Strategyzer Webinar with Whitney Johnson: Build An A-Team To Tackle Disruption

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All right, let's get going. Hello everybody. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you are in the world. Welcome to another Strat Chat webinar session. Today's topic is Build an A Team to tackle Disruption. As always, I'm your moderator Kavi Gupta. I manage content and community at Strategizer. Our host is co founder of Strategizer, Alex Osterwalder and co author of books, Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design. Our guest today is a collaborator and friend of Strategizer, Whitney Johnson. She's a management thinker and a leading author with a few books under her belt. But we're also going to be talking about a book that she's kind of been releasing shortly and it really is about the A team and tackling disruption within that culture management. If at any time throughout the webinar you have a comment or a thought or some kind of feedback about the session, you can tweet @us rategizer. Use the hashtag Strachat so we can follow along with the conversation. And I encourage all of you to check out our blog@blog.stragizer.com where you can for more in depth content and blog posts around this topic as well as with other topics around Business Model Generation and value proposition design, I'm going to hand over the reins to Whitney now. Who is going to I'm just going to unmute her first. Who is going to be leading the presentation? Alex, in the meantime, can you tell us and the audience a bit about our relationship with Whitney and why there's a lot of commonalities with what she is doing and what we're doing at Strategizer as well.

So I'm really excited to have Whitney on the Strat Chat today. Whitney has been a friend and inspiration for many, many years and we happen to be in the same group around management thinker Marshall goldsmith in the Goldsmith 100 and the connection is really around disruption. While we have been writing about how companies are disrupted and how they can react to that. Whitney has done a lot of great work, among many things, but, you know, focusing on individuals and personal disruption and coming up with a new book very soon on building an A team. And I think it's very important to have that kind of a team if you want to survive as an organization in, you know, the times of disruption that we're living through as organizations today. So, Whitney, I'm going to hand it over right away to you, and you're going to show us a couple of slides, and then we will move towards a conversation. Right. And in the meantime, Kavi will be monitoring the questions, anything coming from the audience. So I encourage you to shoot us any questions in the chat window if you have any during the presentation. Whitney, floor is yours.

Wonderful. Thank you, Alex. Thank you. Kavi, I'm so delighted to be be doing this webinar with you. So I will get started with saying to you, think about the fact that many of you who are listening to this webinar have in the past and perhaps are currently disrupting your competition. You are riding high, but you still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night wondering, am I becoming vulnerable? Is my company about to be disrupted? And if you are looking for a very back of the envelope way to gauge whether or not that might be happening, I'd like to encourage you to take a look at where your workforce is on the S curve and to introduce this idea and notion of gauging and analyzing that. I want to tell you about a conversation that I recently had with one of my CEO clients. He had called me to tell me that one of his key people had just announced that she was leaving. And he said, you know, I know she wants a job closer to home. She's been commuting about an hour. She has five children. She wants to be, you know, this new job is about five minutes away from home. But as she was sitting across the table from me, I had this feeling that she didn't like working here. And perhaps more importantly, she didn't like working for me. Maybe some of you have had a similar concern. I know I have. You want to be a great boss. In fact, a lot of people have come to work for you. They hired you to be their boss because they believe that with you, they could bring their dreams to work. But when you are trying to get stuff done, you've got these tight deadlines, you've got product to ship. We sometimes feel like we need people right where they are doing what they've always done. And without needing to, you become that boss. And so you've got a revolving door and it doesn't stop. And you're probably the one pushing it, the one that your talent is walking through. And it is not the ping pong table's fault. In the United States, about 3 million people quit their jobs every month, and that's about 15% of the working population every year. Which means that right at this very minute, one of your top performers is probably about to walk out the door. And it's costing you time and it's costing you money. It's the innovators dilemma. But with people, it shouldn't need to be this way. What I've learned, having been a stock analyst on Wall street and then co founding an investment firm with Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School, he wrote the Innovator's Dilemma is that the theory of disruption that we apply to products also applies to people. I've since spent the last five years researching and codifying a framework of personal disruption so that whether you are scaling a business, building a team, or just trying to get your people to be more innovative, you've got a structure to do this. So. So some of the questions we're going to answer today is how do you stop the revolving door? How do you avoid being disrupted because you're stopping the revolving door? How do you ship even more product? And how do you become a talent magnet, a place where people want to work and a boss that people want to work for. Start with leading them up the learning curve. You give people an opportunity to learn and to do what they haven't done. Can you imagine for just a moment sailing over 200,000 miles, the distance from the Earth to the moon in a year when there was no gps? Think about what would it have been like to be the first European to visit Sydney, Australia? What about discovering the Hawaiian Islands, to be one of the greatest explorers and mapmakers in history? Mapping a third of the globe and your maps are still in use 200 years later. And yet I wonder, would any of this have been possible had it not been for someone, A someone who was willing to lead a person up the learning curve? Three someones in particular. There was a young boy who grew up in a poor family in England, an impoverished family in England in the early 1700s. The Lord of the local banner saw him as gifted. So he paid for school. When the sea called to him, a ship owner took him on as an apprentice. And then after working his way up the ranks in the merchant navy and disrupting himself to join the Royal Navy. An up and coming officer brings them along. Without these talent spotters who recognized and developed his talent, he may have never done any of these things. Captain James Cook may have wasted away unaccomplished unknown. Instead, he wrote in his journal, I've sailed farther than any other man before me. Now, Star Trek fans know, may know, that Captain James T. Kirk is modeled after him. He's a man who wants to boldly go where no man has gone before. That is what people want on the job. It's what the people who work for you want. It's what we all want. We want to go boldly. We want to go boldly where we haven't gone before. And yet we also like a bit of predictability. If we could peek into the crystal ball, we would. If we could take off in our starship full of dreams while remaining in the station, we might. So we've got this conundrum. Disruption or change is what makes innovation possible. But it also challenges our current way of thinking, of doing things without a clear alternative. And it is especially murky with people. This is where the S curve model, many of you know this very well. It's popularized by E.M. rogers in 1962, comes in at our Disruptive Innovation Fund with Clayton Christensen. We used it to help us gauge how quickly new innovations would be adopted. It helped us make the unpredictable predictable. At the base of the S, you can see that growth is slow until a tipping point is reached. And then once that's reached, you enter hypergrowth. And that's typically at 10 to 15% saturation of the marketplace. And then at 90% or almost complete saturation, your growth tapers off. As we were investing, I had this insight that this S curve could also help us understand individual careers. The S curve math tells us that at the low end of the S, when we start something new, we're at the bottom of a wave and it feels like a slog. This helps us avoid discouragement. As you put in the effort, which typically comes after six months to a year, you roar into competence. And with this comes engagement. It comes confidence. And then as you approach mastery, things get easy. Because your brain's no longer enjoying the feel good effects of learning, you get bored. Let's in fact look at an actual wave and how a wave happens. Ocean waves are caused by the wind moving across the surface of the water. So the friction between the air molecules and the water molecules causes energy to be transferred from the wind to the water. This causes the wave to form what's Interesting. And think about if you've ever been to a sports event and people have done the wave around the stadium is that the water doesn't actually travel with the wave. It only moves up and down. It's the energy that travels. It's the same with every single individual. At the low end of your learning curve, there's not very much energy. But with the friction of a challenge, the energy builds until it peaks, it crusts, and then the energy eventually crashes. Same water, same person, different levels of energy. Just like an ocean is made up of many waves, your organization is made up of many S curves. And what we found in our research is that you build an A team, a team that can effectively manage through change, a team that will avoid being disrupted with 70% of your people in the sweet spot of engagement, 15% of your people at the low end, and 15% of your people at the high end. Now, in the follow up, Kavi is going to send to you a link where you can go to my website, WhitneyJohnson.com diagnostic and see where you are on the S curve. But we thought it would be fun if we do a poll and see see where you all think you are right now, how many of you feel like. And Kavi, if you can put up the poll, how many of you feel like you're at the low end of your learning curve right now? So you're in a role, or you've just started a new business, or you've started a new project and you've been there six months or so, less perhaps, and you're looking up at the top of that S curve and it's feeling kind of daunting. There's lots of days where you don't really feel like you know what you're doing yet. How many of you are in the sweet spot? You've been in this role for maybe a year now, two years, and you know what you're doing. You feel competent, you feel competent, you're very, very engaged. And then how many of you are at the high end of that curve where you've been there three, maybe four years, and you're thinking, I think I got this. I really got this. But now I'm a little bit bored. Love to see where people are showing up.

Just give another five seconds for the poll and then we'll results.

And Whitney, I'll ask you a question after we see the poll results. Is that okay?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

All right, here are the results. 34% said they're on the low end, 45% say they're in the middle and 24% say that they're on the high end.

Okay. All right. Alex, do you want to ask your question?

Yeah. I was first surprised with the poll results. Right now probably we have a lot of curious people on the call, so very few are getting bored with their work. But one thing I was curious about, what's interesting is when we talk about organizations, we often make the distinction between the more exploit oriented part of the organization, which you would call the execution engine, which is almost all of the organization these days. And then on the explore side, where you really have inventing new growth engines, where you focus on innovation, you might have a slightly different profile. So I was wondering if you in your research made a distinction between types of roles, you know, those who are more related to innovation and growth and those who are more related to execution and, you know, running the supply chain or so if you see a difference, because I would guess that maybe some people are more comfortable with stability and less comfortable with ambiguity. And on the other hand, you have some people who would get quickly bored if there was too much stability and are more interested in ambiguity more the entrepreneurial types. Have you seen any difference in profiles according to roles?

That's a great question, Alex. So we have not looked at that yet. It's something I think that would definitely warrant further research. So thank you for raising that. What I would say is that as a general rule though, because you're kind of slicing it differently. As a general rule, when you're at the low end of a curve, you are going to be in this exploration, exploratory place and partly in the sweet spot, regardless of the role that you're in. Because if you think about how the human brain works, when we feel like we know how to do something, we start to chunk, like lots of chunking intellectually and so we stop feeling uncertain and stop asking questions. And so even a person who's incredibly expert, so for example, like a neuro, not a neuroscientist, but like a rocket scientist, you need to maintain their domain expertise, but you can still get them to be thinking in an innovative way of questioning why do we do it like this by having them in a different configuration with a different type of team. So I would say in general, even with lots of expertise, you want to put people at the low end of the curve. In general, low end, middle of the sweet spot is going to be more of the exploratory phase and execution is going to be middle of the sweet spot, spot and up. And so for me, I would slice it of. It's a cycle of explore, execute, explore, execute for pretty much everybody on your team. Because our brains all need to be learning and then learning, continually learning. And when we've learned what we need to learn, then we need to do something new.

Yeah, makes sense. Just maybe one follow up question. So one of the things I feel like is a big challenge for organizations is that they're losing a lot of the entrepreneurial talent, right? Those who will get bored if there's nothing to learn anymore and if they just have to do certain jobs but that don't really correspond to their profile. Is that something you've seen in your consulting or in your work? That the biggest challenge you were referring to, the, you know, the talent, the talent challenge there, that companies are losing some of their, you know, most entrepreneurial talent, those who are really good at creating those new growth engines. Is that, that's something you've seen?

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. I mean, and that's, that's in. I would see that that's basically the raison d' etre of this book because as I was, you know, after I wrote Disrupt Yourself and this seven point framework and this is how you do it, I would have people that are more entrepreneurial, you know, more willing to disrupt themselves, say, I get it, I got it, I got it, I got it. I want to do this, but how do I make this happen inside of my organization and company? And so Build an A Team is about, and we're going to talk about this over the next couple of minutes, is how do you create an ecosystem and make it possible for someone to be entrepreneurial in the sense of they're continually asking questions, learning and then asking more questions and then learning some more, etc. Excellent.

So, yeah, let you get back to your slides, otherwise we'll get completely off track.

I know this could be a two hour conversation, which could be really fun. So what I would say, just a quick observation for each of you is that if you were a company, if we collectively in this moment were a company, what it would mean is that we have a lot of people who are at the low end of that learning curve, which is really good. And we're going to talk a little bit more about this in a minute of both the pros and cons of being at the low end of the curve and some discoveries that you're probably making about the contributions you can make to your organization. We don't quite have enough people in the sweet spot, so we would want to get more who are able to being in that execution phase that you were talking about, Alex. The other thing I would say is that we probably have a few too many at the high end of the learning curve. You want to have at most about 15%, because people at the high end of learning curve, and we're going to talk more about this in a minute, can contribute in very unique ways, and they're also getting bored. And so what do you do around that? And so this comes to really what I said at the very beginning. If you want to quickly determine if your company is at risk of disruption, you take the pulse of your workforce. And if you have too many people at the high end, they're going to be disengaging. And so then you put your company at risk. So now. Oops. Let's see. Okay, so now you've got this S curve. You know how you want to have. You know what percentage you want to have on each of the curve. You've got a clear picture of where your flock of S curves is. It's time to load balance, to practice personal disruption, to create a cadence, to learn, leap and repeat. And to illustrate what this can look like, I want you to suppose for just a moment that you've just picked up the phone and you've gotten a call from a headhunter. Do they say headhunter in Europe? They do, right, Alex?

Headhunters, Absolutely.

Okay. All right. So it's for a job that sells a product that was invented 60 years ago. @ the time, it was a really important invention. It kept expensive rockets and missiles from rusting. But the product actually hasn't changed much for over 60 years. So my question to you is, would you be interested in that job? Would you even entertain the opportunity, given what you know about the product now? What if the headhunter tells you that people love. They love to work at this company? Engagement scores are 90% plus. You might ask, like I did, why? How? And this is what I wanted to know when I interviewed the CEO, Gary Ridge. It was a perfect company to test my hypothesis that if you will let people learn to go where they haven't gone before or they're going to stay. Three senior leaders at this company started as a receptionist, and one is now the brand manager. When we administered our diagnostic, we found that 60% of the employees believe that they can satisfy all their career goals without ever leaving the company. This is a company that develops people through repeated personal disruptions. This is a company, like you were just saying, Alex, that that allows people to be perpetual entrepreneurs. They allow them to learn, they leap, and then they repeat. What's interesting is over the past 20 years, the market cap of this company has grown from $250 million to $1.6 billion. Not bad for a company that sells a can of oil. So let's get into the details. How do you execute this s curve strategy? And how do you have people at different points on the curve? I went to Butte, Montana to find my answer. It's known as the richest hill on earth. In the mid-1800s, it attracted miners who were panning for gold and silver. When the initial rush disappointed the speculators, they all sold off their claims. And then this next wave of miners bought them and they discovered copper. At the time, again, this is mid-1800s, copper was not valuable. But as technology developed over the next couple of decades, electrical wiring, it became a thing and copper became extremely valuable. So Butte, Montana, which is in the middle of the United States, presented a once in a lifetime opportunity, not for people who wanted instant gratification, but for people who were patient. And those people are now known as copper kings. I often, often think of Butte, Montana when I hear that businesses can't find graduates with the right skills. Is it possible that people only want to hire for top of the curve expertise, the gold standard, when silver will do? And how about copper? I mean really, there are compelling reasons to go for copper. To hire for potential, not for proficiency. And one of the best ways for people to do that, for all of us to do that, is to look in unconventional talent pools like internal hires. People who are already inside of your organization. You become, you don't notice them anymore. They're like wallpaper. And yet they've got these skills that could be transferable. Another place to look is boomerangers. People who have been at your company and have left and now want to come back. Now historically, people didn't like to hire boomerangers. I think it's because they felt like it was like a jilted boyfriend or something, like, you left, you can't come back. But in fact, when people leave, effectively they're going somewhere else and they're getting trained on someone else's dollar and they want to come back. And I should say euro, they want to come back and work for you on rampers. People who have left the workforce to care for children or to care for parents. These people have loads and loads and loads of often loads of soft skills that the workforce desperately needs. And then finally there are people who are self taught, people who don't have necessarily any formal education in an area but are credentialed and can show you through a platform like degreed, for example, that in fact they have the skills that you need. These unconventional hires are not overpriced, they're not over picked and they're often hungry with something to prove. So let's ask all of you. The question is, when was the last time you made an unconventional hire? Was it in the last month, the last year, within the last five years, or never? And Alex, I'm going to ask you the question. You can kind of riff on this for a minute while we're waiting for people to fill in the poll or what are your thoughts in general? I won't put you totally on the spot, but just what are your thoughts? Think about this.

Excellent. I think you're spot on. Right. Hiring for potential is a big thing given that the world is changing so fast. And I'm particularly thinking about thinking of the innovation engine where you need people who are T shaped. They can go very broad on a whole series of topics and probably the only one they really need to be able to go deep on is pattern recognition. So, you know, entrepreneurs are definitely, you know, people who have a lot of potential to explore very many different areas. So I think this is great and I think it's extremely relevant in the context of innovation in large corporations. So this is very, very important for our audience. So I have got the results.

Yeah, yeah, Tabby, it's interesting. Go ahead.

The poll results are as followed. 15% say last month was the last time they made an unconventional hire. 29% said last year, 23% said within the last five years and 33% have said never.

So what's interesting about that, as I look at that, I think obviously there's an opportunity with a 33% that never, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I thought it would be lower. But given that your audience is. The people who are on this are self selecting and are interested in business model innovation, et cetera. I think that's really encouraging, don't you, Alex?

I think absolutely. I would have expected that never to be higher. And of course, I mean, it depends a bit where you draw the line.

Right, right.

And I was thinking of myself also as, you know, as an employer with our growing company. In some cases you would probably go more for the functional experience and you quickly need to fill a job. But at the same time the world is evolving. So it's a tricky question. It's not an easy one. To answer.

Yeah. Okay, so here. Oops. I have to keep on toggling back and forth. Okay, here we go. So I have a background as being an investor. So when you hire for potential, you're effectively buying low and sell high. And time is on your side. And just remember that time plus competence equals boredom. There's a quote I love. I'm going to read it out loud to you, although you can scan it. If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you're dying. So that's the low end of the curve and the. The motivation for our being willing to be at the low end of the curve. So now you've got all these people who are basically unstuck people who are at the bottom of their curve. That makes up 15% of your team. And what do you do with all these folks? Well, the first thing you want to do is you want to have a plan for this person. No mushrooms. You want to remember that whenever you hire someone you set subconsciously we do it and we believe that they're our one true love, that they're going to be there forever, but they won't be. And so it's really important for us to have a plan embracing this constraint. What do we want them to accomplish during their first six months at the low end of the curve? They're two to three years in the sweet spot, and they're six months at the high end before you help them jump to a new curve. Second thing is, you want to make sure you let them do their job. After a talented high performer at Boeing was promoted from an individual contributor to a manager, one of his engineers announced that he was quitting. And when the engineer asked him, or when he asked the engineer, why are you quitting? He's like, well, you micromanage. You've made 14 changes to my work. Your job is not to do my job. Your job is to help me understand the bigger picture, to plug me into the network and to advocate for me. Will the employees still quit? But the manager apparently learned his lesson because young Alan Mullally went on to become the CEO of Ford, one of the best CEOs of our time. The third thing that we want to do with people at the low end is to recognize the value of their inexperience. And because so many of you are at the low end of the curve, Right now you're going to totally get this. You're going to understand that you're slow right now, but you're not blind through familiarity. Familiarity. You're going to ask questions like why do you do it? Like this. Those kind of three year old questions that feel kind of annoying, but there must be a better way is how you uncover huge, huge strategic opportunities, opportunities to play where no one else is playing. And as you're disrupting yourself by disrupting yourself by allowing the people on your team to disrupt themselves, you are fine finding disruption opportunities for your organization. Okay, so let's go next. Now your low ender is graduating to the sweet spot. And the question is, how do you manage the 70% on the sweet spot of the curve? And let me answer that question by asking you another question, which is how many of you have ever wanted to buy something? And we don't have a poll, but picture this in your head like a Dodge Ram 2500 that has a heavy duty 6.4 liter Hemi V8 engine pumping out 410 horsepower and 429 pound feet of torque.

In Europe you'd go to jail if you would want one of those.

Environmental crime. Okay, well, so think of the Wild west of the United States, all of these rebel cowboys for just a minute. Okay, so for largely emotional reasons, obviously this is not a work truck. There's a man who goes out and purchases this truck and because the other member of his investment committee, his wife had dissented, he was eager to demonstrate how useful this truck could be. So naturally he goes out and decides to cut and haul a load of firewood. It's October. Early snow drives at the mountain because of that snow, it gets deeper and deeper. The road's slicker and slicker still. He's charging on, confident in his truck. Well, when he finally pulls off the road to cut the wood, the truck gets stuck and the wheels start to spin and he's wondering, how am I going to extricate myself from this worrisome and my wife is going to tell you I told you so situation. So he gets out of the truck and he just starts to chop wood. And he chops wood and he chops more wood and he chops and chops and chops until eventually he's able to load the entire back of the truck with the wood. He's now exhausted. He's thinking, okay, well, because hope spring is eternal, I'm going to try one more time to drive out of the snow. Turns the engine on, he puts the Pickup into gear. And as if by magic, the truck inches forward and it gets unstuck. The heavy load of the wood gives the truck traction. And it's the heavy load, our constraints, that give us traction to drive up a curve. This is what your sweet spotters need as they gain momentum. They need more, not less, friction. Remember the wave? It was the friction of the air molecules on the water that created the wave. Your people, you in the sweet spot, those 40% of you, you need friction so that you can learn and then prepare to leap. And so I'm going to tell you, actually I'm going to skip this because I don't want to run out of time. Going to keep going. You basically need to give your people Goldilocks assignments. You need to have them be not too hard, not too easy. And with your people in the sweet spot, don't forget to appreciate them. They're not a problem child. Don't make them one by ignoring them. It's easy to ignore people where everything's working, but as you make it hard but not too hard, people stay engaged. Engaged people innovate. Engage people lower your we're about to be disrupted score. All right, I'm going to pause there for just a second. Alex, any questions, comments before I proceed?

Yeah, maybe just a quick one. So when you say, I really like this a lot, but when you say you need to give people, you know, these kind of tasks, it almost feels a bit like top down. Right. And if I think of, you know, the kind of model that W.L. gore put in place where there is no management, it's more self selection. Could we also argue that you need to give people the opportunity to pick the right kinds of jobs so it's less maybe a management challenge, but an organizational challenge. So people kind of self select the jobs that are just hard enough for them, not too boring. That we would have a more of a bottom up model than a top.

Down, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I would say, Alex, it's a both. And because so I love that model of W.L. gore of allowing people to self select what projects they want to move on. I think it continues to be a management challenge where the manager allows that to be a possibility. Because even though people can self select, there's someone within that ecosystem that's making it possible for them to self select. So I would say it's a both and.

Yep. Okay, great.

Okay, so now we're going to go to the top of the curve and if you look in the middle, if Any of you have followed, you know, on the left is George Washington. If any of you have seen the Broadway play Hamilton, you'll know the guy standing in the middle is Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton was at the top of his learning curve. He'd been George Washington's secretary for four years and he was ready to jump to a curve in the military. Washington said to him, I can't promote you to go in the military over other full Cornells because that wouldn't be fair. But the real, the real problem was that Hamilton had become Washington's alter ego and Washington didn't want to lose him. So now there was this falling out. And unlike most bosses, or many bosses, I shouldn't say most, he eventually honored Hamilton's decision and Washington lost his right hand man. So here's your challenge. After three or four years, people have reached the top of the curve. After months, maybe years actually of investment, your employee is up there and they're your go to person. And so you're saying to yourself, like, why would I push them to do something new? I mean, they're a master, like they know exactly what they're doing. You like them, I like them right where they are, doing what they've always done, where they do me or you the most good. But this is the danger zone because they're going to get bored and they're going to leave or even worse, they're going to stay and be complacent. So again, you need a plan. Here's how you manage people at the top of the curve. You want to say to them something like, I need you here right now. I need you to be here in this place for six months, a year, maybe even a year and a half. And I will then help you jump to a new curve. I will make it possible, advocate for you within this ecosystem, for you to do something new. But in the meantime, what I need you to do is to push people to excel. Like a pace car going around is to set the pace for the other people on the team who are at the low end, in the sweet spot. I need you to train people. You're now at the top of the curve. You've got this vista. If you can think of the top of the curve. Curve is the top of a mountain. There are things that you can see, a perspective that you have that you can convey corporate memory to other people. And I need you to facilitate collaboration because you don't feel you're objective in that you are at the top of the mountain. You're also subjective because it's your company, and you care about people working together. Great example of this, of what this might look like, is a fellow named David Warson. He. He's an electrician. He worked at the furniture manufacturer Steel Case when he was 65. He's like, you know what? I don't really want to go. I'm not done. And so they did a phase retirement plan. It was good for him, and it was also great for the company because they had a lot of baby boomers who were leaving. So now you've learned it's time to leave. To be clear, it may be that people don't want to leave. And so that's a longer conversation, and we can come back to that. But usually people want to leave. And I think especially in this particular audience. So the way you help them leave is you come to their aid. First of all, you applaud their achievements. We memorialize when people have a promotion. We memorialize birthdays, we memorialize anniversaries. One of the things you want to do is say to yourself, okay, when you're at the bottom of the curve, I wanted you to accomplish this. Now that you're here, what good things happened because you were in this role, and take a moment and applaud it and acknowledge it. The second thing we want to do is, if you haven't already, is identify the new learning curve, and the third is deliver. You made a contract with them that if they would deliver for you in helping you climb the curve that you're on and getting work done, that you would now help them jump. So deliver on that. Advocate for them, be their sponsor. Let's do another poll. When was the last time you sponsored an S curve jump? So someone inside of your organization that you made it possible and maybe, yeah, made it possible for them to jump to a new learning curve.

Cool.

This is interesting because we're pretty young team. I guess many of us are at the bottom of the S curve just trying to stay up with what we're trying to build. In our case, could one even argue that sometimes you can have too many people at the bottom of the S curve and not enough people at the top?

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, I remember not too long ago, I was having a conversation with a person when I was at the Thinkers50 event, and she was telling me about how she was building this team, and she had like 25 people on her team, and half of them were at the low end of the curve. And so what you can do in those particular situations is you can basically synthesize a properly load balanced curve by bringing in a person, a ringer, you know, kind of someone who's at the top end of the curve for three months or six months, who can help you load balance and help bring along those people at the low end of the curve. Because yes, you can have too many at the low end, just like you can have too many at the high end. And you can then create a synthetically balanced curve in the short term by bringing in people who are experts in at different points of the curve.

Big caveat with the results.

Yep. So 12% said last month was the last time they actively sponsored the jump to a new curve of high potential. 31% said last year, 27% said in the last five years and 29% said never.

Okay, I have to say bravo again to all of you. I would have thought the never would be higher. Alex, any quick thoughts on your part?

No, but I have a question to you just seeing this also. I mean, one of the things I think that we might not be doing enough in some of the larger organizations in the world or established ones is help some of the people who have, you know, the potential to grow, maybe an internal growth engine to make that jump. Right. So rather than staying in a highly paid, you know, executive job where you're kind of working on your career, you know, furthering your career, saying, well, you know, I believe you'd be the perfect person to create, you know, one of our new growth engines, which is usually career suicide because nobody wants to be in innovation these days yet organizations are not, are not rewarding innovation, you know, enough yet. I guess, symbolically, do you see that connection as well that, you know, sometimes we're maybe missing out that sponsorship of asking some of our best executives who might have the profile for innovation and entrepreneurship to actually make that jump?

Yeah, absolutely. And again, I think part of the purpose for this book is that there's this, like you said, there's this sense of career suicide. I think the thing that to me is really important is oftentimes we will hear, hear ideas like this and think, well, if I could talk my boss into doing it right and then, and then we could do it. One of the things that's really important that was taught to me by my mentor and yours as well, Alex's Marshall Goldsmith, is that inside of an organization, as long as there's buy in for doing, making these jumps or you know, s curve jumps at the CEO level and then you, then you yourself as a boss are willing to let other people do it then it can be possible. I think it's super critical and I talk a little bit about this in the book of the importance of you as a manager when you're having these jumps happen, is to be able to say to people, okay, we're going to look at this, we're going to try this. We're going to have this person jump to this new curve. But there's risk in doing it. I think there is a 70% possibility that will work. There's a 30% possibility this person moving them to this new thing isn't going to work. It's an experiment. We think it's important for the organization. We think it's important for this person. Will you back me up with this experiment? I think that those kinds of conversations provided again that you've got the ultimate backing from the CEO. And I'm going to tell you a story about that in just a minute. I think that can go a long way to making it possible for people within your team, everybody who's listening to make some of those jumps so that it doesn't turn out to be suicide. And in fact, again, it ignites that engine of innovation because this person who's been at the top of the curve and is getting stale, but is brilliant is now at the bottom of the curve and saying, I don't know what I'm doing. And because they don't know what they're doing, they're going to figure out all sorts of interesting places for your organization to play.

Excellent. Good stuff.

Okay. All right, so let's go to the next slide. Now here's the thing. Kind of what you just asked Alex, you kind of previewed the question. What are some of those objections that people are going to have? Why would I move a star employee to a new role? Why would I hire someone with potential rather than accepting? And how is it possible that an underperformer in one role might be a standout in another? And so there is going to be a case that needs to be made. And the trick to doing this is based on behavioral psychology is just to make it scarier for them not to change. You can use a script that looks something like this. If you don't let that high performer do something new, allow them to to try something that will re engage them, you're going to lose them. And you just can't continue to like people right where they are because they won't stay. So if you don't help broker that in house, move to keep them stretching, they'll move to a different employer. Even if they do stay, they won't be engaged. And if they aren't engaged, they won't innovate. They may not even really work. And if they don't innovate, your company will become less competitive. Research says from Accenture that high performing companies surpass their peers on financial. Sorry, let me back up. High performing companies that surpass their peers on all financial metrics across business cycles are those that develop capabilities before they need them. The underperforming companies don't, and so they can't compete. To further bolster your case, I'm going to tell you a story to basically pack the parachute for getting buy in for what you're trying to do of having people jump S curves, you might want to tell them a story, something like this. Suppose for a moment that you are the VP of sales, one of 25, overseeing a billion dollar line of business and have a thousand reports. That's what the top of the S curve looks like for dan Shapiro at LinkedIn. So Dan started in 2008 in operations when there were 600 people, after performing well for two years in 2010. So he's moved up the curve. He jumps to the bottom of a new curve. He's in sales Now. It's a $50 million line of business. He's got eight reports, bottom of a curve. By 2013, he's up at the top of the curve. Three years later, it's a billion dollar line of business. Dan Shapiro has a walking meeting with the CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner. And he shares his dream. I want to become a tech company CEO someday. And Wiener says, if that's what you want, you're in the wrong job. You cannot get there from here. So Dan, after a huge bout of frustration, probably a little bit of sulking, he comes back and he says, okay, I'm ready. Let's build great products. Okay, think about this for a minute.