Latest / Humanity Working / Are Turkeys Voting for Thanksgiving?

Transcript

Are Turkeys Voting for Thanksgiving? · Humanity Working

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Alright, Paul.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: On a previous show, Dr.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Keith Keating said the three most damaging words in an organization are it's not my job.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Paul, what's your take on that?
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Matt, everybody.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, we I think we spoke about this a little bit last week, but um you know what's funny?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: When we had that discussion with Keith, um there were so many interesting things that um that Keith spoke about.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it was very clear to me coming out of it that um this was about much more than you know learning and development teams and how they demonstrate their value.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: This was this was bigger.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: This was about how humans demonstrate value.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was about how organizations think about value and and and all that kind of stuff.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: And and and that comment that Keith made just towards the end of it, which was literally the three most damaging words in an organization are it's not my job, um, really stuck with me.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's a bit of a theme kind of going through our recent episodes, because I said that the most uh damaging words are if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I think Keith might have uh uh Keith might have taught me on it.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And and the reason is that it it defines something about a mindset and an approach to work that does not work with where the world of employment is going.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: So to go get a little bit clearer on that, if you say it's not my job, what are you what are you actually saying?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: What you're saying is my job is defined in a job description or in an agreement that I've made, and that that job description, that agreement um is unchanging.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: It will not alter.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And when you ask me to do something that is not in that job description, you are breaching that contract, and I'm not willing to do that.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now I totally understand the the key here is right that the reason that people do that is because they want to preserve the sanctity of their job, right?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: They want to make sure that they're executing on the core of what their job is.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not like it always comes from a from a bad place.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And also, we're told, right, you should be able to say no, right?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: We're told that that saying no isn't is an important thing in the in the workplace.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a balance that is inherent in uh in everything that we're saying here.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: But the key here is that it's not my job implies a lack of adaptability when adaptability is gonna be the number one skill that people need going forward.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so it reveals a mindset that adaptability is not for you.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And in the future of work, adaptability has to be for you.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: That that that sums it up nicely.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so Gallup keeps flagging stubbornly low employee engagement scores, right?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: So should leaders see that as a red flag for sliding into irrelevance, or is engagement the wrong metric?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Speaking of metrics that are measured, uh is that the wrong metric to panic about?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um this term sliding into irrelevance is a term actually that we've we've used for for some time.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it speaks to something that's that's that I think is broader, right?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, which is that, you know, without getting like super scary, um, I think we are about to get super scary.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: The robots are coming, right?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: AI is coming, right?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: All that kind of stuff, right?
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And while all that is happening, if you wander around the you know, average coffee shop or the average place where people are gathering, um, 90% 90% of those people, certainly 70% of those people, are probably immersed in their phone um absorbing TikTok videos.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is a this is a real challenge in the sense that there is an impending potential employment emergency.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Most people want to be employed, and most people are not doing what they need to do to make sure that they're gonna be uh highly relevant going forward.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so um that's a problem, right?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: So this the idea of sliding into irrelevance is an issue.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Whether employee engagement scores are the main metric that indicates that, I'm not so sure, right?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, employee engagement scores are um are a metric that we've that we've glummed on to because we think it it shows uh particularly that not everybody, you know, that few people love their jobs.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: But for the entire history of employment, most people most people have not really loved their jobs.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no rule that says that you have to love your job.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: There is, however, a requirement, I believe, going forward that you have to be good enough at your job in order for uh in order for uh for people to keep you on.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so being good enough at your job involves those traits of things like adaptability and resilience and so on.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I should not require you as uh you, Matt, to love your job.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: I shouldn't have to require that.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: But what I should have to do is I should require you to be able to demonstrate the traits of adaptability necessary so that you can provide value to my to my organization.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Loving it, that's up to you.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's maybe you that's up to you.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you love playing in a rock band, right?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to love your job.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's interesting, right?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: If you think about if you could embed, well, one thing is we just talked about, I think last week, uh following tech examples, right?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: So if tech's uh like say TikToks, their their KPI is engagement.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't mean that that's the KPI to measure people against in all other companies just because it works for the algorithm, right?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: But also if you could embed learning resiliency and adaptability into an algorithm as interesting as watching random crap on TikTok, yeah, and you could teach people how to do it as engagingly as TikTok does it, it would you'd you'd be uh, I don't know, maybe you'd be uh a billionaire.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: So uh You might be.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: So so let's say like fighting irrelevance, does fighting irrelevance mean we all have to be, like you were saying, not your problem if I don't love my job, that's on me.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: But does that mean that in order to get there, we all have to be obsessed with our jobs, or is it a healthier way to stay valuable and not burn out?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's some interesting data on this, and it's um like being obsessed with your job is not always healthy.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I'll give you like a really good example of this that you see in founders, right?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Founders almost by definition um become obsessed with their organization.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now there are mission-driven founders, I'm one of those, um, where it's all about like what you're trying to do as a uh as an organization and it's the mission you're in love with.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then there are founders that are in love with the idea of the of the journey, the entrepreneurial journey, right?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And how do I make a bunch of money, uh cash out, move on to the next one, and and repeat.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um what's interesting though is that in both of those cases, you sort of have to be slightly obsessive in order to be able to do it.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, burn art rates in founders are very high.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now they love what they do, right?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um but the problem is when you really love what you do, you might do too much of it.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so a moderately healthy separation between yourself and your job is not necessarily a bad thing.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so it does come back to that idea of no, you lack of engagement does not apply to uh does not mean irrelevance.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um being relevant means that you have to bring a set of job-specific skills and durable skills and tangible skills to your job in a way that is really useful for your organization.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: And over time, the durable skills are becoming more and more and more important.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's about having that right skill set um so that people can't do without you.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: So so practically then, what habits or systems help people strike that balance so they grow with the business instead of drifting to the margins, but maybe don't have to become obsessed?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's kind of like a well, the f well, the first thing is um it you're almost like creating a partnership, right?
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um and this is one of the reasons why we've talked previously about the idea of like treating a uh a company as a family is probably the wrong analogy because in general, people don't leave families.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's very difficult to leave families.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so what you're really doing is you're creating a partnership between you and the organization that you're with, knowing full well that you might break that partnership or the organization itself might break that partnership.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: But what you want to do is you want to develop the idea that in order to maintain that partnership, you need to be continuously growing as a human.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so that 1% better every day, that's the mantra that everybody should have on their wall, right?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: What are they doing that's making them 1% better every day?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: What are they doing that is the durable skills equivalent of waking up each morning and they've done a five-second plank today, six second plank tomorrow, and in two months they'll be doing a three-minute plank, right?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: What's that?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: What's that equivalent for the durable skills?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because as we've said so many times, those muscles do degrade if you do not use them.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: All right, so big picture.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: How can both individuals and organizations spot when they're sleepwalking toward irrelevance?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and what first moves stop that slide?
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: So let's disconnect it from burnout, right?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: We've talked about burnout multiple times.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: To me, sleepwalking towards irrelevance is a situation where the there is a growing disconnect between the capabilities that you bring to work um each day and the capabilities that are required today and will be required in six months and will be required in a year's time.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you are assuming that your work is going to look the same in six months' time that it is today, you are wrong because everybody's job is going to look different in six months' time than it is today, and it's going to look different again in a year and different again in a year and different again and a year.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, from the perspective of the individual, um, if you're not changing, if you're doing this your job the same way that you did three months ago or six months ago, that's a warning sign in its own right.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: And we have a natural tendency to try to stick to what we do and what we know and what we love and so on.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: So as an individual, if you're not doing, if you're not learning new things, if you're not growing every day, that's a red flag right away.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then for the organization, it's sort of a similar thing.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: The idea, the old idea was pick an approach, stick with it until it doesn't work anymore, and then move to something else.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you are, as an organization, you're doing the same stuff that you were a year ago, you can almost guarantee that you're starting to sleepwalk into something.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so look at that idea of continuous change and how you go about implementing continuous change as an organization.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Very good.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: All right, Paul.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: As usual, great episode.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: See you next time.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, man.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Mew.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: If you like this podcast, please subscribe, like, and recommend us to others.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: It helps us reach more people.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.