Bonus Episode: Adapt Now For The Future With John Boudreau And Kevin Oakes

Join us for an insightful discussion on future work insights in Episode 1 of the Growth Leaders Podcast. Renowned guests John Boudreau and Kevin Oakes share their expertise on fostering agility and driving cultural transformation in organizations. Discover the key strategies and approaches needed to thrive in an ever-changing work landscape. Don’t miss out on this engaging conversation packed with valuable insights for the future of work!

Discussion Topics: Adapt Now for the Future

• Intro
• Introducing Kevin and John
• Future managers have to learn to deploy capabilities vs jobs
• Only 15% of organisations are agile enough to adapt
• What organisations can do to be more culturally agile
• Organisations might move from hierarchies into talent marketplaces
• The best managers will act like they manage volunteers
• What leaders should do today to prepare

Transcript: Adapt Now for the Future

Alison Eyring: Hi, I’m Alison Eyring and I wanna welcome you to the Growth Leaders Podcast. I’m super excited to be here with two amazing thought leaders, Kevin Oakes and John Boudreau.

Future managers have to learn to deploy capabilities vs jobs

Alison Eyring: Let’s go forward about five years. So 2028, right? We’re in 2023 now, So clearly we don’t really know what the world of work is gonna be like in five years, but what are some of your key ideas? What do you think is gonna be really different in the day in life of a manager?

John Boudreau: I think one of the things that we’re increasingly seeing is this idea of fluidity when you’re dealing with increased automation when you’re dealing with the opportunity to engage workers who may not be your regular employees, when you’re dealing with. Fast changes in priorities like agile or stakeholder changes, et cetera. I think those situations often confound leaders if they operate in a fixed model of talent, work is a job, a worker is a job holder, and qualification is a degree, which tends to limit their options.

Allowing themselves to think about the work as more fluid, more independent, or deconstructed or melted from a job, allows them to see opportunities. They might not see that when I have a work demand, it needs to somehow coalesce into a job, or I need to even start with a job or a job description or something like that. So the number one is letting the work deconstruct.

Alison Eyring: I think that in software development, there’s been a real migration from thinking about software as monolithic to a more complex system that’s modularly built. increasingly you also will use integrations with third-party applications rather than build. So there’s a lot more flexibility. And yeah, it’s really interesting because, it’s not that the job has no form, it just has a different form. And like with modular software you still need rules around them.

John Boudreau: I think the software analogy is a really good one, Alison. All that stuff is pretty familiar to them in the world of software and even products. And yet, When they turn their attention to people and work relationships, they often instinctively can confine themselves to a work operating system that is pretty rigid, very much an old system of software where you had to own everything and develop everything.

So I love your analogy. Now in the book we talked about the idea of disaggregating or melting jobs in things like tasks and projects because those seem to be the most common places where we see these relationships.

We talked about disaggregating workers into what I’ll call capabilities, which is a little different from skills I think. They overlap a lot, but the capability for me would be what someone can do, like simultaneously translating conversation. A skill or knowledge might be something like knowing Spanish or having the Spanish language.

So capabilities are the unit that we used in the book. And then something like qualifications for learning. Now what’s gonna happen is, those things do get put together at different levels, and so I think very much like APIs or modules and that sort of thing, we’re gonna see in any particular application that the unit might look a little different.

Only 15% of organisations are agile enough to adapt

Alison Eyring: You’re making me wanna ask Kevin this one question. But when you’re doing software development, there’s this concept of technical debt. The idea is that sometimes you’re in a rush and you write bad code, and over time it gets messier and it’s a burden.

I think organisations do the same thing that I call organisation debt. Like they make stupid decisions. They’re in this rush and making changes, and then the burden is bad structure, design, ways of working, and things like that. So, Kevin, you’re such a culture guru. I just wanna hear what you think about this concept of organisation debt. How do you change fast without leaving that legacy?

Kevin Oakes: Adaptability is gonna be key going forward. I wrote a book recently called Culture Renovation, and the book is based on a very large research study my firm did. We had over 7,000 organisations participate in this. And it was based on the singular premise that most companies who attempt to change their culture, Fail, but there’s a small percentage.

Our research shows that 15% succeed and so we tried to dive into those success stories and understand if there was some kind of blueprint or playbook that other organisations could follow in order to change our culture. And from it, we came up with an 18-step action plan that companies could use to effectively change their culture.

Every company makes mistakes along the way or creates processes or creates habits that maybe aren’t conducive to what happens in the future. That’s why I think that agility and willingness to change is so critical. When we examine companies that are low-performing companies, they almost always have one thing in common, and that’s the workforce hates change.

They try to avoid it. They wish things would stay the same, whereas high-performing organisations not only recognize change as. Inevitable and commonplace, but they view it as an opportunity. They view it as a way for them to take advantage of what’s happening going forward. And I think leaders have to have that same mentality, that change is an opportunity and if they and their teams are more creative around what’s happening from a change perspective, those are the leaders that are gonna succeed.

Alison Eyring: I think the concept that John was talking about around fluidity is very relevant here, isn’t it? Because if we have a mental model that this is the way the organisation is, then you know, anything different is a change and if you think about an organisation as just, it’s a, it is a fluid being. That will, it’s changing constantly. But that doesn’t feel comfortable for people.

What organisations can do to be more culturally agile

Alison Eyring: This is so interesting. Only 15% succeeded, right? What was? What were one or two things from an organisation standpoint that they were doing that you think are gonna be really key in the future?

Kevin Oakes: Some of the key points to successfully changing culture is listening to the workforce first and foremost. You’ve gotta really understand the issues from an employee sentiment perspective that the workforce is dealing with. In my book, I start out by, Profiling what Satya Nadella and Microsoft have done around their culture change. The things that Microsoft did to effectively change its internal culture are a model for any company to follow.

They did a great job at listening to the workforce. But they also did a great job at really understanding who are the influencers and the energizers inside the organisation. While change needs to be directed and supported from the top, it’s really hard to change the culture. If your leaders don’t wanna change. You need the cooperation of many people throughout the workforce.

But until you know who those influencers are it’s not really clear. Who to bring under the tent and make a culture ambassador in the organisation. And so we’re big fans of organisational network analysis, which is a technique that uncovers those influencers and energizers cuz many times they’re hiding in plain sight.

Senior leaders will often point to people at the top of the hierarchy and think in terms of the hierarchy. But most of the influencers and the people that give energy to others inside your organisation are buried in the hierarchy. And a lot of times they’re introverts, not extroverts, so they fly under the radar.

Organisations might move from hierarchies into talent marketplaces

Alison Eyring: That’s also a great example of how organisations in five years might be quite different. Talking to a friend of mine who’s in tech and he’s had this great quote. He said just cuz you can doesn’t mean you should. And I think that one thing that technology does is allows us to listen a lot, get a lot of feedback, hear a lot, know a lot.

How will leaders in five years be dealing with that? Because you’ve got data privacy and agency and so many issues that are important for humans. How do you think the job of a manager is gonna be different in those areas?

John Boudreau: I think you’re right Alison, as in I think most of society we’re becoming increasingly aware of how much of our data is used for free. Very often the early days of things like ride-sharing and other kinds of sharing economy, where we soon realised that, a lot of those businesses are built on free goods like the infrastructure of community parking spaces. Airport facilities and some of that’s gotten worked out.

And I think in the same way that we’re all becoming with ChatGPT and other things that really scrape a lot of data, we’re all becoming aware of just how much our data is being used and what it could be used for. And I think that’s true in organisation as well. At the very least, workers will want to have more portability in terms of their data. They’ll want their data in a form that can be understood outside the organisation. So less likely to wanna play in a proprietary competency model or skill model or something like that, where no one else can read it and no one can understand it if they took it outside the organisation.

I think it also goes to a broader question of, How leaders establish their own values and their own guardrails. One of the things that an internal talent marketplace, just to take one example, one of the things that bring really to the fore is that a leader who previously had 20 people reporting to them knew who they were because they were in boxes called jobs, and those boxes had a line that went to the box of a leader that was called a job.

And even if there were 10 leaders, each with 20 people, each of them could focus on the people in the boxes whose lines came to them. Now you introduce an internal talent marketplace or some other marketplace platform, and now those people are doing projects often on a voluntary basis, but nonetheless, they’re working for any one of those 10 leaders for a short period of time, and then going back to their regular job.

As my colleague, Jonathan Donna, and I wrote, What that starts to look like is that those 10 leaders are now a team that is overseeing a work capability embodied in 200 people. And as they share, they need to have pretty clear ideas about what data they use, how each of them thinks about performance and sentiment, and all those sorts of things.

And a certain commonality actually. So that as workers shift among those leaders, they’re not confronted with a massively different set of values or priorities or definitions of performance or something like that. So this idea of. Fluidity also goes to the idea of almost a sort of sharing economy of workers among leaders and the change in mindset that comes from thinking of people as your workers to thinking of yourself as part of a team that oversees a fluid set of capabilities that kind of shifts.

Kevin Oakes: What I love about that is we don’t pigeonhole people into the jobs we hired them into, which happens in so many organisations and we only think about them in terms of that job. Yeah. When they have the skills or capabilities that go far outside that job, they could be very valuable to the company in the future. Yeah. And creating that skills or competency database is that you have a much better handle on who you have internally.

John Boudreau: I think that’s right, Kevin. it goes to your organisational debt, Alison, one of the reasons that you lock in some of these organisational ideas that may turn out not to be as fit for purpose later is because you need to create jobs. Those job descriptions are sticky.

They can become very tough to change, difficult for systems to make changes to them. That job description doesn’t even really describe what someone is doing anymore, but it remains our official record of what they do, and I think we’ll see that record is gonna become more accurate, but also more, in a way More informal and more fluid.

The best managers will act like they manage volunteers

Alison Eyring: I love what you’re saying. Our technology Prodigy, we’ve always had a philosophy of, we call it privacy by design. And we build it because we’ve said the individual owns their data. They should see who sees their data. That’s a whole different mindset about control and about the agency of the individual, that’s really what you’re talking about a future quickly where it’s not, the organisation doesn’t own the talent but that the talent chooses to contribute in different ways. I’ve always thought that the best managers act like managers of volunteers.

Because if you look at people that work in volunteer organisations, they don’t have money to pay people. They are basically enlisting people to work with them. And so people contribute to them and they have to be effective at it. And I’m thinking, oh no, this is gonna be a hard thing for many managers if they’re in an organisation and suddenly they don’t have control over their pool of talent and people are working on projects and coming back and forth.

What leaders should do today to prepare

Alison Eyring: My last question for the two of you is, if we’re heading on a path to more fluid organisations, more fluid jobs, deconstructed jobs, more change, faster pace, what should leaders be doing today to help their people become more future-ready and for themself to be more future-ready?

Kevin Oakes: I can almost envision a time, five years from now, and maybe it’s sooner where employees are gonna be challenging their leaders by saying, Hey, you just gave me this answer, but here’s what ChatGPT says.

And you’re gonna be feeling like you’re competing against this huge database. So it’s no longer about. Necessarily the information in the heads of leaders and being, the ultimate subject matter expert. It’s more about how you help your employees manage, the issues that they’re dealing with, the projects that they have, and then providing that mental and emotional wellbeing in that discussion. It really wasn’t that long ago that it was taboo and in a lot of organisations it still is, right? Where you’re not supposed to talk to your employees about what’s going on in their personal life. And that’s really changed quite a bit these days. And now it’s managing the whole persona, not just the work persona. I think that’s gonna be a big difference-maker.

Alison Eyring: John, what’s your thought? What’s that one thing that could be, we could be doing now to help people be future-ready?

John Boudreau: I think the word I would use is experiment Alison. That is to approach work as an experiment. Beginning with the mindset that we don’t know what the future holds. then draw on the tools you already have for dealing with uncertainty. And finance, uncertainty is a given and there are tools about how you design a portfolio. Think about it as product design. And so we are going to have to work together to redesign and keep redesigning work as technology chips away at it, as other work arrangements chip away at it, et cetera. And just like with customers, that’s probably gonna involve a fuller kind of listening, not necessarily just about the customer’s interaction with your product and software, but stepping back and asking about their context.

So for me, rigorous experimentation and having enough respect for work and the work relationship to apply those tools there. Just the way you respect your products, your software, et cetera, and your customers and users to apply the tools with them.

Alison Eyring: I love that you all have been so amazing and given, sparked so many ideas in me and I leave with some thoughts.

One is just around this dilemma of managers at every level of an organisation. Their jobs are gonna get harder. They’re gonna have to push people harder because they’re gonna have to be able to change, but at the same time, they have to create willingness. So I really love the idea of pushing digital savviness.

And a lot of people are not gonna be comfortable with it, but they’re gonna have to change the way they think about how they create solutions to jobs. I wrote down that knowledge is no longer power. Don’t you remember when we used to have that quote? Knowledge is power. And Kevin, your comment about ChatGPT is just so you know, we are relevant, right?

Like now we’re in a world where content is a commodity if knowledge is not power, then your power has to be in helping people be better. It’s not about the knowledge that you lord over them, it’s about enabling them to be the best version of themself. I loved your comment about the whole persona.

And John, I leave with your concept of fluidity, which I really love, and also experimentation, As a company that builds software. I just love the metaphor of thinking about it. Constructing jobs in the way that we construct products and thinking it from a design perspective.

And I think even design thinking is a skill that we can all be learning more about because it really forces us to think about the user, right? And when we think about the user, we think about what’s their experience, what’s happening. And so I think that’s a great takeaway for everyone listening to this podcast today.

Thank you both very much for your time. This has been great.

Thank you. Thanks, Alison.

John Boudreau: Thanks Kevin. Always a pleasure.

Our Guests: John Boudreau and Kevin Oakes

John Boudreau is an accomplished thought leader and HR strategist with extensive experience in organizational effectiveness and workforce planning. He is the CEO of a leading consulting firm, providing innovative solutions for talent management and HR strategy. John’s expertise lies in helping organizations navigate the complexities of the modern workplace and adapt to future workforce trends.

Kevin Oakes is a renowned author and speaker on talent management and learning. With a deep understanding of organizational development and employee engagement, he has worked with numerous global companies to drive performance and enhance employee experience. Kevin is the CEO of a cutting-edge software company that specializes in talent management solutions, empowering organizations to unlock their full potential.