Adaptability with Becks Clarke

Foreign.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I'm Johnny Campbell and welcome to the July 8th edition of the Shortlist. So welcome back, everybody. I hope you've been enjoying the the last 11 or so episodes that we put out there. Already enjoying getting stuck into season two here on the Shortlist. I and as always, I want to encourage anyone listening live to please join in the comments. We've got a great guest today. We've got a fantastic topic I think is going to interest all of you and engage you. So we'd like to see your questions, your comments, your thoughts on LinkedIn or YouTube. We're going to take those live. Myself and our guests will take those out and try and address and answer them. I want to get your thoughts, your examples on this as well. As ever, if you want to check out our upcoming lineup on the Shortlist or you'd like to basically check out some of our previous episodes, you can, you can do so@socialtalent.com the shortlist, where you'll get a preview of what's coming over the coming weeks. But again, as I said, you can access any of our prior episodes for free and watch the videos or listen to the shows as well. So that brings me to today's episode. We're going to talk about adaptability. I'm going to talk about how, particularly out of COVID and the Pandemic, we've all learned that adaptability is, is an essential survival skill. At least I think it is. And I'm hoping we can have a good discussion on this with our guest today. Our guest today has been a friend of mine for some time. She's currently the head of Talent acquisition for Europe, Middle east and Africa for Adobe. Prior to that, she ran global TA for King Games. Bex Clark is joining us live from the UK today and I'm going to hand over to Bex to kind of give you a bit more context as to what, what makes her passionate, what she does, a little bit more about the company she works for. Bex, over to you.

Thank you Jonny, and thank you for the invite to join you this afternoon. Much appreciated. Always enjoy our conversations. So a little bit of background about me. I'm currently leading the TA organization for EMEA for Adobe, as Jonny alluded to. So we're very much about driving the world through digital experiences. So very topical at this point in time. I've been in the business just over six months, so had a very interesting journey of kind of three months of BAU and then thrown into our COVID Pandemic world, so definitely needed to be adaptable through that time. Interesting topic for me. So you know, the ability to be adaptable in terms of how it drives you as an individual, what it means within the organisations you're in, has huge impact. So really, really interesting discussion and looking forward to talking.

Jonny, I want to explore adaptability, both in the personal sense. I'm keen to get your experience of how you have become more adaptable if you have as a result of the pandemic, maybe in a personal way, because I'm going to share some insights even if you don't want to hear them. Bex, I'm going to share them with you about I've learned things about myself and how I've had to be less rigid over the last three, four months in certain things. But I want to talk about that then and take the bigger conversation into the workplace. You know, we work in the world of talent. I want to talk about what that means for organizations and the importance or lack of importance of adaptability, where it does rank, where it should rank, where it comes from as well in particular. So let's dive into those. After we join, we jump into a couple of really relevant articles from the news this week. Ask Niall to get on with this week's news. You might be cheating when we say the news this week. You were presented with a news article to research and instead you found yourself reading what was a bit of an essay from Peter Goblick in Harvard Business Review. But I'd encourage anyone listening or watching this to check this out. Learning from the Future. This is a really interesting article. I'll sum it up and get your opinion on it. But essentially Peter was talking about, you know, how most organizations really weren't prepared for this particular crisis and it's unlikely that we'll be prepared for the next crises because these kind of things are black swans and you just generally don't have a frame of reference to deal with it. And he gives an example, a really good example, a long, detailed example of an organization who have basically built systemic planning into the organization, planning for future crazy scenarios to try and learn from the future, as he puts it, to try and find, figure out what could happen in multiple different scenarios so that if any of those happen or if a combination of bits of those happens, which is perhaps more likely, they have kind of flexed their muscles, their brain muscles, to think about different scenarios and to react well to those. So, Bex, I'm keen to kind of hear what are your thoughts about the approach that the author put forward in this article. And what do you think it means for teams?

Yeah, I think it's a good question, Jonny. So I think for me, scenario planning is kind of the crux of what he's is talking about. And I think, you know, that always makes sense. I think my question is, you know, in reality, how often does that happen and how do you actually encourage organizations to do more of that? So, you know, certainly my experience has seen businesses that are much more reactive rather than kind of driving that proactive thinking that then is needed when you're looking at scenario planning. You know, I think Covid is an extreme. It's, you know, it's an absolute massive thing nobody could have planned for it. It touches kind of everything in a working context, but massive impact on personal lives. And those two things together are just a complete and utter, you know, complete and utter kind of nightmare as a whole piece. So, you know, I think my question is more around how do you encourage and drive businesses to see the benefits in scenario planning and actually carve out the time to do that and then how do you really create kind of diverse thinking in that scenario planning so that you are, you are, you know, you're not just thinking about the, the two or three things you think might be likely, but you're actually really kind of reaching and digging deep for, you know, more, more unlikely scenarios in that mix.

What has your experience been like directly in the companies you work for? I know you, you only just joined Adobe a few months before the pandemic. Perhaps, you know, don't have the same experience there. But even in previous organizations. What was the, what was the approach to this kind of planning that you've seen hands on in the past?

Yeah, I think I've probably seen it. I've seen a mix in my career, Jonny, over the last 20 years. So, you know, I've worked in organizations that have been much more forward thinking and actually have, you know, have done this to a degree. I definitely haven't seen any organization I think has done it amazingly well. So, you know, I've certainly seen businesses and even within the talent arena, we've done what if scenario planning. So if we want to be this size or we want to grow at this rate, what would that look like? You know, what are the hurdles we're likely to overcome? How do we do that? So I think I've probably seen a mix, but I definitely haven't seen an organization that I think, you know, has absolutely nailed this.

Like I've seen. I'm part of a new Leadership program this year. Right. I went back to school, Bex. Right. And I was meant to be in New York last week doing my school schooling. Yeah, I got that got canned fairly well.

It's coming down, Johnny. Yeah.

Oh, it is, Right. So we've been doing this through esa, the business school in Barcelona. Great, great business school. And you know, I'm doing this with 31 of their CEOs. And every one of them, when we kind of got stuck into Covid, we got on some online seminars and stuff, every one of them had scenario planned in a very, very similar way. Right. And we were no different to kind of go, you know, what are the different scenarios? What if it's a V dip? What if it's a U? What if it's double dip? And they kind of mapped, what would they do? And they'd mapped, what would their cost plan be? What is their approach to changing the products, et cetera. And so we all did this planning. We didn't. There wasn't. It wasn't a moment where someone showed us a slide and then we went back into the planning. We came together and said, what have you been doing? And it turns out we all did pretty much the same planning. And my take is that you scale out to enterprises. It's probably what most businesses did. It happened, we planned. Right. As opposed to. The real difference here is planning before it happens and planning for things you can't predict. And I like this because we often go and this is what experience brings you. Right. I talk about hiring somebody who's only got a certain amount of experience in this sector. You know, whether she or he is young or old doesn't really matter. It's that they're new enough to the role and people get quite confident after three or four years. They know everything. Right? We know what it's like, but actually experience, experience is, that is the. Is going through things several times so that when something comes up, you go, I have dealt with something similar to this before. Here's how it worked out and here's either what I did right or I did wrong, so I'm going to correct it. And that's generally what experience means, right? You've just seen it before. I think the problem here is that no one experienced something like this. And what they're trying to do here is artificially create an environment where you have seen so many experiences and scenarios in this kind of exercise, the systemic way of approaching planning that I think the author related, and I like this to the approach that most universities have begun to adapt. And I saw this in the business school that I'm involved with at the moment where I used a case study and what they're trying to do is teach executives through case studies. If you idea being, you know, I go through 20 case studies, okay, I have, I have only my limited experience, but 20 case studies of other people like me has given me at least a framework and heuristics to work with so that if I see something similar, I can either reference my own experience or one of the case studies as an example. But like, how would you do this? Like, how would you, this inspire you to think about, you know, within your team? How would you plan for Peaks Falls in hiring, different scenarios happening? Can you see different applications of this? You know, maybe not in the whole of Adobe, but even within the talent acquisition organization. How would you perhaps implement this?

Yeah, I think it's one of those things that you kind of, you know, in a talent role there, there is always change, Johnny. So, you know, I've, I've, I've seen change throughout my career. So I think I'm always somebody that has a plan A, B, C, D in my back pocket. And if not, you're able to kind of make one up as you go along without being too crude about it. So, you know, I think, I think for me, as you look forward and certainly when you talk more about workforce planning and looking at, you know, how do you build those different models, that definitely part and parcel of discussions at the moment. And I think it's, you know, to your point earlier around, what are the kind of core themes within that? What are the core skills that come out of that and how do you shape that? It's certainly part of my thinking at the moment.

I'm going to ask our listeners and audience if they've any examples of organizations they have worked in or known that do this or other scenarios where they've put in really good planning for wild scenarios and how it's worked out for them. So please jump in on the comments on LinkedIn or YouTube. I'd ask Nylo in the meantime to jump into our second article, which is related but taking a different approach. This comes from Forbes. So this uses the. The A word. I'm sorry to bring up the A word, Bex, but they talk about and. And Steve Denning, the author, is a big, big fan of, of agile. My God, the guy seems to just live and breathe and write about it, but he talks about how agile turns risk into opportunity. I think everyone's trying to be talking about everyone talking about how do we turn this crisis into an opportunity. Right. What are your thoughts on Agile and how it relates to adaptability, which is what we're our big theme today.

Yeah, absolutely. So you know, I think if you take the word agile in its truest sense, you know, you're talking really about kind of quick and easy or nimble. And I think that that for me is really where I focus when, when we talk about agile. Yes. You can talk about agile methodologies and how that's used within organizations certainly successfully worked with an agile. Work fast shift quickly. All of those core things for me are absolutely critical when we start to talk about being agile. And I don't think you can be adaptable.

We got a comment here from Aaron Daniels. Good to have you back Aaron. The show who Aaron saying that some companies in the US where he works started hiring additional staff, logistics and started training management reaction teams for public facing roles. You're seeing companies like this have a dedicated continuity of operations or emergency management dedicated staff, you know and I think, I think that's, that that's brilliant. I've heard of those examples. There was an example in the article of a smaller, on a smaller scale where in the previous article where you had a. Sorry, this article where you had a restaurant who had the same business model for 50 years. In this last article, maybe this might speak to Aaron's point about smaller business. Business businesses, I think 100 staff and they said they had, they had to flip their model instantly. They had not changed their model of how they do food for 50 years and they had to kind of go back to basics. And one of the things that I liked with this was that it wasn't about how you make profit, how you do these kind of things. They really had to just go back to what is our purpose? Like what are we actually trying to do? We're here to feed people. Okay, we're here to feed people. How do we do that? And the idea that profits come after you deliver on this, not you don't, you don't design for profits. You design to drive this purpose and if you do it well, you're going to get profits. I think, you know, agile is perhaps the framework in which you can do that. But maybe Aaron, that's worth digging out of those articles, maybe that piece around, no matter what size of organization are, if you can go back to your purpose, you, you can then see how do we still deliver that purpose and what do we have to change? And being agile to your point, I guess by Its main definition is doing that. So is agile. Just though for the large tech companies. In the article they talked about Amazon or at least parts of Amazon, Google and Apple and those organizations. And you're in a tech organization. I've been in tech companies for most of your career. Becks, what's your opinion? Is agile just for tech companies?

No, I think agile can be certainly the principles and ways of working of Agile can be applied across businesses. Jonny, how often that's done, I think is also a good question. But I certainly think that the kind of principles of it, if you think about small teams, quick review cycles, those types of things I definitely think are all structures that would apply or could apply across organizations. We might well see some of that being embedded in different businesses in terms of a different way of kind of working going forward. I think it'd be quite interesting to see, to be fair, what do you.

Think if you were to pick the most important parts of the agile kind of manifesto or concept to adaptability, you think about an organization's ability to be adaptable. What do you think are the key parts of Agile and maybe parts of the article mentioned in Forbes that a company should focus on that allow you therefore to be organizationally adaptable?

I think for me there are two key things that I would call out. One is kind of having small team sizes so that you're not trying to move a mountain with, you know, 100 people, you've got smaller teams. And then I think the other is speed. So you know, rather than having very traditional kind of project lengths of months and months, if you're, you know, you're running with kind of two or three week sprint cycles, you're looking at things in a much more, a much shorter time frame, Jonny. And you know, I absolutely hear you in terms of keeping that overall purpose in mind. And I think, you know, also if you think about, if you have delighted employees, you have delighted customers. So I think if you can have your North Star of your overall purpose, you know, your team's fully engaged and working well, then that should follow in terms of, you know, customer satisfaction and ultimately profits in there, you know, in a textbook fashion.

Yeah, I think those points around small teams, the North Star of your purpose, if you also give people more autonomy, I think autonomy is one of those drivers. It's been well correlated and documented as being a driver of employee engagement. If you have more autonomy, I think it's an important part of the agility piece. Having small teams working in short sprints, but having a very top down Structure, I think wouldn't get you there. But having, giving people the autonomy to, to make decisions, to be flexible as well is really important. Russell Connor's asked a great question here for you, Bex. He's saying you mentioned the importance of diversity of ideas when scenario planning, which is part of the first article. What does your company do when planning for diversity in the hiring strategy?

Yeah, and this is a really interesting one that I've debated with a few people recently because for me there's kind of your overall diversity topic and then there's also very topically kind of diversity of thought as well. So how do you really ensure that your teams have got all of that in the mix? Jonny, you know, I think we, we are very much looking at diversity as a whole and as most tech businesses are definitely not an easy challenge, but certainly one that's very, very topical at the moment. But for me is how do you drive diversity of thought into those. If we're talking, if we're going back to those kind of scenario planning situations, how do you really have, you know, a very diverse group of thinking that enables you to go through those conversations? And I think that's, you know, that, that's, that takes it beyond gender and kind of ethnicity. It's really making sure that you've got people from totally different backgrounds all able to have their voice heard and contribute. Those things for me are kind of top of, top of mind.

We got a comment here from Farouk Sahid, an agile coach who just commented that speed with business value is the key of agile. I think I'd agree with that. I've seen agile teams focus on the tasks and lose sight of the big goal, the business value, because they're just so obsessed with completion of tasks in two week sprints and getting that done. And then they kind of go, we built the stuff. It's like, yeah, but where are we? Back to your point.

Exactly. And that for me is critical in that team makeup as well. So Fuk's role is absolutely key to success in those teams. Jonny, in my experience, I'm going to.

Share with you my, my maybe trivial nonsense story of adaptability, right? And survival, survival is, is a, is a bit of a stretch for this one. But look, so I'm the type of person, right, who I would consider myself very adaptable, but I have some things that I'm just rigid on, right? I think we are, we all are a little bit like this, right?

We all do. That's human nature.

My rigidity is best before dates or what Right. So if I see a best before date that's expired or it's today, it goes in the bin. I don't care, it's gone. Right. It's trash. Right. And I would have abused my father for, for his, let's say, casualness when it comes to best before dates. And, and actually I, I do know the science behind it, that there's some best before dates you should watch out for and some you actually don't need to. But I would just religiously put it in the bin. But I found myself during COVID I don't know anyone else out there has similar stories of things that they held dear but they had to drop during COVID You know, we got a, we had a once a week shop and you didn't go to the store unless you really needed to. Right. Back in peak kind of COVID for us, which was maybe April. So if you ran out of stuff or it was particularly expired, its best before date you kind of had to question, well, do I go hungry or do I eat this? And I started sniffing food and I started examining food.

You sound like my mom.

Well, this is the thing because I actually, I talked about this with several people, right. Because we kind of go. I think our parents generation grew up in a world where, you know, food was more scarce and therefore you did these things. And we had a mini, mini view of that. Right. Coming from an affluent society where we're lucky enough, we don't have to do that for a while. We really did. I actually find it quite liberating because it did change my view, which is I have a lifelong view on best before dates. Now I'm like, that's cool, it's fine. A couple of days. Let's have a look at the bread. There's no mold. Smells. All right, let's do it. You know, or anything in the cupboard is pretty fresh. Right. So it got me thinking about, you know, that being adaptable, you know, literally is an essential survival skill. If you're hung up on best before dates and you face an environment where you cannot go to the store, you cannot get food, it's. They kind of do need to be adaptable in that perspective to survive. Anything you kind of change your mind on that you were maybe more rigid on during the last four months.

Oh, that's a really good question. You needed to prep me on that one.

I didn't prep me for that one. I'm keen to see maybe of our audience of any that they've things that you held here.

You've given up on the audience. While I, while I quickly think it's, that's all right.

We'll see what our audience have to maybe jump in on that. Right. But I got me thinking about people who just won't. Right. Because I know there's people out there who don't think like that, who just go, no, this is my way, and that's the end of it. And maybe even in a crisis, they still think that we have an issue. And I won't go into it today, I'll mention it, but I won't ask you to talk about it because it's a whole other topic. You know, masks. Right. I'm just not wearing the mask and that's the end of it. Right. Type issue. Or people are just really rigid. And I think, you know, I've been kind of researching this topic for the last number of years. I know you have as well. It's one you're passionate about, Becks, which is adaptability as a skill of an employee, as a critical skill, not just as a nice to have on a tick box. I remember three years ago, I was at TalentConnect, LinkedIn's conference, and I saw a fabulous talk by Jennifer Karl Carpenter, who at the time was running global talent acquisition for Accenture. And she spoke about how Accenture in their chase. Their race, I should say race or chase, to try and make sure they had all of the new skills. Because I'm asked, because we're a skills platform all the time, what are the emerging skills? What are the future skills? And people are asking to be ready to try and hire them or grow them. And Jennifer's story from Accenture, and this is three years ago, it was quite progressive at the time. She was saying Accenture had moved over a decade from hiring for IQ smart people to hiring for EQ People who are more able to be interpersonal, relate to people to what they called LQ or the learning quotient. And LQ is adaptability. Right. They kind of said we don't know what the next generation of skills will be, but we do know that they're changing faster than ever. New roles are being created. You know, the, the, the kind of half life of a skill is, is shortening. So therefore their solution is to hire people who are adaptable. And this is on an organization of 700,000 people or whatever they employ, which is insane. Right. What are your thoughts on that, first of all? And second of all, how do you, how do you assess for that? Like it's, it's all very well to say it's. If you agree, that's important. But how the hell do you figure out if someone's adoptable?

Yeah, no, no, no, A good question. And I think, you know, first, my, my kind of debate I've had myself, and certainly with. With a couple of people in the last few days is, is adaptability in itself a skill? And I don't think it is. I think there are a number of things that go into making somebody adaptable. So, you know, you. You've mentioned a couple in there. I think learning is absolutely key. I actually think it's. It's a blend of both mindset and action, Johnny. So it's not. It's not one thing. So I think you. I think you've got proactive nature in there. So somebody that, you know, has really a kind of driven mindset in that mix. Somebody that's happy to embrace learning and learn from their mistakes, somebody that's prepared to take a risk, I think is also important in that. In that mix. Somebody that can see a bigger picture. So when we talked about purpose, you know, ultimately know what you're striving for in all of that. Resilience is huge for adaptability. I see that's kind of come in from one of our audience as well. But resilience is a massive piece for me in terms of adaptability, as is also, I think being able to stay calm, I think that's a really critical part of it, too. So I actually think there are a number of things that go into making up being adaptable. And then your question is, how do you tease that out of your selection process and how do you look at those different facets through whatever assessment you're taking your candidates or your employees through? Jonny?

Yeah, we've got Russ o' Connor commenting there. I believe today's dynamic complexity, rapid advancement of technology, and increased uncertainty leads to a need for people who are happy with change. Today, being really skilled in one area may actually be a threat to advancement. I think it's a good point here. You know, you mentioned adaptability, resilience. You mentioned growth mindset. Like, can you teach somebody a growth mindset? What do you think?

Oh, that's a great question. Jury's out for me, I think some of that, I think you can hone a growth mindset, and I think you can be very conscious about holding a growth mindset. But I'm not sure if you can out now teach. It is my view in that piece. But I think mindset is a massive one and I think you've developed that through your career as well. So for me, there's a real kind of, you know, if you think about human nature doesn't embrace change, your immediate response, human beings don't like change inherently, so your immediate response is a negative one. So, you know, how have you developed, how have you kind of trained yourself to work through that, work through that quickly and then have the right mindset going forward?

Do you think there's a bit of a problem in that? You know, I find myself doing it right now. We talk about what the talent has to have. You know, she has to have a growth mindset, she has to have this, she has to this, and can she be trained. Whereas that kind of ignores the environment in which you put the talent into. Right. So, you know, you mentioned resilience being really important, which John Halpin has also mentioned. The baseline of resilience is adaptability. Right. In the comments. But if I have, if I'm, if I'm resilient, it's really important because I think, you know, to be adaptable, you have to be prepared to change and try new things. Which means you're going to fail a lot, right? Yeah, I think that's where the resilience comes from because you're going to, you're going to inevitably fail because it's not safe. Right. You'll have to take risks. But if you're in an organizational culture that doesn't encourage risk rewarded, in fact, it depromotes it. That means that you can have a growth mindset, you can be resilient, but you work in an organization where it's not safe to take risks. You are not going to display adaptability. You're not going to embrace adaptability if the organizational structure doesn't embrace it. The leadership, the whole environment, the culture doesn't have it. What's the balance, do you think, between what the individual has to bring and the organization has to bring to the table?

Yeah, I think you need a mix in there. I think you can never thrive if you're not in the right environment. So there's lots of discussion at the moment about kind of psychological safety and do people feel safe in their organizations to take risk? And I think if you don't have that, it makes it incredibly hard. So for me, I think there is a blend of both of those things, Jonny, just like there is in terms of mindset and action when you talk about adaptability overall.

Yeah. Because I know even Steve McClelland from IKEA has commented around, you know, there's a much larger demand for people who can adapt in the role and work with the businesses to be reactive to outside factors. But it's a hard skill to, hard skill to recruit for. And this, you know, again I think it points to the idea that we just need to hire people with the skill and we'll be fine. I remember, you know, I had a similar scenario when I was working with a client, I won't mention them several years ago and they wanted to hire lots. They wanted to become more tech oriented. Right. They, they were selling a, a how can I say this? That revealing them. I get they were selling a high value good. And they had been much more traditional in their channel to market through traditional retail. And they, they saw their whole industry moving to digital. But the people, but the culture of the organization wasn't digital. You know, their, their head office had individual offices like floors and floors of individual offices, beautiful offices and you know, very, very expensive, you know, cafeteria and all this kind of stuff like treating everyone fantastically. And they're like, we need, we need tech people. We need to be more tech oriented business to deal with E commerce. So their solution was let's hire loads of young people who get tech. And it just failed because I worked with the recruiting team and they were just so frustrated because they're kind of going this doesn't work. We hire these people, they're awesome. From all these digital businesses they come in and go, I don't work here. This business is just not what I'm all about. And they kept just losing them. Right. So I think it is that balance between you can, you can hire for a skill but you need to make sure, you know, if you're, you're, you're, you're purchasing the right seeds, you need a fertile soil for the seeds to grow. Buying the right seed or finding the right seed is only half of the equation, I think.

Totally. And if your, your culture isn't ready for that and your culture actively kind of knock knocks that Johnny, then you know those people coming in are never going to be successful. I've definitely seen that through my career. I had one, one actual standout example. Again, I clearly won't name the organization but we were really aggressively hiring for people with great change capability. And literally three months in and this person is just desperately struggling and it wasn't the right match. And that was all around just a lack of openness to say one thing, but actually the culture dictated something else. So it would never have worked.

Yeah, it's kind of too Often when someone doesn't work out, it's they didn't work out. As opposed to going, we hired the right person, but not for the type of organization we are right now. It's kind of what is your expectation? How does it work here? I see this with talent acquisition leaders a lot. Where TA leaders, you might have a lot of friends and colleagues who might have been. This situation where the organization goes, we want to be more progressive. Let's hire a progressive head of ta. So they hire someone from a cool company. They want to be like. They bring them in that person, they go, do what you did there here. And the person goes, great, I want to do this. Oh, no, no, we can't do that. All right, what about this? Oh, no, we won't give you a budget for that. You're kind of like, but go, just go make it like it was over there. You know, scale that down to everybody. It's like adaptability is two ways. It's like, okay, are we willing to change the way we work, how we think about people? And back to the. I think the agile piece isn't just about agility, right? That's one part of it. But I think it is a bigger organizational structure. And Josh Burson talks about this a lot. He talks about the trend to kind of break down organizational structures that the kind of more team oriented. You start a team, you end a team. You might be working in four or five teams at any one time. This is really important because it teaches you that you can. Rather than having a linear role where you just complete your task week to week and report to your boss, you tend to work on different projects with different people and the projects come to a natural end. You start other projects, you parallel projects running, and it just becomes very normal to work in this environment. So, you know, if change comes and hits you like a brick, it's just about, okay, what projects are we going to put together to get used to this change? Where is if I've done the same job for 20 years and then change comes along and it's like, well, okay, let's, let's start doing different things. I have never done anything but this one thing versus the kind of, I.

Guess you struggle at that point. If you think about how careers are developing these days, you know, tenure in role is what's average tenure these days? Something tiny, like 12 or 18 months. Johnny. So, you know, people are moving roles, people are making lateral moves. People are actively seeking how they develop their careers differently to what the traditional world was, you know, kind of 10, 20 years ago. So all of that really creates the need to be adaptable and have environments and cultures that harness that rather than, rather than work against it. So, you know, my last year in King, we were doing a big piece of work around what does the future of work look like and how do you really lean into that and optimize it as a talent attractor, bearing in mind you know, that's a big piece of what talent wants, how talent wants to develop their career. You know, they want opportunities that looks like that as well going forward.

Yeah, I echo Eugene's sentiments there about a system who is not ready will push out bright minds. Farouk's offering you some more good advice. I think this is a really nice nugget here. If you remember, Farouk was commenting a few minutes ago and is an agile coach himself. You can help someone on the team with proper strategy, how to adopt growth mindset, involve them in the problem, in problem solving and allow the team player to use his or her own imagination to solve these problems. This will give them a good start towards growth mindset. I think that's a really excellent point. It's like trusting people. It's getting them involved. It's again, it's a cultural mindset on how you run a project, how you get people involved in different projects. That has to be at the core of the business or the leader.

I think it's creating the environment, Johnny, and I think if you can create the environment that people can try these things. So again, going back to, you know, enabling them to take a risk and fail, no consequences because of it. Actively encouraging that, you know, for me are all the types of things we should be doing in terms of kind of, you know, looking to help adaptability flourish, basically.

So, Bex, abstract question for you for a second. What's your knowledge of Pixar movies like?

A little, not too bad.

Ratatouille. Have you seen Ratatouille?

I have indeed. Yes, absolutely.

Ratatouille, incidentally is the highest critic rated Pixar movie ever on IMDb but not one of the most profitable. I'm in the Ratatouille school of thought on this. I believe anyone can cook, right? To take the line from, from Ratatouille. And I believe, and maybe it's more an aspiration, but I, I do believe that you can teach anybody anything. It is possible. It's sometimes really hard, but it's possible. So I believe that, you know, these things can be taught to anybody. You can get, turn anyone around right into More of a growth mindset and more to be more adaptable. What are your thoughts? Is it something that you can teach anyone?

I think you need to want to do it, Johnny. So I, you know, I'm with you. So you know, how many debates have I had over the years about I need a recruiter that must have recruited finance people to be a finance recruiter. No, I don't. I need a great recruiter. A great recruiter can find anybody, basically. But for me, I think you have to have the right attitude and you have to have the right mindset. So you have to want to do it. I think if you don't want to do it, you know, they're on a hiding to nothing. We're on a hiding to nothing. So I think for me it goes back to the. There has to be that balance of mindset as well as capability to learn it.

There's a great example here from, just dig it out here from earlier on. So Eugene Brockman asked, any thoughts on new jobs that are going to come out of the low touch economy and how old roles can pivot? He gives the example of Uber drivers shifting to concierges for old people or at risk people. Like this is, I think it's a great example because you have somebody who doesn't have a hierarchical structure where there's a team or a company encouraging them to do different things. Although to be fair to Uber, they've put in technology in the apps for drivers that I believe that helps find them jobs or other ways to use their skills, which actually was a really good innovation. But that aside, these are people who it seems you have just a mighty at the right mindset, they're going all right rather than just stick at home and complain. A lot of us think taxi drivers and cab drivers.

What can I do?

What can I do?

What can I do? I see stuff come through LinkedIn on a daily basis around. I'm on furlough at the moment. I'm developing this or I'm doing this or can I help you with that? You know, all of those things for me are absolutely examples of what we're talking about. It's kind of, you know, getting out there doing something.

But isn't about, you know, the, the point of one of the articles earlier on where you go, you know, this North Star of purpose. I agree with you that you have to have the right motivation and want to do it. But I think if you get, if you show somebody the North Star, that's how you start by turning them around and you have to get that alignment and you have to, you have to sell and clearly define that purpose. For example, if you're an Uber driver, it's like, no, you're not an Uber driver. You move people around. Can I go? Like, your job is to move people around. Who needs moving right now? They go, oh, oh, yeah, this person needs moving around. All of a sudden you go, I can still move people around. I know people who need to be moved. Let me go find them. And that, that is the. Again, you know, I think you could tell it an Uber driver who otherwise going, I have no work. You know, there's. Nobody wants an Uber. It's like, well, do people need to be moved around? Yeah, and they need to be moved around in a slightly different way. Could you basically put plastic screens up? Could you do something else? What is the way that you can help that and there's an opportunity there. It's just not seeing yourself in a rigid. I do this. No, you don't. You do that. But it's in service of something bigger. Get into purpose.

Yeah. You know, how else could you do it? And I think for me, again, it comes back to, I think you fundamentally have to believe in that purpose. If you haven't got alignment to that purpose, if that, you know, if that's not quite right or it's off again, I don't think you can ever truly succeed in that. I think you have to wholeheartedly believe in that overall purpose.

Jonny, you do, by the way, shout out to Gary Murphy, who chimed in that he also discovered the joys of gone off food during COVID as well. So he's in my book, in my camp there, we're enjoying much more food. Gary, me and you with best before dates that we're willing to just squander and go, we don't care for those best before dates. So I'm going to bring it maybe to a bit of a conclusion on this, Becks. Right. So if we're talking about adaptability, right, you know, how much of an essential survival skill is this? What would your tips be then to someone for twofold tips to somebody trying to hire for adaptability, somebody on this call who's responsible for hiring their organization are part of the process, what would you say to them in terms of trying to identify and bring in people who are more adaptable? And then to those of us also who are kind of wanting to be more adaptable, what would you say that would maybe help us become more adaptable? So maybe two parts to that question.

Okay. So if I take your first question around tips for hiring for adaptability. I think as we talked about it's, you know, there are a number of things that go into making up adaptability. So for me it's about how do you dig behind those, those different items, Jonny, through your selection process and really building that picture. So not just looking at how somebody learns or looking and kind of pushing how somebody's resilient, but build that picture of those different facets that really go into making up somebody that's successful at being adaptable. I think that that would certainly be the first key piece and question for me.

So it's then, you know, for individuals who just want to be more adaptable. What are your recommendations? What are your tips for someone who wants to have, who's kind of going, they have the attitude I want to do this. What are your recommendations as to become a more adaptable professional? I know there was a comment earlier on, for example, that said, you know, one of the listeners beliefs that working in a highly specialized role maybe is the wrong way around. It's maybe not the future. So what would your advice to somebody saying I agree with this, need to be more adaptable in the future. What should I do, Rex?

I think if you have the desire, Johnny, you have to look for the opportunity. So push yourself forward. Stick your nose into something that gives you the opportunity to really kind of test it and put yourself through it. I think that would be the kind of very simple advice I'd give. You know, don't sit and wait, do something.

Would you recommend eating gone off food?

You're still alive, Johnny. So.

Hasn't killed me yet. Hasn't killed me yet.

Still alive. Yeah.

And thanks to Brie Walsh. Brie Walsh. Just pointing out tenacity. Another one of those skills. I think you're right. It's not about you. Aren't you? I think that's a really key insight. I hadn't thought about this before this call today, Beck, so thanks for giving this to me. It isn't about a thing called adaptability that you're hiring for. The adaptability is, is a, is a family of skills that you need to recruit for. I'm probably in different ratios depending on the organization where you are in your journey on this. But it's how do you figure out how to assess for the family of skills that make up adaptability? Go assess for those things like tenacity, things like resilience, things like, you know, being able to cope with negative criticism and so on, so forth. These Are all things, you know, to have, to be creative, to be, to be, to be, to speak up. These are all parts, part and parcel of the thing that we call adaptability, which I think is the bigger picture. Chris Jennings, by the way, just commenting, as recruiters and hiring managers, we need to discover multiple motivations in that person to ensure continuous adaptability, which I think is a great point. So I think the other layer I got from this today, Bex, is very much the piece around purpose. The North Star, as you say, you know, it's about core basic skills. It's having the North Star, which maybe it's your organization's job to focus you on that North Star. And it's a two way street. It's you got to go into an environment, you got to go into fertile soil, you got to be the right seeds potentially, but you got to go into fertile soil. That's really, really important. So, Bex, one last question for you. I need your general advice. Right, so we ask every guest on the show to give us their one piece of advice. Either that you've ever been given that you want to share or, or that you would give to anyone in the talent space who's listening here today. What's your one piece of advice? The piece of advice that Bex Clark's Bex Clark wants everyone to, to remember at the end of this.

So the Bex Clark gem of advice is as follows. You know, we are in a really privileged position in talent roles to help people realize their careers. Jonny and I always look at that as a privilege. So, you know, for me, I think that the key piece of advice is always remember you are dealing with human beings. And I know that sounds simple, but I think often it gets forgotten. So those human beings have feelings, they have emotions, they have highs, they have lows. Everybody's going through an incredibly tough time at the moment, both yourself and the individuals that you're working with. So I think my advice is never forget and never kind of forget to put on your hat that you're dealing with an individual at the end of the day and, and what's important to them. So, you know, I think that would, that would be my key piece of advice. And I think my key learning is actually having gone through and being a candidate in different candidate experiences as well. I think those have been things that have taught me massive lessons that I've then taken with me through my career in terms of, you know, how do you work with the talent in your mix.

It's the empathy piece that's so important to walk in someone else's shoes. Remember that not everyone thinks like you, acts like you, is in the same situation as you try and put yourself in their shoes before you take action, before you do stuff. It's brilliant advice. Becks, thanks for sharing with us. Thanks for being on the show this week. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Hopefully we get you back and we can have another conversation and move on to different themes.

Oh, let's do another topic.

Please, please. And thanks to the audience for joining us with amazing chat and comments and a shout out to my 11 year old son who's been just recently joining in the comments. So hello Aaron, unbuilt arc on YouTube who's been saying hello as well. Proud to have my son listening in. One of my four sons listening in to us today folks. You don't forget you can check out, you can check out any of our shows and subscribe to get an update for new shows coming by going to socialtalent.com forward/the shortlist Next week we've got another fantastic topic I'm hoping you can join us for. We're going to be running an hour earlier than normal next week though, so that's one slight change. That's 3pm UK Ireland time. So that is actually going to be 10am on the east coast of the US and 7am on the west coast, 10pm Singapore time. And that's because we had a fantastic guest, a good friend of mine for the last, gosh, six, seven or eight years, Jan Akerman, who is the VP of Global Talent Acquisition for Oracle. So someone who's responsible for tens of thousands of hires every year. And Jan is going to be joining us to talk about what I'm seeing as a trend across all large organizations since the pandemic, which is a renewed focus on internal career mobility, how to basically not just keep looking outside our firms for new hires, but looking internally to see who do we have and maybe we can move more of our team around, give them new opportunities, new training opportunities. What does that look like? And to share the story of what Oracle and particularly Jan's team have been doing around that. So don't forget to join us at 3pm UK Ireland time, which is 10am on the east coast of the US, 7am on the west coast to basically get that as well. And John saying thank you guys, lots learned and lots of thanks coming in from those people. Really appreciate that from everyone. Don't forget to check out our full list and lineup on socialtown.com the shortlist we'll be back, not the same time, an hour earlier. Next week, Wednesday the 15th of July. Until then, thanks for listening. Really hope you enjoy the show. I really hope you have a growth mindset and are more committed to being adaptable.