Culture Transformation: Model, Coach, Care

Welcome to Take Command, a Dale Carnegie podcast. The show where we seek to uncover what leadership means in today's world. I'm Joe Hart, CEO of Dale Carnegie, and we will be talking to diverse leaders with stories to tell across various industries to help unlock your potential for success. We will be sharing real-life insights into leadership, which in turn can help spark the next level of your growth as a leader. In today's episode, we welcome a leader with a passion for people and a commitment to cultivating environments where they can thrive. Responsible for leading the success of more than 160,000 employees across the globe, today's guest shares practical insight and advice on the importance of purposeful leadership hone from our experience at leading organizations such as Oracle and McKinsey Company, a member of the Board of Directors of Alaska Air Group and the National Center for Women in Information Technology. Please welcome the Chief Human Resources Officer of Microsoft, Kathleen Hogan. All right, well, I'm super excited today. We have with us the Chief People Officer from Microsoft, Kathleen Hogan, who oversees 160,000 people at Microsoft, a key driver in terms of the culture and talent and performance of the business. Kathleen, thank you for being with us today. Well, thank you. I'm really excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Well, thank you. And it's exciting to have you, and I think particularly because you've had really such an incredible career. You've done so many different things and we definitely want to get into, especially the importance of the role that you have and the changes that are happening Microsoft over the last year, before we do, talk a little bit about yourself. I know you're from Wisconsin. Well, I will try to be brief, but I grew up in Workfield, Wisconsin, and I have three sisters. And in fact, I'm at one of my sister's house right now visiting my mom for Mother's Day. So I've been very close to my family. One of the most fun things that we do as a family is we go up North and we fish and we boat and we spend time together and I have one son who's in college just finished his freshman year. And the not so fun experience of having him graduate during COVID and then start college at home and I was his college roommate. And so luckily he's now down in LA and we're moving forward several years ago. Everybody was thinking, oh my gosh, what are you going to do when he leaves for college? And then of course, you're sitting there going, oh my gosh, if only college would open up so that he would have that experience. So it kind of changed your mindset in terms of dreading them leaving and really just hoping that they can have that experience. Yeah, it's been really hard on particularly the college kids who are missing out on that. And at the same time, I think they'll appreciate it all the more when they have it. Hopefully this coming fall. That's the hope. The speaking of college, you went to Harvard. You went to Stanford for your MBA. Had you always aspired to go to those schools? How did you decide where to go to school? I would have been really excited to go to Wisconsin. That was one of the schools that I did apply to. But I did have this dream to possibly get into Harvard and having the opportunity just to have a completely different experience. Great. And then you went to the other coast for Stanford and then you went on to Oracle. Had you wanted to go into the tech business? What led you there? Honestly, no. It's the short answer. When I was at Harvard, I applied for the Rhodes Scholarship and I really wanted to be a professor. And I was one of the finalists, but I was not picked. And so I was faced with a decision my senior year. What do I do? And Oracle had recruited me and I thought, well, I'll go work for a year. And then reapply and apply to a PhD program and I ended up just loving working and loving being part of Oracle and the experience. Obviously, I didn't go back and get my PhD. But I did start to reach what I thought was my level of incompetence where I was managing people. I was building accounting software and yet I'd never been trained formally in accounting or people management. And so after four years, I decided to go back and get my MBA and that's how I went back to Stanford. After Stanford, you went to McKenzie? Yes. I was fortunate enough to get a job offer in our Silicon Valley office. We were just opening our Silicon Valley office. So I actually started in our San Francisco office and we opened the Silicon Valley office from McKenzie and I spent nine years there and it ended up becoming a partner. It was really exciting to become a partner in the Silicon Valley office. I was actually the first female partner in Silicon Valley and just spent, like I said, nine years there. And one of my clients was actually Microsoft. And so I'd served Microsoft for many years. And so when Kevin Johnson, who was running sales services and marketing and he asked me to come join him kind of in a COO-like role, that's when I made the decision to leave consulting and it was much more predictable than the life of a consultant when you're constantly getting called for client situations and traveling. And I had a new son and made the decision to make that life change. What was the decision like for you to decide to go to Microsoft? It sounds like it was something you were pretty excited about. I had worked with Kevin for many years and so on one level, I had an enormous amount of respect for Kevin as well as the company. I really thought that the company and its global platform was a huge opportunity. And then the other thing was I was trying to work part time. I decided to come back and work part time as a partner. But I soon realized that if you're full time and you have five clients in the air and three land, but you know, if you're part time and you have three in the air, but those are the three that don't land, it's for me it was challenging. And I really decided with a new son who was one years old that it would be easier for me to have a full time job where I had control of my schedule as opposed to trying to do the part time role that had so much uncertainty. So that was part of the decision. So I believe he started as the corporate vice president of customer service and support. Is that right? The first thing was I was COO to Kevin Johnson who was running sales services and marketing and then several years in. I had the opportunity to move to run customer support and so that was a big huge transition because I went from 300 people to about 9,000 people and running our global support organization for Microsoft. So that was a huge opportunity. Now, as you look back at that Kathleen, I mean, what were some of the challenges or the concerns or the opportunities you saw in taking that role? I viewed it as a big opportunity and I think I was fortunate to have such a strong sponsor with Kevin and so having Kevin as the sponsor and saying, I think you can do this and I'll support you and I'll continue to mentor you. I think that made a huge difference in terms of me viewing this as an opportunity versus being in my mind about all the reasons why this could go wrong or not be a good opportunity. But going back, I know we're going to talk a little bit about this mindset concept which is a really important part of Microsoft. It sounds like you really had this mindset of opportunity at that time. You were thinking, you were looking forward, you're looking at the opportunity. You weren't being held back by fear with sometimes can slow any of us down. When I think back at that moment, no, I don't think about fear. I think about, wow, what a great opportunity. I felt very lucky to be considered. Obviously, I wanted to work hard and earn it and I wasn't cavalier about that. But no, I think I was lucky to be in a position where I had colleagues and friends in a sense of support and a sense that I could be my authentic self at work that I went into at thinking this is a great opportunity for me to grow and learn and scale as a leader. You continued to grow in scale at Microsoft until ultimately you became the chief people officer which is different, right? You didn't have a traditional HR background. What was that like taking on that role? I went from support to support plus our consulting business. So now it's about a 20,000 person organization and I was consulting on our products, trying to implement them and help our customers realize the value. And Sasha, who's now our CEO, was running server and tools and building the products. So we had collaborated in that regard. He was building products. I was implementing and supporting the products. We had known each other, sort of, but he called me when he became CEO and that will you help me? Will you come and lead HR? And I thought, wow, again, what a huge opportunity. But to your point, very different on some dimension from what I was doing. I mean, I didn't have a background in HR. I didn't grow up in a HR and so I was very aware that I would only be able to do this if I had a very strong team. If I could rely on my colleagues around the world, which have been invaluable to me. And at the same time, I will tell you, having run a business where people are your product, it's all about attracting, developing and retaining exceptional talent. And that linkage between HR or your people strategy and your ability to change the trajectory of the business, I was very aware of. And I thought, what a huge opportunity to try to do that, not just within the services organization, but more broadly for Microsoft. Part of what you're saying is that you had developed this ability to surround yourself with talented people. And even though this is a new opportunity, part of what you saw was you could do the same thing here to be successful. Is that fair? I think that's absolutely fair. I mean, even stepping into the role-leading customer support, the only way I was able to do that is I had an incredible team and people who had deep expertise that I didn't have that complemented me and that together as a team, we were able to deliver. And so similarly stepping into the role from an HR perspective, I think I brought new things, coming from the business side, given my consulting background. So I think I brought some new dimensions. and at the same time, I could never have done the role if I didn't have the leaders I had in place, who had deep expertise in everything from organizational design to comp and benefits to running big line teams, et cetera. - So building a team like that is really an art, right? It's not necessarily an easy thing to do. What are some of the qualities that you have or you possess or some of the things that you learned that have enabled you to put together such great teams? - One of the things that I think has been so critical even in terms of the culture transformation is this moving from a bunch of know-it-alls that Microsoft to a bunch of learn-it-alls. And so I think truly showing up and trying to be curious and to learn and to seek to understand first has been, I think, really important. And so I think one of the key things I learned, especially coming into the HR role is really taking time to learn from my team and my leaders, spend a lot of time trying to learn from other CHROs. And so being curious, learning and continuously developing your own expertise, I think, is really important as a leader, but grounded in listening, as opposed to showing up and telling. I think the other key thing in terms of building a team is to really spend time with each of the folks on your team understanding what their objectives are. One of the key things we've rolled out for our managers is this concept of model coach care, but the role of a manager is to be a role model coach, but ultimately care. And that care factor, I think, is really important in terms of building team to understand what motivates people, what their objectives are, how you can help support them. And then there's this third dimension, which is getting the team together and saying, okay, as a team, what is our mission? What gets us collectively excited about making a difference in the world? And I think the lucky thing we have at Microsoft is I think we have this mission, which is about empowering everybody to achieve more, that I think really unlocks people's sense of purpose and together doing something as a team. Those are some of the things I've learned about building teams. And then making sure you spend time as a team. We meet every Monday as a team and shared context, shared stories, those funny moments. I mean, all of that, I think too, is part of creating that sense of team. - Going back for a second to model coach care. Can you talk about the care part? What are you encouraging your managers to do when you say to care? How does that manifest itself in terms of how they work? - We spent a lot of time coming up with this model coach care. The funny story is when we worked to come up with what is the essence of the manager? And the first time I went and presented to the SLT and it wasn't model coach care at the time, it was something not great. And I remember one of my colleagues saying, this is not very inspiring. And so it was one of those moments where I quote failed in terms of coming forward with something that wasn't that great. But again, in that growth mindset, you say, okay, well, what's the feedback? How do we take that? How do we learn from that? And we ended up getting together five SLT members, our CFO, the head of Azure, our CMO, head of our field and global sales. And together then we worked to try to distill down across all of the roles at Microsoft, what is the essence? And again, we came down to this model. We knew we wanted people to role model our culture, role model our values, role model our leadership principles, our leadership principles about generating energy and delivering success. That was really important. Coaching the team versus inspecting the team, moving from know it all to learn it all. But this last dimension around care, I was so excited that we added that because in tech, we had a lot of people, I think, who believe that making manager was about the promotion. We hadn't been clear that, no, it's not just about being promoted, you want to be a manager because you want to care about the individual, right? You do want to spend time understanding what motivates each of them. You do want to help them achieve their objectives. You do want to understand what's going on in their life to the extent they want to share it with you to help them navigate work in life. And I think one of the things we've noticed over this last year with the pandemic is humanity comes more into the workforce and you see the kids and you see the isolation and you see the heartache because they've lost a loved one and all of those things, you know, the role of the manager to help navigate that while still being able to deliver at work. If you care, you can make just such a huge difference. That's what we mean when we say care. It doesn't mean be somebody's best friend, but it means you care about that person realizing their full potential and you're invested in their success. - I mean, it's such a critical point and it seems like it's one that's often overlooked is just the whole relational aspect of leadership, right? I mean, there's the saying that people don't care what you know until they know that you care, talking about really trying to bring out the best leaders creating out the leaders and bringing out the best and people to create great results and how does it work when we don't care? We have to really think about, even from a servant standpoint, right, how do I try to bring out the best in someone? How do I support someone? How do I be empathetic about the needs that they have in their personal life in terms of just the dynamics? So it sounds like you've embodied those three points, all of those kind of ideas into your model. - For me personally, as I reflect on my career, managers who have cared have made a huge difference for me. And so on some level, that's why I also want to try to pay it forward in terms of instilling that as a manager myself as well as what we embody in terms of our ethos as managers at Microsoft. I think about what I was diagnosed with breast cancer and being able to share that with my manager and navigating that. I remember when Satcha said, "Will you take the CHR role?" And I said, "Okay, but you know, I'm a single mom." And so here are some of the constraints that I'm going to have and we were able to talk about that. And so being able to have managers throughout my career that cared and that I was able to have these conversations about how I'm going to navigate both and a sense that they wanted to help, as opposed to, "Well, that's your problem to navigate." It has made a huge difference for me. - I mean, you can imagine how that would have gone if they had been the other way, right? If they'd say, "Oh, there's your problem." I mean, but it was really supporting you and really helping you bring out your best to the point where you are today, leading this global organization of people. It's an incredible story. So Kathleen is a leader. What for you are the keys to unlocking employee potential? - Well, we've thought about, in fact, we have a framework. It's the five P's. One of the P's does not stand for potential, even though that's what you ask. But when we think about trying to unlock potential for employees and what we're trying to deliver in terms of a great experience, we think along five dimensions. If you think about a pyramid at the base is pay and of course we want to pay well and we want people to have financial security and I'm not dismissive of that. I think it's important, but it's necessary. It's not sufficient. The other four layers are perks, which are benefits and boil, boil, boil. Over the last year have we realized how important those benefits are in terms of pandemic leave and other things that we've been able to deliver from a benefit perspective to support our employees. And then the other three dimensions are pride. I think people want to have pride in the company and what do we take a stand on and are they proud to say that they work at Microsoft? That is really important to us. The other pre is for people, having people that you love to work with, you can be your authentic self and this is where our culture comes in. And being surrounded with people who have that growth mindset, who challenge you to learn, who support you when you make mistakes, that's I think so important. And then that last piece is purpose. In that sense of are you laying a brick or are you part of building a cathedral? Can you take this incredible platform that you have at Microsoft where we're in 100 plus countries and we're global and we have all of these different assets and use it to not only help Microsoft achieve its mission but achieve your own purpose, whatever that is. And if you can make that connection and people feel like they're getting all five p's, paid well, great perks, pride in the company, people they love working with in a sense of purpose and not just a sense of purpose for themselves, but that they're seen by others. That others see that purpose. Others say what you do matters, what you do makes a difference for others. I think that's the secret sauce. And when we're able to deliver on all of that, I think we retain more people. And when we can't deliver on all of that, I think we're more susceptible to lose great talent. - It's a great model and I can see certainly how this could be a secret sauce. When you really activate people at their core in terms of what's important to them and then surround that with all the things that enable them really to maximize who they are on the job toward a corporate purpose, that really does seem like an ingredient for great engagement. And certainly you've got great engagement at Microsoft. And I want to thank you also, Kathleen, because certainly our organization's deal Carnegie Microsoft have worked together for many years. It's been a great honor to work with you and to support your mission, particularly as it relates to your people. So certainly want to say thank you for that opportunity. - No one, thank you. You realize how important not just having this incredible employee basis, but having really great partners like yourself to help us on the journey. So we're grateful for the partnership. You've been a huge driver, Kathleen, in Microsoft's cultural transformation. I know that when Sacha came in, it was one of the major things he wanted to do is to impact the culture. Would you talk a little bit about why the culture is so important and how that is impacted Microsoft's success over these years that you have been in your role? - I do give Sacha credit for realizing that our culture needed to be a first class opportunity that we focused on. I think there was probably a culture before, but it was never something we talked about explicitly, and if you asked people you would get different answers. But I think when Sacha came into role, he really had a sense that he wanted to anchor the company in a mission that was purpose driven and a culture in service to that mission. And I think we also were looking at a bit of a from-to when we were talking to employees, there was a sense that there were a lot of things about the culture that weren't explicit, but that people didn't want to change, taking on big bold ambitions, a PCN every desktop. People didn't want to change that sense of giving and giving back and making a difference through philanthropy. That's something that is core to Microsoft folks. We didn't want to change that, but there was this infamous characterization of our org charge, which was two guns pointed at each other. One represented windows and the other represented office or X or Y. That was a characterization and there was the sense that the competition was on the outside, we didn't need it to be on the inside. We had perhaps become too much of a bunch of know-at-alls and it was preventing us from realizing our potential as a company, it was preventing us from seeing around corners. We didn't use the language at the time, but we had grown a fixed mindset in a lot of ways, done that, done that, done that, and when you shut people down for they don't bring forward new ideas, it can be very challenging. Those were the from two that we wanted to change. The other funny one, it's not funny, but we can laugh about it now, is we had a value which was called self-critical, but it deteriorated into be critical of others. When you bring forward your idea, let us tear it down and if you're strong enough to stand up to that, maybe your idea is worthy and maybe that works for certain folks, but not for a lot of folks. For a lot of folks, that style just didn't unlock their ability to bring their best self. We embarked on this nine-month effort to really define our culture. The key was we didn't just decide on the culture, we invested a good nine months. We had worked with Dr. Dwak and met with her and other experts. We had focus groups, sales, engineering, millennials, non-millennials, women, men, U.S., non-U.S., really trying to make sure that whatever we were coming up with was something that really would unlock the power of broad Microsoft population. Then we ultimately had the top 200 folks at the time in an off-site break down into 17 different teams and each of the leaders of those 17 teams became the culture cabinet. Anyway, to net it out, we ultimately decided to declare and ground our culture in a growth mindset. We said we want to have our culture be about having that growth mindset, confronting your fixed mindset and really applying it in three areas to be way more customer obsessed, to be way more diverse and inclusive and to show up as one Microsoft, sort of the antithesis of that org chart that I just described. I would say the last five years now has been about closing the gap between what we aspire to, what I just asserted and 160,000 people lived experience. There is no perfection, but we are trying to close that gap so that on any given day, where people are experiencing the culture, the way we aspire it, and fewer people are not. Well, it sounds like you were incredibly intentional about the importance of culture. And frankly, from the outside, looking at the success that you had over these years, it seems like that intentionality and the culture that you, your CEO, initiated really has unlocked incredible growth and greatness in the company. I mean, it seems like that was really a key thing from that point on until now and that you're continuing to do that and to close those gaps. When we first started this, it was interesting. I saw research that said 85% of companies are trying to change their culture and only 30% have been successful. So I think the key is to be humble and recognize that you have to earn it every day and never declare victory, but again, be clear on what you're aspiring to and then how every day you're trying to be better. I personally think that living with a growth mindset is a huge unlock. I think it's a huge unlock for a company. I think it's a huge unlock for a human being. One of my favorite stories is when I first came into role, maybe I was about a month into the role and we had outsourced staffing and it was not going well. Literally we were not able to schedule interviews and so as you can imagine, a lot of the executives were not happy about this and I went to Sachin, I said, this is my first email I'm sending to the executive staff, I'm not going to ask you to read my emails in general, but we read this one because I'm basically saying we're going to have to unwind what we did and we're going to fix it and he read the mail and he said, you're too apologetic. Just assert that you made a mistake, you're going to fix it and move on. And I tell you, when I came back and told the team, it was like this huge burden was lifted off their shoulders because in the past it would have been, we'll come back with more data, who's to blame. And instead when I came back with that message, I know it unlocked their creativity. We ended up hiring somebody to lead recruiting from the engineering group, we ended up changing how we recruited, we took a lot more risks and I think people felt more empowered that if they made a mistake and they owned it, that it would be okay. We give a lot of credit to Dr. Dwak because when we grounded our culture in the growth mindset, one of the things we talked with Dr. Dwak about is how do you hold a growth mindset and accountability? That was the biggest thing. If you talk about taking risks and failing and failing is essential to mastery, how do you reconcile that with that at the end of the day, people are accountable. At the end of the day, people have quotas to deliver at the end of the day, products need to be shipped. And her feedback, and this has been really key is, as a manager, you want to reward the person who took risk and was successful, obviously, that's the ultimate. But somebody who took a risk, but as a result, you're smarter, you're closer to the ultimate goal. You want to reward them more so than the person who plays with faith. And of course, then on the other end of the spectrum is people who are just taking bad risks all the time. And that's a different scenario. And I think she really helped us think about that. How do you tell stories about the person who failed but got us closer to our goal so that people will take risks? Now again, there's no perfection here. If you talk to folks at Microsoft, I think some folks would say they feel empowered to do that. And I think you'd still find folks that would say, gosh, I'm not sure that always works out in people's favor. There's no perfection on that. No, but like you said, it's a work in process. And by establishing the culture and saying, this is what we stand for, you certainly encourage people to take those risks and to have that mindset. And it all starts with mindset. And certainly that's one of the things that we talk about a lot in Delkarniki is, you know, what is the attitude? How do I see things? Delkarniki has said that the most important part of life is really what are our thoughts. How do we see things and so forth? And that guy's everything. So any advice for companies or people who are trying to change their culture, just a couple of quick lessons learned from all that you've been through? Stay humble, but stay the course. Really make sure that you've taken the time to define what that aspire to culture is. I think that's a huge unlock. I think recognize that the leadership makes a huge difference. I think having our CEO completely embody what we're talking about is a huge unlock. It's necessary. It's not sufficient. But often I meet with a lot of CHROs. And if they're trying to do it despite the CEO or despite the leadership team, that's obviously very challenging because that makes a huge difference. Invest in your managers. We have 16,000 managers. You know, you can try to embody it from the top down, but that 16,000 managers make such a huge difference and then really try to motivate the whole company to be part of the solution. One of the things we did in the beginning is we used to have a company meeting where we would be the, I guess you could say the know-it-alls, where we would talk at the employees for four hours and such a change that to one week, where for a week teams get together from around the world and they're doing a hackathon and the best ideas come forward and the best ideas then get implemented and that helps try to activate the employees to be part of the solution too. So, activate at all levels and realize you've got to activate many, many levers and you're never done. Awesome. Great advice. Thank you for that. One thing I read recently is that in the last year you hired or onboarded 25,000 new people, 25,000 new people in this last pandemic year and that you've been able to do that in a way that's enabled them to still feel connected to the purpose of the organization to each other, talk a little bit about how you've been able to do that. That's a big, big lift, especially today. I've been super proud of our managers in terms of onboarding, like you said, 25,000 employees. I think one of the things that served us well is because we knew we were virtual and because we knew we couldn't rely on the osmosis that happens when you're in the office at the water cooler, after the meetings, etc. We really had to ask our managers to be very, very intentional. You have to play the key role in terms of onboarding this person, making them feel connected to the team, getting them involved and helping them network. We really asked our managers to be intentional and they really stepped up. The data shows that employees relied on their manager 20% more for onboarding than they did prior to the pandemic. Amazingly, the satisfaction with the onboarding experience on average is higher than it was before. I'm sure in that mix, you can find people who didn't have a great experience. I can imagine it's been very difficult to be onboarded remote. We have 25,000 people who've never met their manager in person. And yet, I think being really intentional and really driving home that model, coach care, our managers have stepped up and I'm super grateful for our managers. It's pretty amazing. And I also think back to your discussion around growth mindset and fixed mindset, we had to really challenge our fixed mindset. If I had said in January before COVID happened, we're gonna on board everybody remotely for a year, the fixed mindset would have said, I'm crazy and yet here we are a year later and we figured out how to do it. - Yeah, it seems like one of the biggest outputs of the pandemic has been just the paradigm shift in so many different areas where like you said a year ago, we wouldn't have thought any of these things are possible. Now we do. What is your vision for the future of hybrid work? - I'm excited about the future of hybrid work. I don't know that I have everything figured out, but my vision is something way more flexible than what we had in the past, a workforce where we're tapping into talent that we couldn't tap into in the past. We just had our ability summit and you know, you think about just incredible talent that maybe couldn't come into the office every day but can thrive in this new hybrid model. That gets me excited tapping into different locations that perhaps we couldn't in the past. So one of the things we've talked about as a leadership team is we are definitely not gonna go back to the way it was. We don't wanna be chocolateites stuck in the past where we insist everybody be in the office every day. We're fortunate enough to have a lot of jobs that don't require you to be on the front lines. Let me at least clarify that. Super grateful for all of the first responders and everybody who's been out there on the front lines keeping us going. But with that said, I'm really excited that we're not gonna go back to the way it was and at the same time we don't want to stay in the way it is where we're all remote 100% and we never are together in person. We think we wanna be in person some of the time and we think it's gonna vary by role and it's gonna vary by business need. But what I'm excited about is breaking open all of these different models. I just had a meeting yesterday with a team that really believes that they can operate in a very distributed model. They're creating very clear team norms around how they're going to operate when they come back. Some folks may choose to be in the office and choose to work from home but how they're gonna all turn their camera on. So no matter if you're in the office or not you have a very inclusive experience. They're gonna be clear on when they get together once a month or maybe it's gonna be once a quarter and it's a completely new way of working. And I think it's really exciting. And I think we're gonna have lots of different flavors. One of the things back in October I think some folks wanted a one size fits all. Can you just commit that everybody can work from home forever? And that was impossible for me to do. But what we did come up with is clarity around three dimensions, how much you can work from home, moving locations and working part time and even legitimizing that discussion. You think about 20 years ago you would not even have asked for that discussion. Now not only is it legitimate people are gonna make it happen. So I'm really excited about what this hybrid can mean. I think the key things to enable that is being really clear on your policies, being really clear on your team norms. The more intentional the team can be about their team norms, the more flexibility they can create. In the past people would have a meeting on Monday and then on Tuesday and the time would vary. Now people are being very intentional. I'm gonna ask you to be in meetings during this time or this day or this week. And then the rest you can plan around. Way more flexibility. So I'm excited about the future. Coming from Microsoft, I would be remiss not to say the third dimension to unlock this is great technology to make this really work and have that immersive, inclusive experience. You really wanna tap into the power of teams and a lot of the things that I think Microsoft has to make that work. - Absolutely, Microsoft is at the forefront of so much of this, not just in the technology, but even in your leadership about what the future of work looks like, so thank you for that. Is you look back on your career at Kathleen, thinking back upon your experience and leadership that you've had, what are some of the things that you might have told a younger Kathleen? What are some of the things that maybe you've learned that you wish and knew when you were in your say 20s? - One of the pieces of advice I got when I was at McKinsey was, McKinsey won't love you when you're old. And that always stuck with me. Later in life somebody said, well, you can't say old 'cause that mean that McKinsey doesn't like people who are old, no, that's not what that meant. They meant make sure that every day you are prioritizing work but you're also prioritizing your family and making sure that at the end of your life you have no regrets on that. And I thought that was great advice. I think my advice now to people is, work will fill the capacity you give it. And I've realized whether you work 10 hours or 12 hours or 15 hours, there's always more work to do. And so prioritizing, focusing, and then letting go. Let go of the guilt. I don't have regrets about how I prioritize. I really do feel like I've always clear that my first priority is my son. It's that guilt about not being everything to everybody because you do have to make trade-offs. - It's one of the biggest challenges I think a lot of us feel is there's all these things that we wanna do and that we think we should be able to do. We may not be able to get to everything but I mean there's only so much that we can do in any given day just doing the best we can. So Kathleen, as we close our interview and thank you so much and you've shared so many really rich insights from your experience and different things at Microsoft and McKinsey. Any final advice that you might have for emerging leaders as they think about their careers but I have to take command of their careers how to become better leaders themselves. - It's a great question. I would offer two pieces of advice. The first piece of advice would be to really seek out feedback because if you seek out feedback, people will give you feedback and it will make you better and you will learn. But a lot of times people are hesitant to do that. I remember when I wanted to make partner at McKinsey, I was in that mindset. I guess more open to feedback at the time and so I had scheduled time with different partners who had worked with me and said, this is my aspiration, give me feedback. What's one thing that you think I do really well but give me two things I need to work on. When I invited that, they gave me two things to work on. Now they weren't showing up at my door, knocking on the door and saying, hey Kathleen, here are two things you need to work on. They probably would have thought that was offensive but when I actually asked for that in the spirit of, here's my aspiration, help me learn and grow, people gave me that input. And so that would be one piece of advice is to really seek out that feedback and do it in a way where you invite it because then people will give it to you and feedback is a gift. I know that sounds trite but it really is a gift if it's delivered in a way to help you grow and learn. So that would be number one. The second thing is to really reflect on what it is, what is your purpose at the end of the day? What do you really care about when you meet your maker? What is it that you really care about? And if you can get really grounded in that, I think that's key as a leader in terms of A, helping you make decisions with that in mind in terms of how you spend your time, what type of role you wanna have, but also helps sustain you because the more you step up as a leader, there will be noise. There will be people who don't agree with you. But if you're grounded in that sense of purpose and what you're doing and why it matters, you can, and now I will give credit to Sasha for this 'cause this is his great piece of advice. You will look for the signal and let go of the noise. How do you look for the signal no matter what feedback you're getting? Take that signal, but not be thrown off course in terms of what your purpose is and having that sense of your own true north, I think is really important. So those would be two pieces of advice and then going back to what we talked about surround yourself with great teams. Try to be your authentic self, try to have fun. Life is short, enjoy the journey. I could give a lot more of advice to myself if I thought about it. - Well, this is certainly great advice and very rich and I know our listeners are gonna love your interview and I want to thank you again so much for being with us today, Kathleen, really terrific hearing and learning from you. - Well, thank you, Joy. I so appreciate it spending time with you and it was fun to interact with you with great questions. - Thanks, Kathleen. - I hope you enjoyed this edition of Take Command, a Dale Carnegie podcast. 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