Workforce Alignment with Special Guest Mike Bollinger

[00:00:09] Welcome everyone to another episode of HR and Payroll 2.0. I'm Pete Tiliakis and as always, I'm joined by the legendary Julie Fernandez. Welcome, Julie.

[00:00:17] Hey Pete, good to be here. And as everyone can see, we have another esteemed guest.

[00:00:21] Yes, we have one of my favorite folks in the business, someone who I talk to often and I wish we would record it more often, Mr. Mike One Take Bollinger, the VP, the global VP of strategic initiatives at Cornerstone On Demand. Mike, I'm so happy to have you. This is a long time coming.

[00:00:37] It's an honor, man.

[00:00:38] Yeah. How you been? You're looking very Christmas and festive back there.

[00:00:41] Well, you know, you gotta celebrate, gotta represent during the season. So I'm here in Las Vegas, you don't get a lot of snow, so you gotta get color going.

[00:00:50] Yeah. Do you golf?

[00:00:51] I do.

[00:00:52] There you go. Yeah. All right. Well, good. So yeah, you're a little bit everywhere, right? A little bit of Florida, a little bit of Vegas. So yeah, I love it, man. So nice warm Christmas for you.

[00:01:01] So Julie, you want to do the honors this time? And then I thought we could maybe catch up a little bit on Thanksgiving and that sort of thing.

[00:01:07] I sure will. So Mike, you may have heard rumor, but we do like to ask every guest how they got into the HR payroll space and why they stay. So tell us your story.

[00:01:20] So it's kind of an interesting story. I actually started out in financial in college. I was going to do financials and cost accounting and that kind of stuff. And I ended up in technology.

[00:01:31] So I ended up taking some courses around programming and those kinds of things. Well, as time went by, I ended up becoming very, very technical. And I worked in both in a school district in Wyoming and did an HR payroll implementation as part of the overall district.

[00:01:49] And then took a CIO job at a large school district in Wisconsin and did the same thing, took them through a Y2K and did some payroll conversion work and so on.

[00:02:00] And then got picked up and moved over to the dark side, the vendor side, and right after Y2K and spent a little time with SAP and then Oracle and then went back and forth.

[00:02:13] So I told people I did two tours of duty at both SAP and Oracle. And I could always, HR was always something that I really, really liked to do.

[00:02:22] SAP said, you'd make a great technical basis guy. And I said, well, I liked that, but I really liked the HR payroll stuff.

[00:02:28] And they went back, you can do that too. So in 2021 or 2001, I remade myself into an HR payroll guy.

[00:02:38] And from that point on, I've never really looked back and I've continued to grow. I've been at Cornerstone now 10 years.

[00:02:45] I've had a couple of different jobs and at the moment very much focused on an evangelism role and part of the overall product team.

[00:02:52] And I report directly to the CPO.

[00:02:55] Awesome. Well, you fit our mold because nobody starts-

[00:02:59] He's being humble. He is the commandant of Cornerstone. That's what I call him.

[00:03:03] There we go. Well, however you look at it, as soon as HR and payroll gets you in its clutches, it's like a pervasive-

[00:03:11] I love-

[00:03:12] It pulls you back in.

[00:03:13] I really do. I just love people. And you feel like in HR payroll, you actually have an impact. Just like when I had an impact in education.

[00:03:22] And if I got a little sideways and went and had lunch at an elementary school and got re-energized, the same thing is true of this industry.

[00:03:28] Every day I get up excited.

[00:03:30] Yeah. Let's not talk too much about schools. I'm on the board for our local school district.

[00:03:39] And there's just lots of opportunity to evolve your skills in so many different directions.

[00:03:46] I can only imagine.

[00:03:47] I did some service on school board. I can identify.

[00:03:52] We can leave it at that, right?

[00:03:54] Hey, public service. Everyone's got to give back, right?

[00:03:56] That's right. Give and back.

[00:03:58] So, Mike, before we get into- I want to talk to you today about something that has been an observation of mine for a long time.

[00:04:04] But first, before we do that, I want to catch up with you. I see you've got a very festive background here.

[00:04:09] I want to ask you, how was your Thanksgiving? And Julie, you too. What were your Thanksgivings like? Anything special?

[00:04:15] Well, look, I'm the classic American. So we had a Thanksgiving dinner and then I sat down and watched football.

[00:04:22] Can I ask you a trick question? Or a question I didn't tell you I was going to ask you, I guess.

[00:04:25] Sure.

[00:04:26] I probably didn't tell you. I don't think I told you any questions I was going to ask you.

[00:04:29] You didn't tell them anything, Pete.

[00:04:30] We don't script this.

[00:04:32] We warned you about how you got into HR part, but we didn't warn you about any rest, I guess.

[00:04:37] But okay. So I did this webinar last week. I don't know if everyone saw it.

[00:04:41] We had a lot of attendees. We had a lot of outreach. It was an interesting time for sure.

[00:04:45] HR executive hosted a webinar on the future, excuse me, 2025's top fintech financial wellness

[00:04:52] related trends. And I did that with Jason Lee, Mr. Jason Lee, a friend of the show,

[00:04:57] who is the head of Chime Enterprise by way of his company Salt Labs being acquired.

[00:05:03] And also the former, or well, still the founder of DailyPay.

[00:05:07] And so one of the things that we asked everyone on there to kind of ice break and get going was

[00:05:13] some, you know, special or unique or different meal, food meal or item that you make at your

[00:05:19] Thanksgiving dinner. So I'm going to ask you that. Do you have anything off the charts?

[00:05:24] Jason had a seven up salad, I think they called it. It was like a Jell-O kind of thing.

[00:05:28] I was very boring. I don't have, my family just sort of eats the boring stuff, but I want to ask you,

[00:05:32] Mike and then Julie, I want to know if you've got one too. So what is your,

[00:05:34] you have any crazy family side dishes?

[00:05:37] No crazy ones, but no, no Thanksgiving is complete unless you have the green bean casserole with the

[00:05:43] French fried onions on top.

[00:05:45] Right.

[00:05:45] So, I mean, that's a, that's a compulsory dish at the table.

[00:05:48] Okay. Okay. Same here. I'm in that, I'm in the, I'm on team green bean casserole. I'm also on

[00:05:53] team pumpkin pie. So I heard some debates yesterday about pumpkin pie versus sweet potato pie.

[00:05:57] It was interesting, but I'm, I'm, I'm still team pumpkin pie.

[00:06:00] I'm team sweet potato pie. So we differ.

[00:06:02] Oh, Oh, that's an episode then we got to talk about that. All right. So Julie, what, what about

[00:06:06] you? Any crazy, uh,

[00:06:08] So let me tell you what's crazy for an Italian because my husband does most of the cooking.

[00:06:13] He loves it. He's just a, he's an amazing cook. And, um, he was going to try not to do the typical

[00:06:18] Thanksgiving stuff. We celebrated with out of town relatives earlier than the actual Thanksgiving

[00:06:23] weekend. He was going to do pasta and then he had a change of heart and had to do Turkey

[00:06:27] because he just couldn't, he couldn't bring himself to do it. And he was determined to downsize

[00:06:33] the meal, which is impossible. The good Italian is cooking these cannibal pots, you know,

[00:06:38] there's stuff for years. And so he got this, this Turkey that was small. And when it came out,

[00:06:43] he said, it looks like a chicken. I'm never doing this. So,

[00:06:49] but our Turkey leftovers are gone for once. So I think it was excess success. He was mortified.

[00:06:57] Well, we had, we had a friends giving, so we don't have family here in Atlanta. So I had one

[00:07:00] of my veteran friends come over him and his family were very close with him. We, uh, we had a great,

[00:07:04] great meal, hung out, watched football, ate dessert, made ourselves sick, you know? So I love it. Now I

[00:07:09] want to ask you one more question before we move on. So one of the things totally expanding our

[00:07:14] usual. So listen, on this webinar, Jason gave away for the most unique response, which I think the

[00:07:23] answer, I think the winner was like a, a crab boil or something, you know, something like that.

[00:07:27] Very, very different, right? For Thanksgiving. Anyway, they gave away something called a pie caken.

[00:07:33] Have you ever heard of the pie caken from gold bellies, uh, deli, I believe it is in,

[00:07:38] in New York city. You've ever heard the pie caken either of you.

[00:07:40] It's gotta be like a turducken.

[00:07:42] That's what I was going to suggest. I think I can put it together, but which pie and which cake

[00:07:48] is all of them. So this is, this is a, uh, this is a seven inch, uh, pie caken, right? It's five,

[00:07:57] it's five inches tall, I believe. And it is layered as a pumpkin pie, a pecan pie, and then a, a spice

[00:08:04] cake with an apple, like kind of a la mode frosting, you know, on top. And then there's a frosting all

[00:08:08] around. This thing is amazing, right? So we gave one of these things away. I didn't even know

[00:08:12] this existed, uh, but I got to get one of these next year. So we, we need to do a pie caken, uh,

[00:08:17] testing or tasting maybe on the, uh, on the show. So anyway, check out the webinar. If you guys didn't

[00:08:23] get a chance, reach out if you want the slides, I don't know when they're going to put the streaming

[00:08:26] up, but happy to share that with you. And, um, yeah, congrats to whoever won the pie cake.

[00:08:29] You'll see, I walked away with something new today. All right.

[00:08:33] Trivial, but new.

[00:08:34] Yeah. Yeah. Besides the pie cake, and there were some excellent macro and micro trends in there

[00:08:38] that chime really pointed out. And I thought it was interesting too. They had some really good,

[00:08:42] cool personas, uh, of sort of, um, savings and, and financial challenges across the, uh, not just

[00:08:48] the workforce, but across the, the, uh, the, the spectrum of the economy. I thought that was really

[00:08:52] neat. So a lot of good info there, but anyway, yeah, I had fun with the pie cake. And so,

[00:08:56] yeah. So, so Mike, look, I want to, let's get down to business here. Cause the reason that I brought

[00:09:00] you on and one of the things that, I mean, there's a thousand things we could talk about. I know you're

[00:09:04] so well, well-versed in all of these things, but one of the things that I learned really early in

[00:09:09] my career, and I think we were debating before the show where it came from. So we'll just leave that

[00:09:12] out of it, let's say. Um, but I learned very young, late nineties, mid nineties about the concept of

[00:09:19] workforce alignment and that being, uh, you know, bringing the right people with the right skills,

[00:09:25] presumably together at the right time, doing the right things, you know, when, when at the right

[00:09:31] time. Right. And so that sounds like that really set a set of foundation for me personally. Right.

[00:09:36] I had had some excellent leadership and talent experiences from the military that I carried on

[00:09:41] forever, uh, tried and true, uh, you know, things that I do. Um, but that really, really solidified it.

[00:09:48] I think for me in the civilian world was I, when I was learning about HR, right. And then ultimately

[00:09:52] took that to the Walt Disney company, but what I witnessed as a consultant and Julie, I'm really

[00:09:56] interested in your experience too, here is it particularly when I was at IBM, working with big

[00:10:01] companies with Deloitte, working with really big companies is almost nobody was able to actually do

[00:10:06] that. Well, right. It just wasn't, they just don't. And, um, I think when I look back on that,

[00:10:12] I think, well, was that a technology problem? Maybe the technology just wasn't there that we have

[00:10:17] today. Um, but just curious, Mike, like what, what do you think, man? Do you, do you, do you agree

[00:10:22] with that observation? Julie, do you see that same thing that folks just aren't good at that? And

[00:10:25] is technology making them better at it now? Are we getting better at it?

[00:10:29] Julie, you go first. Yeah. All right. What are your thoughts on the concept at all? You know?

[00:10:33] Yeah. Well, I think, um, I wonder if some of what you were observing happened in the project days

[00:10:39] versus the transformation journey days, right. Or was maybe more easily recognized because to me,

[00:10:45] the, um, you know, most HR organizations, leaders are on a transformation journey. And the idea is,

[00:10:52] you know, how do you align? How do you identify the right thing at the right time and make it

[00:10:58] actionable and then string together kind of a life cycle of actionable things, um, to have stars align

[00:11:05] and move yourself forward. So I, in my mind, you know, you're describing something that people didn't

[00:11:12] think about as a transformation before they were just projects here and there. And it's really

[00:11:16] making any, any progress actionable is my own personal mission in life and with my clients

[00:11:24] make progress in something actionable that heads you in the right direction. If you know,

[00:11:30] the entire nut is just too big to crack, right? Yeah. Yeah. It does have a very agile,

[00:11:36] transformative connotation to it. I think undertone, but how do you see it, Mike? Yeah. What do you

[00:11:39] think, Mike? What do you think about the concept and why people can't do it? There's a couple of

[00:11:43] nuances in there. And the first thing is, is I, I, I go back to you in that same history and I think

[00:11:48] it was probably success factors that lifted it with right time, right people, right place, right

[00:11:52] time. Um, and I think there's a couple of things going on when you say nobody does it well. I think

[00:11:59] that what you could say is nobody does it well universally. You'll see implications where people do it well in

[00:12:06] pockets, right? And it's because they focus on that and so on. So part of that is the process part of

[00:12:12] it, the change management part of it. And by the way, you can't manage change. You can only facilitate

[00:12:16] it. So, um, that's one. Then the second thing is, is there's an element to it that I like to call

[00:12:23] workforce agility that I like to call have, want, need. There's a visibility. What do I have?

[00:12:29] There's an expectation. What do I want? And then there's the skills themselves. What do I need about

[00:12:35] it? And back in the early two thousands, when, um, I was at SAP, we could actually create a

[00:12:41] qualification catalog and do some gap analysis and those things, but it cratered under its own

[00:12:46] weight because if something changed, you had to manage and maintain it. And what we're finding now

[00:12:52] in the current environment is skills have become much more the technology behind them, the AI behind

[00:12:58] them, the fluidity between the external labor market data and what the internal processes have

[00:13:05] from a have perspective are now able to be dynamic. So the technology that may have impeded some of that,

[00:13:13] uh, a universal process change is starting to smooth itself out. But at the end of the day, it's,

[00:13:21] it's, you know, people process and technology. And I'm fond of saying, look, I work for a technology

[00:13:26] company. I'm super happy doing it, but technology is the least impactful. If you don't have people and

[00:13:32] you don't have a process, then the technology isn't going to, uh, going to take off from there.

[00:13:36] So I think what you've, what you're seeing is you're seeing not a revolution, but an evolution in

[00:13:44] that workforce agility, that workforce readiness gap. And it goes back to the classic have one need,

[00:13:49] what do I have? What is it that I think I need, which is an external view in many ways to the

[00:13:54] business outcomes. And then how do we set employee expectations so that their ability to be desirous

[00:14:01] want, um, matches the business outcomes? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Reminds me of that, you know, alignment to

[00:14:08] your, to your strategic goals, right? Yeah. Cause that part's the when, right? Are you just gonna,

[00:14:13] do you need to get from here to there in one big chunk or, you know, do you, do you tackle it as a

[00:14:19] journey and different win-wins along the way, different pieces along the way? How, how big is

[00:14:23] the mountain you have to climb to get to your, you know, your need? At the end of the day, it is

[00:14:28] strategic workforce planning, which we've been chasing for 20 years, but we're getting closer.

[00:14:34] Let's put it down. Yeah. Yeah. Can you talk about that strategic workforce planning? Like,

[00:14:37] what do you see as being the parts of that for those that maybe aren't familiar? Well, so strategic

[00:14:42] workforce planning is this, no, it's not, it evolved into because of the technology at one point,

[00:14:47] it evolved into headcount planning, which is useful. Don't get me wrong. Okay. Manpower.

[00:14:52] Right. Yeah. And very, very useful, but strategic workforce planning accounts for

[00:14:57] external market trends. It accounts for business strategic goals. And then it starts looking at

[00:15:04] that have one need, if you will, but from an overall perspective of strategy and then creates some

[00:15:09] initiatives or some interventions to execute back to Julie's point around action. So, um,

[00:15:16] what I think we're beginning to see is a real opportunity for strategic workforce planning.

[00:15:23] And I think the precursor to that, and we're starting to see it is skills-based succession planning.

[00:15:29] So succession planning is skills-based and not just, you know, two levels deep from a leadership

[00:15:35] perspective or so on. You're starting to have a conversation now, which is actually looking at

[00:15:40] your workforce in a new and unique way. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that companies maybe are,

[00:15:46] I mean, I feel like, first of all, do you think technology is sort of now made this, I mean,

[00:15:50] obviously easier, but do you feel like it's made it where it's almost inexcusable not to be better at

[00:15:56] this? Right. I mean, I feel that way about a lot of things that have come out. It's almost like,

[00:16:00] why are you continuing to do this in a way that's struggling when there's this, these things that

[00:16:05] you could bring together, right? Process people, tech, certainly. But do you think tech

[00:16:09] is, is helping, I mean, or making an impact? Or do you think people are maybe relying too much on that?

[00:16:15] So shout out to my dad, who was at one point CFO of Photomat. Okay. And he used to say, Mike,

[00:16:21] a lot of companies make money in spite of themselves, not because of themselves.

[00:16:25] Yes. Okay. And so you have to find the pain point. You've got to, you know, you've got to peel

[00:16:32] that bandaid off on something. And that's where the initiative comes. Skills is not a science project.

[00:16:39] Strategic workforce planning. Well, it is, but it's not a science project. It has to have

[00:16:45] sponsorship. It has to have a predictable outcome and it can't be, you know, elephant one bite at a

[00:16:52] time kind of thing. It's a progress along the way. Again, Julie could not echo the actionable steps

[00:16:58] in the, in the, in that process. So I think technology now gives us the opportunity to have

[00:17:04] this conversation, but we need to be able to do that in a way that is very impactful to the business.

[00:17:10] And from an HR perspective, a lot of times HR is thinking about it from a people perspective. We love

[00:17:16] that, but you have to understand how your business that you're serving is being measured

[00:17:20] and tie it to that measurement. And then you'll get the kind of buy-in you're looking for.

[00:17:25] Hey, this is William Tenka work to find. Hey, listen, I'd like to talk to you a little bit

[00:17:30] about inside the C-suite, the podcast. It's a look into the journey of how one goes from high school,

[00:17:36] college, whatever, all the way to the C-suite, all the ups and downs, failure, successes, all that

[00:17:41] stuff. Give it a listen, subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Yeah. I feel like technology helps

[00:17:47] us bring that up to scale too, right? Like when Mike, when you put the word skills-based

[00:17:52] succession planning together, you know, you first referenced that succession planning has usually

[00:17:57] been too deep. And so for a long time, if you're just too deep in succession planning,

[00:18:01] that's not a huge population, right? I mean, there's, you can, you can manage that and it's

[00:18:06] a very succinct group, but when you start talking skills-based more broadly across a broader part of

[00:18:11] the organization and, you know, using that for different, even job opportunities or experience

[00:18:18] or project opportunities, now you need the scale, right? And the technology is coming about in ways

[00:18:25] that allow you to take things like skills that were once niche for leadership only in these top bands

[00:18:31] in the organization and start to apply them more broadly to your workforce talent. And that is cool.

[00:18:37] Yeah. It's like a lifestyle. It's like a, like we say about transformation, transformation is sort

[00:18:42] of a lifestyle. It's not, not a destination. Sounds the same.

[00:18:44] Well, in addition, one of the things that skills gives us is the notion of adjacent skills,

[00:18:51] bridgeable skills. You know, one of my favorite examples of that is natural language processing.

[00:18:56] A lot of times now you're looking for technical skills that are natural language processing.

[00:19:01] You know, who's good at natural language processing? Marketing people, right? That's not a pool you

[00:19:06] would normally go to. So the notion of that too deep was because it was too hard to do more. It was very

[00:19:13] human manual based. So the opportunity does exist and we're seeing some really good adoption in,

[00:19:20] in some companies, but back to your initial question, Pete it's, it's starting somewhere,

[00:19:27] making it really impactful for that particular part of the business and then grow it into the rest of

[00:19:33] the business. And that's the right approach. Those people that want to tackle it all at once

[00:19:38] tend to fail. Yeah. Just like transformation was people that wanted to transform the business

[00:19:44] tended to fail rather than doing it in steps. Yeah. How would you suggest someone get started?

[00:19:50] You know, if they are a mess, maybe whatever that might be, you know, or there don't really know

[00:19:54] where to go, what to do, what, what, what, what's sort of the first step to this?

[00:19:58] I always start in a place where you have, you have early adopters. Okay. Um, and I always talk

[00:20:05] about, about change management as Bollinger. I should have written crossing the chasm years ago,

[00:20:11] 2020, 40, 20 rule of adoption. The first 20% are the early adopters. The next 20%,

[00:20:17] they're not going to let that first 20% get ahead of them. The next 40%, that's what we're doing.

[00:20:23] That's what we'll do. And the last 20% are never going there. Don't invest. You just deal with it.

[00:20:28] Right. The trick is to get that first 20%. Every business has their first 20% and the snowball

[00:20:34] takes over from there. That's the first thing. And the second thing is, can you actually do this

[00:20:42] in a way? Cause if you start thinking about skills as this MRP bill of goods, right? You'll be

[00:20:49] overwhelmed. Focus on those critical skills. And that's one of the things that only plug I'll give

[00:20:54] today for Cornerstone. One of the things that Cornerstone does is this notion of capability models

[00:20:59] and identifying critical skills that allows you to create focus in your, um, in your have, want,

[00:21:06] need, and in the need part of it, in the development aspects of it. So you can look at those critical

[00:21:11] skills. You can look at the bridgeable skills and you can start thinking about it from that perspective.

[00:21:17] But those critical skills tend to be business by business based, which is why the capability model

[00:21:23] is this is a useful mechanism. Yeah. Yeah. I find a lot of companies, at least in my experience,

[00:21:29] they, they, they understood the skills they had or excuse me, needed often, but they weren't really.

[00:21:34] And I I've worked for a lot of organizations, big ones, right? I would say this about Deloitte,

[00:21:37] no knock on them, but there was so much just experience and skillset. I was like, how would anyone know

[00:21:42] anybody knows how to do these things? Um, and I, and I wonder if companies aren't really don't have a good

[00:21:47] inventory of what's in their walls to begin knowing whether they've got where, where the gaps actually

[00:21:52] are. Um, absolutely agree. Cause you get hired, right? You get hired for some job description

[00:21:57] and that's the lens everyone sees you as, but they don't know you've got these other experiences that

[00:22:00] just don't ever get to get to play out because maybe it's just not your role. Um, what, what do you

[00:22:06] think is, is going to help with that? How do we, how do we mine those? I guess, if you will,

[00:22:10] mine skills, that's a thing. So we've gotten this far without using the word AI,

[00:22:14] AI, but, um, AI and machine learning is going to help in some of that inference. That's the first

[00:22:22] thing. The second thing is, is that there are, we call it a confidence letter or something we talk

[00:22:27] about, which is how, how do I know from the have perspective, not only self-identification. Yeah,

[00:22:34] I got that skill. I can talk a lot. Right. Um, versus, uh, demonstrable elements that actually

[00:22:42] indicate that I have that skill. And we're starting to see those things in technology.

[00:22:46] So you can represent that. Um, but at the end of the day, I would tell you that what people would

[00:22:53] say around what they need might be anecdotal more than it would actually be what it and what they think

[00:23:00] rather than evidence-based. And we're starting to see, um, real impact with external labor market data,

[00:23:07] again, using AI to look at trends that you might not see otherwise. So what's in demand,

[00:23:15] what's looking around corners. We've all heard the 50% of skills are going to atrophy.

[00:23:19] So we have this notion that we use around supply and demand in the external labor market, back to

[00:23:25] strategic workforce planning, which actually allows for you to start looking at, here's what I think

[00:23:32] I need versus here's what I really need. It was a really good last point, a really good analysis done

[00:23:38] where, uh, uh, a gentleman I know really, really well, um, has a bit of software and he went into

[00:23:44] an organization and he asked from a sales perspective, all right, what are you looking

[00:23:48] for in a sales? And they outlined what it was. And then he said, okay, now tell me who the good

[00:23:53] salespeople are. And they obviously everybody knows that. And he did an analysis and he compared what

[00:23:59] they were looking for to what they had in good salespeople and it didn't match. Okay. So, um,

[00:24:06] that kind of opportunity is starting to surface with technology.

[00:24:11] Yeah.

[00:24:11] Mike, do you, do you see, you know, that we all know intuitively, and some of us are living it more

[00:24:15] than others. The idea that, um, jobs are no longer linear as linear as they have been historically

[00:24:23] junior accountant, accountant, senior accountant, and you just have this, this path you're expected to

[00:24:28] follow. And so now skills gives us the ability to do things a lot differently and to navigate careers

[00:24:34] very differently, but are there, are there attributes or, or different characteristics that

[00:24:41] are really critical to helping you identify what are, um, tangential skills, or I don't know if that

[00:24:48] fits into, you know, the idea of bridgeable skills, but, but there has to be a universe of skills,

[00:24:53] right. Or a universe of characteristics that you navigate in order to find, you know, what is that

[00:25:01] nonlinear path?

[00:25:02] So we've done that as humans for a long time. Look at my career, right? I've taken this thing and I've

[00:25:07] moved to this and then moved to this and then, and, and so on. And I've had this multivariate career

[00:25:12] filling the gaps. One of the things, if you, if you get into the skills technology, two things to

[00:25:19] think about. First, um, we've had skills a long time as an atomic unit of measure, if you will,

[00:25:25] but it became very difficult to do it with technology. So we created competencies instead

[00:25:30] because there was a, um, at least a mechanism by which we could evaluate. So that's what happened

[00:25:35] in the past. If you start looking into skills ontologies, that's not a taxonomy. Taxonomy is

[00:25:42] a list of words and ontology is the relationship between them. You're starting to see clusters to

[00:25:47] your point around adjacency to your point around those kinds of things. So that's the first thing,

[00:25:53] but, you know, go back to the have one need. If, if I'm not interested, I'm not going to acquire

[00:25:58] that skill. That's a problem. Okay. The second thing is, is there, and it's a process thing

[00:26:04] is I may want to represent the skills I have because I'm proud of them, or I want, you know,

[00:26:09] forward-looking progress. But in many cases, people are not going to do that because they're afraid

[00:26:16] that those, those things will be used against them in layoffs. So how do you do this in a way that's

[00:26:21] non-intrusive, but is developmental and supportive in that regard and supports the business outcomes?

[00:26:28] And that's the trick. You want to present to your employees things that they might be able to do

[00:26:33] based on what you know about them that support the business outcome. And then let them indicate

[00:26:39] interest from there because that interest is how they really create a level of mastery.

[00:26:45] Yeah. Interesting. Mike, what are, like, what would be...

[00:26:48] It's a little heady. Sorry, professor.

[00:26:50] Yeah. That was a lot. I know, I know.

[00:26:52] I think I baited you into that. I'll take the fall for that.

[00:26:58] Well, we could go a lot of places there, but I'm kind of curious what, beyond the people process tech,

[00:27:03] right? Like that's, that's sort of table stakes. What do you see as some of maybe the

[00:27:08] characteristics of the organizations that are doing this really well beyond just tech and

[00:27:12] whatever, like what are some of the things that they're doing or just the way that they are

[00:27:16] culturally maybe?

[00:27:16] There's a couple of things. And first off, you can use this. Remember back to digital transformation

[00:27:22] when that was the thing, right? And organizations that did it well did it because they had a couple

[00:27:26] of characteristics. They had very clear outcomes that they were trying to achieve, right? Business

[00:27:31] outcomes, business-based outcomes. The second thing was they had executive buy-in that they were going

[00:27:38] to make this effort. And then the third thing was, is accelerating through that change management cycle

[00:27:43] because whenever you do something, the first step is always about grief and then people get over it

[00:27:49] and everybody goes through that. So what you had to do was be very mindful that you had to get through

[00:27:55] that cycle quickly or the acceleration or the foot came off the accelerator. So the same thing is true

[00:28:02] here with workforce agility. There has to be a with them, a what's in it for me. It has to be very,

[00:28:09] very well directly tied to it. And I think one of the things to be really mindful of, there's this old

[00:28:15] classic saying or joke where this guy was talking about learning and the executive said to him,

[00:28:22] what if we invest in all these people and they leave? And he said, I don't know, what if we invest

[00:28:26] in when they don't and they stay, right? So the same thing is here is that you want to be very clear

[00:28:34] that A, there's an opportunity for the employee. B, there's an opportunity for the business and not set

[00:28:41] an expectation that if you make that investment, you have a 10 year employee. If you get three more years

[00:28:46] out of it, you're ahead in the productivity game.

[00:28:49] Yeah, absolutely. Do you feel, Mike, this is purely just an HR function or do you feel like the C-suite

[00:28:56] has a role in this in some ways?

[00:28:58] It's absolutely not an HR function. As a matter of fact, and Pete, I think you've seen me do this talk

[00:29:04] around. There are the bad manager myth, right? HR tends to use individual managers as the multiplier

[00:29:12] effect. And rightly so. The average person, the average manager touches like 11.5 people. And I

[00:29:18] never knew where they got the 0.5. But the point of it is, is that the expectations on that first level

[00:29:26] leader are very, very high in many cases. And so you want to create mechanisms that remember that you

[00:29:33] have to invest there as well. And the executive teams need to be very, very involved in that. HR

[00:29:40] gets out of that way and becomes a facilitator and an operator and coach and business-based. And in

[00:29:48] those environments, that is a key characteristic of successful programs.

[00:29:53] Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. And just thinking along that lines, I think you mentioned this a little

[00:29:57] bit earlier, but how do you measure this? Is that part of, obviously part of any transformation

[00:30:03] driver or any business outcome, I think, but how do you measure this effectively?

[00:30:08] Julie, Pete knows I'm a former value engineer. That's why he's asking.

[00:30:12] Well, no, that's how I think. I'm like, how the hell will you know if we're doing this right?

[00:30:15] Well, let's start with the fact that most won't ever even try to measure, but...

[00:30:19] Yeah. How do you measure this?

[00:30:20] Like they should.

[00:30:21] Yeah.

[00:30:22] There's a number of ways to go about it. Again, tie it back to the business outcome. But it requires

[00:30:27] that it actually land on one of three things. Otherwise, you're not really talking about measure.

[00:30:34] It needs to increase revenue, lower cost, or lower risk. And so, and I did this on an earlier

[00:30:42] podcast. I said, at the end of the day, if you're going to stand in front of an executive team and talk

[00:30:48] about the outcome, imagine Bollinger in the back of the room holding up a sign that says,

[00:30:52] so what? Okay. So that's the first thing. You can measure it in many different ways. Revenue per

[00:30:58] employee, operating margin improvement, time to productivity. But don't just say engagement.

[00:31:05] That's an eye roller in the C-suite, right? So the trick to this though is, is there are going to be,

[00:31:12] when I talked about aligning to a particular business unit and starting small and growing in these

[00:31:17] programs, that business unit will have KPIs that they measure themselves by. Align to those KPIs with

[00:31:24] what the outcomes, how the human can pull that lever. Last point, baseline, baseline, baseline.

[00:31:32] What you're doing with a potential value change is really a value hypothesis or a value prediction.

[00:31:42] At the end, you need to come back and say, here's what we expected and here's where we ended. And if

[00:31:49] you end to the good, great. Let's do more of that. If you don't end to the good, great. It allows you to

[00:31:56] deconstruct and move on. Neither is bad. Starting to measure something is good.

[00:32:02] Yeah. Yeah. It's a very agile way of thinking. It's all, it's a fail fast sort of DNA in that,

[00:32:07] right? Yeah. Julie, you were going to say something, I think?

[00:32:09] No. Well, I'm actually, you know, as you're talking, Mike, I'm really, my wheels are turning

[00:32:15] and I'm thinking, you know, you stated it out loud, like engagement, like don't just harp on

[00:32:19] engagement, but I'm, you know, in my mind, I'm thinking, but what about experience? Right.

[00:32:24] And experience can lead to, or can be measured as risk revenue or cost, but maybe there's a

[00:32:33] satisfaction, you know, some element of satisfaction might be another, that's where my head was going.

[00:32:38] I'm like, there, you know, now the satisfaction should reason whose satisfaction. If it's a

[00:32:43] client's, it should lead you right back to revenue or right back to, you know, something else. But

[00:32:48] there's just so much, there's so much emphasis around in HR around experience right now that I was

[00:32:53] trying to make that link to what you were saying. Have you done that before or how would you see it?

[00:32:57] Well, I made fun of engagement, but actually engagement is not a measure, but it is an impact

[00:33:05] knock on measures. Okay. So mining companies, you know how mining companies measure engagement?

[00:33:12] Deaths in the mine, safety. Okay. Crazy.

[00:33:16] Engagement actually has significant impact on shrinkage, customer satisfaction, profitability,

[00:33:23] first call resolution rate. I can, you know, those are the measures that you want to have.

[00:33:29] If you just say engagement, which is, it's a measure of differential effort or it's an indicator

[00:33:36] of differential effort, where does that differential effort land? That's what you want to measure.

[00:33:42] Yeah. And I think you and I might be using interchangeably engagement and experience

[00:33:46] words, right?

[00:33:48] Absolutely.

[00:33:48] So yeah.

[00:33:49] Absolutely.

[00:33:50] Yeah. I mean, it sounds, I mean, coming back to what you said, Mike, I mean, I feel like the

[00:33:53] frontline manager is a lot of the lens to what's going on, validating the metrics too, right? Like

[00:33:59] to your point earlier, I mean, they're right there with it, right? They're, they're, they're out there

[00:34:03] on the front lines and they're going to be a significant conduit to these things getting done. So

[00:34:08] yeah, I just got my brain thinking too here.

[00:34:09] I know. Well, I'm thinking the same thing. I'm thinking like, isn't that why we're starting to

[00:34:13] see, I don't know, a revival or a renewed interest in tackling frontline problems, which have been,

[00:34:20] you know, kind of taken a backseat to, you know, strategy, you know, strategic and leadership and

[00:34:26] salary, you know, types of functional things that you can do to improve your organization. And now

[00:34:31] like it's frontline is everywhere. There's, there's an energy around frontline that we have not seen in a

[00:34:36] decade or more. There's a couple of things to think about. One is, and I'm, I've been told in

[00:34:41] some countries frontline is not the right term. So I, and I said it myself here, but I use desk list

[00:34:47] now. I try and work with desk list, but literally that's 70 to 80% of the workforce. And so, I mean,

[00:34:55] you had, you know, daily pay on last week, that's an important indicator of that desk list workforce.

[00:35:01] They see that as a significant benefit in, in that regard. I'm just in time learning. I need to have

[00:35:09] something in front of me if I'm trying to merchandise an end cap, right? I mean, there's all these things

[00:35:15] in that first level worker and that first level manager, whether it be within the, the desk list

[00:35:22] space or even in the, you know, in the, in the, what do we call it? Knowledge worker space,

[00:35:28] that first level manager expectation on, you got to know your people. You got to do situational

[00:35:34] management with their styles. By the way, there's mental health issues. So you got to be sure that

[00:35:39] you're a psychologist. There's a lot of things that we place on those people. So the real investment in

[00:35:45] making it predictable for them with tools that matter and the investing in their development

[00:35:52] is actually your biggest yield on return. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. You know, having 20 somethings,

[00:35:58] just out of college, I can't help, but think, you know, I'm not really certain that our universities

[00:36:05] and our higher education know how to prepare a manager for the rigor and the expectations of doing

[00:36:13] those things. Well, when, you know, they go into a position, they haven't cut their bones, right?

[00:36:18] They haven't cut their teeth on the jobs that they're trying to manage. So that's, that's always

[00:36:23] been a gap that, that annoys me a little bit. You know, the tradesman mentality that says you got to

[00:36:30] do before you can, you know, before you can lead sort of thing. There's a lot of sense to that.

[00:36:36] Yeah. Both my boys ended up not in this side of the industry, but one, one of them creates

[00:36:45] manufacturers. I call him, he said, makes cop cars, right? He does a lot of fabrication and those

[00:36:50] very unique set of skills that he didn't start out to do in school. And my other son ends up in,

[00:36:56] in a utility company in green energy. He didn't start out to do that in school either, but both

[00:37:02] of them wanted those tracks and they took the time to learn the, um, the foundational skills before they

[00:37:09] ended up in these roles. I'm proud of them both, but they're an indicator of exactly what you said,

[00:37:14] Julie. Yeah. Yeah. If jobs were a popular vote, you know, the, the frontline or the desk list guys

[00:37:20] have it by a mile. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's just true. I was just, I think what I was

[00:37:25] kind of referring to too, is just, you know, again, I was in the military, right? So I saw the power of

[00:37:30] the leaders in the middle that were not only teaching up or training downward for us below them,

[00:37:36] but teaching the officers, right. Who are young in a lot of cases. Uh, and I saw how powerful they are,

[00:37:43] right. In shaping an organization, right. Skilling people and making sure the right people are in

[00:37:48] the right place doing things. So I just wonder how much we've, we are going to work up more is

[00:37:53] going to be on the manager of the future to say, look, you have the, they really have the pulse on

[00:37:57] engagement. They really have the pulse on productivity. They really have the pulse on who's

[00:38:01] skilled and who's not. Um, I think you're going to have to get them in the game and get them powered

[00:38:06] to, to be effective as they can be right. Because we're asking them and we've always asked them to be

[00:38:10] not just leaders and not just smart at what they do, but also, Oh, by the way, you got to do a lot

[00:38:14] of HR, right. And in some ways they are HR. An interesting stat from a survey we do. I, I also

[00:38:21] founded the cornerstone people research lab, but we do that in conjunction with a lot of, uh, uh,

[00:38:27] external organizations. We did this with, uh, Ben Eubanks at lighthouse, but we had a really

[00:38:32] interesting finding, which was most people wanted to go explore potential moves in their careers

[00:38:40] first before they talk to their, their, uh, next level manager. Um, so, uh, it was an argument for

[00:38:47] presenting opportunities in a myriad of ways to people that they could go explore for themselves.

[00:38:53] What was really interesting in that though, was that it was more pronounced with women than with men.

[00:38:59] So even more so, so the opportunity for them to have this, um, uh, ability to explore before they

[00:39:09] went and had a conversation with their leader was something that they wanted. And I think there's

[00:39:13] two reasons for it. Um, and technology enables that. And the first reason is there's a talent

[00:39:18] hoarding is a real thing. If I want a promotion or I want to make a move, I may have a leader who

[00:39:23] literally won't is going to get in the way because I can't afford to lose you. Right.

[00:39:27] And the second thing is, is in many cases, and we all have felt this, we feel a little bit stuck.

[00:39:33] And by being able to explore, you get excited about what your job could potentially be. So I think an

[00:39:40] important part of this is getting managers and leaders to understand that it's okay for people

[00:39:47] to lead. You're not actually losing people. You're gaining a bigger pool. And that's a little bit

[00:39:53] of a mindset, but to your, your point, Pete, you know, at the leadership level in the military,

[00:39:58] I saw the same thing. I worked at common, I have air pack for EDS and I saw the very same thing.

[00:40:03] Yeah. Yeah. They're very effective at that. I think.

[00:40:06] I was just going to say, and isn't that what all of kind of the redefining of mobility

[00:40:11] and organizations is all about mobility was this very narrow thing that was for expats and third

[00:40:16] party, third party nationals and like just the select group of folks. And now internal mobility

[00:40:23] of the idea of mobility and having skills, you know, tie you to opportunities to do that exploration,

[00:40:29] you know, is kind of the, the new wave definition of, you know, we're seeing that more and more often

[00:40:36] being the way that folks are describing mobility. They really mean some of that, that internal

[00:40:41] pervasive stuff, not just the top thin layer. Absolutely. And I was a Beverly Kay that wrote

[00:40:48] the book, helped them grow or watch them go and coined the term career wall rather than a career

[00:40:54] ladder. We're starting to see that as more and more of a mindset and that's a good thing.

[00:40:59] Yeah. Yeah. When you say mindset, do you mean like a cultural mindset?

[00:41:03] I do. I think that I think more and more, you know, people always thought classically in terms of

[00:41:09] career ladders and you still see it. And then the next level, if we do a little bit of a history lesson

[00:41:14] was this, do I need to go up the management ladder or do I need to go up the technology ladder? Either

[00:41:19] are okay in a seniority perspective, but then it became much flatter and technology helped with that

[00:41:27] various communication technologies and those kinds of things. But it also allowed me to jump.

[00:41:34] In the old days, it was always a rotation, right? You took your leaders through a business

[00:41:38] unit rotation so that they get exposure to other things. This notion of the career wall has allowed

[00:41:45] the individual contributor to have that same kind of a rotation, whether it be a gig assignment or

[00:41:51] otherwise. One other piece of research that we did, we found that high performing organizations,

[00:41:57] this was Cornerstone Research, had a gig assignment program and low, I called them laggards,

[00:42:05] did not. And that was a real indicator. And a gig assignment is not, oh, I'm going to go over here

[00:42:11] and work over here for six months, but it's rather a small project that you do. Back to engagement,

[00:42:17] if I'm willing to sign up for an additional project above and beyond my day job because I want to grow,

[00:42:24] that's a productivity measure. And it's also a characteristic of engagement in terms of

[00:42:29] differential effort. Interesting. Yeah. It's an investment too, right? And that person, hopefully,

[00:42:34] that will reciprocate back to you as an organization. Yeah. Yeah. Mike, I want to ask you about,

[00:42:40] and shout out to Steve Goldberg. He turned me on to this about two years ago, but I'm seeing a lot

[00:42:43] more of it now. Good old Steve. Love him. I love that guy. More and more now with AI, I think this is

[00:42:49] really coming around. But what are your thoughts on the kind of how maybe organizational network

[00:42:53] analysis applies to this? Because one of the reasons I bring this up is obviously ONA is about

[00:42:59] visualizing and understanding the relationships and maybe hidden networks in your organization where

[00:43:04] decisions are being made and things like that. But what I always think about when I hear ONA,

[00:43:10] I think about the tiger teams, right? Again, military or consulting, right? Just bringing people

[00:43:14] together very agilely, very quickly, solve a problem. Those were always the most effective teams,

[00:43:20] right? Laser focused, quick moving, specialized, got it done, got out, and beautiful, right?

[00:43:29] But where does that fit in here? I mean, you're thinking about knowing what skills you have and

[00:43:34] knowing what collective team capabilities that you have that you might not be aware of. Do you feel

[00:43:38] like that's a part of this? Or what are your thoughts on ONA? So, and I agree with you, the

[00:43:44] uniqueness of Tiger Teams gig assignments, however you want to put it, is they stand up,

[00:43:49] they execute on something, and they tear down and go somewhere else, right? Yeah, agile. That's an

[00:43:53] important point. The other part about ONA is ONA started out as this analysis of distance between

[00:44:00] people in an organizational hierarchy, which is fine, and actually has become a good predictor of

[00:44:09] potential churn on the part of an employee because if I had manager turnover a lot and I could see that

[00:44:15] an ONA, I could predict that this individual might be at risk and do an intervention. But I think where

[00:44:21] ONA is now starting to become really useful is the interaction of the communications that are going on,

[00:44:28] whether it be Slack channels or Teams or whatever, those kinds of emails and those kinds of things

[00:44:35] in conjunction with some of the classic hierarchical stuff. So I think as we start to peel that and then

[00:44:42] start inferring what potential skills were being represented there, I think that opportunity to

[00:44:50] dynamically set up those gig assignments is starting to surface. And I assume that's where

[00:44:56] Steve was going with this. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he's been speaking on it, writing on it for a while. I was

[00:45:00] just thinking about, I always think about it in the context of that. And I always think about it in

[00:45:04] terms of like knowing what you have, right? Again, going back to our original talk about the fact that I

[00:45:09] think a lot of organizations just don't have a good handle on what skills they actually have on tap

[00:45:13] to work with. And with the virtual world we live in, I used to, I always say that, you know,

[00:45:19] when we all went into the office, you had those happenstance conversations in layer,

[00:45:24] circle one and circle two, where you walked down the hallway and got a cup of coffee and you saw

[00:45:28] someone, you weren't in the meeting with them, but you had that side conversation. ONA can start

[00:45:34] peeling back those side conversations that you're having and capitalize on them that we didn't,

[00:45:40] we used to just do anecdotally in the office. Yeah. And take for granted, right? There's a lot

[00:45:45] of value in those moments. I would agree. I mean, I think we all agree. That's one thing about not

[00:45:49] working in an office that, that does, you don't have, right? Unless you're staying in constant

[00:45:53] collaboration with people. You've got to be careful. You don't hit an echo chamber with,

[00:45:56] with the virtual world. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, it makes me think that there are definitely

[00:46:01] certain fields or certain industries altogether where the value of that type of gig, you know,

[00:46:07] gig assessment or network analysis has to go beyond the walls of the organization as well to really be

[00:46:14] valuable because if you, you know, within your organization, okay, great. But if you're in a

[00:46:20] service oriented role or, you know, a professional services role, that network is just a microscopic

[00:46:26] bit of what's really important to you in networking beyond into the rest of the blue yonder.

[00:46:33] Well, good call out, right? One of the things where I always get is, do you know anybody? And,

[00:46:38] you know, I'm thinking about it now, but maybe ONA on my external network can actually surface things

[00:46:43] I hadn't thought of, right? Yeah. That's right. That's right. That's great. Yeah, exactly.

[00:46:47] So while we're in that, in that category, Mike, AI, right? We got to talk AI before we wrap this up.

[00:46:53] And I know you guys at Cornerstone have been doing- How do you spell that again?

[00:46:58] Sorry. I know you guys have done a tremendous amount of work with the Velocity Network. And just

[00:47:02] for years, you guys have been doing deep learning, machine learning. Like what's the opportunity here?

[00:47:06] And what's your advice in this, this spectrum for folks to be better at, at, at doing this stuff?

[00:47:12] ONA, skills, you know, workforce alignment, like what, what's the opportunity? What do you,

[00:47:16] what's your advice? Well, if you go back to the, to have one need or the visibility,

[00:47:21] the skills and the expectations, right? There's opportunities, whether it be through that gap

[00:47:26] analysis we talked about, the visibility, right? Whether it be through the matching,

[00:47:30] whether it be through personalized learning paths or democratizing learning, creating learning that

[00:47:36] actually reflects Mosher's five moments of learning need, which are when I need to learn something new,

[00:47:42] when something breaks, when something changes, right? How do you, how do you put the right

[00:47:46] piece in the right place? That's one of the things. The other thing that you have to be really careful

[00:47:51] of is that you don't, you don't indicate that intuition and judgment goes away. I always tell

[00:48:01] the story this way. I'll never, I came back, my dad again, shout out to my dad. I came back from college

[00:48:06] and I said, Hey dad, in college, they teach you how to do a, you know, a SWAT and looks at the pros

[00:48:12] and the cons and everything else, but they never teach you how to make a decision. How do you do that?

[00:48:16] And I'll never forget this. How old I am. He lowered his newspaper, his eyebrow went up and he said,

[00:48:21] you go with your gut. And then he went back to his paper. So at the end of the day, whatever we do

[00:48:26] with those tools, you have to be able to put a human in the loop. I think it was Ethan Mollick that

[00:48:31] said, AI is not going to replace people, but people with AI are going to replace people without AI.

[00:48:38] Um, the opportunity is broad, but you have to be able to tell your folks, um, the models need to

[00:48:45] be fair. The models need to be explainable. Um, and the models need to, they're not prescriptive,

[00:48:52] they're predictive and you still got to go with your gut. So I think as people start to understand

[00:48:57] that, that the, and I can give you a hundred use cases specific. And by the way, that's what your

[00:49:03] customers want. Um, that's what the users want. They want to know a specific use case for AI rather

[00:49:10] than the big laudable goals. But at the, at the end of the day, if you can't create an environment

[00:49:17] that, um, uh, is explainable and transparent and teach people how to use it as a predictive tool.

[00:49:25] In other words, I call it starter dough for the mind. If you know, you're in the South,

[00:49:29] you know, what starter dough is, um, uh, then it's extremely useful as a tool set. And we see it

[00:49:36] that way. You have to create a framework of those things and then start building use cases from them

[00:49:41] that are useful, tangible, and back to your original point, Julie actionable. Yeah. I love it. I love it.

[00:49:48] Mike, this has been fantastic, man. I really appreciate it. I could go on and on with you.

[00:49:52] Uh, I know we have offline, but, uh, thank you so much, man. Where can we, where can we connect with

[00:49:58] you? Where, where can we, uh, where can folks get in touch with you in terms of your thought

[00:50:02] leadership? That sort of thing. I'm on LinkedIn. Uh, feel free to reach out. Um, the other thing

[00:50:07] I tell people is you may or may not know that Bollinger is a famous French champagne and the

[00:50:13] champagne choice of James Bond. I got into Twitter. I got into Twitter now X very early. So at Bollinger

[00:50:21] is my handle. Feel free. I love it. Did they ever try to buy it from you? You got to sell Jim.

[00:50:25] That's my retirement plan. And, um, I do get random. I do get random tweets, uh, from having

[00:50:31] a bottle of Bollinger. I love it, man. I love it. That's awesome.

[00:50:35] Does that mean that you like bleed in words like effervescent in your Twitter posts?

[00:50:41] Okay. Now I have a goal, Julie. You watch next one. I'll, I'll work it in there somewhere.

[00:50:46] I want, I want metrics on this and I'm going to laugh.

[00:50:49] Challenge accepted.

[00:50:50] I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much, Mike. Really appreciate it. And thank,

[00:50:54] thank you everyone for joining us. Good seeing you as always, Julie's and we'll, we'll be back.