Creating a Culture of Learning to Fuel the Future of Work | Steve Cadigan | Part Two

In today's evolving workplace, employee development is challenging traditional compensation like salaries and bonuses. In the second part of this episode, guest Steve Cadigan, LinkedIn’s first CHRO and founder of Cadigan Talent Ventures, shares more insights on how investing in professional advancement is proving essential. Cadigan dives into his thoughts on remote work, the challenges of employee assessment and creating a work environment split between learning and performance. 

Tune in to discover how prioritizing learning agility and embracing humanity can navigate the modern work landscape. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:57 How properly positioned employee development can outweigh salaries and bonuses
• 5:42 Where employers can begin when creating a plan for employee growth and development
• 12:42 How to shift to a work environment of 50% learning and 50% performing
• 17:25 Changes Steve has seen in the conversation on the future of remote work
• 21:42 The challenge of assessment with remote work
• 26:27 The future of work as an ecosystem model of partners and relationships
• 33:51 The details on Steve's latest book, Workquake and his future book
• 35:45 Looking for people who can learn over having the right skills
• 41:09 How people can differentiate themselves from new tech by being human

Transcript

Intro: 

Welcome to The SkillsWave Podcast—a podcast for organizations that want to future ready their workforces, hosted by Malika Asthana. 

In each episode, guests from some of the most innovative businesses around the world share their unique approaches to learning and development. They provide specific, actionable insights into how they’re preparing their workforces for the future, and the ways they’re addressing skills gaps in their industries. 

You're listening to The SkillsWave Podcast. 

Malika:

Welcome to part two of our conversation with Steve Cadigan. I want to repeat back a couple of the things you’re saying. So old strategies for talent won’t work in the new digital economy. We need to be able to transform. Leadership looks really different and culture is paramount. I think those are the four things that keep coming up across the conversations.

One of the other things that you’ve said that’s a little bit spicy is that properly positioned employee development can actually outdo salaries and bonuses at other places. I’d love for you to speak a little bit about that too.

Steve:

Yeah, I think, and again, increasingly I believe that learning is now part of the rewards compensation stack. The more you grow me and make me more capable for an uncertain future, the more likely I am to stay compared to my other choices. If you promise that you’ll never let me go, I’m not going to believe you. You’ve lost all credibility. But if you promise you’ll make me better and you’ll do everything you can, whether I get fired or laid off or the company goes under, I’m okay because you made me better.

And this is where I think the challenge is, is that I believe increasingly talent wants to grow and learn more than anything because that gets me more career security. Don’t promise me job security, promise me something bigger, career security.

And that increasingly I’m seeing, especially with evolved technology companies in particular are saying, “Listen, I don’t know how long you’re going to want to stay. I don’t know how long this unit’s going to exist, but while you’re here, you’re going to grow more than anywhere else you could learn.” We did that at LinkedIn and I saw that, and I had a hand in helping build that, and it was so powerful.

And then what you do is you build lifelong loyalty even if they don’t work for you anymore, right?

Malika:

Yep, exactly.

Steve:

And then when people hire folks from you, people are like, “What? You hired someone from LinkedIn? Oh my gosh.” It’s like hiring out of the best universities in the world, and that serves you so well. And what happens is, and this is part of the culture conversation, if you become the place where people can grow and learn the most, you will no longer have to go hunt people. They will hunt you.

And that’s what started to happen when we started to deliver on this is going to be the best career you ever had. I’m facing a neighborhood of competitors for talent when we were growing LinkedIn that could outpay me, outperk me, outbenefit me, outwork environment me, sushi chefs, on-site child care, chauffeurs to San Francisco and Silicon … Ridiculous.

Google makes more money in a day than we made in a year. I couldn’t compete with that, but I could compete with your day-to-day experience here is going to blow your mind and you’re going to rock. And that we did. And when we started delivering that and the stories started getting out there, real stories, now it’s like people wanted to find us. And that was really a great lesson for me. I didn’t think that that’s how we would win.

And here’s another thing for all the doubters who are listening right now or watching, my CEO was so anti-culture when he started at LinkedIn.

Malika:

Interesting.

Steve:

Jeff Weiner had been at places where the company said these are our values and this is the way we should be and all the leaders did the opposite. And he goes, when he saw a culture poster on the wall, he looked at it as a trap like, oh, I’m supposed to behave this way, but someone’s going to call me out on, oh, you’re not really being constructive or you’re not putting the customer first in this situation. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience, but when people are using it as a trap, it’s broken.

And so he said, whatever we have for culture, I want it to be something that the mind and the heart could understand intuitively. So we came up with career transformation, that’s our culture. Come here and help transform the careers of our members and come here and have it be career transformative for you. And marrying the external value proposition with the internal one was really powerful for us. And it’s a great lesson.

And I think all of us have those assets in what we do. If for example, you’re in the learning business, well, you better be really delivering the learning for the people that are working for you, otherwise it’s just missing. You see what I’m saying?

Malika:

Right. Right.

Steve:

I was talking to a business recently, they’re in the trust business. They’re doing background checks and they’re selling trust like, trust us to give you accurate data to make really good hiring decisions. And I was telling the leadership team, if you’re not building a trust environment in your own culture, are your employees really going to feel it? Are they really going to go the extra?

Because there’s going to be disharmony between what you’re saying you’re doing, but what you’re really doing on the inside. And that I think is more important than ever because I think employees are really, really smart and they have a ton of data right now. If the dots aren’t being connected, it’s-

Malika:

Fairly obvious.

Steve:

That’s right. That’s right. And they will self-select out.

Malika:

It can’t be explained away by, oh, this was a disgruntled case or one-off.

Steve:

Right. That’s right.

Malika:

There’s proof to back it up, just as you say. I want to get back into architecture because you mentioned that a little bit at the beginning. But if you’re a leader that is dealing with some of these challenges with retention, trying to keep people interested and engaged and performing well and productive, where do you even begin when it comes to developing that plan for employee growth and development?

Steve:

Yeah, okay, I’m going to get a little spicy again.

Malika:

Please. Yes.

Steve:

I was told off air that’s what you guys wanted.

Malika:

Absolutely.

Steve:

But seriously, I think engagement is the wrong objective right now.

Malika:

Okay.

Steve:

I think what we should be talking about is high performance, creating an environment of courageousness and trust and looking at a relationship with talent for the long term. Don’t just care about someone when they work for you, care about them forever. And I think if that’s how you’re framing this, I think it takes pressure off of you have to be engaged.

There’s more things affecting employee engagement today that are out of an employer’s control. Do you feel safe? Do you feel healthy? You’ve got parents that are aging. We’ve got more people caring for elders in their family than anytime in history, and we haven’t built a safety net for that.

Malika:

No.

Steve:

Our medical care systems haven’t built the infrastructure to support that. So that’s an infrastructure shift we’re going to have to start thinking about. And I do believe supporting our staff with elder care in addition to employing more elders because we’re living longer, and we don’t have the retirement systems to support people living as long as they’re increasingly going to be living.

So these are some architectural shifts that I think we need to start leaning into and start recognizing and having real honest conversations about that. And I think if you just ask people what are some of the trends, they’re usually pretty good at identifying what some of those trends are. So the aging population and challenges with caring for seniors is a huge one that we’re not really, really talking about right now.

And then also the architecture of work expecting someone’s going to go. So for example, for people that are struggling with this, I usually like to use sports as an example, whether it’s collegiate sports in the US or professional sports. What’s happened in the last 20 years is it used to be that a player would stay in college four years and they would play in a professional team their whole career. Now who does that? Nobody does that.

So what it means is we’re seeing a lot of people change teams, change schools. And what coaches need to do in these sports is if I’m not having someone stay for 8, 9, 10 years, I have to teach a simpler offense and I have to teach a simpler defense.

So I think what’s incumbent for organizations who are seeing higher turnover, who recognize it’s probably not going to slow down, is I need to re-engineer how work gets done here so that if Malika leaves, oh my gosh, she’s the only one that knew how to do that, we’re screwed. Yeah, but you knew she was going to, so why did you have her be the only person that knows how to do X, Y, Z?

Malika:

Yeah, succession planning.

Steve:

Right. So we need sharing of knowledge greater, and we also need to move people around intentionally. We’ve always known job rotations is valuable, but if you think about it in a highly fluid world of work, it’s the ultimate insurance policy. If you leave and someone did your job last year, I’m good with putting someone else back in that until we hire someone new in.

Malika:

Exactly.

Steve:

And now it gets to what every college coach does right now, and what every professional coach does is they’re always recruiting. They’re always, because they know someone’s going to go, someone’s going to get hurt, something’s going to happen. So I always have to have a backup plan.

And this is where we get into succession planning, which is usually a big objective for an organization. Well, who is going to fill this? The big mistake most organizations make is only looking internally.

Malika:

Yes, right.

Steve:

You got to look outside because someone who used to be here, maybe they got a great experience somewhere else and they could come back in.

Malika:

And what are the actual skills that you need to be in the role versus what’s something you could learn on the job?

Steve:

That’s right. That’s right. And this is another big one. When I talk about learning for organizations, I’m not talking about that one day a week. When I started my career 30 years ago, there used to be such things, I know it’s a crazy idea, we would go away for a week for learning. Then it was two days, then it was a day. And now you’re lucky if you get a manager to let you take their employees for four hours.

Malika:

Right.

Steve:

And by the way, we’ve also learned that on-the-job learning, on-the-job experience is so sticky compared to going away. I love going away because it’s almost like I get to unplug, I get to meet some of my peers in other parts of the organization. It’s refreshing. I get to detox a little bit for a day or two.

But I think what every leader has to do is feed new experiences, new assignments, new challenges, new virtual teams. And that is where this challenge of the skill shift has to start with leaders and us helping leaders understand it’s not about finding that right course or finding that right training program. It’s about designing the day to day so there’s a good proportion of learning and doing.

And this is how I think jobs are going to really change in the future. We’re going to move from a economy that used to be all performing to one that is probably 50% learning and 50% performing. And guess what? Learning is delivering for the company because you’re making yourself more adaptable. You’re making yourself more agile.

And then people are like, “Well, we didn’t build the business plan with people learning 50% of the time.” Yeah, but they can be delivering while they’re learning. It’s just something new. And you’re going to be nervous because they don’t have experience doing it, but you haven’t seen the energy that that delivers.

And here’s another great question I love asking executives, and they’re pushing back to me on this one. I said, “Tell me about the biggest break you had in your career, the biggest moment.”

“Oh, it’s when that boss I had put me in a job that I had no experience in.”

I said, “So are you designing for that or are you designing for that not to happen?” And usually it’s the latter because we’re worried about the delivery being impeded by someone not having the right amount of experience.

Now, I’m not saying go out there and create chaos, but I’ve seen enough organizations where they have a healthy framework to put people in to coach them and mentor them and help them, not just throw them to the wolves. And monitoring how they’re doing and getting feedback so that you can use the learning in the job effectively. And that’s another huge architecture shift, I think, from just you’re a command and control boss to I’m the coach, I’m the mentor.

Malika:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a huge shift for managers to even step into those roles because there is so much more than the work management itself. It is very much the people management and trying to see that potential and encourage that curiosity and get people themselves thinking, okay, I’m actually capable of doing this, let me give it a shot, that growth mindset. I want to underscore that point again, 50% learning, 50% performing. I think that’s pretty spicy.

Steve:

It is.

Malika:

So how do you design for that in the day-to-day flow of work? I mean, we heard in the news a couple months ago that there was one company that had taken an entire week off of pause for employees to go and learn. And some people were saying, “Okay. Well, it’s great to have one week, but you have to do that on a consistent basis. It can’t just be one week of dedicated learning and then you stop for the rest of the year.” What have you seen that’s been successful at other organizations?

Steve:

Right. Well, I love experiments like that. And just like this whole increasing world of remote work, we don’t have a long-term body of experience to show is this going to work, this is not going to work, or what the impact on remote work is to teamwork or culture or connectivity or innovation or creativity. But there’s a lot of different experiences, experiments I mean, that people are conducting right now.

I think when it comes to this, what I see organizations are missing is they’re already doing it more than they realize. Let’s just take an inventory of someone’s day to day and what amount of new things that they’re doing or virtual teams that they’re sitting on. And that to me, that starts with, they build their comfort level in saying, “Oh, okay, it’s happening more than zero.” Maybe it’s like 10 to 20%. So we’re talking about just an incremental increase in that and then testing it and measuring it.

So some of the organizations, let’s take one. There’s one called W. L. Gore & Associates. They have built a model at W. L. Gore & Associates, and they’ve been around forever and they’ve been doing this. This is not a new experiment. They’ve been doing it forever. Everyone’s an associate and every job is a project.

And when you’re finished with the project, you go and bid on your next project and your review and the manager’s reviews are fully transparent. So you get to see, oh, I want to work in this … Oh no, I don’t like the manager scores there, I’m going to go try this one. It’s sort of like gig on the inside.

Malika:

Interesting.

Steve:

That’s one way. And now that’s not going to work for every business because some businesses need deep, deep domain expertise.

Malika:

Confidentiality, other-

Steve:

That’s right. That’s right. One of the companies in the music space, Spotify did something a few years ago, which was super interesting before the pandemic. Their biggest challenge was churn, particularly of younger workers. So they said, “Well, we need to move people around.” And so they told all the managers, “Move people around.” And the manager’s like, “Nope, I trained that person. I don’t want them to go.”

And there was this human nature block, and I’ve seen this happen in companies I’ve worked for where, oh yeah, rotations, it’s all great, the best companies have been doing it, let’s do it. But what they’re failing to recognize is if I’m a leader and I’m moving my best person, that means my weekends are screwed, I’m not going to be home in time for dinner. Why would I do that?

Malika:

Well, and who does it fall on? It falls on the manager who is also responsible for making the decision.

Steve:

And am I trusting I’m really going to get someone else’s best person or are they shipping me the one they don’t want, right?

Malika:

Yeah.

Steve:

So what Spotify did was they said, “You cannot be in your role more than two years.” So they’re building institutional skill growth by design and disabling the manager from being a human being and being self concerned. They built that. And that takes the friction out of it and says that’s who we are.

And that also makes it easier to recruit like, “You’re doing this now, but you’re going to get to go in that part of the studio and you’re going to get to go over here and deal with customers. You get to go over here and deal with artists. You’re going to do creatives. You’re going to get to learn about user experience over here. You’re going to deal with our podcast business next month.” And people are like, “Wow.”

That diversity of learning is super powerful. I wish I had more examples, but we need more. The companies that are experimenting more are earlier and younger than the other ones that I’ve seen, but I think they’re already seeing really, really good return on that more than they thought they would. And so that’s why I say we’re in an experimental economy right now where we have to try stuff because we don’t know, particularly with this remote work challenge that we all face.

Malika:

I love the remote work examples that you’re throwing out because I think it makes it a lot more real. And sometimes when we’re talking about the future of work, it’s still ideas that came up in 2018, ’19 before ChatGPT was even a thing. What are some of the main changes that you’ve seen when it comes to the learning conversation, the future of learning as it relates to the remote work conversation?

Steve:

I think that what I’m excited to see is people are intentionally experimenting. So for example, I get asked a lot of time by my clients, “Steve, should we be in person, hybrid, or should we be fully remote?” And my answer is, “Yes.” And they said, “No, no, we’re asking you which one.” And I said, “Yes.” And they go, “All of them?” I go, “Mm-hmm. Yeah.”

You don’t know. You don’t know how you’re going to build the best amount of value, and everyone has different needs. Most, not all, but most recent graduates want to join a community. They don’t want to be staring at a screen. They want to stare at the screen when they’re playing their video games, but they want to be a part of something, and so fully remote doesn’t meet everyone’s needs. Someone who is at a different place in their life may want to have more of that.

And hybrid is telling a waiter or a waitress when they ask you what you’d like to eat, you say, “I’d like some food.” There’s a million … Do you want vegetarian? Do you want meat? Do you want fresh? You want pasta? What do you want? Hybrid is what day of the week, when, what for? Who’s going to be there? What location?

Malika:

Is it mandatory? Is it not?

Steve:

That’s right. And what teams are in on what days? But what I love about the conversations we’re having right now, Malika, is we’re asking conversations we would never have asked before.

Malika:

True.

Steve:

Why do we work in the same building? Why do we meet in person? What’s the point of that? Just like when I was at LinkedIn, we took HR down to the studs, like why are we even doing performance reviews? I never thought to ask that question because that’s just what you do.

And now that we’re facing a new frontier of work, it’s so terrifyingly refreshing that we’re saying, “Well, why would we meet? What’s the point?” And some organizations are getting really intentional like, “Hey, if one person’s dialing in, we can’t meet in person. It’s not fair. We’ve all got to do it.”

And then, organizations are looking at trying to understand what is our culture now. So I’ll give you a really fun example. There was a credit union I was dealing with, huge National credit union, and they’re, “Steve, we love our culture. It’s the best. It’s who we are. It’s what we’re about. It’s our core, but we’re really trying to embrace this remote because we had to during the pandemic. We thought maybe we could hire some really good people. So yeah, we’re all about the remote now.”

And I could tell they weren’t, but they were trying to sell me that they were. I said, “So have you hired remote people during the pandemic?”

“Oh yeah, we have.”

I said, “How many of those remote people are more than 20 miles from one of your offices?”

“None of them.”

“So you’re hedging, this is a short-term play?” I said, “That’s okay, but if that’s who you are, don’t try to be something that you’re not.”

And this is where I think organizations are trying to trip up is people want integrity leadership, they want consistency, and they want to know you’re thoughtful. So that’s why all the organizations that said, “From now on, we’re all going to do this.” I would say, “Why? You don’t know how it’s going to play. You don’t know if it’s good for your employees, your customers, your shareholders, you don’t know.”

So why don’t you just say, “Listen, for the next six months, we’re going to try this and then we’re going to assess is it good for you, the customers, the business, our profit margins, the shareholder. We’re going to look at all that and then we’re going to adjust. Sound good?” And everyone’s going to go, “Yeah, sounds good.” Why wouldn’t you try?

And then those people coming out in the news, like yesterday I read an article, some leader’s like, “People need to work harder. People are just a bunch of slackers at home.” Just because wearing jammies doesn’t mean they’re slacking. It’s challenging your vision of what a highly productive employee looks like, but are they really slacking? I don’t know.

But these moments that we’re in right now of this alien universe where people are asking this and these really, really good profound questions, I think is super healthy. But leaders were not prepared. Many leaders are not prepared for this. They’re comforted by the way it was, and that’s how they got their power. And anything that threatens that, I think is scary for them.

Malika:

I think there’s so much confusion also about assessment. You touched on that at the very beginning with this whole idea that, well, if we’re not using performance reviews and if I can’t actually see you working at your desk for a seven, eight hour day, well, how do I know that you’re actually doing a good job? And how am I supposed to know if you’re growing?

Steve:

And I think that lack of awareness of what employees are really doing and what the manager’s level of awareness of what their employees are really doing is one of the reasons why managers wanted people in because they don’t really know what you’re doing. And this is another great moment that remote forced us to really understand what are the dimensions that are going to help me understand whether you’re thriving or struggling in a role? And we should know that.

The challenge is, particularly for technology companies is most leaders are what I call battlefield promotions. They’re just thrown in, figure it out. Being a leader and being a manager has not been respected. It’s not got the support that it needs. And so people are making stuff up on the fly.

I had a friend of mine who’s at a company, a big tech company that everyone uses, and they were frustrated with their manager, “Steve, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She never meets with me. She’s not aware of what I’m doing. And the conversations we have are just really weird.” And I said, “Why are you expecting anything from your manager?” And they go, “What do you mean?” I go, “Do you think she was prepared? Do you think she wanted to be your manager?”

I said, “How about you look it like this? You’ve got a greatest opportunity to shape your relationship with her to tell her what you need to drive that relationship. You be the low maintenance person. You say, ‘This is what I’m doing. Does that sound good?’ And help her thrive at what she’s … because she’s juggling stuff you don’t even understand.” And so he’s like, “Wow, that’s a huge mind shift.” I go, “Yeah.”

We blame leaders for a lot more than we should be instead of appreciating that they may not be set up for success as much as we think, but that is a real pivot point. When I tell my friends, when you’re assessing whether you should go work at a company or not, assess the quality of the leaders there and what’s respected and what’s valued and how much are they really supporting them?

But here’s the problem that technology companies face, I don’t think many of them are planning to be around in a hundred years. I think they look at the world of disruption and say, “We’ll be lucky if we’re alive in 20, probably get acquired or someone else is going to trump our technology and we’ll get disrupted. So let’s just have a good run for eight to 10 years and then we’ll all go do something different.”

So what level of interest do you have in investing in your leaders when your horizon, you’re not thinking a hundred years? This is a great conversation for our listeners. Sit down with your friends next time and ask yourselves, which companies in your universe do you really think are building to be around in a hundred years? And surprisingly, I think you’ll be surprised how few names you’re going to put on that list.

Malika:

I’m even thinking of it mentally right now. It’s some of the legacy ones that you mentioned, right?

Steve:

That’s right. That’s right.

Malika:

Because it’s also the user need and what they’re trying to address with their products and services.

Steve:

And it’s not a knock. I’m not looking down on someone who’s not building for a hundred years. I think we have to wake up to that’s not how companies are seeing the marketplace. They’re being honest and recognizing that we’re in a highly disruptive universe.

When I was at LinkedIn, the chairman was interviewed one day, Reid Hoffman. He was asked, “Reid, what company do you worry about? You’ve got this really interesting business model. You’ve got this free business for all these professionals to network, and you’ve got a recruiting business. You’ve got a sales networking business. Who worries you?”

He said something that just blew me away. He goes, “I worry about the company that hasn’t been invented yet more than I do about an existing legacy company because someone could change my paradigm and make my value obsolete.

Malika:

And it’ll come faster than you even expect it to.

Steve:

So it causes, what did Andy Grove, the chairman of Intel say one time? Only the paranoid survive. That makes me really uncomfortable to hear that. But I think it is, how do you think about building something that can thrive in a world where the opportunity and the cost to build a company is lower than it’s ever been and it could come from anywhere?

And so I think build relationships that could last, build your connection with your employees forever. So if you move, you’ve got people that are your advocates out there. But if you stay, maybe they’ll come back. Maybe they’ll send people your way. Back to that build an ecosystem versus just-

Malika:

Yeah, that alumni network.

Steve:

That’s right. And that’s why when I think about the future of work, it’s more of an ecosystem model, where we’re going to be able to control less within our four walls, and it’s going to be more about how I can leverage partners and relationships around the world.

Malika:

That’s interesting. In terms of partners and relationships, you think it’s coming from pulling from other pools, competitors, or partnerships-

Steve:

I think it’s even bigger than that.

Malika:

Okay.

Steve:

So let’s take any business. I think the walls between a business and a school are already coming down where my employees are going to be teaching, they’re going to be mentoring. We’re going to have apprenticeships, we’re going to have interns. We’re going to have that blending. We’re going to have the school solving my problems as an enterprise, giving them … We’re starting to see that happen a lot more.

We’re starting to see community colleges and not just four-year institutions, we’re seeing those relationships blur. Or dev teams or other partners where we’re leveraging a more fluid world of work. Because listen, one of the things that no one’s talking about right now is during the pandemic where the future became highly uncertain, people became very nervous about hiring full-time staff because I don’t know what the runway is. So I don’t want this extra burden that I might have to take a big PR hit if I have to cut. So I’m going to leverage a lot more contractors and agencies to support my model. So what happened? The comfort level doing that just rose.

So here’s another fun conversation I’ve had during the pandemic, “How’s it going?” And they go, “Oh, Steve, it’s just been brutal. Can’t hire the people we want. They don’t stay.” And I said, “No. How’s the business?”

“Oh, we just had the best four quarters ever.”

I said, “So why did you answer the question, ‘It’s been brutal,’ instead of saying, ‘You know what? We learned to be really adaptable, really agile over the last year.’ You didn’t say that. You said it’s been brutal and then you said it’s never been more profitable.”

What if this model is the right model and it’s not feeling right because it’s not how we’ve measured what a successful business looks like, which is long tenure, people staying, engagement score’s high? Engagement score’s low, turnover is high, and profits are up. So that’s weird compared to what? Compared to what we’ve been measuring. And that’s another sort of, folks, it doesn’t have to be the way it was.

And a lot of the highly successful ones are finding that new people with new ideas is giving you disproportionate creative horsepower that you didn’t have when the same people were there doing the same thing for long periods of time. And that is making everyone better. When you get more knowledge from outside coming into your organization, that makes you more powerful. And they’re bringing their networks in too with their relationships with the other companies that they’ve been working for.

Malika:

So the social contract is changing quite a lot because even employees themselves can’t necessarily expect that they’ll find full-time off the bat. So they have to be doing that due diligence, that research to see, okay, what does this company actually stand for? What are its values and what am I getting out of it?

Steve:

Yeah. There was a really interesting research paper that was done by the Wall Street Journal about six months ago, looking at highly talented software engineers who had left to go independent. And I thought I knew why they did so. Why are these people doing it? Let’s go find out.

And what they found was completely different than what I thought they would find. I thought it was going to be all about freedom and flexibility, and I’m working for that gorgeous person in the mirror. And it turned out to be something different. What most of these independent, highly talented, technical staff were saying was, “I love having new clients, the learning curve of doing new things.”

And here’s another thing that I’ll have another conversation for a glass of wine or beers with friends is 10, 15 years ago, if you’re a temp or a contractor, you’re kind of a second class citizen. Now, if you’re a gig worker, oh, you’re a badass. It’s cool. You’re controlling your destiny. You have a few clients.

And I’m starting to see, there’s one company in Australia called Canva, and they’re a competitor of Adobe. They do a lot of creative stuff. You might’ve made your Christmas cards with them or your holiday cards with them. They’ve started offering people, if they want you to join their firm and say, “Well, here’s two offers.” And you’re thinking, “Well, I just applied for one, what’s the other offer?”

“Oh, one’s to be an employee, one’s to be an independent. We don’t know if you want to work for other people while you work for us. It’s fine, but it’s on us to get you to want to be fully dedicated to us. And if that’s as an employee or a full-time or as a contractor, it’s up to you, but we just want you in our ecosystem.” Now that is so mature and evolved, it blows my mind.

Malika:

And if the ecosystem allows for it, right? If there’s not confidentiality requirements or can’t work for competitors. You’re doing design, you’re doing dev work, you absolutely could work for numerous clients.

Steve:

Right. I mean, it’s a intellectual property lawyer’s nightmare come true.

Malika:

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Steve:

Are people going to be working [inaudible 00:31:39]? But listen, the ultimate measure is are you guys crushing it? Is the organization thriving? And are people doing great work and feeling really inspired to want to contribute and be there intentionally, not because they have to.

And I look at the fast food industry, have done some really, really innovative and creative thinking around their workforce. What they did is they looked at their value proposition. They said, “We’re fast food. We’re not a career destination. We’re just part of someone’s journey. And it’s usually the early part of someone’s journey. So let’s be, I don’t know, the best part of that journey and let’s pride ourselves in where people go when they leave us.”

But can you imagine a career page that says, “Here are people who left and look, they’re realizing their dreams.” And these organizations are recognizing, we know we’re not your dream job, we’re just part of the destination. And that should cover so much ground. A bank teller, they’re not going to be at the bank their whole life. That’s a starter to get them somewhere else. Celebrate, help them get somewhere else.

And especially in a B2C kind of business, you’ve got someone who could not only be a loyal advocate, but could be a consumer and a customer of yours forever, right?

Malika:

Yeah, right.

Steve:

But no, no, oh no, you left. Well, we can’t have a going away party for you. You’ve only been here a year. And that’s some of the thinking that I see organizations have. And that was my experience when I left a company, was what inspired me to write Workquake a couple of years ago was I left a job after about a year and a half, and I was made to feel so horrible, like I was disloyal, dishonest, lower-than-life, morally bankrupt.

And I’m like, “Yeah, but I’m going to be the head of HR at LinkedIn, and you don’t have that job here, and it’s a career game changer. And you could have said, ‘We’re going to celebrate that. We set you up to be a viable candidate for that.’ But that’s not what you’re doing.” And that just didn’t feel good. I’m like, “It’s broken. You should be celebrating that versus making me feel …” And my boss who’d hire me, she took a hit because how could you let him leave and this and that. And I’m like, “The market’s different.” You know what I’m saying?

Malika:

Yeah. Let’s go back to Workquake. So you recently published your book. In it you speak about … Tell us more about it.

Steve:

Sure. Well, I was really inspired to write this book because I feel that the employer-employee relationship, it’s lacking. I think both parties have been unhappy for a while, and I wanted to have a more honest conversation and recognize that things like long-term retention just don’t make sense anymore. And that you can still have a thriving business if you care about someone for their whole career, even if they leave.

And so I wanted to change the conversation and give example after example after example of people doing interesting things and organizations doing interesting things so that I could give people more of choice set, if you will. The first half is for employees and the second half is for employers. And the whole premise was for us to have a fruitful future of work, we have to have both parties feeling really inspired. And I feel like they’re both really bummed out right now.

And I was just really hit by that sitting on the front step at LinkedIn, where you’ve got thousands of employers and millions of employees and you’re just looking at the intersection here and you’re seeing things from a different perspective. And that inspired me to say, “No, I think, let’s talk about where this is going and where it could go to raise people’s confidence in different ways of doing it.” And it’s really story-based, and that’s what I wanted, make changing achievable and realizable for people. That was really the goal.

But I also say at the end of the book, “Hey, this is just the start of the conversation.” And if I were to write that book now, it would be really different because we’ve learned a lot. And I had to stop it right when the pandemic started because it’s like, oh, I don’t know how it’s going to end, but I’ve been working on it a few years and I’m just going to get it out. I’m going to hedge the pandemic’s really going to stick around for a while, and it turns out I was right.

Malika:

Yeah, and your next book is on a different topic, I’m assuming.

Steve:

That’s right.

Malika:

Building on it.

Steve:

The working domain for this next book we touched on a little bit earlier is going to be, I call it talent hacking. But I’m not sure that’s a name that people outside of technology are really going to resonate with. But it’s really that we have, I think, over-indexed on experience and under-indexed on talent, that the power of giving someone something new is something that we’ve really underappreciated, and giving example after example of having done it myself at LinkedIn. We built the whole company by putting people in roles that they weren’t qualified for and crushed the market. And I think that we need to be more thoughtful about how we can design that in with confidence.

And again, it’s not something that’s going to work in every domain. You’re not going to be cycling through surgical teams and things like that, but I think a lot of organizations could do that a lot more. And I want to be helping give examples to build people’s confidence that I think we should be doing that a lot more.

Think about it like this, if I extend the challenge that I see a lot of leaders have is I can’t find people with the skills we need. What if that’s not what you need? What if you need is someone who can learn? Then it doesn’t matter what skills they need.

So I get asked all the time, radio, TV, podcast, “Steve, what’s the most important skills that people should be focused on?” And I said, “I know the answer, but it’s going to be a little bit unsatisfying because it’s not what you want. You want, oh, it’s programming in Java or some sort of technical thing.” I said, “The most important skill right now is the capacity to learn quickly and, Carol Dweck, the godmother of growth mindset, having a growth mindset, being curious.”

My kids, I have three teenage boys, one of them is in college, two of them are on the doorstep. I said, “So what are your plans?” They go, “We’re going to go to college.” I go, “Why?” They go, “What?” I go, “Why?”

Malika:

What’s your business case for that?

Steve:

Yeah, why do you want to go to college? What for? And they’re so not ready for that. And I said, “So if that’s what you want to do.” But I just walked in there like a zombie because that’s what you did. And I never really had purpose until I went to grad school after I’d worked for a few years and said, “I want to do this. I want to be great at people and human resources and talent, so I’m going to go get a master’s degree.” And that was so much more enjoyable.

And so I’m pushing them like, “Why don’t you take a couple of years off?” But that feeling of I’m missing out, I’m going to be behind, I’m not going to win that argument. So then I’m like, “Okay, well, let’s find you a domain where you can experiment.” Having done a ton of college campus tours over the last few years, I am so disappointed that every school asked the students when they show up for a tour the same question, “What are you going to study when you come here?” And I thought, “They don’t know.”

And so my son, who will kill me for saying this while it’s being recorded. So the first school we go to, he’s like, “Oh yeah, math, science, data science,” with confidence. And so at school after school after school, he’s hearing like 20, 30 other kids say a whole variety of different areas. So the next school we go to, he’s like, “Well, I’m thinking math and science.” The next school, it’s like, “Well, probably science, but there could be some history.” And by the end he’s like, “I don’t know.”

And I love that. And I kept telling him, I was like, “I love that because what you’re doing is you’re using these tours as a barometer for I don’t have to study this to become a that, because that may no longer exist.” And this is where I think we’ve got friction generationally, is that a lot of parents are like, “Study this because I want you to become that because I want to feel that you’re going to be safe in the scary world out there.” But the scary world is not what the parents grew up in. It’s totally different.

Malika:

It’s a different kind of scary.

Steve:

And that’s really dangerous advice. Right. So what I’m telling my kids is learn to learn, which sounds so corny. Just like I break this expression down in my book, like lifelong learning. What the heck is that? Well, it’s just being hungry and thirsty and being curious all the time. So my kids always are really disappointed with me. Whenever we go on car trips, I’m always like, “Wow, look at that sunset. Look at those clouds. What do you think is going on over there?” And like, “Dad, whatever.” And it’s like, “I was just wired that way.”

And I think that for what I wish schools would ask is, “What are you curious about learning if you were to come here? What are you curious about exploring?” Don’t force people into something. When you’re 18, 19, 20, you don’t know. I have friends, 50s, 60s, they’re still trying to figure it out.

Malika:

Well, and the same thing applies to work, right? It’s the same thing when we’re thinking about some of these human resources conversations. It’s not just, why do you want this job? What do you hope to get out of this? What do you hope to have done by the time you leave? What do you hope to learn?

Steve:

Right. Right. And I think this new, more open universe of career paths where the people are doing squiggly instead of this linear line, I think is a little bit scary for the youth because they’re not sure what the net result’s going to be, like I know that if I study accounting and become an accountant, I know that’s going to lead to … There’s a pathway there. But all these other ones, there’s not a lot of institutional knowledge to show us with confidence that it’s going to be okay.

So one of the things that I’m trying to tell my clients, tell this to my kids and anyone who’ll listen to me is with all this new AI, with all this new automation and technical advantage that we have, the ChatGPTs and all that, so how do you differentiate yourself in a universe where so many new technical features are going to be part of your job experience?

It’s everything that’s human. It’s your ability to influence, your empathy, your capacity to communicate, your capacity to lead, your capacity to read body language, all these human things, which we know how to do. And I feel like this narrative is we need to be more like robots is so misplaced.

And I think that’s where I get super excited about what’s in front of us when I look at artificial intelligence, is that we can use AI to grab back control and make careers more beautiful and more amazing. Isn’t that why technology’s here so that we have a more beautiful life? Because it doesn’t feel like we’re going down that path right now. It feels like we’re always behind, we’re always late. We’re sitting here in a podcast going, “Oh my God, my email inbox is just exploding right now. I’m going to have to set time aside to catch up.” Why can’t we come up with a better way?

And when people are saying, “Steve, how should we implement AI?” I said, “Well, let’s first assess your company’s capacity to implement new technology. How’s email going for you right now?”

“We haven’t mastered it.”

“Okay, so what’s your confidence level that something 10 times more complex is going to go well?”

“Yeah, not so good.”

So let’s just use this moment to say, what can we do and how can we design all the capacities of AI to maybe achieve the three-day workweek or the four-day workweek? I mean, let’s get bold. How do we have greater satisfaction rather than greater distance and fear and anxiety? Because that’s what we should program those tools to deliver.

Malika:

That’s a great place to end. Steve Cadigan, thank you so much for your time.

Steve:

Thank you for having me.

Outro: 

Thanks for listening to The SkillsWave Podcast. Check out skillswave.com, Spotify and Apple Podcasts for links to the resources we discussed in this episode, related content, additional episodes and more. 

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