Events

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TRANSCRIPT

Chris Pirie:
We're about halfway through our season and there's lots going on in the world relating to the topic of talent and purpose. So we have a two-part episode for you this time. In the second half of the hour, Dani, Stacia, and I will discuss a couple of recently released reports and some public statements that have a material bearing on our topic, but we're going to start the episode with a conversation that Dani and I had with Dan Pontefract. Dan is a leadership strategist, author, keynote speaker, and his bestsellers include ‘Lead. Care. Win. How to Become a Leader Who Matters,’ ‘Open to Think,’ ‘The Purpose Effect’ and ‘Flat Army,’ great title for a book. Dan was chief envisioner and chief learning officer at Telus, a Canadian telecommunications company with revenues in excess of $14 billion and over 50,000 worldwide employees. He launched the transformation office, the Telus MBA program, and the Telus leadership philosophy, all initiatives that drastically helped to increase the company's employee engagement. We started as usual with our set of questions designed to help sketch out Dan's work and career.

Dan Pontefract:
Dan Pontefract founder of the Pontefract Group, author, speaker, leadership strategist based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. And today is the 19th of October, 2020 vision. Well, I'm in the capital city of one of Canada's 10 provinces, British Columbia, that city, Victoria named yes, after the queen, moved here about eight years ago from Vancouver, where I spent 17 years in Vancouver. And prior to that, I grew up a bit in Ontario and Quebec in Canada. Born in England, Blackburn, Lancashire.

Dan Pontefract:
I am a leadership strategist, I like to refer to myself as, which is someone who's trying to help people, teams, organizations become better versions of themselves, which revolves around a three-legged stool. One of those legs is purpose. Another leg is culture. Another leg is how we think. And what unites it all, the seat, is this thing called leadership. I thought I was going to be a doctor. And then I realized that I didn't like blood, so that was bad. I dropped out or I guess I switched out of pre-med, at McGill University in Montreal and switched into the bachelor's of education and bachelor's of arts program. So I thought I was going to be a teacher. I lasted two years teaching high school of which then I morphed my way into higher ed, spent about six years at the Institute of British Columbia. and then the corporate world beckoned, and between 2000 to 2018, between SAP and Telus, so a high-tech company and a telecom, I was both a chief learning officer and something we call the chief envisioner, which was a totally made-up word to freak the press out.

Chris Pirie:
You have written four books. Is there a sort of core underlying theme that ties these ideas together?

Dan Pontefract:
Indeed, the way I looked at it, and there's a fifth one in the works incidentally, is that book one was taking a look at culture, like, what is corporate culture? What is organizational culture? How does it manifest? How's it suck? What's the link to employee engagement, if you will? And then I recognize there was no plan really to write another book, but I thought, well, there's something missing to culture. And that was the yin to the yang. And that's where I stumbled upon, back in 2014, this notion of purpose. And so I wrote a book based on kind of an investigation into some organizations and just my own thoughts, really about what we were doing at Telus at the time, which is a 50,000, $14 billion telecom, about how we might serve others basically was the premise. So book two was the yin to the yang with culture.

Dan Pontefract:
So ‘Flat Army’ being in the book was a culture. ‘The Purpose Effect’ was about purpose, but then the epiphany also rang true such that I recognized, ‘Well, we're not doing a very good job on culture change and certainly no one's, you know, deploying a sense of purpose or higher meaning. What's wrong?’ And so effectively I narrowed it down to one of several ailments and that was the way in which we think, and ‘Open to Think’ the third book, was me waxing lyrical, if you will, on how we've lost sight of marinading in the moment, Chris and Dani, how we don't creatively or critically think and how we're just addicted to busy-ness and distraction and social media and, you know, overburdened calendars. So that became a bit of an antidote and recipe for, well, if we want culture change to happen, if we want purpose to happen, maybe we need to take a look at our thinking.

Dan Pontefract:
And so that happened, that came out in 2018, and then I immediately went into work on book four, as soon as ‘Open to Think’ published incidentally, because I wanted to create, if you will, a book that was a field guide about leadership and the first three books were traditional hard cover, you know, 85,000-word books with tons of interviews, tons of research and, you know, thick, cerebral even. But I wanted something to be paperback, 35,000 words, and just sort of chock full of techniques and lessons on how to become what I call a leader who matters, which does pay homage to culture and does pay homage to purpose and does pay homage to thinking. But there's some other bits in there that ultimately help the user and the learner and the reader become a better leader.

Chris Pirie:
What kind of work are you doing today, Dan?

Dan Pontefract:
I left Telus, the offer mentioned telecom, full-time on January 1, 2019, and went out on my own. I went on my own and started the Pontefract Group, which is in Paul Jarvis's language, a company of one, but I'm out there helping organizations and/or individuals who are interested in, you know, how their organization operates, if they want it to be a little more transparent, open collaborative. If they're thinking about, you know, this fad, Chris and Dani called purpose, what do we do here? And again, so based on the books, I'll do talks, I'll do consulting, you know, I've done organizational redesign, you know, typical CHRO CLO, you know, experience officer type stuff to help others.

Dani Johnson:
So I'm super interested. Was ‘The Purpose Effect’ your first book or your second book?

Dan Pontefract:
It was book number two.

Dani Johnson:
I'm fascinated with it. Well, we are fascinated with the idea of purpose, and I’m really interested in what prompted you to write that.

Dan Pontefract:
It really, as I kind of began to, you know, dig into the work of Roger L. Martin and the work of Charles Handy and the work of Clayton Christianson and just like greats before us, it really struck me as a practitioner inside an organization of how culture is supposed to be working, that we were missing out on something at Telus. Don't forget as its chief learning officer, I was helping to create back in 2008, 2009, 2010, this something called the Telus Leadership Philosophy. And the TLP as we affectionately called it was our North Star. It wasn't just, you know, values on a wall. It was a working, operating behavior guide for how we were supposed to interact with each other. But the first thing that we did was we defined our target audience, who are we leading? You know, it took about a year and a bit to put the TLP together and to launch it into the organization in the summer of 2010.

Dan Pontefract:
But one of the things, which we weren't calling it purpose at the time, incidentally which, which we've now gone back and refined it as social purpose, nonetheless. We were very clear from the get-go in the TLP that we would affect our leadership toward four key audiences, and the four audiences that we ended up defining as part of the TLP, were as follows. I mean, obviously customers. So our customers we serve, our team members, the business—so that would be those due a fair return from a financial means perspective, so shareholders, investors, et cetera—and community. That became the launchpad for me, because as an organization, we said, ‘No. Community is the word we're going to use, and that's how we're going to serve.’ And what landed on me was, well, actually, that's the who, that's who we're serving. How do we do it? The how was where the word purpose came in. And so then I started trying to figure out, well, what is purpose? And that's where I then found that there's actually three types of purpose, which if you want to go into that, I'm happy to.

Dani Johnson:
How did you guys land on purpose? I mean, in a world where everybody really is focused on, you know, shareholder value and profits, how did you sort of wrap your organization around the idea of purpose?

Dan Pontefract:
Shareholder return and to a degree, EBITDA are actually outcomes of what you stand for and how you operate as an organization. We know that on a global basis, we're still stuck at 87-ish percent of the world disengaged or not engaged at work, but there's a correlation as well when you kind of dig down to the next layer of the causal relationship between culture or engagement and purpose. When the organization feels as though its intent, its belief, its actions are indeed working for a higher purpose, i.e., community, i.e., others, not just EBITDA, shareholder return, et cetera, then what happens is it triggers a sense of engagement and community itself in the organization. I don't know if we, Dani, actually knew what we were doing back in 2010 through 2013, 2014, but we knew enough to say back then, there's more to us than just shareholder return.

Chris Pirie:
The nature of the work that Telus does, connecting people, do you think that had anything to do with how you got to like community, in particular, but purpose?

Dan Pontefract:
I think that’s a fair query, Chris. To be honest, it was, the organization, sorry, was a public Crown corp up until 1999 and very unionized shop. But, at the end of the day, Telus itself circa 2001 became a publicly traded organization. And the machinations that go along with becoming publicly traded where you served any sort of, you know, crown Corp ethos that was originally is lingering if you will, because it's the notion of an organization's singular mandate for many, if not all publicly traded organizations, other than maybe Unilever back in 2010, was what? It's to serve the stock market and the analysts every quarter. I have an example and it's a large company that everybody knows and most people use. And the situation is circa middle of April 2020. And there are some whistleblowers at everyone's favorite online shopping mall Amazon that are discussing work conditions in the factories, in the warehouses.

Dan Pontefract:
And there's a VP of cloud computing. His name is Tim Bray, and Tim Bray, albeit Canadian, working out of Vancouver, goes through the regular channels inside of Amazon, right? To highlight his disdain for how these whistleblowers are being fired for complaining about the lack of safety in the warehouse. And so, because he's a VP and he says this on a public blog post, he said, I wanted to follow the right protocol and the right chain of command by being then and subsequently ignored and, you know, shushed, Tim was left with a decision. He looked at his sense of self, meaning purpose. What does the organization stand for? And what's role in all of this, which is just very simply the three types of purpose that I believe are found in all of us and must intersect.

Dan Pontefract:
And when they're not in lock step, you know, either we have to make a decision or you have to live with it. And Tim Bray made a decision. He quit publicly in a blog post, outing, you know, the situation that just had unfolded and saying, ‘Look, this is not my values. This is not essentially my purpose. And so I'm out.’ And I think that's encapsulates for many, just as a microcosmic story, what goes on. It's that organizations might say, and again, this is not Amazon example now, but organizations might say they operate with a great sense of purpose. That's the what, but the how, the behaviors, do they actually serve community? Do they actually serve all stakeholders and not just shareholders? That's what gets frightening.

Dani Johnson:
Let's talk about those three things. You've mentioned them a couple of times. In your book, you discuss three types of purpose, personal purpose, which I think we just got a really good view of with Tim Bray. The second one is a role purpose and an organizational purpose. You talk about them in sort of three separate chunks, critical relationship between the three. So talk about why, why three, and then what's the relationship between them.

Dan Pontefract:
I think what some authors or researchers and writers and others have done a really fantastic job of is that sense of personal purpose? You know, who am I, what do I stand for? And what I like to cheekily say, as part of your personal purpose, how do I want to be known when I leave a room? But what dawned on me, Dani, was that if the individual who wakes up in the morning and is Dan or Dani or Chris, as a sense of personal purpose, has to go to work. And doesn't recognize that there's actually two other types of purpose that they're getting in the car or the subway and going into work for, then they're in deep trouble. Because if they're not aware that they should be feeling a sense of purpose in their role at work, does their work give them a sense of meaning and value?

Dan Pontefract:
Do they feel valued by their team, by their organization, by their boss? So role purpose, as I call it also has a nice employee engagement. Do you feel engaged in what you do? But then of course, there's this, the elephant in the room, and that is the organization. If the organization's purpose is one in which it’s only focused and fixated on profit or harming the environment, or not caring about giving to the community, you know, if that runs like nails on a chalkboard to you, do you think you're going to kind of be in a sweet spot, Dani, do you think that it's all going to connect? Now we have decisions to make just like Tim Bray did.

Dani Johnson:
So, whose responsibility is it for alignment of those three things if those three things are sort of necessary in order to give somebody a sense of purpose?

Dan Pontefract:
What a great question. Yeah. it's actually twofold. So again, I believe, and I've seen this where there's a principled stance that the organization has to take to ensure that their employees, their team members feel and can actualize purpose in the role. And because it's an ecosystem because we're all in this together, I do truly believe that that organization also must extend its hand to help the team member with their own sense of personal purpose. But then flip it around, whether it's temporary or otherwise, we must always be curating, developing, questioning who we are in our own life, i.e., personal purpose. But we also have to recognize that there's a development path in our career, and we're going to have to learn that role purpose is actually a journey as well. It's not instantaneous. But again, if we think that there's things in our role over time, let's say that are really contradictory to our sense of purpose of self or the organizations, then we got to do something about it. Maybe it was the wrong role. Maybe it's the wrong organization, Dani. So there's two, the organization has a responsibility, I believe, whether you're CEO, C-suite, CHROs, CLOs. But also you coming into the organization, you got some muscle building to do as well.

Dani Johnson:
Do you think that's a fairly, a relatively new construct, this idea of organizations having some responsibility in helping people find their purpose, or do you think that's always existed?

Dan Pontefract:
There are some great examples out there. Dannon Yogurt, you know, those folks back in, I think it was 1970, 1968, somewhere around there. You know, there's an example of an organization that says right from the get-go, this is how we're going to operate. This is our ‘graze on dirt,’ if you will, they call it responsible capitalism. And they said from there that they would support community, they'd support their employees. They would support the environment. This is like 1970. When, you know, Uncle Milt, Friedman put out his famous New Yorker report or article or essay that said shareholder capitalism, shareholder primacy is how we should be operating our organizations. And Reaganomics and Thacher-nomics took, took hold and, you know, that's what we've been stuck in ever since.

Chris Pirie:
What advice would you give to talent leaders and CLOs in terms of how they approach this topic of purpose?

Dan Pontefract:
I'd say, first and foremost, make sure that you've, you know, developed it, declared it, defined it, and you've communicated it so that you can point to it. And its examples. So whether it's videos or stories, that's kind of important first and foremost. Secondly, on the attraction point itself, if you're not having a conversation, let's say, you know, in the interview stage or in the submission stage about a, what is our purpose? but b, how do you see our purpose meshing with yours? Because we want to be hiring the right type of people who are going to enact and continue on, you know, in the sense of hopefully operating with a higher sense of meaning. I think that's really important to have it upfront out in the open and in the conversations of, you know, the interview stage even. And then when you're a CLO or CHRO and you're in the organization, again, back to that earlier point, when Dani and I were chatting about, you know, the two types of responsibility, that organization, I do believe, has a fiduciary responsibility to inculcate purpose into the pedagogy and curricula of the organization.

Dan Pontefract:
So whether that's in the onboarding piece, for example, right, just sort of getting your feet wet if you will, but then having either purpose workshops that are ones about, you know, your own personal sense of purpose, having leaders in a webcast series, you know, its purpose month in February. So we're going to chat with five or 10 VPs, et cetera, about what it is that their sense of purpose, personal purposes, not even thinking about whatever your company name is, just them as people, when we're weaving it into our curriculum and pedagogy, our career pathing actually becomes systemic.

Chris Pirie:
There is maybe a danger to all this. And that is, I know Dani feels strongly about sort of like mono-cultures in organizations and you end up with a lack of diversity if you're just hiring people for sort of culture fit. Do you think that's a possible downside of this?

Dan Pontefract:
I do believe that you can use purpose and your culture and your values to make good decisions and better decisions that revolve around your ethos, you know, your way of being, but I wouldn't hire folks as sort of a group-think hire. Oh, we better all think this way. Then we end up with a very, you know, staid, placid, not very differentiating type of organization.

Chris Pirie :
Perhaps we can talk a little bit, Dan, about the dreaded COVID 2020, how has it changed how you think about purpose and secondly, what do you think is the job to be done next as we start to hopefully put work back together?

Dan Pontefract:
I don't think purpose and this, you know, operating with a sense of higher meaning is as foreign a concept as it was back in 2015, 2016. I think we're actually inching our way to it being part of the vernacular and lexicon of how we operate. And we can thank several organizations. Satya Nadella as he came on as CEO at Microsoft, clearly waxed lyrical five years ago-ish when he came on about how we need to operate, not just for a sense of EBITDA, but for others. I think Paul Pullman, a great example at Unilever starting in 2010, and continue now with Jop, its CEO as well. And then the work of Larry Fink at BlackRock and his annual January letter in January of 2019. He said, look, if we're not operating with a sense of purpose, why are we here?

Dan Pontefract:
And then follow that up with the January letter of 2020 with we better all become environmentalists. It's open when you're trading $7 trillion, Chris, as they are kind of the world's largest shadow bank, Fink has, is helping us see the light if you will. There are some examples and, you know, there's some shining stars that are starting to shine a little brighter. Now the pandemic hits, you know, and what I'm noticing is a couple of things. First of all, there are still a bunch of morons out there that think they can hierarchically pound their way into increasing or at least sustaining their revenues or their profit levels by not caring either for their people or with a sense of purpose with community, just so asinine. Whether it's an Amazon example or otherwise, there are a ton that I've been observing. I mean, a ton, I've kept track of them on a spreadsheet because I keep coming into them.

Dan Pontefract:
But that said, as horrible as this pandemic has been, somewhat obviously it's a tragedy, it's a human tragedy. It has also, I think, awakened many C-suites from where they were to where they ought to go, and let us not, you know, discount the civil unrest from Brianna to George Floyd, et cetera, right? There is a palpable, I believe, pent-up, global frustration with how many organizations had been operating. And so, you know, what it comes down to, I certainly truly believe, Chris and Dani, is empathy. There is such a relationship between empathy and purpose that our organizational leaders that are CLOs and CHROs need to start teaching about empathy and its relationship to purpose. And empathy, very quickly to me, there's three types that I've kind of observed. And I call it head, heart, and hands. The head empathy, if you will, which is known as psychologist called cognitive empathy, is how we intellectualize how someone else is thinking about something.

Dan Pontefract:
So you think about how they're thinking. You use your head to get inside their head. What's known as emotional empathy is the feelings part. How is someone feeling about a particular situation? And then the last one is known as sympathetic empathy, and that's what I call the hands. Are you willing to do something about it because you now understood how they're thinking and feeling. So back to purpose. If we're teaching as CLOs and CHROs in the organization about purpose, you know, purpose of self, purpose of role, purpose of org, I think we need to also fill the gap of empathy by teaching the relationship of purpose to empathy and how, when we think and feel and do, we can then understand that we're not in this, i.e., life, just for ourselves or just for our own organizational needs. We empathize of how others are thinking in the community, about the environment, how our employees are thinking about how we're treating the environment or the community, if we're turning a blind eye, you know, not doing enough that serve those in need. I think that that relationship is going to be key for CLOs going forward.

Chris Pirie:
What do you think are the main things that we've got to get done as we sort of move into hopefully the next phase and we sort of put work back together again? And how can purpose kind of help us think about that?

Dan Pontefract:
I can't stand, to be honest with you two, the notion of the new normal. I've been yapping away calling it the Great Reset. So this is, we had the Great Recession. We've had the Great Depression. I think this is such a wonderful opportunity for us to inculcate a Great Reset. How are we defining ourselves in our work and use this time, you know, to come back to this, the reset of how work ought to occur when we'll be in, I hope, hybrid models. I hope in achieving a different way of operating our business, our organizations. So if we can reset a few things in this time that we've got till the vaccine comes and look at our behaviors, look at our way in which that we might be developing or not developing our people in the organization with purpose, look at how we're hiring or not hiring people with a sense of purpose, look at how our organization has or doesn't have a declaration of purpose, a purpose statement that says, this is what we stand for and how we operate in our community and in the world.

Dan Pontefract:
There's all kinds of chances as people are planning for 2021 right now, as we know at the time of this recording, and mid-October, it's a chance to reset, so that when we do have the vaccine, it's never going to go back to the old normal, because that assumes it actually was normal.

Dani Johnson:
One question that we always ask our guests particularly for this podcast, because we think it's fairly poignant is about your own personal purpose and especially as you went over your career. We would love to ask you why did you choose the line of work that you chose? How did you end up where you are and who hired you to do the work you do?

Dan Pontefract:
When SAP, the company that I did work for, the reason I ended up working for SAP was because it acquired the company I was CLO for, which was a company called Business Objects based in Paris, but locations around the world, had about 10,000 employees, just under a billion in revenue. And it was a business intelligence software company at the time in my life. SAP came in in 2007 and acquired the company. And for about a year, I tried in earnest to sell them, SAP that is, in Germany on what our culture was. I mean, the business objects culture was one of family just to put it bluntly. And we were already back in that day, we had a community investment team and that was about 10 people. And you talk about philanthropy. I think this company, business objects defined what it meant to be a philanthropic kind of purpose-driven company. Anywho. During the time in which SAP acquired us and I was making way too many trips to Frankfurt to convince them of our culture, I also, living in Vancouver, started climbing something known as Gross Mountain, which is in Northend. It's just a 1.8-kilometer up hike. I was doing that like two or three times a week, and I got it down to about 42 minutes, straight up, but I kept swirling around these words, like what, you know, why? What's struggling with me? Why can't I, why can't this fit? Why is SAP feeling like this? It just nails on a chalkboard. It's just not cool. So after, I don't know, a bunch of times, I say, you know what I need, I called it a mission statement at the time, Dani. I need my personal mission statement. Like I'm, something's wrong here. And so I ended up landing on the following. ‘We're not here to see through each other, we're here to see each other through,’ and that line or the kind of two-line, pithy statement there got me thinking about how I need to help SAP see through the fact that they don't get it. I had to find a home for my 120 odd team members because I had decided to leave because I was not in a sweet spot with SAP. So I had to see these folks through, I had to find, make sure they all had jobs and make sure they're all taken care of. And so once that was done, once I sort of made peace with myself, I announced my departure. And then used that kind of purpose statement from 2008 onwards.

Dani Johnson:
Just to wrap up. We know you’ve written several books, Dan. We know you’re out there. We’d love for you to just tell us where people can learn more about your work and how they can connect with you.

Dan Pontefract:
Maybe we'll just go to the latest book. It's called ‘Lead. Care. Win’ and you just go to www.leadcarewin.com and you'll find me and the book and all the rest of them there, including the purpose book.

Chris Pirie:
Thank you for sharing your wisdom around this, Dan, and your personal story as well.

Dan Pontefract:
Thanks for doing what you’re doing.

Global enterprises rely on its collaborative online learning platform to build high-value capabilities that result in real impact, with its customers working to deliver powerful, engaging learning that activates deep skill development, from leadership to design thinking and digital transformation, as well as driving measurable business outcomes.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Hi, I'm Rachel Fichter and I am the global head of talent and leadership at S&P Global. And today's date is October 12, 2020.

Chris Pirie:
Rachel, welcome to ‘Learning Is the New Working’ and the series that we're doing with RedThread on the topic of purpose. So if you’re ready to go, we’ll dive in.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I am ready to go and happy to be here.

Chris Pirie:
Great. So we always ask people where they live and where they work and why.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Well, right now I'm actually in Cologne, Germany, but I'm normally based in New York City. And, of course, there is nothing normal about life at the moment. And since I can do my job from anywhere, for personal reasons, I'm currently spending a few months here in Europe with my husband, who's working.

Chris Pirie:
How would you describe the kind of work that you do at S&P Global?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Yeah, sure. So my title is global head of talent and leadership. And I would start by saying it's interesting because I was recently speaking with my chief people officer who told me that the word talent is so outdated and I should come up with a new title. So I am open to ideas.

Chris Pirie:
What do you think, Dani?

Dani Johnson:
We're hearing a little bit about that too, a little bit of backlash against the word talent, because it dehumanizes folks.

Chris Pirie:
I hear a lot about people trying to get away from 'human resources' as a phrase, but I haven't heard any backlash against the word talent.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Yeah. And I think it not only does maybe dehumanize, but I think in the past it referred to a select group of people. And as I see the talent role evolving, ultimately talent is around our people, and it becomes, it has a much broader, I think, it now has a much broader connotation than it used to. Last week, I attended a conference and I noticed that everybody who was a chief talent officer or head of talent was talking about all of the people and not just a small subset of people. So either we're saying that all of our people are talent, or we should be thinking about it in a different way. Maybe that's another way of looking at it.

Dani Johnson:
Can I ask a quick question on that, Rachel? I have a soapbox right now where I'm just mad at every organization that has a HiPo program, because I think they're fairly biased. And as you mentioned, they focus on a really small group of people. I was just wondering kind of what your thoughts are with respect to that.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
It's a great question, Dani, and something that I've really been thinking a lot about, you know, in my role and also connected to some of the work that we've been doing to promote racial equity. So there are several things that I've been working on around bias. And one of the things that I'm now doing is looking at how to use data to inform decisions around people who are part of a HiPo program, because I agree with you that managers tend to have biases. We all have biases, right? I think that's pretty clear. We all have biases. And if we're just looking to our managers and maybe to the people function to give us the names of people, we are going to miss out on others who might have lots of potential. And so one of the things that I've been doing is really looking at data and how do we leverage data to help us find people in the organization who might be missed because of those biases.

Chris Pirie:
I see. I get it. So the word talent has some echoes of sort of an elite, this notion that there is some people who are talented. Rachel, can you tell us a bit about S&P Global for people who are not familiar with your organization? What's the business model and what service does it provide?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
S&P Global is a global financial data and analytics company. Basically, we turn data into insights for people to make investment decisions. So we analyze data from millions of different sources to deliver actionable insights that help investors and a range of different people involved in the financial markets to grow their own revenues, to manage risk, and make any range of business decisions.

Dani Johnson:
Can you tell us a little bit about the organization population, the major job roles, and sort of some of the dominant demographic trends you're seeing?

Dr Rachel Fichter:
So we have about 22,000 people around the globe. We are a very global organization. About half of our people are in Asia, in particular in India and Pakistan. And, in addition to kind of all of the typical functional roles that you would find in any organization, finance, risk, et cetera, we have domain specialists, our ratings analyst, people who do research, people who do editorial work.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
We have roles that we call content roles and data roles. So I remember being surprised when I first started that we have employees who are members of the same union as journalists are. And that's because we do a lot of publishing. And of course, sorry, I should also add that it won't come as a surprise that technology is really important to our business. We are increasingly a technology-driven business. We have a small army of amazing data scientists. We have software developers, cloud engineers, UX designers, InfoSec and, and our technology function operates solely in agile as well as other functions actually, such as mine, the people function. We also are operating in agile as well.

Dani Johnson:
I’d like to understand what ‘agile’ looks like for the people organization.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
We created a people agility function about a year and a half ago. And so we took all of these people who had traditionally been aligned to different functions. So like within the talent function, I actually have, well, I have one direct report, but that's really a legacy thing. Generally speaking, I get everything done through these project teams that come together from this group of people in the people-agility function now, and then work together with that team using agile methodology, agile practices, rituals, to lead those projects. And so one of the projects that I'm leading, just to give you an example, is reimagining the performance experience. And we have a team of about six, full-time team members. Plus we have some people who work with us on a part-time basis, and they are all team members. We create user stories. I have a scrum master, and then everybody, they take their user stories, choose which ones they want to do every other week.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
We do sprint planning on a biweekly basis, and it's just a really great way to manage a project. And what I'm finding is that people are getting the opportunity now to dive into areas that they weren't familiar with before, they're expanding their skillsets. They're learning, you know, about new aspects of being in a people function. I have, for example, have one person who's on the comp team. And he's been doing quite a bit of work in the performance space, partly because he has the comp expertise, but also, he's been doing many other parts of the performance, you know, thinking about the new performance experience. And I think everybody's having an opportunity to learn new skills and become broader in, you know, in what they're able to do as a result of that. So yeah, so several of us in these types of project-oriented roles, like the one I'm in where, you know, whether it's a talent program that I'm running or, you know, manager development or performance project, all of these are run using people who come together specifically for the purpose of executing these projects.

Dani Johnson:
I love this idea. I think we talked about teams a lot in some industries, but I love the fact that you're using it specifically for the people practice. And I love the outcome that everybody is learning different things about different parts of the organization, but also really developing some skills that can be used later. I love that idea. Does your organization have an explicit purpose statement? And if so, what is it?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Yes, we do. And it is, ‘We accelerate progress in the world by providing intelligence that is essential for companies, governments, and individuals to make decisions with conviction.’

Dani Johnson:
That's really strong. How deeply is it connected to sort of your core business model and your operations?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I would say it's increasingly connected and that actually accelerated over the past couple of years. We became S&P Global about four years ago. Previously, we were McGraw Hill Financial. And when we became S&P Global, we refocused our strategy, called it ‘powering the markets of the future.’ And since then, we've been consistently looking to define what we do in terms of accelerating progress. And that's been a really powerful motivator for people to come up with ideas around what does that look like? What does accelerating progress look like? One example is our strategic focus on ESG. And for those of you who aren't familiar with that, it's environmental, social, and governance. And we have a range of different products in that space that help our companies to understand where they are with respect to accelerating progress in whether it's with respect to climate change, to social justice and governance issues that they might be facing as companies.

Chris Pirie:
So let me see if I can understand that. So you're creating products, sort of information products that are helping people who want to invest with one of those kinds of lenses. Is that an example of the kind of work?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Well, actually what we would be doing is we would be creating products that help evaluate companies for investors. And sometimes we it's a range of different kinds of products, right? So there are several different products that we have in this space, but one of those would be to help a company understand where it stands with respect to those and how it compares. And we also factor that into when, for example, if we're evaluating a company as well.

Chris Pirie:
So I think one thing is your, this sort of, the sense of purpose that you have as an organization has resulted in new products and new go-to markets.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I think that's a really interesting question. I'm not sure if it's the chicken or the egg here, but I would say that, I guess this goes to this question of if a purpose is an articulation of the reason for existence, then I would say that we ended up articulating something that we were already living, right, because we've been working in the ESG space for a while. And we were working in that before we actually articulated this idea of accelerating progress in the world. But I believe that part of it is that actually you can't just come up with a purpose that doesn't match who the organization is. You really have to think about, it has to be something that is you. And so I think really what we were doing was simply articulating that. And I think that then you can take that and then own it and shape your organization and your products and your culture and your people around that in a more intentional way.

Chris Pirie:
Is it possible for you to share with us anything about the process of coming to that purpose statement?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Well, as I said, there were several things going on. One was we had become McGraw Hill Financial in a split with McGraw Hill Education several years earlier. And then from McGraw Hill Financial, we rebranded ourselves as S&P Global about four years ago. And after that, we started really looking at ourselves as a company. And actually, I think some of this happened when we hired our new chief people officer. So we actually went from being an HR function to a people function which is also very much in line with how at least I envisioned accelerating progress, which is with our people. But I think that our chief people officer at the time when she started a couple of years ago, she also created a new function, which was a head of culture. And which was to say that we were intending to focus explicitly on our culture. And it was as part of that work that we ended up refining our purpose statement and not changing our values, but refining the meaning of them for us.

Dani Johnson:
One final question and kind of along those veins, I'm really interested in how you're thinking about stakeholder relationships. So some of the organizations we've been talking about, they're no longer just thinking about the shareholder on the outside, but also the employee, the customer, this player, you know, the actual shareholders, partners, society, those types of things. As you were putting together your purpose statement, can you talk to us a little bit about how those groups were taken into account, or if they were taken into account?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
They absolutely were taken into account. So if we go back, I think to, what was it, maybe the middle of 2019? I'm pretty sure it was somewhere in 2019. The Business Roundtable came out with a new statement of purpose for the corporation, where they said we are no longer going to live by this idea that the only purpose that a company has is to make, generate profits for a shareholder, right, i.e., Milton Friedman, and that we are going to look at all of our stakeholders, our people, our customers et cetera. And so we actually, it was all this time. So we are a signatory of that Business Roundtable new statement, our CEO was, and it was just at that time also that we did reshape that purpose statement. So I believe that that purpose statement is very much in line with accelerating progress.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And, and I guess the way I look at it is I, first of all, I think you need to make an assumption that, you know, that you interpret progress as helping to improve all people's lives, right? Because you could, you know, anybody could make that very narrow and say, you know, accelerating progress for our shareholders, but that's definitely not how we intend it. So I think that it's absolutely very, very central is that our people come first, and we have adopted a people-first approach with everything we do. We actually even have now, I think we're in people-first 6 dot 0 right now. We've come up with a range of different initiatives and support, I'd say more than initiatives, for our people over the last two years that have really shifted us from let's say away from being more focused on a shareholder to much more focused on our people in our communities.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I would also, however, say that we've always been a very community-oriented company, and that's also I think one of the reasons why we've always had a collaborative and caring kind of culture. And that is another one of those things where I say that we've now articulated sort of this, this kind of collaboration and care as an output of what we already have. You'll see that, for example, in, you know, in our people proposition now, but it's, I think it's also another one of those things that was there all along and that we just have now called it out.

Chris Pirie:
It's great that you mentioned the Business Roundtable. We actually start our whole season with a quote around that. What was the process and what was the experience of kind of landing this purpose statement in the culture of the organization and were you in your L&D role any part of that?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I think we need to look at L&D in a slightly different way in our company. We don't even have an L&D function, right? So we don't have a learning and development function, not in the traditional sense. Learning at S&P Global is actually quite decentralized. So we have business-led learning that sits in the divisions, and then we have the talent and the leadership space, which is centralized. And then we have a group that focuses on culture, right? So I mentioned earlier that we have a head of culture. We also then extended that to have having a head of people engagement as well. So if you look at it, it's really kind of the sum total of those three groups who have been responsible collectively for, you know, thinking about how do we, first of all, how do we engage our people in a dialogue around what our purpose should be?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And so we went through and it was very much a business-led endeavor as well. It wasn't something that was, you know, relegated to the people function. It was a business leader-led initiative where we went, there were many, many, many iterations over many months where we had dialogue around what would be, also together with our colleagues in the public affairs and corporate communications and branding and thinking. There were so many different functions involved in kind of thinking about, well, you know, what is it that we do really well? What is it that that we want to really focus on? And what is our purpose, right? As opposed to just putting something on paper and then trying to disseminate that.

Chris Pirie:
A real dialogue across the whole organization with leader-led, but lots of participation.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Absolutely.

Dani Johnson:
Rachel, I'm really interested in how that's changed the way you do your job. And if there are sort of specific examples you can give us about how that purpose, that definition of purpose has really impacted the overall way you run your people practices.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's changed a lot. The biggest shift that I've seen, I think, as a result of this and leading up to it was our people-first strategy. So as I mentioned earlier, we came out with this people-first 6 dot 0 last week. So that means that we have six iterations of what it means to be people first. So aside from completely transforming our benefits, for example, on the learning side, we now offer a tuition reimbursement in the US up to $20,000 a year from 5, to promote a learning culture. And that's part of accelerating progress, right?

Chris Pirie:
That's a pretty explicit statement.

Dani Johnson:
That’s impressive. Wow.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
There you go. If you spend $10,000 of that on learning and you happen to have outstanding student loan debt, you can get the remaining $10,000 for that year to pay off. We just announced a global care leave policy of six weeks to take care of a child or an elder during COVID-19. And we also just announced that Juneteenth will become a company holiday next year. So those are just a few examples, and I have so many more of what we have done to shift the focus. And of course we're still focused on our shareholders, right? There's, obviously we are, because we can't do all of these things for our people if we're not in business, right? Really taken this commitment to a whole new level.

Dani Johnson:
That's amazing. Are there challenges that have arisen because of so many changes that you’ve made?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
You know, it's hard to be fully focused on, you know, doing things for our people. We will always have to make decisions and tradeoffs. And so I guess, yes, you could say that sometimes we do have challenges, you know, and there's always more that we should be doing that we haven't done. And I guess one of the things that happens as a result, you know, you become a, maybe you become a victim of your own success because there's always more that you can do and more that you should be doing, but we just don't have, we can't do it all. And we can't do it all at once.

Chris Pirie:
Is it different to be a talent leader in a purpose-driven organization, in terms of the impact of having a purpose on the core HR function?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I actually love having a purpose like this. I mean, I, you know, we shouldn't forget that all companies have had a purpose and in the past, it's just maybe that purpose wasn't as altruistic or, you know, as meaningful as it might've been. I actually see, you know, my focus is on enablement and development. And part of my job is to help leaders define at a more granular level what accelerating progress means, and then translate that into an inspiring vision for their organizations and their teams. So I actually really liked Simon Sinek’s term for vision. He calls it a just cause. And I think that if I can help leaders identify just causes for their own just cause, and then get people on board to follow that, which is under the umbrella of the overarching purpose of our company, that's going to be a really good outcome.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And it certainly gives me something to hang my hat on and something that I can feel proud of as well personally, right? Because I want to do something meaningful with my life. And I want to feel like that I'm making an impact and that I'm helping people to do something meaningful and do it better. And so feeling like I have something that, you know, like accelerating progress and how I envision that and how I can help leaders to do that and translate that into something, you know, important for their people gives me a sense of purpose as well. So I actually really like it.

Chris Pirie:
Can we talk about this year, 2020? The global pandemic, the social unrest and the calls for social justice around the world, I think have been cause for reflection for pretty much everybody. I wonder how it's impacted your operations and your work so far, at least.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Well, I would say that COVID in many ways has helped us to accelerate our purpose. And also the calls for social justice. In terms of COVID, manager flexibility has been a key topic area. We've expanded our coaching offering significantly to help managers deal with the challenges of remote work. Actually we had a really great alignment with some of the work we were doing around reimagining the performance experience because we were, as part of that and part of some of the experiments that we've been doing in that space, we were also eliminating performance ratings and a large part of our business chose to eliminate the performance ratings at the midyear because the whole concept of how could you measure performance in an environment like this? It's just, it takes on such a different meaning.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And, you know, COVID is something that we all, it's something that binds us, and you know, that we all face together as humanity, but it's also something that plays out in very unique and different ways for each individual. And there are some people who have small children, there are other people who have elderly parents. There are people who had no network access in some of the locations where we do business. So being able to do your job just takes on a very different meaning and picking up the slack or, you know, picking up areas where your teammates can't work doesn't mean that you should get a better performance rating at midyear. It means that you're a great team player and that you've really supported people when they needed it, but to put people at a disadvantage because they didn't have a network connection or because they have children who they had to homeschool, I think, you know, that's something that we were really looking seriously at and trying to help managers to be able to come up with new ways of support, you know, working with their employees and getting the job done. And actually, I think in many ways, our productivity has been through the roof in spite of all of these challenges and even in spite of not having any, given any ratings out and midyear. So that's one area on the COVID side.

Dani Johnson:
It seems like you're very optimistic about the future of your organization. And I love, love, love some of the changes that you made. I'm wondering if your organization is viewing them as sort of, especially the things that are wrapped around COVID, if you're seeing them as sort of stop gaps until we get back to normal, or do you think it will literally change the way you do work?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I have no doubt that it will change how we do work in the future. I mean, look, we all know that the future of work was coming and we all know that in a way it's being accelerated right now, and we have a massive, massive strategic project right now called ‘Project Reimagine’ where we are using not only COVID, but also looking at many things that have happened recently, including you know, the calls for social justice, as a way of really reimagining how we work in the future. So I think that we're using this as an opportunity. We were already planning on experimenting with no ratings, even pre-COVID. And we're continuing those experiments. In many ways, I am hopeful that these experiments and that what happened in COVID naturally will also be, encourage us to continue along the path.

Dani Johnson:
Are you implementing technologies or services or systems that have been helpful in this change?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
We're talking about that now. I mean, our workplace services is an amazing team. I mean, they got 99% of us up and running in a relatively short period of time, remotely. We've always been a very global organization and we've been, you know, we've had great technologies for a while and we know how to work remotely together, et cetera, but we were not working virtually, you know, there was maybe 3% of us working virtually from 3 to 99%, in a very short period of time, and they are always experimenting with new technologies and I've just been in touch with them because also in the manager development space, for example, which is one of the areas that I work on, it's very connected to this ‘Project Reimagine’ that I was mentioning. And so right now we're looking at, you know, coaching apps and tools and how to use AI to do broad, you know, large scale coaching for managers. So that's that absolutely. I mean, we're not doing it yet, but we're certainly looking into it.

Chris Pirie:
I’m really, really interested in this ‘Project Reimagine.’ It sounds like if I've got this right, you're actually going to be very deliberate in thinking about how you move to whatever the next phase is. And then you're going to take the opportunity of this disruption of this year to sort of rethink what you want the work experience to be like. Is that, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but is that what you're saying?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Yeah. That's, that is absolutely correct. So we are looking at how, where we work, how we work, how, you know, what are things going to be like post-COVID when we can all come back to work together? We're certainly not an organization that is saying, ‘Hey, look, we've been so successful working remotely that we're going to let everybody work remotely from now on.’ I think that's not necessarily where we're going, but what I can also say is that we are not going to force people to go into the office. That's for sure. Again, in line with our people-first approach, we want to make sure that anybody who's going into the office is doing it because they really want to be there. But we do have, you know, we are working on figuring out how do we bring teams of people back in safely into the office. But also along those lines, we are looking at how do we turn this into an opportunity to really improve the work environment for everybody and think about, well, how can it add more value to the company and to the work we do?

Chris Pirie:
What do you think are the biggest challenges for talent management and the immediate future?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I think that, you know, going back to the discussion that we had at the beginning where we were talking about, well, what is this talent function anyway, it's so broad now. Talent is no longer that subset of people in an organization who have been kind of identified as the elite few or the HiPos, right? You know, this is about our people and this is about enabling all of our people. And so I guess the breath of it and figuring out how do you tackle that I think for me is one of the toughest problems that I'm facing is there's so many, it's such a big area, right? How do you make choices about what you're going to focus on and who you're going to focus on when it's really more about all of your people?

Chris Pirie:
It makes me think a little bit about some work that Dani did before on the learning side where the sort of shift was, you know, learning used to be the responsibility of one small group, like the learning team. The change that needed to happen is that everybody needed to take accountability and responsibility for it. And the learning organization was not just a department, but it was the entire organization. It sounds like a similar shift going on.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I couldn't agree more. It's great that you bring that up because that's one of the models that I've been promoting now for several years, and that we're really focusing on. I think I mentioned earlier that we've expanded our coaching opportunities as part of wanting to help managers to learn how to be more flexible in how they manage. And our coaches are not just people from the people function. We have built out a coaching capability that is broader than that. And we've invited people who are in the business who are interested in learning how to be coaches and have helped to build their skillsets so that we can offer that. And because there's no way we could ever possibly meet the needs of an organization this size with the number of people who we have.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
So we need to be super smart about how do we scale these things up, right? We need to be super smart about how we scale up and how we operate at scale. And, you know, this isn't, this is another area that I've been very focused on, which I guess, you know, now that I think about, it is a challenge. I didn't think about it that way before, you know, making sure that we have developmental opportunities for so many more people than what we've been able to do in the past, right? And, typically you remember the times where we had a program and we launched it maybe for 15 people. And they said, well, okay, we'll pilot it this year, and next year, maybe we'll double it.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
You can't do that anymore. You've got to scale it up quickly, because especially if you're going to change culture and looking at how things changed so quickly and how much you need to spend time with people, it's so crucial that we're, you know, that we're working on these things at scale. So I think that's one thing. I would also add that another area that I haven't talked about, I'm really excited about how we've tackled it, is this whole performance experience. And I, you know, I've mentioned a couple of times that we're reimagining performance management and we call it ‘Thrive,’ the new performance experience, and we're working with intact teams. So we're not doing broad training across the board to try to convince people to do something different. What we're doing is we started, we're using agile. Like that's what we're doing.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
We're experimenting. We invited teams to come and join us, intact teams. We have advisors who are aligned to those teams and who are responsible for them. And we've worked with those teams as we're implementing the different phases or the different elements of ‘Thrive.’ And it's really all about helping them to improve the performance of their people. And we work with the managers, we work with the people, we do development with them, but we all do it in these experimenting groups and with intact teams as a way of helping to get specific and granular and help people to think about it within the context of their work. And then we have a group of advisors, and then we have these, what we call ‘Thrive Partners,’ who are also extended people who we've also trained up to help managers on a larger scale.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Because you know, we now have about 2000 people who are experimenting and which is much greater than the five or six people who are working on this. So it's all about scale and how do you tap into the energy of the population to help each other. And by the way, along those lines of tapping into energy, I want to just add something else that I've been thinking a lot about is that there are always people in the organization who love working on people topics. And, you know, and I can remember times maybe a decade ago or more where, you know, where we were telling people, you can't do that. That's the last message I give people. I'm so happy to be able to tap into that energy now, right? And to figure out how to let them run with it, how to give them the tools and the capabilities so that they can bring this further into their organization. For me, that's where it's at. It's not in formal classroom training anymore. I don't really like to do that.

Dani Johnson:
Amen.

Chris Pirie: Amen. Amen, indeed.

Dani Johnson:
Our next question was going to be to ask you for advice. And I think you've given us some really good advice. The first one is, think scale always, and then tap into pockets of energy that already exist and leverage the people on the ground. Are there other bits of advice that you would give to talent leaders regarding sort of aligning to purpose?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I think you have to work at it every day. You can't get complacent. So as I was thinking about this idea and our discussion today, it reminded me of a book by a man named Steven Mandis. Steven Mandis was at Goldman Sachs and wrote a book about his experience. And he then used the term organizational drift. And that really stuck with me, this organizational drift concept of how you can move away from your purpose and your core values without knowing it. And I guess any advice that I would give is that you really have to work at this every day. You just can't get complacent or you risk organizational drift.

Chris Pirie:
We always ask a question on the podcast, and we always have, even before we got the purpose bug, why do you choose to do the work that you do, Rachel?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I think it's a mixture of happenstance and intention here. Here's a story about when I first started my doctoral studies in 2013, the first class that I took was a class on writing your life history. And the idea behind writing your life history, doing this narrative, is that after you've written it, you analyze it. And you understand the points along the line of your life, that where there was something, an event or something meaningful, or some kind of a change that helped you to learn and grow. And as an adult, you know, aspiring adult educator at the time, or I guess I was already an adult educator, but an aspiring scholar practitioner, educator, the idea is to understand what motivates people to learn and what are the points along which, you know, you grow and develop.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And so you start with yourself. You know, I started with this: when I grew up, I was a musician. I had never any intention to become a learning and development professional, or somebody in the leadership and talent space. I started playing the cello when I was six, and I thought I was going to be a cellist for the rest of my life. And I, ultimately I went to school, I got a master's degree in music. And then I went to Europe to play, and I became a professional cellist. And so I was writing about this, and then there was a shift, and I won't go into that because that's way too long. And it requires, you know, an evening together, a post-COVID evening together.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
But what happened was that I started talking about the shift that I made into the learning and development space. And I did that sort of via music. And as I was going through and looking at this timeline and looking at my narrative and reading through it again and again, I realized that actually I was coming back to something that was always very important to me, and that it was, this was a very natural thing for me to do, even though it felt at the time, it felt so foreign because both of my parents have advanced degrees and education was such a deep core value in my family. And I think my children also suffered from it being such a core value. It's too bad I didn't do my doctorate before they were teenagers, because I ultimately learned how that value drove, you know, many of the things that I expected of them, which, you know, maybe wasn't as fair as it should, you know, as I wanted it to be later on. But ultimately being an educator and coming back into the learning and development space was very much aligned to who I am as a person.

Chris Pirie:
Lovely story. How does your musical background play into—that's a really bad pun. I'm going to change that. How does your musical background influence, what, how you do your work or does it at all? Is there, are there any connections there?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
It absolutely does. Everything I do is like a musical composition. When I design a program, it's almost like I can hear it in my head. I can hear how it starts. I hear how it evolves, and I hear how it ends. And so, you know, when I think about a learning experience over, let's say at 18 months with a group of executives, it's like, I was never a composer, but I was always an interpreter of other's compositions, but I'm, it's the idea of how do you interpret, you know, you can hear, you could even go back to purpose, right? How do you interpret the goals of the company and translate that into something, into an experience for, you know, for our people?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And for me, there's something musical about that. How I write whenever I have to write something, I hear the intonation, I speak it. I don't just write it. I have to read it. I have to hear the intonation. I have to hear the rhythm and feel the rhythm of it. So it's very much, and I also would say just one, one final thought on that is that I've never been somebody who's good at conforming. And I think, yeah, I know you're laughing because you both know that, right, about me. And I think that, you know, that comes also from the spirit of being a musician. And you have, you just have to have courage to be able to get up there and play in front of, I don't know, 500 or a thousand people.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And you have to have something to say, you can't do it if you don't, right? And then there's also the perfectionism in me because, you know, being an artist as an, you know, help with respect to perfectionism, because you actually want to be able to play every, every note you're supposed to, right? And especially when you get up in front of so many people. So that's another thing, I guess that's sort of more on the negative side, you know, the desire to have everything perfect.

Chris Pirie:
I was going to call you on this. So there's a lot of deliberate practice and hard work that goes into it.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Pirie:
Rachel, thank you so much for your time today and your insights on leading talent in a purpose-aligned organization. And it sounds like a, it's an ongoing experiment for you, and please come back and share with us how things go at some point in the future.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Sure. Yeah, it's, it's so much fun to be able to speak with you both.

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TRANSCRIPT

Chris Pirie:
You're listening to learning is the new working podcast by the learning futures group, about the future of work, and the people helping us get there.

Chris Pirie:
Dani, I'm going to put you on the spot first. What's the two or three things that you took away from this morning's conversation that helped you think a little bit differently about purpose?

Dani Johnson :
Yeah, I think one of the things that really struck me is there seems to be a passion surrounding purpose. So these organizations that have a purpose and make decisions based on the purpose tend to have a real passion for what they're doing. And I think that probably hit me harder than it has in the past. I also loved his idea of calling their mission statement or their purpose a constitution. So instead of just sticking it on the wall and hoping somebody reads it as they pass it in the break room, you actually use it to make decisions. They actually bring it up in really hard discussions and say, this is what we're setting forth to do. Here's how we need to make this decision based on that.

Chris Pirie:
I agree. It was really interesting to hear him talk about them sort of referring back to that in real time decision-making, especially during this sort of tumultuous year that we have. He said it was written on important papers which I really liked that image.

Dani Johnson :
Yeah. The other thing that I really like about his organization, and I mentioned this in the podcast, I heard about Medtronic really early on in my career because of these meetings that they have every year where they invite in the people whose lives they have affected. So the doctors and the patients and community and the workers, everybody gets together and sort of, you know, takes a moment to absorb that purpose and realize it and remind themselves why they're doing what they do.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. Stacia, takeaways for you?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Building on the few things that you all just said, one of them was his point about how they were all stewards of the mission. He talked about how the oldest or the most tenured employee had been there for 41 years, but the mission had been written even before that person and how no one there had been around. And so they were all just stewards of this concept really. And that really struck with me. We mentioned this in the first podcast. I've done some reading on the history of organizations who have tried to be, you know, do well by doing good. And it seems like those who are the most sustaining give a lot of thought to what's written down and what the governance will be around purpose. And so to hear Jeff say that and to hear how alive and well it is right now really struck me.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. I think one thing that I'm learning through all these conversations is purpose is a very sort of personal thing. And there's this interplay between the organizational purpose and individual people's purpose. And one of our interviewers that we'll hear from later talks about purpose can occur in pockets across the organization, but this was a company that clearly sort of foundationally at its roots had a clear sense of purpose. And I think you know, that's maybe a factor of its early evolution and maybe it's a factor of the kind of work that they do as well. But it seemed very, very much built into the framework.

Stacia Garr:
The other thing I took away was the importance of ceremony. You mentioned Dani, you know, that basically what is a ceremony? A bringing together of people to talk about the impact of the company. Jeff also mentioned that the two-pound, you know, medal, you know, it's a lot about ceremony, rite of passage, honoring the work that they do, the purpose they do, and really why they gathered together. And that just struck me as incredibly meaningful. I've done a lot of research on recognition and in recognition is I think a part of that for sure, but this literally, I think is ceremony to reinforce purpose. And that to me was meaningful and beautiful.

Chris Pirie:
I love that too. He used the phrase symbolism and ritual, and I actually think, you know, one of the purposes of this podcast series for me is to try and get takeaways, try to get actionable things that people can use to sort of get better in their practice. And I think it's very difficult for a head of L&D or a head of talent to go write a constitution for their organization. That's something that just takes history and time. But I do think these rituals and symbols, that's something that really can be worked on. And I think L&D in particular has an important role to play in creating the space and time for those kinds of rituals to happen.

Chris Pirie:
I also liked the whole frame in that Jeff was relatively new to the company. He heard about it in his interview, in his recruitment process. It was made very explicit to him the purpose and yet, you know, he didn't quite fully believe it and he's been, how surprised he was at how deeply, kind of entwined it is. So I think it was useful to talk to somebody who's kind of fresh into this into this particular company because they have a nice broad perspective and he was very genuine in his kind of learnings around it.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. What was fascinated me too, Chris, is he's only seven months in, but he knew that history cold. It clearly gets embedded because he could just talk about it. And he talked about it with an incredible amount of just understanding. And so that spoke volumes to me too.

Chris Pirie:
Got it. There were two other quotes that I took away to sort of wrap up my point of view on this. One is you can't fake it, which I think is absolutely the litmus test. I can't describe it, but I know it when I see it. You can't fake it. And the second one, he was talking about a really interesting phrase that one of his leaders used when they did some agile thinking around the crunch that the pandemic created for them. And he used the phrase, ‘Let's do more of that.’ And I think that's a great leadership phrase, right? It's kind of, it really is a positive reinforcement for good behavior. And I'm going to, I made a note of that phrase and I'm going to try to use it more often.

Stacia Garr:
One thing I'd like to add was a quote that he said that just, I literally wrote it down. I only wrote down two or three things because we were so engrossed, but he said the phrase, ‘It's not about them. It's about us.’ And he used that in the context of talking about how purpose and the clear organizational purpose gave anyone the license to raise an issue in a curtain turn, anyone at any level, because it wasn't about them. It wasn't about their standing or where they were in the hierarchy. It was about us as an organization and what we do. And that just was so powerful to me.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. I'd love to learn more about how Jeff's going to impact the learning and leadership culture there. Very interesting guy, definitely approaching his relatively new job with fresh eyes, but a lot of thoughtful focus. It was a great conversation.

Stacia Garr:
Jeff, thanks so much for your time and for sharing your insights with us all. You're here to talk with us about your current organization, but it wasn't very long ago that we were all together at Deloitte. So obviously we’ve all moved on and it's great to be back together today.

Jeff Orlando:
Sure is. Thanks for inviting me to join your podcast.

Dani Johnson :
We're going to start with some really simple, quick and dirty questions to introduce you and your work practice and your organization, and maybe a little bit of your career history as well. So the first question is where do you live and work and why?

Jeff Orlando:
I live in the Philadelphia area here in the United States, but I really consider myself a global citizen as it relates to my work, both the practice of what we do and our business, at least serving global markets. And here in Philly, I'm here for a lot of reasons. But one reason I enjoy is, you know, Philly is really an underdog city and it's been fun to watch the growth and Renaissance of the city over the last, you know, 10, 15 years and see that, you know, innovation, change, and growth kind of in front of my eyes.

Dani Johnson :
That's great. How long have you been in Philly?

Jeff Orlando:
I've been down here since 2007 and before that was in New York City.

Dani Johnson:
So tell us your job title and how you would describe the work you do.

Jeff Orlando:
So I'm the vice president overseeing global learning and leadership development. And it's a good job. It's a good job. I'm still fresh. I'm seven months into the job here now, but you know, for me it really means how do we create the organizational capability to win in the market, using all the different levers that we pull to do that? It's how do we drive a competitive culture to bring our therapies and products and solutions to more patients around the world, through our people? And asking the big questions about how do we scale leadership and scale learning for really diverse and broad employee population that stands technical development, R&D manufacturing and corporate roles? So it's a pretty broad job with a lot of leverage to pull, to drive the kinds of changes we're trying to hear in the company.

Stacia Garr:
Very cool. Well, can you tell us a little bit more about Medtronic itself and a bit about the business model? And part of the reason for that is, you know, we're going to be talking about purpose and how do you drive purpose throughout the business? So giving folks some context on the business model would be helpful.

Jeff Orlando:
I mean, Medtronic's in the medical technology space and really is the leader in that space and has a very proud history. A lot of technology companies, we were started in a garage about 70 years ago with our founder Earl Bakken, who created the first battery operated pacemaker. And that really laid the foundation for a lot of expertise about engineering and electricity and how we can apply that with different disease states and different therapies to help improve patient's lives. And the business has really grown through organic growth and a lot of inorganic tuck-in acquisition growth over the years to really work on so many different diseases and conditions. And now we're at the point where we're serving over 70 million patients per year with our therapies. And the business model is really one that relies on, you know, intensive engineering knowledge and medical knowledge of these different disease states. A good understanding of patient needs, providers and physician needs, and then going out and not just responding to markets, but developing and creating all new markets around the world for these products. So it's a fascinating and diverse business.

Stacia Garr:
Most definitely. It sounds like it, and you alluded just a few moments ago to a range of different types of employees. So can you talk a little bit about the talent landscape in your organization and different populations, job roles, demographic changes, et cetera?

Jeff Orlando:
Sure, sure. We like most companies, you know, we're rapidly becoming, you know, more and more filled with the Millennial and GenZ talent. And for us, you know, we have a specific emphasis on our early career talent, you know, finding the right people from a university or early career venue, bringing them into the company and really having that be a lot of the way we drive innovation here. But that's obviously just one part of it. The core of our business is really our technical expertise and in R&D. If you visit our center, our operational headquarters in Minnesota, you'll walk in and see glass paint walls with people doing lots of things that I don't know how to do behind those walls. Really experimenting with robotic arms and oscilloscopes, pushing forward our innovation and the same time, we have a really significant global manufacturing footprint.

Jeff Orlando:
Some of those are large, more plant-based factories where we're producing some of our products. I mean, we've done a lot of work around ventilators of late due to COVID, but some of those are smaller, very precise almost tailor-made facilities as well, that are working on some of our very complex products. And then add onto that our corporate population, some of whom sit in a big center, some of whom sit in sales roles, some of whom sit remote. We really have it all in terms of a variety of our talent population and how and where they do their work.

Dani Johnson:
So it kind of sounds like you're not busy at all, Jeff.

Jeff Orlando:
(laughs) Yeah, got a few things to do.

Dani Johnson:
Let's talk a little bit about your purpose. Does your organization have an explicit purpose statement? And if so, what is it?

Jeff Orlando:
Oh, we do. Medtronic has a mission and the mission was written really towards the founding of the company. And it was built to serve as the guiding light for the company over its complete history. And, you know, coming into organizations, some organizations have a set of organizational values. Some organizations have a set of aspirations, and oftentimes some employees and other organizations aren't totally connected and they can forget what those are, right? They're not part of the day to day, but here, it almost to me feels like the US Constitution. It's something that's been written on very, very important paper, it's revered, all employees know it, and if we were to change it, it would be a massive organizational effort and massive internal debate to make a shift.

Jeff Orlando:
And there's really been only one change to the mission since it was written, you know, 70 years ago. And that one change where we're talking about the personal worth of employees was modified to not just say personal worth of employees, but personal worth of all employees. And that was really to reflect the inclusive culture that we really strive to maintain and support here. But the mission lays out a number of tenets and the number of tenets in that mission speak to how we serve our patients, how we operate together and then how we aim to have a value to society and make a fair profit in the process.

Dani Johnson:
So talk to me a little bit about that. It sounds like your mission statement is pretty deeply connected to the business model and the way that you guys operate. Has there ever been pushback or downsides or maybe conflicts between the business, making-money aspect of it and the alignment of that mission?

Jeff Orlando:
I think what's nice about it is that the tenets of our mission of which there are six right now, and I'll hit them really, really quickly. And then, then answer your question more directly, Dani. The first around contributing to human welfare through alleviating pain, restoring health and extending life, that's the most foundational part that most employees could speak to. The second speaks to really growing in the areas where we have strength, maximum strength around biomedical engineering, the third around quality of our products and honesty and dedication, but the fourth around making a fair profit on our operations to meet our obligations, sustain growth, and reach our goals. So there is not a conflict between a profit motive and a mission motive here, because those are intertwined. We believe the way to create a viable company and to contribute is to have a fair profit through the work. So I think the mission had a lot of foresight in resolving that potential conflict for us.

Dani Johnson:
I really like that. I think we've talked to four or five people. I think you're one of the first that has incorporated that idea of making profits right into the mission statement.

Stacia Garr:We'll talk a little bit later about kind of some of the other aspects of profit and purpose and how that works at Medtronic. But can you talk to us, just kind of stepping back a little bit, about, you mentioned that this constitution as it were, and I love that idea because it's so, so grounding, can you talk about why that was the case? What was the rationale for that? From the very beginning?

Jeff Orlando:
When the mission was written, you know, way back in the day, I think it was written with a lot of foresight, and when look, I'd have to look up for you the size of the company when the mission was written, but I'm guessing it was at or about 1000 employees, and it was really our founder's vision, you know, Earl Bakken, who was a pioneer in this space and, you know, deeply cared about serving patients and deeply cared about the physician relationship as well, right? I think he was witnessing the growth of the company and seeing the opportunity and seeing the potential and felt the need to, at that point in time, make a declarative statement about who we would become and what we would do. So I think it really just comes from that place of establishing a stake in the ground that is immovable and it's something we would all be guided towards.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. We talk about it in the research that it’s the North Star for the organization.

Jeff Orlando:
Yeah. I think that's right. And, you know, it's in the language here, right? If you see a PowerPoint deck that talks about an organizational strategy, or you see a PowerPoint deck that talks about a market opportunity, 9 out of 10 times, there's going to be a reference in that deck to which of the six tenets of the mission we're connecting to and how we're driving it. And I’ve seen in my limited tenure here so far, especially during COVID where it's been a challenging business environment, right, and we've had to make a lot of choices, I've seen people on Zoom, of course, make explicit references to the mission when we got into a tough spot about a decision. And really lean on it and use it, not in a trite way, not in a cliche way, but in a real way to get everybody to pull back and zoom out and think about the choices we're making. So it's been real. It's been real here that way.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Because I'd love to know what this really looks and feels like, so in kind of a generic way, could you take us in the room and like share with us, you know, how was the conversation going and how did you use that mission to, or how did that person use that mission to reground the team and refocus on what was?

Jeff Orlando:
I think, you know, oftentimes in any group decision-making process, you know, we all know about some of the risks of those, right? There is a group think risk, there's the risk of being myopic. There's the fear of challenging the loudest voice in the room, all those things that happen in decision-making processes, and you know, people who work on group relations over the years have worked on lots of different ways to help that. I remember in an old role we had paddles and one paddle said, I know I have an idea or let's move on. You know, people would use those as almost psychologically safe hacks to help in those conversations. But you know, where I've seen it used here is to unstick a decision or unstick less, you know, fully embracing thinking. And it's a leveler, right? Anybody at any level in that meeting can make that statement because it's not about them, it's about us and it lets people tap into it and step back. And, you know, you see the on Zoom, you see people, you know, lean back in their home office chairs when someone reminds everybody of what we're doing there in a really respectful and, I think, useful way.

Stacia Garr:
And I love that phrase that you just had. It's not about them. It's about us. It's really that connection to the community and that connection to what we're all trying to achieve together.

Jeff Orlando:

That's right. And I mean, the longest tenured person at Medtronic has been here for 41 years. The mission was written before they started, right? So none of us wrote this. All of us are stewards.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. That's a beautiful imagery, I think. We know that Medtronic was recently included in Fortune Magazine's annual ‘Change the World’ list for things like increasing ventilator production fivefold from pre-pandemic production numbers, also doing things like open sourcing design, which is a huge thing for an R&D company. Also focusing on carbon neutrality and gender and ethnicity pay equity. So clearly this is something you all are living and breathing, as you've mentioned, and have been recognized for doing that. I'd love to know about, you've mentioned several times, you're new-ish to this organization, seven months in. So can you share with us some of your initial impressions when thinking about kind of everything this organization is doing when you think about it from a purpose perspective?

Jeff Orlando:
Yeah. I mean, just to hit on those examples that you shared there. And I think the, for a lot of us, the open sourcing of one of our ventilators inside of the heights of COVID was something that all of us took a lot of pride in and, you know, understanding how that decision was made. It was made, I think over a weekend, in a matter of hours, it wasn't something that there was a ton of huge internal debate around, should we do it? I think, you know, we saw that opportunity to help and saw that it was the right choice, the right thing to do, you know, didn't run a bunch of complex financial models around it, right? Leaned on the parts of the mission and said, you know what, this is the right thing to do.

Jeff Orlando:
Let's go ahead and do it. So I think for a lot of us, that was a really nice kind of re-recruitment moment to see the company step up in that way. I mean, and for me, before I even started, I attended well, what's called the employee holiday program. And that's something that happens on an annual basis where, you know, we bring physicians, we bring some of our own experts and we bring patients to our campus in Minneapolis and, you know, imagine the atrium of a big office building filled with thousands of folding chairs with, you know, punch and cookies in the back and, you know, see stories of real impact to these patients' lives and see our own senior leaders have that tear welling up in their eye, listening to the impact of the work. And I mean, for me sitting there in that room, you know, it kind of clicked on how the work we do from a talent perspective, if we get it right. And we let unleashed that discretionary effort, we unleashed that ability to speak up, move forward, our cycle time with better management and better learning. We can get that stuff out the door to more people more quickly and help. And I can just see that value chain in that context. So it's, that's how it felt real to me.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. One of the things that we've been talking about with the research is how purpose can, it gives really in many ways, a reason for an organization to exist, you know, we're in this world with more gig economy with, you know, all these different things that we're doing, but the organization allows us to come together, to be together, and to do more than we can as individuals. And so I think what you're sharing is really kind of the clear articulation of what that looks like and feels like, you know, really why we work in organizations.

Jeff Orlando:
I think that's right. And I think that, you know, our business is one that lends itself to the, you know, altruistic higher calling, right? But every business has a way and has it encapsulating that purpose, and that meaning is really important for people regardless of the business that you're in. For sure.

Dani Johnson:
I remember one of the very first times I heard about Medtronic really, really early on in my career was that very meeting that you were talking about, Jeff, where everybody got together and sort of reaffirmed the reason that they were all there. It's stuck in my mind like nothing else. It's kind of great. Talk to us a little bit about stakeholder relationships. So you mentioned this meeting where patients and doctors and everybody sort of getting together. When we think about purpose, we think about sort of a broader purpose. Obviously, we have responsibilities to our shareholders, but what other stakeholder relationships are important to how you all do business?

Jeff Orlando:
I do think though we think about this and almost that balanced scorecard kind of a way that, you know, we have our, you know, our patients and our physicians, obviously being our primary stakeholders in terms of the value that we create and that's what we're playing. And that's what we're in the game for, right? But I've seen, you know, us as a business take an even bigger voice on societal matters, especially being a Minnesota-based company, Minnesota operationally based company, although we're held outside the US in Ireland, having the conversation and emphasis, you know, as a result of the calls for social justice. So I've seen the company really step up in frankly, bolder ways than I anticipated in a really nice way over the last few months. And I mean that obviously societal lens is one where we're taking a lot of a bigger step, but I've also seen really good relations with the analyst community and the investor community. Today is actually our biannual investor conference. Right before this, I was watching our leaders speak about our pipeline and clinical trial successes. So you've got, I think you'll see here a real nice balance of everybody knows we're in it for the patients, but not just looking at Wall Street as a stakeholder, you know, looking at governments around the world, looking at these broader societal issues as areas where we want play more, we want to have a louder voice.

Dani Johnson:
Very cool.

Stacia Garr:
So can we talk a little bit, you've mentioned a few times, you know, you've seen it click, you've seen the, the talent model click, the importance of the work that you all do, click. Can we talk a little bit more about what that looks like from the HR perspective? So how is HR involved in the purpose-driven aspects of the organization?

Jeff Orlando:
I think what's really interesting about it is HR is not pushing it. Because the mission has been around for so long and because everyone knows about it, HR is not the voice for the mission. Our senior leaders really are the consistent voice for the mission. There's a lot of symbolism around it. So one thing that you know, we think about with companies, right, is what are the rituals and symbols that give that kind of meaning. And there's something here called the ‘Mission Medallion Ceremony’ and every employee within the first couple of years of their tenure receives this heavy two-pound circular medallion and is given that by a senior leader. And just has a bit of a ceremony around reminding everybody what we're doing and why we're doing it. So it's those kinds of institutional things that have been in the water for a long time that continue to happen. And sure, from an HR perspective, we help logistically with some of those things. But those are really business processes that are tied to our senior leadership. There's not, coming from HR, a mission project. There's not a mission task force or a mission leader. It just lives. It is not constructed, governed, and budgeted, I guess is one way to say it.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, that's interesting, this ceremony that you mentioned. One of the things we again talk about in the research is how, in many ways, one of the big shifts that we see overall and in certainly kind of American society is a move away from some of the traditional places that have given us meaning. So most obviously the churches, civic organizations and the like and how a belief that organizations are increasingly giving people a way to fulfill that purpose. And so if you think about, you know, that ceremony in that context, it kind of reaffirms that, you know, this is something that is a in some way, it sounds like a rite of passage at Medtronic, you know, something that is critical to kind of the culture and the sense of purpose and deriving that sense of purpose from being at Medtronic.

Jeff Orlando:
I think that's right. I think, I think your, you know, your observation is spot on about some of those traditional societal institutions and, and I think organizations will need to figure out over time how much do they want to play into that, right? Or live into that.

Dani Johnson:
So you've talked a little bit about how HR does not run the purpose. I kind of love the idea that it's coming from your top leadership, but I'm sure that it does impact the alignment of the talent life cycle on your organization. So your job, how does that purpose alignment affect how you all attract and enable and particularly developed because that's your role and retain folks?

Jeff Orlando:
I think a lot of what we try to do is to translate the mission for the business objectives we have of today. Right? So if the mission is that, like you guys are saying, North Star, right? That we're always looking at and always pointing to that, that's our kind of lofty aspiration. That's what we're shooting for. But, you know, right in front of us, we've got a really challenging, competitive landscape that we're always trying to navigate and figure out. So what we tend to do in HR is say, okay, our mission is the mission, but what kind of tweaks and enhancements to our culture do we need to make, to really drive the kinds of business shifts we're trying to, trying to deliver? What's our talent model need to look like that aligns with our mission, but again, reflects those more near term things? So, so here, you know, our culture and talent levers are more about driving strategy execution and the mission is our ever-present guide. So I think it's a really positive background factor, and it's a way to translate for our people what we're shooting for and what we're trying to do.

Dani Johnson:
Do you ever find yourself sort of at, I mean, and I love the fact that you've mentioned earlier that you actually use your mission statement and your purpose to make decisions, but because you are competing in a fairly tight industry, I'm just wondering, have you ever run across challenges with that purpose alignment to some of the core talent functions?

Jeff Orlando:
I think it can create questions, right? I think when we think about talent development, talent selection, some of those functions, I think at times, people can say, ‘Hey, wait a second. Does this decision align with our intent in our mission?’ Right? And while again, almost always our business leaders, our people leaders are making decisions with that, with those thoughts in minds, like anything written on paper there is interpretation. And people will interpret it in different ways. So, no, we have had scenarios where people say, ‘I don't get it. I don't get how we're making this decision because in our mission, it doesn't explicitly state that, or perhaps it states something else. And there's an implication.’ So, you know, anytime you have these kinds of revered documents, they'll be that risk of misinterpretation. And sometimes it requires a level of explanation, but I mean, from my lens, it's worth it for that trade off because it at least forces that kind of organizational conversation and understanding.

Dani Johnson:
I love that. It also makes the comparison to the Constitution a little bit more poignant as well.

Jeff Orlando:
Yeah. Especially today, right?

Stacia Garr:
Let's shift and talk a little bit about the events of 2020. You've alluded to them several times, Jeff, but I want to kind of go directly at that and want to understand how have the events, and so the way that we're thinking about this is, you know, certainly COVID-19, but also the calls for social justice, given that you all are, you know, have a large population in Minneapolis. How have those impacted your all over operations, your overall operations, as well as your work?

Jeff Orlando:
You know, again, just to personalize it, my first week in this role was in the beginning of March. So it was right as everything was really starting to shut down and compress. So, you know, I've certainly lived this as a new person here as well. I mean, from a COVID perspective, you know, that's been, had an, obviously a huge and material impact on our business, in our operations in terms of what the demand has been for our products, where that demand has been around the world particularly on the ventilator business. And we have quintupled, I think that's the right word. Yeah. Five times, quintupled. We've quintupled our production of ventilators to suit some of the demand. And as we discussed previously, you know, open sourced one of our models as well.

Jeff Orlando:
So you saw a lot of really nimble behavior in the company to make those things happen very quickly. And we establish relationships with places like Tesla and Intel to, you know, bring those products to market even more quickly. You know, and our CEO has been, has said, ‘wow, we've been able to produce so quickly and make decisions so quickly in those contexts. You know, let's do even more of that,’ right? As we think about our culture and how to drive with more speed and decisiveness in the company. And then on the calls for social justice side, I believe we have about 12,000 people out of our 90,000 employee-base located in the state of Minnesota. So, you know, some of those people knew George Floyd personally. So the, you know, the impact on that to, you know, our employee population, you know, definitely, you know, really, really, really high.

Jeff Orlando:
And I think the company just leaned into it, leaned into it. I was really gratified and almost surprised to see, you know, a series of open-air conversations, we called them, happen on a Zoom platform where we brought in clinical psychologists of color to meet with, you know, some folks from our African descent community in a series of interactions. And I was able to attend, you know, one of those sessions as an observer and to see people demonstrate that level of vulnerability over a computer screen and a camera really challenged some of my assumptions about what's possible virtually, but also demonstrated just a really nice level of trust in the company to have those conversations. So you've seen a really nice amount of leaning in there. And then, you know, that's been backed up with some sizable commitments towards institutions that serve the African descent population. And also we have a new relationship with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. So lots of good mix of, you know, supporting the emotional needs of our people, but also some, you know, credible and sizable commitments to really make a shift. It's hit this company in a big way, for sure.

Chris Pirie:
Do you mind if I ask a question right now? Can I just ask?

Stacia Garr:Yes, please, Chris.

Chris Pirie:
Sorry, guys. I mean, that's an amazing story, Jeff. And one of the things that I'm hearing a lot about is how this sort of Zoom work-life that we've all been forced into sort of strips away a little bit of humanity and it's that much harder to connect with people on an emotional level. And I know a lot of the L&D teams that I'm talking to are sort of actively trying to find ways to put sort of humanity back into digital learning to sort of use a catch phrase, but it seems like you went through a pretty powerful experience there. How do you feel about putting the humanity back into digital learning? Was that, did that prompt any thoughts or changes in strategy for you?

Jeff Orlando:
I think it just opened us up to the possibility. Even our, you know, like most major companies, you know, we've had to convert all of our in-person learning programs to virtual programs. And, you know, if you look at our net promoter score or our satisfaction scores, which admittedly are only one way to measure learning, but it's a near-term measure, right? Yeah. And if you look at our scores in virtual settings compared to our scores in physical settings, they are virtually the same. I don't know if that would have been the same prior to COVID or, and the shutdowns or not, but it's, you know, certainly reassuring that we can create that level of value with these platforms. And I do think that, you know, to the point on being vulnerable or being open and ready, I've seen that happen at all levels of our company in these formats. And I think it's just we're social creatures, right? We're resilient, adaptable, social creatures, and a lot of our venues are closed to us for now. And it's going to come out somewhere if we can facilitate it correctly. I think it can even come out online.

Stacia Garr:
I'd like to build on that a little bit, Jeff. We're doing some research on managers and manager behavior, particularly during the pandemic. And one of the themes we've hit on is that we're asking managers to do a lot more, you know, you mentioned that, the facilitating the conversations about social justice, you know, obviously, particularly right after the pandemic and everybody went to working from home, you know, we're asking them to check on kind of psychological safety and do they have the right workspace and all these things that we haven't been asking them to do in the past. And so I'm wondering if in particularly also keeping in mind purpose here, but I'm wondering if you all have been shifting the way you've been thinking about supporting managers during this time and, you know, maybe piggybacking a little bit off the last question, you know, if you see that shift potentially having a long-term impact.

Jeff Orlando:
Yeah, I think there has been some shift. It’s something I've learned in this time too. And so for a lot of what we've done is to say, ‘how do we empower and inspire managers to bring out the best of their people?’ And give managers, you know, a significant amount of autonomy to make decisions for their teams and drive innovation and drive success. And for strategic topics and long-term company growth, that's all the right stuff, right? But as it comes to some of these more challenging topics like COVID, social justice, et cetera, managers have been appreciating clear, simple direction. And that's been a change in our approach for how we communicate and equip our managers around these things. So, you know, the sections in these documents that might've been, you know, considerations or thought starters, those have been replaced with, ‘here's what to do and what not to do.’ Just because everybody is so overloaded with so much right now that it's been appreciated to get that level of direction from trusted sources. So I think it's that mix of empower the manager, inspire the manager on those topics, but when it comes to some of these really challenging matters that people have never held floor as a manager, it's about direction and clarity.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. We've also talked in that research a lot about just what you mentioned, specific language, you know. I know as a parent, sometimes I need to read a book that says, ‘Say this thing to your kid, don't say that.’ You know, before I had kids, I was like, what are you talking about? I'm going to know what to say, and that is not the case. And it's kind of similar with this. When you're in a new situation, you don't have a history of knowing how to respond and you're faced with what is a highly emotional, for many, a highly emotional moment. Just having those words to hand, I think can be really helpful.

Jeff Orlando:
Yep. it wasn't us, but there was another company who sent all their managers a stack of cards, like playing cards with different phrases to start conversations on some of these topics. I thought that was brilliant.

Dani Johnson:
Let's move on a little bit to sort of the future of talent management. What do you, Jeff, in all of your vast experience, what do you think are the toughest problems facing talent management in the immediate future?

Jeff Orlando:
I think probably the toughest one is taking advantage of all the data out there. And it's in so many ways, right? It's data about an individual, you know, think about some of the assessments and psychometrics and employee history data we have that we could potentially use in a better way. I think it's about predicting future skills and future jobs and being ahead of that, preparing for it, and then pulling that all into a package that people who are on the front lines of figuring that out can use and actually apply. So the creating the real kind of objective set of data and to guide decisions around talent management, that has to be one of the hardest ones. And, you know, we're seeing HR as a field really, really grow that predictive analytics and AI muscle but how you take that, bring that into all parts of the HR value chain and help our business leaders understand it that for sure that for sure it would be one.

Jeff Orlando:
And then I think the second one on talent management would just be continuing to work on the inclusion and diversity objectives, particularly around helping to change people's minds about what's needed for success in a role. Right? A lot of people tend to believe that there's a formula or there's one way to succeed. Or if, you know, certain individual doesn't have the same set of experiences as them, they may have an experience gap and, you know, this is across all companies and how you really help people think more broadly about who's ready and what does readiness mean? That's another, another hard one.

Dani Johnson:
I really liked that. And I actually like how those two things fit together. I think over the past five years, we've talked so much about data and technology that sometimes we think it's dehumanizing in nature, but if we use it right, which is the job of HR and talent management, if we use it right, it can be incredibly enlightening to the organization, but also really empowering to the individuals. I love those two things together.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. And I think adding to that, the ability to use that data and extrapolate from it, you know, Dani and I, for instance, have seen some technologies that will say, you know, Hey, we know that that these people will say they have these skills, but we also knew that people who have been in similar roles also have these other skills. So you might want to make the assumption that they do or at least ask if they do which, you know, for in diverse individuals are less likely to share kind of skills that may not be fully baked. And so, you know, you can see how data in that instance could actually, you know, in this example, open the talent pipeline much, much wider, bring in more people who we wouldn't have considered in the past. And so, you know, it's, I think, about making those intentional choices with the data that open the aperture of understanding as opposed to limiting it. And I think we're starting to see more of that.

Jeff Orlando:
That's great.

Stacia Garr:
Jeff, one question we wanted to ask you is, you know, you were working at this incredibly purpose-filled organization, and as you think about talent leaders who are maybe in other organizations, maybe not quite as purpose-filled, what kind of advice would you give to them? What are the things that you think they could do to help infuse purpose into their daily practice and to the talent practices that they're putting in place?

Jeff Orlando:
I think you can't fake it. I think it can't be plastic. It can't be a veneer, it needs to be real. You know, true, we're a business that lends itself to altruism and purpose. But I think as a process of discovery, figuring out in any business, what's the real reason for existing, and not telling some lofty story that is beyond the truth. Instead, it's just, articulate the truth and get people excited about the work of that company. I mean, employees these days, I think all of us are so able to sniff out hypocrisy or sniff out overstatement. So how can it just reflect the truth and build excitement around the truth? Don't create excitement around something that is a little bit perhaps disingenuous. That'd be my top tip.

Dani Johnson:
I love that. Speaking of ingenuous this is a question that Chris asks at the end of all of his podcasts and I love it. Why did you choose this line of work and what inspired you to do the work that you do? So for instance, a person or an incident or an observation or something, how did you get into this line of work?

Jeff Orlando:
Oh man. Wow. I mean, I've been in this game. I mean, I remember you know, being in college and I was interested in psychology and I was interested in business and I'm like, well, I can glue those two together and do this work, but I guess that's kind of a tactical, I don't know. I think I've always been just confused and fascinated by how groups work together, how people interact, and how it can be so predictable, but then people will surprise you, how external events can impact groups of people. And it's just been something I've just always had a curiosity about. And maybe it's me trying to figure it out for myself too. But it's just been a fascination and it's something that, for me that, you know, I'm just as curious about this stuff today as I was when I started, which, you know, I take it as a real gift.

Dani Johnson :
I love that. We hear the word curious when we ask that question a lot. One final question before you wrap up, where can people learn about your work and how can people connect with you and your company?

Jeff Orlando:
We'd love to connect with you. Take, I think, you know, followingour social channels on LinkedIn, it's probably a great way to stay in touch on Medtronic where we've really amped up our social media efforts and do some really interesting stuff in there. And, you know, that's another good spot to connect with me as well.

Stacia Garr:
Great. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for the time today and for just incredibly thoughtful conversation.