S2E43: Martha Bird, Applying Anthropology to Business

This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your workplace. I'm Cy Wakeman. Welcome to another episode of the No Ego Podcast, listeners. As promised in season 2, I'm working to bring you those folks out there working to evolve work and, uh, bringing different ways of thinking into the workplace. And today you're gonna have some fun because I have Martha Byrd with me. And Martha is the ADP business anthropologist. She's bringing anthropology thinking to the business world. And of course, ADP is always on the cutting edge trying to do groovy things, so they have her working for them. Welcome, Martha.

Hi, Sy. Thanks for having me. I'm— I've been looking forward to spending some time with you.

I'm so excited because for me, I come from social work backgrounds. And when I brought that into business thinking or into the business world, just coming in with that different, um, more external background at the time led to a lot of discovery because I came in with kind of a different, uh, um, view of the world and was able to see some things that were like conventional wisdom that nobody else could see. And I'm sure that's gotta happen for an anthropologist.

Yeah, I think that's one of the real I think delights and privileges of my job. I've been doing this for about 20 years and mostly with large tech companies. But what I think is kind of fun for me, and I hope also illuminating for other people, is that I'm trying to get people to sort of look at things out of the corner of their eye maybe a little bit more, look at things a little bit more laterally, or approach a challenge from a perspective of sort of a multiple perspective as opposed to just sort of a single way of looking at it. So it's really about broadening people's way of asking questions and sort of opening their minds up a bit around how we might look at things differently. So it's a great gig.

I love it. I love it. Now, before we get into some of this, we were just talking that we have some background in common, that you came to anthropology late in life. You've got a doctorate in anthropology, but you started off life 7th generation farmer?

That's right. Yeah, I did that for about 15 years. A farm in central New Hampshire, sort of lots of potatoes, lots of tomatoes, pumpkins, green beans, some sort of basic commodity. I

love it.

Yeah, awesome. Really great.

How does one go from farmer, live free or die New Hampshire farmer, to anthropologist? Are you listening to a podcast out on the

Well, you know, it is actually funny because I have an undergraduate degree in art history and philosophy. So I had already sort of tasted academic experience. And so I thought, well, that's all well and good. But I think what happens is, Sai, is that the winters get long and you need to get your mind onto something. So I thought, okay, well, if I can find a program that's going to underwrite my desire to to do some more thinking, then that's what I'll do. And so, yeah, it worked out really beautifully for me.

I love it. I love it. You are the definition of like a lifelong learner, and, uh, um, you know, which is a whole nother podcast out there. But, um, when I travel the world, especially in the US on the coast, people have this sense of those of us in agriculture or farming that somehow we're, I don't know, like backwards or something. And I'm like, oh my gosh, you should meet these people. They're brilliant, fascinating. And, and like you said, they have whole winters to Do things like get PhDs and stuff. Well,

you know what else is interesting about that? And it actually ties into what you were saying about asking about what sort of things do you do in your work? And it's really about doing exactly what you've just done, which is to say, not all farmers are alike, and there are all sorts of different ways of farming. There's small farming, there's agribusiness. And so all these contexts shift. And of course, you can't really think of somebody as just the quintessential farmer, right? They're, they're influenced by the context that they find themselves in.

Well, and I think that when we do have, whether it's technology we roll out or a business idea we roll out, or, um, that when we find that the results were less than desired, we can usually find where we group some people and lost the wisdom of all those intersections that make, you know, our end user or our customer, um, who they are, that we tend to simplify or overgeneralize. I mean, I mean, I went to college 20 years ago, 30 years ago probably, and people talked about segmentation, and there weren't 7,000 segments, there were 4. Like everybody, you know, and that's how I think people have missed huge markets of folks out there. But— Oh yeah,

I totally agree with that. And it's funny because when I give talks sometimes, you know, internally and externally, one of the things that I say is, you know, if you're trying to frame like a challenge, you know, and you're saying things like, well, what do our end users want? Or what does our audience want? Or what does this segment want? You really are already predetermining the answers to your questions or some category of response. And I think it's important for us to get a bit more critical and a bit more sophisticated about how we ask questions because I think, as you point out, if we don't ask them in quite the right way, we're going to end up with products that people don't want to use.

Yeah. Yeah. And we've all had that. Um, you know, one of the things you said in one of your quotes, I was prepping a little bit for this interview, you know, that, that just happened to me is, um, one of my favorite pizza companies. I went on the website, I just wanted a pizza and they have every bright, shiny thing they could ever get. There's like a chat person that came on that said, do I need any help with my pizza? And there was like, did I want to see where my pizza was? And I was just like, I really want a sausage pizza in 20 minutes.

Yep.

And, and it was, it was just kind of that, that thing because I'm on a mobile device, you know, doing the horrible thing, ordering pizza while driving. And I really just, I got off their website and called them. I'm like, please just give me my pizza. Yeah.

Well, just because it can be done doesn't mean you should do it.

Yeah, it doesn't. So for those people that aren't fascinated by anthropology, which by the way, I wanted to major in, and my parents, were a little dismayed about what I might do as a job afterwards. So I only took a few courses when I looked at, you know, like human behavior economics and stuff. But can you just tell listeners who might not know, you know, the quick version definition of what an anthropologist is or how they think or kind of the view they bring to the world?

Sure. It's always my pleasure to do that. I will start by saying, though, I'm sure my parents would have had the exact same attitude that your parents did, except to say, In my graduate work, I had a full fellowship for 9 years, and then they finally said, okay, Martha, it's time for you to go. So they sent me out. So yeah, I wouldn't want to say it quite so crassly as I got my education for free, but it really worked out well for me. But I think the easiest way to understand anthropology is to say that anthropologists are interested in in the messiness of people. What do I mean by that? I mean that people, they dress in a certain way, they speak in a certain way, they follow certain kinship patterns, family dynamics. They practice different religions. People all over the world have all these different things that they do. One of the things that an anthropologist is really interested in doing is to sort of do a comparison to say how somebody raises their child in China will be different than how how they raise them in Japan or how they raise them in Norway. So we do a lot of that kind of looking at how people make meaning in the places where they live, how they actually, how their individual behaviors are actually part of a more overarching cultural norm. So that's kind of what we do both in the academic world and actually ironically more and more in business settings.

Which is perfect segue. So bringing that to business, what, what wisdom did ADP have to bring you on as a business anthropologist? What, what value do you bring to the process as they're working to bring solutions to the work world? What are you— I'm sure it's a lot. It's not a trick question, but more specifically, what type, right? What type?

I think, well, first of all, I, it was, it's like so many things. things in my life, I feel that I've been blessed by a very generous universe. And so this is just one of those. I connected with a thought leader here, Roberto Maciero, who was actually working really deeply in the innovation space at ADP. And he had put out some outreach around finding somebody who could help his team around human wisdom. I see these 2 words, human wisdom, and I'm like, OK, well, I'm not exactly sure what they do. I was coming from B2C. I had never been in B2B. I wasn't really familiar with human capital management and the business. But I connected with him, came to New York. We spent a few hours together, talked about what he was working on, which is sort of a reimagination of HCM systems, a sort of paradigmatic kind of rethink. And he's like, I really need somebody to help me understand how Do practitioners think about X, Y, and Z? What is the language that's being used? What would be appropriate notification levels for someone, let's say for alerts, for somebody in Brazil versus somebody in Germany versus somebody in Japan? So a lot of the stuff that would be really sort of quintessentially academic anthropology is just now being leveraged in the area of product development. So yeah, I do. And aside from sort of that product-level stuff, I do a lot of internal education. I try to familiarize people with some of the basic principles about user-centered design. And I think getting people, as I said earlier, to sort of think differently about old and kind of abhorrent problems. So it's always been my belief that if you have the same old problems and you're asking the same old questions, you're going to come up with the same old solutions. And that's really not gonna put anyone any further in terms of something new, innovative, and useful in a changing world.

That's so true. You know, a great mentor of mine early on in my career said, Sai, if you want better solutions, ask better questions. And I remember our meetings so often were about what questions we'd be asking and just the refining of questions and finding not only the bias, but how it would lead us to like gross generalizations and, And I hated those meetings until years later, I thought, what a good skill set that he taught, that he taught. Because it really— we don't think about things from the user's perspective all the time. I mean, the sense of urgency in Germany, where I was a foreign exchange student and went to gymnasium, is completely different than the sense of urgency in the US. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, constant alerts to them would be harassing given, you know, Um, what an American style would be.

Exactly.

Fascinating.

Yeah.

I love that, to like look deeper into kind of the messiness of, of us. Um, and I had, um, Michael Bungie Sanger on the podcast, um, a while back, and he does a lot of cool breakthrough coaching. And he talked to my listeners about just the power of staying curious 1 minute longer. Like, Just, just not stopping at the obvious. And just that open heart, open mind. You know, just the ability to, to be with some of that not knowing for a little bit longer. Mm-hmm. And it seems like a lot of your, your work is around curiosity and just the curiosity of, let's not make assumptions here. And let's not assume that because we think it's cool, other people will.

Yep. Yeah, no, I think that's true. I think one of the things that most of us anthropologists like to think is that we're just part of what brings us to our profession is just sort of natural curiosity. And I also think the other part is about we honor reality, right? And reality isn't just capital R, it's small r, and there's lots of different realities for lots of different reasons. And I think there's this sort of honoring of the variety of those realities. And I love that, and I'm going to take that away around that sort of waiting an extra few moments, because I do think, first of all, I think people are often uncomfortable with the silence and the waiting. But yeah, that's kind of where things happen often. And I think the other part of that But it's 2 other pieces that for me stand out is that I'm never shocked and I'm hopefully often surprised. And it's a real privilege to be in an occupation that allows you to feel that way. And I do. And I think then the other thing is really about understanding how people make meaning. And so this is why I think it's really kind of cool that you and I are speaking because I know all your work in drama, You know, people make meaning in all sorts of ways, and one of them may be sort of in creating drama. And I think that's very— that's a very interesting topic. It's certainly interesting to me in terms of it in global context, like cross-cultural context of drama, which I know nothing about, but, you know, but it strikes me as really interesting.

Well, and it becomes the emotional waste in the process of connecting. It takes us away from connection and away from good work and quality of life together. And it really is all about when we see reality, rather than honoring it, we create a story to fill in the gap of how it differs from what I think it should be. Mm-hmm. So the ego has a hard time honoring reality because the ego really wants everything to comply to a preferred reality. And so in anthropology, where you honor reality and just kind of notice and am curious about and try and see it from the context of another, the ego really walks around the world trying to script other people. And when things don't match up to the ego's preference, then it creates a negative story about how that person is an idiot or one down or out to get us or trying to harm us. Or, you know, it's always a very anxious story that the ego creates. Mm-hmm. You know, so if, if someone becomes more anthropologist-like, they'll automatically be less operating in ego because they'll just be noticing what is and in a way loving what is. Without that bias. Yeah.

Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And I think the other part is that really the stock and trade of anthropology is sort of participant observation, right? So a lot of that involves getting to know people in sort of a more mundane way. I think mundanity and banality is really underrated. I get so excited about everyday stuff, but part Part of that everyday stuff that I do is talking to people, and so it's dialogical. And one of the things that strikes me about this ego direction is that it's pretty monological. And so, yeah, I think there's a lot that an anthropological toolset can bring to people, is this idea of curiosity coupled with this respect for dialogue.

I love that. Yeah, because the ego's more about control or defense, or there are victims and there are villains. It's a really primitive use of our intelligence. It's probably the most primitive use of our intelligence where everything can be explained in very simplistic terms. And there's one up and one down. And, and that whole messiness, I think, is a, a, a wonderful leadership business skillset to grow in and borrow from other disciplines on how to be okay with the messiness. Hmm. And the, the mundane piece is, is an interesting concept. 'Cause when I speak, a lot of people come up to me and they're like, it feels like you've been listening in on all of our daily conversations. They feel, mm-hmm. Kind of seen and heard. Now, for me, that's because a lot of human behavior cross-culturally is even predictable when we look at low self and high self. So this wonderful universe, whatever religion or spirituality or poetry, there's some universal principles that talk towards that in almost every culture. But that everyday stuff is, is important. Because that's really You know, in my mind, I mean, it sounds so cliché, but where the work is done. And a lot of leaders, um, don't settle in at times to kind of look at the more mundane. It's about what can we drive, what can we hustle, what can we create. And there's a lot of knowledge in the, let's watch people just do the daily. Mm-hmm. And if you pay attention to that, You can find things that can fit into their— what's easy to consume, like their daily work. And the example I'll give you is people kept wanting us to come out and train and train and train. And that's like an interruption of the daily. And my team came to me, a bunch of very young folks, and they said, you know, people are on their phone. Why don't we quit telling people to put their phones away? And why don't we become their distraction at work? Why don't— instead of us trying to get them to training, why don't we just do these 3 to 5 minute vlogs? that people are fascinated by and, and put it out there so that when they are on their phones at work, where one of the things they're, they're doing— and we were working with a client who wanted me to do a training video. And I'm like, you know, I just don't think people are gonna watch an hour and a half of training. But what I noticed is people write me all the time, I binge watch your videos. Now they still are watching an hour and a half, but we deliver it up in a 3-minute YouTube. They spend an hour and a half watching, you know, 30 of those. But that wasn't— so it was almost like the ability to fit into what they're naturally doing instead of trying to figure out how to change human behavior.

Exactly. And, you know, one of the things that I think that illustrates is that, you know, culture, it moves pretty slowly. I mean, culture transforms fairly slowly. Technology does not, right? And now where technology has such exponential Exponential growth, and it's actually changing whole categories of human conceptualization. Notions of privacy are changed, and notions of what it means to communicate, and probably in your world, notions of what it means to be a leader. I think we would be well-advised to really understand where the culture and the technology intersect in a way that is useful, consumable, satisfying, and enjoyable. Because otherwise you're— I love that. I don't like wasted resources. I don't like wasted resources of human energy, intellect, or wasted resources of a business. I think we need to get a little bit smarter about how we spend our time and our money and our energy.

And there's so much of that that can be known and fine-tuned during the process of whether you're developing a service or a product or, you know, we used to say culture eats strategy for lunch and people were talking about company culture, right? They're talking about the company culture, but I didn't know that in the beginning because I come more from a social work standpoint. So I really always thought they were talking about like, like our, our culture, like—

Our geography.

Our geography eats strategy for lunch. And so I thought, you know, that's what they mean. And then I found out what they were saying it meant. And I still stand by my original interpretation of it because I think culture does eat strategy for lunch, but not the kind of culture they were talking about.

Yep. Yeah. I'm always interested too in this. Like you bring up something that I think about often is like this whole idea between culture sort of at large. Like I live in American culture. I live in the East Coast, culture of the East Coast, you know, and then I have a company culture. I work for a large global company. company that develops technologies for global markets and HCM, and it has its own culture. And then we have offices all around the world. We've got, you know, Brazil and India. I mean, so it's like, you know, culture is like a lot, there's a lot of culture around us. We need to understand what, what we're talking about, right? When we're, when we're talking about culture.

We really do. And then, you know, within all of those, it's just all of the kind of intersections of experience that made you, you know, you, I'll never forget, I'll never forget when we were— we actually worked with an academic anthropologist and we were trying to, in healthcare, be more respectful of people's differences. This was early on in diversity work. And so they came out and we were being trained and this anthropologist was there and we were being trained and basically trying to memorize basically these huge charts. Like if the person's from Somalia and they have a headscarf on, then it means this. Mm-hmm. And it was almost like the person needed to kind of memorize this. And I was sitting there having coffee with the anthropologists, and my team wasn't loving the training. They're like, you know, you get that we have torn aortas and like we're trying to like save lives. And I always was one, I'm like, let's make this super simple. And so what we started to do, instead of memorizing like what, like we would have to know all of this, we turned it in. Now I look back, more curiosity. We would just come into the patient room if things were stabilized and we would say, what is one thing I could do or way of behaving or saying I could arrange for you that would show the utmost respect of what you value. And then we would hear like, please don't remove my headscarf, or please only have like female care, whatever it was, right? Mm-hmm. But instead of us trying to figure out all the ways the world presents, we just need to figure out tools with which we could tune in to what the world was presenting. And it was such a less cumbersome concept. Um, but it seems to me it just— it— and that was born out of kind of this insight and talking with this anthropologist. Um, what do you think are some of the common mistakes? Or, I mean, what are some pearls of wisdom from all the beads of sweat you've put into, um, you know, working, um, in the ways that, that you work? What do you— what do you think we could be better at or, or would help us?

Yeah, you know, I think there's, I mean, there's some that are probably not, you know, particularly surprising, but I think they're probably worth, you know, repeating, which is, you know, just because we may have an idea for a brand or a service or a product and we're all excited about it and we're working on it, whatever those things might be, we really should not presume that it's the same, it's gonna be received in the same way to the intended end user, the person who's going to be our consumer of that. I think that's a really big mistake. And I think people just lose sight of— Yeah. —the fact that, first of all, not everyone's an engineer. Not everyone lives in a metropolitan area. There's all sorts of things. So I think that's an interesting thing. And the other thing I think was particularly interesting to me not that long ago in my own work is I think that in HCM particularly, and as technologies are getting better and more aligned to the needs of practitioners, I think you have to be respectful of the fact that a lot of practitioners have spent many years mastering what are really unruly products. I mean, I don't think anyone is reasonably going to say, I was in love with my HR system end to end. it isn't going to happen. And so we have to be respectful of the fact that people have really spent years mastering these systems. And so when you come in and say, well, okay, that's all well and good, but we've got something really easy now, and let's just put that aside. I think we have to be careful with that because I think we all earn a certain badge of honor, in a sense, from accommodating and learning and negotiating these tools, and also we negotiate people and different practices. And so I think it's about really kind of being respectful and being understanding of being respectful, which is exactly what you're just saying with your example with the patients in the hospital. I mean, it's just about taking time to be mindful and to be respectful.

Yeah, and honor the heritage. And for a lot of the HR system users, the heritage, I mean, it's not about telling the war story or the victim story, But it's, there is some nostalgia about how we even used to get people paid. Right. And, you know, right. You know, in, in some of that. And I think it does, I'm glad that you brought that up because I think so many times, even when I look at like product launch cycles, they aren't looking at kind of the user interface or the variety of ways people will use it or the variety of kind of shapes and flavors users come in it. It feeds into, and it's kind of an ego stance, but our kind of ethnocentricity or, um, you know, and, and one of the things I like when I'm interviewing people for positions is that they have, um, had really diverse experiences, even if they aren't, you know, the most diverse candidate. Because I just know for me and my family that, you know, travel has just blown up so many things that we thought, well, this is just the way the world does it, or this This is a sophisticated way to do it. And just even the concept of innovation and, you know, the more we travel, we're just getting ready to go to Africa, but the more we travel with my kids through India and through other places, um, it, it's, it's just a really good thing to always kind of check our ethnocentric viewpoint and check.

Yeah. Yeah. And I always love, um, hearing somebody else, um, you know, sort of remind, um, in a forum, because I just think, you know, um, it takes a lot of voices to sort of get that message out. But I think more and more that's just super, super important.

You know, and part of that we've talked about, um, staying curious. So those are, you know, kind of some of the common mistakes is when we aren't, um, curious. Um, and you talk about, uh, it was a wording, I love language, and you talked about something, um, deep listening in one of the cool articles. I can't remember what article, you've written a lot. But you want to talk about the practice of deep listening? It seems like it goes beyond empathetic or active listening.

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that I think I like to say is that I listen for the unsaid and I'm looking for the overlooked, right? So there's a certain kind of— It's like a clutch in a car. You put your finger on the clutch and you get to stop, right? So I like to put a clutch on things. And when I'm spending time with people, typically I spend time in the places where they make meaning. So it might be in their home, it could be at work. It really just depends. And I'm not there to interrogate. I'm actually even not there to Yeah. I'm not there to question in a sense. I'm there to participate in, respectfully participate in their going about their business, in the way they make sense of the world around them in the mundane ways that they do. And so part of that notion of deep is really around that sort of sense of being able to be still and just settle back without my mind saying, oh, but I need to ask this question, and, oh, this is on my protocol, and so I better get to that. It's really about, you know, kind of settling down, calming down, and just more taking it in than giving it out. And I think that's it. Yeah.

The ability— I remember what you called it now, because I just loved it— deeply hanging out or deeply— I think that so often we come with an agenda, a motive, and something to be done. And, you know, just that kind of no-ego being where we can just really be be in the presence of and experience rather than name it and figure it out. And, you know, it's kind of, it's active soul, not active mind in a way.

Mm-hmm.

Which is, is fantastic. You know, we talk so much, whether it be change management or in HR or new systems like that, we roll things out and, and that we, you know, we define the why. And, you know, old change management is like, you know, how do leaders kind of take all this responsibility and Mm-hmm. And I'm out there preaching, it's really a shared accountability where we can offer this kind of plethora of things. And those people working with us have the accountability, the shared responsibility to reach up and grab and make their own. And your work just kind of, I think, goes into kind of that shared responsibility of how We, um, get things as consumable as possible. And then we also, you know, worked to support others as they make it their own. And, and I think learn and watch as they do that, you know, it's just like you give somebody something and then watch how they use it. Um, those are really two different, two different things.

Yep.

So, so you're talking at South by Southwest. Congratulations. I got to talk, um, there, um, in 2017. Have you been? It's such a trip. It's so much fun.

Actually, I spoke this year. It's already gone.

I'm behind.

Yeah, it's already come and gone and I'm getting ready to submit a proposal for next year. So no, it was great. I'd been before, but it was really— I felt really pleased with the topic. I was really well prepared. I've got great support here in preparing me. And it was a great message. I basically told stories about I love that topic. One was sort of a big data story, and one was sort of a quantitative one-on-one interview story. So it was a nice— yeah, it was very well received. And I think it just underscored, I think, probably a lot of what we're discussing today, which is about this acceptance that people are messy, an honoring of reality, and a willingness to work with people. Respectful, um, you know, attention paying. And I think, you know, if you can actually work those into almost anything that you do, I guarantee that you're gonna be successful.

That's profound stuff, Martha. I love it. It's just a great summary. Like, if you can honor reality and pay respectful attention and just get okay with the fact that life's messy. In fact, the name of my, um, Facebook show is Life's Messy, Live Happy.

Right. Mm-hmm.

Like, once people realize there can be so much meaningful work and life happening the minute you stop trying to perfect life and just kind of, you know, revel in the messiness of it. It's, it's kind of a Zen place to be. I mean, isn't that— it's almost the definition of beginner's mind.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I, and I, and I'm always happy to meet a fellow traveler.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. My ears perked up as both your wisdom, but also just the kind of trust and trust in the universe. So, um, other things that, um, you would like to bring to our listeners who, you know, are, are HR folks out there, they're, they're leaders, um, you know, just if you could even give just, um, you know, those are great. And if there's anything else to, to pay attention to, the thing I love about ADP, and I've gotten to work with the organization a bit lately, um, you guys have such rich data. I almost like feel myself salivating to get in and touch all that data. Um, 'cause you guys pay like

Right. And, you know, I think we're also really mindful about, you know, things like privacy and, you know, confidentiality. And, you know, in a way, it's fascinating because, you know, as other tech companies are, you know, we read a lot about them. You know, we've always had a long history of sort of being that company that is really mindful of privacy and confidentiality. company where you could feel confident that we're not doing anything untoward with the data. So, that's kind of a cool place to be in. But as far as what I would say to some of your listeners, one of the things around leadership that I think is so critical, and I see it all the time, is that really you genuinely have to be the change that you want to see the world, whether that's your corporate world or the world at large. If you want to reduce drama in your workplace and you want to increase a sense of, I would call it not engagement, but sort of energetic enthusiasm, you need to actually model that for the rest of your workforce. I think that's super, super important. I don't think there's any way around it because I think other Otherwise, it smacks of inauthenticity, and I think that's never a good thing. I think that's always going to eventually veer you in the wrong direction. I think also, in terms of HR, it's kind of rethinking what an HR practitioner is. Actually, more and more, we know that they're strategic, right? What are the trends happening now in the world around around sort of the way people work, the way teams are formed, the importance of teams, and how can a practitioner actually start to inform the upper leadership of their company around those trends? So I think there's a lot of stuff going on. I think it's, for me, and I say this to people all the time, and I genuinely feel this way, is I don't think you could be in a more exciting space. You probably feel the same way because you're deep in it too. Yeah. than to be in the business of people's working lives. It is, it's pretty incredible.

It's amazing. It's amazing. And I've always loved about ADP, the respect that they've had. I mean, the original business started out paying us and the privacy, and you guys just have good data. I call it good data hygiene. You're good about that. But you know, for HR right now, the field is changing. And what I see is there's a very low tolerance for people who aren't working their own program to be leading others. It's like, if you want to lead today, in a modern evolved workforce, then you have got to be about the business of evolving yourself. And that doesn't mean you'll be a perfect human being, but it means you'll be vulnerable, courageous, self-reflective. And—

Mm-hmm.

And, um, in fact, um, when I look at it from the social work standpoint, you know, we look at it at roles people play in the system. And it's an old model, but there's the role that you play that's more about managing and controlling and directing work and giving answers and setting the rules and, you know, making sure people abide by the rules. And then there's a role that you play, which is like facilitating self-reflection and brokering connections. And, um, and, and I, I still remember this chart from years ago where it was, um, these, you know, different roles. And I think for HR, we've gotta really look at, um, evolving the roles we're playing and capable of playing, because you can be a director or a manager of work. Mm-hmm. With not very much self-insight or comfort in messiness, but you cannot be a facilitator, a broker, a networker, um, um, without those core competencies. And when I look at the competencies in HR, like what Korn Ferry has, they hint at things like dealing with ambiguity, but they just don't have these things. Like, I would like a new deck. We should write a new deck about like honoring reality and the ability to deeply hang out. Mm-hmm. And one thing that I need to get What are the new—

and be, and be, and be a professional eavesdropper.

Yeah, professional eavesdropper. I love it. Love it. A professional eavesdropper with an open heart, open mind, and neutral sense. Because it's one thing to eavesdrop to reinforce your bias. It's another thing to eavesdrop to blow up your bias. And—

I love it. Yeah, exactly.

And that's what a— I love it. I love it. You just bring good, good work to the table. I wanted to introduce people to you To your work. You're out on LinkedIn. You are out writing. You have some great articles I see, whether it's in HR tech or in computing. I mean, I just see you in all kinds of industries, which is fun.

I will just leave— I will, you know, I'll let you— I'll tell you that if people want to look for me, if they Google Martha Byrd, what they're going to find is that there is— there are 2 Martha Byrds. One of them is a This last passenger pigeon, I think she passed in 1902. She's stuffed and she's in the Smithsonian. That's not this Martha Bird. So this Martha Bird's alive and well and in central New Jersey.

I love it. I love it.

Hopefully they can tell the difference between them. And I don't think she's probably doing much writing.

Yeah, she's probably not doing much writing. And I love your name, Martha Bird. And I think somewhere I came across a picture, you're mom's last name was Pond.

Yes.

Yeah, I just, I love these, um, these wonderful, like, just strong, good nature words for names. So

yeah, thank you. I feel pretty happy about those.

Yeah, awesome. You've done well, my friend. So people, get out there. My assignment— I always end with assignments, coaching doesn't really happen without assignments— is get out of your own industry, your own view of the world, your own— like if you grew up in a business background, get out there, whether it's in the books you're reading or the people you're talking to, and see the other lenses through which people see the world and the science they come from. So anthropology have a certain lens they're taught to see the world through, and social work and psychology, because I think that we need to start borrowing the wonderful techniques and strategies of other disciplines to round out our view of the world. So the assignment is get really interested in other people's ologies, ideologies, and try those glasses on for size to see the world. And Martha, this time went as we knew it would, so fast. But thank you for the work you do and keeping us conscious that we need to see the world from other people's eyes and not necessarily just our own. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks. Thanks so much, Cy, for sharing this time with me. I feel deeply gratified by that.

Good, good. Awesome. Well, until next time, listeners, get out there and check out Martha's work. This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your world place. I'm Cy Wakeman.