Rea Rotholz: We have a wonderful conversation today, and so I want to go ahead and get started so we have the full amount of time.
Let's go ahead and start with some introductions. It would be wonderful, Gianna, if you want to kick us off.
Gianna Driver: Sure. Yeah. Well, hi everybody. Good morning. I am super excited to be here and really looking forward to our conversation today. So Gianna Driver, former CPO of Lattice and Exabeam and BlueVine.
And I get super excited thinking about HR people analytics and this moment in time. So can't wait to dive in more. And with that, maybe I'll pass the talking stick over to Jeff.
Jeff Diana: Hello there. Great to have everybody on today's conversation. I think I saw Ukraine on the list, Norway. We got some folks from all over, which is awesome.
I'm Jeff Diana. Like Gianna, I've done the CHRO gig several times, taking companies from small to public. You can see that there. These days, I focus on advising early stage businesses on the challenges of scale. And my real goal is to try and continue to up level the skills of our community because we're the discipline that can have impact in businesses like no other.
So I'm excited to be here today.
Scott, how about you?
Scott McGillivray: I'm Scott McGillivray with Docebo. I'm the VP of Total Rewards and HR Operations. Currently calling in from Ottawa, Canada. So, luckily it's warming up for us a little bit here. For those of you that don't know a lot about Docebo, we are the world's most powerful learning platform in the business of learning.
We work with organizations around the world to deliver scalable and personalized training for employees. Partners, customers driving a revenue productivity enablement. Our product is stable and intuitive. We have innovative technologies in content generation, analytics. and automation. We've got the most advanced AI capabilities in the industry. So effectively, what we do is we support businesses to create content, manage content deliver training to diverse audiences and effectively provide Reporting that can give you what the impact of your learning programs are all in one single population. So that's what we do and who I am.
Rea Rotholz: Thank you, Scott and Jeff and Gianna. So excited for today. I will do a quick introduction of myself as well. I'm Rea Rotholz. I lead Hone's learning strategy team. And I'll do a very quick intro of what Hone is as well. We are proud integration partner with Docebo. So we have a lot of joint customers, which we love.
But Hone is your all in one partner for employee development. We specialize in the live instructor led training modality, and so anything related to power skills or as we like to call them universal skills, leadership skills, etc. We are your partner for that. We are passionate about working with our subject matter experts and how we've created our content.
So everything we've made has been out in, was made in house and all of our sessions are highly interactive. So it feels like, a zoom classroom where your learners are engaging directly with the coach and each other and really practicing the tools and frameworks that we teach. So just very quick, want to do a very quick intro of hone and now let's get into.
Today's topic, which I know I've been hearing a lot about from our customers. And research also shows, look. The top three strategic priorities for CHROs today. One, elevating HR's impact on the organizational's growth strategy. Two, building a deep bench of change leaders. I don't think the deep bench is necessarily new, but this idea of we need change leaders, I keep hearing more and more, and we'll talk about that today.
And then of course, creating a future ready workforce. In the world of AI, in the world of the changing landscapes, right? What does future ready really mean for the individual organization? So these were the top three priorities from CHRO's courtesy of Gartner. And, why do we share that? Well, Managers are really a linchpin when it comes to addressing some of these challenges, but they also have their own challenges, right?
And so we pulled some stats here from the latest research around about some of what managers are facing, right? They're drowning in responsibilities. They don't necessarily feel equipped to handle it. They have more direct reports than ever, right? This idea we have to do more with less, we have to be more efficient, we have to be more streamlined, right?
We hear about this a lot. And with that, They're also facing more complexities in the work that they're actually doing, right, giving, given today's environment. So we're making them do more with less and we're increasing what that kind of scope of work is. So this is why we picked today's topic and brought together this expert panel to chat about.
And we're going to chat about it today. But before we start our panel, we did want to hear from you all. So thank you for those of you that have already chatted in some of the key skills that you think are important for managers. We have this poll as well. So manager development challenges. When you think about your managers, what feels like the biggest headache?
Right now, when it comes to your managers and you can I think you can probably like more than one. Not sure, but y'all let me know. So is it leading through constant change, managing a growing list of to do's and responsibilities, wanting to provide ongoing development, but. Not wanting to burn them out, ensuring they have the right skills, balancing their leadership role with the daily demands from their team, or something else, feel free to chat in.
Those are sometimes the most interesting answers. So, what are you facing today? Go ahead. And my colleague Caitlin is monitoring for when we get Critical massive responses. So go ahead and click what your biggest challenge might be today. What do you, any guesses, Scott, Jeff, Gianna, what do you think is going to pop up?
Jeff Diana: I think you're going to, many of them are, it's interesting to me as I look at this list and your list on the prior slide of what managers are facing. And I pretty much could have swapped out manager with every HR human on the planet and said, wow, we have a real shared. Challenge around the dynamics of business and what's facing us, right?
Do more with less, more uncertainty. All of that seems like a common theme.
Scott McGillivray: Yeah, I think it really starts with that. Do more with less. Everyone's got a lot on their plate. They pulled in a ton of priorities and making sure that they're focusing on the right things are some of the things that I think are going to be top of mind for sure.
Rea Rotholz: All right. Were you right? So 41 percent balancing their leadership role with the daily demands of their teams. Not super surprising, right? We're seeing even more like player coaches out there where individuals have their own responsibilities and they're leading a team. Interesting. And then a tie for helping them lead through constant change, managing their growing to do lists and responsibilities Not as much around ongoing development with operating them out and ensuring they have the right skills for the future, although we'll touch on that today.
And then I also was looking at the chat too, right? It's hard to pick the biggest challenge and the constant change is really important. Awesome. Well, thank you all so much for chatting in, feel free to, I always love when people continue to chat, like we are a network of HR professionals on this call.
So feel free to chat in with each other as well as we, as well as I chat with our panelists for today. So to kick us off team with the first question, Many of us do feel like we invest so much in developing managers, yet we still hear that people tend to leave an organization because of their experience with their manager.
Where do we think the disconnect is? What's the hardest truth that we as HR professionals need to face about why kind of This is happening and why manager development isn't necessarily translating into better leadership. And for this one, I'll kick off with Gianna. If you want to start with your perspective here.
Gianna Driver: Yeah, sure. Well, so you know, the premise of the question is that organizations are providing training and management enrichment to people managers. So if we assume that is true, which Yeah. Is questionable, but let's just for a moment. My experience has shown that a lot of times managers are not prioritizing their own growth and development, right?
It's, Oh it's quarter end it's year end. There's this, new release. There's some other reason why I'm unable to. Read this thing. Attend this session. Travel to this place. And so I think that the onus is really a shared one. I do think it's incumbent upon organizations to offer L and D and, talent development.
And I think at the same time, it's equally important that managers are prioritizing and creating space to learn and grow.
Scott McGillivray: And I think to jump on that a little bit. I've been in the reward space for forever. And when I think back to, executives walking in my door and saying, oh, I need to incentivize my people to do this.
I've heard forecast accuracy. I've heard revenue. I've heard, bringing everything else. But one of the things I don't hear as often is I want to incentivize my manners to develop themselves to really drive that behavior and make that a principal part of what they do. So, you know, when you Pay for what you want.
And that's not something so that indicates a lot to me that senior leaders, though they talk about it, are not necessarily wanting to always put the investment behind it in where it matters. So if you're talking about chasing the quarter or chasing the month end, those are probably the metrics that matter most for that leader success,
Rea Rotholz: Put their right Scott,
Jeff Diana: When I look at it, look, we talk about how much we invest in managers, I'm going to call BS on that to a large degree.
I think if you look at it as a P& L line item and you sat down with your CFO and you ranked investment priorities, the amount of money we spend on manager development doesn't even register on the scale. So for as much as we say how important it is to our businesses in practice, where we put our investment would say otherwise.
I also think, we have this interesting thing where we view managers as the knight in shining armor. We have this syndrome, they're going to come in and solve all this stuff. But we really haven't set up managers by right sizing the roles, the scope, the expectations. And it's odd because we look at managers and say, develop yourselves and own developing your people.
Walk that up the chain. How many C level executives are really tracked and measured and their top priority is I have to manage? And develop my direct reports while I'm managing and developing myself. We're not, we're focused on shorter term operational execution. So we've really got to look at that dynamic, but to say we invest that much in it, I don't think so, not for the level of importance we say that it has on our business.
Rea Rotholz: I'd love to double click on that because we have this, okay, we know managers aren't prioritizing it, right? Gianna's point, which totally agree. And the chats agree too. And then we also have this. Well, they're not prioritizing it because they're not given permission to prioritize it from the top. We're all HR leaders here.
Many of us are not in the C suite, right? I'm curious if any of you have thoughts or advice on how to make the business case for the C suite to champion learning when it's not necessarily an OKR, Jeff, to your point, that they're being held accountable to. Curious if anyone has any thoughts on that.
Scott McGillivray: I think in my experience, you have to start just executing on that and making it a priority. So I think about from my team, I publicly post all the learning that I do and development I do just to give permission to my team to do that. And I do it both upward and downward. So that it becomes normal. It becomes something that I'm doing and it gives permission or leeway to everyone else to do it.
So it's one strategy I've employed, which I've seen my employees feel a lot more empowered to take that on. Mind you, I'm in the HR space, so maybe it's a little bit easier to jump on that bandwagon than it would be if you were in, a different part of the business.
Rea Rotholz: I love that. That's a really tactical.
We love tactical tips on our webinars. So, the tactical tip is, can you encourage leaders throughout the business to explicitly share? Hey, I just went to this amazing training program, or I just invested in going to this conference, or I just read this book. By the way, right? Even just talking about how they are taking it upon themselves to develop is role modeling.
I love that very tactical thing. Scott,
Gianna Driver: what I would add to that. So I agree with Scott's point. What I would add to that is yes, creating this culture of learning and sharing about it and having that be normalized. Absolutely. And also my hypothesis and what I've experienced is that over time, if you start looking at the data, generally speaking, what you start to realize is those teams where managers are prioritizing learning and growth and development, those teams generally have less attrition.
They have, higher rates of promotions within those organizations and things. And so I think it begins with some of the culture shifting that we're talking about and normalizing learning. And also tying data to that. And when we start to tie data to it, and there are true business metrics there, then CFOs and CEOs and the rest of the C suite tends to embrace these a little bit more.
Jeff Diana: Yeah, I think you're right. The days of saying we ought to do it because it's the right thing to do, or it has some really long term benefit, but a short term hit are not going to sell in the current market conditions. Like we have to be able to. Make it be about business impact in a shorter time horizon, which I think we can.
The one helpful tip I'd give you Ray is schedule time. You want to do learning and you want your people to do it. You've got to tell them, Hey, take two hours a week, block it in your calendar. Tell me it's committed, whatever that is. And the big and with that is, make sure the expectations you have for those individuals allow them to preserve that time.
Because it's easy to say, go do it. And then if we give them 125 percent of capacity of work to do, well, guess what? That's never going to get fed. So you have to do both. Blocking of time and making it a habit in the crazy world we're in, to me, always helps people stay on task with investing and learning.
Rea Rotholz: Yeah, there's the two, what are you doing as you're managing up, right, to make sure that you get the budget and the buy in to do the programming? And Gianna, you mentioned, like, tying to hard metrics, always. You've got to tell that ROI story. But then also, what are you doing for the individuals who are expected to actually take the training?
How are you selling that? Why, how are you doing the appropriate communications and change management? I always tell, our customers, look, a lot of companies view learning and individuals view learning as separate from their job. It's like, I got to stop doing my work so I can go to this training class and they don't see it as.
A really crucial part to continuing to grow and develop. And honestly, if you don't grow and develop today, you're going to be left behind right as an individual and a company, and they don't see that. So it's like, how do we really make that super clear for learners as well? Really helpful. So we talked about, look.
Managers are stretched thin, they have larger teams, increasing complexity, all of the things that we've touched on. I think, Jeff, you even mentioned this, we are expecting too much of them often. And this is the reality of a lot of companies, right? Where they maybe had to go through layoffs, or they had to restructure, or they're trying to do more, frankly, just with the same number of resources.
How do we help? Like what's the solution here? What do we do for this? I'm curious if any of you have, not a bullet, but yes, go ahead. I
Scott McGillivray: think from my perspective absolutely. Yes. Managers have a million, one things to do and they're stretched in a million different directions.
And that is a huge problem, but a big part of that is we reward now. Great work with more work. That seems to be our model within the industry. So, I think the secret sauce or one of the things to really help managers is push them in the direction of prioritization stakeholder management, because if you can get that across all levels of management, you can get laser focused on what matters most for the business and driving that when we're pulled in a million directions and everything's a priority and everyone above you is saying it's a priority.
So yeah. We're gonna struggle. So if you can invest, I would invest in that skill set in developing that and really pushing that through your entire management core to stay disciplined. And then you're really pushing the needle
Jeff Diana: to me that look, I don't think we're ever going to take away, especially in this tough economic set of conditions.
We face the expectations on managers from an execution standpoint. The work we give them what their team has to deliver. Again, it's more people, it's less resourcing, that's elevating. We already know they don't have the core capabilities to execute that and toggle across that work. So where do we create a release valve if we want them to invest in themselves?
And to me, the best place to do that is to free managers from owning and driving their people's development. If we can get individual development really embedded on the individual and enable them to do That will free capacity for the manager to say, yes, I have to execute all my team's goals and motivate and all that.
Now I can have some time, the little bit of time I have, I can invest in myself versus others. So that where all boats are rising, as they say, and I think it's now easier than ever with ai, the learning tools that are out there. I've used hone and businesses before, and it's elevated my manager's freedom because people can do it just in time and peer based.
And so the elevation of the technology we have, I think. We've never had a better time to free managers from the burden of growing their people. Again, not stopping, giving them feedback, not encouraging them, but true skill development. If we can move that, we can make space for the manager to develop themselves.
Otherwise, I think we're kidding ourselves with the balance that we put in place or the lack thereof.
Gianna Driver: Yeah. So I think that Scott and Jeff, I think you've nailed this. The only thing that I would double down and add is again, going back to AI, right? Like that is the wild card. We live in a world where yes, managers are stretched thin and yes, managers need to be enabled and be able to prioritize, like all of those things absolutely agree.
And also I think what What we all need to be doing more of is leveraging AI here because that is the wild card that allows us to scale in ways never before. And the technology is only getting more and more advanced and generative and intelligent. So I'm very excited about that.
Rea Rotholz: Let's dive, let's dive into AI, right?
This is the hottest topic and everyone has opinions on the pros and the risks and, what's the future going to look like. six months from now, five years from now. I'm curious, Gianna, like, I can feel that you have thought about this. I would love, I would love for you to start with your perspective and then of course, Scott, Jeff, feel free to chime in.
Gianna Driver: Yeah. Well, one of the things I really love about this particular time and space where we are with AI and let's contextualize and remember that AI really only came about a couple of years ago in terms of being, mass market available. But what's really nice is that it has empowered individuals to take learning into their own hands.
So AI can sit atop. Many different disparate data sources, structured and unstructured data, career paths, learning competencies, and also ingest performance feedback, that type of information and start to craft a very individualized and bespoke learning plan, individual development plan, whatever you want to call it for individuals.
And so, it's not just a manager's responsibility to steward the growth and development of their team. Yes, that is part of the manager's responsibility. But it is also my responsibility as a member of this company and as my own self to take charge of my own learning and development. And that's what I think that AI is really helping to to bring about in organizations.
Rea Rotholz: Yeah. The theme of take control of your career is honestly not new, right? I feel like Ellen, I've, my background's in L and D. So like the L and D space has been talking about, we need individuals to take control of their career, but this AI piece allows individuals to have something really tactical that they can do.
To really do that. So yeah, it's a dream. Sorry, Scott, you were going to chime in. No, it
Scott McGillivray: really does. I think AI is going to filter into everything and it already is. So, at the end of the day, we also have to consider what's the responsible use for that. And it'd be interesting to see what my colleagues think about responsible use, because this is not just going to be about developing yourself.
It's not just going to be about that. It's going to be ingrained in all of our jobs in one way or another. So if we actively learn more about it, if we learn, develop ourselves on AI itself, and those that embrace it, those leaders that really embrace it and help shape the future of how it's used in business and used in a manner that's responsible, then they're the ones that are going to lead the charge, they're the ones that are going to end up coming out of it.
Most effective from a leadership standpoint.
Jeff Diana: Yeah, I think, look, there's a fear factor of displacement and what will it do and a distrust. And certainly there's some validity behind the concerns for that. For me, there's two key things that AI unlocks here. One is, and you mentioned some of this, just the intelligence of telling me where to look for her.
Yeah. The learning I want to have. There's so much out there. It's inefficient for me to figure out what to look at how it builds together, right? So there's an efficiency when I want to do traditional learning activities to grow core skills, and I think I is going to unlock our ability to do that more effectively and efficiently.
The second part that we don't talk a lot about, though, that I think is equally as valuable is Because AI is so good at synthesizing information for us and allowing us to get answers to in context problems, which is another form of learning. It's not learning a new mature skill. It's learning knowledge in context to drive my immediate productivity.
But the better we're able to leverage it to make me more productive in my day to day work will free up some of that capacity that we talked about. We don't have to then invest in longer term skill development. And when you couple that with the intelligence of AI to where do I put this energy to develop that longer term skill?
Now you've got this great one, two punch where AI can play a really positive role in upskilling our people, just as it has some risk to displacing some of the work we do.
Rea Rotholz: Yeah I agree. It's an unknown. And I think there's also a lot of I don't know. I'm sensing some fear from folks, right, of like, the job displacement, especially in HR.
I talk to HR people all day. So like, especially in HR, it's like, what is that going to look like? But the reality is, it can be, yes, an agent that replaces certain functions, but like, I've chosen to view it as But then think about all the other things you're freeing yourself up to be able to do if you take advantage of this opportunity and view it as an opportunity and own your own career and upskill in AI, right?
Don't be left behind because this is something I know organizations can support their employees, provide formal learning opportunities and like really embrace it, but it's a new skill set for a majority of people, right? And so you have to take it upon yourself too in the theme of like take control of your career.
Absolutely.
Scott McGillivray: That's what I was looking at, that, really driving, the force, like embrace it, find ways that it's going to work within your organization to be able to then create something new. And if you just sit back and say, AI is going to take my job, AI will. Take your job. So you have to embrace and work with it, understand it.
And the more knowledge you have, that gives you power as leaders to really shape the future of where, we go from people development and from an overall HR industry. Because I think there's a lot that we can gain from what other industries are doing to drive their businesses forward. So I encourage all HR professionals out there to think about every task, everything you do, and how can we.
Work with this in a way that's going to make us that much more effective because everyone we interact with in our companies They're going to be doing that for their business. So if we don't have that same mindset, we're going to fall behind I love the comment
Jeff Diana: in the chat lindsay ray had I don't know if you read it I was like there is this sort of fear that through ai i'm no longer going to be A thinker because the technology is going to do the thinking for me I do think that's an interesting perspective and I understand why it's a fear.
I don't think it's the case because I think we're going to tackle more complex topics and connective tissue between sets of data than we ever imagined before because AI is going to bring pieces of that synthesis together. What we do with those insights and then put it back into context of what we're driving, I actually think you're going to see people use a critical thinking muscle actually more than they ever have before.
Because we actually haven't been able to tackle some of these complex areas to put critical thinking to. So we've just stayed away from them. And AI is going to make that a little more accessible. So even though I agree, it may have some dulling on one level, I actually think we're going to use the muscle more than we've ever used it before, ironically, as a result of that.
So I actually think it'll be a net positive, but I do hear the concern.
Rea Rotholz: So getting AI is obviously relevant really to like every conversation that we have now, but I do want to get back specifically to the manager piece, the topic of today's webinar. I saw, I think it was Fahad back in the chat was asking, besides I can't find it right now.
Oh, what are the soft skills you think managers need to get better at? Over the next 2 to 3 years, let's say AI is a given are there specific things that companies can be aware of, managers can be aware of, et cetera, that we should be focusing on?
Gianna Driver: Ooh, I love this question. What I go back to is I think having a curiosity mindset so creating space and normalizing, Trying things, being curious and when you try things, guess what?
You're not always going to be successful in that. And that's okay. And I think that's part of having a true learning rich environment is the freedom to try things, historically there was a lot of focus and emphasis on I think knowledge acquisition. But given where we are right now, it's.
It's not about knowledge acquisition. It's about synthesis. It's about knowing which questions to ask. It's about finding patterns in data and information and then diving deeper into that. And so I would say to the extent that companies and managers and leadership can foster a curiosity driven environment and also the emotional resiliency to, to try something and to fail and to get yourself back up and to just keep trying, I think is going to be really critical.
Scott McGillivray: Absolutely. And, when we met before and we're talking about this and you talked as passionately then as he did today, one of the things is really just being okay with not having all the answers we need managers to get there and to set that because, that's why you have teams.
And that's how we why we work together as corporations. It's to you. Drive things forward, but it doesn't always have to fall to that one individual. And at times we get that mistake of doing that. So we talk about working managers and that evolves to doing an everything manager as opposed to, working managers.
So I think it's really being comfortable in your own skin when you don't know things. And, as you talked about, curate different answers from different areas, AI being one of them, your team being another, your colleagues and other peers that you have on webinars such as this to be able to really drive that.
The experience for managers, push it forward.
Rea Rotholz: I love that. And I agree. And you know me, I want it to be tactical. So if we were to say we want all of our managers to be more curious how do we make that happen? Right? Like what are, what's something that we can do at our organizations that can really encourage that? I'm curious. If you all have any thoughts,
Jeff Diana: I think there's a couple of things, right?
We in this crazy world that we're living in these days on all levels. This concept of your culture and your values of how you work, I think I've never been more important to guide you. So looking at whether or not you've embedded adaptability, comfort with the unknown in that to me is a big place.
And are we telling those stories? Are leaders modeling those behaviors, all those things that. Really drive codifying your culture become really important. The second one to me is to ensure access of information. Like we still are not great at disseminating information inside organizations and the pace at which dynamics are changing and the way we can now synthesize information with all this technology out there, the key driver for that is the information itself.
And some of that is not out in the ethos. Some of it is business specific. So. The value and the efficiency and effectiveness of how we communicate and how we model those behaviors. Has never been more important. If you want to drive that.
Scott McGillivray: Yeah. And if I can jump in there, Jeff, there's one example. You talked about wanting some tactical things.
I have an example where we overhauled our performance management system. And one of the key things that we changed was a simple question. There was two of them. One is what have you learned from someone else in the organization this quarter? And the other one is what have you shared with someone else?
And it set that expectation that learning isn't just about joining webinars or taking a course or going on a phd or mba or something like that There's learning that happens every day and you need to share amongst your colleagues and that really changed the dynamic of what people were experiencing when it came to learning.
So two simple questions as part of the performance was it really was a game changer.
Gianna Driver: I love that Scott, because what I what that shows is, sustainable change often happens in these, like small moments consistently over time. And so by asking those sorts of questions, you're almost, creating space for people to start thinking a little bit differently.
I think that's genius. I love that.
Rea Rotholz: Brett thinks you nailed it.
Jeff Diana: Yay!
Rea Rotholz: We think so too. So I, another just another like tactical thing that. I know we do at home and I think it's easy to implement is the idea of a postmortem where the postmortem something failed, you lost that customer, that sales prospect, that feature deployment didn't go as planned, whatever it might be.
And choosing to have postmortems that are celebrating the wins that did take. What did we do well? Like, and then understanding that it's not always going to go well and calling attention to it in a positive way. What can we learn from this? I think it's also just something I've seen work really well too, and easy to do on like a individual team.
Or even a company level, if it makes sense, right, to have that kind of conversation. Okay, we're getting some great questions in the chat. Just a quick reminder, put it in the Q& A so that we can get to it in the in the Q& A section. I don't want to, I don't want to miss it. Okay, so let's talk about another term that we hear a lot right now, which is, and I'm going to air quote it, high performing teams.
I have literally had people ask me, how do I create a high performing team? Right? Certainly there is no one answer to that. It can mean a lot of different things for different organizations, but it is something that really everyone is trying to achieve right with their. with their teams in their office.
So, why are managers struggling? I know we've talked a little bit about just the context managers are in and their reality. But how can we help them? What can we be doing to help with this idea of we need higher performing teams?
Jeff Diana: Yeah, I've talked about this before with you, Ray. Like, I think the, again, we go to the manager and it's like, make your team more high performing.
I like to up level that thinking and say, what is the leadership of the business doing to set the conditions for a high performing organization? And I don't think we spend enough time as leadership teams really dissecting that we go to again, tactical down to managers. We skip all of this altitude and structure and say, make your teams more high performing.
So specifically for me, concrete things you can do. Look at your operating rhythm. Like, have you defined the soft structure of your business? What are the meetings we have? What types of decisions are made there? What amount of information gets disseminated after those meetings and to who? So mapping the flow of your rhythm of information and decision making and testing whether people actually understand that.
And is it getting people what they need? Similar to Scott's questions in the performance review, right? We will ask people, do you get the information you need to be successful specifically on information? Looking at the org design we have, like are we Structuring people to have a chance to make high performing teams.
If you give her a manager 25 direct reports, I do not care how great the manager is. That is not going to be an optimized high performing team. So there's structural components. There's flow of information components. There's clarity of business strategy for the year that we own as leadership teams. And I just think we abdicate our responsibility and how critical that is, because that's all of the environmental context.
Next. That determines the level of opportunity for high performance within teams, and I just don't think we spend enough time on it.
Scott McGillivray: Yeah, and I jump in and I spoke about it a little bit earlier, but alignment and focus, like once you get that nailed down, I think that helps everything you're just talking about, Jeff.
I think in the chat, I saw something pop up that talked about autonomy and accountability. Well, you don't have that without the alignment. You don't have that with looking at your organization and how you set those specific measures and support your management to be working on what matters most. I keep on going back to what matters most because we work on a ton of things, and that's not always what matters most.
So in order to have that autonomy and accountability that was spoken about Yeah, first, I have to have that direction that you're going and that focus to really drive people in that direction and then be able to say, how did we do against that? And that brings back that accountability piece,
Gianna Driver: I think of this through kind of a lens and framework of.
Define, enable, act, and then reflect. Because if you think about a high performing team, using the air quotes again what is that, right? Like, is that is that long term to the detriment perhaps of some of the short term things? Is it short term? Like, how are we defining a high performing team?
So I think it's really important that we define what we mean when we say a high performing team. Is it just, keeping people at the organization and not having them a trip and leave. Is it, like how, because you can define this in so many different ways, this product release, this, sales target, getting this main leads in the door.
Like, so let's just be super clear on what is a high performing team at this organization. And then crafting a strategy to enable leaders to have high performing teams and then holding them accountable to act and then reflecting, right? So the postmortems on are we doing this well? What can we do differently?
And tinkering around with it.
Rea Rotholz: Yeah. I love it. Go ahead.
Scott McGillivray: Are you seeing that on like a longer term basis? Cause I see it from a longer term basis. And then that might be where my career is coming from, but more and more as. Business accelerates and things are happening faster and faster. Things were thought about on a quarterly basis.
So we talked about farming. It might be high performing this quarter. I see things from a longer term view, and I think you've got a longer term success. But the lens of success for corporations and executives is getting shorter and shorter all the time, and we're moving faster as a business. And an industry to have that longer term view sometimes doesn't work as well though I still hang on to it.
Gianna Driver: Yeah. Well, and I agree, Scott. What I would say is I think there's not a cookie cutter one way, right? I think it's going to really be variable depending on the organization. If it's an organization, let's say, that is preparing for an acquisition the goals and what they are focused on might be short term.
And it's like, oh, we got to do this and this in order to get, this outcome versus an organization that's thinking they want to go IPO in 18, 24 months or whatever. Right. So I think there's not a silver bullet. on this is how to think about it. I think it's more of a customized way of thinking depending on what's important to the organization and to, the board and the investors and leadership at the time.
I think it's a really good point though.
Jeff Diana: Think about it. That's why you've got to have. Clarity of strategy, right? You've got to have flow of information so people can work with that information to then execute. And then I think you're right. I think success is a team by team definition and it will change over time.
One of the things I think we can do better as an HR discipline to help that is we tend to measure that performance around people's satisfaction or retention or those types of measures. Which aren't actually output measures for the business. So I think the more we can help teams define the output measures of what they drive, and it could be any number of the things you've already mentioned.
It could be the number of leads. It could be a product release, whatever that is, but setting the goal posts for whatever that timeframe is. And then giving them the information they need to go execute against that. I think we can be more business oriented and it loops back to what you said, right at the beginning of like, how do we get investment for this stuff?
Well, when I make it be about, we ought to do it or my people will stay or they're happier. In this business environment with the level of urgency around it that doesn't sell but to be able to say this investment will allow them to deliver their OKRs and here's what that looks like in each part of the business and that's going to add up to this level of business value.
For this small amount of investment, I think you're going to get CEOs and CFOs rationally want to back that in a way that we don't always get because of how we position the ask.
Rea Rotholz: A hundred percent. I know I've shared I'm in this L& D world. And so when I think of high performance in order to achieve those business outcomes and do more with less and all these things, I think about the skills.
that managers need. Are they prioritizing the right work? Are they delegating effectively? Are they coaching? Or are they doing everything themselves and burning out, right? Are they providing feedback? Like, all these things seem obvious that they would be important skill sets, yet. If we view the learning and the work separate, then we don't see it that way sometimes, right?
But it's all in service of the high performing teams hitting their metrics, right? So, love that. I heard alignment, having clearer goals, which I know many organizations don't even have clear goals, frankly, right? And the learning piece. So we had a, I, we did have a Q and A question, so I want to make sure we get to that.
And then if any of you on the line have any questions for this amazing panel, please don't hesitate to put in the Q and A. So Kristen asked, when it comes to L& D for managers, have you implemented Oh, interesting, Scott. Maybe you'll have an opinion on this. Any reward or incentive strategies to encourage them to take ownership of their growth?
What worked well or not so well? I called you out just because your total rewards, but yeah,
Scott McGillivray: no problem whatsoever. I do have an example and I was working prior to yeah, Operations company and really with factories, right? And so people are on the actual lines. And so you have got a certain number of staff and that you need to be able to operate a line.
And we wanted to be able to develop these individuals our chief operating officer started his career manufacturing on the line and now is the chief operating officer and he was operating He did that through his opportunities obviously very self motivated and drove a lot of things, but what he incorporated into our operational strategy is even for line workers, they were required to take development.
And so we created a production bonus and production obviously was mainly geared towards what they actually produce, but as part of that was development time and there was dedicated within shifts time that we set aside for them to develop and then measured them against that and what we got out of that wasn't a perfect program, I'd like to say it was a slam dunk, but we got some really effective team leads out of that.
A few people started moving into management and it opened up possibilities for people who thought they were gonna be on the line the whole time and moved into More managerial leadership positions and they understood the business. So by him putting that into place, driven from his knowledge and working with me to create a plan I thought we saw some great success.
It tapered off over time as the business got tough and production measures ended up being. The leading score or leading item. So that's where that short term thinking came in a little bit more. We needed to do specific things, but on the outset, we saw some really great results. So hopefully that answers the question or gives a practical example where I've seen it be
Jeff Diana: successful.
Funny Scott. Cause I was thinking back to my time at GE, which was also in industrial businesses and chemical plants. And some of that as well, besides financial services and the like, the one unique thing that I think Jack Welch did very well on this front was. The incentive was to the leaders of managers.
So they were measured on how many people were moved throughout the business were promoted, et cetera. So when it was my turn to be considered for a role, I was stacked against other candidates based upon how well I developed the people underneath me in a very quantitative way. So, and I, and in some of the businesses, there was actually part of their annual.
Variable cop was specifically tied to those development measures so you can get As tied into that as you want. So besides having the manager do it for themselves, it's like, if I incentivize the leaders around that, guess what, they're going to create space. They're going to create emphasis. They're going to remind the manager to make time on it because they're incentivized to win.
So I think some kind of alignment around that in the system is going to help managers make the time, not just skipping all that and going manager, you should care about this, right? Go do it. You've got to layer up the accountability and alignment above.
Gianna Driver: Jeff, I'm curious, did you ever find there was any like, abuse of that or like, working to have things appear a certain way and that this many people on your team were developed or promoted or whatever, so that then and the only reason I ask is because I've observed and experienced that when you tie financial incentives to this, it can sometimes create odd behavior.
Jeff Diana: Yeah, over time, the way that was addressed was by looking at the quality. and performance and trajectory of the people that you were developing. So it wasn't just to your point, let me get them somewhere so I can like check the box. It very quickly was tracked and Again, had really good performance systems and other things in place that measured very quickly and frequently.
So you could get some of those signals, but you're right. You got to make sure there's a counterweight on anything you measure and incentivize that it doesn't get abused from a performance perspective that you'll get. Some pretty wonky outcomes, for sure. Yeah,
Scott McGillivray: totally. Kian, are you implying as the reward guy that people game our systems?
Of course not!
Gianna Driver: I
Scott McGillivray: would never! We've made perfect systems that can't be gamed, so I disagree.
Gianna Driver: Of course! Of course. I did want to just chime in really fast and add to Kristen's question. I worked in an organization once where what we did is we gamified L& D a little bit so that there was this, healthy competition of sorts.
And I know it sounds really cheesy and corny, but there were no prizes. And like during the monthly, like town halls and all hands there was like shout outs and recognition and stuff like that. And it wasn't a monetary type of reward, but what I'm, incentivizing people to take learning.
Seriously, it can also take the shape and form of non monetary recognition and having fun, playing off of each other.
Rea Rotholz: And all of this just shows the investment. That the organization is having and learning, which I think is really the main point is if you're C suite and your senior leaders and the people who are running your company truly believe in it and are able to champion it in these various ways, then it all honestly, then it all becomes easier.
Frankly, it all becomes easier. I can share just like a couple of quick things from our customers that we know that they do. So definitely the gamification. Badging, etc. We also have a few that you have to do some formal learning before you're even eligible to apply to a manager role. So the expectation is you've taken some formal training, so that you're ready to take that step, right?
And everything is obviously documented. I have a customer that is an, um, they have to track their hours. So if you'd similar Scott, probably to being on like a floor, but like, or a unionized environment, but if you are in a professional services industry, legal, et cetera, where you are like logging hours and they have to be billable to a customer, that's when it gets challenging.
And you can be sure no one's going to take time to learn in that environment unless there is explicit permission to do so. So bucketing a certain number of hours with a certain code that is allowed for learning and expected for learning, I think is like, in my opinion, the only way to do that in that kind of environment.
So I do think understanding your unique environment that you're in and making sure that whatever you're doing is going to Work in that environment and understanding where the individuals are coming from, like in the build our pieces is really important.
Jeff Diana: The only interesting when I'll add to that, that I did an organization was, and I think it's similar to what you mentioned on a gamifying it.
We looked at the number of training hours and things of that people put in, and it drove our community investment. So you had the ability based upon how much time you train to, if you do act, we will donate 100 to a charity of your cause. And so we were able to connect us with community and a bunch of other good orientation.
And ironically, it was money our community people were going to spend anyways. Now, I know in this environment, some of that's been dialed back, but It was money that was already essentially going to be spent. We just found a way to not have to add additional spend and say, Hey, but the more you do this stuff, the more you're going to get control over where small sums of this.
Money goes into the community that you're passionate about and it drove a lot of, it drove a lot of traction 'cause people cared about that stuff.
Scott McGillivray: I love that. That's super meaningful.
Rea Rotholz: Amazing. Great question. Thank you. Okay, time check. We have six minutes. I have a couple of rapid fire questions that, so each of you will answer these questions and we will get some of your perspectives and then we will close out on time.
So. First rapid fire question. If you had to cut one thing from your leadership development programs that you might be running, you got to say no to something. What's something you would say no to. We always add on. We never take away. Right.
Scott McGillivray: That's hard. Quick fire. This isn't very quick. I don't have a good one. I, that one really, let me,
Rea Rotholz: Let me make it larger. So if you were to say no to something that, HR teams are spending too much time on, like what is something that you think you would want them to stop doing in order to start doing something else?
Scott McGillivray: For me, it's always meetings. We have way too many meetings that we don't need to be in. If you don't know why you're in a specific meeting, don't accept it. Don't be there. Have permission to walk away from that. There's definitely time to meet. We're all working in a remote world, so there's times that we have to meet to make those connections, but make it purposeful and know why you're there.
And if you absolutely don't know why you're in a meeting, don't attend. I give all my staff that permission to do and I hold it myself. Accountable to that as well, because that's what I eliminate immediately.
Gianna Driver: We've called that Jomo, so the joy of missing out and just I'm going to Jomo, right, and it just becomes this thing where it's like, oh, do you need a Jomo?
Because Jomo out, right? And it just makes it this fun, cool thing.
Scott McGillivray: I love it. I'm using that. I'm going to take that as my own though.
Gianna Driver: Yeah,
Scott McGillivray: I love that.
Rea Rotholz: Okay, so next one. We have found that a lot of companies are focusing on kind of the newer manager population, right, as a starting point for any sort of leadership development, et cetera. When you think about the newest managers who are promoted or new to the organization, what is a skill set that you think is really key for them to nail first and foremost for their career?
Jeff Diana: To me, this one always comes down to the same thing, self awareness. And confidence to surround themselves around their deficiencies. Like we all have them, but getting comfortable that, them, you're thoughtful enough to assess that or gather feedback to know your strengths and weaknesses. And then just have comfort in that.
Right. And that's hard to do, especially when you're in a manager job and you're trying to prove your way up the ladder. And you're seen as a leader of people underneath you and almost seems juxtaposition to say, yeah, I'm great. You can't see behind that curtain. I actually think the opposites. It's really important for managers.
Gianna Driver: I love that. I love that too. There's so many directions I feel, right? Like we could go with this awesome question. We look through the lens of it being first time managers specifically what I would say is something in the realm of teaching people. There's a difference between. Between being liked and being respected and holding people accountable and helping new managers learn how to navigate that territory because often new managers come from a world of having been peers with other people being liked is really important.
And so giving them some training and skills around how to continue to be kind and also hold people accountable as you step more into management and leadership.
Scott McGillivray: Yeah, I like that. I was gonna, I was gonna say the same thing, but slightly different. I talked about a little bit earlier, but prioritization and stakeholder management, whether your stakeholders or your subordinates, whether it's your superiors, people very often focus on the top and they don't focus on necessarily the people they're leading, but the people who are up top are expecting you to lead.
So really understanding that and, getting laser focus on what your priorities are and then managing your stakeholders because things are going to go wrong. Things are going to go sideways. You're not going to know the answer. You're still learning. But if you manage your stakeholders for delivery of a product, either upwards, sideways, or downwards, you're going to be much more successful as a manager, and you're going to start to understand where your strengths are, where your weaknesses are, and can continue to develop.
Rea Rotholz: Love that. Thank you. With one and a half minutes to spare, we do have some next steps for all of you on the line. Scott, do you want to plug the Docebo conference?
Scott McGillivray: Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, we've got our Inspire conference coming up in Orlando, we'd love to see everyone there. It's a great opportunity to go learn what we're about and how we're helping shape the world of learning.
So join us there.
Rea Rotholz: I'll be there. Come hang out
Scott McGillivray: and while you're doing it, say you want to see Scott there to help me get there as well. Yeah,
Rea Rotholz: Scott's like, why'd you get to go right and not me?
Scott McGillivray: I'm up in the cold in Canada. I need to get down to Orlando.
Rea Rotholz: We'll work on getting you to Florida. And then you can see me again on our next webinar with Hoan CEO, Tom Griffiths.
We're going to be talking about senior leader development. So today we talked a lot about managers, but what about those kind of directors, VPs, etc? How do we think about their upskilling needs? So definitely scan the QR code and join us for our next webinar. With that, huge thank you Gianna, Jeff, Scott, for joining us today and being a wonderful panel.
I feel like we had a lot of good tactical things for people to take away and some. Hot topics that we addressed. So huge thank you for you all for prioritizing this time with us. And thank you all who joined us on the line for joining today and taking an hour out of your busy day to, learn something new.
We know it's not easy as we discussed, right? So thank you all so much. Have a great day, everyone.
Scott McGillivray: Thanks everyone.
