Leading the Conversation with Thought Leadership | Kate Bravery | 555

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us today on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Kate Brovery, and Kate is interesting. She is the co-author of a new book. It's never an old book, right? Called Work Different, uh, published by Wiley just recently. And she has been at Mercer for a long time. Her current role is Advisory Knowledge and Insights Global Leader. So we'll ask what that actually means in English in a moment. But she has an interesting background, and she was previously, in a, in a previous life at PDI Ninth House. So she knows the training world, knows sort of all the things that we tend to talk about. So welcome aboard today, Kate. How are you?

Ah, it's great to be here with you, Peter Winick.

So I guess two questions. Let's start with, your role at Mercer and how thought leadership is a part of that.

Yeah. So like many people in the world of work today, I wear a few hats. So I'm a senior partner at Mercer, but, and I officially lead our talent advisory practice globally. So talent advisory includes assessment, engagement, development, you know, all that good stuff. And then I also have a role looking after our thought leadership agenda. And so that is across the three practices that make up Mercer, which is our health, wealth, and career practice. And so I partner there on the research agenda with a lot of our consultants that are working in the field and work hard to bring new insights to our clients that hopefully get them thinking a bit different about how they tackle some of the persistent challenges of our age.

So it sounds like either of those would be a challenging full-time role, right? So how do the two play together? Like, how do you, how do you balance the challenges of both of those sets of responsibilities?

Well, actually, I think they fit very well together. You know, many people enter thought leadership from very different vantage points. For me, thought leadership has always been a vehicle to get clients and companies thinking differently about a topic and expanding their thoughts about how can we tackle this project. And I love sharing examples from all around the globe that just get people thinking, God, I would never thought of doing it that way. I've been with Mercer for about 14 years now, but 9 of those years was actually spent out of Hong Kong working across Asia. And, you know, it's just fascinating to be able to be in that position. And then I think it's reinforcing because if you're doing work with clients, you're at the bleeding edge of how you're solving those problems. And so if you can shorten the distance between the work you do with clients and the advisory insights you share, I think you get the best thought leadership and vice versa. I think if we've got really good insights that maybe indicate there's a different way of doing things, that should be directly influencing how our clients tackle these topics or immersa how our consultants tackle them on their behalf. So I see them as mutually sort of reinforcing. I also have knowledge management across the firm.

Yeah.

At the moment, that's going on steroids with, with obviously advent of AI. And again, you want your content inside your organization to reflect your thought leadership, your insights, the work that you're doing. So again, I, I, I see them all mutually reinforcing, but yeah, I do get a, I, I do find Friday night.

There's so much there that I, yeah, no, so there's, there's so much there. First, I wanna talk about, you know, the constituents. So thought leadership can do lots of things for lots of organizations. But you, you explicitly mentioned two very, very different populations, right? So there's the internal and the external. So external, part of your role is to show people that could be clients or are clients, hey, look at us, we have a perspective, we're smart, we've thought about this. Here's how we think about this, how it applies to you, right? And the hope there is they lean into that work and realize Mercer is a great partner. They're smart. Then the other one that you mentioned is the internal consultants, because at the end of the day, if you don't have their buy-in, that's where the, the action happens relative, relevant to clients. So talk about sort of the, how you weave the same thought leadership, if you will, a bit differently to be engaging to the external and what you have to do to sort of market it, if you will, internally to the internal.

You know, I think the world of work is just moving so rapidly today. We all win, I think, when we're talking the same language. When we talk the language of our clients internally, and there's no translating it into our practices, our solutions, and the way we go to market, I think you end up with consultants that are more inspired, that have more genuine conversations with their clients and feedback those insights to us. So actually, we've worked very hard to try and say, you know, the type of insights we share with our clients, because whether they work with us or not, it's useful for them.

Sure.

I wanna be sharing just that high-quality level of insights recommendations internally and now serve them up to our internal colleagues through our large language model, which is in-house. So, and I think in the old world, we used to have an internal world that was organized into businesses and practices and solutions and products. And an external world that was talking about issues and, you know, macro trends. And the two actually didn't meet very often.

Sure.

And I just don't think we have time for that lack of translation anymore. So part of my job is is creating compelling thought leadership that has ideas that people want to chew on for external and internal consumption. But it also means that we probably spend more time internally sharing those ideas and having robust conversations so that people can get their head around them, and then they can think about how can I help my client on that?

Right. So you, you need the consultants to internalize, understand, add to the conversation. And then evangelize it in the marketplace.

Right?

That's really sort of where that goes. So, you know, so much here, right? When you think about thought leadership, there is no one right way to do it or no one right way to stand up the function. And I think to me, you mentioned how the world of work is moving so quickly, whatever. I look at that through the lens of what I do on the thought leadership side and say, wow, this is a, like, kind of almost an entirely new function. Now, in professional services, it's been longer than in other places. But it's not a function where there's the best practice of this is the way you stand up a thought leadership function in an organization. It's, you know, one part researcher, one part graphic designer, and, you know, 3 folks on the editorial side. So questions organizations need to wrestle with is where does it sit? Is it a marketing function? Is it a product function? Is it a special forces function? You know, who owns it? And then how do we measure success? Like, what are the metrics? And then also, how is it different from some other things we're doing, like content marketing, like branding, like whatever? So in 2 sentences or less, solve all those problems for us.

No, I'm kidding. Well, can I just say, and we've had chats on this before. Yes. Like I'm sure many of the people on the call, you know, we are in the midst of constantly asking ourselves questions on that. You know, it was so interesting when I, when I had knowledge management reporting to me, it is a codified practice. Our team gets audited once a year by APQS and they get really good ratings and they've got kind of a body of competence so they know how they're doing. They know how they benchmark. All the jobs make sense. We've got a job code for them. It's very clear. I think thought leadership is the complete opposite. And you're absolutely right. In some businesses it sits within marketing and some doesn't. In Mercer, it sits in Global Business Solutions, so it directly reports up to strategy.

Yes.

But I have a very strong belief when we're very, very lean at the core, but we have very big tentacles into the businesses. 'Cause I think the best thought leadership comes from practitioners who are thinking about it and being challenged in new ways every day. And because I've lived in many, many different countries, I believe that diversity of thought is key. So even in the book that I've just written, Work Different: 10 Truths for Winning in the People Age, it was myself who now is based in the UK, Ilja Bonac, who heads up our, who's the president of our career business in New York, and Kai Andersen, who was heading up transformation at the time in Germany. And that combination led to a lot of arguments, but I think we really distilled down to, look, if you know, what are the key things you need to know? I think if we did, if one person had done that, we would have blind spots.

So I will, I'll, we'll get to the book in a minute. I just wanna ask one follow-up question to what you said. When you talk about the practitioners, I've observed two things at the organizational level. One, organizations need to have a— it's culture, but then there's backed up by systems and processes, ways to get that information from practitioners because they're out there every day all over the world getting insights. And if you don't have those systems and processes in place, maybe they're in a specific deck for a client at one time, but you have no way to institutionalize it. That's number one. Number two, you might have practitioners that are getting these great insights, but they might not fancy themselves a writer or a thought leader, and they actually need to have some help on the capabilities development side. And we've done a lot of that work. So talk to me about, A, sort of the system and processes and maybe incentives to encourage practitioners to share, and then what you can do to support practitioners to become, to develop those muscles, if you will, to make them better thought leaders.

So why don't I start with the internal world? Because in the internal world, we have defined with our executive leadership team 6 megatrends that we want all our consultants to be kind of conversant on. And then 12 client issues. Under those 12 issues, there's a taxonomy of 98 client needs. So for each of those 12 client issues, just like the book, we have a multidisciplinary cross-functional team of experts. So it might be a group of 5 people tackling the topic of ESG, another group tackling the topic of D&I, another group tackling the topic of attraction and of digital talent. Another one talking about AI and the new shape of work. Those groups come together every 6 weeks and we are basically saying, what's new? Where are you being challenged? What's been one innovative practice? Have you read anything recently? Is it— and we, you know, and then we as a central team suck that up and we will make—

You're not leaving that to chance.

Yes. And then we have coordination.

I love that you have these 6-week check-ins. What have you seen? What have you heard? Oh, people are doing this, people are doing that. I love it.

And then you're right. And they'll give up 45 minutes of their time to kind of tell you what's top of mind of them. And yes, many of them, you know, they themselves aren't necessarily strong on the thought leadership writing. And the things that bubble to the top as really burning and critical come into our thought leadership councils. And our thought leadership councils are buyer-focused. So we have one focused on the C-suite buyer, one focused on the HR buyer, one focused on the investment buyer. And one focused on the benefit buyer, you know, retirement.

Yes, yes, yes.

And so that feeds into that. It also feeds into our internal playbooks, which feed into our large language model. And we might also even just record a snippet of it for a social card because we think it's so poignant. We want to get it straight out. Hey, you just came back from Davos. I love that clip. Are you okay if we just use that on a social? So, but it's taken us a while to kind of figure out where people are really strong and what support they need from the central function to get that out to them quickest without expecting them to do a lot of the heavy lifting because they're supposed to be client-facing. And honestly, they're doing us a favor.

Exactly.

And what about on the capability side? If somebody says, you know, they're sharing insights, they're curious, but maybe they're not a great writer or they don't feel that they're comfortable on video, how does the organization support them so that they can effectively encapsulate it and share their insights either internally or externally.

You know, I think there are many other professional services firms that are much more prescriptive about you have to get a few articles out a year, or, you know, that's actually part of your KPIs. And we definitely are not in that camp because we think people can contribute in a wide variety of ways, and that is just not the direction some people want to take. But if you are leading a practice globally, there is an expectation that, you know, hey, If you're Jason Allenbrook and you're speaking on AI, you need to be speaking on AI everywhere and bringing that knowledge back to the business because it's a quid pro quo. It's not about—

Yes, yes.

Insight. It's about what have you learned from your clients and how do you bring it back to us? So it is a lot more informal in terms of incentives. I mean, Mercer runs a lot on goodwill. Those practices and those groups are very much The social cachet that you've built up over years and the people that you know lean in and the people who want to lean in. And what we will do as a quid pro quo is if they lean in, if we're gonna do a blog on a topic, we'll author it on their behalf. They get to polish it, but we'll write it for them. Got it.

That's what I was looking for.

You give us a bit of time for free and you stay connected to us and support us and we'll make sure that we bring you on a podcast or we promote you in some sense. So it's very much informal reinforcement and helping each other out.

Thank you.

If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe.

If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So I wanna move to the book. So let's pivot a little bit. What I know from my experience is the only thing publishers hate more than a book written by 2 people is a book written by 3 people, right? So now you mentioned it in a positive light of diversity, right? So you had, you know, you had, I think it's Germany, you, and someone in New York. So A, talk about sort of what was the impetus to write the book, what that experience been like, and now you're in sort of launch mode.

Yeah. You know, now that I've actually worked with a publisher, I can totally understand why they would say that, and I might actually agree with it. So just 'cause I have a value that you end up landing in a better place because you have diversity of thought doesn't mean that that's the least, you know, the easiest, easiest course. I think the reason why you end up in a better place is because you have that—

3 different— 3 different people with 3 unique excuses to miss deadlines, which publishers love.

So anyway, and, uh, so, so Kai Andersen, who's in Germany, it also, 'cause obviously things take longer than it does end up crashing into him having a 4-month sabbatical. So you can imagine what we were all saying behind his back as well when someone goes out for 4 months. Yeah. Anyway, he's made it up since, but, uh, it, no, it was tough. And, you know, so my learning was one thing I know that Mercer's really good at is we're really good at executing. And because we're good at executing, that's sometimes a problem. If you, you know, the more important thing is getting the ideas right, the ideas that linger, the things that you go, look, this is the stuff that we would say when we've had like 2 bottles of wine, but we probably wouldn't say direct to our clients. And we wanted this a book where we came off mute on the things that we thought were fundamentally broken about work that really are gonna trip you up if you didn't do it. And in the first version, it had loads of swear words. Which my boss who's in America all took out. But the book is quite, not aggressive, but it does say the stuff that we probably wouldn't say as a keynote speech. And I think we felt really passionate that we were having these professional conversations on interesting topics like the move to skills-powered organizations and modern reward practices. We weren't having the honest conversation with, yeah, let's be honest, it doesn't pay to stay. And yeah, actually things have shifted and skills are the new currency of work. And my God, what are you gonna do all about your job architectures and your and all the stuff that we supply to you today, because a lot of that's not gonna be relevant in a more agile world. So those are the sort of things that we weren't talking about. And so we were like, let's do it this way. You know, we even don't even have Mercer on the front page.

Well, but tell, gimme, gimme the origin of the book. Was it, who had the idea and when was it over? You know, how many bottles of wine and someone said, well, it would be, it would be a jolly good idea for us to write a book.

You know, I think a lot, a lot of people in our profession might say, hey, We should put some of that down on paper at some point. I know this wasn't the start of the book, but I think it was the one that maybe tipped us over. We're in the US and Ilya and I and Kai are waiting for a flight. Then all the signs, click, click, click, click, click, comes up, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, cancel, delay. We're going to be there for about 6 hours. So we do what all good consultants do, get your laptop out. Got to be productive. Got to be productive.

Oh, I was going to say hit the bar at the airport, but okay.

I think it was about 11, so it's probably a bit early even for us.

Oh, okay.

And then we start to overhear a conversation, you know, like you do in a cocktail party and you know you shouldn't listen in, but it's just too good. Yeah. So, and it's obviously someone in the HR function and they're on the call to someone on the other end and they're like, I know, I know we can't hold on. We can, we can bring the young people in because we've got a great brand, we've got great training. But yeah, you know, that's it. They're going to leave after 18 months. Oh, that's what, you know, that's what Gen, Gen, you know, Gen Ys do. They don't want to stay around. Okay, maybe some of it's us because, you know, we don't move them. You have to be in a role for a year before you could. And then, then they mentioned their competitor. Yeah, I know they've gone to their direct competitor and they said, well, they give them a sign-on bonus. You know, they've, they've, they've even given equity to young people, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then the best bit was it ends by saying, but you know what, I, I'm not worried about the people that go because I think they're the clever ones. I think the bright ones. The ones that stay, that are disengaged, don't have the guts to renegotiate or don't think that they can get a job elsewhere. That's what I worry about, that we've now got a business of people that don't think that they can go even when they can earn a lot more by moving. And that— But how do you get back to this moment in time?

Because I think there's always been this issue of if you're at that super elite rock star level, you know, the HR, you know, the voluntary employees, hey, you know, and I know it, I can go across the street anytime I want. So you're gonna, you're gonna treat me with kid gloves, but that's such a small percentage of the overall population.

I think it is now. And I think that's the thing is there's these ebbs and flows. So at that time we were like, when do we stop valuing loyalty? And is this actually the businesses we wanna boost? So we obviously Mercer, large consulting firms. We had to look now what's the pay difference between people who switch and people who, who, people who, who stay. Sure. And at the time it was a huge difference, particularly in the US. And so that got us talking. It is a very tiny difference in like Germany where you've got more collective bargaining. So that got us on the path saying, we sit on enough data to actually say, are these just fables and people griping, or is this a truth? And if it's the truth, how do we fix it? So that's sort of how we went into it. But then you're absolutely right. I mean, coming off the pandemic, people had so many job choices, and we had, you know, what was it in the US? 50 million people quit, I think, in 2022. So we knew that it's not just pay, we're getting a lot more wrong than that. And Global Talent Trends, which I'm just about to release at the end of February, 1 in 2 people believe that work is still fundamentally broken.

Yeah.

And 82% feel at risk of burnout, which is higher than it was 2 years ago. So some of the indicators I saw before the pandemic, I mean, they were back down in the '60s, is still there. People still feel exhausted, depleted. And, and so we've got old world and new world stuff that I think needs fixing.

But hasn't some of the amplification have been that is, we know from the data that more people, more often than not, move for intrinsic reasons, not extrinsic reasons. Now, there are exceptions to that. Obviously, if somebody's gonna get a 40% pay bump, something like that, but you know, 5, 10, 15, 20%, you can stick with the intrinsic. Yet most organizations are still designed to reward extrinsically, and they're not listening to the employees saying, listen, if you want me to come to the office 3 days a week, that's gonna cost me, you know, for a younger person, it's more as a percentage of their income. 6 hours of my time and a couple hundred bucks between commute and lunch and this and that. And damn it, I'm doing really well. And you, all my reviews are telling me well, why am I, because you've, you're locked into this lease. Why do I need to suffer? Right? And then they go and they say, oh, well we didn't pay them enough. Well, actually maybe that's not so. How do you, how do you balance?

I totally agree with everything you said. One, we talk a lot of the book about the new rhythm of work and the flip-flopping over flexible working and the implication just got this year's Global Talent Trends, which is about 14,000 voices around the world. And yes, people do think that some of that's eroded trust. So I agree with you on that. But I, on the point about pay, I'd say yes and no. You're— I agree with you. Pay— people don't leave a good job where they built a good network and they're enjoying it just for pay. Absolutely not. But over the years, and I've been doing Global Talent Trends since its inception 7 years ago, the impact of pay has been steadily rising. At the same time, the impact of your manager has been steadily declining in importance. And this year I think is incredibly telling. We asked that, why do you stay with your current firm? The top answer is always job security. But what's jumped into the number 2 position is pay equity. Now, not your actual compensation, which is much lower. It's pay equity. It's that, do I think I have a fair deal? Am I getting as many opportunities because I've elected to be fully remote versus you who's maybe going in 3 days a week? Do I think that I get enough money? I mean, here in the UK at the moment, we've got the junior doctors on strike. Am I, you know, when I actually count my hours and what level of work or quality or value is actually being valued? You've got the strikes with the writers in the US. Is this a fair deal? And how is AI changing that deal? That's what's really biting. And so it's that equity theory around pay, not total pay. But I do think cost of living and stuff like that's putting a more finer point on it. So what might be a niggle before is now a, I'm gonna quietly quit or I'm gonna actually quit.

Love it. Well, this has been fantastic. We could go on for hours here. I appreciate your time. Appreciate your insights and best of luck with the book and everything you're working on, Kate. I appreciate it.

Yeah, lovely to be here. Thank you, Peter.

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