Workplace Cult of Disruption

Your Work Friends Podcast: The Problem with Change with Ashley Goodall

Change is worshipped in the workplace…

But at what cost? From reorgs to reinvention, disruption has become the workplace religion. For the past 10 years, organizations have not only been incented and are, seemingly addicted to change and disrupting their companies. Mergers, acquisitions, new leadership teams, new technologies, new strategies, new, new, new.   How do we get to this place where it really feels like we're all working constantly in a cult of disruption?

Ashley Goodall helps us unpack how we got here, why it’s exhausting everyone, and what leaders should be doing instead to create meaningful progress. Spoiler: there’s a better way.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

A sensible, healthy, capitalist, profit-maximizing organization will ask itself the question how can we help our employees do their best work first?

Speaker 2: 0:27

Hello friend.

Speaker 3: 0:29

Well, it's June. It's June in 2024. It is.

Speaker 2: 0:33

It's happening?

Speaker 3: 0:34

Do you guys go to the beach? Yes, we do go to the beach, so we live about an hour and a half two hours from the beach when you drive there. I swear to God, this is where they film all the car commercials because you can get on some really nice like serpentining switchbacky roads. They're all tree lined. You just imagine the Porsche commercial with the back tire kicking up leaves and that kind of stuff. It's a beautiful, beautiful drive and you live on the beach.

Speaker 2: 1:01

Well, I wish I lived on it live five like five minutes away. We just got our beach pass. I like to go early in the morning when no one's there, so I'll typically be there early and then I stay until noon and head out when all the people show up. Do you have an umbrella and stuff? If I stay there past noon, if it's going to be a full day thing, I have one of those tents that you, you. It has like a little window in the back and you see like I'll hang my legs out, but I am too Casper, the friendly ghost, to be out in that sun. I got melasma so bad one year. It looked like I had dirt on my forehead. What'd?

Speaker 3: 1:39

you do to get that off Like you're like right now? Yeah, Just eventually eventually rubbed off.

Speaker 2: 1:45

It just looked like I had a straight up patch of dirt on my forehead, like ash.

Speaker 3: 1:49

Wednesday was all here in the name of the father and the son. Yeah, oh, that's really funny, thank you.

Speaker 2: 1:57

Thank god for chemicals we are here because we met with leadership expert, consultant and author of several books, but the latest book, the Problem with Change, ashley Goodall.

Speaker 3: 2:11

He's held executive positions at Deloitte and at Cisco, heading up people organizations. Full disclosure Mel and I have both worked with Ashley in the past when our paths all crossed at Deloitte. What Ashley is really wonderful at is thinking about how humans can thrive in the workplace. And in order to do that, what do they need, mel? Stability, stability. I'll tell you, mel. When I read this book, I had two very distinct feelings. One was just total delight because the way the case was written around what work feels like right now was so absurd and so fucking accurate, at the same time that I was laughing through half of the book because I'm like, right, it was so relatable I'm thinking, yeah, man, I could have written these stories too, because this is a hundred percent the experience.

Speaker 3: 3:02

Yeah, especially in the last 10 years. You and I were talking like it doesn't feel like it's always been this way, but the last 10 years it's just gotten more and more and more.

Speaker 2: 3:11

Yeah, and change for change's sake not necessarily meaningful change, and it can feel that way sometimes that it's not meaningful, it's just to do it.

Speaker 3: 3:21

The other very distinct emotion I got was a massive sense of urgency, which is one of the reasons why we wanted to have Ashley on the pod, because it really does feel and the data is in that organizations are not only incented to disrupt and incented to change, ie, bring in mergers, re-strategize, reorg, bring new leaders in. Not only are they incented to do that, but they're almost addicted to it. How do we get to this place where it really feels like we're all working constantly in a cult of disruption? Because that all has a massive human toll, that all has a massive negative impact on companies' bottom line, and so we wanted to bring Ashley in to talk about this. And then what the hell do we do about it?

Speaker 2: 4:10

Yeah, Well, with that. Where's Ashley?

Speaker 3: 4:30

Ashley, welcome to the pod. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Speaker 1: 4:34

It's lovely to be here with you both.

Speaker 3: 4:36

Nice to see you. It's been a while. It's been a while.

Speaker 1: 4:40

I think it must be on the cusp of double-digit years, but we're all basically the same people we were.

Speaker 3: 4:46

A thousand percent. Maybe a little wiser, wiser Maybe.

Speaker 1: 4:52

A little calmer. Yeah, certainly smarter. We're definitely smarter than we were.

Speaker 3: 4:57

And we went through the plague. There's that.

Speaker 1: 4:59

Okay, and that's true. Yes, that's true, yeah, so yay, for the last 10 years.

Speaker 3: 5:03

Yeah, we're going to talk about cheat. One of the things that really struck me with this book was this life in the blender. While I was reading it, I was just like this has been my last 10 years of work, where here comes a merger and acquisition. We're going to re-strategize something. Oh, by the way, now we're going to switch up the leadership team. Oh hi, here's the management consulting firm coming in and they're in the era of the CHRO or they're in the era of the CEO, and now they're going to put their stamp on it. This was something that was like every 10 years, and then it was every five years, and now it's every two to three years, and there are some companies that it's almost every year. They're re-strategizing and it's just so much change that it makes it impossible to feel like you can get anything done, and there's like this massive human toll on it too. One of the things you talk about with the life in the blender is this idea that change doesn't equal improvement.

Speaker 1: 5:58

There's an experiment that I don't write about in the book, involving rats and pellets, so we should probably chat about rats and pellets for a quick. I'll do it, I'll do it.

Speaker 1: 6:06

And I haven't looked it up recently, but I know how it goes. So it goes like this you put a rat in a cage and there's a little lever or, as I say where I come from, a lever, and if the rat presses the lever or the lever, it gets a pellet of food sometimes and other times it doesn't. And so you can do this nice control condition and you can see how often does the rat press the lever if every time it presses it gets food, how often does it press it if it never gets food? And how often does it press it if it never gets food? And how often does it press it if it sometimes gets food. And the result is that the rat that always gets food doesn't press the lever very much because it just presses it when it's hungry and then goes off and has a rat nap somewhere. The rat that never gets food gives up really quickly because rats aren't stupid. The rat that sometimes gets food presses the lever like a maniac because it's like the spontaneous, the occasional reward drives this crazy behavior.

Speaker 1: 7:13

And in a way, listening to your narrative of we used to do change a little bit and now we've done it more, and then we've done it more. It's like we've only got one damn lever at work. It worked a couple of times a few years ago. Has anyone else got any ideas? I don't know. Let's press it again, shall we? It didn't work that time. Let's press it again. It still didn't work. And the rest of us now the rat metaphor fails a little bit are on the other end of the lever somewhere.

Speaker 1: 7:41

I think this idea of constant change, reinvention, transformation, disruption has become the only idea about how to run a company, which doesn't mean it never works. I think there's plenty of evidence that we've gone past the point where it's helping, certainly to the extent that we're doing it today. The irony of all of this is the godfather of disruption, if you like, is Clayton Christensen, who writes a book in 1997 called the Innovator's Dilemma, where he says the young upstarts companies will eat the lunch of the old, established companies because they have a different series of economic constraints and they have many more degrees of freedom, and so they can innovate and innovate, and innovate and innovate. And all of a sudden they go from a crappy product at a ridiculous price point with new customers to customers who suddenly flip from the established players to them because all of a sudden the price point got a little bit better. They got a minimum set of features and everyone can see the upside and hallelujah.

Speaker 1: 8:44

So if you're a big company, be really worried because the upstarts are going to going to take your business away. And everyone goes oh yes, kodak, yes, blockbuster, and you recite the litany of names, of which there are like there aren't 20, but anyway, um, but then you, if you actually read that book all the way to the end, you discover what his prescription is. And his prescription is if you're a big company, you're worried about being disrupted. What you should do is you take a small group of people, separate them from the company, either spin them out or make them a special product team, put them in a different place, wall them off. Give them a guaranteed budget. Give them a guaranteed budget. Give them a very clear mission. Keep a tight group of people. Don't change direction for a while, leave them alone and they will do the innovating for you. And what's that? That stability?

Speaker 3: 9:35

that's stability on both ends.

Speaker 1: 9:37

It's a stability in the legacy corp and in the incubator the innovators dilemma, said differently, is how can we create more stability at work? But no one has ever, to my knowledge, said that's what that book is about. It's actually a book about stability and you know we turn it into catchphrases and it's disrupt everything and disrupt yourself and fail fast and move fast and break things and all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. And here we are having a detailed conversation about how miserable change is at work. I don't think anyone ever intended that we get to this point, but I think we're massively in it now and I think we've got to come up with some different things.

Speaker 2: 10:15

This has a serious impact. This life in the blender is throwing so much around and if businesses are in this hamster wheel of every year you're making a change and you don't have the time or the runway to see the impact of that change and whether it's working before you change it again. So now it's this vicious cycle of the blender. Does it become critical that organizations start to create psychologically safe environments where people can say, hey, this is not a good idea. Do you think the C-suite is open to that? Or boardrooms are open to that?

Speaker 1: 10:49

So I wrote the book, partly out of the sneaking suspicion that C-suites were not aware of all of this. We need to raise our awareness of all of this stuff. Psychological safety is an interesting one. It's a real thing. It's very clear in the literature. That's a thing.

Speaker 1: 11:09

In our discussion of some of the other sort of psychological impacts of change, we can lose sight of the connection between the environment of work and the performance of humans, and it's too easy for people to go you know what. Suck it up. It's called work for a reason. We haven't created these institutions to make you lot happy. You don't get to feel good every day, you don't get to have your mental health and your psychological safety and all of these things, because this is the school of hard knocks. So I think the most important thing to do the whole time is to go listen. You could choose to create a healthy, supportive environment, because that's a good thing to do and you're a human too. But if that argument doesn't get you there, these things are what lead to performance or non-performance.

Speaker 1: 12:03

It is a silly way to run a company to subject it to life in the blender, to constant change, because what you're doing is removing the ability of your people to solve things for you or massively, ironically to innovate. Innovation doesn't come from change, it comes from stability. It comes from a predictable set of relationships and environments and rituals and rhythms that allow people to go all right. I don't have to worry about a whole bunch of stuff. I can focus my time and attention and creativity on a well-understood problem without having to worry that in three weeks' time, I'll have a new boss and I've got to explain what I'm doing to them, and then, three weeks after that, I'll have some other thing and some other thing, and some other thing and some other thing.

Speaker 1: 12:49

So the prescription for all of this is, for sure, change less, have a higher bar on all of this stuff. Understand that we are playing with fire here. Understand that the fire is not people's upset but people's performance. Understand you're dealing with that. And then, sure, we've got to change once in a while. But people have got to learn what stability looks like at work, what the inoculation is against change. And we've got to be very deliberate at creating stability at work, because as soon as you say that to anybody, as soon as you say, how about some stability? The people who are humans go. Oh yeah, that sounds really nice.

Speaker 2: 13:38

Relief right your shoulders drop.

Speaker 1: 13:42

I think that's the world people are imagining, where they say you know what? I believe in change. They're imagining a world where change comes, improvement comes from stability. That's what we're actually all trying to reach for.

Speaker 3: 13:56

Out of curiosity, when you talk to leaders that are sitting at a C-level and you're talking about this case for stability right, the problem with change the case for stability right, the problem would change the case for stability, what is?

Speaker 1: 14:07

their reaction. The ones I talk to, feel the tension between the pressure to change and the need to look after people. I haven't run into many people who would name it stability. So I think what I took away and again, I interviewed people up and down organizations for the book there are people who see quite clearly in executive positions the downside of change. We just haven't given them words and techniques for the counterforce thing. But the folks I spoke to, or the folks I speak to, are not going oh goodness me, I've got to turn down change and dial up stability. They're saying I've got to turn down change. And then what? And is there a way we need to teach leaders, we need to tell stories that the stuff that we all want in the changey change actually comes from the stability. And the stuff that we want in the changey change is performance. Innovation actually comes from stability more often.

Speaker 1: 15:21

It is not to do the jobs for them or tell them how to do their jobs or decide for them how their jobs are best to be done, or tell them how to do their jobs or decide for them how their jobs are best to be done. It is to pin back your ears and listen and look and offer and support and help. And again, the role of an organization is to support its employees in doing their best work, which doesn't start with ignoring the employees and deciding what best work looks like. It starts with paying attention to the employees and how best work happens and where it comes from and back to stability. It leads you to teams. It leads you to ritual. It leads you to helping build people's competence. It leads you to a whole bunch of stuff. But you don't follow the path to any of those things if you don't first understand that a sensible, healthy, capitalist, profit-maximizing organization will ask itself the question how can we help our employees do their best work?

Speaker 3: 16:24

first, Work first. So much of this I am wondering is this on the capability of leaders. When I think about the people that are making the decisions about the change, the transformation, in my experience a lot of those people have MBB firms in their ears telling them this is what your competition's doing, this is what the market's doing. They have pressures from various stakeholders the stock market, the board. You have to keep up. You have to keep up. Some of the reason why we're here is because leaders have the lack of capability to lead.

Speaker 1: 17:06

We can offer a couple of candidate explanations. Right, one is that leaders are living in an ecosystem that demands this stuff and the ecosystem you've named, I think, many of the bits of it. There is a stock market and, by the way, the stock market isn't a person, but the people who analyze the stock market are people, and they've learned that shareholder value is the most important thing. Then there are the people who tell the CEOs what to do, and they're the activist investors and the consultants and the investment bankers, by the way, and they've been brought up in all of this and you keep going down the chain to who are all the decision makers and what are the unwritten truths or, in many cases, the written scale quotes truths of this world, and a lot of it is. We have to maximize shareholder value, even though we can't measure it over any sort of decent time frame or human time frame. At any rate, you run into the sort of idea that you have to take dramatic action, and if you're not taking dramatic action, somebody else will and your competitors will. So there's a lot of reinforcement of a set of ideas and not a lot of people standing up and going hang on a second.

Speaker 1: 18:31

But the alternate concept of work might be run an organization so that its employees can offer their best and reason up from that, up and out from that idea. Up and out from that idea, and that's not crazy in terms of looking after the interests of owners or the interests of customers or the interests of God, help us employees. But that's not the place we live today. We live in a place where there are certain accepted truths about how you run a company and you get to look after the employee stuff until you feel it conflicts with the set of accepted truths, at which point you snap back into the set of accepted truths and you do the layoff and you do the restructuring and you do the spinoff and you do the spin-in, the spin in, and in between them you say words like people are our greatest asset, and everybody rolls their eyes and they put up with it because apparently not many people can think of a different way of doing all of this. But yeah, there is an ecosystem component to all of this, I think.

Speaker 3: 19:40

My concern with that is when that ecosystem is running on quarters like we need to see improvement. We need to see impact financially within the next three months. That's the way almost every organization is living right now. I've seen so many organizations do this as of late. They're needing to make an impact. One of the lever levers is absolutely change and another one is dump the people, get rid of these people. How do you think most organizations view people, view their employees?

Speaker 1: 20:15

I think that many leaders are actually sincerely torn because they can see enough of the ecosystem and they can see enough of the humans and they know that the layoff isn't a wonderful thing to do. And they probably know in the back of their minds that if you do the layoff and the market doesn't like it, that will be the wrong outcome. But if you do the layoff and the market likes it for a couple of days, that will be the right outcome. And they probably also know at the same time that's not the leader they set out to be when they were more junior. I think if you give leaders the benefit of the doubt, you can imagine a leader sincerely and honestly conflicted about all of this. My point would be, to the extent that's true, could you choose option B once in a while? Could you actually choose the people once in a while, or could we have a conversation about starting with the people once in a while, as opposed to the needs of the machine must always drive what we do, because we can't stop the machine, because it's something, sooner or later you go. The machine is us. Come on, folks, we can decide to stop the machine. One way to stop the machine is to take your company private. For goodness sakes, it was Francesca.

Speaker 1: 21:54

You and I have a history at Deloitte, and Deloitte does not worry about what's going on this quarter with nearly the intensity that public companies do, and so Deloitte, in a way, has a different attitude, and private companies have a different attitude to their investors which, by the way, is weird because they're more intimate with their investors, because most of the investors are the partners who are walking up and down the corridors every day. So it's like the private company world has a closer relationship with its owners, which allows them to be long-term thinkers Isn't that strange? Which allows them to be long-term thinkers, isn't that strange? And that the public company world has a much more arm's length relationship with many of its investors at least, which forces them to do short-term things. It's because there isn't a relationship there. It does strike me that when you change the context in which leaders are asked to make decisions, then they can tilt more towards people. I remember one of the things I was most impressed by in my time at Deloitte was what Deloitte did in the Great Recession.

Speaker 3: 23:02

I know that I use this story. Yeah, tell the story, because this is that you tell the story. You tell the story. We'll see if we're telling the same story. It'd be funny.

Speaker 1: 23:11

Fabulous, there were two great stories, yeah yeah, so mine is that deloitte said look, there are some storm clouds on the horizon. So what we would do if we were to do the usual thing would be fire a whole bunch of people and try and weather the storm and then, probably in a couple of years, we'll hire them back again. But that's silly, isn't it? Because we're going to upturn a whole bunch of lives and already things are pretty bad because it's 2008. And we know what was going on in 2008. And so we'll upturn a bunch of lives and then we'll have a whole bunch of hiring costs that we don't need. So we're going to go.

Speaker 1: 23:48

The quote, the phrase I always remember was we're going to go long on people and we're going to carry those extra costs and we're going to take it out of the partners pockets, and the partners will support this, and the partners did support this. And we are going to put people first so that when the storm passes we are more strongly positioned to face into the future. And it worked, and it was just massively sensible. And it shouldn't be the only example I can think of that in the last quarter century. That's the thing that really upsets me.

Speaker 1: 24:26

I'm sure there are other examples that I haven't come across yet, but that's a terrifyingly rare thing for a company to do, and I think if a public company did that today, they would be in all sorts of trouble because the ecosystem would go you people are crazy and the activist investor would show up and go. I'm going to have a proxy fight with you guys now, because you shouldn't be allowed to run this company and the institutional investors would go. You just sank the stock price, so blah blah, blah, blah blah. Was that your story?

Speaker 3: 24:54

No, it wasn't my story. But during the same amount of time and I might be getting these wrong right, big fish stories periodically might have embellished, but during the same time.

Speaker 1: 25:06

Did you say big fish as a verb?

Speaker 3: 25:08

I did. That works, I know, there you go Big fish. Okay, so 2008,. Right, so they went long on people. Another way I remember them going long on people was deciding to build Deloitte University, oh yeah, so not only are we going to go long on people by holding our people and keeping them, but we're also asking for a capital call of the partners, and if you don't know what that is, hey, partners, I need everyone to cough up I'm making this up $100,000 to build a corporate university which, by the way, this was not something that people were doing, because we want this to be this cultural hub to invest in people. As a evidence, proof point of going along on people, again, while everyone was cutting, they went long, and the thing that I think about, though, is that was 2008. It was a recent example.

Speaker 1: 25:59

Our listeners need to write in.

Speaker 3: 26:01

Yes.

Speaker 1: 26:03

Goodness me gosh, how old do I sound. Write in on an envelope, put a stamp on it. Goodness me gosh, how old do I sound. Write in on an envelope, put a stamp on it and send it to us at PO Box, goodness knows what. There are quite a few firms that have gone private recently because they want to exit the quarter-by-quarter ecosystem, the activist-investor ecosystem. There are probably other examples out there of having greater freedom as a private organization. But the answer to all of this can't be go private. It can't be. If you're a large company, that means you've got to find hundreds of billions of dollars. The answer to all of this has got to be have better companies. Yes, people have better companies. How are we going to do that?

Speaker 3: 26:42

Yeah, or going back to every once in a while not even all the time, but every once in a while going along on your people, like making that courageous decision potentially to go along or getting good at the difference between change and improvement.

Speaker 1: 26:56

Everyone's interested in improvement. That's fine. That's actually what the activist people want and the consultants want and the investment bankers want and the analysts want. They actually want improvement, but we've just lost the ability to distinguish between change and improvement. So every change looks like a good change and off we go. How can we make things better?

Speaker 1: 27:29

You have to start with the recognition that change and improvement aren't the same thing. I think people at work know that and most people know a half-baked idea fairly quickly when they see it coming baked idea fairly quickly when they see it coming. And it is career suicide to raise your hand more than a couple of times. So the serious point here is we cannot say in organizations tell us if this is a bad idea, because we've created again a power structure and ecosystem where it's hard for people to tell you. If you're a leader, you've got to get curious and you've got to get skeptical about all of this stuff and you have to think much harder about whether I am in change creating. As you mentioned a moment ago, mel learned helplessness. So people have such a lack of control that all they feel like doing is phoning it in every day, or you're creating anxiety, control that all they feel like doing is phoning it in every day, or you're creating anxiety, or you're upsetting teams, or you're disturbing people's sense of place or meaning or any of those things. But we have to teach leaders, they have to be the ones doing this, and we have to explain what no one has ever explained to them before that this stuff ain't always a good thing and it has some very serious psychological consequences. And if you're in the business of improving an organization, then very serious psychological consequences are things that generally you want to avoid. We need to train leaders massively more intensively and massively differently than we do it today, because we've all seen this Most leadership training in organizations is a sort of afterthought and we very often give people the job of a leader before we train them to do the job of a leader.

Speaker 1: 29:15

And you don't do this for surgeons or for pilots or for anyone who's got somebody else's life in their hands, or for any job where it's really important to be good at it, but somehow we do it for leaders as though, yeah, the leader thing. Look, you were the best of the people at doing the follower job. So we gave you the leader job and the trainings in six months, and meanwhile, here are some articles all about change and disruption. You'll enjoy them Off, you go, good luck. And then what's the person? Do they look around and go? What are all the other leaders doing? They're doing reorgs. They're doing disruption oh dear, I'd better do that as well. And we again perpetuate a cycle of leadership capabilities you were asking Francesca a little while ago about. Is this about leadership capability? I think for sure. It's about leadership training, it's about leadership selection, it's about leadership support. It's about the leadership infrastructure and ecosystem of our organizations in a very significant way.

Speaker 3: 30:15

If I could add one to it and I'd be curious about your reaction to this the cohesion of the leadership team as well. I've seen senior leadership teams where the loudest voice in the room gets the win, and if you can't dissent, or if you can't at least understand how to work together as a leadership team, I don't think your organization has a chance. When you look at leadership teams that don't have a healthy cohesion or a healthy dissent ability, your organization is pretty screwed.

Speaker 1: 30:42

And what does that team therefore lack? It lacks a sense of belonging, it lacks a sense of place, it lacks a sense of meaning, it lacks a sense of certainty, it lacks a sense of predictability, it lacks a sense of control. It is a failing team because the place where all of the things that we're talking about either thrive or wither is on a team. And, yeah, if the top team doesn't experience stability, doesn't know how to foster its own stability, then, yeah, good luck everybody else.

Speaker 2: 31:16

It's interesting, especially if stability is the name of the game, right? One of the use cases is around the onboarding of leaders. When you think about a leader's first 90 days either a new in an organization or just new in their role there is this expectation that they've changed something, that they've innovated on something. Do we start there? Is that the lowest denominator to say stop having this expectation for new leaders?

Speaker 1: 31:41

It is part of the ecosystem thing as well, isn't it? Because we teach people to come in and make change in the first 90 days. Therefore, change is the thing that leaders do. Therefore, new leaders must come and make change. It would be a lovely and fascinating exercise to say to a leader all right, in your first 90 days, I want you to discover everything that's working and elevate those things and explain to everybody why.

Speaker 1: 32:10

Those are examples of the sorts of things you, as a leader, want to build in an organization and just completely flip the script. If you flipped it that way, you would be building massive stability for people, which goes here's who we are eternally. Here's how we do our work eternally. Here's what we value eternally. Here's who we seek to serve eternally. We're going to keep all of those, honor those, elevate those, preserve those, and over here, x and Y. We need to find a better way of doing these things. Can you help? For me at least, that's a very psychologically healthy way of beginning a narrative that feels like an improvement narrative, not a change narrative. Now, this whole conversation is about a hell of a lot more than the narrative, but it is interesting to just try on a few words for size and see how they make you feel as a leader or as an employee, and to see if we've actually put the emphasis on the wrong syllable when it comes to all. Things change and we should emphasize some stability too.

Speaker 1: 33:47

So Mel and I like to do this thing with our guests called rapid round, ideally quick short answers.

Speaker 3: 33:50

However, if you met me, I know I understand, I get it, I get. But this is the thing, this if we need to go off, we need to go off on the scenic route. That's the point. It's fine, it's fine, it's fine. All right, are you ready to play ash Ashley?

Speaker 1: 34:00

The medium quick, medium rapid round. Yes, I am.

Speaker 2: 34:04

We're not willing to take a stand on anything. Hopefully this is a fun one for you. In your book you mentioned the word disrupt. Gets folks extra bonus biz dude points which crack me up. What buzzwords would you like to see die off already?

Speaker 1: 34:24

you like to see die off already. Strategic, which is not considered a buzzword, but is affixed to the front of far too many things to make them sound better than they are and to paper over a lot of very lazy thinking. So you just have to call it an asset. It's not a strategic asset. You have to call it an investment, not a strategic investment, and we can save a few syllables from the world.

Speaker 2: 34:43

I appreciate it. Let's simplify. What new buzzwords are on the horizon that you're like? Let's stop this immediately, before this catches on.

Speaker 1: 34:53

AI is getting.

Speaker 2: 34:54

Oh.

Speaker 1: 34:54

Jesus up to everything.

Speaker 2: 34:56

Truly.

Speaker 1: 34:57

And some things that are AI, which is a thing, but plenty of things that aren't AI and that are actually just math or an algorithm, but it's AI, this and AI, this and AI, this and AI is the new blockchain, because a few years ago it was we'll do this on the blockchain and this on the blockchain and this on the blockchain and this on the blockchain, and sooner or later, you just want to go shut up and sooner or later, you just want to go shut up. Ai is terrifying, I think for me certainly, because it seems to remove humans from a lot of necessarily human interactions, and you've got to ask yourself where does that point to? But I don't think we help by affixing AI on the front of things that aren't AI-like.

Speaker 3: 35:38

All right. What would you like to see CEOs do more of? Lesson how about less of? What would you like to see them do? Less of?

Speaker 1: 35:53

Change for the sake of change. By the way, can I go back now? I'm going to go back to my prior answer Listen. There is an art to listen I don't just mean be conversationally savvy. Create the systems and structures to understand the experience of work on the front lines and then pay attention to that so that there is like an infrastructure that needs to happen yeah, but listening to occur I love that answer.

Speaker 3: 36:14

There's a very deep schism a lot of times between the front line and leadership and, quite honestly, we have all the tools Qualtrics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah to do that efficiently. It's just listen to it and maybe do something with it. Would be nice too.

Speaker 1: 36:28

But you have to make it a priority and you have to realize that the things that people tell you are not the whole story.

Speaker 3: 36:33

Fair. Yeah, All right. Same question for CHROs, our chief HR officers. A lot of times they are in the ear of the CEO and the people voice sometimes, but what would you like to see them do more of?

Speaker 1: 36:56

I wrote a chapter about it in the book Advocate for Employees. And again, that's a hard thing because of the business decisions we want to make and not necessarily come up to the C-suite and go. You shouldn't do this because this will create uncertainty, anxiety, unbelonging displacement, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. You shouldn't do it. But I would like to see CHROs feel the necessity of doing that more. And, by the way, to give another answer to one of the prior quickfire questions, which is now a slow fire question, I'd like to see CEOs demand that of their heads of HR more. I'd like to see more CEOs go. You know what we actually do, really need to change the balance on the people stuff. And so, head of hr, that's on you, and if you come and tell me we've got the balance wrong, I'm gonna listen to you yes or no?

Speaker 3: 37:53

do you believe most hr organizations are working in benefit of their people?

Speaker 1: 37:57

I think they're missing a few things, like if you look at the way HR is structured. It's structured to support business leaders. Mainly it's structured around business priorities. I've spent countless hours sitting in HR off sites where HR says, all right, as good citizens of life in the blender, we're going to change our strategy. What should the new strategy be? And someone around the table goes we should start with the business strategy and then we should figure out the people implications of the business strategy and that will tell us the HR strategy won't hit. That's an incomplete answer. Yes, it is, because the other part is what do the humans need? And the humans don't need the business strategy. The humans need the conditions of human performance. So those are things we could bring those into the conversation. We could bring those into the strategy.

Speaker 1: 38:45

I would love a stability governance organization in a company. What would stability governance look like? You can imagine HR playing that role. It doesn't at the moment. How do we train leaders, how do we listen and how do we deploy ourselves so that we understand the experience on the front lines? Because, again, most of the time you have to be a business of a certain size to get one HR person who has then massively run off their feet trying to keep up with the leaders charging around doing the business strategy stuff. Their feet trying to keep up with the leaders charging around doing the business strategy stuff. We've got to figure out a way of rethinking that so that we expand HR's portfolio to include the conditions of human performance, because, goodness me, those should live somewhere in our organizational construct.

Speaker 3: 39:34

Yeah, and right now it's like learning and development. Sometimes it's looking at the talent management team and being like aren't you doing that? Are you doing that? Because I'm not doing that, that's not my domain, so it doesn't feel like it's something that is its own entity and needs to be its own entity.

Speaker 1: 39:46

And there's a little bit more to continue my very long answer to this now.

Speaker 1: 39:50

Not at all quick fire. This is the slow fire round that. When HR talks about performance, we get very quickly to performance management and skills and all the things that we can capture in spreadsheets and that the software gives us. But if you go and talk to people on the front lines about what are the ingredients of performance, they go a leader who talks to me in language I understand, a sense of predictability and a set of relationships on my team and there is no line item budget in HR for those things. So the definition of performance needs to be agreed and understood, because HR doesn't actually map to those things. Hr maps to things that you hand money to vendors for, and those things are good organizational administration things, but if you think that those are the same as performance things, then you have a very strange idea of what performance looks like.

Speaker 3: 40:55

Ashley, thanks so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure seeing you and chatting.

Speaker 1: 41:00

Lovely, lovely to catch up, and let's do this again soon.

Speaker 3: 41:03

Thanks so much for joining us today. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can come over and say hi to us on the TikToks and LinkedIn community. Hit us up at yourworkfriends.com. We're always posting stuff on there and if you found this episode helpful, share with your work friends, Thanks Fred.

The Human Debt of Tech at Work

Your Work Friends Podcast: Human Debt with Duena Blomstrom

Humans aren’t just resources…

But we’ve been treating them like they are. We sat down with Duena Blomstrom, author and Human Debt expert, to unpack what happens when companies prioritize speed, systems, and output over emotional wellbeing—and how to fix it. If your workplace is running on burnout, blurred boundaries, and broken trust, this conversation is the reset you didn’t know you needed.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

I'm wondering if you can explain it to our listeners like a five-year-old. What is human debt?

Speaker 2: 0:07

To five-year-olds it would be difficult because they would have to assume that the enterprise is an honest place where good things should have happened. So I can't do that, but I can explain it to a 35-year-old.

Speaker 1: 0:19

Let's do it, let's do it, let's do it. What's going on, mel, hey, hey, how's it going?

Speaker 3: 0:39

It's good. It's good. I cannot believe we are almost a month away from fall.

Speaker 1: 0:45

I know we are 40 days left of summer, though Plenty of time. Did you get your beach day in? Not a day.

Speaker 3: 0:53

I did get two hours, but Robbie and I are planning a trip to Block Island, which, for those of you who don't know, is off the coast of Rhode Island. It's gorgeous, and that will be our beach day, hopefully at the end of this month. How about you? Very nice, very nice.

Speaker 1: 1:09

We are taking a trip up to Mount Rainier, which, yeah, I don't know if anyone else does this. We've lived in Portland for about four years now and I looked at a map the other day and was like wow, mount St Helens is like an hour and a half away, never been. Was like wow, mount.

Speaker 1: 1:24

St Helens is like an hour and a half away. Never been right. Mount Rainier, super close like these, beautiful, you know experiences and we're just like we want to go to JCrew this weekend. So like, yeah, we are. So we rented like a cool cabin. The Airbnb market around Mountain Towns is just stunning. I mean funny. Also, you can you can rent someone's trailer, you can rent a yurt, you can rent, you know, a cabin that looks like it's totally set up to be instagrammable, that kind of stuff I've always wanted to stay in a yurt.

Speaker 3: 1:54

I don't know what it is, I'm like same such a fun tent I'm not a camping person.

Speaker 1: 2:00

I love to hike and be outdoors and I want to be in a room with a whack, yeah a yurt is the nice middle ground.

Speaker 3: 2:06

It's like a nice middle ground between a tent and a house.

Speaker 1: 2:10

Yeah, yeah. Do you think you could just buy a yurt on Amazon? You could buy anything on Amazon.

Speaker 3: 2:15

I know, like Timu, I've not ordered anything from Timu, have you?

Speaker 1: 2:19

No, but I really want to just to see what comes. I do too.

Speaker 3: 2:23

You know what it makes me wonder. I have the funniest story when my niece was going through this donut obsession for like ever, as you do, as you do, and I saw this donut chair on Amazon and I thought it was like a person-sized donut chair and then she got it for her birthday and it was a chair for her cell phone. So I imagine this shopping experience at Timo is kind of like me not paying attention to the dimensions of her donut chair.

Speaker 1: 2:51

That's why I want it. That's why I want it. Like, did you just spend $150 on a thing for yourself?

Speaker 3: 2:55

Yeah, it was like the dumbest thing ever, yeah, oh that's funny, god, I love shit like that. Yeah, I'm a big fan.

Speaker 1: 3:02

Mystery packages, mystery packages. Aren't you a big fan of, like the mystery bags, like $5, what's in the bag. It could be anything Like such a sucker for that Huge.

Speaker 3: 3:12

Where do people get those? You know like those mail bins, like unclaimed mail, and then they just buy an entire pallet.

Speaker 1: 3:25

I want to in on a palette with you Nordstrom returns, amazon returns. What do you get? What are you going to get? Yeah, oh, we got to do this. Yeah, when we make our first million, we'll get a palette.

Speaker 3: 3:31

We'll do a live unboxing.

Speaker 1: 3:35

It's irregular jeans. We have 45 packs of irregular jeans. These are our dreams $501 sunglasses. Yes, oh God, I love every minute of it. Well, no, we talked to someone super duper cool this summer.

Speaker 3: 3:53

Oh, yes, duena, I love her. Yeah, yeah, tell us about Duena doing things that don't take care of their people and their employees. And her whole discussion was on how to recognize if you have human debt. Every organization, just like tech debt, has human debt, and she was addressing ways that you can recognize it and ways that you can address it. It's a really interesting concept that we need to start talking about more. And she's done a million other things. She has a podcast called Mero Spicy at Work Tech, not People is a book that she's written. She's a keynote speaker. She's just an overall powerhouse.

Speaker 1: 4:52

Talk about a renaissance woman that's out there just doing good.

Speaker 3: 4:55

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:56

And has done good too. Right, human debt is one of those things where, if you don't know the term, when you have her explain what it is, what happened to me is like oh, I have felt this, I know exactly what this is, when you feel like the reciprocity and the relationship with your organization is off balance massively. I loved talking about what it looks like and feels like with her, but also, and probably most importantly, what can we do about it as organizations and, most importantly, as individuals? Because it starts with us one-on-one.

Speaker 3: 5:30

One-on-one we're humans at the end of the day, we're humans. I'm only human. Sorry for the woo-woo everyone. That's who we are. I love everything about this. She's just fantastic. So we hope that you get a lot out of this episode, folks, and let us know what you think. Here's to one-off Welcome friends.

Speaker 3: 6:14

We are super excited to welcome Dwayna Blomstrom. She is the author of Emotional Banking, people Before Tech, the Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age and an upcoming book called Tech-Led Culture. She is also an international keynote speaker, the co-founder of Tech-Led Culture People, not Tech companies that are really offering a human work platform, providing a framework to usher in a new tech-led culture of humanity in the workplace. She is one of the top voices on LinkedIn. She has an amazing newsletter that I follow the Future of Agile, as well as Chasing Psychological Safety. She's also a podcaster, like us. She's the co-host of NeuroSpicy at Work, which I'm excited to listen to.

Speaker 3: 6:58

The Secret Society of Human Work Advocates the People in Tech podcast, tech-led Culture and, married to Tech Duenna, that's a lot. So we just want to say wow, you've accomplished quite a great deal in influencing the working world in general in a very positive way. I love that you're calling out how we need to prioritize humanity in the workplace. Tell us, how did you get started in this space? What really inspired you to get started in this space?

Speaker 2: 7:29

Oh, only that. Let's see, that's an easy one to start with. We should have started with the harder ones. I don't think I've had any kind of inspiration. I didn't want to get started in this space at all. I don't know really many people that woke up going. I shall be in this space. So I think, like all of us, I just happened into it. I happened to see what looked to me like vast injustices and I had to do something about them.

Speaker 2: 7:56

I don't think I ever chose anything and I don't know if I might ask you what is this path we're talking about? What exactly have I chosen? Because if you ask me, none of the things have really been the ones that I've necessarily went after, but the things that have happened to me. I hear this a lot from other people that are AUADHD and have worked in the business world. I feel like careers have never been designed. We just fell where we fell and then we put all of our passion into something, learned all of the things, possibly got bored with that particular topic and moved on to the next.

Speaker 2: 8:32

Industry Happened to me a couple of times. I would say I started in psychology, obviously, but then I very quickly moved into business and did kind of technology and got excited when the internet boomed, when the financial technology side of things boomed, and learned everything there was to learn about it. But then the more I I put my head into it, the more I realized these are bigger human issues and I had to get my head out of the small holes. I was so pleased tinkering in, like every other autistic person that I have employed in my life not everybody else and yeah, I didn't choose anything. It's become a vocation, more than a day-to-day nine-to-five.

Speaker 3: 9:15

Yeah, that makes sense. I can totally relate. Francesca and I often talk about how we fell into our roles and then you just become the expert while you're doing it and quickly get bored and move on to the next. What's the next thing? So that makes total sense to me.

Speaker 2: 9:30

No one I don't believe wakes up at five and goes. I desperately want to be the uh back-end developer of apis. It's not a life-saving. It's very hard to attach the meaning to it, but we find other things at work that do that and I don't think there's anyone in the workplace that's not hundred thousand percent burning for something.

Speaker 1: 9:54

It's an interesting. People feel that. They feel that either that line between I'm not passionate about my work, but I'm doing this for the money and I'm doing this to bring home a paycheck, or they're burning out or they're feeling all of the impacts of the way that organizations are set up. And one of the concepts you talk about is human debt, and I love that. I'm wondering if you can explain it to our listeners like a five-year-old. What is human debt?

Speaker 2: 10:24

like a five-year-old. What is human debt To five-year-olds? It would be difficult because they would have to assume that the enterprise is an honest place where good things should have happened. So I can't do that, but I can explain it to a 35-year-old.

Speaker 2: 10:37

Let's do it, let's do it and there's probably different explanations to a 25-year-old, a 35-year-old, a 55-year-old and so on, but for everyone we should have done right. As employers, we should have done a set of things. As organizations, we should have come to the table in a certain fashion when we offer whatever it is that we offer in this contract of work, and those things haven't happened. So I'll expand in a second. It's every time that the organization hasn't done the things that they should have done and by those taking care of their employees in monetary and emotional fashion. So, for instance, all the things that most organizations will tell you they have but they don't really have. All of your failed dni programs. All of your stages of leadership with no explanation. All of the times when they should have been respectful to the conversation and the communication and never happened. All of the times when we promised our people a promotion and then we forgot, as if it never really was going to materialize anyways. All of the times when we presided over unpleasant and bullish behaviors, because think of a wrong in the workplace and think how it has never been addressed and think that will become your debt as an organization, because the more of these instances that you have as an organization where you have failed your people. Most of these are not going to be recorded anywhere, but they will exist in something like the, and I never thought about it until right now, but it's almost the antithesis of culture. It's an anti-culture vessel in the back of everyone's mind going. These motherfuckers have effed other people up. It may not have been me, but it has happened here. You know.

Speaker 2: 12:35

What happens is you then sit on an organization that has a debt and you can decide to pay it off and start treating your people better, figure out what they hate you for and when, and then make them love you again, or you can decide to ignore it, which is the case for a vast majority of most enterprises today. You can pretend it's not a problem. You can better your retention programs instead or put more money in position. I don't know what else we're doing than that, if I'm honest. So if you as an organization decide to not pay off this human debt, what happens eventually is that you become unviable. I believe that they will not be around. I'm not saying we should never get debt, right? If I'm talking to particularly your listeners must be Americans. You're fine with that. Question is when do we start paying this off?

Speaker 1: 13:23

Yeah, it was super fair. When I was growing up, my parents always talked about this idea of reciprocity and relationships. Right, Even on a one-to-one level. You are going to have moments where you're going to withdraw from the emotional bank account and you're going to have moments where you're going to have to deposit in the emotional bank account, and sometimes it's going to be uneven, but ideally, in the long arc, you have a balanced bank account. And this is one of these concepts where I feel like this happens on an individual level To your very good point. It happens on an organizational level and you feel it. You feel it, that's right.

Speaker 2: 13:57

Yeah, everyone knows it Exactly that I'm saying and what you said, that when you said you feel it. We know what we're all about, everyone knows. And it's that email we didn't answer. It's that person. We told them to have themselves in a corner because they weren't their fault, it was the bloody system or whatever. It's that time when we didn't keep a promise. It's that time when we didn't help a friend or we let them fall on a sword, becoming debts that you carry. As a human, workplace should care about those bits, because I'm not a different human, but outside of that, we're not entities that exist. Why would the workplace as well that claims it has regulated method in which it will not, if you over, do that to you is my question. So I'm on a work path with human debt in general, but the one at work is just shameful if you ask me I am curious about, on an organizational level, what are they supposed to do?

Speaker 2: 14:56

Fair question. It's massive. What is anyone supposed to do?

Speaker 1: 14:59

I don't know. Yeah, be cooler, be a nicer person. I don't know. Don't be a dick.

Speaker 2: 15:04

I'm a dick. That is the answer. But regulating against dickery is not the answer. Making people genuinely not biddicks is probably the answer. And if they genuinely wanted to do something, then there would be no employee that wasn't through a level of Communist Party from 1955, re-education camps of what the bloody hell an emotion is, because that's the level we need to get our leadership through before we will be able to engage with this very new generation that speaks emotions like that.

Speaker 2: 15:37

And if you are in a leadership position or you are engaged in teamwork and you haven't had it that to me doesn't recommend you to exist in the workplace at all, because what they're using, and what we're all using, is this lack of education to say I don't quite know, we don't quite engage like that at work. So, in between the armor of professionalism and this insanity of I don't know much about emotions I'm not a psychologist how am I supposed to engage any better? What happens is we cannot communicate and we cannot collaborate at work and we sure as fuck cannot lead anybody. That's the problem we have. If you're losing money anywhere the workplace you're losing on the fuckers you're keeping who are lying. You don't have emotions. If we're going to keep them. We can't just flush these people out.

Speaker 2: 16:22

I remember starting in the business world and everyone telling me to not worry in banking. We don't need to change all the systems In time, we'll just replace them with the people and everything. Come on, these guys only have one more board meeting. The amount of times I heard that you'd be surprised. That's not the way to be doing life. I am not supposed to wait anyone out to die because it's uncomfortable for me to speak about real things.

Speaker 1: 16:46

We hear it all the time, though All the time. He's not going anywhere. Blah, blah, blah, Like it happens all the time.

Speaker 2: 16:53

But people are using it as excuses.

Speaker 3: 16:56

Yeah, they absolutely are.

Speaker 1: 16:57

What's fascinating about this, though, is that, when you look at all of the research about great leadership, great team dynamics, innovation, engagement, it harkens on those things that people are emotionally intelligent, that they do make space for things like psychological safety, like that they understand their own limitations, and all of those things make for great performance, but it also means that you need to get your own shit together. Do you understand how you operate? Do you understand where your pitfalls are? Do you understand how you need to flex for your team? And vice versa? I think our leaders in organizations that grew up with my joke is, they grew up with this like Shackleton view of leadership, which is I'm strong, I have no emotions, I'm going to just push my way through, as opposed to really thinking about what works to lead people through what we're going through, what we're about to go through.

Speaker 2: 17:52

And.

Speaker 1: 17:52

I know Mel's probably so sick of hearing me say this, but there is not a person on the planet that has led through what we're going through and what we're about to go through. When you think about the speed of business, when you think about AI the amount of wars happening cultural and on the ground. When you think about AI, the amount of wars happening cultural and on the ground it's too much for a lot of people and to deny your humanity in that versus to lean into it, is not the right move.

Speaker 2: 18:15

But we have done it in the workplace for the last X amount of years. We need such a blank slate reset. You asked me earlier what needs to happen. What needs to happen is everyone needs to shut down, come back with a new plan. That's what needs to happen.

Speaker 3: 18:29

In addition to blowing up the workplace, people need to blow up the concept of what work means in their life. Right, there's a reset that needs to happen on a personal level as well as the organizational level.

Speaker 2: 18:43

You hit the nail on the head Disconnect between what work can and is and should be. It's not even a genuine, open conversation. Big concepts are up in the air. Who am I? What is work? What is the point of me as a human? What if your worth as a human is never about how much money you make?

Speaker 2: 19:01

What if we start remunerating people on being emotionally intelligent or remunerating people on being kind intelligent or remunerating people on being kind or taking up someone else's work for a second instead, because we haven't taught them the right things, in particular men, the same men that we are upset at.

Speaker 2: 19:17

How very dare they be a shithead and whatever shit. We put them there and we said all you need to do is tell me what to do and then I will execute on it. And no, that isn't, isn't the ask? The ask is that you check yourself, that you sit with being uncomfortable, that you understand your emotions, that you communicate efficiently, that you care about me. Those are the asks. With that said, there are companies out there, there are enterprises out there, there are combinations of people out there and groups that have gathered in a way that allow them to see each other, that allow them to get psychological safety to be real teams to go real fast, and those are the people that will get us out of the workplace if we don't want to also match them, not AI or anybody else. So literally, being a human is the only USB we're going to be asked to bring.

Speaker 3: 20:07

Yeah, we don't have anything if we don't have our humanity. We just talked about AI, and one thing we do know is that maintaining our humanity and bringing our full human selves is going to be more important than anything. So you talk a lot about tech debt. What is tech debt?

Speaker 2: 20:34

That's easier when you write code, when you're heart of heart as a programmer. That you could have potentially written it a little bit better is the only way to put it. You could have tested it more or you could have double checked something. But what has been prized in the software development world has always been speed of delivery. So the first answer you get off of Google is the one you get in. I'm joking, it's not quite that easy, but it takes a little bit more than that to be a programmer, but not a whole lot more, let me tell you.

Speaker 2: 21:01

That said, it's a natural thing to incur technical debt as you write, because if you write code fast, some of it won't work, some of it will get old, some of it will need a rewrite. What happens when you have a lot of this code that's not brilliant accumulating, is that you have to do a full rewrite of your code base, and anyone in technology knows that's the kiss of death for any CTO or any team attempting to exist. So you don't want to get to a place where you have to throw away everything you've written. When it comes to tech debt, it comes to bite you and your system stops working if you don't start fixing it. So the same way that they're supposed to be going back and fixing bits and pieces of that tech debt where it will make sense, so that the entire thing doesn't crash, that is how I'm saying we should be doing it in terms of human debt in the enterprise and let's start in the emotional intelligence, because it is an emergency. I I was desperately afraid of this in the ending of all my books. If we are to take a leaflet from the tech industry, we'll have to change culture everywhere else, because in the tech industry, by hook or by crook, we've invented this crap called agile, and this crap called agile means many things to many people, but what it essentially means is that you have some autonomy and you have some goodwill. That's what it means, and when you have those two things, you do things with other people. That's literally all that it means.

Speaker 2: 22:20

And because you cannot make technology as an individual contributor anymore, they have had to produce the thing. Let me tell you where else it didn't wasn't needed. Everywhere else, because the workplace is still made of a hundred billion individual contributors. So in the technology side, if you don't collaborate, you don't end up with any code. If you don't do the pair programming. You don't have the thing that's being paired properly On the other side. If your workplace is horrible and your workmate is an asshole, you still do it. You still show up to not take any blame for anything and to be the hero and to deliver the project. We have workplaces that are carried by millions of desperate, adulting individual contributors. The workplace doesn't exist. The workplace and the business place is a lie. We don't have that. We just have some conventions that we are happy to avail ourselves of for different reasons. So those are the ones we need to get to, because they are not something to be proud of to leave the next generation.

Speaker 2: 23:24

You feel it in the ether, what we hear from folks who are still in corporate, consistently it's just like I know that the people that are blessed and still in and for a long while it was they're going to be out, weren't they? But now I'm telling you that the out is out. These people are the outliners now, the people that are convinced that what existed come back. The same exact structure, the same exact. The same exact structure, the same exact conversation, the same exact fears of being authentic. No one's going to notice I don't quite understand anything. No one's going to notice I'm not quite engaging humanly properly. That's not happening anymore and I am genuinely worried for anyone who thinks we're wrong and we'll all calm down.

Speaker 3: 24:03

It won't. It feels like it's just going to amp up. I'd love to hear, especially with all this talk of AI. I'm wondering what your point of view is on how employers and employees, during this change, can get ahead of the human debt side of things. What can they do? Because we know the tech change is here and increasing. How can they get ahead of that human debt when it does start?

Speaker 2: 24:26

happening. I want to believe that, as society, we'll be at the place that we can go. Not everybody needs to show up to work, and not everyone needs to have a nine to five job. Everyone else can go read or make paintings. There is no need for jobs to be created. We don't need to fear AI. If AI shows up and AI takes all our jobs, that's brilliant. Then we all can lazy about. That's not going to, unfortunately, happen in our lifetime. It would be nice, it would be great, but not going to happen. So what will happen is, though no one will be employable if you don't bring yourself to work every day.

Speaker 2: 25:05

I remember when I was in college, I wrote a thesis on always being on, and I was like, so proud of myself. All you need to do is always being on, and I was like, so proud of myself. All you need to do is always be on, and then you'll be so focused and so in flow. Everything will be fine, literally. I remember my professor going God, this is not. This is not going to work. You're going to have to go back to the drawing board because you're describing ADHD. Can you go back home and calm down? But so I'm not saying that everyone's going to like me, right, not everyone can be on, but you're like don't mask a hundred percent, you can't mask forever exactly that.

Speaker 2: 25:40

Yeah, so when we say mask, we mean in the workplace in particular. When we say it in in a private fashion, we just mean that those of us that are not neurotypical spend our entire lives attempting to be like the neurotypicals. Possibly, if you ask me, we should just ask for the neurotypicals to try more to be like us. But that's just me. But we do that. We attempt to pretend we are neurotypical.

Speaker 2: 26:05

But that happens at work as well, when people mask their true emotion and they employ a process called impression management, which is essentially attempting to appear in a certain fashion in front of your peers. But when you do that, you are not authentic, you are not genuinely giving your opinion. You are are attempting to control the narrative in a fashion that will not help a team function, so it's not a desirable behavior. When you're attempting to create a team dynamic, it's really not a desirable behavior in any fashion other than when people want to wear pink. It's the only impression management I'm fine with is for pretty. Anything else is not for pretty and it's for hiding. Should not exist either in personal or workplaces, simply because it makes our lives harder and it makes other people suffer.

Speaker 3: 26:58

Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I'm so happy to hear the discussions had started around bringing your authentic self to work and workplaces trying to really create spaces where that's okay. No one's getting it 100%, but the fact that some workplaces are even trying to do that and foster that is so incredibly important.

Speaker 2: 27:22

So it's good to see, I say this a lot the organizations that do have psychological safety are not the organizations that are chasing it. They're the organizations that have built it to begin with and then have guarded it. Guarding it is an everyday work. Let's be honest. The work that is needed of humans at work is the same work that's needed of us every day, with our spouses, with our children, with our parents, with our friends. The same work. Be honest, be kind, be always putting yourself into somebody else's shoes. Same way. Does anyone want to do it, even at home? No, we're equals to our own family. Why would we extend that kind of kindness to strangers at work? So, the more that the world implodes, the more that we are afraid we're dying, the more that we are in defense mode, the less psychological, the less a team, the less a workplace the less there's any point to this conversation.

Speaker 1: 28:19

I think about this a lot. I've been on a journey the last several months around how do I want to reimagine my life and how I live my life? One of the North Stars is am I doing this out of love and to be a better version of myself for other people, for myself? Or am I doing this out of ego? And this idea of this constant pull of? Is this out of love or is this out of ego? And sometimes you want to do things out of ego. I get that. But for the most part I'm trying really hard to have a very simple vision of do it out of love, even if it doesn't make sense, even if it's not good for my career. It's out of love Because at this point I don't know what else to do, and as I'm listening to you when I'm feeling like, is that kind of the mantra that we all need to be? Not that I, that's all.

Speaker 2: 29:00

That's all. That's all and it's. They should have started with what you started and they should end with what you're ending now, which is what when you started, you explained you there's reciprocity in there's a rupture and repair and there's a reciprocity, and when you fuck people up, you then have to come back up and put more in that. That's how you do repair. You put more that coin from bloody dr phil's jar, if no one knows any other reference, you would remember dr phil's love jar, if nothing else. Or some people might remember vick's from the Orange County Housewives they all had the love jar like that. Have a fucking love jar and stop taking shit out of it instead of putting crap into it, because you'll fuck up your life and your work life.

Speaker 2: 29:42

I think it's the easiest advice, but we all know that it reduces all the way to don't be a dick, the method to not be a dick, I think, and to minimize those instances when you go for the ego instead of the love. I don't know if it's any good, but it's an intense daily pressure. I will tell you that these days I just have to go. What do I think is the right thing to do? What do I genuinely believe is the right thing to do and, like you say, you won't always do it. Sometimes you'll be like, fuck, the right thing to do. I've been doing the right thing continuously. My significant statement is the right thing to do.

Speaker 3: 30:17

Okay, go fuck it up, but some days and most days you would have tried, and it's a handful of questions, some are yet. They can be yes or no, but the hope is it's your. Whatever your immediate reaction is to this question or your immediate answer, I will tell you that you're giving palpitations to people who are AUADHD.

Speaker 2: 30:55

No, I'm joking, I'll be fine.

Speaker 3: 30:56

I'm sorry, I'm joking, I'll be 100% fine, I'm curious now Go ahead In terms of human debt, because you've seen examples of who's really fucking it up and who's doing it really well. Who do you feel is getting this right?

Speaker 2: 31:15

It's getting it right. Google started by doing it right. That's why they came up with the idea. They sort of found it at the same time that Amy has repopularized it. It's not something that Amy Edmondson has come up with, it's not something that Google has come up with, but psychological safety will forever be intrinsically connected to Google. That doesn't make Google a psychologically safe company today, necessarily. They have pockets of amazingness and pockets of absolute shit, like everyone else, but, with that said, they are an absolute good company to look at.

Speaker 2: 31:44

The second example I have and it's surprising to most people is fucking Amazon, and it's Amazon corporate. It's Amazon corporate working practices. Let's put it that way. I look at what they're doing in terms of collaboration internally, where we make software, and it's insanely smart. It's probably the only place where you have good acknowledgement of the fact that work doesn't happen like we thought it does. A famous example is the fact that they use written memos that they all bloody read first before the conversation starts. So we all have the same bloody context Very, very basic.

Speaker 2: 32:22

And then, lastly, and most interestingly so, somewhere around March, jeff Bezos came out after eight billion years where we thought he died or something. He was busy being in love. Some of us used to be back in the day, and so he came back saying we are doing no structured meetings anymore. I'm sorry, what we know when we show up, we know what we show up for. And then I remind everyone that they have to do mind wandering, which, yes, I can just see all the wondering which, yes, I can just see all the um, various developers going oh my god, now what mind wandering. They want my feelings to wander somewhere as well.

Speaker 2: 33:01

So completely get it why. It's woohoo for some people, but it's a hundred percent the truth. You only come in to get an answer when you've had five minutes of mind wandering, and what most work meetings manage to do, which is insane, is attempt to fit a little bit of mind wandering in the. And what most work meetings manage to do, which is insane, is attempt to fit a little bit of mind-wandering in the middle of an insane work meeting. And because he doesn't have an exact end time, it allows people to actually be creative and try to apply themselves to a problem. These are execs at Amazon, so maybe we get people treated like execs at Amazon and then we let their minds wander. How about that?

Speaker 3: 33:34

Can companies afford to ignore this human debt?

Speaker 2: 33:39

Companies are non-existent. There is a real of a concept organizations and companies are just as serious as Santa Claus has been saying this for 10,000 years. They cannot afford it, but they don't care because they can't care or afford or do anything. They don't exist as a thing. I I keep saying this to the child anytime he gets up in arms about corporations there isn't this thing. This thing doesn't exist. The thing you're upset against does not exist. There's no five people that have sat down and decided this and are gonna do this.

Speaker 2: 34:10

Things happen in the business world in virtue of inertia and in virtue of the taxation episode. We're in a movie that's not being ran by a company. So no, they can't afford it, but they don't care that they can't afford it, and more and more companies are going to drop off and the ones that won't. At the end of the day, we all know which we started talking about. The bloat companies are practically an extended social service. These days. They know they've not audited which of their teams is doing anything after a certain size right? Big organizations know that they are half paying the state by keeping these people that are useless. It's an insane model. Hopefully we'll walk away from it one day. If we don't't, they will simply stop being viable. I think when they are up against companies that are doing whatever they can to do better yeah, this is more moving to a personal side of things.

Speaker 3: 35:06

What are you reading and or listening to right now that you're really excited about?

Speaker 2: 35:12

I I'm really excited about brushing up on my Spanish, which has been a lot better than I thought it was. I am surprised every day when one of my team doesn't know something and I'm like that means X and they're like, can you stop just flaunting your Spanish? So I do need to learn some proper grammar. So that's what I'm reading continuously. I'm trying to catch up on Spanish. Proper grammar. So that's what I'm reading continuously.

Speaker 2: 35:34

I'm trying to catch up on spanish and, if I'm also honest, I'm reading the most I can about the effect of being a leader and a neurodivergent leader in the workplace who has teenagers and children who are alphabet mafia.

Speaker 2: 35:51

It's a really important bit that I think we have completely neglected. We've just started a new podcast called tears of dopamine, and it's literally just us talking to other parents of trans and gay kids who have had to themselves go through major and horrendous things. I can't begin to tell you and I won't because I let them tell their story Most of them will have their voices covered because they have exact jobs that they are desperate to keep, but some of them have been willing to give us their courage and use their voice and their professional standards. So you'll hear professional standing. So you'll hear of a few names, but the rest of us, the rest of us that have these kids that we are just trying to keep alive and happy, and have never talked to each other about it, shame on us, and shame on us for not opening the conversation from here on. So we have to start working on it. Let us know if you need any.

Speaker 3: 36:49

I love that. It's so important to have that community just to start the conversation and to support one another through it. What are you most excited about for this next year?

Speaker 2: 37:15

about and I'm not taking that in any trivial fashion after having been acquiring some ptsd last year and after having seen my child go through horrible things, it's a big deal for us and we've worked really hard at re-establishing our mental stability, like I say, and our therapist would be very proud if we could just uh, be happy for a minute.

Speaker 3: 37:31

Yeah, yeah, it's important. We appreciate you and all the work you're doing Duana.

Speaker 2: 37:36

Thank you so much, you guys. It's been an amazing opportunity. You guys Both beautiful, beautiful humans and souls Really appreciate you. I don't know if you're a hugger, but I'm hugging you.

Speaker 1: 37:44

I'm so excited.

Speaker 2: 37:45

I can't wait to actually genuinely hug you guys, because I cannot wait to hug you.

Speaker 1: 37:50

Truly, I I cannot wait to play a game. I look forward to it. I will look forward to it. Thanks so much for joining us today. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can come over and say hi to us on the TikToks and LinkedIn community. Hit us up at yourworkfriends.com. We're always posting stuff on there and if you found this episode helpful, share with your work friends.

More Human in the Age of AI

Your Work Friends Podcast: More Human in the Age of AI with Jacqueline Carter

We’re all being told to master AI, but what if the real secret to thriving at work is doubling down on what makes us human?

In this episode, we talk with Jacqueline Carter, author of More Human, about how leaders can build their edge through awareness, wisdom, and compassion.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by tech changes or unsure how to lead right now, this one’s for you. It’s not either/or. It’s not about keeping up. It’s about choosing to start with human.

Listen or watch the full episode here

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Speaker 1: 0:00

It's like a lot of organizations right now. It's like they're rolling out high-end Ferraris but not teaching anybody how to drive, and that's just a waste of money.

Speaker 2: 0:21

Welcome to your Work Friends. I'm Francesca and I'm Mel. We are breaking down work, so you get ahead, mel. What's the good word?

Speaker 3: 0:31

I'm heading to Rhode Island and excited for that. How about you? Very nice, pretty chill over here, pretty chill over here. I showed Robbie the picture of Enzo on the first day of first grade and the last day of first grade of Enzo on the first day of first grade and the last day of first grade.

Speaker 2: 0:46

For those of you who don't know, I have a seven-year-old. He started first grade with a shaved head. He ended first grade with this mop of curls, a gold chain. Dressed in all black, he either looks like he's a sophomore in college, at USC, or is going to start really getting into creed sometime soon. I don't know. It's all over the map.

Speaker 3: 1:03

I love his style evolution.

Speaker 2: 1:05

We let him dress the way he wants to. He picks out all of that. He asks for a chain. We got it from TJ Maxx or something. It's not like he has a real gold chain or anything like that, but it's interesting watching your kid make choices.

Speaker 3: 1:18

Yeah, it's just fun to watch their personalities evolve. I don't know, I think it's really cool, but I do too.

Speaker 2: 1:24

I will allow him to wear anything but sketchers. My child will not be wearing sketchers. What's your beef with sketchers? I just I cannot, I like cannot stand that brand. I don't know what it is it's like a joke it's like a joke.

Speaker 2: 1:42

I don't like a joke. I don't appreciate it. I don't. It's not real, I need it to be. Oh my God, every once in a while, especially when he was younger, he'd pick some up and some of them had. They would light up underneath and I'm like, absolutely not Like. I will let my kid wear the craziest shit, except for Skechers. Absolutely not.

Speaker 3: 2:03

No, I love it Speaking shit except for Skechers? Absolutely not. No, I love it Speaking of style. We launched some merch on our website. We are independent and we want to keep it that way, but if you feel so inclined, check out some of the merch that we put up there. We thought there's some pretty cool designs over there. To check Any purchase that you make helps us stay operational, so appreciate your support and you get a cool hat or sweatshirt or something.

Speaker 2: 2:28

Good hats for summer sunscreen. That all works out. It's all good stuff.

Speaker 3: 2:31

We had such a great conversation earlier this week with Jacqueline Carter. She's an author, speaker, a senior partner and a director for the North America Potential Project. She's an expert in leadership, development, mindsets and corporate culture and she just came out with this book More Human. This is an opportunity right for us to lean into our humanity in the workplace and really see AI as a partner, but also taking some precaution as we go through this evolution. What did you take away from this conversation?

Speaker 2: 3:07

We've been talking about the future of work and AI and even things like oh, we have to lean into our deeply human skills for the last 10 years. This is not something that's new. What I think is so different about what Jacqueline and More Human, the book and the potential project are talking about is they're making it really easy to lean into those more human skills that you really need to. In this conversation and also in the book, jacqueline outlines this trifecta of how to make yourself a more human leader. As technology takes on more and more of work. How do you lean into that humanity, that trifecta being awareness, wisdom and compassion, and I love that, because you and I have both seen this these deeply human skills as a laundry list of 30, 40, 50. And you're just like Jesus Christ. How many do I have? These are the top three. If you're going to do any, do these?

Speaker 3: 4:00

Yeah, I really liked that. I also liked the concept of moving away from either or. You could either have AI or humans. You can't have both, but this is a both and conversation. There's just a lot of power in that. Everybody's going through this shift. I don't think I get any news alerts that don't involve AI in the title these days, but if you and your team are moving through, this is a definite book to check out With that. We think you should check this conversation out. So here's Jacqueline.

Speaker 2: 4:50

So I think every day, maybe multiple times a day, I'm asking somebody, sometimes jokingly what timeline are we living in? Because it just feels like some fascinating times for various reasons, but really amazing times for opportunity. And I'm looking at this moment in time around AI, this moment in time around humanity. What made you see this as a moment in time, as like a fork in the road, especially for leadership?

Speaker 1: 5:17

So, as you guys know, I'm part of an organization that's a potential project.

Speaker 1: 5:21

We are a research and leadership development organization.

Speaker 1: 5:24

We've been focusing on researching and supporting leaders and global companies to be able to enhance their potential for the past 15 years, and what we're really excited about is we really do see this is an amazing moment in time in terms of human leadership and when we look at it, we really see that with artificial intelligence and, specifically, of course, generative AI, we have the opportunity to really make this major shift from management, which none of us really liked to be able to lift, into leadership, which is really about elevating our ability to be able to enable other people to realize more of their potential.

Speaker 1: 6:02

And if and I think that's the big if we're able to navigate this, we really see a potential opportunity for a future of work that is really quite inspiring and, I think, one that could be really quite hopeful and flush with possibilities. At the same time, we also see a lot of darkness, and I think that's really why it's never been more important to be a leader, and it's never been more important, as a leader, to be able to lean into the kind of choices that we need to make about the future of leadership.

Speaker 2: 6:32

One of the things I'm curious about is you mentioned these more human kind of aspects of things. Like we have this opportunity to really reach this different level of leadership potential. How do you define more human in an AI-powered world? What does that look like?

Speaker 1: 6:47

We come at it very much from a research and data perspective. So what we've done, like I said, over the past 15 years has really distilled what we see as being three core qualities of leadership excellence in terms of being able to bring the best of our human potential. And they're going to sound simple but simple is not easy. And they're going to sound like common sense, but common sense is not always common practice. So, fundamentally, a first core quality is awareness being able to be aware of what's going on internally and also aware of what's going on around.

Speaker 1: 7:16

The second core quality is wisdom, and this is very different than knowledge, but wisdom is basically the discerning capacity of mind, to be able to discern what's happening so that I can make wise choices.

Speaker 1: 7:27

And the third core quality is compassion, and compassion the way we define it is to be able to do the really hard things that we need to do as leaders, but to be able to do them in a human way.

Speaker 1: 7:37

So when I operate with compassion, say, I'm able to give really tough feedback, but do it in a way that helps you to be able to hear it, so that it supports you in your development journey, as opposed to you feeling degraded and depressed, and what we see from a data perspective is that only 16% of leaders are really ready to be able to lean into these core skills that we believe are critical in the age of AI. 60% have potential, but 24% probably really shouldn't be leaders. I think we've all seen leaders that have been promoted because they had great technical skills, but they really don't have these human skills that we know are critical for the future not only be able to leverage the benefits of AI and overcome the risks, but we know there's going to be massive transformation in the world of work in the coming years and we need leaders who can really lean into those human elements to be able to guide the workforce and create the work context of the future.

Speaker 2: 8:33

First of all, those data points resonate. I think all of us that have worked especially in corporate you're like, yeah, that tracks, that tracks. Maybe you haven't had a leader that leads with awareness, wisdom and compassion, or maybe you had one and you remember them for the rest of your life. Right, they just make or break your work experience. We're not seeing a lot of organizations invest in what we will call these deeply human skills. Yet, to your very good point, only a small percentage of people are ready. Most people aren't getting trained in those. I'm curious about that moment in time where the mindset shifts, where people start to pull in that direction. What does that look like? What's that mindset shift that separates someone that has that AI augmented leader trifecta of awareness, wisdom and compassion? What is that shift that people are making?

Speaker 1: 9:24

Yeah, I do love that you point out that not enough organizations are investing in it, and that's one of the things that we feel very privileged is we, of course, work with many global companies that are actually prioritizing the human development aspect in parallel with the AI advancements, and I think when we see organizations that say, yes, we've got to be able to roll out the technology, but at the same time, we want to make sure that we emphasize the human, the way that we see that, it's like a lot of organizations right now.

Speaker 1: 9:51

It's like they're rolling out high-end Ferraris but not teaching anybody how to drive, and that's just dumb, that's just a waste of money. And so the light bulb for us really goes on for leaders is when you know these aspects of awareness, wisdom and compassion and that's why I said they're common sense is because, when you dive into them, we all innately have these capabilities it's whether we have the permission to be able to develop them, the permission to be able to see the benefit and we again look at it very much from a research and data perspective Leaders that have these high awareness, wisdom and compassion are able to create the conditions where people feel more empowered, where greater trust, greater performance, greater job engagement, when you create the conditions where people know that there's a prize at the end and, at the same time, you give them a path to be able to support them in that development.

Speaker 1: 10:38

Oh, I can develop compassion. Yeah, I may have a set point where I'm good or not good, but there's a journey and I can see how to be able to take that journey and to be able to be supported along the way.

Speaker 2: 10:51

Yeah, yeah, I really love to. By the way, that it's three. Having been in talent development my entire career and we've been seeing this deeply human skills that you're going to need. It's a laundry list. It's typically a laundry list of at least 10. And to be able to have this distilled down into a framework of look, this is the three that will reap the most benefits that you really need to be focusing on Huge One question that might be a little controversial. I'm going to just ask it. Here we go. All these organizations are investing heavily in tech but not in the human aspect of it. Buying a Ferrari and not having someone know how to drive, would you say. People need to invest in the human first, or they are better suited to invest in teaching people how to drive first before they buy the car?

Speaker 1: 11:39

I love the question because one of the other things that we found in our research and it was a little bit surprising to us was that if you just like and we call them human purists so let's say, if you just invest in the human, which we were like, yay, this would be so great.

Speaker 1: 11:54

Imagine an organization that just invested in the human and we're like this would be awesome. But the reality is that the smartest human being is a little bit smarter when they leverage AI, so it really does have to be a both and and. That was, I think, one of the key insights that we came is this paradox. So the journey, we believe you need to start with the human, because if the human, like great tools in unskilled hands are not great tools, like you can do a lot of damage with a hammer or you can build a house with a hammer, so you need to be able to have the right skills. So you need to invest in the human development. But the opportunity now is to augment these great human capacities that we have. But we can augment them with AI. My awareness enhances when I leverage AI. My wisdom enhances when I leverage AI. My compassion even enhances when I leverage AI. So it's really a both and from our perspective.

Speaker 3: 13:10

I'd love to drill down further into what each of these look like in practice, alongside AI, because in the book there were some really good case studies, if that's okay. Yeah, awareness, when you think about that skill set, that human capability what does that look like daily, alongside the use of AI tools?

Speaker 1: 13:28

Absolutely. Definitions are always important, because awareness can sound like a really big word, but the way that we look at awareness is the ability to, like I said, be aware of what's going on internally and, at the same time, be aware, to the extent that I can, of what's going on externally, and we know. Let's just take a simple example situational awareness. Right, it's been for many leaders for a long time. We've been told that not everybody is the same and so we need to be able to be situational. And Mel, what you like is different, francesca, than what you like, but that's really hard. Like, how can I, as a mere human, be able to really keep track of oh? Can I, as a mere human, be able to really keep track of? Oh, when I communicate to Mel, it's a little bit different than when I communicate to other members of my team. And these are the kinds of things that AI is really good at. Ai is really good at being able to track what Mel is, what's important to you, what kind of messages resonate with you as opposed to what would be useful for other employees, and so again, and that's why that awareness of being able to be more aware of what's happening with my employees what's important to them can really then enhance me. My awareness is lifted. And these are just some examples.

Speaker 1: 14:33

But we also see, like sentiment analysis. I sent out an email to my organization. Ai tools can let me know was it opened, did anybody read it, how long did they read it for when they responded? If they responded, what was the? Did anybody read it? How long did they read it for when they responded? If they responded, what was the sentiment associated with that response? And this is gold, because this can then enable me to be able to enhance my ability to communicate more effectively. And I think these are just some examples. But that's again from an external perspective. But then from an internal perspective, ai can help to be able to challenge me on maybe my biases, on my limitations, on my blind spots, to be able to support me in a development journey if I'm open to that. So these are just again some of the ways, but we just see it's a really an amazing tool to be able to support enhancing my awareness.

Speaker 3: 15:19

Awareness and wisdom and compassion are all critically important right For the future for this to be successful. But it stood out to me. It felt like compassion might be more of the linchpin here, because I think you had mentioned it's the one thing that AI can't replicate. What crystallized that for you from your research?

Speaker 1: 15:39

Yeah, and I would say the way that we see awareness, wisdom, compassion, they're all linked right. It's how, neurologically, how the theory of mind, how the mind works, like we perceive, then we discern and then we respond, and so very much that responsive capacity of mind in an ideal world for leaders that want to be effective, is compassion right To do those hard things and do it in a human way. And what's super interesting is that we really have been with great interest following the advances of AI. We know that right now, people actually prefer and sometimes feel like an AI chatbot is more empathetic than a busy leader, right, which is not surprising, because an AI chatbot has all the time in the world to say oh Mel, I'm so sorry that you're having that problem, how can I help? It isn't rushed to be able to get to the next meeting.

Speaker 1: 16:30

But the key thing and I think the reason why, mel, to your question, why it's the most important is because, even as AI gets better and better at being able to mimic human emotions, it's programmed, of course, with all the intelligence that we know around emotional intelligence, around human psychology, human behavior. Fundamentally, human beings were social beings. We feel each other, we thrive based on each other and fundamentally, even though and this was so interesting what the research shows is, even though people found that the AI chatbot was more engaging, they felt empty inside, they felt fooled when they found out that it was an AI chatbot, because, fundamentally, human beings prefer messy but authentic other human beings than perfect, programmatic, empathetic AI.

Speaker 3: 17:17

Yeah, of course, in the news, just like when video games were villainized, right, you think of some of the horror stories that are also coming out as well, because AI is essentially acting as a mirror of the person who's using it. It's interesting. I'm curious about these three pillars, because you mentioned what was it? 16% have these skills and 60% can use some training on it. That's a pretty big gap, and then 24%, who are never going to get there. Of these three pillars, which do you feel people struggle with the most?

Speaker 1: 17:49

Yeah, I love that question and maybe I'll just say this, and I hope it's okay but what we did find is, within that 16% one, in four women, only one in 10 men.

Speaker 1: 17:58

That's a whole nother podcast. I just wanted to say, yeah, exactly, very interesting data. It's really interesting around that 60%. A couple of things that surprised us. Sometimes a non-result is as interesting as a result.

Speaker 1: 18:12

One of the things that was surprised us is we were surprised that there wasn't more differential around level, so we expected to see a real difference in seniority and, specifically, around wisdom. We just made the assumption that people that were and, by the way, I should say that data that I shared that's not based on leaders rating themselves, that is, employees rating their leaders. So this is in the eyes of the employees. So, based on 360 data, do I see you, as a leader, as being able to demonstrate these qualities of awareness, wisdom and compassion, which is quite different than when leaders rate themselves? So what's interesting is that. I would say, though, that still, our experience working with leaders is that most more senior leaders have figured out how to manage their mind, how to manage their time, which is a lot around the importance of awareness. Do I know what to focus on? When am I able to read the tea leaves, to be able to say this is most important and I can let this go. Most of them have a good North Star, which is really around that wisdom capacity, and that's why it is the one that we emphasize.

Speaker 1: 19:15

I do think especially more senior leaders struggle with the compassion piece, and oftentimes what we do see, and what's really interesting, is that we see, as leaders rise in ranks, their ability to engage in a compassionate way in the eyes of their employees goes lower, and that we find really interesting.

Speaker 1: 19:33

And it makes sense because, of course, as you rise in ranks, you're making bigger decisions that affect more people, you have a bigger span of control and you don't necessarily have those same touch points, and so it makes sense that a leader might be seen as being less compassionate. But the key thing is that we also see leaders that use that as an excuse, and what we see is there's a real opportunity because we know, just because you have a big span of control, we know that doesn't mean that you can't show up with compassion. That compassion piece is probably the one that all leaders can develop and I would say, at more lower levels of leaders, we do see a lot of that awareness. Right, it is that starting point, because you can't really dive into wisdom and compassion if you don't have good awareness about what might be getting in your way, if you can't manage your mind and manage your time. We were surprised that there wasn't more differential by seniority, but that is our experience working with many leaders over the past decade.

Speaker 3: 20:27

It's really interesting to see that, but I could also see why it's probably the lowest with compassion just given when you grow, If your organization isn't going to give you opportunities to nurture these things while we're going through this massive technological shift at work. What are simple ways people can start to nurture these things while we're going through this massive technological shift?

Speaker 1: 20:50

of work. What are simple ways people can start to nurture these three qualities in themselves today? Yeah, yeah, I love that question and I've always been inspired by the quote be the change you want to be in the world If you want to be a good human being, which is really around. What these skills are? Be present, be wise, be caring and those are, I think, key things in terms of your own brand. And, of course, there's a lot of resources. Of course, our book is one resource to be able to provide some practical tools around it.

Speaker 1: 21:13

Probably the starting point is really around the intentionality, and we oftentimes, when we work with leaders, we look to be able to have simple brain hacks to be able to help you In this moment. Like, what's your intention? And right now? My intention is to be of service. That's my intention. If you ask me a question, I'm going to try to be of best service, and just those simple things can really help us as leaders. When I show up for my team, it's like I just want to be present and I want to be able to be able to support everybody in the best way possible. I'm just going to be a good listener. Whatever it is, the starting point for all of us is really around setting our intentions and using that as our North Star, because we know being a leader today is really hard. Let's be real, yeah.

Speaker 3: 21:56

I think if that's all you can do is set the intention and always go in with that's always a good starting point.

Speaker 1: 22:01

Then afterwards have opportunities for reflection, say how did I do? And then you get that learning cycle. So these were my intentions, this is how I wanted to show up in this meeting and then to give myself the space and the grace to be able to say, okay, how did I do, what did I learn? What do I want to implement for tomorrow?

Speaker 2: 22:19

I want to talk a little bit more about the both end, the both end because I feel like there is this reality, especially with folks right now.

Speaker 2: 22:28

their companies are probably like get to know AI, understand AI, your job's not going to go away. The person who knows how to use AI is going to take your job. We're hearing all of the tropes and we know that those folks that lean into these really more human skills are the ones that are really going to thrive, not only for themselves, but, honestly, for their team. Who wouldn't want to work with a leader like that? I'm curious about how people can start to tiptoe into this, especially that both end thinking and really make the power of AI and our human capabilities work.

Speaker 1: 23:00

It's really the best marriage of mind and machine and the way that we look at it, and this was really based on hundreds of interviews that we did and also our data collection but when we looked at each of these different qualities, there's a really nice kind of both and aspect of looking well, what's the best of tech and what's the best of human, and so, for awareness, the way that we framed it is in terms of AI is amazing at content, like more content than any of us could ever grasp, but human beings are amazing at context. Why am I here? What's important? What are my intentions, what else is going on, what else is relevant? And that ability to be able to marry that context setting with then leveraging content is a way to be able to get the best of both.

Speaker 1: 23:44

On the wisdom side, ai is amazing. Any question that you have, it'll give you an answer. And what humans, though, are really good at if we have the time and space is really good at being curious, beginner's mind like to being able to think outside the box and our critical thinking to be able to. When we get an answer from AI, I'm not really sure that's a good answer. What would be another question.

Speaker 1: 24:04

So this marriage of questions and answers is a way to again really have that both and thinking. And then, on the compassion side, the way that we looked at the both and was really human beings fundamentally are able to connect with their ability to care, their ability to create trust, their ability to look at you and say I care about you, you're important to me, and to be able to lead with heart. And AI, like I said, it's programmed with all of the best knowledge of human behavior, emotional intelligence, and so another both end is to be able to say okay, I care about you guys, and how can I be able to use that care and leverage AI to be able to help me? Because we have to have a difficult conversation or we need to move an agenda forward and I don't know where to start, but I want to be able to engage us in that process, and so those are some of the key things that we really see as being a way to be able to marriage the best of both minds and the best of both technology.

Speaker 2: 24:56

Do you see that changing as AI gets more eugenic and gets smarter? Do you see this changing or do you see these are evergreen?

Speaker 1: 25:06

It was one of the questions that we asked and that we continue to ask in our research, and so far we do see that these are evergreen, and that's why I think it's so interesting is that even though AI is getting better at, let's say, context, it still doesn't have the amazing wealth of understanding and experience that a human does.

Speaker 1: 25:27

And I think that even when we look at agentic AI like it still is at this point in time and again we're looking at a horizon of the next three to five years it still needs to be told what to do, it still needs to have ground rules and it still is limited in terms of what it can do. And even though it's got a really big box, still is limited in terms of what it can do. And even though it's about a really big box, thinking outside that box is still something that is in the realm really of still of us mere mortals. So, at least for the next three to five years, we see these as evergreen and hopefully that, leading with heart, our aspiration, our hope is that will always be augment with AI, but something that is evergreen in terms of bringing out the best of our human leadership.

Speaker 2: 26:08

I also am really taken with your finding about even though AI can communicate with emotion, if you will people. When they found out that the bot or the chatbot was a chatbot, they were left feeling empty. I'm very taken with the fact that people still innately want a human right and I wonder if that's never going to change, even when AI becomes like minority report and singularity and all this good jazz. I wonder if there's some sort of magic, juju, that we're always going to want a human, no matter what, and these things are always going to be the case.

Speaker 1: 26:40

Yeah, I deeply hope so, and I do think that is the case. The problem, though, is that these are at risk Our human connectivity. We know that there's an epidemic of loneliness and this was before Gen AI came out and we know that organizations that are heavily AI dependent people feel even less connected and more lonely. Why? For a number of reasons. One, because people overuse the technology. Right, they use the technology to be able to send a message that really should be a conversation, but we also know that because, when an organization that's heavily embedded with AI, people aren't asking each other questions. They're using AI to be able to ask the questions, so they're not turning to their neighbors.

Speaker 1: 27:21

And the other thing, critical thinking. We know that 74, the recent study this wasn't ours, but a recent study showed 74% of leaders are so overwhelmed that they would prefer to have a chatbot make their decisions, and that's scary, but real right, and so I think that the problem right now is that our awareness, our wisdom and compassion is under threat because of AI it's creating. We're more distracted. We have the risk of, I will say, instead of being wiser, actually being dumber if we delegate our decisions to AI, and being more disconnected and what we really need to do, and I think that's why conversations like this are so important. We need to be really intentional about overcoming these real risks of artificial intelligence, so that we were able to leverage the benefits and not get sucked into kind of the dark side of where the future of work could be going if we're not careful.

Speaker 2: 28:13

Yeah, yeah, I wonder what you'd recommend. Let's say somebody is I'll take myself, for example, and I know a lot of people I talk to are the same way right, they have a large language model. They're using gpt, cloud perplexity, whatever doesn't matter, they're using that. It's their little assistant on this side. They're using it more and more each day.

Speaker 2: 28:34

they're reaping the benefits of the efficiency of it and maybe, slowly, they're talking to humans less and less by 30 minutes yeah, how do they like break that cycle potentially and or make sure that they're like carving out space for more of the more human attributes? Like you know how people have phone addictions, it's just put it away.

Speaker 1: 28:55

You walk away from it.

Speaker 2: 28:56

What what do people need to be really thinking about, so they don't get into the trap of only using their large language model?

Speaker 1: 29:04

First of all, I love the question because I do agree. We do know that people are addicted to their phones Many programs actually that we do with leaders. One of the most simplest intervention that we do is we take away their devices and you should see the looks on their faces Like it's just we've taken out their heart, like how could you like what? I'm going to be disconnected. And it's so interesting that they actually do go through withdrawal symptoms because they're not like, oh my gosh, what if somebody needs me? And it's really interesting.

Speaker 1: 29:31

Many of us are addicted to our technology and I do think that with these tools, because they are the large language models, as you said, they talk to us really nicely, they're designed to please, they're really engaging, to be able to have conversations with, and they never get mad at us like real human beings, real colleagues do, and they're designed to suck us in. These are money, these are not altruistic devices that have been created for the best of intentions, and so they're designed to suck us in all different kinds of ways. So what I love about your question is that we need to be able to make sure that we stay in the driver's seat. Back to the Ferrari analogy, we need to be able to make sure that we stay in the driver's seat. Back to the Ferrari analogy we need to be able to make sure that we're in the driver's seat of our technology and that we recognize, because many of us think we're smarter than our smartphones and we're not Like.

Speaker 1: 30:16

Our smartphones are designed to be addictive and until we wake up to that fact, we'll say, oh, I'm not addicted to my phone. It's like all right, let me take it away. Oh, wait a minute. So I think that we need to be aware that these tools are designed to be able to suck us in and really promote use, which, again, is wonderful because they're really useful to be able to help support us in our daily activities. We need to be really practical. Like you say put the device away, get up, go for a walk, put the device away, have a conversation, put the device away, have a conversation, put the device away, take some time for reflection in terms of your to enhance your creativity, enhance your ability to be able to think outside the box. So I think that you need brain hacks to be able to help you to not get sucked into the technology, because they're designed to be addictive. They put us in echo chambers, and that's another risk that we need to be intentional about to overcome.

Speaker 2: 31:07

Yeah, yeah. It's a very odd feeling when you realize you are addicted to your phone, even the muscle memory of reaching for your phone the other day. I have Claude and I have chat GPT and I have found I have started going straight there as opposed to wait. What do I really think? What do I really need to be researching? And so it's almost not getting rid of the muscle or not making sure I have atrophy or like human atrophy or addiction, and it is a job that is a very intentional practice, but I think it's needed, yeah.

Speaker 1: 31:41

What I loved about what you said is exactly that it's got to be a practice. Exactly, it's so easy, let's say, I've got to brainstorm, I need to write a new article, and it's so easy to go into whatever tool that you're using and say, all right, write an article for me in the style of HBR. I could even write an article that Jacqueline Carter would write in HBR, because it does have access to the web and it's so tempting to the web and it's so tempting. What I loved about what you said is no, I've got to force myself. It's like going to the gym. I've got to force myself to make sure I continue to go to the gym.

Speaker 1: 32:11

And that's the other analogy that we use oftentimes when we're talking about AI and how it can augment. It's like looking at it like an exoskeleton, right, so an exoskeleton. We know that it helps us to be able to enhance our strength. And AI can be like an exoskeleton that can really help us to augment our mind and augment our heart. But if we don't, at the same time, develop our mind and our heart, it's going to atrophy. If we just let that exoskeleton do all the work, our muscles will atrophy.

Speaker 1: 32:41

And I think what you said is exactly. It's a practice to be wait a minute. What do I think? How would I write this article? Wait a minute, what do I know before I go to my tool? What would be a good way to be able to create this presentation or to be able to have this conversation and then augment with the tool to be able to help you but don't lose the muscle? And I think that's exactly it. We're really at risk of losing some of these core, fundamental muscles, like critical thinking, like emotional intelligence, because we're over relying on our technology.

Speaker 3: 33:12

The addiction to your phone is so real. I don't know if I don't remember where I saw this, but someone mentioned if you start to have this little indent on your pinky finger where you hold your phone, that means like you forever have changed like the bone structure of your finger from where you hold your cell phone and like you forever have changed like the bone structure of your finger from where you hold your cell phone. And I looked down and I was like, is that a dent? And I started to slowly back away. For anyone listening, check your pinky when you think about getting into some of those ethical guardrails, as we're talking about not letting these muscles atrophy. We're introducing this to teams. Francesca and I are trying to advise folks on, like how to introduce this to your team without fear, like testing and learning in a safe way. Given everything that you've researched, what's like a one sentence AI policy for a leadership?

Speaker 1: 34:01

team. Oh, I love that One sentence. Policy I would say is human in the driver's seat is do not, do not allow these tools to overcome your human judgment, your human responsibility, your human accountability, and be aware of the seductive nature of these technologies to be able to to delegate decisions. If I was going to have one word policy, it would be always human in the driver's seat. And then, of course, you said just one. But I do think we are deeply concerned about considerations about using these technologies in terms of the environmental impact. We are concerned about data security and privacy, which is already a concern. It was a concern before artificial intelligence and now all of this information. And who's storing this information? How is it being used? So there's a long list, but the one is the human in the driver's seat.

Speaker 3: 34:53

By the way, the smartest policy possible when you're looking at that workday class action lawsuit, exactly, yeah, okay, I love to hear it when you think about the case studies, because you had multiple that were highlighted in the book, case studies that during your research that kept you up at night could be good or bad, but was there one case study in particular that kept you up at night?

Speaker 1: 35:14

There was one. We didn't put it in the book. So we had the privilege of being able to talk to chief people officers, chief learning officers, ceos as well as tech leaders, chief learning officers, ceos as well as tech leaders. And probably the story that scared us the most and we were shocked by this and I will not say the name of the company, but it was a story we were sitting down with the chief human resource officer of a global technology company and she told us a story about a senior executive in the organization that had been basically deep faked by somebody posing as the CEO of that company and was about to transfer millions of dollars and it scared the bejeebies out of us and this was actually like a year and a half ago and I think it gets back to.

Speaker 1: 36:02

We all think that we're smarter than our smartphones, we think we're smarter than our devices, but this it was just. It was unbelievable because I would think, oh, that would never happen to me. And when and when she talked about this case, like the guy had emails from his CEO, he had text messages, he had video little snippets telling him he was on a secret project and not to tell anybody about it and it had been an extensive scam that had been over multiple months, and this guy had absolutely no idea and he had been completely hoodwinked by it and it was just like whoa, that was yeah. So that was really scary.

Speaker 3: 36:39

Yeah, as the video continues to get better and better On TikTok right. Has anyone seen the fake Tom Cruise? Oh, fake, Tom Cruise is crazy.

Speaker 1: 36:49

What is this? And I think it's great. Yeah, it is really scary, and I do think that we are so susceptible to, if we see something, even if somebody says that it's created by artificial intelligence, we have a tough time unseeing it. It's part of our neurology, right, like we trust what we see and that is how our brain has been designed and wired over so many centuries, and so, even if somebody says, oh yeah, that was fake, it's no, it still sticks with us because we saw it, so it's real. And so I think one of the bigger, larger concerns that we have is just around the continued what's real, what's not real, fact versus fiction, but not only that like how we are so influenced by our quote, unquote peers, our tribes and how. Again, social media and I think that's one of the things that we focused a lot on.

Speaker 1: 37:37

Human beings have always had an amazing history of introducing new technologies without necessarily looking at the negative potential consequences.

Speaker 1: 37:45

Social media was designed to make us better connected, and how's that working out?

Speaker 1: 37:50

Email was supposed to save us a ton of time, I don't know, and so I think that's for us. One of the big things is that really started to scare us when we started to look at this technology is how fast it's moving, how fast it's being pushed, like every organization right now and if they're not, they should be is pushing adoption of AI, and they should right, because they got to get ahead all their competitors, so every organization is pushing adoption, but I don't think we're spending enough time thinking about wait a minute like what are the potential consequences of this adoption and are we taking the time to pause and say what are we potentially at risk? And that's really a lot of the work that we do with leaders is we talk about the adoption and how to be able to embrace it and we talk about I think, francesca, to your point like how to have the brain hacks that you say, put away the device. Let's just make sure I'm still using that muscle that I have as a good leader, as a good human being.

Speaker 3: 39:04

Okay, Jacqueline, are you up for some rapid round?

Speaker 1: 39:07

I am. I'm a little bit scared, honestly, Mel, because I don't know what's coming. But bring it on, I love it.

Speaker 3: 39:12

I promise these are harmless and fun, and hopefully you will have fun with them too. Okay, it is 2030, not far off, by the way. What's work going?

Speaker 1: 39:22

to look like no idea. Very simple Anybody that tells you that they know what the future of work looks like is making things up. I can tell you two things, though, that I know for sure about the future of work in 2030. The first thing is it is fundamentally AI enabled and it doesn't look anything like what we see it as today. And the second thing and this is both my prediction and also my aspiration, so there's a little bit of hopefulness is that those of us that are able to double down on the best of our humanity will be the ones that are thriving in the world of work in 2030.

Speaker 3: 39:57

I love to hear that. What's one thing about corporate culture? You're ready to see die already. You're actually excited it might be gone by 2030.

Speaker 1: 40:07

I do think that there are so many.

Speaker 1: 40:09

You guys, of course, have been around the halls of corporate, of the corporate world, for so long.

Speaker 1: 40:14

There are so many bureaucratic tendencies box checking, ticking, activities reports that nobody reads, emails that are just out of control, activities reports that nobody reads, emails that are just out of control. And I guess I am really excited about the opportunity for us to rethink work so that what work really becomes is the opportunity for us to really thrive in terms of human connection, ultimately, the opportunity for us to be able to inspire each other, to be able to connect with each other. That's the way we get great ideas, that's the way we build trust, that's the way we engage our customers in a way that makes them feel, wow, these are awesome people to work with, and I just think there are still so many bureaucratic elements of work today that we've been talking about for years to be able to let go of. So I hope to see those shift, and probably I'll say one thing is meetings where nobody knows why they're there and there's no agenda and everybody thinks it's a waste of time. Any time we can do that, let's do it now.

Speaker 3: 41:12

There was a tool that was out a few years ago. Francesca and I were like how do we tap into this? That used to tell people. I forget who is using it, but I read this article where one organization, anytime they set up a meeting, it told you the potential cost of that meeting based on who was in the room.

Speaker 1: 41:28

And I'm like genius we all need that Nice and of course, it's something we can get into. But a lot of AI tools, if we use them well, like they, can give us a summary. Was this a good use of time? Did everybody contribute what?

Speaker 1: 41:40

were some things that could this. There's a great tool right now that you can say could this meeting have been an email? Ai can really help us to be able to look at the quality of our human interaction and help us to be able to lean more into that. If we use it well, if we use it that's the key word.

Speaker 3: 41:59

You might have already answered this, but I want to ask just in case you have a different response but what is the greatest opportunity most organizations are missing out on right now?

Speaker 1: 42:08

Yeah, human potential. I think that right now, there is so much focus on AI and, of course, we just wrote a book and we're doing research on it and I think there's so much focus on the technology and organizations are missing out on and they're investing and organizations I get it like they're investing so much money on the technology they're missing out on the opportunity to really develop and support and leverage the best of our human capabilities, and that is what's gonna enable us to be able to use these tools well and be able to get the return on investment of these amazing technologies.

Speaker 3: 42:43

Yeah, okay, it's getting a little personal. What music are you listening to right now? What's on your playlist?

Speaker 1: 42:50

Oh my gosh. Okay, that was a real I. It's so funny. I have to say that I was just with a girlfriend over the weekend and we were laughing about like eighties music that we still love to be able to go back to as a go-to, and so I have to say I'd love to try to pretend that I'm hip and current, but people would laugh at me if I tried to pretend that yeah, 80s, 90s, those are my go-to. But I love, actually I love Pink these days. I don't know why. She just really is inspiring to me and I guess she's current. So maybe that would be my lead into modern music tech in this age, my lead into modern music tech in this age Perfect.

Speaker 3: 43:26

I'm not going to judge your 80s and 90s because I'm right along with you. I was listening to Cyndi Lauper yesterday on my drive Girls just want to have fun.

Speaker 1: 43:31

How can you go wrong with?

Speaker 3: 43:32

that no judgment. What are you reading right now? It could be an audio book. It could be like the old school turn the page. What's on your reading docket?

Speaker 1: 43:43

I'll tell you what book I just finished which I just loved. I just finished Nexus and I am old school, I have tried, I travel all the time and I tried to use audiobooks and I just I love actually. I'm a tactile reader, I just love being able to like actually, and so Nexus is a really thick book, and so carrying it around has been a real chore, but that means every time I open it up and I just loved it.

Speaker 1: 44:05

I think that he that I think that he provides such a fantastic, interesting insight on democracy and information technology and and just recognizing some real risks that we're facing with these new technologies and and, of course, the state of the world. And so I love books like that, so it's a great read. Okay, who do you really admire? Love books like that? So it's a great read. Okay, who do you really admire? Oh my gosh, there's so many people that I admire.

Speaker 1: 44:31

As soon as you said that, I guess that's what Rapid Fire is all about the first person that came to mind is Michelle Obama she just came to mind but I also, I guess, in my work I've been so privileged to work with senior leaders and I could name so many of them but particularly chief people officers right now that are really in a challenging position where they know the future of work, as we've talked about, is going to radically change and they need to hold that space where there's so much fear and, at the same time, and they need to be honest, because there are changes coming in terms of workforce transformation and anyway so I just I really admire a lot of the chief people officers, so a big shout out to all of them that are standing in this space of, at this major inflection point, work and being able to lead with courage, with care, but also with clarity and with integrity and with integrity.

Speaker 3: 45:26

Yeah, I know HR always has the tough job right. Because, you're in the sandwich between the board and the employees and what that looks like. You're always in the middle, but always with the best intentions, hopefully, and if they read your book, for sure they'll have some good guidance there. What's a piece of advice that you want everyone to know?

Speaker 1: 45:50

I think that was such a good question. I think lean in. I think that it is at least in my career and my life, I've always trusted my gut, even when I was afraid, and I always liked the definition of courage is to step into places that scare you, and I think that there is a lot for us to be fearful of, whether it's fearful of social rejection right, there's so much tension in terms of having a tough conversation or whether it's concerns about will I have the skills that I need in the future, and I guess, just yeah, leaning into the places that scare you and recognizing that you're not alone and being willing to have courage and take risks and I'm not saying I always do that, but that's advice I try to give myself and hopefully maybe that'll be helpful for others.

Speaker 3: 46:32

Yeah, I think it's good advice, right Like we're in a time where we're all learning, so now's a good time to have that courage. Where can listeners stay in touch with you? Stay in touch with what you're doing? What's the best way to stay connected?

Speaker 1: 46:45

Yeah, absolutely. You can follow me and find me on LinkedIn and please feel free to reach out. But also, as I said, I represent an amazing organization, potential Project, wwwpotentialprojectcom and a lot of the research that I shared is freely available. So if you don't want to buy the book, that's okay, but a lot of the research we post on our website and we love to, and you can also follow us on Potential Project, where we share, because this is an ongoing research and insights and, yeah, a great way just to be able to keep in touch and reach out.

Speaker 3: 47:15

Perfect, and we'll link to all of that in our show notes too, so folks can get easy access to that. Thanks for joining us today, jacqueline.

Speaker 1: 47:29

Thank you so much.

Speaker 3: 47:29

I just love this conversation and thank you so much for both being intentional and also really future focused in our discussion today. Appreciate it. This episode was produced, edited and all things by us myself, Mel Plett and Francesca Ranieri. Our music is by Pink Zebra and if you loved this conversation and you want to contribute your thoughts with us, please do. You can visit us at yourworkfriends.com, but you can also join us over on LinkedIn. We have a LinkedIn community page and we have the TikToks and Instagram, so please join us in the socials and if you like this and you've benefited from this episode and you think someone else can benefit from this episode, please rate and subscribe. We'd really appreciate it. That helps keep us going. Take care, friends. Bye friends.