Leading at the Speed of Change: Building Talent in a Shifting World

This is the Future Talent Podcast, a future-focused podcast series showing the channels that enterprise can engage today to empower their current employees and future proof the talent pipeline of tomorrow. This series is brought to you by Technological University Dublin's Enterprise Academy. We create learning solutions to enable your business success. Want to find out how we can support your learning and development needs? Visit www.tuwdublin.ie/enterprise-academy to book in a call with our team. Welcome to the Future Talent Podcast. Today's episode features Steve Cadegan, globally recognized talent strategist, LinkedIn's first chief HR officer and author of Work Quake. In this keynote, Steve delivers a powerful, funny and urgent message. The world of work is broken and we can't fix it using old maps. In this episode, you'll hear why skills are the new currency, not job titles. People aren't disloyal, they're loyal to learning. The scores are outdated, alumni return rates might be the new gold standard. CEOs are quitting faster than Gen Z and why organizations must shift from talent hoarding to talent ecosystems. Steve also challenges us to ask, are we solving the right problems? And who really owns the future of skills? This, education, government or all of us. If you're leading through change, designing learning or rethinking talent, this conversation is full of real talk and sharp insights to help you build for what's next. Thank all of you for taking time out of your busy schedules. I didn't hear a lot of people thank me for the sunshine I brought you yesterday, but they'll be time for that later. I want to start with a story of a trip I was on recently in Spain and I was asked by some of the largest employers in the country to come and help them think through the complexity that we're going to talk about today. One of the things I love to do when I'm talking to large employers is ask them, what's on your mind, what's bugging you. And I said, Steve, we're having trouble and this is, you know, we've got telephonica, we've got BBVA, we've got Santander Bank, we've got wineries, we've got Hamon producers. Most firms have, you know, thousands of employees. Steve, the big problem we have, we can't find people that are qualified. And when we do find them, they don't stay. And I said, you know, why do you think that is? Why do you think these people are harder to find? And why do you think they don't stay? And they said, as a collective group, there's probably 20 of them, they did sort of a proverbial look left, look right, and then they leaned in. And you know when someone does that, what's coming is going to be really good, right? They said, Steve, in America, do you have this thing, the millennial generation Z? I said, yeah, we've got those. Why? Well, you know, they have a short attention span, they're always shopping for promotion. They just show up yesterday and they want more money and they're disloyal to which I said, you mean your children that you raised, that generation? And that whole propensity, and we're really good at this in the States of like, let's, when things are about, let's find someone to blame. Yeah, those young people. And I mean, I think about, have we ever had a generation, a younger generation where we just work so much harder than we do? How is that possible? And I said, listen, executives from Spain, I said, listen, let's just go back and remember when we started our careers, we actually did something which my kids jokingly tell me, Dad, you know how someone knows someone old lives in our house? Because there's a newspaper delivered here. And the newspaper is where I found my first job in something called the classified as, and you just don't see those anymore. And so I told the executive, listen, the talent today that's entering the workforce has so many choices, so many new industries, so much visibility to see what's possible to do. It's hard to choose. And you know, if you had those choices, you'd still be in the same bank insurance company, phone company, 40 years later, no, you wouldn't. And that's the reality of what we're facing right now. It's just this landscape of massive difference compared to what we've built to lead and grow organizations. And what I want to do with you for the next, what do I have clear six hours to address? What I want to do is talk about this forest that we're all walking through together, all of us, universities, businesses, governments are facing more new challenges than any time in history. And I don't know about you, but I don't think it's going to change. And I'm not excited to tell you about that, those of you that don't love change. But as a recovering human resource professional, I'm a change junkie. I love this stuff. But think about what we face today. We're having something in the world that's never existed before called I call it the Pajama Revolution. I'm so much better doing my work in my pajamas, yo. I don't want to go to that office over there. I got to get dressed and take a shower. No, I want to stay home with my kitty cat and look like that creepy person on the Zoom call. Or we have more people not only leaving jobs faster than any time in history. We have more people changing careers than any time in history. We have more new industries being born than any time in history, which comes with a new career path. Cryptocurrency, blockchain. You think we've hit the end of what's possible with new industries? He was going to slow down in our lifetime. If I could show the look in your face, probably not, Steve. So where we face is a real high degree of uncertainty. Every researcher, every economist, everyone who studies labor around the world is going, whoa, we've never seen the kind of stuff we're seeing right now in Silicon Valley where I live. I call it crazy town over expensive land. There are more companies letting people go while they're hiring than any point in history. It used to be, let's put the break some recruiting, stop the, stop the hiring. The let people go, cut expenses, no, we've got the foot on the gas and the foot on the break simultaneously. We've not seen that before. We've not seen the supply of qualified people shrink to the degree that it's in right now. And so I want to unpack that for you right now because as we face, how do we prepare for our future, for ourselves, for our teams, for our families, I think we need to understand the landscape really, really well. And I want to start with what we look at most importantly to measure the vitality of the economy in America, cheeseburgers. Okay? When we've got a problem at Burger King that people are quitting on mass and saying, sorry, yo, but help yourselves to self-service cheeseburger, something's going on. I was in Atlanta, Georgia a few weeks ago for big conference, checked into the hotel, one in the morning. And the hotel clerks at Sarmas, Chicago, again, we don't have a room for you. I said, excuse me, do you know who I am? I'm a double platinum super duper gold elite mega user of Marriott Rewards. I got a confirmation number right here. And I said, well, we're sorry, we actually do have a room, but we don't have anyone to clean it. And I said, well, I'm pretty clean person. I can take care of cleaning it. And I said, sorry, we're going to have to move you in a different hotel or some restaurants after the pandemic serving plastic cutlery going, what, what's going on? We can't hire dishwashers, and I was like, well, where'd they go? Where are they hiding? And this radical flip and new challenges experiences on such an epic degree we've never seen before. We have more people in the world starting their own business in any time in history. In the United States in particular, we have more people filing what's called an EIN employer identification number and say, I want to work for that gorgeous person that I look every morning in the mirror, me. And I don't know about you. I have three teenage boys and two teenage daughters. And when I ask them, what do you want to do? It's pretty clear. Well, dad, I want to be a YouTube influencer. Oh yeah. I said, well, that's good because that's all you do is look at YouTube's all day and don't talk to me. But listen, think about that for a second. YouTube influencer. Not working for someone else, working for yourself, on a whole platform designed to allow you to create. And when I thought about it, at first I was like, I know people over at YouTube, really that's what you're going to do. Like, 1% of the people make a reasonable income off that. And then I thought about it. I said, well, what they're aspiring for actually is pretty beautiful. If I create content that's valuable, that other people value, I become valuable. That's a great education. If I create value that other people valuable, then I will raise my value. Now, the study that the Wall Street Journal did looking at particularly technical professionals, software engineers in particular, found something really interesting. And as I was reading, I thought, oh, I know what the answer is. They just want more freedom and flexibility of schedule. And sure, that's what they wanted. That wasn't the big driver of why these people loved going independent. It was the chance to learn new stuff. New client, new culture, new business practice, new norms, new challenges, fills me with energy. And what we've done over the last century or so post-industrial revolution is we've built businesses so that you don't change. So you do the same thing for a long period of time. And oh, yeah, guilty is charged. I'm the one rope policies early in my career that said, you can't apply for another job for two or three years. You just hired you and trained you. Don't even think about that. And then I started working in Silicon Valley. And if you're not challenging someone in six months and they want to go do something different, they will leave you and go across the street. You better solve that challenge. And so this radical pressure many organizations facing some of the best people are saying, I could just go work for myself. Why would I work for you? Because you're just keeping me boxed in. And I want to do new stuff. These organizations weren't designed for that. Most organizations are designed to keep you in one job family and one department and one discipline. And we're not even talking about the managers that are saying, what, you want to transfer to the other department? Well, I'm going to tell the manager, you're horrible. You're staying there. You work for me. You don't work for the company. Anyone ever worked for that person? Oh, no, I'm sure. Not, right? Because your boss is in the room and you're not going to out him. But listen, here's another statistic that just hit the Wall Street Journal. And weeks ago, 79% of people say, yeah, not really in love with my corporate job. Why is that? Is just leadership just generally horrible today? No. We've just got a visibility, a window to opportunity of what's possible. It's never existed before. We've not had companies try to hire and retain people in a world where there's a candy store of opportunity. So let me ask you, do you think that candy store of opportunity is going to slow down anytime soon? No, probably not. Probably not. But most of the companies I talk to are kind of doing, thank you, Steve, we're just going to go back and do what we want because we can't handle it. Here's some other really interesting trends. We have not just companies, countries, cities, industries competing for talent. We have full on countries fighting for people. We're seeing the most radical shift to immigration, to attract knowledge workers since we've been studying the world of work. Germany, your neighbor across the pond over there, if we don't have 400,000 knowledge workers every year for the next four years, our economy is going to be in crisis mode. They've never faced that before. They're looking at the demographics, they're looking at the population changes, and they're going, we need more people to sustain this, to fill our tax coffers so that we can provide the proper insurance, the proper education, the proper quality of a vital country. And that's even before all the craziness that's going on in the world right now. We have seemingly more struggle than we've ever faced before. Countries fighting for talent. Let me ask you a question. Pre-pandemic in the United States, how many people do you think immigrated their knowledge workers every year pre-pandemic? Anyone want to take a guess? A million, two. Every year. Do you know what that went to during the pandemic? A doughnut. Zero for two and a half years in every country for the most part. That flow of talent and skills and abilities and experiences stopped for almost three years. So what does that mean? We don't know. We've never seen it before. But one thing we know for sure, the world's not going to be the same post that arrest of migration. Super interesting. Most people don't think about that. I think that's a big reason when we look around and say, well, where are all the workers? Well, there was something really radical that happened that paused the migration. So this world of work that I was talking to these Spanish executives about that we all live with right now is playing out on colleges to a magnificently radical degree. More students deciding not to go to school. More students changing their four-year normal, quote unquote, normal plan to maybe one year, maybe no years, maybe two years, maybe part time, maybe I work and I go to school. More people in my neighborhood in the States saying, I don't want to go to school anymore. It's too expensive in the U.S. 40, 50, 60, 80,000 dollars a year to go to many schools, even some of these public schools. And more interesting than that, more students are studying different subjects than any time in history. The average number of times a student changes their major in a four-year school went from 2.1 to 4, four times, changing a major, wow, or maybe, and they considered if you double majored, if you started with one, you added another one that's considered changing your major. Why do you think people are changing majors? Why do you think that doubling of what I should be studying is happening? Because people don't know, what should I study? It's not simple anymore, it's not study A to become Zed. It's not so simple anymore because Zed might not be here next year. Because we thought the robots were coming, it looks like AI is coming. We don't know. And students, we all want to study the right stuff to give us the best leverage opportunity for financial independence to take care of ourselves, to take care of our family. That's a noble outcome. But we don't know what we should be studying. I went on a college tour with my son. A few years ago. And it was magnificent. And if I could make a full-time job out of just visiting college campuses, I would do that. I spent most of yesterday wandering on the campus tour, it's my heart is full. And I was trying to figure out why is that? Why do I love the college campus? And it became pretty clear to me, after one campus tour, inevitably, what most tour guides say is at the end of the tour, well, let me tell you why I chose to go to school here. And then you hear their story. And what the story is all about is promise. It's opportunity. It's something magnificent is in my future. Don't know what it is. I love that feeling. So I'm with my son a few years ago. And the first college we went to, they asked the dreaded question, which I can't stand, for someone who's 18 years old. So what are you going to study when you come here? And I was like, oh, this is going to be good. He was like, oh, math and science, I go, oh, math and science, it's good to know. I'm glad I'm on this tour, because at home, I get one word answers to most of my questions. Yeah, math and science, OK? Next campus. Now we've heard 20 other students give all kinds of really interesting responses. Analytics, data insights, software engineering, cultural anthropology. Next school is like, what do you want to study? Well, I'm thinking math, maybe some science. And by the end, our 10th tour, his answer was my favorite. I don't know. Why do we ask students when they're 18? What do you want to do? It's because that's what we think they should know. Are you kidding me right now? Are you kidding me? Any 18 rule that says I want to do this, I'm like, no, you don't, you don't even know what you want. Because you haven't tasted from the buffet table of opportunity, what's possible yet? And shame on us for making you think you have to know. We've got more people career pivoting at any time in history. And that's not just the generation Z of the millennials, it's everybody. I give talks like this all over the world. I will be approached by 40, 50, 60, 70 year olds. I just switched my career trajectory. I'm going to a different path. Awesome. That's awesome. What we should ask college students at the beginning of their journey is, what would you like to explore here? And that's what we should be asking our employees, by the way. When you come here, what would you like to explore? How can we make you better for the future? So let's talk about another bit of data. And I know most of us from the talent business, so we will not need any tissues to cry about those poor accountants. Accountants have been declared an endangered species. That's what we're talking about. That's how great accounts endangered species. When did we ever think that's possible? And do you think the accounting industry, the Ernst & Youngs, the Deloids, the Accentures or a magnificent firms? I work with many of them. They've not had to sell being an accountant before. They've just had to show up on school and say, and the high school has given us your best graduates. The college gives us your best accounting majors. And now it's like, hello, is anyone here? Did we miss schedule? Am I in the right room? Yeah, you are. Ain't nobody here. Where'd they go over there in data science? They don't have to buy a pocket protector over there. And they can make 2x and it's a lot sexier to say your data science than they count. There's more opportunity with those skills and they could see it. And that industry is struggling to sell making an accountant a worthwhile profession. Same in health care. More nurses leaving that profession anytime in history. Wow. Do you know the number one training course that's had to be adopted in most health care facilities around the world in the last year? It's terrible. Violence prevention training. Do nurses signed up to mediate violence? No. Especially in the States, you know, no, you have vasking police. You know, you can't be with your loved one because they're dying because, you know, COVID, all that. I didn't sign up for that. I did not sign up for that. And then the most obvious one that I feel like I'm preaching to the bishops on this one, we got a skills gap. Anyone here have an alcoholic beverage this morning and think that's going to shrink anytime soon? No. Here it is. And it's really playing out in wild ways. So let me just ask you this question. I'm going to get a lot of questions this morning throughout the course of the day. Do you think the new need for new skills going to slow down? We can all get a break? No. Probably not. It's probably going to accelerate. I found this chart recently, manpower published it in 2023, end of '23. It's a chart of talent scarcity. Can you read that sort of? The way I try to capture what this slide really means is how hard it is to find qualified people. Why do you think it's so hard? Well, probably because people are changing careers and the need for new skills is higher than it's ever been. So the normal supply that we go and recruit isn't there. It's not there. And it's not going to come back. And that is miserable news for most organizations to talk to because when I look at them, they think their problems are recruiting. Oh, we got to fix our culture. We got to fix our rewards. No, you don't. No, you don't. People are not leaving because of that because you're, you know, you study the Tony Soprano School of HR. You quit your dead to me. No. They're leaving because there's more choice and opportunities and they want to explore different things and bless them as a parent. That is joy to me that my children have many new choices and they can become YouTube influencers, but it's terrifying as an employer, isn't it? My people have more visibility to opportunities, not only opportunities, but how they pay what their culture is like, what their turnover is like. I can see more out there than any time in history. And this is a problem when more people are switching careers and more skills are needed faster than any time in history. People think it's a recruiting problem. It's not. It's not. I really, really, I'm here to tell you, this is a skill awareness problem, I believe. Most of the recruiters that I talk to are seeing this play out right now. We're used to being having a reasonable size pool of people that are 90% qualified plus that we can find in three to six months. And now it's like, I'm lucky if I get around 65%. And they're facing the dilemma. Do I take that person inside who's 60% qualified and try to upskill them in three to six months? Or do I wait nine months and try to hire someone on the open market? And what do you think most of them are doing? Waiting and going to hire. Why? Why? I tell, listen, we'll talk about this a few slides here now. I believe, you know, this whole notion of like, oh, people are just not loyal today. Oh, yes, they are. They're more loyal. Just not to you. They're loyal to learning. Yeah, make me better for an uncertain future. Don't promise me a job because you can't because the world's changing. Make me better and maybe I'll stay. And if I don't, maybe I'll come back faster. This whole notion of engagement, I think, is the most rotten measure that we use. And I'm sorry if it's heresy for all of us in the town world. I think we should stop measuring engagement because there's more things affecting the engagement of our people that we don't control. And yet we have to have high engagement. I think the ultimate measure for companies in the future is going to be how many people came back. Not how few left, how many came back as people are going to go? People are going to go. So what are you doing to build alumni communities to make it possible for them to come back? This moment is what I call the Black Swan moment. I was over at the Dublin Zoo looking for one yesterday. Didn't see any. But they're there. It's a Black Swan moment. So one of the things in prepping for this conference with you all with Claire and her team was Steve, you better bring some data if you're going to come here, okay? We got a really impressive, and you see, you know, I'm one of the few who doesn't have the doctor before his title in front of you today. So I better supply some data. So here's some turnover data, which this is North American, Canada, US, and Mexico, knowledge workers. But it trends exactly the same in every developed country in the world. People are staying shorter. We already know that. That's not super, super interesting. What is interesting is if we take down the demographics and we slice it down, we find out that the most important demographic at work that's got gray hair or no hair, we tend to stick around. We have mortgages and two ishins and tax payments and summer homes that we got to pay for. Our risk tolerance is way low. I'm going to hit this clicker in a second. I'm going to show you the 25 to 35 year old demographic, those millennials and Chen said, "What do you think the median tenure is for that category of worker?" Three weeks? What? I think a hired that person. Two and a half. Yeah. You're leaving? We just finished your new higher orientation. Is something happening in the parking lot? What's going on? And that's the median. I'm not a math major. I think that means half of that pool of numbers is less. In Silicon Valley, my neighborhood's crazy. It's a wild world. We know what the median tenure is for a software engineer, 1.2 years. We don't have the 20, 30 year anniversary dinner with the chairman and their spouse. It's like 10 months or so, Lyra, can I hug you? Thank you for staying. What? What? Well, here's the rub. We'll talk about this in a second. I live in Silicon Valley. It's not a perfect world. There's a lot of broken stuff there. I'm not here to sell you on it. Some of the most creative, some of the greatest innovations, creative discoveries of the most valuable intellectual property in some of the most valuable company in the world's coming from Silicon Valley. That's weird. But Steve, I was taught that the companies that win are the ones that keep people the longest. Yeah. Those are the companies that are most violent. We've been taught. That's why I got bonus. How many of you used to get bonus on? How low the turnover is? Yeah. And now the turnover is rising. People are like, oh no, what's going on? I don't know. But Silicon Valley is still innovating, creating like crazy. And they've got some of the lowest tenure in the world. Maybe there's something we're missing here. Maybe it's not all about in this wild world of work that's changing. Maybe it's not all about keeping people if the goal is innovation and creativity. And that's a head scratcher, a lot of companies were not built around. So it happened to be walking around town yesterday. I ran into this courthouse. Give a list of this one. This woman is going to ask this person who was just sitting in the building that I was walking by, what do you do? And give a listen here. And that's how it feels. I'm a film producer as of three hours ago. And what's really, really interesting here is the discovery that I think we're going to have to go through around the balance of new people doing new things and the comfort and the necessity for us to have the confidence that someone is doing something that we know is going to get done right. And that's the balance. That's why we want people to stay longer. You're here. The more I've confidence, you're going to deliver. But now that we all know, people probably aren't going to stay as long as they used to, we got to find that mix. So one of the bits of data that hit my desk recently was this report from Corn Fairy. All those CEOs, like, oh yeah, those young generation, those disloyal people, I finally got a report on CEO turnover. So here we go. You ready for it? In last year, they studied 15,000 CEOs since 2015, so last 10 years. And this is what they found. After one year, 11%, after two year, 23, and after three years, 36. Is this just a millennial problem? Is this just, oh, those young workers in home? I mean, maybe, maybe mostly CEOs are in their 20s and 30s. I doubt it, but that's super interesting. It's not a just a demographic issue. And we talked about why, but this is the bigger question. And it's a really important question for you and your leadership teams to try to understand and make sense of. Do you think we're just in a moment of time right now? Oh, yes, Steve. Once we saw that skirmish over there in the Middle East, and now we've got Iran pulled into this thing, and now, once we saw that thing over there in Ukraine, things are going to definitely, people are going to definitely stay in companies longer. What do you think? Do you think turnover's going to slow down? I think best case, it plateaus, I mean, at some point it plateaus. But people are probably not going to stay longer. Okay, that's a problem for us. Why is that a problem? Because everything we built is all about long tenure. The more you stay, the more remuneration, the more retirement benefits you get, the more holidays you get, the more vacation you get, the more opportunities. We all built the whole infrastructure of HR for people to be rewarded who stay. And now we all know they're probably not. So we got to think of a new model of talent strategy. I mean, this is, again, it's really, really hard, it's really, really hard. But ask yourselves, are we building our rewards, our infrastructure, our job families, our skill development, within awareness, people are not going to stay as long? Okay? So let's take a look if you're a candidate today. Let's take a look at that. Hold down, it's not just 20 favorites, the whole demographic award. What do you see as I hypnotize you here in the two inner circles? Here are those. Someone said apps for their companies, right, new companies, yeah, no, these are new industries, not just new companies, new industries. And on the outside is a whole host of many companies that used to be like, oh yeah, I'm working at Blockbuster, I'm working at Kodak, I'm good to go. Mom and dad, you can retire. And those companies are struggling. In my neighborhood, the United States General Electric used to be, your kids get a job there. Let's get the house in Hawaii. We're done. We did our work and now GE lost a trillion dollars of market capital in the last 20 years and split into three companies saying, I think we're better if we're separated into three companies. Not what all those leadership books telling us GE was the brainchild of the world. And let's play that out in a real industry, healthcare right now. What you see right here are 85 companies in the healthcare industry that in the last three years became worth over a billion dollars. Let me translate that to those of you who are recruiting. These are new choices that people in healthcare have to work, mail order prescriptions, wearable technologies where if I'm a researcher, I don't have to sit in a lab, I can go do something different. I don't have to be a nurse suffocating on the unfair schedule of this hospital shift and have to rely on a network of 15 friends to take care of my kids. I can work from home, terrifying to the healthcare association's traditional model of, you got to work here, you got to work in the shifts. This is just healthcare. Now, there's a dark side to all of this, for I believe the workforce in general. And that is, with a more choice, comes something really difficult, fear of making the wrong choice, right? Those of you who have worked in sales know is it easier to sell 50 cars or three to a customer. We got 50 cars here, which one you want, or hey, here's the three. What's easier? The lesser number. And now we got so many. That's why people are changing majors and studying different stuff. And that's very, very hard to address. So in a way, I think we as organizations, we need to have more career conversations. And I know, because all of you probably have that sick feeling in your stomach when it's performance or view time, oh yeah, can't wait. That one moment, everyone hates. Managers hate have to do the horror show of putting a performance appraisal together and the employee gets to hear something. The manager never told them all year until they meet. And I've got a few TikToks on that for your listing pleasure if you like that. So we got to, I think, we got to open up the dialogue. Here's one of the things that we did at LinkedIn. So, you know, come into my world, you're head of talent at LinkedIn, you're surrounded by Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, they're in your neighborhood. You have to go through new hire orientation with your employees so they don't get run over by the Google bus coming to work. They've got sushi chefs, they've got LeBron James coming over to shoot free throws, they've got Michael Jordan, Lady Gaga's coming to sing to you during your break time. They've got daycare centers. You have a baby, they'll build an in-law unit for your in-laws in the back of your house. My employees say, Steve, how can we don't have those benefits? I go, because Google makes more money in a day than we make in a year. You make me that money, I'll give you those benefits. And so what we are struggling, like what do we have? We found out we have something, we have a culture that matters, we're working on changing the world, we're helping people find their dream jobs. Oh, yeah, you want to go over there to a face plant, I mean, Facebook, and you want to help kids develop their short attention span capability and proliferate fake news, that's awesome. You go do that. You want to help your children find their dream job? Come here. Oh, you want to go over to Google and be engineer number 17,000, buff all the trophies that everyone before you? And yeah, make a lot of money, or do you want to come over here and put your fingerprints on our code and build something that's going to change. So, I don't know, what do you want to do? We were fighting. I mean, I would hire recruiters that had, you know, can you hold a knife in your teeth in a dark alley where there's candidates that don't have a job? Yes, okay, you're hired. I mean, and most of these companies that I talked to, they've never had to fight for people. And I believe that's given me a real advantage. I've had to fight. And many of you have had to fight that battle. And if you've had a sort of a captive audience of talent, it's gone now, poof, where to go. But it's not there anymore. And as I was saying to you, loyalty is shifted. I'm loyal to learning. That's the core. That's why what we're doing, what you do, is so important. Here's another disappointing fact for you, you ready for this one? When most companies have big layoffs, guess which department gets hit first? The learning and development team, oh yeah, that's just extra. We don't need those people. That's just a nice perk. What? What are you talking about? That's your future. That is your future. Oh yeah, just, you know, that's a nice to have, wow. And so in summary here, this is the Instagram shot here, you know, money shot, if you want, to guarantee that your blood pressure is going to rise. This is just a short list of some of the things we talked about. I didn't even talk about the aging of the world right now. Didn't talk about all our employees have more worries about the seniors taking care of their parents longer in a sociable society, not prepared for that. I literally standing here right now worried about my father, he's 88 years old, his house isn't built for that. He and his, my stepmother, they do not want to leave the house. And we had one, one period of three months, I'm laughing, it's not funny. But he slipped, fell, went to the emergency, went to the hospital, went to rehab hospital, came home less than 48 hours, slipped, fell, went to the emergency room, three times. And I had to call my stepmother. Linda, at what point does it hit you that he, you probably need to have us, like him in a senior home. Like, you know, the fact that you have to leave the door unlocked because the emergency room has to come in if you're out doing groceries and he falls down, like, that's not a good strategy. I, I find I'm thinking about that, I know a lot of other people are, it's a whole nother dimension here. And this is the really unsatisfying part that we all face right now, we got more questions and answers. And that's why I was so excited to be invited to come talk to you, like, let's have these discussions because I don't have all the answers and anyone that stands up here and says, Oh, the future got you. I know the answers. No, they don't know that we don't. We've never been here before. And part of the problem that we face is when we've confronted something new in our worlds in the past, what do we do? Let's go benchmark. Oh, yeah. Whose face this is a global society, a pandemic, and a whole new world of work. Anyone face that before? I don't know. And from the industrial revolution, do any of your relatives, we're frozen and we can unfreeze them and ask them, how they handled that? It's really hard. It's really hard. And I have to tell you, if you can't benchmark today, you're going to have to become the benchmark. You're going to have to experiment a little bit more. And that is not something a lot of organizations I work with are comfortable in doing. Because you're a culture, fostering experimentation. Because I work in a lot of organizations and I usually go in and the executives are like, oh, yeah, we're all about taking risk here. We're all about the experimentation. And I go talk to the employees and like, how's it going? They go, well, you take the risk first and I'll see what happens to you. It's all rhetoric. It's not really believed. And one of the reasons I love working in technology companies is because most of technology is an experiment. We're going to try it. I'm going to maybe test this and that easily morphs over to culture, to rewards, to challenge strategy. Let's try this. Instead of let's lock this down and let's reassess in five years. Mm-hmm. Can't do that today. Can't not do that today. So how do we compare, how do we prepare for a complex world? Well, like many of you over the last decade or so, I've really gotten into podcasting. And I am a bit of a podcast junkie. I was listening to this podcast on, I can't remember the name of it, a few years ago, and they had the head of learning and development, the SVP, the learning development for a unilever. One of the most revered companies, not only in Europe, but around the world, huge organizations really known for pioneering something. And he was asked the question, okay, you're the SVP learning and development. What are you guys focused on at unilever? And we're ready for, you know, like, black belt leadership, communication, rape for something really cool. Nobody said, we're worried about distraction. Huh? Yeah, we did all the research, and we found out we're overwhelming our leaders by giving them too much stuff, and when they're distracted, they're not productive. And I was like, okay, I pulled off the road, I'm like, all right, I want to hear this. So what are you doing? Well, we're looking at what we can take off, and what's that right balance of the right amount of data to consume, the right amount of work to delegate, the right amount of, I mean, we've all done this, you know, in our own way, the right amount of direct reports, the right depth of the org structure. The system wasn't built for this right now. You know, one of the funny things I was talking to some friends in the lobby before, about just like all of you, like, AI, it feels more like AI, AI, AI, but AI. And, you know, one of the things that's really interesting to me when I go to clients, and they're, you know, talk to us about, yeah, okay, let's have a conversation. The first question I ask is, how confident are you with your adoption of technology, traditionally? And they go, oh, yeah, real good, you know, that SAP Oracle overpriced work day implementation that we did. Yeah, those 30 people on the implementation team, I said, no, no, I'm talking about something simpler, like, how's it going with email right now? Email. Are you more productive, or is that a device to make everyone else unproductive? We haven't figured out email, our relationship with technology, it's pretty jacked right now. It's a very exclusive, you know, HR term, it's jacked up, highly technical, it's really kind of messed up. And now, oh yeah, we're all running to the AI, gods, full force ahead. We haven't figured out how to make email, email effective in organizations. We haven't figured out what a productive meeting looks like. Oh, yeah, AI is going to be a layup, easy, open goal, net, no problem. Huh? Yeah, we got to be cautious here. Distraction. You worried about this? You worried about distraction? You worried about the fact that we've got more people on antidepressants, more people experiencing anxiety at all ages in the world right now than any time that we've been measuring it. We've created this world. Not them. We. We have. What are you going to do about it? You know, I have this big debate with one of the members of my team around, is AI going to deliver the four day work week. And he's all about, oh yeah, we're going to hit the, in our lifetime, three days, four days ago, I don't think so. And he goes, what? He goes, I thought you'd be all about it. I'm like, I love that. And every company I study that has hybrid, guess what day that, if it's a three day work and guess which, guess which day is there in the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, right? Everyone's home. Money free. Everyone has those contiguous days off for powerful. And all the cognitive researchers, all the brain studies, all the mental health research all says more sleep, more creative, more sleep, more innovative. A few months ago, I was invited to speak to an audience like this of the, the most dynamic new companies, the most dynamic entrepreneurs in mental wellness and brain health. And then with them were the most prolific investors in that space. Okay. So we had a couple hundred people. And I was a little cranky because at the end of the day, and it's also my nature to be a little disruptive. I said, so let me ask you, you know, all you smart people about brain health, what is the proper amount of sleep and rest that we should have? So they're talking about that. I said, how many work days is optimal do you think? And they all said three. I said, how many of you work three days a week? That's when they said time to check my shoelaces zero, zero is hard. Even when we know what we need, it's hard because we've got an architecture of work, not built for this. We're worried. I'm worried about my, if I go to my investors and say, hey, I'm thinking to go into four day work week and they're going to go, why? I said, because I can get everything done in four days. And they're going to go, okay, we'll take on a new project. Go make some more money. We've got five days to work. And it's not just work. It's society, it's all the banks and the schools, everything's built for that. Not, not easy to change. So what skills should we be building? Right, Claire talked about this in the tip of this is a big, it sounds like simple, but it's really a hard question. What should we be building? And I saw a video, I'm sure a lot of you saw it, not long ago. You know who this guy is? Anybody? Davidia CEO, Jensen Wong, who's probably grown about six inches taller as his share prices gone through the roof in the last few years, you know, semiconductors, I worked in semiconductors and they were like, it was like, gone about 10 years ago. Now it's the hottest things in sliced bread because we can't build enough to support the infrastructure for all the AI. So he said something which I tend to agree with, you know, 10 to 15 years ago, you know, it's all about STEM, computer science. Now it's the opposite, it's your capacity to communicate. It's your capacity to communicate with technology in very human ways to extract insight. Not program anymore, that's fascinating. And so you saw a list that Claire had up there, lots of people doing this. This is a LinkedIn poll of executives last year, what are the most demand skills? Not based on what the executives say, but all the jobs that they're actually recruiting for. What do you notice here? If you were to characterize these skills mostly in one word, they would be what kind of skills? People's skills. And yet everyone's running towards the AI train, right? And yeah, AI fluency, important. But to extract value, I believe, and again, I'm not an expert here, to extract value I believe from AI, it will derive from your capacity to understand the world really, really well. And so all of these contribute to us building adaptability, which I think is a really interesting notion, that is not something that we've been focused on in the world of work. Traditionally, the world of work is to keep you doing what you're doing for a long period of time. So I lower my turnover, I have consistency and reliability and predictable outcomes because my shareholders and customers want that. So don't want to change a lot of stuff. Now, it's almost like if I'm not changing a lot of stuff, I'm out, I'm handicapped. I'll give you an example of that in a second. But in a high-distraction environment, you know, with a lot of change, one of the reasons I want to go through all this data with you is for the rest of it, let's make sure we're solving the right problem, let's make sure we're identifying it. What are we trying to address here, right? That's why Claire and I talk about like, let's have a foundational conversation. First thing this morning, that's going to see if the rest of the day like, are we solving the right problem? Or do we have a solution looking for a problem? Are we solving the right problem? I've given you the landscape of the world work. And again, sweeping, I could do this for six hours, we wouldn't be able to cover everything. And the next question, once we sort of figure out, okay, what problem are we really solving? And I hope this conversation starts that conversation, is who owns this? Because usually in the States, it's like they do, not us, them. Is it universities, schools, because they take so much unfair blame. Oh yeah, they're teaching crusty old case studies from the 80s over there at that school. Well, is it the businesses? Because I go to a lot of schools and say, how's it going? They go, it's going great, business doesn't know what skills they need. So we're just trying to make it up. So, again, the schools, the businesses want to blame the schools and the schools like, "Yo, the businesses don't know what they need." Is it the government's responsibility? Is it the workers, right? Who's responsible? Are we supposed to know what we should be doing, what we should be building, addressing our vitality in the future? Yeah, we should. So what's the answer? Who? Exactly, what she said, everyone. Or we can go ask Elon Musk if he can solve it for us, right? Yeah, yeah. It's great. He's solving everything else. I mean, just amazingly, right? Anyway, another story for another day. Why this is so hard, again, this is a sort of reminder and a comfort, there's really no bench. We're all in this together, all of us in different ways. We're all here, pioneers, experimenting, trying to figure it out. And we're stuck with a model of work, it's kind of broken, it's not really built for this. So what I want to do for the next last piece of the conversation here is give you some examples of organizations doing some really, really interesting things. Because I really believe that in this transition we're in, we need to learn to experiment and get comfortable. And I know probably a lot of you are and they're like, yeah, but those executives not so comfortable with it. So we need to, I need to give you some data to make them more comfortable with that. And let's start with some technology companies that are mostly in Silicon Valley. If you have an executive team or maybe you're still carrying that belief in your mind that longevity of employment is the main reason that's going to get you to be successful, take a look. Any surprises there? This is median tenure for some of those innovative, creative, valuable companies in the world. You surprise it's that low, surprise it's that high, they're not crushing it because of all those 30 year veterans, they're not. I was at a human resource conference the other day, it's another funny story. And you know, when they have those conferences they have like the exhibit hall with all the people selling all the stuff like we've got this great, you know, employee benefit. And there was the service award booth. And the dude had like five years, 10 years, 30, I was like, you, are those months or years? What do you do? He wasn't very amused anyway. Okay. This is technology companies. Okay. Let's take another industry that's been around, I don't know, century. Automobiles. And let's look at tenure, but let's also look at what the investor community, the smart money is going towards and we find something pretty interesting, the company. And by the way, if you're a BMW or Mercedes, you know, for those people that, you know, we love cars in America. Oh yeah, we're all about the big car. BMW and Mercedes are right where Honda is. Turns out the company that has the shortest tenure is worth more than all the others combined. Who is that? Maybe in video. Maybe they will be a car company. Who's the company at the top? Wait a second. The company run by a lunatic. The company that's less than 25 years old. The company there were people and it's not because people are staying a short time. They're growing. So when you grow your tenure, it comes down quite a bit. You mean to tell me that the company that has got a CEO with six part time jobs in addition to acquiring the US government on a spare time, that company's worth more than all the others combined, combined and trying to keep a slide up to date is impossible because Tesla was worth like a trillion dollars and it was worth 400 million, I don't know. Why do you think the investors think Tesla's worth investing in and not companies that have been doing it 100 years? Why? Because they can do one word, they can do something that the others can't innovate. Wait a second. How can they innovate better? They just got here yesterday and these people are doing it 100, well, if you're not sure, go to your favorite streaming platform and go watch Ford versus Ferrari. And there's a wonderful scene there where Carol Shelby who's trying to win Le Mans from Mr. Ford goes to Mr. Ford's office and says, you see that folder you're holding Mr. Ford to touch 30 hands before touch yours, we are not going to win this race touching 30 hands. It turns out in the world of work that's changing really quickly, having policies and practices in bureaucracy over 100 years slows you down. And that's an impediment. I could teach a college course on this and I'm welcome to come back, Claire and teach that class for weeks on this slide, this slide, your legacy is your impediment. That does not feel comfortable. So what are we doing about it? Well, let's take fast food. We've got a burgeoning fast food renaissance in the world of fast food chicken in the U.S. says here's the company called Chick-fil-A. And what you see right here is a snapshot I took of their career website and the woman in the middle and the woman on the right are ex employees. Thank you Chick-fil-A for helping me become my dream fifth grade school teacher. Thank you Chick-fil-A for helping me become an emergency room nurse. That was my dream. Thank you. And Chick-fil-A says, we know we're not your dream job, we're fast food. We know you're not we're not your destination. We just want to be the greatest part of your journey because we know we're fast food. That is beautiful. That is so mature, you know. And most organizations don't do that. They say, you commit to stay here a long time, we'll commit to employ you a long time. We both know it's crap. So let's start a relationship on a false foundation. Yeah. My other favorite one is the management consulting industry. And this is not new, but they've been doing it quietly very well. You ready for it? Come here and then please leave for a better job. Yes, that's their model. Oh, and when you go, would you give us a call and hire us to be your consultants? So we birth our business development arm through you. Oh, and by the way, after you leave, I'll go to campus, I'll go to TU Dublin, hire a bunch of people and say, look, the last people got that job over there, that hot, cool company. You can too. Yeah. And this has been going on for now. I know people who've worked there 10, 20, 30, 40 years and they love it, but at least 50% of their talent is expected to leave and the biggest problem they had was the pandemic. There weren't a lot of new jobs being created, so the pipeline got stuck and they're still trying to get weaned their way off that. Here's another one. Big, big companies, airline company, NASA, tire company, sort of realize like, man, we got this really aged, aging workforce and people are leaving. And the traditional model is you're in or you're out. And there had all these people that they're struggling to hire to teach all these new things to and the people like, no, I got to start my retirement and someone said, well, if you hired me for like two days a week, I would do that. And then the finance people go, oh, we need a regular full time person. We don't have a model, it doesn't have part time. Again, broken model work, not built for more flexibility, not built to tap into incredible knowledge for senior workers. Now we're starting to see game changing. How about a day week? I was working with a health care association recently. Biggest problem, nurse turnover, okay, what's happening or they're leaving. I said, do you talk to the nurses at left and find out if they want to come back and they're like, it looked to me like, why would we do that? They divorced us. We're not sexy. They're not sexy. I'm like, because they might come back, they don't maybe they maybe it's nicer where you are. Here's an example, which is one of my favorites. I was on a panel in London last summer with the CEO of a potential insurance company. It was all these insurance executives. And bless their hearts. Have this retreat every year where they try to expand the minds of all the major insurance carriers CEOs. And I was asked to come in and talk about, you know, conversation we're having today. And I was really disappointed and I was kind of pushing the CEOs like you guys are just not creative with your talent strategies. And my expectation of creativity come out of the insurance industry having worked for Aliens for four years, I can say that was really low. At Aliens, we used to have meetings to decide who's going to come to the meeting. I'm like, really? Are we really doing this? Well, they've got a problem, just like all of you. People are leaving, especially the young talent. What are we going to do? So they said, let's build a platform, a portfolio that assesses career readiness. And here's what they did. They looked at every job in the company and they mapped how qualified every employee was for every job in the company. And they got so good at this that they sat, they sit down, they're new hires now. Their first day of orientation and say, hey, we don't know where you want to go. We hope it's here. And in case you want to move from HR over to investor relations or engineering or operations, here is a graph to shows how qualified you are based on what you told us, okay, what we know about you. Oh, and by the way, if you want to go over there and you're only 30% qualified, here's all the courses you can take, here's all the universities we have partnerships with, here's all the mentors you could find, here's coaches for you. So you can navigate a future inside, instead of outside. And you see the problem we have in HR is that org chart that a new hire on day one looks up and says, huh, I'm looking at the org chart and there's fewer opportunities up there than there are here. To look outside, there's more opportunities. It dispells that problem with this kind of solution. Now one of the things that's awesome about what TU Dublin's doing and I hope I can be a part of it going forward is very similar to a school that I've been working with in Spain for a few years called ISD. And ISD was founded back in the 90s when a bunch of executives at Proctor & Gamble said, our kids are going to have to leave the country because unemployment for people under 30 was like 60%. You know the story. And so they said, what's the biggest skill we need to give them is digital marketing skills. So they built a school. And the school start, the premise of the school is no one teaches, that's not a working practitioner, number one. Number two, they started realizing after they're teaching their students and their students are going back into their companies and the companies are saying, where did you learn that? Yo, you're really good. Well, over there. So then they started doing in company training. Then they started to see some people say, I love this stuff so much. I want to quit my job, not so welcome by the in company training sponsors. I want to quit my job and go do something. They started an incubator and they started investing in companies that the students wanted to adopt, building an ecosystem, okay? My belief, and if you read my book, it's the last chapter of my book. My belief is that the future of organizations and learning entities is one of symbiosis. Not like, oh, can you come in and teach a class? It's like those boundaries are now permeable. We've got workers, managers, leaders teaching. We've got students in the entity working and providing value and it's not like a very distinct wall between the two. We're going to have to see emerging and we're going to have to see an ecosystem play. The world's changing too much for you to own everything as an organization. It just is. And so you need partners and you need colleagues and you need friends. First thing I want to say, got to talk a little bit about the AI bomb because everyone, it's on everyone's mind and we can have more conversations during the rest of the day about this. But here's the biggest challenge I think with AI that we're missing is that it's not a technical challenge. It's a cultural challenge. And it starts with, if I want to learn how to leverage AI and what I do, we're starting with the wrong question, which is, how do I leverage AI to do my job better? The wrong question. The right question I think is, how do I solve what I'm doing today differently with AI? It's a very scary question because what if it makes me obsolete? Why do I want to do that? Why would I do that? And it's really a dynamic. But here's a perspective I want to give you from a gentleman that I've come to know the last few years, named Antonio DiMazio. He is a neuroscientist studying brain damage for the last two decades in Portugal and he wrote a book called "Decards Air" where he outlines the studies that he did with humans that had suffered a brain injury to the point where their emotions were compromised. He didn't have a lot of emotion and he looked at decision-making and he found out that the people who had emotions compromised didn't make as good decisions as the people that do. So our emotions are a super asset that are not to be forgotten in this world where we seem to be so AI obsessed. So another question I want to leave you with here is one that I hope we get a chance to talk about on the panel and for the rest of the day as well is, how do we shift from this whole notion of mastery when what you mastered may not be as relevant tomorrow as your capacity to learn new stuff? How do we think about that? How do we think about it? We'll see what is the super skill of the future and I'm going to tell you what I think it is but I don't think it's going to be satisfying is the capacity to learn new things quickly. So I hope you can join me as we go forward here, join to you Dublin in building a new learning agenda and thinking about building a new map because we're exploring a new world with an old map we need a new one. And here's the, again, another Instagram money shot for you. These are the things that I think we need to put on the stack. We need to build talent ecosystems. We need to talk to our alumni. We need to focus on not soft skills but what I call the human skills, okay. We need to redesign jobs. I was at that company in Atlanta after I finally found my hotel room. I go talk to the head of manufacturing. I go, bro, are you okay? You look like you're about to stroke out. He goes, yeah, my head machinist took me seven years to train how to work this machine just quit. I go to my inner voice, what machine takes seven years for someone to learn? And I go, why did it take seven years? Can you get three people that take six months to learn different pieces and now you've got an insurance policy with more people redesign the job? Nope. I have one person doing it because that's how I roll. That's tricky. So in closing, I challenge all of us to be the benchmark, to build a better future work. I think it's worth it. I think it's an exciting, audacious, bold challenge that we should and we deserve to take on. And let's recognize the world of work that we had wasn't so great. I want to give you lastly here. If you want to connect with me, you want to tell me, Steve, thank you. I just organ reject everything you have to say. You're welcome to do that. But please connect with me. If these ideas are interesting to you, I've got a lot more that I share on a regular basis. And then if you'd like to follow me, here's the book, here's my contact information and that barcode will take you to my website. I want to thank you again for your time and attention. Those of you that got up early and had the free cappuccinos and I really want to invite you to participate actively the rest of today. Thank you all so much. And that's it for this episode of the Future Talent Podcast. A huge thanks to Steve Cadegan for challenging us to think bigger, act braver and reimagine how we build and support talent in a world that's constantly changing. If Steve's insights resonated with you, whether it was the idea that loyalty now lies with learning or that we need to become the benchmark, not follow it, share this episode with your team, your network or anyone thinking seriously about the future of work. And if you're interested in partnering with us or learning more about how to future-proof your workforce, head to the TU Dublin Enterprise Academy website to learn more about our work at Technological University Dublin. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. [Music]