Building Flourishing Cultures and Human-Centered Leadership with Jeffrey Schmitz

Welcome to the Flourishing Edge, the podcast where we share weekly tips on making flourishing your competitive edge. I'm Ashish Kothari, your host and each week we'll dive deep with flourishing experts, change makers and executives to share best practices that can help you unlock higher performance through science based interventions. Let's step together into the edge of what's possible and live, work and lead with more joy, health, love and meaning. Jeff, it's so lovely to have you on our Happiness Squad podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Hey, Ashish, thanks for having me.

You know, Jeff, you've had a remarkable career story. You know, you were a general manager, you were in marketing. You take took on this chief HR officer role and then, you know, became the chief people officer at zebra in 2023. And I'm curious, you know, I'm seeing more and more of this trend where marketing and then people or other functions and then people take on chief people officer roles. Tell me a little bit about your story and what inspired you to focus your leadership energy on culture and flourishing at work.

Yeah, I mean, let's step back even further, Ashish, maybe in history, because I think it's an interesting story and if you would have told me. I'm an engineer, software engineer by education. I started out writing code and I started writing for those of you in the crowd that might have written code in the past. I wrote assembly code way back in the day.

You and I both. It's funny. Very cool.

So what are we doing here, Ashish? It's really a good question. And if you were to ask me when I came out of school, like, you'll eventually run hr, I would say you are crazy. That's not going to happen. I have no interest in that. But as my career unfolded and I did all those things that you mentioned, I came to realize that companies aren't the buildings, they're not even the products, and they're not necessarily even the customers. As important as all those things are, they really are the people. And as I got into leadership, I recognized that more and more and that's what led me to hr. So as I was in my last role, I had talked to the CEO and I told him that this is a thing I'd like to do. I enjoy leadership. I enjoy culture. I think culture is such an important part of any company and certainly part of Zebra, that stewardship and ownership culture was really fundamental to leadership. It's not owned just by hr, it's stewarded by hr. And it's so important to a company that I wanted to be part of that and that's really what led me to hr. In a career that's really kind of been all over the place. I feel like this is a place where leadership and culture really, really have the biggest influence and they're the most important predictor, I think, of success of the company.

Yeah, you know, we've had such similar stories. So yeah, I started at IBM, assembly, jcls, cobol, that was my world. I have a chemical engine BA in Chicago and very similar, Jeff, you know, my first, even at McKinsey, my first 10 years, you know, we were working with companies that were struggling in one area or another. And most of my focus was on large scale ops transformations. But in my last seven years, right, I shifted because I realized if you really wanted to make a company successful, it wasn't about the performance initiatives you launched, it was to make it sustainable. You actually had to address the people, you had to help the people flourish. And if you did that, you could unleash much higher potential than any consultant or a top team would come up with. And that became, that shift became even more pronounced with what we are doing. And like you, I fundamentally believe, right, flourishing cultures drive high performance. All these results from Oxford work clearly show that. And you all are a live example of that. Right. Zebra Technologies. And the reason I wanted to talk with you is, you know, it's very, you know, you find lots of high performing cultures but it's really hard to create a high performing culture that is a long term investment in its people in a publicly traded company just because of quarterly pressures and kind of investors, you know, being such short term gains. And you stand out, you know, you stand out as one of the few companies that consistently rank in top places to work. You know, you have high scores around all the work well being metrics and I'm really excited to get into that with you. But before that I wanted to actually start with your new brand narrative that you just launched because it so speaks to me better every day. Tell me a little bit of what that means for you, what that means for Zebra and how you're bringing that to life.

So maybe a little bit of background here also Ashish would be helpful and it might be interesting for the audience to hear how the HR team had a role in branding. And I was the prior CMO and worked very closely with Ralph Armstrong as a current cmo. And I launched the last brand, which we're now retiring the last brand kind of themes. But we're putting that aside, I think for a Lot of good reasons. And I will tell you that our brand started with actually some work that HR led along with marketing, and that is to define our purpose statement. Right. So we defined, you know, really, for the first time ever, we really refined what was our purpose statement? Why do we exist? And I'm a big fan of Simon Sinek. So what is the why behind. Behind it? And fundamentally that had to do with how do we create new ways of working? Because if you look at what Zebra does for a living, we're, you know, we. We hide in plain sight of many things you do every day. Whether that's. Yep, you know, anything you buy, anything that's manufactured, transported, and you're tracking it, raising it, Zebra's there all the time. And so, to be honest with you, this brand effort started with us starting with our purpose, restating our values, and that led directly into our branding and better every day. And I think that fundamentally, when we think about better every day, that's what we want to do, both at Zebra and what we want to create for our customers. As new ways of working are employed. How do we make sure that you're improving every day? And I always like to. There's a famous quote from Einstein that talks about one of the great wonders of the world is compound interest. The way to think about that in business is really continuous improvement. If you can build a system where you're continuously improving, it's amazing how those little changes every day turn into massive changes. Few times do people transform their business or their culture by taking one big step function. They do it in little pieces every day that are choreographed and tied to a purpose. And this idea of better every day applies as much to Zebra as it does to our customers, as much as it does to our partners. And I think that's really the power behind this brand. And in a lot of ways, the foundation for that was set with our purpose and our values that really helped define our culture.

You know, I am a big fan of better every day. I mean, the moment I heard it, right, I think you just launched it this Monday. The moment I heard it, it spoke to me. Because, you know, today, in many ways, number one, you know, all of the work we do is at the heart. Like, that's what we do. Like, that is. I'm a big, big, big fan of that. But most importantly, today in the world, I'm not sure everybody is experiencing the world as better every day. And so for in this moment, that message shows up as a moment of hope for the world. It shows up in real practical steps. Right. You, as you mentioned, it is all about every day, the shifts that we are making. And I think that's really, really powerful too. Right. Small movements. But we're going to keep making better. You know, I can think about how it translates for customers. Right? Like we are, you don't just install us and we are done. We will continue, we will continue kind of to show up this way. And so that's, that's actually pretty cool. And then what's other part of it that's very cool for me is employees. You're like, we're going to continue getting better. We want you to grow and develop. And it compounds. So I think it's beautiful. What are some things that you all are doing to really bring this to life in the front? So you talked about, you defined a purpose for the first time and how are you activating it in the workforce and with your clients?

Yeah, great question. I mean this leads to probably a good story of culture for Zebra that I think starts back a decade ago. And it's a really interesting story and I think there's some real lessons here and some practical things that anyone can do to help with their culture. And it starts with this. It's an interesting story. Zebra. Zebra started as a barcode printing company. That's where the, the term zebra comes. Think about the black and white stripes of a barcode. Right? And so Zebra was a billion dollar revenue company primarily, you know, in the printing of barcodes print barcode printers. And that's what we did. But in 2014, something fundamental happened and something really unusual happened. Zebra bought a billion dollar revenue company, bought a part of Motorola, a two and a half billion dollar business enterprise business that brought with it barcode scanning and mobile computers. Now you may say, wow, that's interesting. And you know, we could talk about how important it was that barcodes are read by these scanners and mobile computers and the synergies of it all. But the most important moment I think in Zebra's history was Anders Gustafsson, who was the CEO at the time by the way, in our 56 year history, he's our second only CEO we're now on. And when Anders understood just innately was we're going to take this smaller company that's buying the hardest possible M and A you could have a carve out, right? If you buy a company in whole, it's hard. If you rip a part of a company out of a bigger company, it's the hardest type of M and A. And so he Said, we're going to take this culture of a billion dollar company. We're going to marry it with a company two and a half times our size. Rarely does a smaller company buy a company two and a half times its size. And then we're going to rip it out of Motorola, which had a completely different structure, the structure of a fortune, you know, 50 company, and we're going to turn it into a company that's much smaller. The first thing he said that Anders did, that I think was so important, is we need to redefine a culture that's going to be uniquely ours as an as one team, not as zebra, not as Motorola, but as one zebra team now in a whole. And that decision was important. And he said, we're not just going to hang banners on the wall. We're going to bring every person physically in. We're going to set a group of values up. And when I think about culture, culture to me is defined most organically by how we treat each other every day. That turns into how we treat partners, how we treat our customers. What are those norms of behavior that we want to have, and those are those foundational elements. So we define the culture, we defined the values, and we brought everyone in. Not for training. Let me read the values to you. But for experiences that we would have in cross functional small teams, so that it was an experience and people could remember. When we talk about collaboration, we talk about the exercise we went through an exercise. We had to trade puzzle pieces. And having that experience, that unique experience, I think really brought the culture home and it helped people live it. Next. The next key moment is just three years ago, Bill Burns was named as our CEO, right? Two to three years ago. And Bill said, look, coming out of COVID we had something different happen to our culture, right? And it happened to everyone's culture. Everyone went home immediately in March of 2020, didn't come back for a couple years. And in that time, we, like many others, we acquired companies. People left, people joined, and we ended up with a whole bunch of people who had never been through this culture training before, through growth and through natural attrition and attraction of new employees. And we weren't together. The basis of our culture was how we interacted together. And we weren't together and we had changed. And Bill said, look, you know, we're back in the office. We need to revive our culture, but not just revive it. We need to re energize. And that's when we redefined our purpose, came up with new values, and then we brought everyone in, both virtually and physically, to experience what that culture is like. So, again, I think culture can't be banners, it can't be slogans. It has to be experienced, and it has to live. So when I think about culture, I think there's three things that everyone can do. Define it in your purpose and your values. Invest in it. Turn it into experiences. Because joint experiences are the basis of trust amongst people. And then you got to find a way to live it ongoing. And those are the things, I think we started way back in 2014 that have helped us win those kind of Best Places to work and best Places for Innovator awards that we get that aren't from us filling our surveys, they're from employees, employee surveys. And I think that's why those awards are so important. And I think those are some of the things that everyone can do.

Yeah. I mean, it's such a powerful story. In a time. In a time when so many companies are pulling back from any discretionary investments, you're actually leaning into it. Right. Because you're living into that. Everybody matters, and people come first. And through that, we're going to create magic for our customers, we're going to create magic for the employees, and we're going to create magic for communities. Right. In which we live. I mean, you're in 54 different countries. Right. You're in with 9,900 employees. So to be able to orchestrate this at that scale is amazing. And congratulations for leaning into that.

Yeah, it is hard work. By the way, you know, the fun thing about being in hr, we don't call it hr, by the way, at Zebra, we changed the name some time ago. I'm the chief people officer and we call ourselves the People Team. And I think absolutely, that in itself is a cultural element. Right. Human resources are pretty cold way of looking at humans as assets. And I think we don't want to think that way. We want to think of people as individuals who we want to belong and we want to excel and we want to develop. And I think that's embodied in the idea of having a team that's about people that stewards the culture, and it's about letting people get better every day. So I think it's reflecting on all those things, and it's not easy.

Yeah. And you know, Jeff, one of the things that has been the through line all the way from early times is. And what, you know, you talk about is inclusion. I think you show up as one of the companies that really leans into and making sure you know, people feel like they belong, people feel like they can grow. So talk to me a little bit around. What are some of the practices, what are some of the practical ways in which you create this culture where everybody feels they belong, their voice matters, they can have different perspectives. How does that bring that life?

Yeah, look, you know, we had someone come in to speak to our team a couple years ago, and it was. It was powerful. I've never forgotten it. And this was a neuroscientist, and when he came in and talked about early days of humans and their need to belong was not a convenience or a feel good. It was a matter of survival. So being part of a tribe meant having a better chance of survival. And that is the most powerful feeling anyone can have as a feeling of belonging. And if you ever think of your past when you haven't felt good about yourself, often it's because you didn't get invited to that party. You didn't get invited to the, you know, the birthday party when you were a small kid or somehow you didn't feel included or you didn't feel appreciated. Well, in a company, we want everyone to feel like they can belong. I don't care what their background is. I don't care who they are. We want to attract the best. And the best people exist in all diverse backgrounds, all diverse corners of the world. We want them to all feel like they have a place here. And once you join Zebra, it's more important. Now we're actually compensating you, and we want you to feel like you can bring your best self to work. You can bring every component of your different background to work, and you feel like you can belong. And the reason we want to do that is actually pretty simple. And it's a business principle. We want you to be creative here. And we believe that people with diverse backgrounds, different thoughts bring different contexts to work, and that helps us be innovative. And we're a technology company, so that's at the heart of everything we do. So we want different perspectives. We want people to have active debates. We want to think about different ways of attacking problems. And that comes from people having different experiences and different backgrounds, and they grew up differently or in different places. So we want everyone to feel like they want to be part of Ziva. We want to attract the best. We want to attract the best from all walks of life, and we want you to bring that with you so that you can drive innovation in our company. And we want you to stay. Right? And we want you to stay because we Want to become a destination for talent. We want you to come here, build your career, continue to learn, continue to grow. And we want you to do that here. And to do that you need to feel like you can belong and you can bring yourself fully to work. So those are the reasons we do that. Those are the things we believe in and we believe that we can't innovate without that.

Yeah. How are some ways, Jeff, do you enable that? So if you're an employee, right. Or if you're going to come in, how can you take ownership? This notion of make your own McKinsey was at the heart of our McKinsey journeys. Right. Everybody was like, yeah, there is a road, but you should define what you want. Like, and I want to talk. And that stayed with me, you know, for a long, long while, was at the heart of my success. So I am all in on this notion of one, you belong and second, you take ownership of where you go. We're not just going to put you in a cookie cutter approach. So talk to me a little bit about how some of the ways in which individuals can both belong but also stand out by, you know, not just becoming part of a homogeneous, but taking ownership of their experience, their growth in the company.

Yeah, great, great question, Ashish. And I would say the first step is what you kind of already stated, which is I think people who want to have where career is important to them and growth, whether that's. And I always define growth as whatever you think it is. Right. So for some people, they just want to do different things. For some people, they know exactly what they want to do. Great story of this is my daughter. She knew from the time she could speak she wanted to be a teacher and she just wants to be the best teacher she could possibly be. She doesn't want to have a non linear career like you and I had. She knows. So if that's your path, that's awesome. Some people want to be CEO, some people want to lead people, some people want to do something else. So the starting point is you in all these experiences and you kind of said it, what I often say is the second you outsource your career, you're in trouble.

Yes.

So you don't want to outsource it. And there's a lot of people I talk to, they say my boss should, you know, be owning my career. That's the last thing that you should do, own your own career. And we believe that it's even. So what we do is we give people tools to help build their own Career, how do you build your own idp? Your individual development plan. And we give people tools for that. So what we've built in my time in the People team is you can go to the the People team website and you can see all the training that's available, whether it's available for you to do on your own, whether it's in a class, class environment or somewhere for nomination for leadership. And we've built out a full portfolio of things that you can go keep your career going and to keep learning. We've also created experiences, whether that's onboarding, mentorship, shadowing, where on the job you can learn more. So we've created avenues for that as well, because I think it can't be just classroom, it has to be applied. And lastly, and this is something I'm super jazzed about, we did it for the first time ever. And I also say that, you know, copying from other people isn't a bad idea. So I got this idea absolutely. And we did it. We had the last two prior two weeks as what we call development days. We had two days of where we highlighted all the tools we had in place. We had seminars, we had educational opportunities, and we had over half the company before the two weeks started for half the company, you know, signed up for different events. And we wanted to highlight you owning your own career, what was available to you, because often people don't even know and so they don't know how to take that first step. How to build an idp, how to learn about AI. We built all these tools out there and had two days where we celebrated and had events for people to engage. But it wasn't to engage where we just teach you. It's you have to own your career. Here's tools to help you build your idp. We had a whole session on building an idp and I think that was really successful. And again, it was refocused on you owning your career. What do we have to offer and how do you put it in place so you can continue to grow, to make Zebra a destination for your career and continue to grow and learn.

You know what I love about that is usually those things only happen in many companies at performance review time. You know, you sit down, you get, look, here's what you did, here's the raise you're getting, and oh, by the way, here's some things you should work on. And I think by focusing and really saying development is the hack again, it goes back to better every day. You know, these two days is where we want to Share with you what's available so you can own it, you can write your own, and then it's a journey. I love that because it's focused on development. It's not focused on feedback. It's not focused on. It's really highlighting how important in today's world growth and development is.

Yeah. And I would say, Ashish, the other thing I would add to that is, well, you need to own your own career. I would also say, I often say if you're supervising somebody at any level, you're responsible to help them with their idp. You're not responsible for their idp, but you're there to help them and give them guidance and help them grow. And so managers aren't completely immune from being part of this. You, you know, I. In our groups, I always track how many people have an IDP and an idp, what it is, what it means for you. For some people, they need to write it down. For some people, they just need advice. So an IDP can be. It doesn't have to be a written thing. I tell you. It can be what you need to be. It's what you need to grow. And your manager's there to support you. And I think we're really fortunate at Zebra.

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That you know, when our manager, we have great managers and when we do our engagement surveys or pulse surveys or all our listening, what we hear consistently is people really love their managers and they like working with their managers sometimes maybe a little bit too much if they outsource their career to them, but they're there to support. You need to own.

Well, I like there's two things that really, I think, as you said that Jeff, really resonate. Right. One is this notion managers play a bigger role in the mental health of an employee than a therapist ever will. And I think really. Right. It's research back. It's true. Because that's what you experience every day rather than once a week with a therapist. And so I think your fact that your managers are loved almost, as you say, sometimes too much. But love is, I think, a beautiful thing because a lot of. There was a recent survey by Gallup that showed not many people actually like their manager and they don't even want to be a manager. So I think you actually uplifting people to say it's a big role that you're playing. Yeah, like it was crazy. You know, most people leave. Yeah, most people leave because of their manager. So that's, that's really, really cool. But you know what I really also really like about this notion is many people today think about growth in two dimensions. Am I getting promoted? Is my salary going up? And you're actually highlighting a third dimension that you say, hey, you can also grow in your skills, you can grow in your competencies, in your experiences. And frankly, if you want to think about the long term investment on what helps you get promoted and get, you know, do well, it's actually the skills. And I think that's the other piece in terms of the IDP work that you are putting front and center. That is so powerful. You're giving a whole different avenue.

Yeah. Hey, Ashish, I feel the need since you brought up psychology to tell a little story. And I maybe this is marketing and because this is about happiness. And one thing that I always tell people and I think it's really important is, you know, happiness only comes from you. And since that's kind of the focus of your podcast.

Yes.

And happiness starts by defining what you want to do. And I think there's a lot of people when I talk to, when they get frustrated, they actually don't know what they want. And it's the first step. What do you want? Do you want to hone your skills and be the best at what you're doing? Do you want to be the CEO of the company? That's the first step to happiness and the second step. And I can't help but tell this story. I recently went to Mayo Clinic for a, in a physical evaluation. But as part of that, they signed me up for a psychological evaluation. And I didn't know that I was getting sent up for this. I learned one of the most powerful things in my life about happiness. And if you don't mind, I'm going to just.

Please.

What she told me one is I didn't realize I was signed up for this. And I went to the appointment and I was a little surprised. And she told me something that I kind of knew in my heart, but I didn't, maybe I didn't express it. And I love telling a story. And I said, this can change your life if you practice it. It was something called 532. Have you ever heard of this?

Yeah, go ahead. But please share the 532 it's powerful.

This is 532, the way I interpret it, right? Like, before you go to bed at night, think about five things that you're grateful for. And I think gratitude is such a powerful absolutely for us to be happy. And we often, we can go through every day and decide the things we don't like or didn't go our way. But truth is, most of us are pretty gosh darn lucky reminding yourself every day is important. The second thing she told me, and this is the way I interpret it is, you know, three times I always make somebody's day. Whatever happened wrong was saying, you know, you did a great job. Gratitude for others, or even if it's the staff at a restaurant, like, hey, you know, that was awesome. And there's so much you get in return for making somebody. Why not make someone's day? Is the way I heard it. And the last one, which I think is important and I got to try to work on this every day is the way she explained it to me is take two minutes before you walk and see your family at the end of the day and separate yourself from all the things that happen at work and make sure you're showing up for your family the way you want to. And I found this 5, 3, 2. Something that really helped me stay in a positive attitude and be happier about the things I have rather than all the things that didn't go right. So that's the way I heard it. You might know it differently.

Yeah, no, it's beautiful. There are different versions of this, you know, in our rewire program because it's all about habits. Happiness is an inner game, right? That's at the heart. So we have a program, Jeff, called rewater. And in Rewire, what we basically do is it's a year long program. Every month we help people build one or two micro practices and habits. And literally one of those. We always start with mindful start and mindful end. But the mindful end practice that I invite people to do five minutes before they go to bed. So ours is slightly different. Five minutes before you go to bed, write down three good things that happen today. Three good things. Our brain has a negativity bias. It'll always remember the things that didn't go well. But if we tune ourselves, we build a positivity bias, right? What are three good things? The beauty of doing that in the night, I always say, is what happens when we sleep. Our short term memories go into our long term memories. So you are actually letting sleep do the act of Rewiring from within again. Every day better every day. Every day that we actually go do this, practice, our different neural pathways, our positivity bias pathways are getting stronger and stronger and stronger. Right.

Yeah. This is great. This leads. This leads right into, you know, a philosophy I've had for a long time about what I find. The three foundational elements for success go right into this.

Yeah.

If you don't mind, I. This is something that I often talk about. I think it's really important, and one is positivity. One of the things I think that's most important if you want to succeed, whatever that is for you, being positive. Because I've never been in a room, and I've been in lots of rooms where we decided, we've got to replace somebody who left or we need to promote somebody. Nobody ever said, you know, that guy's always grumbling and complaining and negative, let's promote that guy. Nobody's ever said that. But people have said, let's take a chance because this person is creative and positive. And so why not take that? Take that perspective? And by the way, as you pointed out, that's not the way. Humans are hardwired. Humans are hardwired for survival. So we always think about the worst possible outcome.

Absolutely.

Avoid getting killed. Right. And so in our fundamental nature. So we want to belong to a tribe, we want to survive, and we want to avoid terrible things. So the best thing to do is prepare for the terrible things. But often that leads us to negativity. And if you can flip that, you'll find that you can manifest a lot of success just in positivity. And the other two, briefly, are. And I learned this from my dad, who just passed away, hard work. No one's ever succeeded without hard work. To be honest with you. I haven't seen many people succeed who are negative. They tend to be positive people. You will find. And the last one, I say, for people like you and I who have nonlinear careers, is curiosity. And curiosity in the business. Like, if you understand. You know, I started out as an engineer. People often ask me, how did you take this next step into the business side of things? Because I went and learned, and I asked questions, and I was curious about the business, and I didn't know it at the time, but that natural curiosity turned out to be one of the most foundational elements for my career. And so I tell people, hard work is foundational. Being positive is foundational for success, whatever you define as success. And the last one is, if you want more opportunities to show Up. Be curious, Be curious about the business. What do you, what does your company do? Why do they do it? Who do they compete against? You know, why do you win? When you win, why do you lose? Knowing that enhances everyone's role. I don't care if you're in the people team, in sales, in finance, it always gives you more opportunities. If you can do that.

Yeah. You know, curiosity in particular is also one of the most powerful ways when we face hardship to find our way through it. Because our brain always goes to why me? Or why did this happen? And instead, if we can curious, if we get curious about, hey, okay, this might not have gone well, but what else is going well in my life that I can stand the foundation of? And second, what can I learn from this? There is always a learning. It's our choice, do we want to learn or not? And when we go in, who can I ask, you know, get different perspectives. Instead we feel like an expert most of the time. I need to know the answer. I need to bring this into control. And curiosity can be a powerful doorway for growth.

Yeah, 100%. As she said. I talked about culture in terms of understanding the business, being curious about things maybe you don't know about. But another critical element of our culture is the idea of curiosity. And it has to do with being curious. That oftentimes in situations we tend to think we're right about things or we already know the answer. And if you want everyone to feel they belong and you want the most innovative solutions, you need to be open minded. And what that means from a curiosity perspective is when somebody says something that maybe you think and you instantly think that's not right, you know, I know the answer, you're wrong. Rather than reacting, how do you get curious about maybe there's something here? And how do you turn that into an opportunity to be open minded and to learn? That drives to me positive culture and innovation. And that's why it's, it's one of the foundational elements of our culture that we train on and we, you know, build experiences.

Yeah. And so needed in a world right now, Curiosity and learning, Jeff, where the world is changing faster than ever before. You know, the AI revolution is. It's not linear. It's literally not even exponential. It's at a whole next level. Right. Of how it's permeating. So talk to me a little bit. In this rapidly changing world where curiosity and adaptability are the core, core skills, how are you? You talked about development days. You talk about some of the learnings but how are you creating an environment where people are reskilling, people are adapting and really this is becoming one of the key elements. Curiosity is becoming a key element. It's what's going to win the day.

Yeah. So I'm going to give you two answers to this question. The first one is something that I've learned in my HR days over the last few years. And I think it's something that I again took a good idea I heard from someone else and we're repeating it and then I'll get to AI specifically. So one of the things I've realized over the last five years in the people team is that there's hot jobs, there's always a next hot job. When I started it was data scientists and then it was robotics engineers and now it's AI. Right. And they get compensated differently. They're highly difficult to find. You've got to find ways to develop it. And one thing that maybe your audience who's in HR or the people team can learn from this is if you want to. What I've learned is we've gone through cycle after cycle and it felt like we were doing, having a do over, over every time to figure out how do we attract, develop and retain these kind of specialized skill sets. And now we're building a playbook because I've realized we've learned these lessons a few times and if we want to get better every day, we need to have a playbook for the next hot job. And I think it's really important now. So that's one maybe practical thing people can take away that I think is helpful is build a playbook for the next hot job or build a playbook for how you attract, develop and retain AI. Now what is, how are we using that playbook for AI receiver? And by the way, we're using AI in every possible way. We have had artificial intelligence in our products for a long time. We now have generative AI products that we are developing and delivering to our customers. And they're using them. We use them internally in our tools and we're building our own tools for ourselves using AI. So I think that the starting point and what I recognize pretty quickly is the people team has a role to play in AI. And it starts with training. You will not find all the AI experts you're looking for in any company.

Absolutely.

We need to be curious, we need to be open minded. We also need to create the tools out there for people to grab onto. So we partnered with our IT team to build a set of trainings and tools that people could use to start playing. Like a lot of companies, we built a safe sandbox for AI so people could start playing with it. And I think that's been helpful. Our CIO recently came to our ELT meeting and said, you know what? We've got a little bit over half our people, unique people playing with AI. Now, that's really important. So we have a lot of curious people out there, but there's still nearly half people we want to get engaged more. So we're putting those tools out there, we're encouraging people to use it. We need to get more. So we've had some progress, we need to make more. The next thing I think we need to think about, particularly in a people team, is, you know, if. And I think zebra is quite similar. Looked at other studies, you know, half the people are playing with AI. The other half feel like either it doesn't apply or they're so busy doing their work they're not investing in it. And we need to get them all curious and get them all playing because they AI is going to affect all our jobs. And we want to figure out how do we best use it and get more efficient, work on more, have the humans work on more strategic stuff, make sure that AI is helping us with more transactional stuff. We need to be doing those things. But we also need to say, as we hire new people, how do we make sure that we are interviewing so that we get half of the people out there who are curious about AI? And let's not hire the people who aren't curious. We want to hire the people who are, and we want to get our people more curious at the same time. That's. That's kind of what I would say to you.

Yeah, I think it's. I think it's beautiful and it's actually quite, you know, just to, you know, I talk to companies all the time. Right. I'm out there. I will tell you. You are, you are, as in the words of Kim Cameron from Michigan, you're positively deviant. And I'll tell you because. And you're doing something that is actually better. Right. Here's what's better. A lot of companies are thinking about AI and often going down the pathway of let me figure out how I can use AI in my processes. There's a small, small group, they'll bring somebody in, here's all the use cases, somebody in it, starts to build it and then they're going to roll it out. Right. And usually with that also comes a bit of Fear, because what they're rolling out often results in headcount reduction, et cetera, et cetera. But I think the approach that you're taking is, is what I really like about it is you're saying, hey, the future is an AI future. And so let's upskill as many people. Let's create a place where they can play, right? They can play because guess what, people are using it anyway. Let's give them the training because again, going back to your context of better every day, if we give people the tools to say, hey, listen, the external environment is not limited, right. The possibilities are endless. For us as a company, there is so many places we can go. What constrained us is capacity. But if we can help train people where they can come up with ways to kind of get the transactional out of the way so that we can go after transformational. I think you unlock capacity and you say again, curiosity. We really care for it. So I love it how you're partnering and rather than do it to them, do it with them. Because I think the answers are always better because people know best, right?

Yeah. And again, I think AI is, it's going to affect all of our jobs in some way or another and it's better to embrace it than, than not. And the faster we learn, the better off we're going to be. But there'll always be a role for people. I often joke, Ashish, that if you've ever seen the movie Wall E, have you ever seen this movie?

I don't know if you've seen it. I love it, I love it.

It's a great movie. And unfortunately it's a kind of a post apocalyptic movie. But people kind of sat around drinking giant Diet Cokes and watching TV and if they fell out of their chair, a robot put you in a chair. I believe AI is going to fundamentally change things. But just like people were fearful of, you know, the first industrial revolution where assembly lines, oh, people are going to, there's. People are going to come out of the rural areas, move into the cities and there's not going to be any jobs. And we were worried about that. Look, there's lots, there's going to be lots of AI jobs. There's going to be different jobs. There's jobs that humans are just better at doing that will always be better at doing and there'll always be more strategic things for people to do. That's what I believe. So we should embrace AI. We should find ways to have it enhance our roles. And we need to be open to the Fact and curious that jobs may are going to change and we need to be open to that. So that's my belief.

I think it's beautiful. Jeff, looking at time, we can talk. We could go on for another hour, but I know, you know, we have an hour with you as we look to wrap up. What would be some advice that you would have for future leaders who are an inspiration? Right. For those who are even in publicly traded companies, what are some things that they should really consider learning from the journey you all have been on of putting people first?

Yeah. You know, I think the most powerful two things that we could, that I could give for advice is one is, you know, culture is one of the most important indicators of success and defining it. Investing in it and living it are critical and living can be easy to kind of forego that. But when your leaders believe in that, it makes it a lot easier as well. And even if you're interviewing for a job, I always ask people, make sure you ask questions about the culture. What's it like to work here? How do people engage with each other? It's such an important thing. You want to be at a company where culture comes first and if you're in one where you think that needs to be improved, make the case to your leaders. I think it's important. If there was a second thing is build the foundation for getting better every day. Since that's been the theme and it's our new brand, I think it's such a powerful concept that you're not going to build an instantaneously fantastic culture. Nobody changes anything overnight. Make sure you build a foundation so that you can continuously improve. And I think if you do that, you'll find that when you look back a year or two later, you've done amazing things. So that's my two bits of advice.

Thank you, Jeff. I think it is. You and Zidra are such inspiration and a light of hope. Right. For what can be. I love these two. I'm taking away what I'm doing every day to be better every day. Right. That's, that's, that's something that I'm going to take away. I'm going to think about it. I so appreciate you joining us, sharing your insights, sharing your journey. Thank you.

Thanks, Ashish. I enjoyed it.

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