Rethinking Manager Capabilities in 2026
[00:00:00] Linda Schwaber-Cohen: Without further ado, I'm very pleased to introduce Jeff, Diana, our wonderful moderator today, and dear friend of home to introduce himself and kick off our panel.
[00:00:11] So thank you, Jeff. Thank you panelists for being here and I'm looking forward to this conversation.
[00:00:16] Jeff Diana: Awesome. Thanks Linda. Thanks of course to everybody who's joined us. We really wanna make this as practical. And innovative as we can. So we want to hear your voice, we want to hear your questions. We wanna see what we can do to make sure you leave with value.
[00:00:30] My name is Jeff Diana. I'm a formal CHRO. Several stops from SuccessFactors to Atlassian to Calendly. Worked in lots of different industries and had several exits in my career. And these days I spent a lot of my time doing board work and advisory work, helping. HR organizations figure out how they can have the greatest value on their businesses and help businesses figure out how they can grow the top line.
[00:00:55] So excited to be part of this conversation, which is front and center for those types of topics. I'm gonna pass the introduction to Rebecca, who I see first, and then Rebecca, I'll let you pass it from there to hear from our amazing panelists.
[00:01:08] Rebecca Crotts: Hello everybody. So Rebecca Kotz, I'm dialing in today from Saratoga, California, which is in the Bay Area, and I am at Rubrik looking after talent development and inclusion.
[00:01:18] We are a home customer and love our partnership with you home. Thank you for helping us develop our frontline managers. And then maybe I'll turn it over to
[00:01:25] Sofia Lamuraglia: Sophia to introduce yourself. Thank you. Hi everyone. My name is Sophia La Morelia. I lead leadership development at the enterprise level at IBM. I am sitting today in the IBM Learning Center in Armon, New York, and super excited to start this conversation with you.
[00:01:42] Leslie,
[00:01:43] Leslie Laws: thank you Sophia. Hi everyone. I'm Leslie Laws coming to you from Miami, Florida. I'm a VP of HR at Thumbtack. I lead our HR business partner function. We work closely with leaders and managers to help them build high performing teams and help deliver on our business' goals. I also have a background in high growth technology with a real focus on org strategy, coaching and manager effectiveness.
[00:02:07] And of course, we are also a home customer and have loved seeing our home classes get scaled to all of our managers at Thumb Tech. Jeff, back to you.
[00:02:15] Jeff Diana: Awesome. Well, we have a great group of practitioners, which I love different scale businesses, different industry segments, so. I know this is gonna be an awesome conversation.
[00:02:24] I think to frame the conversation the, I really wanna step back and look at macro conditions first, and I think this is something that HR organizations need to do more of just to show our fluency and what's going on in the broader business context. So indulge me for a few minutes and I will frame that up.
[00:02:40] And then we'll get to the real experts, our panelists here for their advice for you on how to tackle this important topic. But if you step back and look at the macro environment, it's pretty challenging and opportunistic. And I think anytime you have a challenging environment, you have an opportunity to leapfrog your competitors and drive real differentiation.
[00:02:59] So keep that in mind as you hear all the gloom and noom around some of the numbers and things we're facing. I think it really does give you a chance to differentiate for your businesses. If you think about global growth, let's start there. Global growth numbers in 26 are gonna be about 2.6%. They're predicting historically we've run in the low threes about 3.2%.
[00:03:20] The US is even lower at about 2.2%, so you're 20 to 30% below the traditional global growth numbers that we're predicting next year. So not a great year. A lot of headwind around global growth, which will impact our businesses. Inflation is cooling. Interestingly enough, there's a lot of noise about concerns about the spike.
[00:03:40] How will tariffs, at least in the United States play, if not in other parts of the globe? We did see a huge spike in inflation during the COVID years, and we've really never fully recovered. So even though the rates are slower, they're moving from a higher base. It's expected to be around two and a half percent globally this next year.
[00:03:59] Now most countries and fiscal policies will look for about 2%, so coming from a higher position, still a little bit above what we want with less growth. If you look at unemployment rates in particular in the us. We're at about 4.4% in December. It's not bad for what you historically see, three to 4% unemployment rates is typically what many of the pundits will say is as low as it can go.
[00:04:25] But hiring has actually slowed. The predictions for this year are in the mid twos 2%. That is normally, if you look at historical trends globally and. Upturn economy, it's about 4%. So almost double that. And in a moderate economy, it's three to three and a half percent. So if you look at that macro environment, growth is low, inflation is still creeping up off of a high base.
[00:04:52] Unemployment is okay, but we're not doing a ton of hiring. So a challenging environment for businesses around resourcing and managing those resources and optimizing those resources. If you move then specifically to our business environments underneath those macroeconomic trends, I wanna talk for a minute about the AI effect, and I know we're gonna talk a lot today about AI and what's hype and what's not, and how does it fit in.
[00:05:18] But when you look at what's going on, at least in the last 18 months, you're seeing improved valuations for businesses due to AI premiums. There's actually a phrase that I find that's awesome that was coined by the Institute of Corporate Productivity. They talk about the illusion of instant transformation, right?
[00:05:36] AI is coming in as this great white knight that's gonna change a whole bunch of stuff and take us to glory, right? There still is a heavy profitability focus for businesses and how they're valued. To put a finer point on that, if you look at, and I'm, I was surprised to learn this stat. I'm always excited to learn new business related information, but historically, when you look at how companies are valued, 80% of your valuation is around tangible assets, right?
[00:06:05] What do you own? It's either the plant you own, or the IP or the software or whatnot, your trademarks. 80% is normally tangible. Now, in the last 18 months, it has completely flipped. 80% of how companies are valued are intangible assets, and this is a lot of phenomena of what AI will bring or not bring. Is it a bubble?
[00:06:28] I don't know. There's smarter people out there that will predict on that. I think it's real. How real? We'll wait to see, but it's a very interesting shift when you think about those. Macro trends in the global environment, and then you think about how businesses are being valued. AI is front and center on your business' valuations.
[00:06:48] When you look at stats like what Gartner puts out, it's amazing the medium amount of spend on ai. Last year in 25, 1 0.5 trillion with a T was identified as spent on AI. In 26, that's gonna pass $2 trillion. That is a massive amount of spend on this illusion of instant transformation, and McKinsey actually recently came out with an article and mentioned that these AI investments are expected to bring between 10 and 30%.
[00:07:22] Think about that, almost a third of a lift in productivity benefit for your organizations, but the catch is it's expected in under six months. That is the perfect storm. I probably would've used some other words to think about the organizations I'm associated with and how they're going with ai, but I appreciate what was said there.
[00:07:45] So if you zoom back on that context, as we charter this conversation, there's a huge push for productivity and efficiency in those numbers to even come close to the promise of the valuations behind our businesses. The time to get that value has shrunk significantly under six months. Last time I did a Workday deployment, it took almost nine, right?
[00:08:07] Just to put some sense of timeframe around this stuff. AI is the singularly biggest driver and valuations of businesses today. And spend is up because it's believed that this is gonna transform your organizations. So when I, my takeaway from that is fairly simple. When I look at that. I think HR and manager's importance in business success has never been higher.
[00:08:33] The direct correlation to our ability to execute in an AI driven world and its impact on our businesses in this tough macro environment has never been higher. And so when I hear a little bit of this hype, I will, I'll throw this out provocatively and then we'll jump into questions with the panelists, but I really do think we're fooling ourselves if we think we don't need human skills.
[00:08:55] In today's AI age, in fact, I would argue they've never been more important in this technology driven expectation of value and growth for our businesses. And so this is the backdrop for our conversation. Now, we want to get started with a poll. I told you we're gonna try and make this as interactive as possible.
[00:09:14] Please add your chat, thoughts and questions. We have q and A availability, and we're gonna do q and a at the end. So we'd love to spend a chunk of our time answering your specific questions, but let's start with a poll. If we can bring up our poll and let's understand, does your HR organization have a key deliverable that's AI driven this year?
[00:09:33] Talk. Tell us a little bit about that. Is it in progress? Do you expect one? Not sure, just not ready yet. How big is the benefit expected to be from your initiative? And then lastly, what's your timeframe expectation around that? To see whether we're aligning with what we're hearing and how companies are valued.
[00:09:55] We'll give that a minute to, to marinate and get your thoughts together.
[00:10:04] I am excited to see the results to this. While we're waiting on those results, while I'll throw one more stat at you that I find really interesting or really two stats 'cause they go together and mc one of McKinsey's most recent reports they mentioned that nine out of 10 respondents that they asked around use of ai, they said at least one business function.
[00:10:25] Is using ai. That same audience also said that only about one third said that their organizations have actually begun to scale their AI programs. So a really interesting paradigm. People are out there using it, not necessarily a lot of clear organizational control around making sure that can scale for the business.
[00:10:46] So a little bit of a perfect storm associated with that. All right, here comes our poll results. Pretty good. Pretty good numbers. A large number, so really about 70% of you are saying you either have one or it's in play already, so that's great. We're gonna be really interested to hear your challenges and how we can help scrolling down to be how big is your productivity efficiency benefit?
[00:11:11] All right. A little smaller on some have it low, but still look at that 10 to 20% is the bulk and you still have almost a third of us, greater than 20%. So. These are big bets on benefits around productivity in your business. And then of course the timeframes around these. Well, it's good. I'm glad to see some of you have more rational timeframes in those stats, looking at about two thirds of you, expecting six months or longer to start to see those returns.
[00:11:38] So an interesting time for us all to be operating in, and I hope you find as I do that it could never be more exciting than these times. This transformation around AI will not happen if it doesn't show up through our managers and how they execute and how you all lead. So with that, I will stop my long rambling and I'm excited to engage this great group of panelists.
[00:12:05] So let's start with our first panelists question. Let's talk about manager capability here in 26. And I talked to lots of folks and I hear different views, like it's all changing, nothing's changed. How do we think about that? So let's talk a little bit about that. My first question for the panel and any of you, feel free to jump in here.
[00:12:22] How have expectations in of managers in your organizations changed? Who'd like to jump in on that one?
[00:12:30] Leslie Laws: Yeah, I'm happy to jump in, Jeff.
[00:12:31] Sofia Lamuraglia: Oh,
[00:12:31] Leslie Laws: great. Go ahead. No, go ahead. Leslie hop in.
[00:12:34] Jeff Diana: Leslie.
[00:12:34] Leslie Laws: Awesome. Hi everybody. You know it, it's okay. I was just thinking, Jeff, I'm really curious for the folks who are on the webinar, if you have a minute, pop, what role you're in your organization in the chat.
[00:12:45] I think it's always interesting to hear what you might be solving for based on your role, and we can tailor some of the responses in return. Okay. Awesome. It's super interesting to hear, to see come in. So thanks everybody. So I was thinking about this question and for those who are working in tech, when you think about even just a couple of years ago the big news were just layoffs.
[00:13:04] There were layoffs, there was a layoff tracker happening in the tech industry with, what was happening every week. And you started to hear this refrain of doing more with less. We have to do more with less. And I was thinking about that in the context of ai and how, I think the watermark has risen.
[00:13:21] Like when I think about managers expectations. What it means to do more with less now with AI leverage has changed. I think it's gone up. I actually think doing more with less isn't new. That's something that, when we tighten our belts is something we all have to deal with. But what is new?
[00:13:37] That's different now. Like what that more is I think a different definition. So I think the moment creates like both more demand from managers and more opportunity when you see what AI can do.
[00:13:49] Jeff Diana: Interesting others. Sophia, I know you were gonna jump in as well. How have you seen expectations change?
[00:13:53] Sofia Lamuraglia: Yes, I think we have our expectations have increased in an insane way. We want managers to play so many different roles from activating the culture, be performance coaches, now they are, we're done with allowing them to experiment. We want them to role model ai and we're all learning, but they are supposed to be role modeling, right?
[00:14:14] So I do feel like there's a lot of expectations of our managers and I have this sense that the way we support them hasn't evolved, have fast enough. And that's our challenge, right? Like it's a lot they have to do. How can we better support them because they are even the ones activating our talent strategies.
[00:14:33] Like a lot of what we do in hr, we activate through our managers. So I think there is a lot of additional expectations of managers these days. Great.
[00:14:43] Rebecca Crotts: I'd love to build on that and just plus one to everything. And also say, in reflecting for this, I paused and thought, what have we taken off a manager's plate?
[00:14:52] 'cause I can't think of anything recently. And really that's a challenge to us in the people functions, HR functions, whichever ones that we're in. And I also think it's a challenge for managers and opportunity, particularly with AI, to say, how can I make things a little simpler for myself? Because everything Leslie and Sophia you just said, and oh my goodness, all the dynamics, Jeff, that you just shared, I was jotting down some of the statistics.
[00:15:15] It's wild, but particularly going back, even six. Five, six years ago to the pandemic, we added so much of the human element, extra things, look after wellbeing, all those kinds of things to team members. And look, we live in the most volatile, unpredictable world right now. There's so much happening around the globe.
[00:15:32] And so much just affecting each of us as we come into the office or our zooms wherever we are every day. And that challenge for me is how might we really help simplify some of the things, because we may not be able to take the actual task or the need off of the manager's plate, for example, to lead with human empathy and lead the business, lead people, and lead themselves.
[00:15:54] But can we make some of that work a little simpler for them so they can focus on the things that only they uniquely. In that role as the leader of a team, that visionary, the strategic, but also kinda that chief motivator and encourager of the team, how might we help them spend more hours on that?
[00:16:12] Jeff Diana: It's interesting 'cause even in that context as well, like we've always talked about managers playing such an important role in a business's success.
[00:16:20] I think you're right. The supply demand and the approach around talent has changed from care for every bit of the human being. Make sure you're thinking about not only their wellbeing, but their satisfaction and happiness. And there's almost a perverse shift in that now of people are lucky to have a job and.
[00:16:38] Like the tides have turned where corporations can now get more balance back. And so the empathy component, I think has shrunk in terms of what businesses are focused on putting out for their people, partly because of this timeframe of we need returns quicker. Like we're all feeling the urgency for improvement of our businesses in short periods of time.
[00:17:00] And how does that impact. The manager in our roles in doing that, at the same time that we have less capacity to coach and handhold managers, 'cause our teams as well have all been hit by the efficiency and the reductions and things of that sort. It's an interesting paradigm shift.
[00:17:16] Leslie Laws: Yeah. And Jeff, I'd also add that managers are on the front lines.
[00:17:19] Having to deal with that delicate dance of having to get more efficiency, but also having to deal with the emotions of their people saying, am I gonna lose my job and is AI gonna replace me? And so, when you're higher up the chain, you have a little more distance, you can make plans and strategies, but when you're the manager you're dealing with those that negotiation every day.
[00:17:41] It's a hard challenge.
[00:17:42] Jeff Diana: I agree.
[00:17:43] Leslie Laws: I love
[00:17:43] Jeff Diana: that. So what are some of the, sorry, what? Some of that, oh, sorry, Sophia, jump in. Go ahead. I didn't realize that. No, I was, add something
[00:17:49] Sofia Lamuraglia: to what Rebecca said in an idea of what can we remove? 'cause I do think we made progress there. It's a very interesting point.
[00:17:55] So there's two things that I think we've been able to do. One, obviously going back to AI and automation, being able to automate and use, well internally it's. Task HR for us, but it's an AI tool that allow us to have, remove some of those, how do you transfer an employee? How do you, all of those things that take time away from the people.
[00:18:14] That was a huge win for us in terms of giving managers some time. But the other thing that I think it's interesting for us, and I. Think it's worked really well is we've made our more senior leaders accountable for providing clarity around the tough decisions and all of those things that sometimes managers are left to figure it out and try to translate what's going on.
[00:18:34] So we drove that accountability at the top, and I think it's worked pretty well. Our managers are. Feeling a little bit of that pressure instead of, a few years ago they probably were getting some of it and having to figure out how to translate to their teams. I think those are two things that we've done to help create some space, but definitely not enough to your point.
[00:18:54] So I, but I like the challenge that you set up with us.
[00:18:57] Jeff Diana: I think that's great. I love to hear in the chat from others if there are things you've concretely done to free the manager for. Giving them more capacity and time to not only develop new skills, but also to address how to win in this new environment, because we are putting more and more on them.
[00:19:14] So I'll be curious. I'll watch the chat if there's other great ideas from folks of things you're doing in your organizations. So with the shift in expectations that we've just framed here, I'd love to hear from the panelists. In this new environment with this shift in expectations and this change around empathy and all the things you've mentioned, like what are some new skills that you view are required of managers to be successful?
[00:19:38] Like something new that you say, Hey, maybe five years ago this one wasn't as critical, but now boy, it's moved to the forefront. Curious to get the panelists thoughts on that?
[00:19:48] Rebecca Crotts: We can share and begin. One is. Now that managers are needing to manage both humans and also AI agents digital work in different ways than we ever had before, you're really orchestrating work.
[00:20:03] So, and you're orchestrating all these different, pieces in the ecosystem. And one of the things that I've been thinking about specifically, we're doing this in my team, we're doing it, looking at it across the com company and just talking with lots of people, peers out in the industry.
[00:20:16] Managers need the skill of more org design, if you will, really team and organizational structure and work design. So looking at work and saying, okay, what's the, not just a job not being boxed in by the boxes on an org chart per se, but saying, what's the work? How do I break that into tasks? How do I break that into processes?
[00:20:34] That sort of thing. Who are the people? What are the things that human beings have been doing? What are the things that you know. AI or something else, some other other technology might be able to do. How could we automate, how could we work differently? So I think that's just a skill that often some managers have that a little bit more innately often they also have relied on HR business partners, org development folks to answer those questions.
[00:20:55] But I think frankly, managers need to do more and more of that on their own. And one other thought I've had with that is. At the end of the day, managers shouldn't do that responsibility in a vacuum either involving your team members in doing that with you. So sitting down with the team and saying, let's look at our work.
[00:21:12] Let's challenge the status quo. How might we do it differently? And there's a few, I think, benefits in that. One is when we engage our teams, one, there's trust and transparency, and that's really just extraordinarily important in this time of massive change, right? But in addition to that, sometimes we're further away from the work and our team members will have better ideas about ways to restructure our work, maybe restructure jobs, maybe restructure.
[00:21:37] Our D delivery model may not be so much about the job, but about the actual. Operating model that we have in our team. So I think this is something new we're asking managers to do, but they can do it in concert with co-creating with the team members in their teams.
[00:21:51] Jeff Diana: Yeah, I love that idea. I think to your point, it builds trust and likely a better outcome in terms of whatever you redesign by doing so others thoughts?
[00:22:02] Leslie Laws: So many thoughts. There are so many different skills that I think leaders need. I think I think as AI takes on more of execution oriented tasks, I think the premium shifts to ideas. And so, all the different types of thinking, systems thinking, design thinking strategic thinking.
[00:22:19] The ability to take information within your sphere of influence and make sense of it, and then be able to design ideas to transform whatever that may be at an individual level. How you get your work done at a team level. Maybe how workflows are designed at a departmental level, how context is shared, how strategies are designed.
[00:22:37] I think teams that are, and managers that are not putting a premium on ideation will look stale faster. They will look like they're behind faster and then every month that they're not demonstrating that, that perception will compound. And so for example, even within my own team I'm doing explicit trainings where I am asking us to act like product managers asking us to act like design thinkers.
[00:23:02] And we're talking and we're exploring systems thinking in all sort of different facet facets so that we can. Be able to look at our own workflows differently, look at our world differently, and then ultimately design be able to decompose the different aspects of what we do so we can then figure out how to transform it with AI leverage.
[00:23:21] Jeff Diana: Yeah, it's an interesting time. To me, unlike any other time with the ubiquitous access to ai. That everybody inside an organization has and the ability to synthesize data both inside and outside the organization in a way unlike ever before. I don't think we've seen this exact setup that managers, HR folks, leaders have seen before where the people in the organization all around you can have the technology and the understanding of that at a level like never before.
[00:23:53] And the ability to no longer let knowledge be power in a very condensed, isolated, siloed way, like your ability to synthesize information and bring new insights from all places and all individuals. Has never been higher. So I love the commentary around get those people involved. Let's have a team sort of review and redesign on thinking of the work and get that collective wisdom now that takes a manager that's comfortable in their skin and has some aptitude, technologically, and all those types of things to play.
[00:24:24] And we'll dive in that some more. I did wanna follow up Sophia with you, Kamal had a comment in the chat there of, liking what you mentioned about getting senior leaders more accountable and was interested to hear, have you share more about what or how you held them accountable and what practices you were able to put into place to make that happen.
[00:24:43] Sounds like they may be facing the same Yes. Opportunity need that you all are working on.
[00:24:48] Sofia Lamuraglia: I always say people care about what's being measured. So we did start measuring the feedback around that and literally my senior leadership, blah, blah, blah. So really starting to understand how employees were seeing what kind of signals we're getting.
[00:25:01] And then we, through our. Programs for our most senior leaders plus coaching. We did have a huge focus on making sure that they were driving those conversations, that they were driving the clarity and the transparency. And so setting the expectations first. And then again as, as soon as something's being measured, then it becomes important.
[00:25:21] People pay attention and for them to get the feedback. If the feedback wasn't great about how they were doing, they tend to quickly focus on it and pivot.
[00:25:31] Jeff Diana: Great. Thank you. Okay, so I'm gonna put you all on the spot. And Rebecca, I'm gonna come to you first, but if you could only pick one, because we all know we have to focus and we have smaller budgets and all that great stuff.
[00:25:44] If you could only pick one, what's the skill that managers need most to thrive this year and into the future? And why do you think that's the skill? And we'll start with, we'll start with you, Rebecca, but we'll get to all three of you.
[00:25:56] Rebecca Crotts: All right. This is, in my mind, it's a skill, it's a behavior.
[00:25:59] It's a way of operating, but I would say adaptability and agility, all those statistics that you started us out with around just how uncertain things are, the rapid pace of change, everything feels like it's accelerating, and I agree with you, by the way, this timeframe we're in is a really exciting opportunity.
[00:26:18] It's frankly the most exciting. Opportunities I've seen in my career around the changes that we're seeing with ai, all the possibility, all these things we've dreamt of for years about learning in the flow of work or automating things, hyper-personalization, those kinds of things. I think they're now becoming a reality.
[00:26:34] But with that being said. There's so much that we don't know. We have all these ideas and all these promises, but there's a lot of things we haven't done yet. And then we know there are really dynamic forces at play inside of our organizations, outside of our organizations, and it can be really hard to anticipate those.
[00:26:48] So for me, the number one would be this adaptability or agility. And in fact, I was looking at some stuff over the holidays. I think I four CP just released their 2026 predictions or insights, and they actually said that this was the number one. Need that across any industry that leaders said the adaptability and agility were the number one needs that they felt in their organization.
[00:27:11] And when I think about that, it's really the ability to look around the corner and predict what might be coming and be able to make those adjustments maybe before you hit the obstacle or the roadblock, but really being a little bit preciate about what's coming and being able to be nimble and move quickly.
[00:27:28] Jeff Diana: Yeah. It's interesting. Nick made a comment in the chat there that spoke a little bit about we're sometimes ignoring basic time management principles here, and it's leading to disastrous results. This concept of, even with ai, you can only work on one thing at a time. That is a really interesting perspective and a counter pressure here for managers.
[00:27:47] Can you only focus on one thing at a time, and how do you do that in a system that's constantly changing? Everything from the change that comes from your resource base. To what technologies and processes get put into place to bots and all this other stuff that's coming our way. We're constantly trying to do decision making under sifting sands, as they say.
[00:28:09] So this adaptability and agility, I think. Is a really good one. How about you, Sophia? What's your number one here that, if you had to pick one, what is it to
[00:28:18] Sofia Lamuraglia: pick one? I know it was a hard one, but I think it builds on what Rebecca was talking about, but mine was sense making, I think managers in 2020.
[00:28:26] Six are not gonna fail because they didn't have enough information. They're gonna fail because they didn't realize, they didn't know what to ignore, what signals to follow and what signals not to pay attention to. In the whole, complexity, ambiguity, it's gonna be really hard to make sense of all of that and provide some clarity and focus to their teams.
[00:28:44] So that was the one I was thinking about.
[00:28:46] Jeff Diana: Yeah. That fits really well, in fact, with just what Nick mentioned too, right? Yeah. And he is just put back in their noise versus signals, right? Find. Your way through that and how do you drive that? I will also add, I think unlike any time before, you are going to have people around you, on your team, in other functions, et cetera, that are gonna have.
[00:29:05] Educated insights and opinions on those things, and whether they're noise and signal. So the day of you are an expert in your space and I'm the manager and I will decide. And other functions, do your own thing. I think that's changed in this world. So your ability to cut through that and articulate your position and influence others around that is gonna be super important.
[00:29:27] That's a great one. Okay, Leslie, what's yours?
[00:29:32] Leslie Laws: All I have to say is Nick, I see you. You were reading into my soul with that comment. I actually had time management as my number one skill. I I think protecting time for learning and thinking is actually increasingly becoming a leadership skill.
[00:29:46] It's already something that you. You hear about with more senior leaders, right? You need to be able to protect your time to be able to get above the work and plan and coach and all the other things you need to do. But I think we also know that time poverty is a real blocker to AI learning.
[00:30:01] I heard of, to a podcast this morning where someone said we don't have time to learn about the thing that's supposed to save us so much time. And I think, I think like all the other skills, the sense making, the ability to be adaptable. Just the taking care of yourself, filling your own cup.
[00:30:16] Like actually really what it comes down to is the most like root solution there is just protecting your time and figuring out how to manage your time. And we all know, with conventional skills, you can teach someone how to recruit, but you also have, they have to be able to block the time to invest in screening candidates then, right?
[00:30:34] So it ultimately comes down to both a skill and a behavior.
[00:30:37] Jeff Diana: Sure. Well maybe building on that, Leslie, 'cause it's interesting. I wrote down the skills you all mentioned, adaptability and agility, sense making time management. When you really think about all three of those skills, AI isn't going to lead any of those.
[00:30:53] Now, AI might help you with time management. It might help you be more agile, but this human skill associated within pulling on technology still remains. Actually, I'd argue even more important than ever before with the ability to put these new technologies in place like that, which can completely disrupt and change your processes and flows of work has never gotten higher.
[00:31:14] So, building on that, Leslie are there any classic key managerial skills that you think are critically important in this brave new world and and same kind of concept, if you could pick one that you say never let us lose this one to guide us. What would that be?
[00:31:28] Leslie Laws: Yeah. Well, there's a lot of l and d folks on the calls.
[00:31:31] I'm hoping this will resonate with them. But regardless of what's happening out there in the world, a pandemic, breakthrough technology, like you wanna have the best people in the boat with you. So I would say talent management, retaining your best people, making sure the right people are sitting in the boat with you.
[00:31:47] Never goes outta style. Managers are, their success is always measured by their team's success. So I think keep making sure you're understanding your talent bench. When you think about the skills that are important in this day and age, those for you as a manager, those are gonna trickle down to your people too, right?
[00:32:04] So, know who your stars are, know you, know what they're made of, you know how they want to grow. So I think, never waste a good crisis. I think typically it shows you how strong your manager, excuse me, your talent bench is. So just keep up those good talent management practices.
[00:32:18] You can't go wrong.
[00:32:21] Jeff Diana: What I love with that one is it aligns really well with our ethos and mission, right? It has always been around the talent we bring into the organization and how do we optimize it, make sure it's the right talent, it fits our business, our workflows. So that alignment with managers, I think you're right, can be something we can.
[00:32:37] Really strengthen in this period of change. So that's an awesome one to, to share. Okay, so we've got a little more than 20 minutes left. I'm gonna make sure we leave some time for audience questions. We wanna be as operational and practical as possible here so you can continue to learn from this panel and have them share their best practices.
[00:32:54] So we're gonna do our last poll now. And this poll is gonna pop up momentarily. Which manager skills are you most interested in hearing how to ideas from the panel on? We've covered some, but as we answer the questions here in our last section with the panel, I wanna make sure we hone in where we can on how to ideas specifically for those skills that you all find most important to the challenges you're facing in your businesses.
[00:33:22] So let's let that poll run. It'll be interested to see what we get here, and panelists will have you use that context and try to weave those particular skills in as you look to answer some of the questions here in the last section. And a reminder to the audience if you have questions, get ready to throw them in the q and a to have you can now while we're going through and we'd love to make sure we have some time to answer your specifics.
[00:33:49] Okay. So poll results. Wow. The winner has changed leadership on that list. Interesting. Followed by, you can see workflow and process redesign. We talked about how those go together. I think even if we talk about adaptability and agility come into there, the data matters. I think you're right. I'm excited to see that EQ at scale holds a really strong percentage, not a ton of breakout there.
[00:34:12] There is obviously some harmony around these skills. For managers to be super successful. So panelists, keep those in mind as you, as we go into the last section. And if you have some more specifics on best practices in those areas associated with those skills feel free to offer it as context.
[00:34:30] Okay, Sophia, I'm gonna start with you on this one. So let's talk a little bit about what does manager development look like in practice inside your organization today? You're arguably in one of the biggest, most well thought of organizations on the planet with a history in the learning space, like very few, some.
[00:34:46] I know that folks will be really excited to, to hear that. So what does it look like in practice today? And then secondly, what do you wish it looked like? If there are areas you'd like to see it change.
[00:34:56] Sofia Lamuraglia: Yeah. So at IBM we have what we call our signature programs for new. Managers. So all of the newly appointed first line managers and upline managers come to our signature program.
[00:35:06] That's a live class, three hours a day for three consecutive days where they get a chance to better understand what are the expectations of managers at IBM, but also connect with peers from all over the world, share challenges, and do a little bit of the role play, giving feedback to each other, practice some of the skills that we teach them for our ex.
[00:35:25] Experience leaders. We have what we call our continuous development portfolio, which is different offerings that we created internally, sometimes with our partners externally. They are usually aligned with what we found in the engagement scores, so what are the key areas that we need them to focus on based on the employee feedback.
[00:35:43] And then also if there's anything around our talent strategy or lately ai for example, we added content there. So usually that. What we have been doing for management development. What I wish we would do more of and we can talk about later about plans is leverage all of the latest technology to bring to life some of that, to GA to bridge the gap between the learning and doing. So There's one thing to be role-playing with another new manager, but the truth is we both don't know what we're doing. So we're trying to give feedback to each other about something we just learned. And then it's hard because they finish the program and they go straight back to the work and it's really hard to remember what they intend to apply.
[00:36:24] So yeah, so leveraging some of the latest technology would be something I would love to see more of.
[00:36:30] Jeff Diana: Love it. The great news is we actually, I do believe the technology exists finally to do that, right? We've talked about. Historically, and I've always done this as A-C-H-R-O with my my l and d teams is like, how do we grow and develop these people but make them productive today?
[00:36:45] There's always this time component to that. And if you're not using the skill frequently enough, how sharp will it be and how can I show the value of that work? That whole continuum of thinking there, technology will be a big part of the answer to that, which I think is great. Okay. Let's see.
[00:37:01] There's one other in the chat here. I see Jackie mentioned with so much change happening so quickly, how are folks keeping an eye on the strengths of their teams or identifying them quickly with new hires? I assume Jackie, that thought is a little bit more around Hey, the world's changing, the shifting sands.
[00:37:18] We gotta know what people are good at, so we know how to move people or change the nature of work that they're working on to. To get the most out of our teams. So curious if anyone on the panel would like to talk a little bit about how you are keeping an eye on the strengths of the teams and helping managers identify them quickly, whether that's new hires or existing members, to make sure we get the most out of those teams.
[00:37:40] Rebecca Crotts: I'm happy to contribute. Oh, sorry. I'm happy to contribute one thought here. So. My team is relatively small rubrics and organization of about three hundred and three, thirty, thirty five hundred people. And and we've been a relatively lean and nimble team, and we have a really large remit. Back to the points earlier about having so many priorities and so much to do, I wanna stitch this together as well with that.
[00:38:03] How do we redesign work and think about it differently? So. A couple months ago, somebody in my team said to me, Hey Rebecca, I used to do all these things in my job and my job's have been changing a lot. No surprise there. And I'm really curious because also the last time we did X, Y, z, we involved some other people in the team.
[00:38:20] So what they were basically asking for was a little more role clarity. And at first they had this moment kinda this ping of oh, I think I've confused the team a little bit by bringing more people into certain projects and shifting some of the responsibilities and so forth. But I realized.
[00:38:35] My failure was a little bit more in the actual not being hyper explicit in the communication of why I wanted the team, the resources in our team to be a little bit more fungible. So it's a little bit of a, circular answer to your question, Jackie, but at the end of the day, I think one of the reasons my team has been pretty successful is because we have deployed more so based on.
[00:38:55] Almost like a consulting model and a capacity model, and we're constantly cross training. So it does enable us by saying, what is the work, what's the capacity of the team today? From skills, from bandwidth, from expertise, what are also the development needs of the team today? Maybe this, the last annual development week, so and so worked on it, but this year I want so and so to work on it, someone different.
[00:39:16] So we're constantly just looking at the work and evaluating, matching all those. All those things from kind of supply and demand to capability to development plans. What do people need? And then how do we deploy against that? And that's worked pretty well for us. But again, the lesson learned for me was be hyper explicit in your communications around, that delivery model.
[00:39:35] Because it doesn't just look like a job description on a page, if you will. And I frankly think that a lot of that is the way we're gonna be working even more in this age of ai.
[00:39:46] Jeff Diana: Love that. I think what's interesting to me is. Part of what you, what went through my head as you said that is, we're a microcosm of the manager, right?
[00:39:54] We look at the manager and go manager, manage all this complexity, solve it all, make it all great. Oh, by the way, you don't necessarily know all the technology. You haven't experienced this before, and we're gonna train you at the same time, we're purporting you to be an expert to your teams and to guide them forward.
[00:40:11] There is that friction and duality. By the way, that's every HR team on the planet. We're learning the new technologies, we're uncovering the new ways of how we're working. We're recognizing these changing business environments and how companies are valued and trying to translate that. So one thing I would offer in there is, as you are looking to take advantage of the great wealth of new ways and technologies to deliver development to your people, start with your own organizations.
[00:40:40] It's actually one of the first things I recommend. Is pilot with yourselves, right? Let's up tool ourselves. Let's learn these capabilities, let's learn these technologies and experience them and then move them to the broader organization. So we are already showing that knowledge and that. Really that acumen that we're gonna need to guide others.
[00:41:00] And I know that's very hard to say with all the time management and other things we've mentioned, but it's important that we get a chance to invest in ourselves at the same time. And I know that always comes last on the list. At least that's my experience from being sitting in those chairs.
[00:41:15] Okay. Let's talk management. So I'd love to hear from all three of you on this one. What signals tell you management development is actually working, and are they different in today's AI driven world than what you've seen in the past? But we know forever it's been invest here, but how do, I know I'm getting a return?
[00:41:33] So I'm curious what you're doing from a measurement standpoint around manager development. So who would like to jump in first on that?
[00:41:42] Leslie Laws: Yeah. Oh, well, Sophia I definitely would wanna hear from you on this one. I think, again, lots of l and d folks on the call, so this won't feel new to these folks.
[00:41:50] But I think always start when you're picking your programs to design with measurement in mind. You are setting those, that criteria upfront about, how you plan on moving the needle with whatever your intention is. I think the other thing I would, that I would bring in, and again I have a bias working in business hr, but by tying your programs explicitly to business goals using your data to show impact on.
[00:42:14] Not only your your sort of org health or team health metrics like attrition or engagement or vacancy rates or some of those things, but also with, company priorities, like speaking the language of your of your leaders will help you shorten that distance between what you wanna build and how you wanna have impact with your programs, as well as how it could have an impact on the company top line or bottom line.
[00:42:40] Jeff Diana: Love that others.
[00:42:43] Sofia Lamuraglia: So we have something that we call license to lead at IBM that's probably interesting. For most we expect our leaders to continue to invest in their development ongoing. So we have an expectation of certain amount of leadership development courses within every three years. And so what that has allowed us to do, to be very frank, if you lead an organization leadership development where you have a lot of bus that have their own initiative to do their own things or different countries that do events.
[00:43:09] That consistency is tough to drive, right? So because they want those hours to count towards the license to lead, now they come to us to get alignment on the content. If the content is aligned to our strategy on what we're doing in ld then they get that license to lead. So. That has allowed us also to measure impact of what we're driving from a behavior change perspective.
[00:43:31] And so when we look, we do impact studies almost every year, and we look at the leaders that actually attended the training, the ones that are eligible for the license to lead versus those that don't. And we do see two or three points higher in the manager index scores, which is all about how managers show up.
[00:43:49] Their teams have higher engagement scores. We see higher inclusion index as well for those meaning I feel respected at work, I can be myself. So we definitely, and we've seen that year over year that they have higher scores around all of these dimensions on our engagement survey. And our leaders already know that, engage employees, drive better client experiences and business results.
[00:44:13] So those those results matter for our business leaders as well and drive them to be interested in having, they started tracking how many of their leaders are eligible to the license to lead because of that.
[00:44:25] Jeff Diana: Neat. Rebecca, how about for you?
[00:44:28] Rebecca Crotts: I don't have a lot to add there because we're doing a number of the same things, although I think unlikely a smaller scale in terms of the impact studies and so forth.
[00:44:37] One thing I will add, which is a slight pivot, but back to ai, we're gonna see how this plays out. We added a question in all of our annual performance reviews for managers and employees this year on AI utilization, and we did it less, not because we're tracking and it's not like a weighted goal or anything.
[00:44:56] But we added it there as a forcing function, ideally to drive a manager and their team members to have conversations about new ways of working. It's a little less of the looking backwards and a little more of the looking forwards just by putting it there. And so that's gonna be interesting for us to, I think, see what people write in that question is we can use, machine learning and AI to data mine that.
[00:45:18] But I'm also just very keen to hear, just hear a little bit more anecdotally as well. What's coming up? What are the conversations that are being had and how might we help support managers in terms of helping their teams to leverage AI a little bit more?
[00:45:32] Jeff Diana: Yeah. It's interesting when I hear there's this good blend of traditional HR metrics, right around engagement and satisfaction and some of those things.
[00:45:41] And I think we need to continue to keep those, we understand what they drive for productivity and sustainability of an organization and for culture, what I really. Like that you added to that, Leslie, which I think in this day and age, normally the question I get asked is like, how do I sell this thing, right?
[00:45:57] Like, how do I get buy-in to make these investments and continuing to develop folks in this environment where we need less people, we expect more productivity, et cetera, et cetera. And I think your ability to. Sell those opportunities with improved business performance is critical. And the way I usually talk about that when I drive and develop these is, and they ask me, well, how am I gonna measure success?
[00:46:22] I keep it very simple. It's like, how well are the people that are participating in these activities doing on their OKR completion rates, on their top financial metrics of their team or function? I know there is a correlation between those things, but I'm going to sell the value on this, on those business output metrics.
[00:46:40] And the more I hitch to that, I know all the other ones are critical and I'm gonna measure the heck out of those. Sophia and I love the set the expectation and then create this tension of you gotta hit that goal of time and investment in yourself. So put some focus on that 'cause we put the spotlight on it, but make sure you really do focus on those business outcomes.
[00:46:59] And I do believe. The investments we're making in manager development are more closely aligned and correlated to that than ever before, given those macro conditions and the changes and the way workflows are happening inside organizations. So it's excited to see that. Okay, we're almost at the end of our time.
[00:47:16] I feel like we've done a really good job at taking your questions along the way here, so thanks for that. There was one that was put separately in the q and a tab, so I want to make sure I hit that one and it was. How are your companies assessing talent or doing talent reviews? Now, if there are changes in that, I'd love to hear from that and then I'll come around with a few final thoughts,
[00:47:41] talent reviews, anybody, any changes yet
[00:47:44] Leslie Laws: in talent review approaches
[00:47:45] Jeff Diana: or too soon to tell?
[00:47:47] Leslie Laws: I feel like everyone is living in my, I think we're all living parallel lives right now. I had a conversation. Yesterday about this, so someone was talking about assessing strengths, like how do you do that?
[00:47:57] I feel like we should not lose the tried and true talent reviews like that. We should just make sure what we're doing those on a regular basis, 90 day feedback loops. Like all of those things should stay, I think current. I'll be honest, we haven't dramatically transformed how we do talent reviews, but for the first time, what came outta my mouth in a conversation yesterday was, do we need to have an AI readiness or an AI capability like dimension that gets added to our talent review?
[00:48:23] But I think of course, what you. What you need in that with that kind of like inventory dimension is you need to have clear expectations. You gotta make sure that if you're assessing your talent on a certain capability, that there's clear expectations that they build that capability and that capability should be true across the board.
[00:48:41] So I think, we have to remember that these are building blocks, right? Or a system with reinforcing. Foundation foundations that all reinforce each other. And so I'd say if you're gonna invest some time into your talent review, like what skills are we looking for? You gotta make sure that you're being clear about those skills.
[00:48:56] And then of course, music to the ear of the folks on this call, make sure you're actually building training and having develop an opportunities to build those capabilities. Too
[00:49:05] Jeff Diana: helpful. Sophia? Rebecca, are there things you're doing differently in the talent review? Side.
[00:49:11] Sofia Lamuraglia: We've definitely spent more time similar to what Leslie was saying, like being more clear about expectations and progression.
[00:49:20] And and I would say also being a little bit more strict around top performers, core versus low, which, it was a little bit more fluid before and now we're driving that differentiation a little bit more aggressively For sure.
[00:49:36] Jeff Diana: Rebecca, anything on your end?
[00:49:38] Rebecca Crotts: I would add, so we still have ratings at Rubrik, and I know a lot of people don't.
[00:49:42] We spend a num, a fair amount of time on things like ratings, calibration, but over the past couple of years, we have invested more in future focused conversations and really trying to tie that as much as possible to the business. So we've asked every business leader for a fair, meaning like C-Suite leaders.
[00:49:57] A fairly simple, just one pager on the most critical roles, the most critical talent. What are those most critical capabilities that they need? So it's a fairly simple, I've been in some organizations where we had very sophisticated processes, but this we're trying to keep just right sized enough to where we are and also knowing in a horizon, probably honestly, of not longer than six to 12 months.
[00:50:20] And we try to do it a little bit more frequently. I remember back in the day when we would say we were trying to plan people's careers and experiences and talent development for five years from now. And that is just wild. In fact, I heard somebody say recently, oh, I think it was John Chambers, former, from Cisco, right?
[00:50:35] He said he used to look for people who had a five year strategy. Now he thinks if you have a strategy that's longer than six months, you're just like, forget it. You can only look that far out. Now. I think he might just, maybe that's a little hyperbole for effect. But the reality is that's the rate of change, which we're ending, where we started this conversation with the pace of change and the pressures and so forth.
[00:50:53] But yeah, we're just trying to do something simple, a little more frequently. Future focused.
[00:50:57] Jeff Diana: Nate? Yeah, I think time horizon is a big one. I've seen change and just being more granular on skills to answer that question. I think skills. We're finally at a place to assess skills. Catalog those, design interventions and capabilities to grow skills differently.
[00:51:12] Well, let's wrap here. I will say, have a few closing comments, but first of all, thank you panelists. What an awesome conversation and all of you that attended, great questions, great engagement, made it a much better conversation, so thank you for that. If I could leave you with a couple thoughts, one practical one, if I'm going after manager development today, I think really painting the picture for organizations around the.
[00:51:34] Challenging macro conditions, how skills have moved for managers from task supervision to owning outcomes, from being the information keeper to decision orchestrator, like create this yin and yang for folks to understand how challenging an environment that is. And think about it, we need managers to be highly technical and high eq, right?
[00:51:59] This is why we have sales folks challenges and highly technical products. 'cause you have the technical person and you have the sales person. We're trying to blend so many things here and managers will be key. Human skills matter more than ever, and the context in which managers operate has never been more challenging, but never been a better time for impact.
[00:52:19] So keep that optimism. And lastly, and I know you all know this, but we have to help organizations rethink manager development. It's not about discrete training anymore. It's about context. It's about our ability to think through precision at a personal level and do more in the context and flow of work.
[00:52:41] But thankfully, the technology's finally there to help us with that. And lastly, I know the panelists are happy to do this, but I'm also happy to meet with any of you if I can help you think through this. Or enlighten any of your leaders that need enlightenment on this topic. So feel free to reach out and thanks again everybody for a fantastic conversation.
[00:53:00] It was great. Thanks panelists so much.
[00:53:03] Sofia Lamuraglia: Thank you
[00:53:04] Jeff Diana: everybody. Have a great day everybody. Thanks.
[00:53:07] Sofia Lamuraglia: Thank you.
