Navigating the BullDOGE Era: AI, Tariffs, and the Future of Work - Part 2

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[00:00:31] The pace of change and the magnitude of change, it's as slow as it's ever going to be today. You know that I dedicate some of my time working with people in job search. Yes. And I can assure you that people that have more gray hair than I do are very motivated to learn new skills. You know, hunger is a major motivator. Love making my mortgage payment.

[00:00:59] I will put my kid through college. Like the whole thing, like, you know, people are motivated. I think in some cases it's more fear that I'm too far behind the technology curve to catch up to where things are because for whatever reason I live in a little bit of a technology cave and all of a sudden I got thrown out of it. This is a whole new world that I haven't seen. And I do have a lot of people that come to the group coaching things that I do.

[00:01:28] Who are like, I work 20 years at a company. I haven't even thought about finding a new job. So they've lived in this cocoon that all of a sudden just blew up. Yeah. And so they want to, it's, it's almost like they, they don't know how. So, you know, I'm hopeful that in part, not in total, but in part, because you do have to want to personally, that the vehicles to help educate people who want to be.

[00:01:55] And as you said, so much of this is available online at low cost, no cost. That's right. Like, but again, I do think a lot of it sometimes is a lack of awareness of the resources that are available to people. Because I will show folks stuff that are, I think to you and me would be very common resources. And Shazam, I didn't know you could do that. That's available. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not expensive.

[00:02:22] Look at where you get these people. Two things I want to give you. So one, we'd like to think that if people knew better, they'd do better. But we already know that's not true. People smoke and they know their kills, right? People do a lot of things that knowing better doesn't always translate to that. I think you, to be fair, see people when they've already lost their jobs. So yeah, you have a different motivation.

[00:02:49] Where with the problem we have is the people who have gotten fat and happy. The people who have are, they're alive. They don't have a reason, a motivation to go do it because they think until Doge came around, I was going to have my government job and I was going to be out of here in 35 years and take my pension plan. And that's what I was going to do. So I do think we have to acknowledge that we're going to have to get the broader society to get to understand lifelong learning is not only a thing, but that it's your responsibility.

[00:03:17] We've got to, we've got to change the narrative around that. That is not someone else's problem. That is not once my company fires me, they then pay for six months of training with Bob. No, you should have gotten in the front of that before a Bob and Bob would just simply help. So you get me, I think you would agree with me that you see people at a different point in their cycle. I'm seeing a segment of the population, you know, I've got my executive coaching part of the business too, right?

[00:03:45] And people that do, you know, they're working right now and they've got career aspirations and they are kind of looking down the barrel of AI. And I'm thinking like, what's this going to mean for me? I better get ahead of this thing before somebody figures it out for me. Just like, don't want to be Bob's other kind of client. Yeah. So any, any parting thoughts on that? Cause there's a couple other topics. No, no, let's keep going.

[00:04:09] Okay. So other things that are, you know, here in the first, what is it now? 60, 75 days, something like that. Are the tariffs. Yes. All right. And I think the vast majority of what I read in the press with economists and stuff like that was. Is with Trump getting elected, they expected deregulation, lower interest rates. Woo. We are off to, you know, some fun times.

[00:04:40] And that's not what he's doing. And he's actually, you know, putting hurdles in front of businesses with raising tariffs, you know, whether it's stuff coming in or, you know, then of course people are retaliating. So now our stuff is more expensive. I think a good example right now is the alcohol industry. And, you know, I think it's none of that, but, but all, you know, automobile, I mean, there's a lot of it.

[00:05:04] And so this clearly has trickle down effects on work. Because now if my costs are going up, I'll find some cost savings because I've got shareholders of some form or fashion that I promised the number to. I wasn't banking on this particular scenario. That doesn't change my goal. Right. I got to find a new way to get it. So either it means in some cases I'm letting go of people. In other cases, it means I'm not hiring like we thought that we were. That's right.

[00:05:36] Where's your mind going on this? Well, I start with what you started with. It's 70 days in. Who knows? You know, there are all sorts of things that sometimes you have to get sicker to get better. You know, who knows what the end goal of these, this tariff or if you're going to call it that is and how much of it saber rattling. How much is it if I stare the person down, you know, then they blink. I don't know.

[00:06:04] What I do know is it does have a direct impact, as you pointed out, on the economy and on jobs because employers have to get the money from somewhere. So if business slows down, typically your number one and number two largest expense item is people. And so who do you go after first? People. That's what you can do to aggressively reset your business to respond to your targets. So it is a real threat to people and their jobs.

[00:06:34] Again, but I will say this. It's your job to make yourself always employable. It is not your company's job to guarantee your job for life. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. We just do that to people. So. A lot of what we see is people. We what I'm talking about is whether it's in the executive coaching part or the outplacement part.

[00:07:02] People don't know how to quantify their contribution. And if you don't know how, then I guarantee the CFO knows how to quantify your expense. Well, right. That makes it an extremely easy decision. So to your earlier point back on AI, but in this context, too, you own this. Nobody owns. You understand. You understand of your value. It's incumbent. But so, dear listener, please write this down.

[00:07:29] It is incumbent upon you to understand how you either help your company make money, save money or mitigate risk. Those are the three main value levers. And if you can't draw a short line to how you connect to one or more of those, that's a problem. And when they're trying to decide, hey, with all these tariffs, we've got to let go of some people.

[00:07:50] How to keep your name off of that list is you need to be somebody who is contributing in a way that's unambiguous to people that are making those decisions. Bob, you know what I love about what you just said? And it's a theme. Something I love about you is this is very much about not giving agency of your life to turn it over to other people. A hundred percent.

[00:08:12] Listen, if I can draw that line, you know, that contribution line for you, then if you don't want me, I can draw it for someone else. But you start with I can draw the line. Like so much of this, you hear me thematically. I think that's why we're aligned so much is you've got to take this back and stop talking about what the world is doing to you.

[00:08:33] And say, like, listen, if this company goes out of business, I need to have a skill that I can take to someone else and sell and have the same level of income or better than I had before. That's my job. It is the days, the naivete. Listen, my mother's generation, she honestly believed that she would have a job if she did it every day for 30 years and she'd get their proverbial gold watch. That's what my mom and dad thought. No one today believes that. No one believes that.

[00:09:02] You know that today you can have a job tomorrow. You can be you cannot. And through no fault of your own, by the way, doesn't mean because you're not performing. It just means things happen. The tariffs come in. COVID happens like there are a gazillion reasons that people lose jobs. They have nothing to do with a bad employer or a bad company. Got it. Your job is to ensure that you have up to date skills that allow you to go back into the market and get a job if you need one.

[00:09:30] I mean, if you that's or and save, you know, I'm a big person on financial save. So you should also save. So the people who I saw something the other day in Washington Post, they were lamenting the people who had been laid off by Doge. And this was like, OK, here we are in March, so call it February. And this one was like, I just don't know how I'm going to pay my mortgage next month. And I just was perplexed about it because this is not a 22 year old. This woman had to be in her mid 50s. It was like, so you've been working for this. She went on to talk about how many years she worked for the government.

[00:09:59] I'm like, and you can't make next month's mortgage. Like, again, no judgment. Kind of. A lot of judgment. It is your job to make sure that you have skills like and that you have some security. I don't know why people just live in the moment. OK, so, you know, I'm annoyed with this right now because where am I going to come from? And this may not surprise you.

[00:10:23] This notion that you've put people want to put all of the pressure on and responsibility on the employer and not own of it. There's joint accountability here. It's we as employers will facilitate you having resources. Every almost all of the companies I know have tools where people can go in and re-skill themselves. The people don't take advantage of it. It's not the school that they haven't made it available. Most companies have financial literacy training.

[00:10:52] If you don't understand the importance of having X amount of money in the bank, that's on you. As the company provided that resource, you just chose not to take advantage of it. So I want to defend employers here, too. I know people may be throwing things at the screen right now or at their podcast. But at the end of the day, we're going to have to teach people to take responsibility for themselves. Joint accountability. And ultimately, it's not even joint accountability. Ultimately, it's your accountability.

[00:11:20] I was going to say, our mutual friend Katie George, formerly McKinsey, now Microsoft. And the McKinsey model is you are the author of your career. Period. End of story. You are the author of your career. And we have gotten a little off here where we think it's some. So I can preach on that for us, a whole different conversation. In fact, we should have another conversation exactly on that. How, as the author of your career, you navigate it.

[00:11:48] And you have to anticipate in the navigation that there's going to be bad times. That's right. Another big, let's just, a couple other topics here real quick. Another major, major thing that Trump ran on was the border. Yes. And, you know, curbing the tide of illegal immigration. Yes. Well, the dirty, not so secret secret is a lot of those people do a lot of the jobs that the people don't want to do. Okay.

[00:12:16] And I'm curious in your travels, is this coming up to where it's kind of like that real kind of manual labor, the stuff that people don't want to do, but whether it's construction, it could be in the agriculture industry. Is this coming up in any of your conversations with executives? You're shaking your head now. Yeah. Right now, that's not coming up. And it's an interesting thread or narrative from the media, but no, we don't have a shortage of that.

[00:12:43] And where we would have shortages, I'll tell you, as we approach this summer, we're going to open theme parks, for example. The Disneys, the Six Flags, all those things. And yes, we have a labor shortage. We need people to work those parks and they're lower paying, not high skilled roles. And, but guess what? The last thing you want in a theme park around children is someone who you don't have the background check on. You have no idea who that person is.

[00:13:12] So, yeah, I might have a harder time finding talent, but the answer is not allow someone to come in and work who could be whatever. Right. I'm not going to throw a crime out there, but could have a background. So, yeah, I can tell you no one's talking about that. What we are clear about is where we need skilled talent, bringing people in, in enough volume who want to be here. So I don't mean taking people. That may sound like bringing them in.

[00:13:41] But opening our country to people who want to be here and properly vetting them and bringing them into those jobs is what employers do want. So I can tell you, Sherm fought a lot. In Trump one, there was no visas, like none. It was almost shut it down. This time, as you've seen, he's been more open to visas, work visas, because we do understand that you need workers. And they're not all doctors and lawyers and coders for Silicon Valley engineers.

[00:14:09] Many of them are the people that you talk about for agricultural efforts and J-1 visas and parks. The theme parks all rely on special. They call them Disney visas, but they apply to the industry. So, no, no, I haven't heard any like, oh, my gosh, this is the end of the world. If you were relying on people who are not here legally, notice I didn't call them illegal, who are not here legally to work, then you have another problem.

[00:14:35] Because employers have an obligation to ensure that everyone who works for them is here and legally authorized to work. Not doing that is also your problem. That's can't blame the Trump administration for enforcing the law. And the law says people who work for you should be here and legally authorized to work. Yeah, I don't think I-9 is a new thing, is it? Right, exactly. And so that part, that's why I think I will say this.

[00:15:01] I think people have conflated the border immigration issues from workplace immigration issues. Those are actually two different things. And we have to stop allowing that debate and that conflict and conflation to occur. No, I appreciate you saying that because I think that's exactly right. I think that people hear those synonymously. And that's why we have an expert like Johnny C. Taylor Jr. to clear that up for us.

[00:15:26] I would be remiss if we didn't talk a little bit about how DEI has just been, you know, carpet bomb, find a word, bulldozed, you know, from everything that has anything to do with the federal government right now.

[00:15:46] And, you know, the knock-on effect that we have seen is many, many major companies, both in light of the Supreme Court decision and then now currying favor with the president, who seems to be wielding quite a bit of power right now. And, you know, folks that were very loud and proud in a previous era are now like, yeah, no, not so much.

[00:16:12] Again, just I think people know, you know, Sherm talks about inclusion and diversity in that order. And so very much advocates for diversity, very much advocates for inclusion. Yes. Could you just wade into that pool a little bit with me for a minute? Yeah, briefly. Listen. We are as diverse as we've ever been, yet as divided as we've ever been.

[00:16:41] We're as diverse as we've ever been. And we're going to become increasingly more diverse. So there's naivete with everyone, including leaders in the government who believe that diversity is not. We're stronger on account of our diversity. I just think the idea that we're going to eliminate conversations around diversity are just not based in reality.

[00:17:08] And what I also believe, and Sherm's research shows, is the more diverse your workforce, the more you have to focus on intentional inclusion. Because you can't have a lot of diverse people together and then they won't work together or people feel excluded even though they're in the part of the company. So this is, the work will continue. I'm going to put for the moment the work of equity in the workplace aside.

[00:17:33] There are legitimate healthcare equity issues, legitimate educational equity issues. So I'm not talking about those E's. I'm not, we've said, we have a commitment to it. But for what we want to focus on, it's the inclusion and the diversity for all. What I will say to you is people forget as much as the, oh, this is an anti-DEI environment in the last 60, 70 days. The Supreme Court addressed affirmative action in 2023.

[00:18:03] And so in higher ed, they killed affirmative action then. That was before Trump. That was during the Biden administration. Okay. We have to, as we're going to write the history and tell it, tell it accurately. There are a number of cases, including one that was just argued February 25th here in DC before the Supreme Court, which addresses another, essentially is going to impact DEI in private sector.

[00:18:28] A straight white woman alleges that she was discriminated against in her workplace, state of Ohio. And in favor of, she was discriminated against, but a decision was made in favor of members of the LGBTQ community. And our case was lost. It's called Ames versus Iowa. And the lower courts announced before the Supreme Court. I suggest to you that the Supreme Court is going to reverse the Iowa courts, period. I mean, Iowa, Ohio courts.

[00:18:58] So I say all of that to say we ain't seen nothing yet, Bob. Anyone who thinks this is a 60 or 70 day Trump thing is naive. There will be a very close look at how we practice inclusion and diversity. And the net goal, I believe, I don't know what the goal is because I don't know what anyone's thinking about, but I'll tell you what the net result will be.

[00:19:23] We're going to practice this work legally in this country going forward. And there are some very well-intentioned people who did good work from the heart, but we're doing it in undeniably illegal and unconstitutional ways. I can tell you that. I've seen some of the work. I've seen it. I know it. And I'm not here to say that was the majority of the work. And I clearly am not going to say they did it with a bad, coming from a bad place.

[00:19:53] But the reality is our country has an equal rights concept, which is everyone in equal protection has the right to equal protection under the law. And it's not just for historically underrepresented groups. You can't do that in the context of work, openly discriminate against majority members of the community, even if you want to do so in the name of equity. So that's the problem. So where do I think we land? I think we talk about it differently.

[00:20:23] And we've seen this before. ESG, as you know, used to be talked about a lot. And now no one talks about ESG anymore. So that isn't a race or gender or national. That's just what it was. That term became polarizing. Larry Fink, who introduced the coin, the term, decided not so much. People are pissed off about it. Let's do the work and not worry about the words. That's where we're going to land. You can't not do the work in an increasingly diverse society, but we're going to have to do it in a different way.

[00:20:54] So very, very well said. And I'm not going to try and build on that because I think you just said it well. We've talked a lot in this about life from the employee's perspective. Am I going to get laid off? I need to upskill. I need to own my career, whatever. I want to flip it around. When you're talking, you're on public boards. You talk with CEOs, CHROs all day, every day.

[00:21:22] What are some of the key things that you're messaging at the executive level for how they need to be thinking about these issues? Yeah. So CEOs want us to think about these issues as a profession. I can tell you that. So I'm going to start with CHROs, my tribe. We are going to have to become a lot more strategic in our approach. Yes, the trains have to run on time. You've got to pay approval on time. Benefits have to work. That kind of stuff. Got it.

[00:21:51] But the value, the real value to HR leadership, to the overall business unit, especially the CEO and increasingly the board, is to have a human capital strategy. And so the strategic part of our work is oftentimes not the focus of HR leaders. And as a result, we're not seen as strategic business people. We're seen more as tactical administrative people. We should own that.

[00:22:19] And that's anyone here who says, well, that's not me. Good. But there are a lot of people who that does apply to. And so I think we have to do that. And so CEOs are telling me that. I had lunch the other day with the CEO and chairman of a Fortune 500 company literally a week ago today. And that was the point. He said, I want my HR person to be a trusted expert advisor and confidant. That's what I need from you.

[00:22:48] And I call them the three C's you've heard me talk about. I want you to be competent. You need to be competent as an HR expert. Then you've got to absolutely be my confidant. I need to be so confident, confidant or competent and confidant. And finally, I need you to be courageous. Every business leader has you launch a new product. Hell, you don't know if it's going to work or not, but you do it with courage and conviction. And you need HR people to do those things. So that's what we're hearing.

[00:23:16] So I'm hearing CEOs say that and board leaders say that about what they want from their HR leader. More broadly, people management, meaning all of us, no matter what your C-suite title is, what we're going to have to do is understand that we sort of like the best way for me to wrap this up is to explain. You know how teachers used to have to just come to school and teach. Now teachers have to be social workers. They have positions. They have to be everything else in addition to being teachers.

[00:23:46] We now have to be all of that. If you're going to be a people manager, you've got to practice with empathy. It's not enough to say that's in their personal lives. That's not my problem compartmentalize. Those days are gone. You've got to take the whole person who shows up at your workplace and optimize that talent, which means finding things to help them develop themselves, deal with personal issues, et cetera. That's the big thing in this world, knowledge-based relationship economy that we're now floating ourselves in.

[00:24:16] The companies that win are going to find the right people and keep the right people and develop the right people. And that's what we're going to have. And the companies that lose are not, won't have figured this out. That's the strategy in HR. That's what business leaders want. And that's what HR leaders are going to have to deliver. Or we won't have a job. In worst case, we won't have a profession because someone else will do it. Wow. So let's get strategic. Yes. Right. And listen to how. Physical. Did I just date myself?

[00:24:47] I don't know what to do with that. No, but again, because you're so good at this, Johnny, is the strategic business partner, competent, confidant, courageous, and then the people management piece of this. Because that really is the big unlock is how do we help, you know, our colleagues, you know, fully actualize on how they've been gifted, what they want to do. Everybody wants to be successful.

[00:25:16] Everybody wants to, you know, make a contribution if they believe that they're capable of it and that it's desired. And when we can create that environment where they can become the best version of themselves, if somebody wants to opt out of that, that's on them. But as a people manager, if we can create that environment, then, you know, probably stay on the line from you. I think our best days aren't out of us. I'm an optimist. I'm glad you ended with that. I'm absolutely more optimistic than I've been in a long time.

[00:25:44] There are going to be some bumpy heads of the road. This is the takeoff. You know, if you think about an airplane, that ascent is kind of, it takes a lot of energy and thrust. Yes, it's bumpy. But when you get into, you know, you level off or you get into orbit if you're going into space, it's really kind of nice. I think we're heading that way. But the turbulence that we're experiencing is part of the process, is what I believe and I'm hopeful. So let's end on this.

[00:26:13] Whether you see this era as reform or overreach, one thing's clear, we're not going back to where we were. Business as usual is over. In the bulldoze era, the future of work is being rewritten in real time. And Johnny, I enjoy reading it with you, so thank you. And I'll see you next time. Okay, thank you all. Thank you, everyone, for listening. We love reviews and comments. If you've got suggestions for future topics, we would love to hear from you. In the meantime, thank you for investing a little bit of your time with us today.

[00:26:44] Johnny, I will see you in the next episode. The next episode. Thanks, all. Check out Career.Club for personalized help with your job search. Visit SHRM.org to become part of the largest human resources organization worldwide.