Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome back, everybody, to our podcast. Unlocking your people today is essentially a Hot Topics episode. So we're going to be talking through a number of themes and patterns and trends that we're seeing out there in today's world of work. And rather than just hearing only from me, which can get a bit one sided, I asked Tom Hickey back to join me. Tom is Canadian. I am British. He is a man, I'm a woman. We sometimes have aligned values, but different perspectives on these things. And I thought it'd be good to have two voices in the podcast rather than just one to talk through some of those pieces and how we think about them and deal with them in the world of work today. So over to Tom. Welcome back, Tom. Always happy to have you and your opinion on the show. I'm looking forward to our conversation today. How are you doing?
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Oh, good. Yeah, it's good to see you too. It's been been a couple of hours since I last saw you. What were you doing last week? What were you working on?
[00:00:55] Speaker A: Mondays is always the same. Mondays I do team stuff. Right. And then had a bunch of. So I was delivering webinars all day Tuesday, Wednesday I was doing podcast recordings and then I was gone for a couple of days to do a session in Nova Scotia. So.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Wow, you were a busy woman. I really only asked it that question, so I got to tell you what I did.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Okay, so tell me what you did.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: I went to Harvard.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Oh, swanky.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Yes, I know it was. But no, it was like a little CEO mastermind thing. We had a. A coach put this event together. It was probably about 25 or 30 of us, mostly Canadians, but some Americans as well.
And yeah, so they brought in a bunch of speakers, mostly from the Harvard Business School, who are really researched on everything from AI to the impacts of remote work to all those things that are sort of hot topics. So it was great to learn about all the research they've been doing on this stuff. There was all kinds of businesses there from like, you know, 30 people up to 3,000. But the issues, the issues may vary in complexity in a bit, you know, based on the size of the organization, but they're all basically the same.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Yeah, well, the people stuff is my perspective. Like, it is true. Like you get more of it and it gets more complicated the bigger you get. And they downsize and be more expensive.
But people's stuff doesn't like really change that dramatically. You just, if you're talking layoffs, so you're talking two layoffs or 200 or 2,000 or 20,000. Right. Like, you know, and so you have to be a bit more systematic about things when they get bigger. But really a lot of the people stuff doesn't ever change. So.
[00:02:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And all the business stuff. So it was great. We had a one lady, the editor of the Harvard Business Review actually gave a sort of a fireside chat during dinner, which was interesting to hear. And she was talking about strategy and just all the challenges leaders have, like, you know, not just on people stuff, but on everything because everything's changing so fast. So the strategy, you know, you made last year on whether how many people you're going to hire or how you're going to develop people, everything under your feet changed. I mean, forget Trump and all the tariffs and stuff. Just everything is moving so fast. In fact, just this morning I had to have a meeting with a few leaders in our team because everything I asked them to do, in fact, you've helped us with some of that stuff. Things have changed so much even since we did the strategy last May that I had to give them a complete reset. Like, I know I'm like pivoting on you in the middle of this, but like one thing I learned last week was like, you can't make a strategy and tactics and it's, you know, three or four months later, it's almost out of date or things have changed so much.
[00:03:34] Speaker A: You know, we used to do what, 10, 20 year strategic plans. I mean, who in their right mind would think about doing a 10 year strategic plan right now? Like, everyone's like, I can maybe contemplate what the world might look like two years out, but I certainly can't contemplate what it would look like 10 years out. And I. The planning horizons for things. I mean, we used to do five year strap plans. We still sort of do, but they're now two to five year strap plans because you're going to revisit them all. And we used to do like one year operating plans. Like a lot of clients, a lot of organizations I'm connected to have gone to quarterly planning cycles. Like, we're not even really looking much beyond the next three months, particularly if you're in the tech space. Because I have no idea what's coming that's going to completely change what we do. It's a very, very different world, right? Different world we work in.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: What do you, what do you think? How do you think we should be dealing with that? Like, you know, I mean, you're dealing with in your own business, I'm sure just Like I am. But you know, in general, like, if you're working with teams and about things like that, like, because I find some people feel like they're getting pulled from pillar to post. Well, you said we were going to do this and now we're going to do that. And if I was them, I'd probably feel a bit frustrated at times with that. But, you know, you just had to do it because everything. The ground moves under your feet. Right.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: I think there's a couple of things I say or there's things I try to do. Now we're tiny. Right. So I can wrap my arms around people pretty easily. But I don't know that we do setting expectations around flexibility. Right. I don't. I think that people have this idea that you set the plan and you're going to work the plan and there's no deviation from the plan. It's a bit like performance management. Right. You set me smart goals for the year, so they're never going to change. Right. Instead of. Actually plans are about evolving to where you're trying to get to. Right. So if you think about it as a map, you're driving from A to B, but if there's road works along the way and you have to change your route, you change your route. Right. That. That's all a strategy is. It's a direction from A to B. But people feel like we can't leave the highway. So I don't know that we do a super good job of talking to people about the fact that strategy is an evolving thing and it should, it should change. And then I. I'd like to see organizations do more work with people on things like resilience and understanding reactions to change and how to handle change. Because the world's changing all the time now and we're not really giving people the tools to cope. And I'm not sure that we're giving the younger. I don't know the statistics for the younger generation is that they're more stressed than the older generations are. And I don't know if that's just because they are literally more stressed and we haven't given them coping skills or they're just better at noticing that they're stressed and talking. And I don't know. I don't know what. What's what in that regard, but I think we could do more to help people understand that uncertainty is not necessarily a bad thing and it's not necessarily going to be a consequence for them in having to pivot.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: So that.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Almost like you need to set the expectation that half of what we're planning for today we will not actually execute on because something will have changed. Like, and just sort of set the expectation at the beginning that, well, these are, some of these, like, you know, your goal might be X dollars of revenue or whatever it is that in over, say three or five, that doesn't change. But, you know, the reality is there's a 50% chance of we're going to completely swivel on some of these tactics because the ground moved. You know, just what we thought was going to happen didn't happen. And now we have to sort of adjust course along the way.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: But I think that that goalpost piece is really important too. Like, there's a role in neuroscience, which I always used to do and not knew why I was doing it, which is the rule of three, which is like three key messages, three main points to a speech, like all that three is a good number for the brain. So I like to think about things in our. When I talk to the team about what we're doing, there's three pillars of what we're doing. So if something changes, the pillar hasn't changed. The tactics we're using, to your point, or the stuff we're doing to reach that pillar might look different now, but still the goalposts haven't changed. Right. I think it's probably harder for really big organizations, like government organizations, like in our world, if you can't pivot, you probably don't stay here long anyway.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: All the time. Right. So.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I mean, that's one of the benefits of a smaller organization, like everyone, you know, I don't know when I started in business, I want to grow my business, I want to do this and everything will be so much easier when you just get bigger. You're going to have more scale and you're going to have more cloud and actually it just gets harder to get anything done because there's just more complexity, more moving parts and you can't, you know, you can't change things as quickly. So, you know, sometimes, like, be careful what you wish for. Right.
You know, and so, yeah, it was interesting that happened after going there last week and just today even, you know, like just looking at what we're doing and, and how we do it.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Was there much discussion on the political situation, the U.S. canada divide, while you were there?
[00:08:26] Speaker B: Not much.
All my American folks and friends, who I call my friends now, I didn't know them before that, but they are all basically apologetic and ashamed by and large, like we are so sorry, particularly for Canada, like what did Canada ever do to deserve this? So that gives you a little bit of good feeling. Like, you know, you got to sort of separate some people from the politics and realize that, you know, what you're hearing at the political level doesn't necessarily respect what I would think 90% of business people want.
And certainly a lot of just, you know, regular, like regular people who aren't maybe aren't necessarily business owners want. So you know, I just, you just gotta, you can't control it. So I'm fortunate, I think you probably are too, to be in a business that isn't like directly, you know, we're not importing, exporting products. So it's easy for us, you know, for me to say, well it doesn't, it'll impact some of my clients. And even in Newfoundland here we don't have a huge, outside of the fishery and some mining issues.
You know, most of our clients aren't, aren't big importers and exporters. So it might have some impacts on cost of product they buy.
But luckily, you know, it's not like as front and central as it might be in somewhere like Ontario or Quebec who do so much cross border manufacturing and hard goods trade as opposed to services which are not even really talked about in this. Right.
[00:09:51] Speaker A: No, no. Some of our clients are affected, certainly the ones that like microbreweries and things like that, reporting their aluminum for cans and things like that and just not necessarily of a size or scale where they can suddenly make a difference to how any of that works either.
There was a Gallup post this morning which was looking at general public views on what Trump is doing and whether or not what he's doing was going to create more manufacturing jobs or not, and whether inflation would change. And unsurprisingly it was split by party lines. So Republicans generally think that there's going to be more manufacturing at the end of this and Democrats don't.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: It's funny you mentioned young people and stress and I don't know if you saw this today, but Mark Zuckerman's building a big AI in Meta and their first quarter results come out and they've made a fortune last month.
But he's really working on AI to enhance friendships and relationships.
And he says, and basically.
Oh yeah. And he basically said, because they did a study and said most people only have three really close friends in the US at least in this. Now the information I've read is that most people can't even have more than three really close friends. We have lots of friends, but most people, like, you know, a close friend of someone maybe, you know, knows a lot about you confide anything in them and go on support, like, no, who has 20 of those?
So I think sometimes it's social. It's like they're living in an alternate reality of what a relationship actually is.
[00:11:33] Speaker A: Did anyone say they wanted AI to help them make friends? Is this something that's a need or is this something that Mark Zuckerberg has decided that we all should have in our lives? Because it's.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: Well, basically in Facebook terms, if you share pictures with someone and connect with them, they're your friend, Right?
So Facebook's definition of what a friend.
[00:11:51] Speaker A: Is lots of friends. But I tell you now, most of them wouldn't come to my birthday party. So they.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: Exactly. So I just, you know, I think about young people and that was actually one of the presentations we had down there was, you know, the distorted reality people see versus what's real in terms of what people's lives are like. You know, you got your social media life and then where everything is a bowl of cherries. And I went to this event and I went to that event and look how great our Christmas dinner table looked.
And the real life was, you know, they were screaming at each other for three hours because a turkey got burnt.
So I don't know. I see that and I say, like, we talk about AI. Like, to me that's. They're not. That's not good thing, you know.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: No, it was one of the things that I actually thought came out of COVID that was good was that we actually saw people's lives.
This was like you'd be in a meeting and someone's kid would come up to them and like, yeah, come sit here. Or their dog would come and like, whatever. Or they'd be like, hang on, my six year old's throwing up. Like, that's real life, right? And then that's kind of what people are. And even this, I mean, chuckle. We talk about this like we're gonna have conversation that Ross is gonna cut and edit, and then I'm. I'm doing my hair before I come on so I don't look half sensible. And if I was actually just having a chat with you and it was me and you, we'd be shooting the breeze about all kinds of things and I wouldn't be worrying about some of that stuff. So you never get real people until you get them in kind of real life. But I did. I so one of the things I liked about COVID I hope we don't lose is that, that recognition. I don't know if you saw. Did you see the BBC clip of the gentleman who was in an. It was on an interview and it was. I don't know, he was talking about something economics or whatever and his kid came in. Yeah, I saw that on her hands and knees. I thought that was brilliant. I thought that was absolutely brilliant. But that's the stuff we should be able to laugh about and joke about without being confused about things. So.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I know, I know. That's a good part about it. All right. You know what we came out of that with anyway, right?
[00:13:53] Speaker A: Yeah. So what were they else were they saying about the AI space? I just came up in AI conversations and now I'm really curious.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: I gotta be honest. They had a guy from MIT there who's also like, he's got a startup and he was explaining a lot about it and he's saying like all this stuff we see now, like with ChatGPT or Gemini, like where you sort of. It's basically a text engagement or look at this picture and it's almost like using Google, right? You type it in a box and type your prompt in. You know, what's the new role? We're going to be prompt engineers. I think we're already bypassed that by now. Those fake new jobs people talk about.
But he said it's going to show itself in other ways, but more not visible. So, you know, if you use Spotify or anything like that, I mean, you're getting a. On the background with all its suggestions and understanding your likes and pushing out music to you. But he gave us an example of two credit cards. You know, you go to a restaurant and you split the bill, right? And so you go, you know, tell the, the server, you know, we're going to go split this this way and that that way. And they, of course, they all hate it, right, because it's so much work. You know, if you got a large group, they say, we're not doing any bill splitting.
So he gave us an example of something they were working on with a credit card where, you know, if you had a pair of glasses on, it'd be like this little thing in the corner of your glass that could read the credit cards.
And it knew you would just sort of take your hand and the two credit cards would be on the table and you would take your hand and just go like that. And it's like a little slider would appear and that's how you would apportionate the bill between the two credit cards. And it was AI driven based on knowing your gestures and you were in a restaurant and what you're trying to do. Like it was things like that, that, I mean who even thinks of that, right?
So he was going to an example of how there's like these thousands of applications which will dominate your daily life but it'll be totally invisible to you and just, you know, so you just go, okay, now credit card split. So it was like he talked, he gave us, he showed us how that would work.
And I gotta admit some of what he was saying was like, whoa, this is way too, too much for me. But that the, the crux of it was that impact.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: I mean that kind of makes sense. I mean the whole premise of all of this is it's supposed to make life easier, right? You're supposed to be able to do things more quickly. Thus far, I mean I, I use chat GPT all the time for thoughts on things, give me stats on this, have a look at this and poke holes in it, poke holes in documents, I've written all that kind of stuff.
And we are having a conversation. So we will be launching a self serve HR toolkit and the fall for micro businesses that don't have an HR person and want more guidance. And we are talking about how we layer a just ask Jess kind of functionality on top of that. So you can ask it like basic questions, you can ask it like super complex HR scenario questions and expect a proper answer. That's what you need to talk to more.
But that like distinction of what is routine, mundane and how you take that off people's plate and what is more complex and requires nuances as the human brain, like that kind of split makes sense to me. I just, I'm not sure when everyone's first started, started touting AI and it was all like, it's all going to be great. I'm like there are people who are going to lose their jobs from this. Like there's no way. And it's happening. I mean you think about silly example, but like supermarket checkouts, right? There's people who are no longer having jobs because the technology has taken over the job. And whilst that is fine from a principle of people moving to more knowledge based jobs and doing more complex work, we've still got to retrain all those people to be able to do those jobs. And that's the bit that I'm not sure we figured out yet.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: Yeah, well everyone said that about globalization, right? Oh yeah, we're going to send off all the cheap, boring jobs off to places with lower pay and all the jobs around here will be better. But that's like to me, businesses don't behave that way because I know all the technology we put in and free up all our staff. And it does, but it never goes fully the other way to say, oh, we freed up all these staff to provide better customer service and at the same time we just invested all the money that we saved because now we don't have people to add a typewriter typing up carbon copy invoices. All those resources did not go into client facing jobs because not everybody can do a client facing job. If you haven't got the right personality and the ability to build relationships and problem solve.
Everybody doesn't want to do that. So if you're a really good data person, the last thing you want to do is say, oh, now I'm going to be client facing. I hate that. So just to make those assumptions, it's great for the people selling the technology, but what really happens is there's a big cost push down.
And so a lot of the savings that we felt we could put into client service in our business, insurance companies pushed all that work just down onto us. So yeah, we got rid of all that work and now we just have more other things to do which aren't necessarily value added because they're on a quest to lower their costs and drive shareholder value. So all these things are like, you know, it takes a long time to shape out. But I'm always very skeptical when someone says, oh, you know, people won't be replaced by AI, they'll be replaced by people who know how to use AI. Well, not everybody is going to want to use the AI, nor should they will they want to be in jobs where that is. So, you know, I always laugh at those things because you can't minimize a disruption. You got to be honest with people, you know, and tell them what's coming and if there's skill ups they can do that will help.
Tell them that like, and it's no good telling them after you've got AI. You got to tell them a few years ahead of time, say this is coming, you know, and that's what we've been trying to do in our business.
And. But people who are later in their careers are going to go, Jesus, I don't want to do that, you know.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: Later in their careers either necessarily. It's not how everybody's brain works. And I mean, I think there's A There will continue to be an opportunity in, in the people that. I don't want to talk to the machine. I don't want to be served by a chatbot. I don't want to be served by a computer that can answer my question properly. You know, when you're getting a chatbot response because it doesn't make any sense. I wanted to say where the thing was just repeating the same thing over and over again. I'm like, this is not a human being. Right. So, you know, then. Then there's an opportunity to say, okay, we offer a differentiated service. I think, because you actually talk to a real person now, whether that means you only get to do that if you pay more and then we're into different questions of equity. Right. But yeah, I don't. I don't see how.
I mean, I.
I know in the. Some of the pieces of work we do, if you are in graphic design, if you are in elearning development as we are, if you're in any of those things, there's a lot of stuff that's being removed from people's jobs. It's a bit of a fallacy to say that suddenly means that they can go do something else because that's what they've been doing for the last 10 years. They're not suddenly exactly now. So we need to give some of that stuff a bit more thought than I think we're evangelizing the world of A.I.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's people who want to sell all the AI say all these things, right? Because they want to make it. They want to make the business leader making the decision make it feel easier. Oh, yeah. I'm not going to be a horrible person and replace all my data people with AI like, who wants to be sold?
Unless you're a large corporation or you're so remote from people that you don't really. They're just numbers to you. But for someone like me, who I know everybody in our company, it's not easy. It would never be a nice thing for me to go in and say, well, yeah, I've decided to replace you all with AI oh, but the guy who sold it to me said, I'm not actually going to replace you. You're all going to do something different. Oh, what's that? Well, I don't know yet.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: No.
[00:21:51] Speaker B: What kind of an answer is.
[00:21:52] Speaker A: That's. I mean, that's the face of business though, isn't it? And I guess that depends on why and how you run your business. And I will never say anybody Running the business, however they want to run a business, up to them. But there will be some people who run the business purely for the bot and then there are the people who run it and know the names of all their staff and care about those people's well being while they figure out shareholder returns and all the other stuff that we have to think about.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: Luckily we don't have to do that. But you know, and the reality is some people like our later career may just say well okay, I'm just going to retire over time. And you know, the reality is if you, you know, over time, if that tool exists, well, people might retire and you don't need to replace them and things like that. But I worry more like you just got to look at LinkedIn to see all the posts from people who say stop working so hard, your company doesn't care about you. Like it's not a great career move I think to tell young people just never put in an extra five minutes and never do anything because you could get laid off. Well like that comes like a self fulfilling prophecy because if you're going to behave like that, yeah, some of those.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Place I'm like sure, but that's not every organization in the world that is like mean with the boss that screws you over every minute. Like that might be where you are right now, right? Or you might be in the wrong place for you because that's the other bit that people don't think about. Like if you don't like working somewhere, that doesn't mean necessarily they are wrong. You may be in the wrong place because your values don't align with theirs. Like I work in the City of London early in my career. There's plenty of organizations that are work hard, play hard, right? You put in all the hours that God sends, you get paid massive bonuses but when you get fired, someone just cuts off your access to the building and you can't get in anymore. Like that's like that. That's not where I want to work. That doesn't mean that that culture is wrong. There's lots of people who want that and go and work for that quite heavily. Doesn't fit for me. So I do sometimes find it.
Bemus, I get it. I get the frustration of that. I get that when you've been in that situation you're hurt, annoyed, frustrated and a whole bunch of other things. I'm not sure how putting it on social media makes it any better.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: I gotta admit, LinkedIn is the only social media I have left now because I found it all an incredible time waster. But I feel from a business point of view, I had to be there. And I used to really find it pretty good place, you know, like you could keep up to the date with companies you're interested and people you did business with.
But I find now it's just, it's like bombarded. Everyone in the world is a coach or a consultant or recruiter.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: All three of those things apply.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: Yeah, but at least you, at least you really are.
But it's like, it's just. I don't know if it's like why that is. I don't know if it's the algorithm or if that's reflecting the reality of like people are being taught like, okay, to build your brand on LinkedIn, you have to post five times a day and you have to do this and you have to do that. And what I do is I end up blocking them all because, like, I don't mind hearing from someone a few times a week. But when your feed is getting filled up multiple times a day, it's like, okay, either you're using an AI solution, which I did try one for fun, to help you do post. Because who has that much stuff to say of any value?
[00:25:11] Speaker A: Well, who has that much time? If you have that much time to be posting that much on LinkedIn, your business can't be that busy.
[00:25:20] Speaker B: I know, I tried one called Tapilo, I think it was called, and I'm just curious. So I signed up for it and you get all these stats of percentage, how much your posts are like, and then it gives you so many AI tokens and you can sort of say, I want you to write about this and you sort of do the chat GPT thing where you sort of give a little profile of yourself. So it has our tone.
It was a pilot, it didn't work for me. Like, you know, to post for the sake of posting is like. I mean, I went a month and didn't really post anything lately because I was busy with other things. I had nothing to say.
Right.
So, you know, if I don't have anything to say because it's like relevant to my life, like, I don't want to hang my hold myself out there. So I'm going to just everyday post and tell you something about leadership. You can get that from the 10,000 other fake consultants on LinkedIn.
I mean, how many books have been written on leadership now? 10, 15, 20, 30,000.
[00:26:16] Speaker A: Loads and loads and loads. Yeah. What's left to say is that challenge though, right? Like it's Hard for people. We're a small business, hopefully a growing small business. But how do you get visibility?
How do you get people to know about you? Because traditional media doesn't exist anymore. There's no newspaper ad. I'm just going to look in a newspaper to find us. There's no, I'm old enough to say Yellow Pages to you and you know what that means. Like, they're not going to look me up pages, right?
And so you're left with social media and it is a full aurora of noise. And so what people get told is, well, here's, you know, you should be posting. Well, even I've had this advice from marketing firms, right? You should be posting X many times a month on this and then X many times a month on this and X many times a month that. And I said, yeah, in theory, but I don't have time. So I'm going to post on LinkedIn. We're going to post our recruitment post because they're useful for people. We're going to see what we're up to and something every one or two weeks on what we've done. So you have some idea of what we do. And then I post for me on topics that I think are relevant, that I have something to say on. Like I posted on Bully, anti bullying day and all that kind of stuff.
But the general guidance was like, post two, the rules have changed, right? So when I first started it was like, you got to post 3 useful contents to 1ask content or 1post just sell your business. So I think there's a lot of people just trying to get, get traction in their business, in their organization, if they work for themselves, solopreneur, all that jazz, putting stuff on LinkedIn. And it is designed to tick your brain buttons and make you want to come back, right? And you get likes and you get ticks and thumbs up and claps now and hearts and smiley flowers and all the rest of it.
I'm gonna come and keep posting more, but I don't know that any of that necessarily does anything at any real depth, which is the whole problem with all this. And that takes us all the way back to relationships. And does AI social media actually help you build relationships? And my problem with it will always remain that we will be far nastier to people when we can hide behind a screen than we can ever think about saying to somebody's face. And if you would not walk up to that person and say it to them, you should not be putting it on social media.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Yeah, it's true. And you know what, what I've found is the stuff that I've seen get the most attention. Either things I did or our business did are usually things that have nothing to do with business. Like, oh, you know, so and so, you know, well, business tense, got a promotion or so and so did such a great job with this client. Or, you know, things that are personal people about their success or that just make people feel good.
Yeah, that type of stuff, you know, like it's not like, oh, here's my five risk management tips. Like, like, you know, that'll knock me in the next in a stupor immediately.
So. Or something that you like a real problem you had that was.
Which is another issue I have is like the level of transparency put people on there. Like, you know, I put a couple of things that I thought people would find useful where I either made a big mistake in something or found something. A great conversation. Me and someone who maybe disagreed, came to an understanding and like they're little like the things that go on every day that are real life that, that you can sort of relate to.
But beyond that, like most of it's just noise.
There's a guy, Tom Goodwin, I follow, and he's British, I'm pretty sure, and he's like an anti everything about social media. So he challenges every norm.
Like, oh yeah, an AI sales agent that will make 10,000 sales calls for you in a day.
I'm like, I would love all my competitors to buy that and implement it as quickly as possible because I'm sure all the prospects. We were bombarded with emails from people we don't know or usually phone calls. Right Then it became emails. Now it's in mails.
I just can't wait for fake AI phone calls from a non human to call me. And they think they've targeted me based on my profile, so they're calling up to sell me. I don't know. We've got what got Moroccan goulash on sale and it was supposed to be targeted to me. Like that's going to do so much for people's brands to have a piece of AI. It's like imagine what an AI chatbot on your website is. Bad enough to try and get that thing to work right. Imagine what an outbound call will go like.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: I'd like to think we might at some point get to the point where those things are actually useful because I think there is inherent value in the potential of what we're talking about. I just don't think we're there there yet. I think we're trying to use the technology before it's developed to a state where it's actually meaningful. And I, you know, like, I loathe the idea that someone will want. I mean, I started the business true female entrepreneur. I didn't start the business to make any money. I started the business. One, I needed a job and two, I wanted to help people.
Like the idea that, that feeling you have when you pick up you on hold and you're listening to elevator music. I feel like that perpetuate all of our lives with technology because there's nothing more annoying than getting caught in a lo loop. I got in an Air Canada loop the other day where it was like clicking the thing to do what it was doing. And it says, this doesn't work. You need to click here for help. And then I click the help. And it took me back to the page that says, this doesn't work. You need to click here for help. And I was like, or I can go sit on hold for four hours and talk to an agent. At least I will talk to somebody eventually.
Eventually.
[00:31:55] Speaker B: But you know, yeah, I mean, cold calling, like when you're trying to grow your business. And I've been there too, like picking up the phone and calling people you don't know to introduce yourself. And I mean, it's the worst thing.
Like, I don't care who you are as a salesperson. If you're per nobody, it's not possible for 99.99% of people to enjoy that. I think if you enjoy that, you're a bit of a masochist or something. There's something wrong with you and they get no 90% of the time.
But it's also in some cases a necessary evil. And I can understand how someone's thinking like, well, if we can make that process a little less painful for people by having an AI agent whose feelings won't be hurt when someone says no or just hangs up the phone.
But it's such a risk to me, to your brand and what you're trying to accomplish to sort of take that interaction down to a level of an AI agent is going to have a fake conversation with someone and hopefully do enough of a good enough job on data gathering or information sharing works in your world.
[00:33:00] Speaker A: I mean, and maybe that's your organization and your brand and you. But your world and my world are all about relationships.
That is what we are. So it, it makes no sense to me to use that. Now, if you're in a commoditized thing and you're selling something that is a.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: Non heart, press 1 to buy the red widget.
[00:33:19] Speaker A: Yeah. Like door stops.
[00:33:22] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:33:22] Speaker A: Like maybe AI is your perfect that if you're in a relationship driven business to business environment. I don't see how any of that helps you. Any cold calling? Yes, cold calling absolutely sucks. But we had Susan Engel on who's the person who runs the way buyers buy. And she and I were having a conversation about the fact that a lot of that is.
Then you're just throwing dots at a wall and hoping that person is interested. Right. So you've got to expect that in those situations most of the people you contact are not looking to buy. Right. Like if you're just randomly calling people, you're looking for the person who happens to have just had a reason to want your services in the last probably week. Right. And any longer than that they're not thinking about you anymore. And how many of those people are actually going to be the people you end up cold calling? Much better off if you could try and do something like to find those people where they are and go meet them where they are.
But again, I think maybe this is about what industry you're in. Maybe if you're selling something that's more commoditized, that makes sense. It doesn't make sense.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting because you say we're totally speculating on what the world may hold and there's probably like we just talked about, there's probably about an 80% chance that's not the way it's going to go at all.
But you're trying to, you know, you're trying to plan your business and say what are we going to do with this and what are we going to do with that and how do we help people be more productive? And you see all these tools coming at you and you think like really, you know, is that, is that one of them or is, does it fit? So it's a big challenge to. There's so many tools available now, you're bombarded. I got one last thing I want to ask you about before we run out of time.
DEI and like bad, it's almost like a bad word now. So I did, I was talking to someone last week about that and they said like instead of talking about Di D E I or anything, we should just be talking about fairness.
Like just make a fair workplace so everybody has fair opportunity. Everyone, like if someone like is starting from someone, somewhere behind some of those are making a fear that they all start from the same place. So opportunities are fair.
I struggle with that because like, I was like, I want to hire the best person. Like we just promoted two female vice presidents in our business and they got promoted because they were like the most awesome people for the job. Had nothing to do with whether they're female or not female.
So that's the 60 year old white guy's feeling about it.
Like, how do you see that? I really struggle with that because we, you know, we've got a lot of people coming up behind, you know, like our team is actually was getting really old now it's getting really young.
And I've become so conscious of unconsciously, you know, pegging people or not being fair to people. How do you think, you know, we should be, you know, making that real? So it's not just you get away from buzzwords like who cares what it's called really at the end of the day.
[00:36:27] Speaker A: So I think we have to be, I think we have to be careful. I'll come back to whether I think fairness is the right way of putting it. So I think we've done some things that aren't helpful in this space.
But I fundamentally believe that trying to support people having equal opportunity is the right thing to do. There's no ands or maybes and the world is inherently unfair. So I did have a conversation with a well known politician here who talked about fact that one of our, I'd say two political parties now was about the kind of live and let live party idea. And I said that that's a lovely concept in a world that's fair. It doesn't work in the world we actually live in because people are marginalized through no fault of their own. And so we have to, from my perspective, create supports in society that allow for a more equitable and just world. But what I think we have also done, particularly in the corporate world, is managed to make that incredibly complicated.
Now I'm sure somebody's watching, this is going to go. It is incredibly complicated and there's loads of things about it. Yes, absolutely. But human beings can't cope with complicated. And so when you have acronyms for things and we keep adding letters when you're trying to educate people and it comes from a place of blame and shame, instead of learning an opportunity, then we create resistance to what it is we're trying to cover. Now language is a funny thing because who you know, to some extent I would agree with you on who cares what it's called. At the same time, language does matter because language creates the world. We Live in. Whether you call it fairness though, or you call it diversity and inclusion, I think we need to talk to people about what we're talking about rather than get caught up in what acronym we use to describe something. So I went to a conference where someone did a really good presentation on DE diversity inclusion. But they spent the first 15 minutes of that hour explaining what each of the letters of the acronym D, E, I, B, A and R.
And I was like, if we've got to that point, we're losing. We're going to lose people. We're going to lose people who are like, this is too complicated for me to get my head around when really the principle of all of this for me is no one should be starting from behind. So I think that kind of quick that principle becomes helpful and then helping people understand that there is unconscious bias.
There is conscious bias, absolutely, but there's a lot of unconscious bias and being willing to recognize your own and talk about your own and talk about the things you do. I'm very conscious that I find it difficult to remove certain words from my vocabulary. So I will constantly say, apologies, everybody, that's crazy. Which is not helpful.
And so I can recognize that for somebody, that would be a very affronting word for me to use in the way I'm using it. And I've got habits around it that I can't switch off. So helping people recognize and have the license to say, jess, could you do your best to not use that word around me? And that's not helpful for me. I think those conversations are really important.
But I've seen lots of sessions and topics where it's kind of been the finger waggy end of things right? Where if somebody isn't getting it right, isn't getting the language right, isn't getting the tone right, isn't up to date and what's the latest thing, there's something wrong with them and nobody ever moves when they feel ashamed or blamed. Nobody. So if you want people to move on this stuff and you want people to buy into this stuff, it has to be about meeting people where they are and having great, honest conversations about it. So I was in a training session and we were talking about diversity and inclusion and respect for workplaces. And one of the people in the room said, I would never hire a trans person. And the room went up. And in some ways I'm really glad the room went up because that's kind of the immediate reaction. But I said, hang on, let's have a conversation about that. Let's Have a conversation about that perspective. Talk to me about why you feel that way. And what it came down to was systemic issues in the way that that person would have to handle that situation and in their workplace. So they were in construction and they were like, I just literally have no idea how I would handle that on a construction site. What we do about bathrooms, how I do signage, the number of people that would be asking me questions like, I'm just. I'm not equipped to handle that. So it was not necessarily a fundamental issue with somebody being trans. It was an organizational issue with how we welcome those people and support those people in the workplace. And I think that that then opens the door to have the conversation about how then do we do that? So I say, so, okay, so what you're saying is, if we could find answers to those solutions, would absolutely hire a trans person? He said, well, yes, right. So there's a very different lens on it. But we're not giving people the space to have the conversation, and we're not working through those things. We're having the reaction to the comment instead of saying, walk me through that. Now, super easy for me to say, isn't, I'm not trans. The reaction. That's different. But I've been on the receiving end of agenda. I'm not necessarily sure it's the same. I'm not trans or I can't speak to that, but I've been on the receiving end of sexism and gone. All right, time out. Talk to me about that. That. Because that's not how I see things. Walk me through why you think I should do X, Y and Z and where that comes from. And sometimes what I thought was sexism wasn't. Sometimes they were just purely patronizing. Sometimes it was.
But I think some of this stuff is that we've.
There are people who are incredibly uncomfortable, and we haven't made the learning around this comfortable enough. And so as soon as the opportunity has come to say, I don't have to look at this stuff or confront it anymore, they've gone there. And I think that's. That's an absolute misfortune, because I think it's absolutely the right things that we should be doing in organizations.
And the more that we can have conversations and normalize difference, the better in organizations. But we have to support people in being uncomfortable, because you never learn unless you're uncomfortable. And then people will just say, I don't want to be, and pass.
[00:42:12] Speaker B: And the ironic thing about that is, is that in a time when we're all saying, we have a shortage of talent here. You are sort of saying, well, I know like the cnib, the National Association, a friend of mine is on the board of that and talking about the levels of unemployment with blind people who could be perfectly capable.
And because of technology, there's obviously you, you can't do all jobs if you're blind. If there's something that requires vision, you can't do that. But for like, you know, to use computers, like, I mean, Microsoft systems and that, they come fully, you know, with a few minor equipment modifications, they're fully functional to do that. And a lot of times it's like, you know, if you're a line leader or line manager in a business, you're swamped, you're trying to get stuff done.
And the natural reaction is the passively at least resistance. So you say, well, I just need. I just, you know, I know how many hurt times I've heard it's like, I just need to hire so I can plug in.
But the reality is a lot of times like, you know, we've tried to hire for roles, there is no plug in people, at least in this geography, some of what we've wanted in the past literally doesn't exist. But you forget about, about, you know, I'm totally guilty that feel like, is there a creative way we could find another really good candidate who may not be in the traditional pool of where we would go looking?
And it's, it's one thing I took out of last week actually because the CEO CNB was there and I got a few conversations. I never really thought about this.
It was a case not of not wanting to, I just, I just literally did not know.
So, you know, what you're saying holds a lot of water.
And a lot of it is just, I hate to say it's education or awareness of what other places can you go to find good people.
[00:44:20] Speaker A: And I'd say the point before that, because we only become aware when we have the space to stop.
And it's about I'm too overwhelmed and too swamped in my world to contemplate anything outside of this set of train tracks because that requires mental capacity for me that I can't handle is where a lot of the world is. I think the latest Gallup stats were like 50% of the world feels stressed a lot of the day. So if we have 50% of our workforce, 50% of our people feeling stressed a lot of the day, then you present anything out of the norm to them or their definition of norm, and they're going to go, can't cope with that.
So you don't, you know, you don't build self awareness. You don't have the energy and capacity to confront your biases and think about your view of the world. And how do I adjust a workplace for somebody with a disability? What do I do when you're barely keeping it together and getting stuff out the door? So we have to make sure, I think, that workplaces are looking at managers and making sure that they're not entirely doing leaders who are drowning in the things that they do. We're still not training people in leadership, let alone training them in how to lead vastly different people. We've got to the point where we got people getting trained in how to have good conversations, let alone what do you do with diversity and inclusion in the world. So. So I think a lot of this for me has to be baby steps. I'd love to speed it up, fast forward to the end and just be like, come on. But the world, people can only move so fast. So where are they? Where is your organization? What makes sense to people? What are you training your leaders on and how do they do it? And then how do you incrementally increase people's bandwidth and thinking about some of this stuff and recognize that for a lot of people it is a journey and it's not necessarily to your point, one, they don't want to go on. It's just one they either haven't contemplated or they have no idea how to move forwards on their own.
[00:46:07] Speaker B: Awesome. I really appreciate that answer. It was one of the more pragmatic ones I've gotten.
[00:46:14] Speaker A: I just, I don't, like, I don't ever want anyone to misinterpret. I fundamentally believe that we do not have a just world and there's no reason for it. Right. But society doesn't move that quickly. Right? We have to meet people where they are and nobody moves. So pick your battles. Move the people you know you can move. Move them first and nobody moves. By you wagging, they're thinking about them and telling them about human beings and what they're doing. So that's not going to help you. Don't do it. Talk to them about why they're doing what they're doing and how you can help them move to something new or something different. And if they're not open to it, they're not open to it. Just keeping smacking your head against a brick wall is not helpful.
[00:46:53] Speaker B: Yeah, that never works. Right? Beatings will continue until morale improves.
[00:47:00] Speaker A: Although I did work for somebody. I did work for somebody once when movie talking about moving darling organizations where the leader stood up on stage and went, you all need to get engaged. And I was like, okay, we fundamentally missed the point here, that I'm going to need to spend some time with you on that one, because that's not how this works.
[00:47:20] Speaker B: What is wrong with you people? Why aren't you engaged? Are you listening to what I'm saying here?
[00:47:27] Speaker A: So again, meet them where they are. Are not intentional, not doing like you might inside want to roll your eyes and think seriously. But that person, that's their understanding of the situation, the context, where they are in the moment. It's not going to do me any good to go up to them and go, what did you say that for?
[00:47:42] Speaker B: Well, I don't know if you were a consultant then, but all I'd be thinking like, oh my God, I'm going to get so much revenue from this client. They need so much help.
[00:47:51] Speaker A: They need it though. That's the challenge.
[00:47:52] Speaker B: That's true.
[00:47:55] Speaker A: How much of a movement do I hold up for this person so that they can.
Or how much do work with that where it is right to do people trust you? Because people trust you. You can tell them the unpleasant truth. If they don't trust you, they're not going to hear you. So how do you build trust with people? And we never build trust with people by making ourselves at odds with them. We build trust by saying, I'm quite like you, actually, in lots of ways I'm a lot like you. And therefore we can have a good conversation about this.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: But I had a conversation with someone like that yesterday. It was a really difficult conversation and I said what I had to say and I probably got myself a bit more worked up and angry about it because, you know, you're speaking it now, you start to live it. So you just go to being nice and calm and then you can feel yourself.
I actually did the hell with it. I just let myself go because I felt like it.
But 99% of the time when I do that, it never works. Right. You. It's just not good. But there's so much capital in that relationship. I gotta thank you, right? Because I was completely honest. I was probably too honest. But conversely, my respect for that person, like, went so much up because, like, if they'd come back at me with this, it would have been totally appropriate and I would understand it. Even though what I said was true and right.
So it just goes to show, like, when we forget about these things, the power of actually having a true relationship with someone and not a LinkedIn relationship or just a transactional relationship. I give you a service, you pay me. But actually a true when someone knows you are looking out for them, even if it's against your own interest, you can, you've got so much capital you can pull that kind of. You know, you can do that.
So you're totally right about that.
[00:49:51] Speaker A: That is relatedness. In the Neuro Leadership scarf model, there are five buttons and relatedness is a negator. The better your relationship with somebody, the more you can press all of their other buttons and cause issues and they won't react the same way because they know you care about them.
[00:50:03] Speaker B: I'll have to get your reference. You'll have to send me a link for a book on that or something. I want to read about that. So I like that concept book.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: Good book. Your Brain at work by Dr. David Rock. That's my book recommendation for today, but I'll send you there's an article from the Neuro Leadership Institute that talks about the scarf model in depth and I honestly if you don't know what scarf model is, everybody should read Scarf Model. There's a plug for the neur.
Everybody should read.
[00:50:28] Speaker B: Sounds good.
[00:50:29] Speaker A: So that's it for today's Hot Topics episode. So today we've obviously chatted about a number of things going on in the world of work and how can hopefully that's very relevant for you and where you are. Next episode we are going to have a full episode of Just Ask Jess Again. So scenarios and real life situations that you want me to chat through and apply the kind of people thinking from E3 to those situations. So if you've got comments or questions from today, if you've got things you'd like me to tackle in our next episode or in our next season, send them all through to contact 3ca. And of course, don't forget to follow us on Spotify itunes or channel out our previous episodes on our website at E3CA. I'll see you next time.
