LH #112: Learning Futures 3 with Kevin Oakes, Kim McMurdo and Terry Jones

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If you're in workplace learning, learning technologies 2020 should definitely be on your radar. It's happening 2324 at Excel London and the scale is huge. 11,000 visitors, 1,000 conference delegates in a free exhibition with over 200 L&D solution suppliers. A conference theme People, Technology and the Future Decision Time taps into the biggest topics in L and D right now with 80 expert speakers and 30 sessions, they'll cover AI skills and personal growth and practical L and D essentials. Booking opens at the end of January. Check out learningtechnologies.co.uk for more info. Everything changes. Everything's changing all the time. Getting hotter or colder, bigger or smaller, more or less alive. And yet we like to talk about change as if it's something out of the ordinary, an aberration. More than that, we seem to want to believe that the global changes affecting business in our own time, but somehow bigger, faster and nastier than anything that has happened before. Personally, I always thought that last idea was ludicrous. Until now. Welcome to the Learning Hack, a podcast about the people and technologies that are creating the future of learning. I'm John Helm.

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Learning is cool.

Learning is cool.

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Knowledge Education.

I first came across the acronym VUCA standing for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous more than a decade ago at a knowledge exchange event in London run by Iventive, one of our sponsors for this season. I was also at the most recent of their London events last week, and I felt moved to take a time machine back to that earlier year. I wanted to tell them all there, if you think you're living in a VUCA world now, just wait until 2025. All three of our guests this time were taking part in that eventive knowledge exchange. Learning Futures London. At times it seemed like the whole event was about change. The changes AI is bringing, how you transform something as resilient and stubborn as company culture, and how you shift the focus on individual performance to team performance in an age of hyper individualism. It's all about change. And we've got a whole typology now. We talk about disruption. We talk about transformation, changes in the rate of change. It was a great event and I want to give a personal thanks to Russell Butler, to Richard and Kerry and everybody in the Iventive team, but also to the people who helped us from Shell who were hosting the event. In this episode, you'll hear interviews with Kevin Oakes, Kim McMurdo, and Terry Jones, thought leaders, all of them. So here's the first of those an interview with Kevin Oakes and who he Hack Facts Kevin oakes is the CEO and co founder of the Institute for Corporate Productivity i4CP, a leading human capital research firm. He authored the Amazon bestseller Cultural Renovation, detailing strategies for successful organizational culture change. Previously, Kevin founded and led Sumtotal Systems and Click to Learn. Kevin, welcome to the Learning Hack.

Thanks John. Good to be here.

In your book you talk about culture renovation rather than culture change. You know, people talk a lot about change in learning in hr, but renovation rather than change? What's the difference you're getting at there? Why is renovation the better way to think about transforming organizational culture?

Yeah, it probably makes sense to go back to what we originally researched. So this all came about from a study we did on culture change several years ago, and we were fueled by one particular statistic, and that's 85% of companies who try to change their culture fail. In fact, only 15% will tell you they had success in changing their culture. And as we, as we embarked on this study, what we were trying to uncover was a blueprint of those companies that succeeded that we could share with others. You know, were there commonalities that they embarked on that we could then put into a playbook that other organizations could learn from? And we did find 18 action steps, leadership actions that companies could take in order to effectively change culture. Now when we went into this, we were using the common term culture transformation. So if you Google that, you'll get millions of hits on culture transformation. As we studied those successful companies, we recognized none of them transformed themselves. They didn't become something completely different. What they did instead was like how you would approach an old house. They carefully renovated their companies, keeping what was unique about those organizations to begin with, keeping what was hard to replace, much like you would with an old house, but improving areas of the organization in order to improve value, again with an old house. So renovation just became a much more approachable term, and I've heard this from many, many people since we published the book, that they love the concept of renovation much more. So it's much less daunting and is something that they can work with. So that's why we chose that term.

Doesn't that kind of run a bit counter to the current culture of start up, day one, burn it all down and start again?

And that just doesn't happen. Companies don't just start all again. You know, you can't just shed everything that you've done in the past and, you know, begin anew. You always have artifacts that you're carrying with you. And so most companies that are trying to change their culture, you know, take that more of a renovation approach. How can we renovate for future value increase?

So somebody's lived in an Edwardian house and had to kind of deal with quite a major extension to the house. It's a matter. It's kind of a matter of what features you want to keep and yeah, what you want to sort of let go.

And the way we organize these action steps is using that house metaphor, we put it into three stages. Plan, build and maintain. And those are important concepts because a lot of new CEOs or senior management teams, when they want to change culture, they leap right into the build phase.

Right.

They just want them to have action quickly. And they're often urged to make changes quickly. But like an old house, if you ran in there and just started knocking down walls without a plan, you could take the whole thing down. And I've seen, you know, some leadership take the whole company down by, by not having a solid plan. So we talk a lot about, make sure you understand what are the strengths and weaknesses of the culture to begin with. The worst thing an executive team can do is lock themselves in a conference room and decide amongst themselves, you know, what needs to change about the culture and what's what' wrong about the culture today. Because they will get it wrong. You really have to listen to the workforce and do extensive listening sessions to unearth, you know, what is really happening at the ground level within the organization before you can even begin to discuss making changes. And it's the same with the maintained phase. It's a phase that often gets ignored. But many times when a company is trying to change their culture, there's a lot of hoopla and, you know, you know, a lot of activity around changing it. But if you don't do the hard work of continuing to maintain that, it's like the old house. It'll just fall back into disrepair. And what happens in a corporate culture is they fall back to old habits and they fall back to the way they used to do things.

Yeah, which is where the housing metaphor breaks. Down because once you've put that third floor in the house, it's there. Yeah, yeah.

It's a loose metaphor, John.

Yes, like all metaphors shouldn't be taken too seriously. So you studied all these organizations, the ones that built resilient adaptive cultures. What are the common traits of the people who got it right, have got it right?

Yeah, we've studied that pretty extensively. And companies that have very healthy cultures tend to be transparent in general. They share information widely across the organization. There's not a lot of rumors and secrets in the organization. Everybody knows the scorecard. They know if they're performing well or performing poorly, both at the individual level, department level, organizational level. So I think that's a, that's one big part of it. I think having a shared purpose and a well understood purpose as well as well understood values and behaviors is a common thread through healthy cultures. We actually did a study a little while ago that showed companies where employees can't even remember the values, they tend to be low performance organizations. The ones that know the values off the top of their head, they tend to be high performing organizations. That's a very simple test, but it was amazing how clear the correlation was between toxic cultures and healthy cultures.

So it's a bit like that politician thing of putting your key messages on a, on a credit card and just making sure they're memorable.

Yeah, but also, you know, making sure that all decisions are aligned with the purpose of the organization, the values of the organization and that the behaviors that are carried out are in line with the values. We often find companies, they've put the values, you know, in a PowerPoint, they framed it on a wall. But the leaders don't walk the talk. Right. The leaders do something very different than the values. And that also is the sign of an unhealthy culture. Usually the companies that are healthy tend to reinforce that quite a bit and ensure that leaders behaviors are always in support of those values.

Yeah, that alignment with values throughout a company can be harder to do than to say Katya. I mean, I think absolutely most of my experience in companies is with startups. But even with small companies we found that we wanted to change the culture of the company by bringing in a, a yammer network that everybody could talk to about. But a large proportion of this company were developers and they weren't going to move away from irc sure to yammer. And they resisted it tooth and nail. And in the end the CEO decided, well, they're developers, developers do what they do. We have this bit of the company that functions slightly differently to everybody else. We can't enforce that. We just kind of have to go with it. Does alignment break down when you have to change the change program according to those specificities and slight eccentricities of different parts of the organization? The lawyers don't necessarily think they're the same way as the accountants.

Well, there's a common thread amongst these companies that successfully change cultures. And having those detractors is something every organization runs into. And you're going to have detractors at the lowest levels and even at the highest levels. And so it's important to remove those obstacles, not necessarily take those people out of the organization, although that certainly has happened, but make sure that their opinions can morph into what you're trying to do as an organization. And the way that you do that is to identify the influencers and energizers throughout the company. Every organization has these go to people throughout the company that others turn to not just for subject matter expertise, but many times for energy. And you have people like this in your life that you, you turn to them to have great conversations and to bounce ideas off of. And when you leave that conversation, you're pumped up, you know, you feel better about yourself. And then there's the opposite. There are people that you talk to, you know, in a normal course of business, and they kind of suck the life out of you like a Darth Vader. Right. And all your energy is gone. We, we use social network analysis to identify those influencers and energizers. And, and again, if you ask executives who are those people in the organization, they're going to think more in terms of hierarchy. They're going to look more at the hierarchical org and think that those are the people that are the influencer energizers and they almost always are not. The people that are the true influencers are spread at the lowest levels in your organization. They often fly under the radar. They're not always extroverts, many times they're introverts, but they have great influence. And when you uncover those people, you now want to make sure that they are bought in to what you're trying to do from a culture change perspective so that they can influence others around, around you. So in your engineer example, if that same organization had a few key people sprinkled throughout that, you know, that organization, and they were championing, using yammer, using the new tool, I guarantee you everybody else will start to follow suit after a while.

Yeah, that's such an important point that the kind of inference networks within the company and the dynamics of that are not coterminous with the org chart that you know.

In other words, almost never is.

You might be the manager, but you're not the person that people go to about terms decision. I worked at a change program where we were, it was about salary sacrifice schemes through hr and we realized that there was a big resistance to the behavior change needed. People just didn't trust the thing. So we worked out who they trusted within their department about things and those people became the champions.

Sure.

It's working in a similar way to that.

Very much so, yep.

Okay, so there's kind of lessons for leadership in that it's often said that culture starts at the top. What does that actually mean in practice? What are the most important things leaders should be doing daily to reinforce strong culture?

If leaders don't want the culture to change, then it almost never will. So it is important for this to be leader led. But just like my last example, it's equally important to have the cooperation at the lowest levels in the organization. We find that there are, like I said, 18 leadership actions that organizations can take in order to change culture. But in general, leaders have to be highly communicative around what they're trying to do. They've got to describe the why behind the what, you know, why are we trying to do this? Yeah, they should be focused on measurement, making sure that there's very visible signs of progress. And if there's not, you know, where do we need to tackle that going forward? I mentioned transparency earlier and that that was a big commonality amongst those leaders. So there's numerous things that I outline in the book that leaders should undertake in order to have successful culture change. And I'm thrilled that we have many Global 1000 organizations, Fortune 500 organizations, that are using the book as a blueprint that they're following in order to effectively create a healthier culture.

Okay, so culture isn't just about big leadership decisions. They're also those invisible day to day forces that shape how people work and interact. What are some of the most overlooked and underestimated factors to influence workplace culture?

Maybe the most difficult one to deal with is when you have detractors in very powerful roles and they're not very, it's not very obvious that they're detractors. That's what derails culture change efforts more often than not. And I Talked to several CEOs who had successfully changed their culture. That that was the hardest thing they had to deal with is how do I take these people that are in senior leadership roles reporting to the CEO oftentimes. But they just don't believe in what we're trying to do from a culture change perspective. Many of them moved those people out and shifted the roles. And they said once they did, it was a breath of fresh air. We suddenly could move forward and progress. And I think that's the hard part for a lot of companies is how do you, how do you deal with that? We find that there's a number of companies that resist dealing with the brilliant jerk. You know, the, the person that is the best salesperson or the, you know, the top engineer, maybe a brilliant marketing mind. And they, they execute very well, but they leave a trail of disruption in their wake. Right. We all know people like this.

Yeah.

The hardcore companies around culture, they don't let that execution success cloud their judgment around those individuals because the end doesn't justify the means. And so they deal with it. Microsoft's a great example. I highlight Microsoft a great deal in the book. I think what they have done and continue to do, frankly, around their culture is something that anyone organization can follow, but they do not tolerate those brilliant jerks. They, they deal swiftly with them.

Right. So it's. When it comes to sort of performance, it's not much, just a matter of, all right, I want the high performers in this company and everyone else can just leave. You're going to end up with a skewed organization.

That's right.

That way. So we talked, you talked a bit about measure measurement and tangible measures. Culture is often seen as a soft thing that's hard to measure, but you argue that it's trackable. What are the most effective ways to measure cultural.

Yeah, first of all, you can absolutely measure culture. And many organizations are today, which is great to see. They're often doing it through an index or a dashboard that's made up of several different measures that come into the organization. I think a lot of times people just think about an engagement survey and say, oh, is that the culture measurement? And that is not, you know, that's one small piece of data. I argue that oftentimes engagement surveys are poor measures of culture because it's a, a point in time survey that companies typically do once a year, once every two years. And it only gives you, you know, a little bit of data around what's happening at that point in time.

Yeah.

So we see companies measure culture numerous ways. They certainly apply business measures to it. You know, what is our customer success rates, you know, whatever business they might be in measuring the, you know, the business Results over time. Also measuring things like employee net promoter score. You know, we put a lot of effort into Customer net promoter score. Employee net promoter score can be very insightful, I think. And just seeing how are your employees talking about the organization, what's your employer brand externally and measuring that over time is what's critical. It's not important to measure your culture versus somebody else's culture. It's important to measure your culture over time. One company that I think does a great job NAT this is MasterCard. Their CHRO, Michael Focaro's written a wonderful article about how they created a culture index. And they make this visible to many, many people both inside and outside the organization to show how their culture is morphing over time. And we've done lots of articles on this and lots of research studies. So you can, you can definitely see those out on the website. But there's numerous metrics that go into this.

Yeah, how about things like newer forms like sentiment analysis, kind of looking at what, what people are saying on teams or.

Yeah, I love sentiment analysis both internally and externally. I think looking at what is being said on your internal social channels is important. It's equally important to look at your, you know, glass door and external.

I was going to mention glass door.

Yeah, so a lot of people cringe when I say that because Glassdoor can be very caustic. You know, it can be more dominated by disgruntled economics that got completely hung.

Up on a particular negative post on Glassdoor.

Yeah, you can't do that because you know, that'll drive you nuts trying to, trying to decipher just one comment on Glassdoor. But you, what you do want to look for are trends. And if you have enough reviews on, you know, there, or indeed or comparably or any external social site, you can start to spot, you know, trends and commonalities across those that I think can be insightful.

Okay, so workplaces are changing fast, AI hybrid work, shifting employee expectations. How do you see the concept of culture evolving in the next five to 10 years? Difficult at the moment to talk about next five, 10 years. And what should leaders be doing now to future proof the company culture?

Well, you just highlighted a lot of words that I use many times. So future proof is a big one. A culture will always be evolving. And so what you want to do is create a culture that is change ready, one that accepts, not only accepts change, but looks at change as an opportunity going forward. That's what the highest performing organizations do anytime there are, there are changes in their Environment and their industry, what have you. They will look at how can we exploit that change, you know, and what are, what are the opportunities for us as an organization? It's the companies that have workforces that dread change and hate change. Those are the slow moving organizations that tend to be the also rans overall. So I think, you know, as AI is a great example. You know, certainly AI has already affected organizations immensely, but we're, we've only scratched the surface. And what our research has shown is the companies that are operationalizing AI today, meaning that they have it both from an efficiency and effectiveness perspective within their organization. They tend to be the higher performing companies. So the strong are getting stronger through AI. The companies that are just in experimental mode or maybe ignoring AI, those are low performing companies by our measure. And we measure performance by companies that have better revenue growth, market share, profitability over the, you know, a five year time horizon. So we're constantly measuring this. And a big piece of our cultural advice to companies who want to operationalize AI is make sure your executives are on board. Make sure they understand it, make sure they're using it, make sure they champion it inside the organization. The organization won't adopt AI if the executives don't really understand it or aren't really using it. So that's a profound shift right now. We see in a lot of organizations.

Such an interesting discussion. You're obviously a real expert in change and we talked a bit about transformation. But are there different categories of change? I mean, how about disruption? When something changes so fundamentally that the whole thing just seems like your basic business model is blown out of the water. Is there a kind of, is it an intensification of the same kind of focus that for you or are there different categories of where you go into crisis mode or something?

Disruption is almost a matter of opinion. I heard this a lot when the Internet came around, right? So suddenly that was going to completely obliterate certain businesses. But it was the businesses that adapted that became stronger. Right? They use the Internet to their advantage. It's the same thing today with AI. The ones that are using it to their advantage are going to become stronger going forward. So I don't put a lot of, you know, a lot of weight behind. Is it too disruptive or not? I think there's always going to be disruptions in, in the environment and you know, in the industries that you're, that you're operating within now there's different types of change, there's process change internally. And how are you having some innovation around what you're doing from a process perspective. There's change in innovation, what you're doing with your customers externally. I think the goal here is to not be stagnant. I think there's very few organizations out there that are completely stagnant for a long period of time and are wildly successful. Just, you know, is a rare thing. You know, it's the companies that are constantly adapting that are going to succeed.

Interesting. So we have to bring this to a close, unfortunately. Very interesting. Thank you for very much taking the time. Lastly, could you just say who, on the kind of topics that we talked about, who do you personally follow? Who would you would do apart from reading your book, what else should people look at and follow and listen to?

I, I take a lot of learnings from data that is published around culture and you know, a lot of people publish data in addition to ourselves, but also from the case studies. You know, I just, I love reading about success stories.

Yeah.

Out there. I think that brings that data to life. And you know, there are numerous companies that I think are doing a very good job with their culture. You know, I mentioned, I mentioned Microsoft and MasterCard. You know, if you go back and look at their stock prices of when they decided they were going to really impact their culture, it's night and day from where they are today. They've just tremendously increased the value of the organization. But there's many more examples out there. T Mobile is another one which has been one of the greatest turnaround stories in corporate history. And I think we can take learnings from all those case studies out there that any company, whether you're in that industry, small or big, you can apply to your own organization.

Yeah, I'm sure people have learned a lot from this interview that they can apply to their own organization. Thank you very much.

Hopefully. Thanks, John.

Thanks. If you're looking to connect with the top minds in learning and talent, there's no better place than an iventive event that's I V E N T I V. Since 2009, they've hosted nearly 300 interactions, interactive conversational events exclusively for senior leaders like Global Hitler Learn. I've been a sponsor myself and found these events invaluable. Less about sitting and listening, more about real impactful conversations. It's an unmatched opportunity to collaborate with leading chief learning officers on the challenges they're tackling today. Join the conversation visit iventive.com learninghack that's website ventiv.com learninghack. Hack facts Kim McMurdo is the global head of Organizational Development at Standard Chartered bank overseeing leadership capability, team effectiveness, employee voice and culture activation of over 17 years in financial services. She's got international experience across Asia, Europe and the US Kim is passionate about developing leaders aligned with the bank's purpose. Welcome to the learning hack. Thanks for taking the time.

Thank you.

You're head of OD at Standard Chartered Bank. 83,000 colleagues in 53 markets. Core markets being Asia, Africa, Middle East. When it comes to learning, organizations have a lot in common. But every business has its specificities. What are the particular challenges for Standard Chartered neural role?

So I would say akin to a lot of global organizations there is I guess a specific challenge and opportunity of how do we work in a hybrid environment. So we have long, well before the return to office debate. Standard Chartered has been a truly global and hybrid organization working with colleagues in over 50 markets. So I would say how do you get colleagues learning in a network where those nodes of the network might not even be co located? I think is an interesting challenge and I think as a organization that has cross border as its strategy. So that's our key client value proposition. It's how do we truly have learning that cross borders.

Okay, but a big area of interest for you. I know that came out in the session I saw. It's a really good session. By the way, brilliant. Is the team as the unit for organizational success rather than the individual. And in this era of hyper individualism with the individualism on steroids actually lately with the discourse about performance focusing heavily on individuals and also technology fighting ever ever more clever ways of personalizing stuff to the individual. And we're all very much into that kind of individually personalized digital experience now. Everything kind of focused on the individual. What is this about? Are you a dangerous communist?

I've not been described as that before but I think whilst of course the value of the individual and individual effectiveness and hyper personalization to help individuals will of course continue to be important, I think when it comes specifically to the domain of leadership, it's a dead end to only think about the individual in that construct. I think if we look at the size, scale and shape of the adaptive challenges, even if we just take the interplay between the human and technology, it's I think a tad naive to think that that's going to fall down to individual competence of an individual set of leaders. I am much more curious about how do groups, coalitions of leaders come together and we see this actually both in private and public sector where actually the need to, to partner and to Work in an ecosystem is much more important than your individual competence within your individual domain, within your individual organizational walls. So yeah, that's why it's not a replacement of individual capacity. I think it's looking beyond individual capability into collective capability.

So not so much about locating your big stars and developing them, but about a constellation leaders.

Yes, nice way of putting it. Yeah. So thinking, how do a collection of bright and starish leaders come together as a unit and how do they interplay with each other and their skills and their styles and their preferences? That I think is where we can do some leading edge organizational development work.

Right. Do you want to talk a bit more about what you shared in the session with everybody? And there were those three points, weren't there? And I. And it's a memory challenge that I'm now struggling. Co creation was second, I think. Yeah, but what was first?

So the first area was around having big groups of leaders learning together. That was really the first. So social learning, peer learning at scale was really the first area that we talked about that I think is so important. If you are majoring on the collective, not the individual, then don't go do learning in the shadows one on one with an executive coach. Do it out loud in big group collectives, I would say was number one. The second. Yeah. As you say was if we are going after this more collective style of leadership, then it can't just be the domain of the HR professional that picks the competency from the competency framework. It has to be very much contextual and co created with the business as well.

Right. And what was the third one again?

With partners. So bringing in partners and clients to thinking about how we are doing leadership development not as a spectator or not as a provider, but actually in the sandpit with us learning. I think large partnership organizations, a true sense of that or size of that partnership is are they actually learning together as well?

And when you say partnership, is this partner within internal people in different divisions or different territories or external partners?

So both really, I think, particularly at the executive end and the senior end. Again, I think there's very little that a CEO can achieve just within the four walls of their organization. Right. The need to partner, whether it's with government, non governmental, whether it's sometimes with competitors, with suppliers, advisors, et cetera. So I think, yeah. Bringing more leadership learning closer to the context of this. Yeah, it's an overused word, but I do like the descriptor of an ecosystem rather than functional leadership.

Okay. And within those three things there were things you located that were tricky and others that were difficult. Tricky is a word that's come up a lot in this day, which is weird. What were the tricky things about the approach?

So I think when we were talking about what's tricky, we were thinking about what's getting in the way of us going after this more collective style of leadership. And I think there was a couple of things that really stood out from the group discussion that we had. The first is assessment. I think in the HR world we often only assess individual competence and individual personality, individual preference. There isn't really too much work being done on assessing collective or institutional capability. So that was point one. And then the second one that I loved, which is what one of the participants shared, is patience. So again, in a world where people are quick to try and show their ROI within six months of delivery, if we're thinking about developing deep trust with leaders across the network, that's not going to be a kind of instant noodle return on investment.

Yeah. To come back to that thing about assessment, a thing that I didn't actually voice in the session, but it was the back of my mind probably because it tends to be large organizations that represented here and my experience is mostly with startups, but I've worked a lot trying to get sales to work with marketing as a consultant and as a middle manager, which is difficult because they're assessed completely different. Completely different salespeople. Individual, have individual targets and they live or die by their, you know, by their target and whether they've hit it or they haven't. And a lot of them are in sales roles because. Because of their personality profile. That's how they prefer to do it. Marketing people, completely different, very kind of systematically driven and tend to be assessed that way and more collectively assessed. I think if, you know, the organization's not getting a lot of kind of brand purchase or enough leads, those are types of measures. But it's doesn't tend to be turned to that individual target. How do you deal with that? Because it's very often the case that different functions within an organization are assessed differently.

Yep. So I think there's multiple levels of assessment that we're thinking and talking about here. So originally I was thinking more about the competency assessment.

Right.

And the individual. But you're taking it up a level which is assessment in the broadest sense of how are you rewarded and measured on your performance?

You're going to be here next quarter.

Exactly.

To salespeople.

And I think looking at those hard system drivers are so important because quite often when we think about, oh, how do we want to drive collaborative leadership? We think it's all like mindset and behavior. Whereas actually as you're pointing to, it's quite hard wiring in terms of am I going to get a bonus and am I going to be here next quarter? So I would say having more conversations around shared goals and shared success and making sure that what you're rewarding is, yes, there will always be an element sometimes of the individual, individual performance in say a sales role. But making sure that that's value accretive and not eroding value from somewhere else in the franchise and in the organization is so important in your kind of sales and incentive structures.

Yeah. Is it a matter of changing the way that salespeople, for instance, are assessed?

Yeah. So I think it's being very careful what you put out into the organization as to what you value. Right. And what you pay for and making sure that there's, it's like that leadership shadow, isn't it? Making sure that if you say in the organization that you value cross border collaborative leadership, that that's what you measure and that's what you prioritise and that's really much what you reward. So I think it's the cohesion that's as important as to what you pick, that you're reinforcing the same messages through your leadership learning, your selection, your assessment of and performance and then ultimately your reward.

Yeah, you just reminded me there. I'm hopping around a bit here, but a resonant phrase that stuck out for me was the wirearchy, not the hierarchy. Do you want to explain what that means?

So I can't claim credit for that phraseology. It's a wonderful professor Tony o' Driscoll, who does some of our leadership learning. But why it stuck with me is I think quite often in large organizations people are adept and skilled at using the hierarchy and using the official kind of command and control style of leadership. As to how do you go up, down and sideways in the organization? I think the invitation to use the wirearchy, which is the soft connective tissue of influence, partnership and collaboration, is a slightly messier but much more effective and long term healthy way of activating leaders. So yeah, we quite often talk about the wirearchy, the invisible knitting together of different leadership systems within the organization.

Yeah. And it comes back to something that came up earlier in the day and I'm kind of struggling to remember who it was who said it, but that the sources of kind of influence and even power within an organization aren't necessarily exactly the same as the org chart. There'll be people who are kind of mavens for some particular thing and everybody trusts what they say and their advice. And so that's what we mean by the wirearchy.

Yeah, absolutely. And when operating in a wirearchy or when operating in a network or an ecosystem, the role of trust becomes so critical and really important. And I thought it was a wonderful addition by one of the participants to talk about the three levels of trust. So the benevolent trust. Do I like you? Do I empathize with you being kind of the least helpful in a network? Then the kind of capability trust. Do I believe that John has the skills to do the job?

Of course you do.

Of course, of course. And then the third level of trust being dependability trust. So not only do I think you have the skills to do the job, but can I rely on you to get it done? So I think the role of trust in these kind of systems is so fascinating and important.

Yeah, I think that was. Kevin Oakes brought that up, who I talked to earlier this morning. Another thing that you said that really interested me was that rather than kind of focusing on the top level of leadership, in terms of leadership, it's really important to look at the kind of people who are on the way up in the middle in earlier parts of their development as leaders and managers because that's the way you kind of see change in the organization to carry on in years to come. It's kind of a good long term view. Perhaps difficult for C Suite to get their heads wrapped around when they're focused around the next quarter. That's quarter sales and the share price tomorrow. Yeah.

I think where I found the C Suite very helpful in that however, is that I think by nature of making it to the C Suite, these individuals do tend to have an eye on purpose, an eye on legacy. And I think all leaders, when exiting the C Suite, want to feel like they're leaving a kind of positive legacy behind. So I found it quite an easy sell actually to suggest to C Suite that actually it's not all about them and it's not all about the top and the executive leadership. It's deeper in the organization. So I think I feel lucky to have worked for an organization that is very empathetic to the leadership mandate all the way in the organisation. I think we should focus on all levels of leadership, but very much those. The next generation. Yeah, it's a, it's a key moment to be working with.

Right. And also not to dismiss People who might be perceived as mediocre because Kevin was saying that if you make changes at that level, if, in other words, people who aren't massive star performers, if you can increase their performance by incremental amounts, you can actually have massive effects on the, the productivity and performance of the organization.

Yeah, and I think this is a big important point into how do you approach leadership development in your organization? I'm sure there's many schools of thoughts, but there's one where there's this kind of like remedial approach where I'm going to take the 10 things that people are defunct and are deficient in and fix them. That's very much not the style that.

We that was going to be. My next question was how do. If you're taking that approach, looking for kind of early stage managers and also those who aren't performing magnificently, how do you stop that feeling like it's remedial, like training for punishment, which very often training is often kind of received and thought of as oh no, I've got a good training, I must have done something bad.

So I think a couple of things on that. I think one is making sure that you're very much co creating with your business. What do they need? And it feels like it's you asked we've given. The second is making sure that it's not just all about teach so that you've got peer learning, you've got learning from other leaders. So it's about creating the connection among those leaders as opposed to punishing them. And then I think the third is really being comfortable that it's a multi skilling strategy. So it's not. I'm going to take these five skills and I'm going to move them from A to B on these five skills that will obviously happen, but it's also meeting leaders where they're at and having context rich leadership development strategies and techniques that are about giving people what's helpful to them at that point in time as opposed to this prejudged sense that people are defunct in empathy or whatever it may be.

You shared a paper with me from McKinsey you found inspiring on leadership. Could you kind of sum up in a nutshell what you really like about that paper?

I really like the fact that the unit of analysis is teams, not individuals. And they had some pretty compelling data on the driver of team effectiveness and overall organizational performance. Not coming from the myth of putting your best people in each job. It's actually about how the best people are sometimes perhaps the right people or the second best person can work within that construct. And yeah, I find as HR professionals, if we're working at the enterprise, organizational, team and individual level, it's the team level where we often and don't spend as much time. So yeah, I found it particularly inspiring to say actually we're playing a team of teams games, we're not playing an individual game.

So we were talking about peer learning and this is really a peer learning event. What interests you about what came back as a reaction to your session? Because it's very interactive in this.

Two things that interested me. One was most of my peers are grappling with this in some way so we could look at the problem statement, I'd say relatively coldly, almost and not see it as something that only one organization is struggling with. And I think the second thing I loved in the peer learning was just the long range vision. So the gentleman that we had who shared the seven year progress that he's been on with his CEO to get to the point where the collective and shared ownership of collective goals is valued. So I think when you're playing a long game and it's a marathon, having sessions like this that you can take encouragement from your peers I think is super important.

So you've recently been promoted from a role that focused on leadership. Congratulations. How would you look at spreading this team based approach into leadership across an organization like Standard Chartered Sereny? So as opposed to kind of narrowly focusing on leadership, focusing on organizational development across the whole, how would you spread that team based approach?

So, so yeah, so thankfully organization development is now my job title and is now my mandate. So I think it's about flowing to the work and to the moments rather than thinking about taking leadership development out of the flow of work. So one good example in organization development is using strategy activation. So conversations that we're naturally having in our business around how do we accelerate growth and performance in certain parts and co opting those to be real moments where we can do big organization development interventions. So that's what I see as a bit of the nuance is how do we use the team of professionals that I have who are very skilled org development and org psychologists, et cetera, to support big critical teams, sometimes teams of teams, sometimes agile teams, sometimes leadership teams in the flow of work I think is the big opportunity that I am excited about.

We all get very excited about learning in the flow of work. When will it come?

Yeah, I think maybe we're calling it the wrong thing, learning in the flow of work. Maybe it is just it's the flow of work and not trying to bifurcate that learning is something that happens separate from kind of leaning into that natural occurrence of learning within the flow of work.

Yeah. So lastly, who would you recommend people following on this? I mean, we'll share the McKinsey paper in show Notes, but beyond that, who else, in your view, should executives seek out and listen to in today's crowded media environment for sound judgment and advice on leadership and organizational development? You mentioned Simon Sinek and a couple of other names.

So this is maybe not the right answer for the podcast, but I think the reason that I've brought this topic to Eventive and to my network of peers is that I actually don't think there's lots of people talking about this. So I don't have a single person. So, yeah, obviously I mentioned the McKinsey article and it's their executive development branch that have been working on that. But I do still feel like, to your point, in this world of hyper individualized, personalized. Yeah, maybe, maybe you can tell me. Maybe your. Your readers can tell me who I should be reading because, yeah, there isn't a singular voice on this.

Yes, readers, please write in and tell us. Write in. Sounds like, you know, the old birds.

Of the stamp on the back of an envelope. Yeah, yeah.

Answers on a postcard, but, you know, kind of hits up on social media and tell us who you think is good in this area. I mean, it's already new for me. I'm learning today. Every day is a school day.

Exactly.

Especially today. And it's been wonderful to be instructed by yourself. And thanks for taking the time.

Thank you for learning with me.

Hack Facts. Terry Jones is the Senior Director of Global Talent and Development at Palo Alto Networks, focusing on talent learning and organizational development. Recognized as a thought leader in the HR field, he emphasizes leadership development and employee experience. Terry has previously held senior roles at Chubb BT and Google. Hi, Terry. It's great to have you on the podcast.

Thank you very much for having me.

John, you've worked in the picture. People function in tech, notably at Google and Palo Alto and also in finance. So you've worked kind of, you know, those type of companies and also more normal kind of companies, if you like. I think a lot of us who don't work in the tech sector have this idea that companies like Google or Meta are different in some important way from those in more savage sectors. Well, obviously they are. They have a kind of different culture, but they also think that the people are different, but they're Completely different species of people, maybe from the people that HR deals with normally in other sectors. But are they?

It's a great question. I mean, the short answer to that is no, the people aren't different as such. But what is different, I think is the culture and the leadership in particular. And if I take the culture first of all, all organizations have got their values which they try to anchor their culture in, and it defines them and places like Google parallel to networks that have similar types of values. But the one which always I think is amplified in those types of organization is disruption or innovation, however it is called. And I think, you know, I think those are. That is the type of value that is lived and breathed and you see and is encouraged and. And because of that, there's a real authenticity that under underpins it. And you know, when you have everybody in the company, from leaders all the way down, expected to disrupt and innovate.

Yeah.

And be themselves and bring their whole selves to work. Truly.

Yeah.

I think that f very different type of mindset and therefore behavior.

Yeah. We're at a conference where people are constantly mentioning change actually over the last couple of days. It's a word that comes up again and again and kind of a realization that there are different types and grades of change. So you have kind of transformation and, you know, you have rapid overnight changes. Disruption hasn't been mentioned that much, but it is very much a key part of the landscape at the moment when we were recording this, as we all know.

Yeah, I completely agree.

It's been like constant, disruptive, tumultuous change. Is that a function of the companies that you worked in, sort of tech companies? And what kind of strains does that impose on hr?

Well, I think to take change, first of all. Yes. We're in a, you know, incredibly uncertain, high Vuca world.

Yeah, I first heard the term Vuca conference here many, many years ago. About 10 years ago. Yeah.

And you know, obviously the geopolitical landscape translates into the business landscape, translates into the individual functions and you know, certainly within tech organizations, but all organizations, I would imagine at the moment are having to make decisions constantly based upon the change that is happening around them and some of the things that they can't control as well. So I think when they're sort of synthesizing that into what is it that you can control and change and transform, I think it's really important. And coming back to Google and Palo Alto Networks and other tech firms, I think they've got a certain tolerance already built into the culture for change because of that innovation in disruptive mindset and encouragement. And so, you know, I think I, I think those organizations are already a sandbox for experimentation and change and they set up their whole systems, processes and, and, and ways of operating to drive continuous change. So I, I think there's a, there's a great level of, of resilience and tolerance. Certainly in those types of companies.

Do they have a different attitude to things like performance? Performance, for instance?

I think, you know, most organizations and sectors that I've worked in, I think, you know, the performance bar is always high. I think, you know, distilling it out of that, you want to look at, you know, obviously what people are achieving, but also how they're doing that. And I do think there's a greater emphasis on, on the how because you know, the way that you collaborate with people, the way that you're inclusive and that's another defining feature, I think of those types of companies, you know, very, that philosophy of the wisdom of crowds. So not believing there's anybody has a monopoly on wisdom, that actually collectively we can create great and amazing things. But yeah, I think those environments and Harvard did some research on this, didn't they, and said that 70% of behaviors in organizations is based upon the environment. And that's what also is driving the high performance in organizations. And so I think what you see in some of these tech companies is let's create the right environment and culture to enable people to come in, do their best work, self actualize and therefore perform at a very high level. So I think the level of performance certainly from what I've seen is typically very high in most areas. And I think that's quite defining in tech sector as well.

Yeah, one of the things that's driving a lot of change is, and a perception of change to come as well is AI. Of course a lot of businesses are bringing it in, thinking it'll be a magic bullet for productivity. But how do you make sure that AI isn't just about efficiency that actually helps people to do more meaningful high value work?

Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting, isn't it? Obviously, AI is a, you know, it's an omnipresent part of our vocabulary now and you know, it comes up in majority of conversations certainly that I have with leaders across the business, with leaders within HR functions. And I think the key principle here is about continuing to lead with humans empowered by the AI, rather than letting the AI overpower or immediately jumping to the AI as a solution. So the best use cases actually that I've seen is where AI is augmenting what people's current work and role is. And so for an HR professional, for example, it could be about the way that we assess performance and identify very targeted and precise interventions, whether that's, that's translating into hiring particular types of skills and people that we need, or whether it's about development and making that a bit more personalized. And so, you know, in that example, it's allowing greater focus and precision and efficiency in order to do that. But I think, you know, it was interesting that it is important though for everybody in the company, I think, to have a baseline skill set around AI. And at Palo Alto Networks we ran a learning series around AI. There was a non technical series of learning and there was some technical and we had a huge amount of employees go through this. And obviously the non technical is largely around large language model usage for productivity and how people can prompt engineer effectively. But we measured it really, really closely and what we saw as a result was that There was a 53% increase of people's usage of AI and large language models, either on a daily or weekly basis as a result of being educated in the space. So you're seeing, you know, a massive tangible impact by educating your workforce on some of these models and using them day to day. And that equated to approximately 40,000 hours of saving for the organization.

Right.

Every month.

Wow.

So what that meant, John, was that those people were then able to focus on even higher value work with the use of AI, augmenting what they currently do and then their existing tasks. So I think that's, you know, the, the example I would use there is the currently how I'm seeing that we use most effectively.

Yeah. So you're seeing the link there between AI and productivity, not just measuring usage, but the number of hours saved.

Absolutely, yeah.

Kind of manager saving. Yeah. What's the first thing HR leaders should be doing right now to make sure that AI is a force for both human potential and business success?

I think one of the first things HR professionals should do is not be fixated by AI and use it as a performance enabler. And it comes back to, I think what Simon Sinek always talks about, which is, you know, the why that should always be the start point in terms of what's the problem we're trying to solve here. And then having identified that and clearly defined that look at how we want to do it and the what is really could be the AI solution, but it could be many other things. And so I think just sometimes reversing our thinking around, okay, this has got to be an AI solution. And coming back to those, some of those basic principles around really, why do I need to do something here and what is the problem that we're trying to solve? So taking a really sort of structured approach to it.

Yeah. Thinking about my own usage, obviously I'm a freelancer and kind of on my own, but it feels like it's quite a difficult problem in a way initially that, you know, you can go and see Sam, what's his name? OpenAI talking about use cases for, for ChatGPT and the latest release and the kind of upgrades and it'll be things like, wow, you can get this thing to book a ticket for the Super Bowl. I don't want to book a ticket for the super bowl in America. And a list of use cases. I think, how does that apply to me? And thinking through what I can actually use it for has been an interesting process and a productive process, but a little bit slow. And even yesterday, I think I learned something. Somebody told me you could do with it. I thought, oh, bloody, I do that every day. Yes, of course I can do that. But that feels to me like the journey. How's it apply to your specific work and your specific role and capabilities and so on? Does that. How do you scale an effort like that?

Well, I think scaling anything really comes with real focus and structured implementation. And so the approach I would take, and again, I'll bring it back into the HR world because this is obviously the topic. I think first of all, diagnosing the performance that's needed in the organization is key, is a key start point for implementation with any solution, whether it's AI or otherwise. And then I think identifying as a result of that diagnosis the functional business areas that would benefit most from, from, from having AI. And it could be something to do with recruitment, it could be to do with onboarding, bringing people into the organization, employee engagement or learning and development, and, you know, and then looking at the right solution. So whether that's the ATS for hiring, whether it's a chat bot that's going to, you know, bring the organization together and, you know, streamline some of those of common repetitive requests that people have, or whether it's, you know, you're doing predictive analysis, looking at, you know, the types of skills for the future and integrate, integrating those. And so as a result of that, I think, you know, following that sort of process, it enables you to focus then in implementing on the right people, the early adopters. And I think it Comes a bit down to the sort of law of diffusion with this, where you will, I think we'll get to a tipping point across the organizations and I think law defusion talks about 16 to 18% adoption of something before you get that tipping point. So I would definitely encourage that sort of, you know, go after those early adopters and those areas of the business that also are prepared to collaborate and embrace that type of approach.

Yeah, you mentioned skills there. Yeah, skills is probably the number two hot topic in lnd. According to Don Taylor, his wonderful research. This, this conference in the last couple of days, I've had heard a real variety and mix of views about skills and competencies and the. And that whole what's your beat, what's your stand on that area?

Yeah, we've had some good conversation, haven't we, John? And you've seen it in the room. And you know, when I step back and I think about, you know, performance and what it is that drives high performance and across any domain, the first principle is really having a clear sight of what it is you're trying to achieve and how you're then going to get there. And so having that sort of North Star, you know, with a framework, which is a guideline really, I think is fundamental to high, high performance. And, you know, I've worked with lots of different and built lots of different, you know, competency models, frameworks, charters, whatever they're called in organizations. And it just gives you a compass as to, you know, where am I now? What does good look like in this role? People are calling them success profiles, talent profiles, all types of fancy words now. But ultimately it's about he are the core mindsets, competencies, knowledge I need to exhibit to be really good in my role. And I don't think they're static, so I think the frameworks themselves are a guide, but it's a decent start point. And I think if they've got flexibility built into them, what you're able to do then is add the strategic critical skills that you need as a business going forward. Because any assessment you do against those things, John, is just going to be a snapshot in time. Time.

Yeah.

However, it is a, you know, it, it's a good start point and it's. It, in my view, worth investing in getting those, you know, looking at who your high performers are, identifying those key competencies. Yeah, because it's the old adage of garbage in, garbage out. If that isn't, you know, in a decent place, then, you know, you're not going to get great Data.

And the problem with that, though, is it takes time to do it. It can be very costly too, to kind of assess the skills in your organization and around roles and stuff, and you end up with something which is at least slightly rigid. And we're in an era where skills needed are changing quite a bit and jobs disappear or bits, tasks at work disappear, and then people have to be kind of moved on something else or sideways. And you need a bit of reskilling and upskilling, which are things people talk about all the time. Time. Are you worried that skills and competencies matrices are things that kind of slightly hold that back?

Not if it's dynamic. So I think for me, any system framework that's put in place needs to have flexibility built in from the outset. And so obviously, depending on how you then scale that, one of the notions I've got, which I really want to sort of build out further and implement in organizations, is this idea of a skills dashboard.

Right.

Because this is something which I think is very dynamic and will be able to accommodate any changes that an organization needs around its skills. So just to give you a snapshot of my sort of concept here, I think using AI, we can take a scrape of every individual in the organization's current skill set in terms of what it's doing for its role right now, but also take a scrape of what it is that they've done historically. Because I think there's a huge amount of great skills in organizations and individuals that's underutilized. You know, people have come from different environments, different organizations. They may have done enormous project management, change management work, which they're not currently doing in their role. And, you know, maybe it isn't identified, but we need that type of skill. So I think getting a greater understanding of what is it this person's bringing to the table, what is it that is their package of competencies, if you like. And then having done that scrape, looking at, okay, what do we need as an organization? So we need these things for you right now in your role, but we also need these other things as business critical to drive the organization forward. And then what does that gap look like? And then feed into that, the personalized interventions and development paths and an activity that the individual needs to do. And that can be a very dynamic thing because you can keep feeding that type of system once it's created. Because as an organization, if we want to open up different products, services, channels to market, whatever that may be, we can feed that into that system, that ecosystem, and that individual, when they would go into that platform, would see their personalized skills dashboard and see that there is some things that they need to develop in, in because the organization needs that of them or that's part of their defined career journey and where they want to go next as well. And they've got automatic linkage to the types of development opportunities that will get them there.

Marvellous. And playing that back towards HR and L and D and people, people generally these professionals are going to lead the sort of changes that we've discussed. How do HR professionals need to develop their own skills and stay ahead in that space?

Yeah, I think in a number of ways actually. I do feel when I look at AI is going to start to take on a lot more of those sort of transactional repetitive tasks and that's going to take that away and, and enable the HR person, as I've alluded to before, to be more productive and add value in other areas. When I think about the way HR functions are currently structured, you traditionally have an HR business partner or people business partner, depending on what you call that function, and then you'll have your sense of excellence. And I think there's a huge overlap between what the people business partner is doing and the talent development or learning business partner is doing with the, with the business. And I think taking some of those repetitive tasks away, I think those two roles are going to get even closer and overlap and potentially could merge into one going forward. So I think there's some organizational structure implication with the introduction of AI on a sort of operational level. I think, you know, we in, we've introduced in organizations across the whole employee life cycle now AI, it's, you know, use the sourcing, screening, job description creation in, in the hiring spaces as well as creating interview questions you can use for scheduling. You've got AI summaries that can now capture obviously some of the stuff that's going on.

Talking about a lot of the stuff I do. Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, so, so this is you hugely powerful, powerful and enabling performance. I think when I think about sort of leadership and leadership is key as we know it can be up to, you know, 70% of what, what creates the sort of culture and environment for performance and the influence that it has on the team. I think it will be really important and helpful for leaders to be able to practice things like coaching and feedback, you know, with avatars and users using, using AI in that sense and you know, role modeling and collaborating as well across the organization better, you know, so I think there's, there's massive opportunity There and you know I, I think overall the final example I give and I think that there are many here of usage and the way HR leaders need to sort of up level and raise their game. But I think when we are hiring developers helping, there's going to be a greater focus on some of those sort of human centric skills. So things like, you know, determination and resilience, you know, what, what is it the what thought leadership can people provide from an external perspective as well and bring in and yeah, and, and sort of develop that curiosity and emotional intelligence and, and so I think there'll be a greater focus on some of these things that will give people Runway in their career. So, so yes, I think there's a, there's a lot to be done and you know, just, just stepping back a second for an HR function, I think the mindset needs to be elevated to think more systemically as a result of this. You know, what are all the moving parts here that need to change to introduce some of these AI solutions in the appropriate places and that has again implications on the culture that's needed. And I think we as an HR function also need to role model this. We need to eat our own cooking and we need to upskill and remain really current on, on AI its usage and, and, and, and that as a result I think builds different relationships. I have recently been working with people analytics, you know, a separate sort of sub function within HR and you know, looking very closely at, you know, assessing skills, driving performance, where are gaps within individuals, teams, functions, etc. And, and that's enable us to be really, enabling us to be really intentional and deliberate about what we're trying to do and then measure that relentlessly.

Yeah.

So it becomes a very dynamic ecosystem as well that HR can start to.

Work with the talking of thought leaders. To wrap up, you mentioned Simon Sinek. Are there other people that you follow and look up to for guidance and inspiration?

Yeah, I mean a couple of other podcasts I listen to regularly apart from.

The learning Hack of course.

The learning hack is an essential for any talent. Learning professional, professional. But, but two others I think that are really quite insightful and quite different. I have a slight bias on them as well. So first of all there's a podcast called Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat which is by a gentleman called Bruce Daisley. I used to work with him at Google, he used to run Twitter in Europe and, and that's all about creating it's psychology, behavioral science around trying to create a better workplace and a more productive, a more performing a happier workplace because happy people perform. So some really interesting guests and things on that one. And also a gentleman called Paul Boros who runs a podcast called Humorology. It's an award winning podcast. It's about the application of humor into situations, whether it's diffusing sort of tension or whether it's just about bringing that into your or work day in order to be healthy and obviously great for mental health, et cetera as well. But the power of humor in our lives and that sort of chemical happiness that it gives us I think is unlimited. And so Paul Boris has some incredible guests ranging from politicians through to thought leaders and sports people, business people, et cetera, and their usage of humor in order to be able to get by in very uncertain world. And we need a bit more humor.

On that happy and humorous note, thank you very much for cheering us all up.

Thank you very much, John.

Thanks for having me. Thanks.

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