The Customer-Driven Leader (Episode #10) ~ Dr. Alexis Fink

James welcomes Dr. Alexis Fink — one of the leading voices in people analytics, workforce strategy, and organizational measurement. With leadership experience spanning Meta, Intel, and Microsoft, Alexis has spent her career helping organizations better understand the intersection of talent, business performance, and human behavior.

In this episode, we explore a question many leaders are struggling with right now:

How do we leverage analytics, AI, and measurement without losing the humanity behind employee and customer experience?

We’ll dive into:
• The future of people analytics and AI in leadership
• Why organizations become what they measure
• The hidden risks of over-engineering work
• How employee experience shapes customer outcomes
• What truly human-centered leadership looks like in a data-driven world

This is a thoughtful and timely conversation for leaders navigating the evolving relationship between technology, talent, culture, and customer experience.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:05

Hey, good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Customer Driven Leader Podcast, where we explore the critical impact that leaders have in creating and sustaining winning cultures that positively impact customer experiences. I'm James Killian, and I'd like to thank the XM Global Collaborative for sponsoring this event. Really excited to invite my 10th guest. It's hard to believe it's been 10 episodes already, my good friend and long-term colleague, uh Dr. Alexis Fink. And Alexis has a long and storied history with some brands that you may know. She's former vice president of People Analytics and Workforce Strategy from Meta. That's Facebook, for those of you who don't know. She's also held analytics leadership roles at uh companies like Microsoft and Intel. She's a past president of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. And she's a frequent writer and speaker about AI, future of work, and leadership topics. And she's also written a couple of books. Alexis, my friend, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm delighted to have this time with you today.

SPEAKER_02 1:12

Yeah, me too. Me too. It's great to see you. Uh, I should probably also add Alexis is an occasional um drinker of a glass of bourbon with yours truly, and that's always nice. Unfortunately, we couldn't do this in person today. So here we are virtually, and it's definitely too early in the morning for a glass of bourbon.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

That is true.

SPEAKER_02 1:32

So, Alexis, really excited to have you on here. You know, we we had our prep session, you know, we've talked about the importance of measurement and analytics. We've talked about the importance of refocusing on the customer as part of this um business world that you and I are both in. But uh, as we also discussed, I have a couple of bookends. I start and finish uh the say the show the same way every time. And so I'll ask you the same question that I ask everybody, and that is a leader team or company culture is customer driven when what? Can you please finish that sentence?

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Oh wow. Uh when the customer is part of every conversation, that you're not making any decision without at least considering the customer implications of it.

SPEAKER_02 2:17

Yeah, I really like that. Um, that actually reminds me of um it's a little um storied, a little uh maybe even a tad cliche, but I I I think the story about Howard Schultz having the two chairs in every meeting, and one represented the partner, which is what they would call employees, and the other represented the customer. And the whole concept was if it's not good for the employee, and if it's not good for the customer, then you got to revisit the topic until you're ready for it. So um I thought that was a really great and simple, and you know, as they say, simple isn't easy though, right? I mean it's uh it is it is tough to get there.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

So, you know, people I think so much. Oh no, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 3:00

I I know we've got a little bit of an internet lag. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 3:03

So much of today's I think organizational challenge comes from only considering one stakeholder, one set of criteria at a time, instead of really thinking about the fact that you need to take care of your financials, you need to take care of you know your employees, you need to often take care of the environment or society or some other abstraction. And you don't get to have a business if you're not taking care of your customers.

SPEAKER_02 3:31

Yeah, agreed. And and I'll um so right before the show, you and I were talking about, you know, this book about Jack Welch and how that was the shift in businesses uh moving away from stakeholder focus to more shareholder focus. Um, how do you think that's kind of impacted, you know, how we have to manage businesses these days?

SPEAKER_00 4:06

And you can translate a lot of customer decisions into something that also has financial implications. But so often they're not even part of the conversation. Or if you're a technology organization, we might think about customers in terms of who are paying us, but not users who are actually consuming the services. And so we really do we see a degradation in service. There's a great book out based on a series of articles about the inchidification of IT. Uh and there's this sort of logical and typical progression from something great from users, great for customers, into something really great for the stock market and really great for the investors who own a lot of stock, but um stripping away privacy, stripping away utility, adding in fees over and over and over in a way that really eventually you you abuse customers so badly that they leave.

SPEAKER_02 5:03

You don't say, wow, huh, that does happen, doesn't it? You know, and talking about the technology um uh space, uh, you know, which you and I have both spent a good amount of our careers in the technology space, right? And one of the things that um that we tend to see in technology is this concept of shelfware. And probably not everybody knows what that is, but essentially what happens is as deals are getting done, the people in the company, the vendor company who are selling that technology to the customer, they say, why don't we just throw another couple of million dollars worth of XYZ product line in there? And that way you'll have the full stack and you can use it to your heart's content. And so deals get done at the level of the CIO. But unfortunately, the stakeholders, the people who would actually use that technology to do something effective, oftentimes have no idea that their organization has purchased that license for them. So they're using another program.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

Well, or there are cases where they'll purchase that license and it turns out that it's another term, vaporware, and it doesn't work. It's a really large provider in a prior life, and I won't name names or disparage anyone, but we bought a module that in the three years of our contract was never actually usable. And another where um the vendor would only bundle an enormous number of services when we needed them for one very narrow slice. And we actually had internal tools that covered everything else better than what they were offering. And I ended up canceling that contract because they wouldn't let me unbundle for only the service that I required. So there certainly is uh there are a number of ways in which the folks writing the contracts are thinking about how can I maximize the number of dollars, get my get my ARR up there, right? My annual recurring revenue uh as high as it possibly can be without thinking about the long-term consequences of, yeah, and eventually you're gonna lose me as a customer.

SPEAKER_02 7:03

Bingo. And and that right there is a great example of being shareholder focused and not stakeholder focused. You're not focusing on the customer. And I'm a really big uh believer in one of the thematic areas that I talk about when it comes to being customer driven, Alexis, is this concept of politely challenging the customer. I think that's really, really important because uh, you know, I gave the example of the iPhone, you know, when that came out. Hey, why would I have a phone with no buttons? I mean, it was kind of weird to me at the time, but they were politely challenging my assumptions, my way of thinking. Would I ever go back to a Motorola StarTech flip phone right now? Absolutely not, from little punch buttons. No, of course not. That was a good way of politely challenging the customer, but you can't do that if you've got vaporware, to your point.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

If it if it isn't working. And there's the famous Henry Ford quote about well, if I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said a smarter horse, because they don't necessarily know what's technically possible. And so there's this innovator's opportunity to show what's possible and then really test for appetite, test for usability. You and I before were having a conversation about the segue, and it does work technically, but from a user acceptance standpoint, from a from a felt need standpoint, there was a fairly low need. The product market fit wasn't there, independent of how innovative it might have been. So there is that kind of polite challenge, but really use that as information, use that as data. Don't assume that you automatically know best just because you've fallen in love with your with your technology or your product.

SPEAKER_02 8:46

It's true. Although I will say it really did work out for a Paul Blart mall cop.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Hey, have you ever ridden one of those things?

SPEAKER_02 8:53

They're a weird- I have not, to be honest. I never have.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

They're really easy to use. They're practically psychic, but the use case is fairly narrow.

SPEAKER_02 9:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They well, you know, I mean, I see them in tourist groups and I see them in mall cops and I see them in, you know, boardwalk police officers, and so I mean, it's still got a place, I guess, but it's definitely not in my garage, I'll tell you that much. So, so one of the things that I like to do um you know when we talk about um customer experiences related um to business is to personalize these a little bit. Do you have a personal example of uh a bad example of a customer experience that you've had as a consumer and and and how maybe how has that shaped how you think about these things?

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Boy, I shared the two earlier where we bought something that turned out to be vaporware from a very large provider. I shared the one about um turning out, so shared those two initial ones, right? Uh the third one is to me the most unforgivable because it just feels deceptive. Ended up signed a contract, we're starting implementation. It was a fairly small contract, it was $300,000. Again, I won't name the vendor because it's inappropriate. Uh and as we were starting implementation, they said, Oh, wait, we forgot about this six hundred thousand dollar licensing charge you'll have to pay annually. Oh my god, in order to use this thing that you're spending $300,000 for us to custom develop for you. And so it was supposed to be a $300,000 once and done. And it turned into $900,000 in the first year and $600,000 every year thereafter. And so I canceled the contract, and it just felt either profoundly incompetent or profoundly deceitful to frame our cost burden for that in that way. And I'll tell you, just as a cautionary tale to vendors who might think that a bait and switch like that can work out, that happened to me in 2005. And that's a pretty major vendor who's still in business, and I, to this day, will not do business with them and have never referred them to anyone else who asked me for recommendations, even for things that I know that they can do, because of the amount of either incompetence or dishonesty that they displayed in that contract.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Yeah, um, neither of those are forgivable, quite frankly. Uh, I mean, that's that's just a and I would love to say that what you just described is an isolated circumstance, but but you know, you can see the trail of breadcrumbs that we've started laying here about the shareholder focus versus the stakeholder focus, and then you know, the stories that you told before. I I I'm I'm afraid that this problem that you're describing as far more commonplace than we would like to believe that it is. And I think that's a function of culture, which is a function of leadership.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

Yes. And I'd like to share my counterexample. I had another vendor, uh, and he has since retired. Uh, but this one essentially partnered with us beautifully. And when we needed something new, he ended up charging us about half of what the build costs because we said, yeah, the stuff you build from us you can sell to other people. And so we ended up being his his RD shop. Here's a neat new feature that we think your other customers are gonna like. You let us do your alpha, let us do your beta, let's see if we can build this bleeding edge together. And that was a wonderful partnership that ended up lasting about 15 years. Yeah, that's a brilliantly um consistently was charging us very competitive rates, probably undercharging us because we were um his advertising engine, his RD engine, his test bed. And boy, if this is when I was at Microsoft, if we could make it work in that organization, you could make it work anywhere. And so that really was in this case him being really, really customer, um, customer driven, literally using the customer to help drive his business forward.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

Yeah, I love that story because I we need more of this right now because the future is co-innovation like that. That's what's actually going to create meaningful, I'll say offerings, right? That could be solutions, that could be products, that could be services, what but offerings. But offerings that are actually really solving problems and helping meet customers where they are. So I love that. Yeah. Uh afterwards you'll have to tell me who that person was so I can think about researching that a little bit. But um, yeah, I love that story. So shifting gears just a tad uh to extrapolate from that. So you've spent uh your career helping organizations measure people, performance, organizational effectiveness. Kind of along this theme that we're talking about here, from your perspective, um, what do most leaders still fundamentally misunderstand about the relationship between employee experiences and the customer outcomes that companies hope to achieve?

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Oh, you know, that's such an interesting question because there is some folklore that if your customers are happy, or if your employees are happy, that will naturally make your customers happy. And we know that that's not true. Sometimes your customers can get really happy and start to think that the your employees can get really happy and start to think that the customers are there to serve them. Uh and they can really uh get the attitudes a little bit upside down. And the challenge is to make this a rising tide that lifts all votes. And some of that, I think one of the places that people frequently get things wrong is that um we know that when you have uh employees who genuinely understand the strategy and genuinely are there feel uh commitment to meeting the customer's needs, giving them some autonomy to go a little bit off script to meet that need in a way that that provides significant value to that customer and does not uh create significant harm back to the company is really important. And so one of the things we're doing in organizations over the last decade or two is standardize, standardize, standardize, standardize. And the opportunity to allow a little bit of flexibility, I think can be really, really powerful. It can be scary because you have to have a lot of trust. You have to think that there there has to be a lot of competence, there has to be confidence in their integrity to really kind of loosen the reins a little bit and say, do the right within these guardrails. Uh but I think if you can create a situation where that's true, some really phenomenal things can happen.

SPEAKER_02 15:34

Yes, agreed. Um going off the script a bit because you mentioned a word that I think is really important um as part of this topic. Um trust. Trust is really suffering right now. Um if you look at Edelman's Trust Index, it's as wide of a gap as we've seen in a very long time. Um, you know, the we've got some very exciting things going on right now, right, Alexis. I mean, the my gosh, I mean, the things that I built using AI a year ago compared to what I built literally yesterday in three hours is unbelievable the exponential growth that we're seeing in that. Um, but it's also creating some very real fear out there among employees. Um, you know, what's my shelf life, basically? Um what are your thoughts about how organizations should be handling that trust bond between the company and the employee right now?

SPEAKER_00 16:43

Oh boy, I love this question, and I'm so delighted that we're going off script. There was an article in JAP close to 20 years ago that I swear changed my life. It was a meta-analysis about trust. And as most meta-analyses, it was, you know, hundreds, thousands of studies, and they basically determined that there were three key factors in trust. The first was competence, can you actually do this? The second was integrity, do your words and your actions line up, and the third was benevolence. Do I think that you have my best interests in mind? And so I think anytime you can keep those three things in mind and then be honest. That's really that integrity one. A skill or a function has a short shelf life. That's an and there's always been sort of an undercurrent of this. In fact, I saw some economic data in the last week or so that we've been chunking along with about the same number of layoffs for a really, really long time on a monthly basis. It's just that now they're hurting people who used to think that they were pretty isolated and insulated from that. And so I think if you can be really honest about where the risks are, show up with real competence that you know uh enough about your business to understand some of that, uh, and then really show up with the term benevolence, I think, really applies. I do have your best interest in mind. You're not just a line on a balance sheet. I do care about not just the employees, but also the customers, also the community that we sit in or serve, right? And show up with a little bit of this. It does not have to be dog eat dog, claw your way over dead bodies to get to the top in order to be successful. And we see time and time again where the ability to hold all three of those in tension together can really deliver outstanding results.

SPEAKER_02 18:37

Yeah, I I think that's right. Um and one of the strangest phenomena that that I'm seeing right now is the arrogance of uh CEOs really bragging uh about how they were able to reduce their headcount by 15%, all in the name of operational efficiency. That doesn't create that trust. That doesn't show that benevolence that you're talking about. It shows almost a diabolical uh Machiavellian um kind of an attitude toward building relationships. And you can't build great long-term relationships with customers if you're telling employees that you know they really don't matter the minute that they walk in the door. Um, and you're also embedding that fear and that employee base that's still around. I mean, okay, maybe short-term operational efficiency and gains that please, again, the shareholders, maybe that works in the short run, but it's not playing the long game. Because I keep questioning, and I'd be interested in your perspective on this. How is that impacting that company's employer brand? How are they going to recruit future talent? How are they going to establish re-establish really that trust? Because we know, right? The pendulum always swings back the other way. And yes, AI is amazing, just like the internet was amazing, just like personal computing was amazing, right? Just like electricity was amazing. We know the pendulum's gonna swing back the other way, and these companies are gonna go, oh shit, we actually do need really talented people. Let's go hire those folks, and then nobody's gonna trust that the organization is gonna treat them right. Your perspective on that.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

Well, I agree with you, and I think one of the things that is not going into the financial calculations when people think, oh, I can like engage in this kind of layoff behavior, is how much more it does cost them in a couple of ways. One, it becomes much harder to recruit top talent to your organization because they have options and they're going to go somewhere that feels like they have a career opportunity. We've known this for decades. It's a key driver of what opportunities people consume or choose. And then um, it will cost them more in the salaries that they have to offer. So they will have one or both of those problems where they will get essentially a lower quality of talent, and or they will end up paying a lot more for the talent that they do acquire. And so there really are long-term consequences, and the the half-life of those consequences can be very, very, very long. So I do worry about that employer brand reputation. Uh, it's one of the reasons why when um when hiring went just crazy, like it stopped, and then it went way up, and then it went way down again, right? Sort of in those first couple of years of the pandemic. Um the organization it was at at the time, and I you could look it up and figure it out, but I won't name it here, uh, was getting ready to cancel all of their college hires. And we said, you can't do this because you'll never get you won't get another college hire for a decade, right? Or at least not a top one. And the college hires we were going after had multiple offers. And when they get multiple offers, and there's one that they feel like might get yanked back from them versus one that they feel confident in, I better take the one they feel confident in. So the the the legs of those decisions, the tentacles are long.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

They are. And I think that um we're seeing a very myopic focus right now from our senior leaders. And I see this, I talk about this in my book a lot. That um um you know, I showed you the model of the pyramid, right? And the whole idea is you can become more customer-driven, but it's just like product development. You have to continue to work really hard at staying there if you're able to get to the top. Otherwise, I'll borrow from Bob Hogan here, you can derail and backslide into less desirable territory. And I see this happening all the time right now because our leaders and teams and middle managers and the leaders of frontline associates have never been under more stress and pressure to deliver short-term results, potentially at the cost of long-term results.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

Yeah, and it's interesting, there are a lot of things that are changing at the same time as the AI revolution, and some of that is for many people's working life, call it the last 15 years, um, since the 2008 financial crisis, money has been really cheap. And that makes different organization uh decisions possible. When you can essentially borrow money for almost nothing, um, when you can take on debt as an organization for almost nothing, a lot of your decisions can be very different. And we are not used to operating in an environment of high interest rates and what the consequences of that are. So we've got all of these decisions that are kind of coming together and um and crowding the cognitive space that's available. And we know that most people can only really consider a few things at a time. But there are not that many people who are true organic systems thinkers and can think about you know 15 different features at once. So we have to help them. We have to build something like you mentioned, Howard Schultz and his famous two chairs. Here's your visual reminder. Are we thinking about these things too? It's easy to get derailed by these conversations. What are the consequences over here to these, you know, two invisible people and these chairs that I've brought along? And given the additional complexity that we are navigating, how can we help keep that top of mind so that people can make thoughtful decisions? And yes, you can you can certainly rely on AI to help you, but I know you've had the experience of AI giving you a confident but wrong answer and a very narrow answer about this. Right. And then it like reverses itself. Um uh and and so I think we really have there's a lot of opportunity to really get in trouble right now.

SPEAKER_02 24:54

Oh yeah. Yeah. I um I I often talk about uh to your point, uh when I was still teaching in Michigan State, uh I have one of the modules that I had in my um class was on AI and how it impacts leadership, employee, and customer experiences. And uh it's definitely gotten better over the last few years. But um, you know, I gave you the example that I asked as part of the class, uh ChatGPT to write a biography of James H. Killian PhD, which it flawlessly articulated. It was beautiful, except it was for James R. Killian PhD, who was the former president of MIT and Nixon's advisor to NASA. That's definitely not me because I don't know shit about robotics. So so th thinking about like So I did the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

Oh, did you? Except it did know who I was. It did know who I was, it got the first paragraph pretty right. Uh and so, like, know as an IO psychologist and all these kinds of things. But then it went off the rails and said I had been CHRO of Airbnb, where I've never worked in a role I've never had, I've never been a CHRO. Uh it gave me a PhD from Stanford, which I've never had. Like it gave, like it just it started out like, here's some facts I know, and then it just started making shit up. Uh and it was they've gotten better about that, but they're fundamentally generative, right? Uh so they're like, what seems likely for this profile? And you can really, you can go pretty, pretty off the rails, even today, even with the better models. Um, you can still uh they're very very frequently confidently wrong.

SPEAKER_02 26:32

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's important to have that fact checker. I mean, I uh you know, I was saying that I set up some stuff just yesterday, and I've got a a team of agents that are out doing things and looking for these opportunities. But one of the the roles, the personas that I insisted on was I need a a fact checker to go through every single thing that the team is bringing me and verifying that it's accurate, you know, three times before you put it in front of me to make a decision about it. So I mean that's it's it's it's it's kind of like um, you know, AI is kind of like an intern or a puppy, you know. They're really eager to please, you know, but but they're not necessarily always on point.

unknown 27:18

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

Even just last week I had it confidently give me a statistic, and I'm like, and it was not one that I recognized. Like, find me a source for this. Like, oh, actually, you're right. There's not a real source for that. I just kind of like munged a bunch of things I knew together. I'm like, nah, I I knew that wasn't right. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:33

Oh God, that's like what was the comedian Stephen Wright? Uh, 97.8% of statistics are made up on the spot.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

Thank you. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 27:44

Too funny. Well, speaking of stats, I mean, um, and and you know, what we've been talking about is more um conceptual, but um, you've literally written the book about analytics and talent, and you know, and you said that you know measurement and analytics needs to be pragmatic and tied to actual business outcomes and not just to be interesting, which I think I think is important. And so, you know, when you think about this, you know, what does people analytics in particular need to look like to drive or deliver that actual business value, you know, to show real growth, real innovation, real customer loyalty through employees?

SPEAKER_00 28:27

Boy, I love that you're asking this question. And there's this sort of existential crisis in the at least some corners of the people analytics community right now, because a lot of what's happened, particularly over the last decade, uh, is people analytics has kind of morphed into the HR reporting function.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

And that's not the way I came up, right? I started doing this stuff in the late 90s, and it was very much what's a business problem we're trying to solve, and how do we take a workforce lens to it? And it's interesting to see people analytics now kind of coming back to that, where we have this opportunity to say, gosh, we have a cycle time or a development time that is too long. Let's figure out what we could do uh to make that shorter. And almost invariably there's gonna be a workforce component to that. Um how are we structuring teams? And structuring teams might be a combination of a physical agent, a piece of robotics, a synthetic intelligence, some sort of a an AI agent, it might be an individual employee, it might be uh an accessed external talent source, like a fractional executive or a vendor, a contractor. What are all the ways we could possibly sort of throw this into an optimization blender and say, here's the most efficient possible way that we could do this thing with the fewest errors, right? How could we uh lean into qualitative work to really understand meaning? Because if you want to change something, you have to understand not just what is happening, but why it's happening so you know which levers to pull. And so I think there is I think there's a tremendous uh opportunity to start with the business problem and then work your way back to the workforce implications. Whether that is something about how you are you mentioned culture earlier, so how you are um valuing different elements of your organization, structure and decision authority, how that functions. People think about org design mostly as just who reports to whom. But actually, I would argue that decision authority matters more than reporting relationship, and we don't spend enough time on that. Um moving your way backwards into what's your IT infrastructure? What's even possible for you? Where are you putting in human glue of, you know, where's there a rogue Excel spreadsheet that's still holding this whole thing together? Um, right? Because you know those happen. Uh it's real.

SPEAKER_02 30:46

It's real.

SPEAKER_00 30:47

But how do you start with the business problem and work your way back to something with people, as opposed to starting with people data and saying, oh golly, what might this be related to?

SPEAKER_02 30:57

Yeah, uh big fan, big fan of that. In fact, I um I I've got this employee experience maturity workshop that that I've done for years, and it you know, it flips the script because you know, oftentimes, like back to the whole software sales or IT sales thing, you know, that's when I won't name any names because I used to work for some of them. But but, you know, the the team walks in, they're like, you need a better engagement survey. Do you really need a better engagement survey? Why don't we actually start with what are the business imperatives that you're trying to solve? And then let's figure out how you're measuring those business imperatives. And then let's think about what does that look like through a human lens, an employee to customer lens. Then let's figure out where are you now, where do you need to be next, and how long do you want to take to get there? And I think that that's just simple and effective and very rarely executed on, frankly. Well, and Alexis just departed. This is one of the joys of doing a live podcast.

SPEAKER_00 32:18

I apologize. Um speaking of employee engagement surveys, I had uh situation years and years and years ago on the customer item where we actually showed that the assessments on the engagement survey of the extent to which the leader of that country unit expresses certain customer-driven behaviors could be tied to contract renewals within that country. In other words, I could agree the employees knew whether leaders were prioritizing customers and the things that that leader examined and cared about were really showing up in the business success and the continued financial success in that region. Um but you're right, figuring out what matters, like the extent to which we're prioritizing customers and building an engagement survey around that instead of building an engagement survey that it seems like some people are just trying to find things that they can get good scores on.

SPEAKER_02 33:19

Check the box, score chasing. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Right. And um in reality, those scores that are consistently high, they're not useful statistically. You need variability in order for anything interesting to happen in the math. And so you want to find the places where there's something broken because that tells you where there's something you can do better. And folks don't don't generally approach their uh their engagement surveys certainly that way. It is more like how can we use this as almost like employee marketing? Like, wow, look how great your job is.

SPEAKER_02 33:53

Oh, yeah, well, that's like the great place to work survey, you know. Ooh, look at us, we're great place to work, you know. But but also, you know, big no-no I've seen is um you know, engagement scores being tied to variable comp and bonuses. I mean, so what does that look like? Listen, Alexis, I really need to make sure that you give me a five out of five on all these marks, or you know, we're gonna have a problem.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

I mean, that happens years ago when I uh took over the employee survey at Microsoft, the job, this was a long time ago, the job came with a filing cabinet that had employee surveys going back to 1993. Yes, and on the front of that filing cabinet was taped a Dilbert cartoon that was about the employee survey, and you know, if we got good scores, then we would all get a bonus, and it was this exact problem. And the last frame was one of the characters saying, I'm gonna line me up a new couch. And it was just like such a distillation of what we were rewarding. We were rewarding what people told us instead of actually trying to find, you know, where the bodies are buried, trying to find where the opportunities are to make things better.

SPEAKER_02 35:04

That is priceless. I love that. Um Wow, in the literally in the filing cabinet. That they hadn't even digitized it.

SPEAKER_00 35:11

In front of the filing cabinet.

SPEAKER_02 35:13

Wow, that's impressive. So uh Alexis, I you know you you um you've been uh doing a lot of thought leadership over the last 18 months or so. Uh what are you working on right now? What's exciting you?

SPEAKER_00 35:25

Oh, bless you for asking me. Um, obviously, everybody than their brother is playing with AI, so I'm doing a lot of little AI stuff myself, but also working with organizations as they move through their AI strategies and helping take these from uh pretty looking decks into things that are really transforming work and organizations. A lot of that is then leading uh back to two of my great loves uh around organization design and strategic workforce planning. And just like I think probably every good IO psychologist, I'm still doing some leadership effectiveness and team effectiveness stuff that really is uh near and dear to my heart. Plus, I've got a couple little writing projects, another book that'll be coming out next year.

SPEAKER_02 36:03

Oh wow, congrats. That's uh great news for you. Yeah, and I'm just uh hoping to get you know number one punched out by the fall. So it's it's a laboratory. We're in copy editing, though. It's there.

SPEAKER_00 36:15

Oh, that's great. And uh like many things, it's one of the things that you're happy. The middle of the experience is terrible. It's kind of like um having a baby, like labor delivery, not a good time. But then the baby's here, and it's really exciting.

SPEAKER_02 36:29

That's hilarious. Well, you know, um I know um also a shout out here. I know you're doing a little bit of work with some of our mutual friends, John Golding and Justin Black with Work Vivo. Uh one of the things that I'd be interested in your perspective on, um, I'm um I've recently been speaking a lot about what I'm calling WX or work experience, because as I look at kind of like what we're talking about with engagement scores, it's becoming a lagging indicator. I say employee experience has also become a lagging indicator because it's basically how were your first 30, 60, 180 days? How was your promotion? How was your post-parental leave? You know, I mean, how are the other 364 days this year, right? Um, and so mm the concept here is um you have to create the conditions for success for employees to thrive that allows managers to manage. And that has to deal with things like uh the importance of culture, accountability, uh collaboration, systems integration, and onboarding all these various sources. So I'm curious what your your perspective is on that and um how you think that um you know some of the investments these days could actually help create those conditions for success.

SPEAKER_00 37:49

You know, I'm really excited about what the the opportunities AI brings forward to create those conditions. And what I'm worried about is that organizations are trying to create conditions for success in yesterday's context. Oh, yes, as opposed to success in the future context.

SPEAKER_01 38:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 38:06

Right? And I think uh it's very easy. Training models, by definition, will help you be successful yesterday, where the data came from, instead of a sort of more of a futurist approach to what will be necessary. And if you think about the old like the old hay group climate design, it's like, oh, how much how much autonomy do you have in your decision making? I think that we now have through the sort of um agentically available tools where you can always have up-to-date project status and all these kinds of things that can give you more breathing room in terms of what you can do accurately. We know that clarity is really important and the opportunity to have clarity now is really high. Conversely, the opportunity to have mass pandemonium is also really high. So I think organizations have a role in really creating conditions for success around boundaries of autonomy and what your authority is, around creating conditions of clarity, uh, and really giving folks whether they are um when you talk about work experience, whether they are sort of traditional employees inside the organization, whether they are kind of floaters, if you will, inside the organization, so flexibly deployed on a project basis inside an organization, like a flexed pool nurse in a hospital system or a consulting firm, uh, or externally accessed folks who may be sort of floating in and out, the conditions for success for those have never been more possible if we can architect them effectively so that you can get your hands on the right information at the right time and really have that be presented to you in a digestible way at the moment of need, instead of you having to go out and look for it. You having to know that some new policy was launched or some new product was launched at the moment of need, it should be presented to you. And you can't like humans can only process so much information. So, really getting into some discernment about what I'm presenting to you when our tools now can do that better than any previous uh any previous technology I've ever seen. And so I am really excited about this opportunity to connect people to information and other people and help them understand effectively the playground that they get to operate in.

SPEAKER_02 40:16

Yeah. I, you know, that that whole concept of JIT, just in time resources, you know, get the right level of detail at the right time when you need it, not before, not after, now. I think that's really important. Well, Alexis, we're gonna land the plane here. Um, so uh the way that I like to finish uh our show is to ask, think about it in terms of like stop starts or continues, but uh what I call two things. If you could have a recommendation for you know leaders of teams and organizations, maybe one thing that they could start doing or continue doing to make sure that they are customer driven, and maybe one thing to stop doing so that they can become more customer driven, what would those two things be?

SPEAKER_00 40:59

You know, I really am a believer in the fundamentals. So the thing to start doing or make sure that you are doing is really uh what I said at the opening, making sure that the customer implications are part of every decision that you make, even ones that seem really internal, uh, making sure that that is part of your decision criteria, part of your whole decision architecture. And the inverse of that, not a terribly creative person, is to make sure that you are not uh prioritizing only the financial, the direct financial implications of your pricing model decisions, your hiring decisions, like whatever sits in your decision architecture, make sure that it is not exclusively near-term financials because I think the the place where we see folks getting in trouble over and over again.

SPEAKER_02 41:50

Yeah, I love that. Simple and effective words of wisdom from my friend Dr. Alexis Fink, ladies and gentlemen. Um Alexis, how can people best get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_00 42:02

The easiest way to find me is on LinkedIn. There aren't that many Alexis Finkes. I'm the IO psychologist that's blonde. Uh, and uh that's the easiest way to track me down. Uh if you want, if you're feeling ambitious, uh my website for my LLC is propellerinsight.org. Uh so you can um you can check out a little bit more detail there as well. That's also linked from that's also linked from my LinkedIn profile.

SPEAKER_02 42:23

Propellerinsight.org. Well, thank you so much. Um, Alexis, it's been a real privilege having you on. It's always a pleasure. I know that you know we have to actually cap this because you and I can easily go for another three hours being as ADHD as we both are, but we're gonna go ahead and end it here. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Thanks for my special guest, Alexis Fink. It's been great having you on, and thanks to the XM Global Collaborative for hosting this episode. Uh, we will see you all for the next episode. Thanks so much.