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At RedThread, we love our data, but we know that what you remember is stories. So we spend time listening to thinkers, writers, leaders, and practitioners as they tell their...
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At RedThread, we love our data, but we know that what you remember is stories. So we spend time listening to thinkers, writers, leaders, and practitioners as they tell their stories about what works in the workplace, what they’ve learned, and what they hope to see in the future. We hope you find it inspirational, motivational, and a touch irreverent.
show less
Workplace Stories by RedThread Research
Workplace Stories by RedThread Research
The Problem with Change: Author Ashley Goodall
17 JUL 2024 · Ashley Goodall has spent 20 years in various roles in HR, covering everything from performance management to leadership. He spent six years at Cisco as the SVP of HR. He left Cisco to write his book, “https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Change-Essential-Nature-Performance/dp/0316560278,” which was just released. In it, he addresses the problems that accompany change.
To write his book, Ashley interviewed people around the world, asking them to tell their stories of organizational change. Many people told miserable stories, stories of unending change propelled by mergers, new leadership, new strategies, and much more—much of it unnecessary. What was the result?
People were struggling to do their jobs because of the constant change. Yet organizations are rewarding leaders to do things that make it hard for their employees to do their work! That’s a problem, right? So, what should we do instead?
We have to understand the conditions of human performance to understand how we can “do” change better. Ashley begins to dissect that complicated yet fascinating topic in this episode of Workplace Stories.
You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in...
- Join the RedThread Community [1:34]
- Why you should listen to Ashley Goodall [4:49]
- What is the problem with change? [7:09]
- Why Ashley wrote another book about change [10:34]
- The problems that accompany change [12:45]
- Looking at meaning and purpose differently [18:53]
- The story of Alexander the Great [23:38]
- The connection between meaning and ritual [25:29]
- We need to stop treating humans like “SKUmans” [29:10]
- The lightning round [33:08]
- Getting good at stability management [36:38]
- What we can learn from “the pistols” [39:59]
- How to create belonging on your team [44:21]
- Focusing on your teams to create stability [45:43]
- Learning how to radicalize HR [48:53]
- Ashley’s biggest takeaway from writing a book [53:11]
The problems that accompany change
Ashley addresses five core problem areas that accompany change:
- Uncertainty
- Lack of control
- Lack of belonging
- Displacement
- Loss of meaning
The feeling of belonging is intuitive. Humans form social groups. Those groups are massively important to psychological health, sense of identity, and cognitive processes. The way we think is socially mediated. A team gives you a sense of belonging. It’s a source of massive stability.
Teammates complement each other so together they can meet a goal that couldn’t be achieved alone. When reorganization happens, all of the social groups at work are upended. In his book, Ashley also dove into the science of “place attachment.” People get attached to places. Place is a thing strongly tied to work. But there’s also a connection between ritual and place.
Our habits are a mechanism by which we grow attached to a place. Habits and rituals tied to place have people saying “It’s where I do this” or “It’s where we do this.” When offices are changed or people are moved, you disrupt the rituals attached to that place.
Those places are a source of stability. And for people to do their best work, they need stability. All of these facets of a human—certainty, control, social groups, sense of place, ritual—are the foundation of showing up at work and being useful. Everyone wants to be useful. How we design the workplace hinges on these things.
Ashley is clear: “Sooner or later you have to ask people what they want and listen to what they tell you.”
How Ashley looks at meaning differently
Ashley points out that the world around us must make sense. You can’t be uplifted by the mission of an organization if you can’t figure out what the mission is. Science tells us that the coherence of our world is so important that when it’s taken away in one place, we find it in another.
There are two ingredients to meaning:
- Things have to make sense (which is shredded when things are changed)
- You need to find your own purpose. Someone can’t tell you what your purpose is
We encounter the world and question, “Do I understand what’s going on here? Is this something that speaks to me?” If it does and someone asks if your work has meaning, you’ll say “yes.” Unfortunately, people think everyone around them has to have the same meaning. It doesn’t work like that. As much as they dislike it, employers aren’t massively important to someone’s purpose.
We need to stop treating humans like “SKUmans”
What characteristics of humans do we capture in our technology at work? How does that inform how we think about people at work? We track the “cogs in a machine” stuff. We record names, date of birth, someone’s role, their certifications and experience, etc. but we don’t record what amuses someone, what makes them smile, and the weird things they love to do. Maybe they’re always late for meetings, love to bake, or love creating spreadsheets.
If you think humans are interchangeable and emotionless beings, how would you describe them? As a “SKU” number. SKUs are stock-keeping units. They track what something costs, where it is in the store, what the margin is, etc. We’ve been doing the same to humans. And that’s massively inhuman. We can’t capture human work this way. How might we capture a human at work?
Ashley argues for getting better at understanding what people are like at work. It’s about asking questions like, “How are you offering your best to other humans? Why did you show up today?”
Now that we’ve covered the problems with change, how do we address them? Ashley shares how stability management just might be the key (and how to navigate it) in this episode.
Resources & People Mentioned
- Join the http://members.readthreadresearch.com!
Connect with Ashley Goodall
- https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Change-Essential-Nature-Performance/dp/0316560278
- Connect on https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleygoodall/
Connect With Red Thread Research
- Website: https://redthreadresearch.com/
- On https://www.linkedin.com/company/redthread-research/
- On https://www.facebook.com/redthreadresearch
- On https://twitter.com/redthreadre
Subscribe to https://pod.link/1554931884
Using a Skills Framework to Empower Employees: Microsoft’s Shweta Srivastava and John Mighell
29 MAY 2024 · The mission of Microsoft is to empower every person in every organization to achieve more. An enterprise-wide skills focus is one way they’re fulfilling their mission.
It’s about moving beyond job titles and fixed roles to give freedom and flexibility to apply skills and expertise where they matter the most. And it’s all in service of creating an environment where growing one’s career is the top reason to join and stay at Microsoft.
They’re using human verification to give the individual control over the data that’s included, who it’s shared with, and how it’s shared.
Shweta Srivastava and John Mighell share how Microsoft is implementing skills on a large scale in this fascinating conversation.
Why Skills are like Oxygen: Ericsson’s Vidya Krishnan + Peter Sheppard
8 MAY 2024 · “Skills are like oxygen, invisible but necessary.”
This mindset shift is the brainchild of Vidya Krishnan, the Chief Learning Officer, and Peter Sheppard, the Head of the Global L&D Ecosystem at Ericsson.
Much of their job is identifying the oxygen and making it visible so they can do something with it. To do this, they’re taking a top-down and bottom-up approach. They’ve worked with senior leadership to define seven key skills they think everyone in the organization needs. They also work with the job leaders who own the skills to make sure their skills taxonomy is continuously updated.
Vidya and Peter are passionate about what they do. They’re working tirelessly to systemize learning to take care of and serve the individual. Because, ultimately, systems-first means people-first.
Skills Management: What is the Secret Sauce? GP Strategies’ Matt Donovan
3 APR 2024 · How do we define work and the skills needed to do the work? The way we view and assess skills is often through assessing and appraising someone’s output. But the problem is that most organizations aren’t capturing the right data and using it to gain insight.
According to Matt Donovan—the Chief Learning and Innovation Officer at GP Strategies—Job descriptions and skills in general describe the baseline. They are not what makes someone great at what they do.
So how do we define the work and the skills needed to do the work? How can we capture a high-performer’s secret sauce? What are they doing that’s making it a successful experience versus what’s written in the job description?
We dive into a fascinating conversation about where we are now, how AI is going to both help and disrupt organizations, and what the future of skills assessment could look like.
Generating Value from People Data: GSK’s Angela Le Mathon
20 MAR 2024 · GSK is a global biopharma company with a purpose to unite science, technology, and talent to get ahead of disease together. They aim to positively impact the health of 2.5 billion people by the end of 2030.
In her role as the VP of People Data & Analytics, Angela is responsible for generating value from their people data. She has the opportunity to shape thinking and inform strategy. Her job is to translate skills so that everyone can do what they need to with the data.
She shares more about GSK’s scientific approach, how they’re using AI to gather information, and how skills verification ties in. Don’t miss this fascinating conversation.
Skills: Yes, the Juice Is Worth the Squeeze: EPAM’s Sandra Loughlin
6 MAR 2024 · Sandra Loughlin is the Chief Learning Officer and the Global Head of Talent Enablement and Transformation at EPAM, a software engineering and consulting firm. Unlike many of the organizations we’ve spoken about, EPAM has been on a skills journey since its inception over 30 years ago. Building a skills-based organization has been the backbone of everything they do. In this conversation, Sandra shares why the juice is indeed “Worth the squeeze.”
When Digital Transformation Drives Skills Transformation: Booking.com’s Oliver Drury
21 FEB 2024 · When Oliver (Ollie) Drury joined Booking.com, they dove into digital transformation by simplifying their tech stack—and reducing variables—using a middleware to stitch everything together. That enabled them to have a simpler set of variables from which to create their skills ecosystem. Their driving goal was to solve skills for the entire organization. In this conversation, Ollie shares how they’re working to accomplish a skills-based transformation by first focusing on digital transformation.
You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in...
- Join the RedThread Research Community [5:01]
- Learn more about Ollie Drury and his work [5:59]
- Why they’re creating a skills-based organization [7:09]
- Why they focused on digital transformation first [8:00]
- How they’re building for reversibility [18:04]
- Major obstacles they’ve overcome [24:08]
- How they’re measuring effectiveness [26:08]
- The lightning round [27:58]
- Who leads skills at Booking.com? [34:29]
- Why employees own the skills data [38:05]
- How culture impacts the journey to skills [42:38]
- Steering away from the reward use case [47:53]
- The biggest thing Ollie’s learned [49:35]
- Why Ollie is passionate about this work [50:22]
Resources & People Mentioned
- Join the https://members.redthreadresearch.com/
- https://www.mulesoft.com/
- https://www.tech-off.com/
- https://www.workday.com/
- https://gloat.com/
- https://neilsoft.com/
- https://www.crunchr.com/
- BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/Work-without-Jobs-Organizations-Management-ebook/dp/B097B3C73P
- BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/INSPIRED-Create-Tech-Products-Customers-ebook/dp/B077NRB36N/
- BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Potential-Science-Achieving-Greater/dp/0593653149
- BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/Technology-Fallacy-Digital-Transformation-Management/dp/0262039680
Connect with Oliver Drury
- Connect on https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverdruryhr/
Connect With Red Thread Research
- Website: https://redthreadresearch.com/
- On https://www.linkedin.com/company/redthread-research/
- On https://www.facebook.com/redthreadresearch
- On https://twitter.com/redthreadre
Subscribe to https://pod.link/1554931884
Company Culture is the Foundation for Skills Readiness: Executive Networks’ Gina Jeneroux
7 FEB 2024 · According to Gina Jeneroux, company culture sets the foundation for skills readiness. If a company culture isn’t supportive of innovation and creativity, is it ready to support an initiative to focus on skills? Skills should be infused into everything you do in your organization and supported from the top down. Gina has spent almost 40 years in the financial services and learning industries. She spent the last few years running BMO’s corporate university and serving as Chief Learning Officer. In this conversation, she shares why a focus on skills is necessary, why company culture plays an important role, and how to get buy-in from company leadership.You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in...
Connect With Red Thread Research
- Website: https://redthreadresearch.com/
- On https://www.linkedin.com/company/redthread-research/
- On https://www.facebook.com/redthreadresearch
- On https://twitter.com/redthreadre
Subscribe to https://pod.link/1554931884
The Skills Odyssey IV: Opening Arguments
6 FEB 2024 · Welcome to the newest season of Workplace Stories. It will come as no surprise that we’re devoting season 11 to continuing our conversation around skills. Why? Because there are still questions to be answered. In these opening arguments, we’ll share the questions we’re being asked, what we’re looking forward to, and we’ll give you a sneak-peak of some of the amazing guests we’ll be having conversations with.
Connect With Red Thread Research
- Website: https://redthreadresearch.com/
- On https://www.linkedin.com/company/redthread-research/
- On https://www.facebook.com/redthreadresearch
- On https://twitter.com/redthreadre
Subscribe to https://pod.link/1554931884
A Skills Approach for the Present and Future: IEEE’s Jennifer Rogers
6 DEC 2023 · Jennifer Rogers is the Executive Officer in the Learning Technology Standards Committee at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which has 427,000+ members in over 190 countries. The IEEE is the world’s largest trade organization and the professional home for engineering and technology communities worldwide. Jennifer is an unrelenting advocate for the potential that exists in others, which is why she’s a perfect fit at IEEE. IEEE is working together to figure out skills across an industry. They’re also focused on skills development and education at all levels through college and a professional career. In this conversation, Jennifer shares what a skills-based organization looks like, how they organize and validate skills, and how their approach focuses on both the present and future.
At RedThread, we love our data, but we know that what you remember is stories. So we spend time listening to thinkers, writers, leaders, and practitioners as they tell their...
show more
At RedThread, we love our data, but we know that what you remember is stories. So we spend time listening to thinkers, writers, leaders, and practitioners as they tell their stories about what works in the workplace, what they’ve learned, and what they hope to see in the future. We hope you find it inspirational, motivational, and a touch irreverent.
show less
Information
| Author | Stacia Garr & Dani Johnson |
| Organization | Stacia Garr |
| Categories | Management |
| Website | redthreadresearch.com |
| hello@redthreadresearch.com |
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