Latest / Humanity Working / Building Organizational Resilience

Transcript

Building Organizational Resilience · Humanity Working

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_03: First, we have to, as uh leaders and managers, understand how does that change even impact me?
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_03: And what we as organizations, because we're not focusing on the people part of that equation, we're not even giving our leaders and our managers time to even take in the change.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: They're often being notified the change at the same time as their employees.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Mindy Hong Koop has spent 20 years as a people leader and HR advisor.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: She guides leaders to optimize their work to thrive as fractional HR executive and facilitator.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Before founding Agile in HR, Mindy held a chief people officer role at TCP Software and HR leadership roles at Care.com, Spiceworks, Zip Davis, and Expedia.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Mindy sits on the nonprofit Love Justice International Board, co-founded the Austin Women in Agile meetup, and is the lead coordinator in launching Disrupt HR Austin 3.0.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: When she's not busy with people, she can be found reading, walking her dogs, traveling, or hiking.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: And if you want to learn more about Mindy, please chat uh check it out in our show notes.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, Mindy, and welcome to Humanity Working.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: Hi, Paula.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's such a pleasure to be here.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks for inviting me.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'd love to start with something that we've been chatting about offline for a while: change and how people are adapting to it.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I just had stomach flu, and it feels like change is a bit like that at the moment.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of it about.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how do you think the workforce as a whole is responding to change in general?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: I really do I love this question.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_03: But and often, you know, we as humans just naturally are not great at change.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_03: I always like to just holistically start there.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_03: And when you put a bunch of humans together, it starts to get messy if we don't have the right structures in place.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: And I think some workplaces that have been really thoughtful about change uh do create an environment that can foster continuous improvement well.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: But I often think that with the amount of change that we have, and because we don't have the frameworks in place at work, to really be able to have healthy continuous improvement and really behavior and how do we as humans, or how are we adapting to these new ways of working?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: It really comes down to at the behavioral change level, right?
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that we have such an opportunity to help provide better frameworks within our workplace to be able to create um resiliency for change.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think change is going to stop.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_03: I think that we need to get more thoughtful about how we're asking the humans in our organizations to adapt to change as we continuously need to improve and stay um viable as organizations to continue to drive value for our consumers, our customers, or whatever our why is to exist as an organization.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's a thing you started off uh with there.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it's I think it's important, it's come up in a couple of the previous um episodes that we've done here.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: We as humans are not really great at change.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's really, really important because um you see so much inside uh at a manager level, at a leadership level inside organization, this concept of, you know, there are employees that can can process change and there are good employees.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then there are employees that find change more challenging and they're less good employees.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it ignores the fact that sort of as, you know, as it's come up even in episodes that we've had with clinical psychologists, we are just as a human, it's part of what it is to be human is to is to treat change with some skepticism and continuing the status quo and not um and doing what we've done is often the most successful human tactic.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I think if we understand, kind of as you've indicated here, right?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, change is a reality inside these uh in uh in inside organizations, change is probably only increasing.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Humans will have some natural skepticism uh associated with that change that is probably good for their overall uh their overall uh survival.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: So if we want humans to behave uh differently towards change, we have to put in place the structures to support that.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: And we have to give the and we have to support the humans through that idea of of navigating the change.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Do you agree with that?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I do, Paul.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_03: And that's why I often talk about organizational capability as the equation of people plus process plus systems.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get into the a little bit more the people side of this.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we talked about sort of the organization as a whole and the people that are affected by the change.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, if you're a manager or a leader inside an organization, you've got sort of two roles, haven't you?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: You you're you're you're number one having to drive the change to help other people through that change.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: But number two, you're having to deal with it yourself.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um so what do you think is the um, what do you think are the are the roles of managers and leaders in organizations that are highly dynamic and are changing rapidly?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I I I think they have a very hard role because we don't what what you just said, you articulated so well that I think often is messed.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_03: That first we have to, as uh leaders and managers, understand how does that change even impact me?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_03: And what we as organizations, because we're not focusing on the people part of that equation, we're not even giving our leaders and our managers time to even take in the change.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_03: They're often being notified the change at the same time as their employees.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_03: So, even being able to, from a communication standpoint, even go back and really think how are we supporting our managers to understand what's happening, how it's happening, why it's happening, so that they can even digest it themselves to then be able to ask questions to inform how do we best now bring our team along with this change?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_03: They don't, they're processing it at the same time as the employees often, which creates additional levels of messiness.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's a very difficult time to be a manager and a leader, often in organizations or even seeing a lack of uh support for our managers.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_03: And in some organizations, we still often promote people into that role without giving them the tools and resources to even understand how do I move from that individual contributor mindset into what it means to be a people manager and leader?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I I think that question you could have one whole separate podcast uh um separate to that, but it's not easy um to be a manager or leader, I think, in today's workplaces.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: And do you I would agree.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um do you think it's hard?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think it's harder than it was?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: And if and if it is harder than it was, why do you think that is?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_03: I do think it's harder than it was.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_03: Often we are more distributed.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_03: I often find that organizations that used to have some level of support for managers, as the world of work has become more complicated and changed and moved super quick, we haven't evolved our way of supporting managers.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_03: And the ability to access those resources and systems, they may have worked in the past, but they're not really for what's true in the organization today.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: They haven't evolved.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: And so they're not really useful tools anymore for the managers.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_03: And so, and and I just think that as we're starting to make, as we start to see this change and we're moving super quick within organizations, we are moving so fast that we're not taking the time to be thoughtful.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_03: And we're not taking the time to think about how do we align, how do we make sure that we all understand what's being asked of us.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_03: I think this is what we're seeing in data around the research showing the level of disconnection in work.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and just the fact that not everyone is in an office.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_03: They're working together, right?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: We have such distributed work teams, and there's just so many layers of complexity that drive the answer to this question.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I would I'd vigorously agree with that.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the um I think one of the most interesting things that we've seen through our work is that, and as weird as this sounds, there's very few people inside organizations who truly understand.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: Let's say how work gets done inside inside their own organizations.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: So so uh an organization 20, 30 years ago, in most cases, very clear job descriptions, very clear uh indication of what good looked like, right?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: You'd have X number of employees, and we like to think of it in terms of widgets, right?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: X number of employees, their job is to move this number of widgets from this number of widgets over this period of time, and if they do, that's successful for them, that's successful for their team, and that's successful for their organization.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: And what's happened um largely in many cases for for good for good reasons, right?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: But what's happened is that that's been replaced by lots of roles, including management roles, that if you tried to build a job description that accurately describe what it was, it would be really, really difficult to do.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Most people don't know how to do that.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's unclear what good looks like for the employee.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's unclear what good looks like for the manager, it's unclear even what good looks like for the organization, except for this overall top line.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Is this is this top line number high enough?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: And is this bottom line line uh number?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: So they look, they can look at those things, but sort of connecting that to what people do on a day-to-day basis has become really hard.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: And often I find depending on obviously the industry and the size of the company, often there may be a kind of idea of what that strategy is that we're our North Star that we're moving towards.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_03: But what you're saying is like, how do we operationalize that and break it down?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_03: But often even that strategy could be changing monthly, like it is moving so quick.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_03: And then how that work gets done is also as we layer on digital transformation, how the work gets done is also getting changed so rapidly.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_03: And those job descriptions, if they're have the best of intent and trying to have a job description, really, if you're speaking to employees and managers, I often hear those jobs are changing even within two months of that job description getting being written.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_03: And just all that amount of data and that change that is happening, trying to keep up with the minutia, which is so important, right?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_03: Because the minutia is what gives us the clarity.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_03: It helps give us clarity of expectations so we can hold good one-on-ones and you know, all those things that you do to execute that vision and that north star.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_03: People aren't even able to take the time to keep those things up as that larger North Star, it feels like it's always bleeding out of your as the moment you think you start to able to articulate it, it's now something different.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_03: That's often the feedback that I uh hear with the clients I work with.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and to and to add to that even further, we um we did some surveys a while back of um of employees and of managers.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: And we asked a lot of different questions, which we've alluded to on previous episodes of this podcast.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the questions we would ask is um, can you just can you describe what you do?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: That was to employees.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: And um the uh we asked that same question to managers, but you also said, can we describe what your employees, what your direct reports do?
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: Most common answer for both employees and managers was I don't know.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: And isn't that wild?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: You don't know what you're being paid to do.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_03: And often they don't even understand the question I find is how does a company make money?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_03: And then how that ties back to their role in being a part of that process.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so huge amounts of confusion out there, obviously.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um and but when we get to the managers and and uh and leaders inside organizations, as you say, that kind of translates into we don't even really know what our managers are doing, right?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the managers don't even really know what their employees are doing, then existing management training and stuff like that doesn't really seem to hold anymore.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: So are what do you have you seen examples of where where it's where companies are getting a hold of this and actually attacking this directly and saying, okay, we're gonna invest in in managers that can adapt to change and bring their teams along to be highly adaptable, uh highly adaptable and highly resilient.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Have you seen examples where that's working well?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_03: I wish I had more examples.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm sure they're they're out there, right?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_03: I am just working, I find this within the small medium businesses and the tech role that I'm working in.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I I do see the, I do see people starting to try and think about how do we slow down to go faster, which is refreshing.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_03: I I do see that.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I do see how for organizations that are understanding organizational capability as we actually need to, we really need to think about our people more and how are they a part of the processing systems in our organization and our people are anemic, how we treat people is anemic, and we need to like put them on a boost of vitamins.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_03: And and what does that do?
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_03: And that's often why people talk to me, like Mindy, help us.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_03: We know that we've been moving super quick, our people are anemic, um, they're disconnected, we don't have role clarity.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_03: Help us come in here and understand, you know, where we are today, like even the current state, in order for us to get to a better future desired um place.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: And uh often we have it when those conversations when I go in and really look at a discovery, it is about how are we becoming more thoughtful?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_03: How do we get better at actually communicating our why and our how?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_03: And and how do we start to put in thoughtful meeting cadences and really think about our meetings?
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_03: Often there's too many meetings and and they're not tied to that clear why.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_03: Why are we doing this?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_03: What is this moving the needle towards?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_03: And also thinking about how to become more agile and we think about the structures that we put in place.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_03: How do we check in and say, are these things still serving us?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_03: And if they're not, why not so that we can iterate on that?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's that there's a lot in that answer.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I just want to I want to pick apart just a couple of pieces of it, right?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: So uh you explained a little bit of this, but you but I'd love to go into a little bit more detail on it.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you used a concept early on that some people will have heard of slowing slowing down to move faster or slowing down to speed up, we sometimes is sometimes called.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: So what for people that are unfamiliar with that even as a concept, I mean it sounds counterintuitive.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: So what what do we mean by the idea of slowing down to go faster?
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_03: It's even as simple as understanding how how what what it what is the current state.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_03: I that's so many which no, they don't even understand their current state.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: And and that can be that that can be at every level inside and over.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_03: That's exactly right.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_03: That is 100% true.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_03: They've been working so quickly, and now they've come to something that's blocking them.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: They don't understand why.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_03: Everyone's frustrated.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_03: It feels like they're having the same conversation over and over, but never being able to see progress.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_03: And so then that's that's making them stop and ask why.
• 16:23
  unknown: Yeah.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: What's happened, what shifted, what changed.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_03: And and so understanding kind of okay, let's, but then it's about ah, they have this aha moment by slowing down because they've been forced to, and they understand the goodness of let's have these like important conversations and the thoughtfulness and hearing from our employees and being able to really dig into where did our strategy and our operation operationalization break down and take those learnings and really think about how do we continue to build in these feedback cycles or debriefing or retrospectives of how we work so that we have those moments and that we can then build in the learnings to iterate so that as we are evolving as an organization, our our process systems and people are also evolving.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: And that's so important.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so important.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it's it's so funny because I think people will recognize, even if you've never been in leadership or never been in management, you'll write you might even recognize elements of this in your own life.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the classic example that I sometimes use is the is the the messy garage, right?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: That has the um that every time you go into the you maybe you go into the garage once a week or something like that, and you spend three hours trying to find something because you've got no idea where everything is in the garage.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: And you know that if you spent a day like cleaning the garage or tidying the garage more accurately and throwing out all the stuff that you don't need, then the next time you go in there, you'll find it in two minutes instead of spending three hours in there.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: But you haven't got time to tidy the garage, right?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's a sort of classic um real life example of that thing, whereby organizations often feel like they don't have time to pause to fix some of this stuff, but they're wasting so much time as they're trying as they're trying to get there.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that leads me to the other point that you also made in in one of your earlier answers here, when you talked about this idea of people being a anemic, right?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is something that I'm really, really interested in because we refer to this as two, we refer to this as two related concepts, change fatigue and change anxiety.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: So change fatigue being the, oh, really, you're gonna give me something else to do, you know, and uh and I'm not gonna hear that you need to do more with less thing again, it's not working for me anymore, right?
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's the sort of change fatigue side, and then change anxiety is oh my goodness, all of this stuff is changing.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And am I gonna lose my job?
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: Am I gonna be able to keep up?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Is the company gonna survive?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: All of those kind of things.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: So this I suspect that when you're talking about this idea of of uh of people like lacking energy, as it were, and the sort of anemic thing, yeah.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Is it related to those concepts, do you think?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_03: And it goes back to where we're talking about this how we're built from a survival instinct, right?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_03: Like we naturally, when we get those, what we're talking about that like in our amygdala, it triggers our flight, which we're gonna flee, find another company, or we're gonna freeze.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: We literally just freeze and we get stuck in like, or we're in like you know, denial, right?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_03: Like of what's happening, and we're just gonna keep trying to do the same thing that we've been doing.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, or we start to fight, we start to have like uh more unhealthy behaviors that show up as a result.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I I do agree.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_03: I I think, and that's when we think about change management at that human care level.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: That is the level of how are we helping support our humans thoughtfully in a healthy environment, being able to, yes, change is difficult, but it doesn't have to be really hard and it doesn't have to trigger your survival mechanism.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Hi everyone, Matt here.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the producer of Humanity Working.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: To be honest, I kinda hate mid-roll ads, but it turns out they actually serve a purpose.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Staying focused for a full podcast is really tough, so these couple of minutes will help you reset.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's not just podcasts where people struggle to sustain attention.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Most business and self-help books don't get read beyond the first chapter, and corporate training, 90% of it's forgotten within a month.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: All that work results in no meaningful change for anyone.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: But it doesn't have to be that way.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: Billion Minds is on a mission to make sure that the important information doesn't live in a vacuum, that can really help people change.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: They can take any content, a book, a course, a speech, even a podcast, and turn it into compelling, learn to experiences that drive change in people.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to learn more, email us at info at billionminds.com or visit billionminds.comslash change.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: So now you're ready to pay attention again.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get back to the podcast.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know one of the most interesting things about this, Mindy?
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like all the stuff that we're talking about here, about human nature and how humans respond to things, and the fact that humans kind of get tired and humans are find change difficult, and humans are um need to be brought along brought along with ideas if they're gonna work well in them, uh well with those ideas and respond and adapt and all that kind of stuff, right?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: But none of this is like rocket science.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is stuff that we that we've known collectively as a species for I at least a hundred years.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Think probably more than that, right?
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: So, given the fact that that we know a reasonable amount about what it is to be humans and how humans process change and all this kind of stuff, and we also know that we have humans working inside our organizations.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: Why is it that we don't do this better?
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: Why isn't this front and center to every company?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's sort of weird, isn't it?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_03: I I that that question keeps me up.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_03: You think we'd be getting better at this, right?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, yeah.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_03: And and I definitely think there's, you know, organizations that do get better at it, but it is still it's it's this, it's also, you know, why do CEOs look in uh there's so much data that shows that the companies that care that have invested in their people, that have tried to think about that people equation, that part of the organizational capability, but if they're looking at metrics of engagement and health, they haven't really seen anything move the needle there.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_03: And there's so they're like, why should we continue to invest in the same things if we're not seeing it change?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_03: And often here, I'm like, well, should we be asking that question in a different way?
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_03: What if we were to shift our mindset and think about it?
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_03: Like maybe we're not using using the right um measures of success.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe engagement isn't the right measure of success within that organization, right?
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_03: And and really looking and asking why five times to get to the underneath issues that are maybe um stemming that you're not seeing a change, even though you're investing so much, because maybe you're investing in the wrong things, or you're investing in tools and resources that we started of the conversation used to serve managers in an old way of working, but because things have changed so much are no longer useful.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_03: And yeah, and and and these are the type of questions, you know, like, are we actually spending the time to do a and how do you make an audit sound so heavy?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't want to digress from our conversation, but it's like it's those retrospectives and debriefs.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_03: How do we start to do that in a way that we we can learn quicker and that we're asking the right questions at the right time to take the right learnings, to then rethink and and iterate on how we do things?
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_03: I think our HR Island, which is often devoid of the strategy of the business, is it's we haven't taken the time to ask those questions and think in that way to tie it back to who we are as an organization, because it's off in a silo, because it's often been seen as a spend and a tactical nature.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_03: But yet, if we even think about the tactical, because people usually say, okay, payroll benefits.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_03: But if you take that and shift it into how are our payroll and benefits strategic, which they should be, because it's incentivizing, and how is that driving our success as an organization?
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_03: How does that tie to our North Star?
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_03: Because it's part of the operating, how we're operationalizing this.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_03: But but those are not the conversations that are happening often.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_03: I shouldn't, I don't want to generalize.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, but I think it's right.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that what's what's really interesting, you talked about the engagement side.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and are we are we even measuring the right thing?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, measure engagement directly.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'll encourage people to um I'll put a link in the in the show notes.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: We just did a a newsletter on exactly that, actually, about whether engagement is the right thing to uh to measure.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and without kind of like burying the lead of that, where we came out uh with on that was the idea that engagement is a little bit like happiness, which we're learning more and more and more about the science of happiness, which is something that you don't pursue, like the the direct pursuit of happiness or the idea of like being, I will be happy, I will choose to be happy as an individual.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: None of that actually really works.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: And what you do is you create environments in which in which happiness can thrive.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: So an individual is a human, right?
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: That implies, you know, having a lot of social connections, et cetera, and it uh and it implies sort of structuring your life in such a way that it is fulfilling in certain ways and things like that.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: And if you do those things, then happiness sort of emerges and sort of grows in those and those things.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: But that's something you work on directly.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we think engagement is actually something that is fairly similar to that.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why you don't you see all these investments that are sort of theor theoretically directly into employee engagement that clearly don't work.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then um, but then we should really think about like what do you do to create an environment where that is supportive of employees?
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then if that environment is supportive of employees, then engagement can flourish out uh out of that.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it's often too, if we just go back to the fundamentals and the foundations, it because it may be how we've uh managed or how we have told managers or given them the tools in the past to do things like one-on-ones, for example.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, how should we shift that?
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_03: How should we rethink one-on-ones?
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_03: And often, in I have often because we have in so many organizations just started promoting people into these roles without the training, without the know-how.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's not like when we're promoted into managers that we've been given the gift of management with the whole toolbox that I have managers.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: Once you build that trust, they would come to me in the organization and say, Mindy, how do you even have a good one-on-one?
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: What does that actually look like?
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you alluded to the idea of HR being uh, or some of these HR-like discussions that sit in islands, that they should be more strategic in nature.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: Conversations should be more strategic in nature.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: And what's intriguing, I think, about that is that that's part of a broader conversation, I think, that's going on about the HR role.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and people operations role and the emergence of chief people officers and things like that.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: You hear a lot right now around this idea that HR needs to be a more strategic role in organizations.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: Do you agree with that?
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I do.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: And if you do, do you do you see it happening in any kind of widespread way?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I yes, I do.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_03: I do think it, and then you should understand the organization in which you work.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_03: You should be able to understand that financial acumen, the business acumen, who are our customers, what are we serving, and in order to be able to kind of understand as you're sitting with the executive team and hopefully in strategic conversations, being able to say, okay, we're gonna even shift um pricing and packaging.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_03: How does that impact the people or the roles?
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_03: And like how do we need to update the communication and the training or the skill sets that we have, who we're hiring, how are all the things, right?
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_03: There's not anything that we do as a company that doesn't impact people.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, often HR is given the outcomes of these strategic decisions and said, Oh, how about oh, we didn't realize now it's just become a fire because we didn't think about the people, go fix it.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_03: And they're the behind cleaning things up.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_03: And if we were able to get ahead of that, to have them in the conversations initially, to then be that glue, because the people are the glue.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, the organizations that have their people in those strategic conversations, they're not having to come and clean things up.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_03: They're proactive, they're ahead, they're able to have those, you know, meaningful meetings, they're bringing people along for their change.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_03: They have the channels open for employee listening.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_03: And those are the organizations that often are moving quicker and faster that we see from a revenue standpoint because everyone's in the same boat rowing together.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the sec that's great.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: I agree with it.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: Second part of my conversation, uh, of my question, sorry, was really centered around whether you're seeing it happening in any meaningful way.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: Is there, uh, I mean, a lot of talk about it.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: Is it is it really happening yet?
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Are we seeing more and more organizations where HR is becoming more strategic?
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_03: I I feel like maybe that answer like uh changes depending on the day.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_03: But overall, yes, I do see hope.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_03: I do see hope because I I do sense that people, especially within small medium businesses, maybe can't afford a 20-year professional like me.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_03: But that's where the fractional piece comes in.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_03: They understand that they're about to grow and scale and they want to do that in a meaningful way.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: Often these are, you know, maybe even first-time executives that said, you know what, in the organizations, I started this company because I wanted to do it different.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_03: I wanted to care.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_03: I and and I need someone, but I can't afford a full-time person, but now with someone being able to come along for 20 hours a week, even um, they can afford that.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: And then they can afford the strategy that comes with that.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_03: And what's also great about that fractional piece is that young HR person that may be operational at that time, the fractional person come, can I come alongside them to help them and their knowledge base grow and scale to really rethink how do we move from tactical to strategic and be able to coach them to be able to move into that seat.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_03: Me as a fractional leader, I always think success for me is I'm there for a short period of time, but then they outgrow me.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_03: And that HR person becomes then that strategic person.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_03: And then I'm just on call as needed.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's a really, really important point, Mindy, which is that the the rise of these fractional roles um it sort of kind of allows organizations to square the circle on this a little bit, right?
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, which is it's really obvious that that when almost every new organization wants, to your point, to do this well, but then there's always this idea of like, yes, I want to look after my people, I want to treat my people well.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: I do believe that people are really important asset to me, et cetera.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: But I can't afford, I can't afford a highly strategic HR human.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll I'll get somebody like really junior and we'll figure it all out.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: And before you know where you are, you're beyond that point, you're just trying to do all the operational stuff, you never have time for any of the strategic stuff.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: And you're probably not investing properly in learning and development either.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: So the managers are not are struggling as well.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: And before, and then before you really know where you are, you're just trying to clean up the mess.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, these fractional roles, particularly if they're done early, and particularly if when you're hiring a fractional HR leader, you're looking for a strategic one versus just somebody who will, you know, who will do all of the operations.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right, there's a different type of fractional option.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so so hopefully, hopefully this will be the um this will be the start of it.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: The cautionary note, I think I'd probably add, is that I like a version of this movie that I've seen before was centered around um CTOs and CIOs and so on.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: And around 20 years ago, there was this really big push led by Gartner and others saying chief technology, you know, every company is gonna be highly strategic around technology.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: CTOs should all report directly to the CEO.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: It needs to become absolutely the core of the strategy inside every organization.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it kind of happened, and then it kind of didn't, and then and then people were often C uh TOs and CIOs were reporting up through the CFO again, and it just became another cost structure inside many organizations.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: So if this is going to happen in a very in a very real way, I think it requires, yes, organizations to be persuaded of the benefit of that, but it also requires the the HR professionals inside organizations to step up and start behaving any more strategic way in order to allow that to happen, which obviously requires in some cases a lot of learning and development on the part of the HR leaders themselves.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: What are your thoughts on that?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_03: And and taking the time to, you know, if you know, if you haven't had the opportunity, if you've only been asked to do tactical, it it does.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_03: I how do we how do you find the right coach to be able to it's not like you just turn on a strategic switch?
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you don't go, oh I'm gonna be strategic.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not gonna be strategic now, right?
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it it's it's gonna be an interesting, uh, I would say probably next couple of years, two, three years as we try to figure this out.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_03: Just one thing that was really interesting because I love mentoring.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_03: And some of my some of the pieces people that have recently reached out to me and it started to actually change.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, ah, people are the CEOs are asking their HR people to be more strategic, like versus tactical.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_03: And when I saw that, it was towards the end of last year, I started finding people, young HR leaders reaching out to me through mentoring platforms, seeking help.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_03: And they are often paying from it from their own pockets, which because the the leaders, they weren't putting the the coaching, they the how we just said it's not just a switch to turn on.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_03: It yeah, it's they realized the gap themselves and that they needed help to make that happen.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_03: And so, how do we help organizations understand that when your managers, when you're asking them to move from tactical to strategic, how are you supporting them even with coaching or and and helping pay for that?
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, backing up the design you've suggested with some investors.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: All right, last question for you.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you're spending an awful lot of time seeing how the world of work is changing for the humans that are in it.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um we're clearly entering into a new phase of the world of work.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: There's AI, there's robotics, there's automation, all of that's getting democratized.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, uh a lot of that technology threatens to uh make the role of uh humans diminished inside inside organization compared to to where they are today.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm curious, what do you what do you think will be the role of humans in the workplace in say a decade?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: And what can we do to make sure that that role is significant and meaningful for the individuals, for the humans inside the organizations and for the companies?
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um I always I'm a positive, so I always try to think about how can we use a technology to augment the work that we're doing, and how do we help move us forward to be able to focus on more strategic and creative um ways of working that maybe were held up because we were having to spend all the time doing the research just to get one initiative done.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_03: But now that that research can be done with the help of um augmentation through technology, like how do we then be able to move into a more innovative, creative way of working?
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_03: And I think you know, technology is continuously to learn.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that challenges us as humans is how do we take do all the things that we're talking about, which I feel like if they're every comment that we've talked about, Paul, I would we could dig into a deeper series because that is how, like, if we don't start to adapt and create continuous learning at work for the humans, then the technology gets harder because we have to stay ahead of it in order to be able to use it as a as an augmented tool.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I think it's exciting if we're able to think about how do we support the humans to be able to have the space to thoughtfully, continuously improve and how to use a technology along with us.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for joining us today, Mindy.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: Really enjoyed the conversation.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Paul.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: Our interviewer is Paul Slater.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: Music is by Dolo Records.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you like this podcast, please subscribe, like, and recommend us to others.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: It helps us reach more people.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: 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.