New Importance of Internal Career Mobility | Johnny Campbell & Anne Fulton

Sam, On this week's show, we're going to revisit a theme that we first discussed a couple of months ago. And that theme is the one around internal career mobility. Well, what is that? In short, it's how do you get a job in the same firm you're already working for? What are those opportunities? Because guess what? This has become a big hot topic in organizations since the pandemic. Why is it a hot topic? Lots of reasons. We'll explore those reasons with our guests today. But what we've got to do is try and figure out what it means for organizations and to step back and look at the bigger picture and the bigger questions that internal career mobility asks. It's not just a simple case of can I find a job within my own organization? There's a lot more going on. And to help me unpack those ideas, we literally have the woman who wrote the book on internal career mobility joining us here today. Before I introduce our guest today, I just want to remind you that the Shortlist is a show that runs live on LinkedIn and YouTube every Wednesday afternoon, European time. But we also are available as a podcast on all your favorite formats. And you can check out all our previous shows, the videos, the podcasts, and check out our lineup for future shows by going to socialtalent.com the shortlist, and you can subscribe for updates on the Shortlist from there. That brings me to our guest today. Our guest is Anne Fulton. Ann Fulton literally wrote the book the Career Engagement Shaping Careers for an Agile Workforce. She is a bestselling author, but she is also the CEO of and founder of tech company Fuel50 and is massively passionate about this area. And tell us about your organization, why you built a company around your passion, what is that passion and why is it so important?

Yes. Amazing. Thank you, Johnny. So, yeah, Fuel50 was founded to actually create career path transparency for employees across the globe. And here we are five years later, having built out a true talent marketplace where we're connecting people to opportunities. So our little tagline is your future, our passion. So the future of you and the future of your workforce. So reskilling has never been more important than it is today. And so we're helping organizations that are really focused on creating reskilling for their workforce and creating futures and a transparent talent marketplace in their organizations, whether it's ebay or Pepsi or Coca Cola or some of the world's largest banks and companies like Abbott Labs. So we're really focus on helping those organizations on their journey of delivering true transparent Fair career pathways in these organizations that delivers routine.

And you guys, you know, you and your organization are truly looking at this from a global perspective. I know that your business is based in the US serving customers globally. You're joining us today from London, England and you're originally from New Zealand. So we're touching on a lot of countries and a lot of zones there today. I think I'm going to maybe get your opinion on some topical items first. Right. As you know, on the shortlist, what we do is we start the show by launching into the news to see what's happening in the world of work today related to the topic we're talking about. So I'm going to ask my good colleague Niall to give us that first article. In fact, not really an article, but a piece of research. Niall, over to you. You're on the bottom there, Niall. So this, this is a piece of research, a meaty piece of research here that we want to address and talk about. And it's called discriminating systems sub line here. Gender, race and power in Artificial Intelligence. So this is a fantastic piece of research. I want to share it out. It's a 33 page publication, but for those of you who kind of are put off by a 33 page publication, it's got a great summary with recommendations at the very front for you to get into. And I'm going to ask you, Ann, to kind of tell us why this is important, why this piece of research is important and what do you believe the impact is on the workplace from the conclusions of the authors of this research?

Yeah, I think we love this little piece of research because of the fact that it's raising some really important issues. We obviously with the pandemic era and you know, these new forces around Black Lives Matter, you know, putting diversity and inclusion kind of front and center today, that transparency in your systems has never been more important. And we need really good people intelligence to make great people decisions right now, whether it's who's going on furlough, who's coming back from furlough, who's being retrenched, you know, who are you placing, where are across the organization. So, you know, I think as never before, it's really important that we're making decisions around people that are absolutely above reproach. And I thought this article was super interesting because of the fact that it's showing how careful we've got to be in terms of our systems. And we're seeing the emergence of AI and algorithms, you know, kind of dominating our lives and our worlds. And I think it's really important that we are very careful and thoughtful around the way that we using these intelligent systems to help make great people decisions. So from our point of view with our clients, it's so important that we're making sure that not only are we careful, but we're actually mitigating risk around people and ensuring that we're above reproach in the way that we're using that data. Right. So I've always personally believed that great data makes great decisions. It's really important that we have quality information. But, you know, the more intelligent these systems become, the more careful we need to be with how that information is being used. Can I just give you a little sound bite example, please. And I think, you know, one of the risks is that if your AI is telling you that, you know, this particular position was filled in the past by five middle class white males. Sorry, sorry, Johnny, if I'm insulting you, but just because that's happened historically does not necessarily tell you that that's going to be the best fit person. So we need to be so careful that our data is being used in a way that is really supporting the organization's purpose and values around diversity and inclusiveness. And so I think increasingly this kind of research that we've seen today is going to help us be more thoughtful and robust around the way that we're using AI to make people decisions today.

So I really, really got a lot out of this. Right. It made me stop and think in so many ways. Ann. Right, let me share with you some of the ways this got me. First of all, I didn't know this piece of data which appears on, I think the fifth page, which says that, you know, for first of all addresses the inequities of women in the workplace. But it talks then about black workers and it says that in only 2.5% of Google's workforce is black. And what Facebook and Microsoft each are 4%. I thought to myself, hang on a second, they're US multinationals. I'm going to guess at least half their workforce is in the US I was thinking what percentage of the workforce is which gender and which ethnicity in the US And I was fascinated, first of all to find that in the U.S. 51% of all people are women. So I'm a minority. I discovered in the US which is hard to believe. And then second of all, that I think it's about 13 or 14% identify as black. And only 2.5% of Google's workforce, only 4% of Facebook and Microsoft, it really just highlights something's wrong here. And then I was thinking about my experience with working with recruiting teams. When they talk about the importance of diversity in their efforts and in this world today, where we're on zoom calls with the teams and you can see everybody, it happens. So time and time again, I look at the faces and the importance, I look around, I see the ethnically diverse person and I scream inside my brain to go, please tell me they're not from the DNI team and they're actually in the team. And time and time again it's, no, no, the ethnically diverse person is the DNI person and all the, you know, white people are the recruiting people. You can just. My heart sags. Right. Because if you don't have representation of the customer base, of the population base in the teams solving the problem, you'll never get there. And this article uncovered the unbelievable kind of white maleness of the AI industry, which I didn't know about. I don't know if you did this, that the interview is working on the algorithms because they all tell you that they don't have the bias that you're talking about. And I'll be correct for that. But then when you read this, it says, hang on a second, all of the people working in these companies, working on these, in these professions, you know, nearly all of them are non diverse. So therefore, how, how, how, how confident are you that they're addressing these problems if they aren't actually even representing the workforce? They're trying to mitigate the discrimination against within their own teams. It just struck me as there's a big problem here.

Yes, I was equally horrified when I saw this, you know, the data around who was actually building these algorithms and, you know, what are we perpetuating there? So I think, you know, that may.

Be what it is.

And I know in our own team, we've tried to be really diverse and representative in terms of who is building our AI and algorithms, but I think more importantly, it's really looking closely at how data is being used within our clients and then we can help ensure that the algorithms are treating people as fairly and inclusively as possible. So, you know, but it needs to be driven by that organization's data. So our view is, yes, we can create algorithms specifically for you, but we would only be comfortable doing that when we've got some really robust data around, you know, perhaps gender, ethnicity and impact, you know, across your systems. And then of course, we can help them correct for it. So, yeah, but, but it's who's building and what's the purpose and who's caretaking, you know, the systems that are being built and how that data is being used. So I was hearty to see Amazon had been using a hiring system but then found that there was some inherent bias in that around females. And they tried to correct it by putting some tags around the word woman, but they found that it still didn't work and so they've flagged that system. So, you know, a responsible decision really. We've got to make sure that our systems are supporting our business goals and purpose and values.

And I want to return to this topic, but I'm going to jump into our second news story before we do on so this appeared in Forbes and you know, their new normal. I think we're all sick of the phrase new normal at this point, but Forbes were talking about supporting internal mobility through reskilling and the author here is talking about, you know, that that organizations faced with the financial pressure not to hire externally at the moment are through the last six months are instead returning to the concept of internal mobility. Internal mobility is not a new thing, Anne, at all, but there seems to be a heightened interest in the last six months. Would you agree with the author's rationale as to why is there more to it and what's your experience around internal career mobility and the challenges there?

Yes, I think there's a wonderful new imperative that is emerging right now largely because of the pandemic where we are looking at our internal talent marketplace first. I mean there's some great business reasons to look at your internal talent marketplace because if you can fill more positions internally, you're going to get a your cost of recruitment goes down, but you're going to get faster time to productivity for your employees as you're taking on people that know the organization and the systems. But I've got a a lovely example about the importance of talent marketplace today and internal talent mobility from the strategic workforce manager for Allied Irish bank and she put it beautifully. I thought it used to be about succession planning that we were thinking about and succession planning for the C level and our critical talent. But today we've got a real need for rapid redeployment and a contingency plan for almost every single person across the business. So we need a really robust talent marketplace where we can see capability across all roles, not just those critical talent or, you know, C level positions that we were once upon a time doing succession planning. So it's almost like succession planning for every role. So for example you know, what she was worried about is, you know, perhaps Covid hits one, you know, one particular suburb. You know, that whole branch needs to be closed and we need to think about the contingency, about how we get a manager in there and people at the front line. So it's almost like contingency planning and succession planning for everyone across the organization, which is where a talent marketplace becomes super critical.

I had not thought about that angle actually, Ann, until you mentioned it. It's funny, I'm currently living under private lockdown here because my 2 year old has Covid. He's fine. It's absolutely good. But he was diagnosed last week and he's absolutely fine, trust me. He's had a mild cold for two days. But our whole family's under lockdown. My wife's a teacher, so. And she, she's been pulled out of the school at the beginning of the school term for a month. They had to get a replacement in immediately for that. And since that happened a week and a half ago, you know, she's been getting stories from colleagues, but other teachers. Another friend of hers has gone off. Her son went for a test yesterday, so she has to go off work. And you just see the problem now certainly in this part of the world where schools just went back to, you know, just went back, that you're going to have this ripple effect everywhere. And then, you know, unless the company is purely virtual, their colleagues and parents are just going to all of a sudden disappear. You know, it's like that. There's a TV program that was on one of the networks where 10% of the world's population just vanished overnight. Just disappeared. I was like, that's going to happen every month for the next, for all through winter. It's like people are going to disappear from their roles. Like, you go home one day, all of a sudden you're not coming to work for two weeks or a month because you or one of your families or a close contact has been diagnosed and boom. How do you basically, how do you rely on moving people around? Because you're right, I was thinking about career progression and transition and what's my next job and that kind of stuff. But what about just coming in for a month? How many organizations do you think can react like that? What do you need to have systems wise and process wise to be able to even do that?

Yeah. So it's very much around rapid redeployment this year and across the entire organization in terms of your talent supply. The best example that I can think of was Abbott Laboratories, who use our Fuel Gigs now. We were super proud to be working with them because they became the first organization to release a COVID 19 test showing that you can rapidly, you know, redeploy these rapid response teams to emergency projects like they've been working on. And then to, you know, be able to get that test out, you know, ahead of everyone else is an incredible testament. But the other part of the internal talent marketplace is also really focusing on that reskilling agenda. And in the last six months, you know, again, through our Fuel Gigs product, there'd been 11 million hours of experiences taken and reskilling actions taken across that organization. So that organization, at scale, 110,000 employees, but at scale, was really supporting the reskilling of their workforce. And I think they documented 374,000 reskilling actions taken in that last six months. So people were, you know, ready, willing, and able. They were prepared for, you know, for what came at them unexpectedly in terms of having to respond to this, you know, global pandemic. And everyone was hungry to understand more and be able to test and release. And as I know, we all are hungry right now for a vaccine. And, you know, I'm hoping your little boy's okay. The other example I've got, you know, is we've got to think across all roles. One of my team members, nanny, came down with COVID but again, that same ripple effect, right? You know, so everyone's being tested and it escalates into a whole school community.

So you mentioned the scale. The scale of the potential solution is amazing. With Peter Hogg, good friend of mine. Peter joins us on LinkedIn. He's director of TA for Middle Eastern Africa at Schneider Electric. Schneider, massive, big global engineering and innovation company. And Peter's saying that they recently launched an open talent marketplace as well for internal mobility and so far have unlocked 60,000 hours of productivity so far. Like, that's kind of amazing, you know, like, you're talking about something that. It does sound relatively simple to just, you know, build this open talent marketplace and the skills marketplaces. And you're mentioning, you know, millions of potential hours of reskilling. Peter's talking about 60,000 hours of productivity so far. You know, in a large enterprise, this isn't a small little thing that you kind of go, it's a nice project. It's massively impactful. Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I think, you know, very high on the CLO agenda is. And also the, you know, talent acquisition leaders is making sure that we've got A workforce that is ready and able. And I think if we're looking at Harvard Business Review put out a study recently, recently and highlighted that something like 85% of CEOs are even concerned about having the right kind of talent supply and that their organization's got the right skills for the future.

I'm going to put a shout out to those listening live on LinkedIn or YouTube. Any questions for Ann? She'd be delighted to take them. You'd like to under, you know, any insights you'd like to understand around building these talent marketplaces and driving more internal mobility and skill mobility, Please do jump in and ask us a question or you have a story to share similar to Peter's on what your organization is doing. We'd love to hear from you. And I want to talk to you about internal mobility and its potential perhaps to solve some of the inequities that exist around diversity, whether it be gender, race, et cetera, in the organizations. Because I've always thought about not just the opportunity to perhaps look instead of hiring externally, which so many people are focused on external hires and they're almost held up to such high regard, yet the data says that they generally don't, for loads of reasons, aren't better hires. But is there an opportunity to have more diversity of thought, more crossover of skills, and really kind of use internal mobility as a mechanism to solve some of those inequities across the business? And if so, have you any examples or have you seen this work well in any of the companies you've been working with?

Yeah, without question there's some real gains to be had when you have a diverse workforce so that you know that you're going to get better productivity, more innovation, and you're also likely to get greater engagement and retention in your workforce where you create a diverse workforce. And it's interesting when we're looking at what are some of the priorities across the globe. And this is also from a Forbes Insight article recently that, you know, Companies Diversity, Inclusion Priorities, 66% said that recruitment of diverse employees was top of their agenda. 44% also said they want to retain diverse talent. And 29% were looking at building a robust pipeline of diverse talent. So it's on the agenda. And interestingly, in terms of diversity, there was 28% saying that they also wanted to have cross generational issues, you know, so that we're creating a diverse from a generational point of view as well, which I really think is important.

Yeah, I've heard about examples of organizations that have done this bullying system on where they take, you know, this, pardon the crudeness of this, an older person and a younger person and kind of body them together so that the younger person learns from the older person's skills. The older person gets perspective of the younger person in their generation and it's a win win rather than being old person coaching and mentoring young person. It's like this is a two way street. We both can learn from each other. There's benefit here for both parties and I like those ideas to try and for both individuals to see the perspective of a different generation, not just one way kind of traffic.

And I think one of the other things too, I think with our hiring practices is that we shouldn't be making assumptions. So on my own team, the best person on social media in our whole business is end of her career and she's coaching the millennials on how to absolutely use social media. For good and for business development and really how we can leverage it. It's interesting. We shouldn't be making assumptions about who can do what for us.

Heck no. I've got a great question here from Simon Wilkins. So Simons is asking, do you think the internal recruiters struggle with certain candidates internal recruiters struggle with certain candidates who might not wish to disclose their potential desire to move to a competitor? I. E. The confidentiality like this is something that I've seen in process wise the majority companies I've spoken to, if you apply internally for a job, it's flagged to your manager before consideration. Do you see that a lot? Is that a challenge, a problem? What are your thoughts on that?

I think there's still a proportion of organizations that are looking at their talent practices that have a fear about a manager gatekeeping and having a hoarding talent mentality. But the way that we're approaching it is that the more transparency you build across the organisations around opportunities, particularly around projects and gigs and stretch assignments, I think the more comfortable leaders can become with that transparency and if they're able to see their own talent pipeline, they don't have that same fear about losing a talent. So we can start to build out true internal talent mobility while, while honoring the needs of both those leaders, team leaders and also the individuals in terms of their own career choice. The way that we also manage it ourselves is that we, we like to make sure that the employee has control over who sees what so they can hide or share what they want to. They're encouraged to, you know, put their full career aspirations out into the marketplace. But they can hide a little Data point if they don't want, if they don't feel comfortable sharing that with the wider organization. So there's great gain. So for example, if you get feedback, I mean, of course you want to share that into the talent marketplace if it's positive, but if there's some constructive feedback, you might want to think about that yourself.

What happens if I've got, if I've got five, five people working under me and every one of them puts themselves in the talent marketplace saying, I want to move? Does that happen? What happens in that kind of scenario?

They're not. Well, from our point of view, you're not necessarily flagged as being on the move. So the employee would start to put in target roles, target destinations, maybe target projects or stretch assignments or experiments, experiences that they want and applying for that. And so it's visible, presumably to HR and recruiters, not necessarily to the line manager who will be the line manager will be able to see who's shown an interest in their project, their gig or their vacancy, so they can see it or for a future opportunity, even if there's not an immediate vacancy. But you know that visibility and transparency absolutely drives greater mobility, greater engagement, greater transparency around, you know, who has what. The example I like to give today is that I think even in recruitment we're getting better at transparency and decision making and an open marketplace. So everyone has an internal job board so you can see an opportunity. But what's been happening is that stretch assignments, you know, those decisions may be or have been happening behind closed doors. You know, somebody gets shoulder tapped and invited into a stretch assignment, get some visibility from their contributions. But now we're creating a true talent marketplace for that kind of experience as well, so that anyone can put their hand up and create visibility.

So it's kind of, it's probably more like an internal LinkedIn in that not everyone is necessarily looking for, for a move, but everyone's encouraged to be there to profile themselves, to share their interests. And they can always apply or, you know, express an interest in an opportunity, as you said, not just to move jobs, but to get a stretch assignment or something else. Back to that transparency piece. I have a question here from Peter Hogg, by the way, and I wonder if you've got experience in this. He's asking, have you seen good examples of internal recruiters, headhunting, internal talent? Any lessons learned, good or bad, from that?

I think, you know, from a recruitment point of view, I think it's all about pipeline building and pipeline visibility. So I think I'm Sorry, I can't think of a specific example off the top of my head of a particular individual that's doing it well. But the enablement that, you know, we can provide around pipelines for all positions across the organization that are fair and inclusive and transparent and, you know, to a certain extent, anonymized in terms of, you know, person's name and photos so that. So that we, we can be respectful of our D and I agenda and. But everyone's got an opportunity for their skills and match to that opportunity to be visible and available and managed.

We had Jan Akerman, who's the global head of recruiting for Oracle, on the show back in, I think, June or July, and he was again talking about internal career mobility. And he shared a story of his journey in the last year trying to raise the profile of internal career mobility. And he was saying that they organized career fairs, so physical career fairs at the time, and maybe this would surprise some of our listeners and viewers. But at the career fairs, again, which were, you know, they invited an internal staff to meet their own departments or the company's departments, they did fairs such as how to set up your LinkedIn profile, how to write a resume or CV, which might seem bizarre because they might encourage somebody to move externally, but they were saying this is a. This is about bringing value added service and if someone wants to move, they want to move. Right. They're not going to move just because we show them how to write the LinkedIn profile. Let's be the person who adds value. You know, give more than just, you know, a listing of the jobs. What's your experience as to that relationship between, you know, how far do you go in terms of helping your team get ready for the next job, even if it could be external.

Yeah. And I think Peter Hogg put it up there quite nicely today, which is, you know, leaders need to become known as being talent agents and talent magnets and that they're seen as being facilitators of the career, that growth of other people. And no one is being great coaches and leaders and, you know, having an understanding of, you know, if you're growing your talent and giving them opportunities, then you're going to attract other people to your team in future. So having that confidence that, you know, there will be that pipeline. And I think I just want to segue back to your comment about, you know, virtual careers fairs. And what we're finding is that we're able to kind of also connect people that have. To mentors or people that have perhaps made a move or had an experience or an assignment, so that we're creating this true kind of community of learning around, you know, perhaps somebody's made that move before you or is three steps ahead and may be able to share some specific kind of learnings around that opportunity, but also perhaps sharing some particular kind of skill learning. So as part of the marketplace, we can also provide, you know, a true coaching marketplace so that if somebody's got a skill that you need, you can transact with that person and create a kind of a coaching or mentoring relationship with that person so that, you know, you've got that opportunity to learn that skill. And it's much more transactional than mentoring was a few years ago. It's no longer a two year relationship. It might be a three month kind of focused effort around, you know, developing a particular skill that you need.

So, so I'm going to comment straight in here live from Simon Wilkins again saying you met the head of talent for a large insurer. She was telling him about some software which has algorithms start planning job vacancies before they become available and she could predict with some accuracy when people might leave based on historic data. I've seen similar claims. Simon, can you see AI working within internal recruiting? Do you have examples? Maybe that one are different ones, you know, of. Back to the AI conversation at the start here. Where can it do good in terms of helping mobility?

And that's exactly what we're thinking about a lot, is making sure that our solution, which was built to create opportunities for people and believing that everyone can be at their best, you know, in their work, you know, by, by fulfilling their potential, going on a growth story. So I think, you know, that kind of data, you know, you know, we do need to make sure that we're doing no harm and also doing good with our algorithms and our data. I think in terms of predicting retention issues, we do, we are able to kind of track some retention predictors and it's based on your career stage, your tenure, you know, a number of other things, and also your career satisfaction, you know, so that maybe that you're looking for more challenge at work, or perhaps you've got issues with balance, but that can be shared with your team leader. And by sharing that, that retention risk, what we're able to do is then provide the leader with a coaching question. So say, you know, Jonny's looking for more challenge at work and we're sharing that data point back with the team leader. But that team leader, there's no given. A beautiful coaching question was Johnny. You know, I'D love to help you find more challenge at work. And all of a sudden the light bulb goes on and you're more likely to stay. So we can start to shift, you know, the retention outcomes in an organization. And, you know, we're now finding that where fuel 50 is being used within an organization, average churn is at 15% and where it's not being used at 24%. So that's a 60% action and employee turn. So you can get, you know, really strong gains and that's across multiple clients. So.

I love the data side of it in terms of the predictability, again, as you say, and as long as it's used correctly. I remember I was, I was in Helsinki in November at the slush conference and the, one of the stages I sat down at was the founder of a company called Pecan, you probably know Pecan, and they were talking about the nine month warning in the data science behind, you know, the predictability of someone leaving can be shown for about nine months. And the piece that jumped out at me from their data that, you know, just resonated really well was that people leave unchallenging work, not a challenging workload. And that one of the easiest ways to mitigate against somebody leaving is make sure they're challenged. And I guess that's probably the biggest, you know, if you look at it, we talked about it from the employee side of having the right skills, making sure people in the right place. When we flip from the, from the employer side, the employee side, is how do I find challenging work? You know, I might not have a boss giving me challenging work, but I guess this is part of the, part of this, part of the whole system is to create a marketplace for me just to find challenging work. Is that correct?

And I think what we're looking for from a career is different today than it was, you know, 10 years ago, the last decade, last millennium, even. So I think, you know, what, you know, people are looking for more challenge at work. And I was surprised with one of our clients, a large leading bank in Australia, 18,000 employees. But the number one career driver across that entire organization was expertise. People were expertise driven. So if you're defining career growth in terms of developing my skills, developing my marketability, developing my expertise, it becomes quite a different kind of proposition that we need to be offering people, you know, beyond just a position title. And so many of the clients that we're working with are wanting to shift from vertical movement to more lateral movement. And again, that's something that we can actually track and get some significant shifts on so that more people are moving horizontally. But I think the other big shift is around work being delivered in projects, right? I mean, Jonny, I'm sure you're on five different team projects yourself. And so it's less about our job title today and more about our project contributions. And, you know, we need to track those contributions to say, I'm on three different projects. I want to get some feedback. I want to look at what my contribution was. I want to bring that back into the talent marketplace to create further opportunity for me. So, you know, work is being deconstructed today and is, you know, less about the job title and more about our contributions and more about project work. So.

I like the holistic view of mobility. You know, one of my favorite speakers and authors on this topic is Bev King. Bev. She's a wonderful speaker, and her book up is not the Only Way, you know, covers this and addresses this issue to go. People want more opportunity. When people say, I want progression, again, the, the classic of a manager, she says, oh, no, they want a promotion and pay rise. And of course, some people do want a promotion and pay rise, right? But a lot of people just want more opportunity. They want to challenge. Like, if you were working on something challenging that you can, you know, overcome, you can probably achieve, you know, you love that. We all love that kind of sense of achievement. We're driven by that, that drive to make progress on something. The worst thing in the world is let somebody just kind of be bored. And I think the classical manager to some of the questions that we've now so far around privacy and stuff. And I go, Peter, again, just putting that in Schneider. They, they, it's, you know, they do not tell. The, the, the approvals for mobility managers aren't formally told until the hire is secure. Right? I know so many companies who don't do that, Peter. Right. I know that Standard Charter bank brought in that same process 10 years ago. But so many others still ask the manager, inform the manager before you can move. And the manager, I get the reluctance because the manager is thinking, I'm going to lose this person if I let them go. But the reality is they're going anyway. They're disengaged. Engagement is a big, big, passionate topic of yours. I know, on. But they're disengaged, which maybe is worse than somebody leaving your team, is that they're staying in your team and they're completely disengaged. And the poison that can spread around everything else, you know, it's like they're ready to go. If you can provide them the challenge, go find them. But as you said, transparency, if you can, like any other team, see that your team want opportunity, I guess it's not just about moving them around. I can see my team and go, oh, I didn't know this person wanted this type of opportunity. I can provide that. Does that happen as well?

I think so. I mean, I think increasingly there's more of a mentality around talent sharing, you know, across, you know, across the business and an openness around that. And you know, as you said, say, if I'm trying to hold somebody back, you know, and control their career. I think, I think we've so moved past those times. Thankfully, you know, still some organizations that we come across, you know, around the world where that's the case and you know, perhaps in certain, you know, geographies more than others, where the manager does have control of your career. But generally the open marketplace is a win win. Right. And you know, if you're an amazing leader, that person may still come back to you with more skills and capabilities, you know, with, with that kind of talent sharing.

And can I ask you, Ann, apart from like, obviously it would be helpful to have the budget and a piece of software that manages it for you on almost essential, but I imagine that's not enough. Like what, what's required to make a talent marketplace successful in your experience. Right. Like beyond obviously putting the right software in and having having that buy in, I assume you're still going to have to do a lot of things. Get buy in, sell it, promote it, get people using it. What have you seen that works? What would your lessons be to others to say, here's how to make it successful?

I think the way that we think about it is that a really robust skills architecture and a thoughtful skills architecture sitting in behind the talent marketplace. So it's creating a true skill and talent experience exchange across the organization. So taking some care when you're building that architecture and increasingly we're really with our capability library, we're thinking about making sure that we've got some. I'm coming back to our opening concern around DNI and our algorithms. You know, we want to make sure that in our underpinning architecture that we've really got some, you know, strong principles that are going to support the organization's goals and their cultural DNA. And if there are some burning imperatives around D and I, let's build them into the skills architecture. Let's make sure that we're creating transparency for who has this capability, whether it's diversity awareness or building cultural competence of some of these trending capabilities that we've seen in the last 12 months with the COVID era. So I think getting that. So skills architecture is quite important in doing that in a thoughtful way right from the get go. And it doesn't have to be a laborious process. You know, we can create talent blueprint for your organization and then use AI to do the skills matching. So it doesn't have to be the kind of, you know, five year project where you're looking at your capability model across the organization. That's. That's so last year, so last decade.

So I guess it's creating a common language in the skills architecture to say this is what we call X, et cetera, et cetera. That's. That that's pretty important. Peter has chimed in. I think you'll agree with this on the tool is only as good as the talent philosophy philosophy upon which it is built, which I think is empowering the belief, the buy in the will in the organization to basically invest in this as a way forward, not a quick fix.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think having the right kind of charter and defining your principles and behind the marketplace and also creating some education across the organization. So, you know, a tool like this does become part of your cultural transformation across the organization and can be an enabler in such a way that it transforms your talent experience, transforms your people experience, you know, and helps with those business goals of, you know, productivity and retention and, you know, all those other good things. So a really strong charter is a great starting point. So, yeah, thanks for that.

I'm going to maybe move to our close and to ask you for your contribution to the shortlist for those first time, first time viewers and listeners we know every season of 10 episodes we try and compile a short list of advice from our guests. So Anna, I want you to think about maybe advice you would give us maybe particularly around this post pandemic or mid pandemic world. What advice would you give to our listeners and viewers today from your experience, whether it be your experience with your customers as a CEO of a tech company that's growing like crazy, or just as an author who's passionate about a subject of talent engagement and talent mobility. What advice could you share with our audience here today to add to our shortlist?

Yes, well, I thought about, you know, from the COVID experience point of view and I was really inspired by a piece of advice from Rusty Roof, who was former chief people officer at PepsiCo and, you know, is now involved with Run Coach, which is an amazing app. But the advice that he suggested was, you know, through the pandemic, you know, there's a fear factor going on for people, and basically, it's like having a child that's having a nightmare. The monster under the bed. So we've got to go in, help our people check under the bed, turn the.