HR, We Have a Problem - The TRUE cost of change.

[00:00:00] So it's constant and it's ongoing. But as you say, it's not just the big stuff. The human who's trying to do their work every day is, you know, it's not like we're all like, well, as long as there isn't a reorg, I'll put up with whatever other, you know, the new policy or the new piece of software or the, you know, the one that always sets me off when the email software gets updated overnight and you can't find any of the buttons the next day.

[00:00:29] And you're like, I'm just trying to do my work. I don't need the, this is actually not helpful. Because I used to, yesterday I could do a thing and now I can't do a thing.

[00:00:40] Welcome to the HR Huddle Podcast presented by Sapient Insights Group, the ultimate resource for all things HR. It's time to get in the huddle.

[00:01:00] Hello everyone. Welcome back to the HR Huddle. I'm your host, Terri Zipper. I'm the CEO and managing partner at Sapient Insights Group. And I'm back for another exciting episode of HR, We Have a Problem.

[00:01:13] This is the show where we like to break down the big and most relevant issues of the day. We help you make sense of what they mean for you. And we talk about what you might do about them.

[00:01:24] Joining me today is Ashley Goodall. Ashley is a leadership expert who's been exploring large organizations from the inside out. He was most recently an executive at Cisco, and he has a newly published book, The Problem with Change.

[00:01:38] He also co-authored Nine Lies About Work. Sounds very interesting. And before Cisco, he spent 14 years at Deloitte as a consultant and also as the chief learning officer. So quite the background. Welcome, Ashley. It's a pleasure to have you on the show.

[00:01:54] Thanks, Terri. It's great to be here.

[00:01:56] Yeah, you've got quite a background. And I'm excited to dig into that a little bit and also hear some of the things that you've experienced over your career.

[00:02:06] This is always an interesting topic. And I know one of the things we've talked a little bit about is the importance of change.

[00:02:14] And one of the things, the importance of HR's role in change. So they're always the people that get turned to in times of change so they can consider what the people's strategy is.

[00:02:25] But I think based on our conversation, you've kind of been turning this idea on its head a little bit and questioning the business's need for change.

[00:02:34] And that's what I was hoping we might talk about today. Does that sound like a good plan to you?

[00:02:39] It's like a fantastic plan.

[00:02:40] Awesome. Then let's get into the huddle.

[00:02:43] So before we dive in, it might be helpful for you to give a little more background on your experience and what led you down this path.

[00:02:52] I think we as consultants are typically focused on the problems that client has asked us to solve.

[00:02:59] And I like that you're kind of coming at this from how to solve the problem of the problems.

[00:03:05] Like, you know, why all this change?

[00:03:07] So give us a little bit more history on your background.

[00:03:11] Well, I actually, I mean, if we go way back, way, way, way back, my undergrad training was as a musician.

[00:03:19] Oh, wow.

[00:03:20] And so I have a degree in music.

[00:03:22] I learned to conduct a symphony orchestra when I was 20 odd years old.

[00:03:26] And then by various steps, found my way into business school and then found a tribe that I really liked hanging out with.

[00:03:36] And it turns out that tribe was the HR folks.

[00:03:39] And since then, I've spent a couple of decades now in various HR roles, some of which you've mentioned.

[00:03:46] So, you know, I think the first thing to say to anyone listening is I imagine you sort of tune in to listen to talking heads talking about stuff.

[00:03:58] And you go, oh, those were the people who had the perfect plan.

[00:04:01] And they knew from the age of two that they were going to go and do this thing.

[00:04:05] And then they just went and did it.

[00:04:06] Well, I certainly that's not what happened to me.

[00:04:09] I found a group of people who I enjoyed hanging out with and I enjoyed the conversations that we were having.

[00:04:20] And then from that, I found a career.

[00:04:23] But it certainly wasn't what I set out to do in the first place.

[00:04:26] And it's interesting that it begins for me with the people.

[00:04:31] It's always, you know, it's one of the great cliches.

[00:04:33] What do you love about your job?

[00:04:34] Oh, I love the people.

[00:04:35] Everyone always says that.

[00:04:36] Yeah.

[00:04:37] Just because everyone always says it doesn't mean it's not true.

[00:04:40] It's very often you find your gang.

[00:04:43] So I found my gang and I spent a little bit of time as a consultant, as an HR consultant.

[00:04:52] But I was sort of frustrated that you never got to see how the movie ended.

[00:04:56] And I wanted to be around to figure out how you actually build an organization and build a team and build a company.

[00:05:05] And those are things that aren't, certainly from an HR perspective, aren't done in the typical span of a consulting project.

[00:05:14] So I had a bunch of internal roles in HR organizations.

[00:05:18] And that's been most of what I've spent my time doing.

[00:05:21] And in the midst of all of those, I very often run into stuff that doesn't make much sense to me.

[00:05:30] And I guess early on in my career, I thought the problem was me.

[00:05:33] And then later on in my career, I began to realize that there's another argument.

[00:05:37] And the argument is that the problem's the stuff.

[00:05:40] And when things don't actually make sense, it might not be because Ashley got his head screwed on wrong.

[00:05:46] But it could actually be because some of the stuff we do in organizations doesn't make much sense.

[00:05:52] And one of the things I observed was that everybody says how marvelous change is.

[00:05:58] But if you actually go and talk to people on the front lines about their experience of change, it doesn't sound very marvelous.

[00:06:07] So that's the most recent book.

[00:06:09] Before that, I've looked at feedback and I've looked at performance management and ratings and all of these things.

[00:06:15] And I'm always trying to figure out what makes sense for the humans.

[00:06:19] And that's been a very good guiding principle for me in my work.

[00:06:25] Yeah, yeah.

[00:06:27] You know, it's my experience as well.

[00:06:29] I kind of landed in HR by accident.

[00:06:32] And it's been a great, great ride.

[00:06:35] There's a lot of great people in HR.

[00:06:37] It prompts me, though, to think of that recent article in the New York Times about, you know, just how people...

[00:06:44] I don't want to use the word hate, but essentially that's what they were saying, like how much people are unhappy or just hate HR.

[00:06:53] And I think that's probably partially true, but it depends on who you ask, right?

[00:06:58] Like when you get down to the field level, you know, these are the people that are being impacted by everything HR does, right?

[00:07:06] Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's possible to love the profession of HR and value the importance of HR and have found the last four or five years really, really tough going.

[00:07:19] Yeah.

[00:07:20] I don't think those are contradictory ideas.

[00:07:23] I don't think that particular article was arguing that HR is a bad profession or a bad objective or a bad aspiration for anybody.

[00:07:34] But it is saying, hey, listen, who's going to look after the HR folks?

[00:07:38] Because they've been on the receiving end of just the most incredible amount of stuff.

[00:07:43] And if it is such an important profession, we need to know the answer to that question.

[00:07:48] We've been headed down this path, though, I think for a long time with respect to the amount of change.

[00:07:54] I mean, probably before both of our times, there was the 10-year plan, right?

[00:08:00] And then when I really got involved at the management level, it was, okay, we need, you know, what's your five-year plan?

[00:08:07] Now it's the three-year plan and maybe even just like, what are you doing for me tomorrow?

[00:08:12] I was going to say the tomorrow afternoon plan stands as per se.

[00:08:15] I think the three-year plan has even fallen by the wayside after COVID, right?

[00:08:20] So there's just a massive amount of things happening in an organization.

[00:08:26] You know, another thing I was thinking about was just, you know, you hire a new person into a senior role in the organization.

[00:08:35] You don't, how often do you walk in and your new boss says, just keep up the status quo, right?

[00:08:41] Just do whatever your predecessor was doing and you'll do great.

[00:08:45] And it's those kinds of things that have huge impact on the organization, even if it's not a merger and acquisition.

[00:08:53] Just simply it's something as big as having a new boss come in the door and want to just blow things up, right?

[00:09:00] I mean, I spoke to people around the world researching this current book.

[00:09:04] And I didn't say, I didn't reach out and say, tell me horror stories.

[00:09:07] I just said, tell me stories of what's your experience of change at work?

[00:09:11] What people told me were horror stories, all of them.

[00:09:14] So no one was like, oh, I had this most marvelous experience of a reorg.

[00:09:21] Or we did this, I had a new leader and it was just fabulous because they changed everything on the third day.

[00:09:27] No one said those words.

[00:09:29] And, you know, in a way we shouldn't be surprised that no one said those words because we've all lived through those things.

[00:09:35] And what I took away from listening to all of those stories was firstly, change is constant and pervasive.

[00:09:41] And I think it is true that it's become more so in, again, the last four or five years.

[00:09:49] There was an HPR piece a few months ago that was sort of trying to quantify the extent to which organizations are going through major, major change.

[00:09:59] You know, four or five times the rate they were, certainly when you and I began our careers.

[00:10:04] So it's constant and it's ongoing.

[00:10:07] But as you say, it's not just the big stuff.

[00:10:09] The human who's trying to do their work every day is, you know, it's not like we're all like, well, as long as there isn't a reorg, I'll put up with whatever other, you know, the new policy or the new piece of software or the, you know, the one that always sets me off when the email software gets updated overnight and you can't find any of the buttons the next day.

[00:10:34] And you're like, I'm just trying to do my work.

[00:10:36] I don't need the, this is actually not helpful.

[00:10:40] Because I used to, yesterday I could do a thing and now I can't do a thing.

[00:10:44] Yeah.

[00:10:44] But that in microcosm, you know, yesterday I could do a thing and today I can't do a thing is actually in some ways the problem with change.

[00:10:53] That when you have constant change of environment, of strategy, of direction, of leadership, of humans, of ritual, by the way, of meaning, of all of these things in a company, people can't do their jobs.

[00:11:09] And so this is not an argument for companies should be nice to people, although I think that companies should be nice to people.

[00:11:20] Absolutely.

[00:11:20] Actually, this is an argument for, it's kind of bad capitalism if you're designing things so that people can't do their jobs.

[00:11:28] It's like, well, that's a very strange thing to do.

[00:11:33] And, you know, it's very easy to be sort of dismissive and go, listen, they'll figure it out in the end.

[00:11:38] It'll be fine.

[00:11:39] But I think you can look at all sorts of recent business failures and recent business challenges and go, you know, in one way it's because of this increasing separation between caring for the ability of the employee to do work and caring for the financial success of a business.

[00:12:00] Those things seem to be two separate poles and very separating poles as well.

[00:12:09] And I don't, you know, I don't think it's sustainable in the long run.

[00:12:13] I think we've got to find another way of thinking about what an organization and business organization is actually for.

[00:12:21] Well, and people need predictability, right?

[00:12:24] I mean, if I get up in the morning and my coffee maker's not working, that just blows up my whole day, right?

[00:12:29] So, like you said, you come in and try to do something in your email and suddenly the email is completely different.

[00:12:36] Now I can't do my work.

[00:12:38] Now I'm, you know, really not going to be very productive today.

[00:12:42] Exactly.

[00:12:42] And essentially all of that productivity rolls right back into the financial side of the business.

[00:12:50] You've got to imagine it does.

[00:12:52] I mean, you know, it's, again, these sorts of things are very hard to quantify.

[00:12:56] But if you look at the psychological effects of constant change, those are pretty well understood in the literature.

[00:13:03] And you mentioned predictability to which we can add a sense of control is taken away from us.

[00:13:10] A sense of belonging is taken away from us.

[00:13:12] Hugely, hugely important psychological experience that I'm in a crowd that I belong to that gives me some sense of location and meaning.

[00:13:22] And, of course, a sense of meaning in itself.

[00:13:25] You know, we talk an awful lot at work about the purpose of a company.

[00:13:30] But it's very hard to understand how your work connects to the beautiful words on the purpose slide when the world around you keeps getting stood on its head every 15 minutes.

[00:13:43] So, you know, constant change takes away very clearly the things that we need in order to put in our best effort.

[00:13:54] And then HR, to our earlier conversation, sort of gets stuck in the middle of all of this.

[00:13:59] It gets stuck between a group of business leaders going, hey, where are the results?

[00:14:04] And a group of employees saying, it's really hard to work here.

[00:14:08] And HR gets pulled in two directions at once, which I think is why it's been a hard profession to live in.

[00:14:17] And why, while change continues to run at this pace without better ideas as to how to care for employees, it will continue to be a hard place to live.

[00:14:28] Yeah.

[00:14:29] How do you see HR influencing these decisions?

[00:14:33] What can they do differently to advocate for the right things?

[00:14:37] I think you said to me when we talked the first time, you know, they have to be advocating for the humans, right?

[00:14:43] So how do they make sure that they are advocating for the humans?

[00:14:48] And, you know, they're looking to get the most potential out of people and people, that's what they're looking for, right?

[00:14:55] I want my, I want to find my purpose.

[00:14:58] And, you know, like you said, if I don't, if I don't have purpose, it's hard for me to, you know, get things done.

[00:15:06] I think the marketing profession is an interesting place for, that we could look for suggestions.

[00:15:15] Because marketing a few years ago was, or maybe slightly more than a few years ago, was sort of in the same bind.

[00:15:23] Like people were saying, marketing do this, marketing do this, marketing do this.

[00:15:27] And the marketing people were like, look, we don't think this is the right thing to do, but we haven't got a better argument other than we don't think this is the right thing to do.

[00:15:34] And what marketing did as a profession was it figured out how to get closest to the customer.

[00:15:42] So they had a source of authority and a source of expertise.

[00:15:46] And they got close to the customer quantitatively and qualitatively.

[00:15:51] And so they knew the stories and they knew the data.

[00:15:54] And then they knew what buying patterns were.

[00:15:57] And then they knew where to find people.

[00:15:58] And they could document all of this stuff.

[00:16:00] The bit that's missing for HR is to do that.

[00:16:03] Do that same move, follow that same strategy with respect to humans at work.

[00:16:11] And I think there are plenty of HR organizations where if you say, for example, the team is the most important unit of human performance.

[00:16:22] How many teams do you have at your organization?

[00:16:26] That there are plenty of HR organizations who would go, well, we know how many are on the org chart.

[00:16:31] And we know there's a whole bunch that never show up on the org chart.

[00:16:34] So we don't actually know.

[00:16:37] Okay, step one in being an advocate for humans is to be savvy about how the humans are clumping together to get the work done.

[00:16:47] And what distinguishes now your best teams from your worst teams?

[00:16:52] How have teams changed over time?

[00:16:54] What do you do to upgrade a team?

[00:16:56] What do you do to upgrade the leader of a team?

[00:16:59] And HR does not have, in my experience at least, a systematized body of knowledge about all of that.

[00:17:08] Because the agenda is handed to HR by others.

[00:17:12] And the others say, listen, what we really want is the enterprise software upgrading.

[00:17:18] So we really want you to do the workday implementation or the cornerstone of demand.

[00:17:23] We want you to put this thing in.

[00:17:25] And then to the extent that that software contains a thought about human performance, we're ready to listen.

[00:17:32] But if there's thought inside the software is everyone gets a rating once a year.

[00:17:36] And if you get a low rating, you'll be inspired to perform better to get a higher rating.

[00:17:40] If that's the thought on performance, that's our thought.

[00:17:42] And HR needs to be able to go, that's not true.

[00:17:47] That doesn't work.

[00:17:50] That is to impose the thoughts of software engineers on humans.

[00:17:56] And that doesn't work either.

[00:17:58] Human performance, goodness me, comes from predictability, from agency, from belonging,

[00:18:05] from a sense of meaning, from a sense of place.

[00:18:07] Human performance is something that responds.

[00:18:10] It's a response to a set of circumstances.

[00:18:13] It's a response to a leader.

[00:18:16] You want performance.

[00:18:17] Stop asking us to put in the latest version of the enterprise software or the applicant tracking system

[00:18:24] or the comp system or the...

[00:18:26] Leave all of that alone for a few minutes.

[00:18:29] Let us explain to you where performance comes from.

[00:18:34] And then let us design our organization around that.

[00:18:37] Now, when HR can say that in stories and in numbers, the profession will change, I think.

[00:18:45] Have you seen anybody really doing that well today?

[00:18:51] I hate to be self-serving, but we did a lot of it at Cisco.

[00:18:54] Yeah.

[00:18:55] It made a big difference to that organization.

[00:18:57] I mean, we increased engagement by 10% over the course of four years, I think it was,

[00:19:04] and actually kept it there for the early part of the pandemic.

[00:19:08] And that was, again, that was the sort of thing I'm talking about.

[00:19:11] I could tell you on a Tuesday afternoon how many teams we had at Cisco.

[00:19:17] I could look it up.

[00:19:18] I could look at team engagement by team.

[00:19:22] I could look...

[00:19:23] I could...

[00:19:24] You know, we could do the research when we got curious about what makes the difference

[00:19:29] between a great team and a bad team in terms of the leader's behaviors and rituals.

[00:19:33] We could answer those questions.

[00:19:36] After I left Cisco, they used that data and did a beautiful study of hybrid work

[00:19:41] and what the most important conditions of hybrid work were.

[00:19:45] And again, not based on what a business leader or a software developer thought the right answer was.

[00:19:54] Because when you ask people what they think the right answer is, they go,

[00:19:58] you should be in the office three days a week.

[00:20:00] But this was actually a study that looked at performance as a function of where do you spend your time

[00:20:07] and discovered that actually the key is empowerment.

[00:20:11] You allow people to make their minds up and they'll do better,

[00:20:15] irrespective of whether they decide to come into the office or work from home.

[00:20:19] So there are examples of this stuff.

[00:20:23] It is research-led.

[00:20:25] It is data-led.

[00:20:26] It is science-led.

[00:20:29] And when you get it right, it's extraordinarily powerful.

[00:20:33] But there are, you know, just to acknowledge,

[00:20:35] there are all sorts of forces on the HR organization that push in very different directions.

[00:20:40] And you do ultimately need a system of record for an organization of any scale.

[00:20:46] And they come with all these bells and whistles that purport to be about performance or about teams

[00:20:51] or about belonging and just aren't.

[00:20:53] And it's very hard to push back against some of that stuff.

[00:20:56] Yeah.

[00:20:56] I think it's getting, to me, it's HR getting closer to the people,

[00:21:03] through the people versus through technology.

[00:21:06] And you're right.

[00:21:08] We have to have a system of record.

[00:21:09] There has to be some way to track information.

[00:21:13] But, I mean, I've worked for people in the past who were more of the old management by walking around, right?

[00:21:19] They knew your name, right?

[00:21:22] They knew where you worked.

[00:21:23] They knew what you did.

[00:21:24] You knew the HR people.

[00:21:26] A lot of people don't know anybody in HR.

[00:21:29] If something comes up and you've got to do something, a lot of people have no idea who to call.

[00:21:35] They just, you know, they call the HR help center, right?

[00:21:37] They don't know the people there.

[00:21:40] And I think what you're describing is if HR really knows the organization,

[00:21:45] they have to know the people in the organization.

[00:21:49] And by design, the teams and how those teams work together.

[00:21:54] Yeah, that's exactly right.

[00:21:57] And be the expert in what is going on and where does human performance come from?

[00:22:05] It's funny.

[00:22:06] You can spend a long time in HR and not hear the word performance a lot.

[00:22:11] You hear it in association with the word management, performance management,

[00:22:16] but that's actually got very little to do with performance.

[00:22:19] Yeah.

[00:22:20] And, you know, is its own sort of strange kabuki that we go through once a year.

[00:22:25] But if you say to people, what is the point of HR?

[00:22:30] What is the actual point of an HR organization?

[00:22:35] You hear a lot of stuff about the business strategy.

[00:22:38] You might hear execute the people strategy.

[00:22:42] It takes a while before somebody will typically say, oh, HR exists to lift human performance.

[00:22:50] That's a different beast.

[00:22:52] It's a different body of knowledge.

[00:22:54] It's a different set of practices.

[00:22:56] And it's a different place from which to advocate for humans.

[00:23:02] I think it's a much better place from which to advocate for humans.

[00:23:06] Yeah.

[00:23:08] One of the things you said to me on our last conversation was getting permission to speak

[00:23:13] to people like humans.

[00:23:15] What did you mean by that?

[00:23:18] You know, there's a lot of language at work that doesn't help.

[00:23:23] It's not human language.

[00:23:26] So it's funny.

[00:23:28] I mean, just to take the example that we were just sort of playing with a little bit.

[00:23:33] You can say, what's the point of HR?

[00:23:35] And somebody will say, well, business strategy.

[00:23:37] It's the business strategy.

[00:23:39] And no one really knows what a business strategy is.

[00:23:41] It sounds desperately impressive.

[00:23:43] It sounds very important.

[00:23:45] It sounds like it will have dollar signs in it somewhere.

[00:23:48] But what's a business strategy?

[00:23:50] What is one?

[00:23:51] Yeah.

[00:23:52] Well, it's this week.

[00:23:54] It's a PowerPoint.

[00:23:55] It's a PowerPoint.

[00:23:56] And very quickly you go, it's a PowerPoint.

[00:23:58] Great.

[00:23:58] Okay.

[00:23:59] So that's actually slightly weird.

[00:24:01] And you realize after a while that almost anything with the word strategy in it is slightly weird

[00:24:07] because people don't really push inside that and go, so what does it do?

[00:24:11] What does it tell us?

[00:24:14] Usually if you push inside the PowerPoint on a strategy,

[00:24:17] what you quickly find is we're going to be everything to everybody,

[00:24:21] which is not a strategy.

[00:24:23] That's a wish.

[00:24:25] If I then go, here's the point of HR.

[00:24:28] It's not business strategy and it's not people strategy.

[00:24:32] It is to lift human performance.

[00:24:35] Now, you know what those words mean.

[00:24:38] You know up and to the right, lift, performance.

[00:24:41] How do we do every day?

[00:24:43] But yet a lot of business is couched in language which is vague and abstract.

[00:24:50] And, you know, that makes things hard for HR trying to argue for real human things.

[00:24:56] It also makes it hard for the humans because you're trying to figure out the whole time

[00:25:00] what on earth is going on and everything is a transformation or a reinvention or a reboot

[00:25:04] or a retool or one of these things.

[00:25:06] And you're like, I don't know what any of this stuff is.

[00:25:11] So there's a, you know, vague language leads to vague understanding,

[00:25:16] which is not a thing that we want to promote.

[00:25:19] It also erodes trust.

[00:25:23] There was someone came up to me when I was talking about language at a conference a couple

[00:25:28] of weeks ago.

[00:25:29] And she said, look, Ashley, you're standing there advocating for saying things plainly and

[00:25:36] simply.

[00:25:36] And I said, yes, it's always a good thing.

[00:25:41] And she said, well, how do we say then that we are using AI to take out costs?

[00:25:49] Because at the moment we're saying we're using AI to search for operational efficiencies and

[00:25:54] innovation, which is exactly the sort of phrase that means nothing, by the way.

[00:25:58] Operation.

[00:25:58] Who knows?

[00:25:59] That's like a bit better and shinier.

[00:26:01] And, you know, we don't really know what that is.

[00:26:03] But how on earth would you say something as arresting as we're using AI to take out costs?

[00:26:11] And I said, oh, I would say it in the following way.

[00:26:13] We're using AI to take out costs.

[00:26:16] Because then people on the receiving end will go, well, you know what you're doing.

[00:26:21] I always knew what you were doing because it's obvious.

[00:26:24] And so now we've connected again.

[00:26:27] We've connected in reality.

[00:26:28] And we can reestablish a sort of trust where if you're doing a thing, and I suspect you're

[00:26:34] doing a thing, you're going to tell me what the thing is.

[00:26:36] And then I can deal with it or not.

[00:26:39] But at least I'm not trying to translate what leaders say into what those things mean,

[00:26:46] because that creates them and us.

[00:26:48] It creates more separation.

[00:26:50] It creates a whole bunch of stress in the system.

[00:26:53] It creates anxiety.

[00:26:55] It creates dislocation.

[00:26:57] And I suppose you could say, yeah, but everyone knows anyway.

[00:27:01] Come on.

[00:27:02] Doesn't make much difference, does it?

[00:27:04] It's a little petty to be picking on the words.

[00:27:09] But I actually think the words are enormously important.

[00:27:13] And when you encounter a leader who knows how to communicate, firstly, what that looks like

[00:27:20] is they use short, real words and you're not confused.

[00:27:24] But secondly, it is enormously reassuring.

[00:27:29] No matter what the news is they say.

[00:27:32] Obviously, it's better if it's good.

[00:27:33] But bad news honestly communicated can actually be a source of stability.

[00:27:40] Yeah.

[00:27:41] Yeah.

[00:27:42] I mean, the words are critical.

[00:27:44] And the words that you use in different environments may be different, may need to be different.

[00:27:52] But plain speaking about these matters to me, I just think it's critical.

[00:27:59] And you know it when you hear it, right?

[00:28:01] You may not be able to describe it to someone else, but you know it when you hear it.

[00:28:09] And, you know, the trickiness is that as soon as you make somebody a leader, as soon as you say,

[00:28:16] well, you're in charge of an organization of any size, it's a fairly natural reaction for people to start

[00:28:23] second-guessing how they will show up.

[00:28:28] And it's immediately like, you know, people want to position everything as consistent with the thing that they did last week

[00:28:34] because no one wants to be seen as somebody who's changed their mind.

[00:28:39] Whereas, of course, changing your mind in the face of new evidence is actually a very, you know,

[00:28:44] it's the mark of intelligence, not the mark of full hardiness.

[00:28:47] But people start thinking, okay, I have an image.

[00:28:53] And if my image isn't clear to everybody, they will suffer.

[00:28:58] So I must support the image.

[00:29:01] And if I can support the image by saying the word strategic a lot, then all will be well.

[00:29:07] And unfortunately, it doesn't work like that.

[00:29:09] It doesn't work like that.

[00:29:11] We need our leaders to be predictable.

[00:29:14] Some of the predictability comes from they're not trying to be someone they're not.

[00:29:19] And some of the predictability comes from they're talking about who they are and what's going on in words that people understand.

[00:29:28] Yeah, that's a really good point.

[00:29:31] So as you think about the, as people walk away from this conversation today,

[00:29:37] I think there's some really good points here.

[00:29:40] I think, you know, if they just walk away and say, okay, what are the things that I need to do to start thinking about how I lift performance,

[00:29:49] lift human performance in my organization?

[00:29:51] Because they, in addition to doing that, they then need to be able to tell the stories associated with that to leadership,

[00:29:59] to get them to buy into the things that they want to do.

[00:30:03] Is there any other sort of specific advice you might give people or just, hey, start doing these two or three things today and you'll start to see how things change,

[00:30:14] especially given your background and some of the things you guys did at Cisco.

[00:30:18] If you can give us any trade secrets there, that would be great.

[00:30:22] There are two legs and we've, we've touched on them already.

[00:30:27] The first is to get close to teams.

[00:30:31] And I would say teams, not people.

[00:30:33] Understand how teams work.

[00:30:34] Teams are where the game is played.

[00:30:36] Teams is where it's at.

[00:30:38] No one person in an organization of any size and complexity can do a project by themselves.

[00:30:43] The success of the organization rests on how effective people are at working with other people.

[00:30:50] And the containers for that work are typically called teams.

[00:30:53] So I would say the first thing is go hang out with some teams.

[00:30:58] Go hang out and watch them do their work and ask a whole bunch of questions and see if you can construct for yourself

[00:31:05] an understanding of what great teamwork looks like and what ropey teamwork looks like.

[00:31:13] And if you do that, if you found an HR career on exposure and curiosity to teamwork,

[00:31:24] you will be almost unique in the profession.

[00:31:27] I came up in this profession and no one ever said to me, go sit down and watch teams work.

[00:31:32] Right.

[00:31:33] You know, go, go be a learning person.

[00:31:35] Go look at what classes are like.

[00:31:37] Go look at, go look at curricula.

[00:31:40] Go look at how the thing is funded.

[00:31:42] Go look at an LMS.

[00:31:43] No one ever says, go look at teams.

[00:31:47] Go look at teams.

[00:31:49] Go look at what work is like on the front line.

[00:31:53] And don't go looking to prove anything to yourself, but go looking to discover what is there in plain sight.

[00:32:00] That would be the first thing.

[00:32:02] And by the way, it's hard to do, just to acknowledge.

[00:32:05] It's not hard to be in the room with a team and be curious and ask questions, although they have to get used to your being there a little bit, which is strange.

[00:32:13] But it's hard in the following sense.

[00:32:15] When you say to an organization, hey, can I go hang out with some teams?

[00:32:18] They go, what's wrong with you?

[00:32:20] What?

[00:32:20] Huh?

[00:32:21] They don't know what that means.

[00:32:23] Why would you want to do that?

[00:32:25] What?

[00:32:25] Don't you have work to do?

[00:32:27] So you have to be a little bit persistent and sometimes a little bit creative.

[00:32:31] But spending time with teams is super important.

[00:32:35] It's easier to do when you are earlier in your career, because by the time you show up and you're the senior vice president of teams, as I basically was at Cisco, then the teams start behaving differently when you walk into the room.

[00:32:48] So it's very hard to get good sort of firsthand data.

[00:32:53] But that's the first thing.

[00:32:54] Get close to teams, get super curious about what teamwork looks like and feels like and what makes it great and what makes it hard.

[00:33:03] Now, the second thing is the sort of scientific research-based lens.

[00:33:10] Give yourself a mini MBA in human performance.

[00:33:14] There is all sorts of science out there.

[00:33:18] The social sciences have done a fantastic job at beginning to peel back the layers of the various aspects of human performance.

[00:33:28] That almost never makes its way into the business world.

[00:33:32] The business world still does not understand some of the most elemental findings in the social science about performance.

[00:33:40] I'll give you probably the most obvious one of all.

[00:33:44] It is generally accepted as true in the business world that the more we pay somebody, the harder they will work.

[00:33:54] Well, it's 20 years, 30 years since people discovered that that is only true for piecework.

[00:34:03] That is only true if you're making widgets and you're on an hourly rate and the hourly rate is keyed to the number of widgets.

[00:34:09] Beyond that, the findings are pretty stable.

[00:34:12] It happens up to a point where you think I'm paid enough.

[00:34:16] And then at that point, paying you more doesn't make you more productive.

[00:34:21] But most businesses in the world operate as though the more money you shovel at somebody, the harder they work.

[00:34:27] And this justifies everything from hourly rates for hourly workers all the way through to the C-suite.

[00:34:36] And we think now that if the CEO is good for $6 million a year, he'll be fantastic for $12 million a year.

[00:34:43] Science doesn't actually work like that.

[00:34:45] It makes me think of these pro football contracts.

[00:34:48] They almost never perform out what they get from these hundreds of millions of dollar contracts where the expectation is they're going to do more of what they just did the last two or three years.

[00:35:00] It's very hard.

[00:35:02] It's very hard.

[00:35:03] So there is a massive disconnect between the science of performance and the practice of performance inside organizations that are, although they'll say they're about strategy or actually about human performance.

[00:35:17] So the second thing for somebody, I think, thinking about what are the right ingredients on which to build a fantastic career in HR is get really curious about performance.

[00:35:30] Find an IO psychologist friend and ask them for five really good science papers.

[00:35:37] Read the science papers.

[00:35:39] Read the footnotes.

[00:35:41] Read the papers in the footnotes.

[00:35:43] Rinse.

[00:35:44] Repeat.

[00:35:44] Repeat.

[00:35:44] And, you know, the beautiful thing about the way the scientific literature works is each paper stands on the shoulders of other papers that have come before it.

[00:35:54] So you can read those.

[00:35:55] And it leads to other papers and other areas of exploration.

[00:35:59] You can follow those, too.

[00:36:01] So, you know, you can spend a lifetime doing this stuff.

[00:36:03] But if somebody set themselves a goal of reading 10 really interesting science papers a year, they would have a leg up on, I think, a lot of people who are trying to address the question of what's an HR organization for and how should we go about it.

[00:36:19] I love it.

[00:36:20] I love it.

[00:36:21] Well, I hope people will take you up on that and we'll have a lot more people looking at how to make better teams and how to really understand the organization and organizational performance because the change cannot continue at the pace that it's going at productively and result in good things.

[00:37:08] Yeah.

[00:37:10] What are we going to change?

[00:37:11] But what are the things that are working around here that we should protect?

[00:37:15] That's not a crazy thing.

[00:37:16] It's a very – it feels very different to be on the receiving end of.

[00:37:20] And, of course, we ultimately do have to advocate for those things and we've got to be able to argue and we've got to be able to make our case.

[00:37:26] But that is grounded in something and it's not grounded in a point of view.

[00:37:32] It's grounded in evidence and science and experience.

[00:37:38] And that, I think, is what ultimately will make the greatest difference.

[00:37:43] Well, Ashley, thank you for joining me today.

[00:37:46] This has been a great conversation.

[00:37:48] Where can people find you and your new book?

[00:37:50] So people find the book wherever books are sold and people can find me at my website, ashleygoodall.com or on LinkedIn.

[00:38:01] Awesome.

[00:38:02] Well, thank you.

[00:38:03] I want to thank our producers, the Brand Method Media Group, our marketing team, and thank you, the audience, for tuning in.

[00:38:11] That's all the time we have for this week's episode of HR, We Have a Problem.

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