Breaking down talent siloes to scale internal mobility | with Colleen Rush

It's mid January 2023, the longest month. Oh, Lord, it is tough to get through January. And you know what you need to get through January? You need a really great conversation about a really fantastic topic that's going to give you a bit of motivation to get through the next two weeks as we go go live today on January 18th. It is episode 127 of the Shortlist. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm your host for today and also the CEO and co founder of Social Talent. And we are going to be talking all things internal mobility and particularly breaking down talent silos to scale internal mobility, AKA career progression and mobility in an organization here today on the show, I'm really, really delighted to be joined by fantastic guest guest. Before I introduce our guest, I want to, you know, just give some logic as to why the topic internal mobility consistently ranks as a top or number one indicator of what a great workplace looks like. It's a win win for talent development and retention. You get to move people on through the organization. You keep people because you keep giving them different roles. But it's also still a big challenge for many organizations, particularly those with very large workforce courses. How can you create a culture of internal mobility when it's difficult to even know the true extent of the talent you have today? Our guest on the shortlist this week is Colleen Rush, the global head of talent acquisition at Merck Group. Colleen is going to be sharing her experience and it is great experience of working in large organizations to talk about collaboration across various disciplines, building internal mobility at scale and how in particular learning and development can unlock new possibilities for talent and the company alike. Colin, you're very welcome to the show. I was wondering if you would do me a wonderful favor of just introducing yourself, tell our audience a little bit, you and your career how you've navigated the different roles and experiences you've used. You've had. Fascinating. And then where you're joining us from today because the voice and the accent might not particularly suggest where you truly are and then maybe a little bit Merck as well for those who might not be familiar with your current employer.

Sure. Happy to do so, Joni, and I'm really thrilled to be able to have this conversation with you today. So my career, over more years than I care to admit, has taken me to ge, where I started in GE Capital, not in hr. I made the career detour into HR fairly early on. And then in my HR career I was focused on mainly on learning and development at GE with a little bit of Talent management and OD mixed in. I made a job change to Siemens in the US where my primary focus was in fact talent management with a little bit of learning and development and OD mixed in. After a while at Siemens, I ended up seeking a new challenge and volunteered to go on the Carve out list to be part of a joint venture between Nokia and Siemens. And that was a great experience. And there I was actually the head of HR for North America for the joint venture, which was eventually bought out by Nokia. And partway through that I made a move to Germany and that was to take a role as a global HR business partner and at Nokia Siemens Networks. I did find my way later back to Siemens at their global headquarters in Munich, was part of a team that set up the Talent Acquisition center of Excellence and worked to build a global organization there and also led talent acquisition for Siemens healthineers, a role very, very similar to the one that I now have in Merck. So I am sitting in Darmstadt, Germany, which is where Merck is based, but I am an American, grew up in the Boston, Massachusetts area and have been living and working in Germany continuously since the middle of 2009. I want to talk just a little bit about Merck because there is a bit of confusion about the companies, plural Merck. There are two that have rights to use the name in different parts of the world. So I don't want the Merck that I'm working for, which is Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany to be confused with the American pharmaceutical company who has the rights to the to use the name Merck in the US and Canada. And we have it everywhere else in the US and Canada. You will see us doing business as Millipore Sigma for our life sciences business, EMD Serrano for our electronics business, and EMD Healthcare for our healthcare business. We are a vibrant science and technology company. You will recognize us by our vibrant MIC and our very vibrant color palette in our brand. So it is, it's, it's got quite a few colors and very, very distinct. Merck actually traces its origins back to 1668. So it is a very old company, has reinvented itself many times and we currently have the end of 21, just under 63,000 employees. We operate in well over 60 countries and last year the talent acquisition ecosystem filled over 13,000 positions. So pretty good.

Yeah, that's an impressive background when I look at this, considering the topic, Colleen, I'd argue that you are a poster child for more mobility, sometimes internal, sometimes external. You have tried your hand at many A role developed in all of the different possible areas in hr, in different businesses, in different parts of the world, in global roles, local roles. You know, you really have pushed yourself and I'm really keen, maybe we'll get to it later on to understand how much of that was just down to you and much of that was down to the structures and cultures of the organizations you were in. So we might park that one and come back. And maybe I could, if I can ask you firstly, maybe can I give us your view on what exactly what is internal mobility? Right, because folks in the HR world, world, we know this phrase, but the average person on the street will go, what's this? And then sometimes mobility gets mixed up with movements in different countries. So what do you see as internal mobility and why is it important?

Yeah, for me, internal mobility relates to the career development or the series of role roles that an internal employee takes. And of course, a large company like Merck, you know, offers, has a lot to offer because there are a lot of roles, a lot of diversity. But it also does come with its challenges. The scale can be a bit overwhelming, to be honest, but. So internal mobility is the degree to which a company supports and or facilitates its own employees to pursue their career interests through job changes inside the company.

And why is that so important? Like, surely everyone does it. It's fine. People can move jobs internally in companies. What's the problem? Why even bother devoting 40 minutes of a conversation today to it?

Yeah, it is, it is definitely possible, but it is also not necessarily easy. And there are a variety of obstacles for employees. One of the first challenges is the possibilities can be very confusing and even overwhelming. During the craziest time of recruiting last year, Merck had 4,500 openings at one point in time. So it's, it's. And you know, we are three different business units. The titling practices are not necessarily consistent. It's not clear whether skills that I have gained in one job would be transferable into an a different industry. Many times they are, but it's just a bit overwhelming. And, you know, many employees are not actively browsing the job postings. And while we encourage employees to set up job alerts, many of them don't. So when a suitable opening is posted, they never know about it. Unfortunately, those are challenges that are distinct to very large organizations. The irony is the company struggles as well because it is very difficult to get full transparency to exactly, you know, who is working for you. The sad truth is companies like ours are often relying on LinkedIn to understand what skills the employees we have. And the challenge the company has is even though the talent management organization has a platform for employees to put their experience and to document their skills, it's actually typically not very user friendly. And if it's not, if it's not used or they don't know that it's being used, they don't bother to fill out the profile. And that's the biggest obstacle. I mean, there is software, I think, in all companies our size, but getting employees to populate those profiles with the data is actually the biggest obstacle.

So I want to kind of break it into maybe at a high level the two, two of the challenges that exist here. One is just the data, the information, the systems, the processes, and maybe the second being more the cultural aspects of it. But I had a conversation just before Christmas with a team, we're in a kind of half day session in Sweden and we talked about just the challenge of what is a skill and having a common language to identify. You mentioned the challenge of role titling, for example, which arguably is just the tip of the iceberg. When somebody says, I want somebody who has, who is good at data science. Like in an organization of 60, 70, 80,000 people, I imagine there's 101 definitions of what that really means. And it's one thing building a database that houses the skills, which may be internal or to your point, could be just using LinkedIn, but having agreement over what one thing means in equivalent way to another. Like how do you, how do you even tackle that and how important is it to tackle that kind of an issue?

I think it is a foundational element because I think part of the solution actually is technology, particularly for large companies like ours. And some of the AI capabilities that are emerging should really help. But what I see in the market is a bit of a fragmentation along the silos. You know, there are organizations that are designing specifically for the needs of the learning and development team. There are separate vendors that are focused on, you know, internal job markets and the talent management domain, and then yet others that are creating platforms that meet the needs of the talent acquisition professionals, which is around sourcing candidates and matching candidates in jobs. None of these are using a consistent skin skill ontology. There is no standard. They have all had a different starting point. And so while I believe these technologies will converge and will provide a good piece of the solution, we are not there yet. And you know, one of the things that we are talking about is buying a skill ontology and just insisting it is used consistently across the platforms because still today the platforms that the talent colleagues in learning and development and in talent management and talent acquisition tend to be specialized.

When you do a Google search of internal mobility solutions or just internal mobility, a lot of the results, I'd argue most of the results tend to be focused on something you mentioned earlier on, which is kind of the marketplace and marketplace software for hosting the advertisements for these opportunities for internal talent to be able to search just like an external job board. And oftentimes people think that's where it starts and that's where it ends. What's your experience on the strengths and positives of those kind of platforms but also, you know, where do they stop and what is the gap that still remains?

Yeah, I think, I think the challenge, you know, the software platform, just like job posting platform, advertises short term assignments, whether they're done on a sabbatical from your regular job or in addition, they're potentially part of the solution. But the problem is if employees are not actively looking and searching, just as I mentioned before, you know, for positions, they will miss them. And I think longer term the solution will be is when the AI software begins presenting both gigs, short term assignments and even job changes to internal employees. And I do not believe we're very far away from that. I mean there are vendors that can do that. Does it work as well as it needs to be? I think we need still to train the software a little bit when you.

Think about the external world for a second. So let's say we talk about external mobility, hiring talent from other companies into Merck or into Siemens or Nokia or any business you've worked in. And I'm putting you on the spot for exact numbers. What's your good on how much of the talent you hire? Let's say in Merck there was more than 10,000 hires you made last year. How much of them came from people actively searching and you know, finding the right opportunity on a website, career site and applying, which is kind of what we're asking internal candidates to do. So how successful is that method when you look at external hiring in your view based on what percentage of the hires typically get made from that activity?

Yeah, I actually have quite a wide range of experience. As I reflect back at Merck, we do need to work a good bit harder, including investing much more, many more resources in sourcing active candidates because our brand recognition is not as strong as say a Siemens. At Siemens, for positions where there was adequate talent supply, active applications were, were probably the biggest source. I would say we have a mix at Merck. We also have, I would describe at a global level, a pretty healthy level of internal mobility. I think there is a general belief that it needs to be higher. And the driving force behind, you know, working to make it easier for employees to realize career aspirations is actually retention. Because we believe that what's happening in many cases is our employees are being approached with an attractive next position that they haven't looked for in Merck and may or may not have found in Merck, but they weren't looking, but the talent competitor found them first.

So this is the, I guess the challenge of, I guess some of the softwares and processes rely on the talent to take the action, whereas in the external world we recognize not all talent will do that. And to kind of really get a full view of the talent, we're going to have to rely on multitude of methods to try and attract, find, pull them in, push them towards us. All these different things. Tell me though, we've talked before about silos and particularly talent silos. What is a talent silo and how does it impact people looking to make career moves within a company?

Yeah, so I, you know, we're going to start to get into the cultural piece as well. But for me, the classic talent silos are learning and development, talent management and talent acquisition. The first two are focused primarily on the internal population. And when I think of development, I really think the 70, 2010, which is 70% on the job, 20% from others, mentors, coaches, feedback and 10% structured learning solutions. The L and D team is focused on the structured learning solutions and a bit on the 20% coaching and mentoring and then they try to influence the 70%. The talent management team is focused more on talent reviews, high potential identification, succession planning, performance management. They too are focused more on the internal employee. Whereas talent acquisition typically has its primary focus on the external market. Of course it's a happy occurrence when an internal employee applies and is successful because that's usually a faster and easier fill for a recruiter. But there are some cultural obstacles to actively sourcing passive talent inside of large organizations that I think we have to actively solve for in terms of tone from the top, in terms of, you know, a very lightweight policy framework that gets certain, you know, that gives the recruiters permission or talent advisors permission to source internal candidates. You know, when are, when are you able to approach that? Now, of course, our talent competitors don't observe any, you know, framework. The person could be in your company for 60 days, not even past their probation period, and lured away by a bigger job, a bigger job title, better compensation. So this is, this is a struggle for internal companies. And of course large companies like ours have, you know, people who are committed talent developers, but also people who are trying to keep their most talented high perform performers in their team.

I'll mention it towards the end again, but we're running a live webinar event next week on, on Thursday 26th looking at CHRO CPO priorities for 2023. One of the panelists, when I was doing a briefing with her, talked to me about how in her organization internal mobility is going to be the big, big focus this year. And she highlighted to, to me a structural challenge, obviously I think is what you're alluding to there. She said we bonus managers based on retaining their team. And she said we just realized that goes completely contrary to the idea of talent mobility across the organization. And he said one of the first things I got to do because I was asking about do you have a talent marketplace? He looked at mapping this, the skills. She said, well, I can do all that stuff, but if people are incentivized and bonused on did they retain their team, I'm in Trouble is I got to look at how do we create a bonus incentive, a KPI that is based on how you creating talent or you know, distributing talent around the organization. A different type of KPI. And it seems that when you dig into it, there are a multitude of these structural challenges that you alluded to. Whether it be, you know, limitations on how long you have to be in the organization before you could apply for an internal job, whether your boss has to be informed when you apply for a role, if she gets to know about that, if she can veto you, you know, what the terms are for you to then take an internal role. The notice periods, there's so many rules that are built up and they don't always live in one department. Like how do you. I get a sense that you need to really involve lots of teams if you're going to solve this. Because your point, it isn't any one team's problem. A multitude of teams can influence it, affect it. How does one go about doing this across an organization?

Well, I think it starts with a commitment and a tone from the top and ideally from the leadership, not just from the head of hr, you know, supporting this and something that recognizes the contribution to the organization of those talent producers and makes it a little bit more difficult to hide your talent. And you know, in addition, I don't think it's just about the compensation or the, the KPIs, I think, help, but the other obstacle or the other reason, many of the folks that hoard their talent is that if I give up somebody who knows how to do the job and is performing well and I have to replace them with somebody who doesn't know the job, that is a lot of extra work for, for me and maybe even puts my deliverables at risk. And, you know, how do we balance that? You know, despite the fact that there are some people that think that way, there are just as many others who really celebrate when somebody that has been in their team gets that big promotion. But it's a cultural aspect and is what, you know, what do we reward and what do we provide adverse consequences for?

At the start of the conversation, I said I'd come back to a colleague and I asked you unfairly because I didn't give you the opportunity to answer, but maybe I'll do that now if you don't mind. How much of your mobility, your success, you know, tasting different roles, careers, companies, cultural environments was down to you and your attitude and your role in mobility, and how much do you think has been down to the organizations you worked with?

I would definitely say I have both experiences. I'm not going to name companies, but I have worked for companies that had a really strong talent culture where the leadership understood that this was part of their job as a leader in the company and that the talent was the company's asset and even had. And sometimes it's individual bosses. A boss come to me and say, you know what, you're doing a great job. I love having you and my team, but it's time for you to do something else for your own good. So I can give credit to those good manager coaches. There also have been cases where I personally decided to, you know, ruffle feathers, make a change, because I knew it was what was right for me. Obviously, leaving an organization doesn't often sit well with your direct manager. And I have made the decision that it is, you know, what's important to me, the right move for me. And even during organizational changes. Actually, my, the way I found my way into HR a long time ago in my early 20s, was because the organization had changed its strategy and that had taken a big chunk of the job that I was doing, the part that I liked most and moved it to another location. What I was left with was the part of the job that frankly didn't interest me and, you know, just said, okay, this is, this is the change. It doesn't align with my personal, professional aspirations. So I actually initiated a project doing something that did interest me, which I didn't do for the purpose of getting a job offer, but it's what created an opportunity for me to make an internal move in this case and moved to a learning and development role, actually doing technical instructional design, what was then called computer based training. Long time ago. And I also think that you and I were talking about a mutual acquaintance, the former head of talent acquisition at Siemens. You know, I think every day you build your resume and the quality of the work you do, you. Your resume or your CV is not the piece of paper, it is a reputation you build. And I have to say that, you know, many of the job changes came unexpected, where I got a phone call, maybe internal poaching. Sometimes internal, not always internal, sometimes external. Where I have worked with somebody in the past who has said, you know, I'm tackling a new challenge and, you know, would you be interested in joining me on this journey? And you know, Johnny, you know me well enough that I just, I'm motivated by new, interesting work with big juicy challenges.

And it's funny because you talk about the role of the manager and I'm a firm believer that the manager's role is oversized in this. You can have great processes, great systems in a business. But to your point, a bad manager can really negatively affect that and a great manager can positively affect it. I want to just reference, and I didn't mention to you in advance, so sorry to throw it on you, Russell Arroway, who used to be the Chief people Officer of Qualtrics and worked in Twitter and Google before that, wrote a book last two years ago, I think, called when they win, you win being a great manager, Simpler than you think. And he's been involved in the radical candor movement as well and was involved in kind of writing some of those books in the early days as well. And his thesis is that. And he references the kind of the idp, the Individual Development Plan kind of process. And he kind of poo poos it by saying it's just not enough. He said like, great managers should be really invested in their team's career desires and need to go deep into. And he advocates a process for, you know, several stages of meetings where you really get to know what drives the person, what they want to do in their career. And he states that, you know, it is one of the top priorities of each manager to try and help their team fulfill those career opportunities. And not just from an internal point of view. And that attitude is one of the attributes that makes a really great leader one of the four attributes he advocates. How would you respond to that kind of an approach?

I love it. I try to practice it personally. But I do understand the demands on people in a leadership position. And it's a big commitment and it has to come from your convictions. And I think it sounds terrific. But I think if I'm honest, you know, transforming many, many leaders, I think it's a. I think it's a tough sell.

Well, let me give you an example of maybe where there has been a lot of ground made, whether you agree with the process or not. I'm still not sure either is different. But you look at Netflix and Reed Hastings. So the Netflix culture as recently told, not just by Reed, but Aaron Meyer in her book no Rules Rules that she wrote with Reed as a kind of companion or if you'd like a balance checks and balance to his opinion, our version of the world. He talks about the Netflix culture and he talks about their pay approach to pay comp. And they try to pay, you know, high market rate. And they have a culture where they encourage employees to talk to external recruiters. Like managers are told, you need to go tell your employees to go talk to external recruiters. Come go find out what the other roles are. Go find out what they're paying. One is to make sure that Netflix is paying good, high market rate because that's the best benchmarking is to see, well, what could they get? And it's a culture where, and again, this is where the top down approach to really say, we want you to ask your employees to go out to market, talk to recruiters. You need recruiters in your network to understand what's being paid so we can keep on our toes. And it's a high bar, but a pressurized bar. That pressure then on those managers is okay. I really need to make sure everyone is out there looking at what's available, looking at what's being paid. I'm confident that my boss or the top boss has my back if they're a high performer. It's a very high bar and it's a unique case. And I'm not sure I agree with it, but to me it was a good example of how, you know, you have a, have a practice that is very much driven by the top overemphasized from the top down. And only because it's done that way does it actually apparently work.

Yeah. What I like about what you're saying is that it encourages the employee to educate themselves on their market value.

Yes.

And I actually think that is important for internal mobility. As I look at the reaction sometimes that employees have when they are not the chosen candidate for a position, I'm sometimes struck by the naivete and I actually think part of talent acquisitions contribution here is to support our talent management colleagues providing better career coaching, particularly in those moments that matter, which is when you've applied for position and not gotten it. So I do think having a good understanding of the market is good for the employee sets realistic expectations. But I also think it builds confidence that they can have a plan B should there be a transformation in the organization that does not align with their values or their interests. Not every company has the financial or has the financial strength to pay top market. If every company took that approach, then you know, the costs would be unreasonable. I can, I can understand the advantage for Netflix. I do think it will be difficult to match.

So I totally agree with that. I think maybe one company can have that approach and maybe it's in a particular industry where the margins, etc. Right, which, which, which, which may be the case. But, but I love in the kind of principle of it, and you mentioned it there beautifully, that career coaching idea. And I think this is what, what is, what is lacking because you can have all the processes to advertise, you can have a great awareness of the careers, you can have email alerts, AI saying, hey, Colleen, these six jobs ideal for you because we've matched the ontology of your skills to these different roles, etc. Right. But there's still a gap where that person is not going to get that job if they don't one have some of the fundamental skills. Right. Or let's expand that, know how to fill the skills gaps that they may have. They may be close but not quite there. And there could be gaps they could fill, be preemptive. But then there's also just the what do they want out of their career? What are they suitable for? And how do I build a network? Because if you go to an external recruiter for advice, they'll go, hey, Colleen, you should do these courses and I'll be able to recommend you for these roles. And you need to build your LinkedIn network. You need to reach out to folks in your network to make sure they're aware of what you're doing. All these things will be given to you as an external career coach to go for an external move. But there seems to be a lack of internal focus on this, which is, you know, what does the employee need to do to make herself more visible More suitable. And then how do you teach them to get the job? Because at the end of the day, the manager that you're going to meet could fill this role from an external candidate. In most organizations they do tend to go with the external candidate over the internal. So what works? There's loads of different teams that play a role. But what are some of the fundamentals you think that are important to building the, call it the softer skills, the culture around this?

Yeah, I think the culture is. An awareness among employees and managers about the different elements that need to be in place in the development path. Because you mentioned, for example, go take a course, maybe get a certification. But think about, you know, the hiring manager who's interviewing candidates and the evidence that they've got the skill is that they completed a course. Actually, the hiring manager is looking for evidence that they completed the course and then had some real world practice. And so one concrete practice that I think is important, and this now crosses over into the learning and development, is when an employee expresses interest in participating in a training program. At that moment, the employee and the manager need to brainstorm how can we orchestrate real world practice either simultaneous to or shortly after, so that you have the chance to actually develop the skill? Because the course usually won't do it. And I think this is, you know, coaching and awareness that we can share with our employees, really greater insight. And how do you bridge those gaps? I think they are not that well understood by many employees. And I think the other element is this element of stretch, which I must say GE was really, really good at this notion that, you know, you need to put people in a position that they. In a position means assignment. Or it could be a gig, it could be actually a job where they don't have a hundred percent. There is, there is the necessity to learn. And that is an environment where people, most people do learn. And I have observed that many large organizations are more conservative about the kind of stretch assignments they will put an employee in compared to small scrappier organizations that, you know, don't have as much choice. And so I think that combination of whenever there is an investment in training, say you've got an employee who wants to be Scrum certified and you have to find a project that is suitable, maybe not the most challenging project, to get them to experience in the real world what it is to be a SCRUM master.

I love that. I think going back to the technology, that's where perhaps there's a real role to play. Play for a marketplace, not necessarily for your next job, although that's important but for, you know, a 20% role, a project, a three month assignment. And we, we talked about our, our, our common friend Gonzalo, who's now in Google. And in Google they call these bungees, six to nine month assignments where you go out and you bungee back into the roller department. But it's very deliberate. In Amazon they have a, a group that manage what they call the ships, apprenticeships, returnships, mentorships, all the different ships that exist to create those opportunities. I think it can be done on scale but to your point, has to be quite deliberate. I do love that idea saying let's not just see this as a learning opportunity to bridge the gap in skills from a, you know, from an education or informational point of view, let's look at it about how can we combine this with perhaps one of those mentoring opportunities, ships which, just thinking about it also can go a long way to solving the networking challenge. Because if you help a project team in an area you have no experience with whilst you're doing formal education that's supported internally, you're also going to get to know the team, get to know the head of department and other departments so that when six months down the line a new role comes up and you've got your certificate, you've had a three month part time assignment on the project, they also know you. Right. So I think it can go a long way to connecting those dots.

This is a page out of the talent management playbook that I think we in Talent Acquisition can support and participate in and that is creating those forums for visibility. You know, we go to external job fairs. Why not do a lot more internal job fairs where it is about creating visibility to the opportunities that are in the organization, you know, and then, and then in the reverse to the employees or to the managers about what talent is out there that could be theirs.

We had John Ackerman on the show about two years ago who was sharing in Oracle. He's the global head TA in Oracle and sharing how he with a bunch of colleagues in various different HR organizations in Oracle, because it wasn't obviously just TA created this, this process. They launched their first one just before the pandemic actually in Brazil where they had an internal career fair, had it in the head office in Sao Paulo. They invited all the different teams to come meet other teams and see what opportunities they had. They even had things like a LinkedIn profile clinic where they do up your LinkedIn profile and you could go to interview training classes on how to Ace an interview as a candidate. All these different things you'd expect at an external career fair, except it was just for internal employees. And they've since scaled it globally. And I agree with you. That kind of initiative, that kind of thinking, again culturally says we're absolutely up for mobility, but then tactically focuses on the things people need to actually make a move to gain the skills, to gain insight as to what's going on, to build those networks as well, which is pretty important.

We had a very recent success. There was a business, a relatively small business that was divested from our US operations and 58 employees would be impacted. They were not going with the divestiture. So there was an outplacement firm engaged. But the TA team worked very closely with the engagement with the firm and met with the individual employees, created a resume book. Each of the impacted employees that did want to look for an internal move had a TA advisor who made sure that if they applied for a position, they got what I call preferential consideration, not treatment. But somebody took the time to really look at it and really think about are these transferable skills, skills. And we actually, in, you know, in the US these things, you don't have a lot of time to find people internal positions. But we placed 40% of the people we were, we were amazed because these were moves often across our three businesses. And the three businesses are very technical and very different and you know, hire very different profiles. But we were thrilled. So we plan to keep doing that.

I love that it shows. It's, it's a combination of technology, processes, culture and just people getting stuff done and making it happen to make this work. Colleen, we could chat, I definitely could chat for several more hours on the topic because it is, it is a, it is a complex topic, but one so worth diving into and getting right in every organization. But we've managed, we've taken a whole lot of your time and you're, as you say, you're trying to close a lot of roles every year, juggle a lot of projects in Merck and a very fast growing business as well. I'm really interested to have you back, if you wouldn't mind for another topic, another time. But for now, thank you so much for your time. I do want to ask you to perhaps share one more insight with us and that is if you wouldn't mind, we ask every guest on the show to share with us one extra piece of advice that they have either garnered from their career, their own experience, or perhaps it was passed on from somebody else. They worked with over the years or met or inspired by. But one last piece of advice to leave our audience here today on the shortlist. Colleen?

Yeah, I thought a little bit about this because your team alerted me that you had asked this. And I know that many, many of our organizations are going through transformation. And I think that we, as leaders have an obligation to help our teams navigate those changes. And, you know, of course, the challenging part is that we may also be impacted by the change. So the piece of advice I have. One thing I discovered a while back is the one translation of the Chinese symbol for change is the juxtaposition of threat and opportunity. And I think as leaders, it's our obligation to make up our mind to focus on the opportunity piece because we need to be focused on the positive for ourselves and our people and have a mindset that is optimistic, confident and calm. Because if we're nervous, our teams will feel that nervousness in the end. And for me personally, where that ability to put my mind in that space comes from is the fact that I know if at the other side of the change, the situation doesn't meet my values or my professional interests any longer, I am in control of my own career and, you know, can make a move if, if I decide the place is no longer the right one for me.

I love that. It's about the, the attitude is so, so important. You know, you, the greatest development opportunities and learnings, and I'm sure you'd attest to this from your career as well, come from the most challenging times, the greatest challenges and struggles. They don't come from easy work. They don't come from an average, ordinary day. You need these. And you can see a threat as that or you can see, see it as, hey, I'm going to look back in six months and by God, I'll have learned something. We have developed. So what? Let's get into this. And you're right, the attitude is so important. Colleen, your attitude's been amazing. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having this conversation with you. As I said, I'd love to have you back on the show again. So we'll, we'll hit you for the, for the many topics I know you're so passionate about and again, update how things are going in Merck as well and how you're progressing with your own internal, internal mobility efforts. But until then, thank you so much for joining us. I wish you a great day.

Take care, Johnny. The pleasure's been mine. Thank you.

And thank you for joining us today. And listening. Hope you really enjoyed that conversation and garnered some great insights from Colleen and her experience in Merck Siemens knocking all those businesses over the years and how to do mobility well to consider the right aspects that drive great internal mobility. I also appreciate how difficult and complex it can be, but it is a noble cause worth pursuing. Speaking of great things worth pursuing, join us next week. We're not going to have a short list next week. We're going to skip Wednesday because Thursday, oh, Thursday is going to be so action packed. So next Thursday. And that's for those listening on the podcast, I repeat, it's going to be the 26th of January. So that is when Thursday the 26th of January 2023 we have our Social Talent Live. You can find out more by going to social.com and we have a panel of chief people, officers, chros and experts talking about their priorities for 2023. You can register for free for this fantastic 90 minute event with I think we have over 10 guests joining us from companies all over the world. And I'll be doing a fireside chat with Pat Waters as well from from UKG and previous being in LinkedIn and Service Force and many other brilliant, brilliant organization. She's a fantastic inspirational speaker herself. That'll be in the middle of the segment, but you want to find out more, register, share with your colleagues, go to socialtown.com live. Until then, take care. Have a good week.