us versus zaps our energy, because there's something authentic about that. That's our inner guide telling us it's like a registry, like a Geiger counter kind of like, oh, that's the stuff I need to be doing more of right there. But it does take time to figure that out. Okay, next on the list is a highlight from Selena Rezvani. Are there any specific tactics that you advise for, for building this at a company for allowing employees to feel like they can give feedback and speak up?

Is it, you know, workshops or specific kinds of tools and resources? Anything that you particularly advocate for? Yes, there are, you know, more than one way to do this, which is great. Different things that we can lean on. And I think one thing is as simple as developing meeting norms,

you know, so that we don't just walk into meeting situations all with very wildly different ideas of how to be a good teammate or contributor. But we actually lay out what we want that, you know, we're going to treat everybody with respect or we're going to, you know, bring evidence or reasoning for our ideas. What I like about this is it creates a safe environment to call out when somebody's not respecting those norms. I think another thing we can do is when somebody raises a concern, which we know there's some psychological safety there, if somebody's saying, hey, there's a red flag, this might not be the popular view,

but I really need to air a concern, is praise their perceptiveness. You know, thank them on a basic level for being willing to be that voice. In many cases, you know, group thank has been catastrophic in so many public examples that you want to praise that person. So it's modeling for someone else that they can do it. How about some things you can do as a leader yourself? I think opening up about a fear

you might have when you changed your mind, when you made a mistake? You know, for the greater learning, being able to share that, wow, are you giving a permission slip to other people that they can share a mistake? You know, they can share an evolution in their thinking. And I think just prioritizing that nonjudgmental behavior, that empathy is huge to build psychological safety. And we're moving on now to a clip from Rebecca Horton. One way that you suggest embracing your influence is by listening effectively and asking the right questions to make sure that you have the right information. So let's talk about this topic of influence. Why don't we start there, listening and asking the right questions? Yeah, absolutely. So we've got a phrase that we use a lot in the programs that we run

that says influence is not a coincidence. Back in the 80s and 90s, people were trained that influence was part of a charisma, right? This kind of this magical fairy dust that leaders had. These alpha type leaders had this great charisma and their charisma would carry them. had, these alpha type leaders had this great charisma and their charisma would carry them. Now that has long been discarded as a fairly unattractive and uncontemporary model of leadership. And we're moving much more regularly into a space where introverts are becoming far more effective leaders. But an introvert's inclination to put themselves out there is virtually zero. In fact, it's in the negative numbers. For many people, the concept of putting yourself out there kind of makes you feel a bit icky. You're a bit like, oh my God, I feel like such a show off. I feel like it's all about me. I feel

a bit creepy. These reactions are super common. And actually in every culture that I've ever coached anyone from, they have the same reaction to this deliberately influencing, this putting your head up, standing up and saying something. The issue though, is that without deliberately influencing, you're not really going to get the outcomes that you need. So when I think about influence, it's really important to remember again, what are your priorities? When you think about influencing, it's not just a personality trait, it's an action. And it's an action towards an outcome. So if you're influencing for an outcome,

then getting that outcome is not a coincidence. It's part of your plan, part of your strategy. And it's part of the actions that you put in place to make sure you get what you need for your team and for your business. So when we're looking at techniques like listening, that becomes a really important point. Back to the kind of the charismatic leader,

the charismatic leader would do a lot of talking. I'm sure we've all sat around the table with one of those in the room and thought, oh my God, when are they going to stop talking? And that's part of their MO, right? But the really smart leader asks a whole load of questions to make sure when they say just one thing, it's going to land perfectly. And there's a big difference between selling your

idea to people and responding to them with a solution. People are far more inclined to agree with you, to buy what you sell, to invest in you, to give you what you need, if they feel that you've solved their problem. And the only way you could possibly solve their problem is to really listen to them. Once they know that you're solving their problem, they're far more likely to say yes to whatever it is you're about to ask for. And as an influencer, it's absolutely crucial that you know that. Because if you're trying to influence by selling to the benefits or pitching or any of those things, you've missed this critical step, which is that most people these days are very cynical about being sold to. And if they're feeling that your

leadership style is like selling to them, they'll close down and back away really quickly. And particularly at a time when you need them to open up and lean in, the only way you can do that is to make it about them rather than about you. Next on the list is Michael Lee Stollard. So how do you advise that people do that across massive organizations like this? Ford has a really good example of sort of doing this with their leadership. But I'm a pretty strong believer that this sort of thing should be extended to as this sort of practice should be extended to all arms, which might include like frontline workers who, you know, might not have the sort of depth of knowledge, but have, you know, more experience

than others. So how do you advise really, you know, getting that to the extremities of the organizations? I think it depends on the issues that you're putting out there in the meeting. And so if they're operational meeting, if it's strategic issues, which affect the whole organization, almost all employees would like to have some sense of that. And so I think of, you know, there are, well, I used to head marketing and strategy for part of Charles Schwab. head marketing and strategy for part of Charles Schwab. And Chuck Schwab, I love Chuck Schwab. He is just, you know, he would travel. He was so generous in terms of like opening up even strategic reports that most organizations would never let their employees at large see were available online and what they called the Schweb, which was the internal web, Schweb. And he was out there

traveling the world. And Dave Patrick, when he was co-CEO of Schwab, they were very open about sharing information, traveling around the world, letting people, I would call it putting their cards on the table to say, here's where we're going, what's right, what's wrong, what's missing from our thinking in appropriate meetings where that's possible. And so understanding the type of information, strategic issues, almost everyone wants to hear that at a higher level to know where the organization or the unit is going. If it's an issue that has to deal, it's more of a micro issue with a particular unit, then we really only involve employees who are connected to that issue somehow, or maybe even slightly tangentially

connected. They might bring some new ideas that the group that's so connected to each other isn't aware of. And so there are some guidelines that we use in our work. So for example, focusing on people who you're expecting to implement that decision and people you know have an interest in that decision, it's wise to include them in to get their opinions and ideas because they'll have insights about it and they're going to execute with, you know, implement the decision with much greater effort if they feel they've had a voice. Well, that wraps up our highlight episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'd also like to extend a broader thank you

to all the listeners who have joined us since we launched four months ago, as well as to Fame, our production agency that has been with us since the very start. It's been quite a ride and I can't wait to keep delivering the best in learning and development straight to your ear holes. We will catch you on the next episode.

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