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Welcome to the show where we expose new perspectives on our ever evolving world through the lenses of various industries, cultures and backgrounds.
Our guests are disruptors, united by a common goal to bring their purpose to life.
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Whether they’re from the commercial world or third sector, from the global North or the global S, expect an inspirational journey that will transform your perspective on just what is possible.
My name is Philippa White and welcome to TIE Unearthed.
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Welcome to episode 98 of TIE Unearthed.
Today I’m speaking with my friend and university colleague from way back, Susie Martins.
Now, we studied business together and graduated in 2001.
And then the stars aligned and we’re now back in touch.
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Now catching up with Susie after almost 20 years has been incredible.
She’s an accomplished business executive and executive coach whose career journey has spanned over 20 countries and some of the world’s leading companies.
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From tech unicorns like Clearco and Apple Board to global giants such as General Electric and Three M, she’s built and LED high performing teams, managed multi $1,000,000 budgets, and navigated the unique challenges of scaling and adapting organizations.
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And now, through her boutique HR consultancy, she continues to drive transformation, offering coaching and strategic support to executives across industries.
Now, in this conversation, Susie opens up about her life and career journey, sharing insights from her transition from corporate to entrepreneurship.
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We’ll explore the role of connection and belonging in remote work environments.
We talk about cultural intelligence and global mindsets and the shifts in leadership that are shaping today’s workplace.
We’ll also hear Susie’s perspective on this term conscious unbossing, a new paradigm that’s reshaping leadership development for the next generation.
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So if you’re looking to foster a more connected, engaged, and agile workforce, this one’s for you.
So grab that favorite beverage or throw in those running shoes.
And here is Susie.
Susie, I am so happy to have you with us today.
2:38
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
This is so exciting for our listeners.
Susie and I go way back to how many, how many years are we talking?
Over 20?
It would be what, 23 or something?
Yeah.
Almost.
2:56
I mean, it feels like it.
We were at university together and God, I mean, it’s just, I’m so happy that the world has united us again.
So this is just very exciting.
So to kick off, it’d be really great to know where are you?
Where are you sitting right now?
So I’m in Canada, I’m in Kitchener, just South of Toronto.
3:14
Did you grow up in Kitchener?
Are you from that region?
Yeah, I’m primarily southwestern Ontario, so a couple hours from here.
I would just love for you to just tell a little bit of a story as to who you are and just, yeah, just a little bit more about you.
What brought you to where you are now?
Sure.
3:29
So that’s a fun one.
We’ll start where in the region.
So yeah, so I’m from Canada and I grew up in a small town.
We’ll go quicker after this.
I basically went to to Western Riches where Philip and I met.
I actually studied languages and kind of my own degree for the first couple years of school.
3:45
They went to Business School.
I was really passionate at that time, which you know, this is the early 2000s kind of in being global, right, in a global mindset, which was not that common back then.
I wouldn’t say right.
So my my studies I did in exchange to northern Quebec because I was taking French.
4:03
Then I went to Australia for an internship and between my third and 4th year and then I went to Spain in my 4th year also for half a year.
So I was just like, yes, like the world is small.
This is amazing.
I like the idea of like practicing the different languages and all, and business angle.
So when I, I graduated, you know, as Philip and it was like all of our friends became I bankers or consultants and Philip and I, I don’t know, fell off the train or something.
4:25
And then I was like, well, I don’t know, I was like, I kind of feel like I just, I want to work in something where I can use my languages and I wanted to work with a really innovative company.
And at that time it was three M, like 3 M is like, you know, post it notes, all that type of stuff.
So, and I started in customer service and then and also logistics.
4:43
So for me that was super interesting.
It was frontline and I was in it.
I was speaking French and English and all the reflective materials, very interesting skill sets.
Anyways, I, I stayed there for a couple years and then thought, you know what, I’d really like to get my stripes and, you know, really learn finance, right?
5:00
And I still really want to go global.
And I couldn’t do that with three M, even though I love the organization.
I needed to like leave and go somewhere else.
So I ended up moving to Europe for pretty much the rest of my 20s.
I went into finance and audit, which no one could believe.
And I work for General Electric.
I, you know, we’re kind of across all of Europe.
5:17
And then as an auditor around the world working probably something like 20 countries at the time.
And then I had the Super geeky love story, met my husband, he was an auditor and then and I was an auditor And then we decided, you know, that to start our lives here in Canada.
And after we got married, so basically came back here, did my MBA with the thought of like, you know what, why not work for a Canadian company?
5:39
I’d work for these two big American companies and I came back and worked for Manual in Life, which is John Hancock from the US.
So again, another 10 years I’ve been in a lot of development programs kind of rotating around.
This was like at four to six years to general manager role.
So but at that time I got in kind more into the operations strategy and HR side.
5:57
So went through all of those rotations and then continued down that path, had a couple kids and then you know, manage teams probably up to like 1000 people during that time.
And then in the last five years I’ve transitioned into tech.
I had the opportunity here where I live in Canada, there’s a tech center here.
6:13
It’s like the home of the smartphone, right, which is amazing.
So like Google’s headquartered here, A lot of different things that was always around me.
So I ended up moving out of, you know, kind of these corporates to go and help like a startup that was helping students actually to go study abroad.
So I joined apply board.
I was their chief people.
There’s no company that was truly a rocket ship and, you know, growing like mad globally and, you know, 4 billion valuation and, you know, we were hiring 200 people a month.
6:38
It was amazing.
And it was cool because their hashtag was, you know, something that would align with you.
Philip is like educate the world, right and really helping students and making education a right, not just a privilege.
So that was super cool.
And then from there, I worked with another, another Canadian Unicorn, like $2 billion valuation at the time that basically was helping founders, you know, get funding without taking equity.
7:00
So so I did all of that and then kind of got to the end of that and brings you to what I’m doing today is that, you know, I did the rocket ship and then the next one did kind of like the market switched and we did a lot of restructuring and all of that great stuff.
And I got to the end of that and I thought, you know, what, like maybe what I should do is start my own business.
7:16
I’ve always wanted to do it business student net core.
And I thought after I got, you know, quote UN quote, a lot of experience that that would be cool to jump back in and do my own thing.
So that was about two years ago.
So now I own my own HR boutique company and I kind of work half the time on HR strategy and business strategy projects and then the other half in the exact coaching realm.
7:35
So, so never a dull moment really a portfolio of a career.
It’s kind of now and and having fun.
What are just a couple of things that you miss about Europe being based where you are, but also what were things that you really missed about Canada when you were there?
7:53
So when are you happy that you’re back to having close to you?
I’m just curious.
Yeah, I think the one thing, like just to start with your second question, the one thing I missed when I was there, like as a mid 20s person kind of going through it all of my 20s was the sense of humor, right?
8:09
Because you would be somewhere and you’d have like jokes and I’d be like, oh, no one even understand.
This is such a good one.
You know, you’re like, Oh my God.
You know, you’d be in this like whole different realm where, you know, people are really like, you think, Oh, yeah, everybody’s the same or I’m your my parents are from Europe.
I’ve been to Europe like many times as a child.
8:25
It’s not the same, You know, being Canadian, I make eye contact.
I’ll smile at you, you know what I mean?
Like this is generally not the way people query themselves around like it from my experience, and I worked with them, they’re a bit more serious.
Just the whole idea of making friends, you know, in North America.
And like, I always had a pack of friends, you know, like girlfriends and guy friends.
8:41
And it is brave to move abroad.
And, you know, people think, oh, that sounds cool.
Like, and I’m sure Philip, you’ve heard this too, right?
Like, oh, that’s so cool you went to Brazil, but I’m sure it wasn’t easy, right?
Like you have to then re establish yourself, you have to try and speak these different languages, which I think is it’s humbling, it’s good experience.
8:57
And then you appreciate everybody just has an accent, right?
Like not to judge anyone.
And it’s good to have that struggle yourself and just to figure out how do I just fit in here?
Feel like you become more malleable, you adapt better being with anyone, right?
Because I could never choose who I was with.
9:13
I would be sent on audits.
I would be with whoever the auditors were and then whoever the business was in whatever location I was sent, right.
So what’s, you know, the best way to get things done and just figuring out how to navigate and figuring out how to just see the good in everyone because who was around you?
And that’s, you know, and I think that’s good, good practice, right?
9:31
Because otherwise you can tend to find people.
You know, the whole idea of having diversity in life and organizations is diversity of thought and experiences.
And if you’re in it like that, you really, you live it, right?
And you can find out that someone who’s totally different than you is super awesome, right?
9:46
That you normally wouldn’t sit down and talk to, but you just happen to be stationed with them.
It’s amazing, isn’t it?
And those are skills with both of our work, certainly with TIE and what I do with getting people to be exposed to these different challenges and different situations around the world.
10:03
And essentially it’s to help develop these competencies.
And one of them is this cultural intelligence, right?
And so it’s being able to truly understand, you know, how do you gain the trust of people who are different to you?
How do you find those common that let common humanity that even though they don’t get your jokes, but it’s kind of like, OK, let’s try again.
10:22
What is the commonality that we have here that we can figure out where we join up in some place?
It’s amazing because it’s not really something that you can learn in a PowerPoint presentation.
It’s something that you genuinely have to just go through it.
But at the beginning, like you say, it’s bloody hard because it’s, it’s like a muscle that you have to kind of build, isn’t it?
10:40
And you and sort of you have to grow through this.
And I remember having my phone with very few numbers in it.
And, and you’d go to a party if you’re like, oh, do you want my number?
And you’re well, I don’t think we’re, we’d be the best friend in the whole world, but I’ll just add them to my phone book, you know, and also to stick them in my phone.
10:57
And then like, I don’t know who to hang out with.
You sort of call these people and hi, do you want to hang out?
And you sort of just force yourself to be friends with people that you wouldn’t normally be friends with.
But it’s amazing because the more you do that, the more you can grow that muscle, so. 100% And I think the other thing I noticed when I went to Europe was that, you know, I was in a finance program and I was kind of more of a generalist coming in, obviously from customer service and logistics.
11:19
Everybody else was an accountant or the I banker type of person.
But what I noticed and what I learned at that time is that from a young age in Canada, you would start with show and tell or something like that in kindergarten.
You know, this is my stuffy.
It does this, it does whatever and then you do 2 two-minute pitches.
You do all of these things when you’re a kid here and you’re constantly presenting your ideas.
11:37
And I never even thought about this ever in my life until I moved to Europe.
Then I go there and they’re like, wow, you’re really good at presenting.
You know, I think I always have been pretty good at presenting.
But at the same time, in North America, I’d say a lot of people are good at presenting, right?
Like because there’s so much practice and, and emphasis on that.
Whereas you see all these people come from around the world and from Europe.
11:55
That was not the focus.
It was more on the grind, the like math, the whatever.
So then I realized, and I think it’s something that’s still true it at work, and I see it in my work now, is that packaging is so important in terms of like how you communicate, you manage yourself through different scenarios.
12:11
In the example of finance, I would do well and you know, and I’d get picked maybe to keep on going in a, in a program or do something.
And then someone else who’s I would say could run circles around me from a math perspective or something, a genius.
They wouldn’t get there because they couldn’t communicate what they meant.
12:26
That’s the key, right?
People practice that their whole life, right?
Like they just try and they try to figure it out and you can see that they’re kind of following like, I don’t know, like some sort of template in their mind of ways to do it or things they’ve read about these types of things.
But I think there’s a real normal progression here in our society on that.
And it’s the give and take.
12:42
We’re definitely not as technical, right?
Where is there and.
And then that’s why diversity is so important in teams, right?
It’s just explained why it’s so important to understand where you thrive.
Also what you’re so good at and where your skills lie.
And then understanding, perhaps it’s a cultural thing, perhaps it’s an education thing.
13:00
Perhaps it’s just a personal competencies thing.
Why you need to actually have these diverse teams with people from different places and different backgrounds and everything because their education, their background, just how they’ve been brought up, it provides different ways of seeing the world and being able to do things.
Yeah.
Fascinating.
What was that catalyst that got you wanting to do what you’re doing now?
13:20
You know, you said that you had the one role where everything was just growing and you had sort of hiring people 200, you know, 200 people a day or something month.
I don’t even know what you said.
It was crazy.
But then, you know, the next role was a very different scenario and obviously things weren’t as positive, but there had to have been a moment where you just thought, you know, every founder has a founder’s story.
13:39
And I just wonder, what was that for you?
I.
Don’t know when you’re corporate and you know you’re doing that grind, you’re climbing that ladder and then being surrounded in a Tech City, you always think that I could do that.
I’ve always wanted to be in the action.
So and I think it’s just in a weird way, you would never think that that would have been the way that I would have started.
13:56
And people were shocked when I started my business because I said, OK, I’m going to do it.
And the next thing that happened is I probably got the most job offers that I’ve ever had.
The other thing that happened is everybody who was in corporate was like, I’m watching you because they couldn’t believe it that I went from AC suite to basically jump off the ledge and just say, I’m going to do this myself and just see what happens and give it a go because I think it would be awesome.
14:17
And I’ve seen so many other people, we have so many classmates who have done it right that went out and started their own thing, including yourself.
I’d always dreamed when I was in school, actually, that I would work for many years and then, you know, gain all this knowledge and earn the right to go maybe be a professor or something.
And at university, that was always my original dream, and it kind of changed because now I’m doing that, but in a different way that I never thought of or even existed at the time.
14:38
So I think my founder dream started a long time ago, kind of just happened the way it is.
And I’m not a big believer that things play out the way they should.
So you just knock out what you’re doing right now.
And you do that all the time, and you’ll always find your next step.
Maybe not the typical aha, but I think it just kept on coming at me, you know what I mean?
14:54
Until you’re just like, all right, this is it, let’s go.
Yeah.
And I think it’s interesting because when you’re open to the universe, I think some people, I feel like more in North America, sort of they sort of over plan.
I’m going to, you know, go to high school, then I’m going to go to university and I’m going to get married and then I’m going to have this job and I’m going to get retired.
15:11
And, you know, and then I and then I die.
And it’s kind of like this.
I don’t feel like Europe is like when I was working with people in London, maybe it was an advertising too, but God, it’s not linear at all.
I mean, I just feel like people don’t study advertising to go into advertising.
15:26
Some people do, But when I was at BBH, they on purpose did not hire people who studied advertising that went into advertising.
If you studied architecture or philosophy or Russian studies or Japanese something or other, and then you go into advertising, yes, that’s what we want.
We want different thinking and people who are curious.
15:43
And I feel if you see the world like that and you just you don’t over plan it and you don’t necessarily know where you’re going or how you’re going to get there, but you, you feel it and then you know, and then you follow that feeling within you.
Yeah, I find that amazing because I feel more, more people need to be open to that.
16:02
You know, don’t feel like you need to follow some conventional way of doing things.
And also don’t feel that you need to know what’s going to happen in 10 years.
You need to follow what makes you feel a certain way.
And if things don’t feel good, then figure out what that is.
16:18
But then just be open to the universe.
And I just think it’s unbelievable when you do that, how things just work out.
Sometimes people will be like, what’d you learn being an entrepreneur?
What would be your advice?
I get a lot of those types of questions.
And one, a person I spoke to when I was like thinking about doing this, he was like a mentor.
16:33
And I said, this is what I’m thinking of doing, etcetera, etcetera.
And he said, well, Susie, let me ask you something.
Could you not make money for an entire year?
And I was like, well, I could there’s would I want to know?
I guess I could do that.
He’s like, well, you need that freedom of mind to actually start your own business.
16:48
And at first I was like, yeah, what?
OK, logical.
But as I continued on my journey, I was like, that was really insightful because when you have a job, you make a salary every couple weeks or however you get paid every month, Maybe for people listening and you’re used to that, that regular salary, you know, going on.
17:03
And when you start, and this is a pretty basic point, but it’s very true, is that when you’re in your own business, it’s not linear, right?
Like you could have a month that you make a dollar and then you could have another month where you make $1,000,000.
You know, I mean, like, it’s just like up and down and it’s normal, right?
It’s like normal, just like a big business.
But now you’re, you’re your own business, right?
17:19
So, and you know, everybody says, well, I’m a founder.
I was like, no, no, no, I’m a vendor because people come to me and want things on their schedule and I’m serving them, you know, in terms of what they need, which means, Hey, you may have thought things would happened in September, October and November, and now they’re all happening in November.
17:34
And you’re one person, you’re creamed in November.
But the other months were not as busy because you’re still working it out because you’re on this mass schedule, right, For everybody.
So anyways, yeah, I thought that was really good advice because the worst thing you could do is put yourself in financial ethnic stress and not have that freedom or people around you that would encourage you to keep on going, right?
17:51
Because my husband’s like, don’t worry about it, Just keep on going, right?
You’re fine.
You’re moving, you’re getting momentum, right?
But you have to be in that environment.
So that helped me.
And I tell people that all the time because is you don’t want to be so stressed.
And, and I’ve seen when people are stressed out, a lot of the founders in the ecosystem and what they do is they do things that I would call desperate, right?
18:09
Like they try to charge for anything.
Let’s say you’re a coach.
Would you charge your friends?
I would never charge my friends.
But then other people have made the decision to, you know, charge friends or up charge them.
And things like that just doesn’t seem like a good long play.
You know what I mean?
Or not, not the way I would like to proceed right with my business.
So that money factor, because you start feeling that pressure, it shows out in everything you’re doing.
18:29
What gets you excited every day?
I think for me, I really like the variety of my work because I just started off early with audit and I’ve always done lots of different jobs on True Generalist.
I’ve worked probably in almost every functional area, all different angles on business.
So I always have a few projects on the go and then I always have a bunch of people I’m coaching.
18:45
I think there’s 15 companies I work with right now.
So it’s 15 companies you’re learning about and all these different people.
And the really cool thing is that a lot of them are scaling companies.
So I could talk to someone today and in two weeks they’ve already implemented what we talked about.
Wow, that’s so good.
Looks like you’re in those companies before.
I would have never dreamt about that because I was always navigating so many people right in your own organization trying to get stuff done.
19:05
And now if you feel like you’re a real multiplier.
The other thing is that I don’t think I grew up in a lot of leadership programs and you know where there’s a lot of investment in class with my leaders.
The whole culture, like a GE culture, is all about leadership or any of the companies I worked with.
And I didn’t do that by design.
It just happened that way.
19:20
So then you get primed as leader leadership principles.
And now I feel like when I talk to people that I work with, there’s not that investment anymore.
It’s not a thing.
It’s not like a gold card to be a leader right now, and everybody seems to be.
I’m using air quotes, too busy to talk to one another, so therefore they don’t have anyone in their corner.
19:36
I feel like I’m someone in their pocket that they can just talk to about stuff that they would love to talk to you about with anyone.
But it’s almost like people are passing ships inside of organizations right now.
That gets me excited too, that I get to really help them because I’m I’ll just develop work products with them.
I’ll be like, hey, let’s think about this.
19:52
Does this make sense?
Who are you talking to?
Let’s try, let’s test it out.
I feel like I’m actually their leader and I feel like that’s such a missing capability.
It’s about.
Connection, isn’t it?
And it’s about feeling a part of something.
And it’s interesting that you’re, you’re needing to be that person for the people that you’re working with.
I’m just wondering before we get there, So what are you doing?
20:10
I mean, you said that you’re coaching and I know that that’s not the only thing that you do, but it’s a big part of what you’re doing.
What is working with the people that you’re working?
With they all need different the good thing about coming with such a background is that I could jump in and look at any scenario they’re looking at and help them do it.
And what I’ve learned about coaching is that people are better or worse at using their coach, which is something no one ever talks about.
20:31
For example, this one person I coach, she is a 12 out of 10 on how to use a coach.
She’ll come prepared and she’ll think about things that normal people would not think of using their coach.
I don’t think or nobody else does that I coach.
So for example, she’ll be like, hey, I’m planning an off site.
I’m going to prepare with you for my off site.
She is a managing director, so I’m working with her and she’s saying this is really important.
20:48
This needs to go well.
I want to make sure people connect.
I want to make sure they come together and we’ll talk about it.
OK, Let’s think about a flow.
Who could you bring in to influence this?
What kind of breakouts could you have?
I helped her even script what she would say.
It’s not something that you prescribe, say like I’m going to coach on that, but I did for that purpose for her or she’ll come, OK, I’m going to do performance reviews.
21:07
I’d love to vet this with you to make sure that I’m really got a really good 2nd instead of eyes on this.
And these are extremely senior people, so they’re not going to go to the CEO of some big company, you know what I mean?
Or whatever company and be like, hey, do you want to talk about this before I talk to you about it?
Like no one has time for that, right?
She’s really smart.
21:22
She comes to me and we’ll talk about it.
We’ll talk about potential and performance together and talk about questioning where some of these people are as like kind of a person who kind of knows the essence of the organization.
But I don’t know every player intimately.
So I’ll ask tough questions about that.
So I’ll do stuff like that.
Sometimes I’ll create even, for example, presentation deck with them.
21:40
Last week, for example, I was coaching another person that was thinking about their organization and how they’re actually thinking about having a PE firm come in and invest a lot of money.
It would be a major multiplier for them.
And they’re like, what do you think about this?
Like what should we be thinking about?
And I actually brought up the idea of having like an event as like, why wouldn’t you have an employee event where you could actually have everybody win?
22:00
You know, I mean, like, so an event would be, you know, you’d payout people on the options that they have in the organization or some portion of them, because I’ve done this type of work, you bring out ideas and then you help them explore them.
So now this person’s exploring their organization.
Could we do this?
Does this make sense to do this?
What is the happy path for employees as we continue to change how the organization is structured and it’s funded to keep people on the journey with us?
22:21
And how come they went?
You know, if someone’s been with the organization for a long time, you want them to live that dream with you.
Like founders always say, join my company.
You know, you can get lots of options and equity and we’re all going to win together.
So then they need to win at some point, you know, like if you’re going to get all this money, it would be great to have an event.
So there’s lots of different things because they bring a finance background, OPS, the HR, everything, a lot of people, leadership.
22:41
It could be like 5 million scenarios, but I like that.
It’s hard, right?
Like none of it sounds like easy, but it’s not.
It’s not easy.
And when you’re by yourself thinking about it, you just don’t think of it as many angles as with another person, right?
Listening to your background and listening to what you’re doing, you could have only got to where you are now with your background.
22:58
I mean, you couldn’t be providing that understanding and the help for people without having gone through it yourself and through so many different scenarios.
I mean, just the skyrocketing company, the company that’s having, you’ve done it all, like it’s just amazing.
And it does make sense for them to have that outside perspective who’s also not in the culture of the company.
23:20
For anyone who’s listening who is in that role of being a managing director or a chief people officer or whatever sort of the C-Suite role is, to have that opportunity to talk to someone who has been in so many of those different positions, it totally makes sense why you could really add value.
23:36
When we were talking, well, the last time that we talked actually, which gave us the idea to have this podcast, we were really riffing on the whole sort of being more human.
And the area that obviously I talked about in my book, which is around connection and belonging and how workplaces, like the cultures of a workplace just are so much more competitive or just a much better place to be when they are more human.
24:01
Great business is obviously how you make people feel.
It’s creating that culture of connection and belonging.
It’s about employees being customers themselves.
So rather than just being cogs in a wheel and being seen as, you know, just a necessary part of the business, it’s actually recognizing that we need to treat our employees almost as customers as well as the actual customers.
24:25
And, you know, so therefore people need to feel empowered and excited about working where they work and feel like they’re valued so that obviously they didn’t stay.
And it feels to me like many companies are getting this wrong.
A lot of companies don’t understand the importance and what it means to be more people centered or people focused and creating those human environments.
24:48
You know, the knock on effect is more profit.
And I know that you have a lot of thoughts on this area of connection and also just insights of what is happening in the job market right now.
So I just wonder what are your thoughts on connection?
What are you seeing and what are you hearing?
25:04
Just to give some stats just to start with that, what’s the market look like?
One and two, people are disengaged at work, actively disengaged.
I would say it’s probably higher than that.
Those are the stats if you look at Gartner, except people who they do this as a living to benchmark.
Another interesting one that you know, is a real shift in the market is that one in four people are looking for their next job on their first day of a job.
25:24
Can you imagine?
So 1/4 of people who join an organization are already thinking about leaving.
Why is this happening?
And I think that it’s the affordability crisis that we’re in.
Things are so expensive that, you know, you have your Maslovs, you know, like hierarchy of needs, they’re not getting met.
So, you know, when people are thinking about like, I want to, I have to afford my house, you know, and all these things that I’m already paying for, I’m joining this company and now I don’t know, like I need to commute to, to work.
25:49
So that extra cost, like I don’t want to do that.
So like, I’ll take this job now, but as soon as one opens up that I don’t have to commute, I’m gone or whatever the, the personal reasons may be.
But it’s sucks, right?
And it does also go back to connection that what am I seeing?
I think it’s pretty cool.
I’ve started following a company that talks about organizational network mapping and that’s fancy word for to talk about how many people are you connected to at work?
26:11
So there’s organizations that go out there and they’ll actually create a kind of looks like if you thought about the big dip, right?
And you connected all the dots of how people are connected in an organization.
So right now, the average amount of people that someone knows when they start in an organization that’s new, like that’s new to the organization and it’s hybrid is 3/3 people.
26:29
That’s it.
So how can you be connected to an org if you only really know three people?
You know your manager, maybe the person who hired you, and then another person you might deal with on a regular basis.
So that makes the conditions for connection much more complicated.
Now you’re really relying on the leader and then that leader needs to be good at remote and hybrid management, which is also not easy.
26:49
But also more than that, you need to be organized and it’s time consuming.
You have to put a lot of effort into and it has to be very intentional when everything is remote to be thinking about why would someone come in?
What are we going to do for the whole time someone’s in the office?
How are you logistically going to do that?
How am I going to stay on top of, you know, talking with you, making sure you know what you’re supposed to be doing in your job every day when everybody feels run over in their job because they feel like they have too much work because things are much more flat, right?
27:11
And they’re also new to their role doing the same thing that, you know, the person who’s trying to connect into the org ones to do.
So I think this is an issue.
Work has changed so much that there needs to be probably new rules around how do you make things more intentional and make it easier to create the structure or connection.
27:27
I did a talk last week on Disrupt HR.
I talked about the new ways of measuring our workforce and just talked about connection a bit.
And then also talked about the opportunity to change how we look at workforces.
Because the, the reality is, is people will say something like, I don’t know, 80% of people went to our town hall, 95% of people completed onboarding.
27:45
And you say that that’s pretty good.
It’s like both over 80%, you know, like whatever this big high swipe.
But on a people side, we have the opportunity to go down to the individual data perspective.
So my advice was, why don’t you create an individual index for your organization, 6 moments that matter.
That would be so important that you’d want every employee to be there or participate or, you know, have whatever outcome in those moments.
28:05
And then measure that for every single employees.
And then you’ll be able to see, hey, this group of employees is a 12 out of 10, man, they’re always there.
That these are our shiny stars.
And then what’s going on with this other group that’s just missing all those marks, right?
Like they’re making up that gap in the 80 and the 100, probably the same people.
So you can get ahead of it, right, and kind of figure it out.
28:22
And maybe certain managers aren’t asking employees to attend.
Could be anything, right?
Could be just they don’t know that they should be there or they got disconnected at a critical point where you could have really engaged to that workforce.
So things are just changing.
It’s a big shift from like you can’t use in office old practices for this dynamic workforce that is not very connected to the workforce right now.
28:41
What is conscious unbossing?
So conscious unbossing is a new term.
I think it was Korn fairy point conscious.
I’m embossing in in some of the work that they’ve done or they’ve written an article about it where it’s about 70% of Gen.
28:56
Z’s basically don’t aspire to be a leader.
They call this unbossing when we graduate from school at Philippa.
Like it was the dream, you know, you would meet everybody and be so to be so respectful.
Almost everybody would want to go up to that leadership stream, right?
This is completely the opposite now, because now it’s seen as why would I want to do this?
29:14
I don’t get training to do it.
I don’t get paid that much more money to do it.
I want to live my life and have better balance.
This is a very tricky thing because we obviously need, you know, someone to be a leader in the organization and that’s a huge part of the the work population right now.
29:30
I wrote an article about this once about conscious embossing.
And what I talked about is that when I graduated from school too, it was the boomers that were already projected to be retiring in, I don’t know, like 20 years or something.
And they had what they called the talent gap.
So the talent gap was, Oh, well, we have to fill all these leadership roles because all of this whole population is going to retire out.
29:48
So that’s why they developed so many leadership programs and that’s why all of us are a generation of Xers or YS basically got this presence of all the leadership development programs with the intention originally of filling that gap.
Those don’t exist anymore.
Those have been gone to the wayside.
They’re so expensive and a lot of them aren’t even that successful.
30:04
But the companies that were good at them are known for developing leaders, right?
I called out a while ago just to see, does anyone have a good example of a company that’s known for developing leaders right now?
Because I don’t know one I wish I did like, because I like, you know, I would say GE was the forefathers.
They used to spend $1 billion B billion a long time ago to develop leaders every year just in L&D amazing.
30:25
Of course they had strong leaders.
And then every time leaders would leave, they’d become CEO’s of other companies.
And there’s so many examples of that.
There’s other organizations that would be in that vertical of being leader developers.
I think a lot of the Consumer Packaged Goods or banks, financial services would still have some goods intake programs that would develop leaders and especially because they have to keep their attractiveness somehow too, because who wants to work in insurance right now, right?
30:49
I did it for a while and like, I think, you know, there’s a lot of purpose in it, but out of school, everybody wants to work at ChatGPT like a open AI, right?
So.
How do you set people up for success?
I think it’s the basics #1 is alignment.
I think that’s it.
31:04
If you can get aligned, that’s the number one step to success.
So do you know what your goals are?
This is a piece that seems so basic.
Definitely not.
People mostly are kind of off on what their goals are or they’re off on the communication and tracking of their goals with their leaders.
Those are the two pieces.
If you can nail that, spend your time being very clear on what your goals are.
31:21
And then as you’re progressing and working, making sure that you’re communicating with your leader and stakeholders of what have you been up to, right?
How are you trending towards those, but also packaging up the things you do.
And generally what I tell people is communicate with your leaders as here’s the great stuff that I’ve been doing and getting momentum on.
Here are the other things I need your help with.
31:37
And here’s a general update on my business as usual stuff, projects and then people on my team, like who’s sick, moving, you know, leaving pregnant, whatever, all those types of things, right?
So that everybody’s up to date on life at work as well as what’s going on.
And it will take you one hour a week for sure, like to be organized so you can communicate clearly all these things and package them out.
31:55
But you couldn’t spend any time better than that because it makes you rethink like what am I doing?
Am I aligned?
Where am I spending my time, right?
And like, can I communicate this to someone else in a succinct way that is still aligned to our goals?
If I go back and keep myself and my teams and my peers or whatever, you have aligned to the same kind of North Star.
32:12
So yeah.
And it makes you so much more intentional, doesn’t it, just as far as ensuring that you’re actually doing what you want to be doing.
I think sometimes it’s so easy for us to just you’re just sort of plowing through the To Do List and sort of OK.
And then people are throwing a whole lot of stuff at you and you’re like, OK, I just need to get it done.
32:30
I just need to get it done.
And then suddenly you reflect a little bit and think, what the heck am I doing?
This isn’t even what I signed up for.
This isn’t even what what I want to be doing.
And I think what’s interesting is just when you’re talking about earlier when you talked about your coaching and how some people say, oh, I’m going to charge my friends.
And you’re like, oh, I wouldn’t charge my friends.
32:45
It’s a fine line from the point of view of whatever it is that we’re doing.
We do need to be intentional.
And we also need to be very careful, you know, not to be people pleasers, to be kind, but not to be people pleasers and to be doing things that actually make sense for us too.
33:03
And I think it’s very easy for us to just say yes to everything.
OK, yeah, yeah, I’ll do that.
Because if you want to get that promotion or if you, you know, don’t want to let people down, but at the same time, your time is important.
You need to look after you because you’ve got your family, you’ve got your home life.
But at the same time, you want to do your job well, but also you need to, you need to be at an OK place in order to be able to do all of that.
33:26
And that also does mean perhaps charging for your time and OK, you can choose maybe there’s sort of a certain a number of freebies that you’re going to do.
But at the same time, you just need to be so careful about what you’re taking on.
And I from the point of view of just even what you’re saying is those goals to be intentional about what what you’re doing in your work, whether you work for yourself or you work in a role in a corporate.
33:48
It is so, so, so important to have those check insurance talk to your boss about what you’re doing.
Because I think obviously, particularly in this virtual world, it’s so important just to ensure that everybody’s clear and what everyone’s doing because otherwise, you know, if you’re not talking about stuff, it’s sometimes just it gets complicated.
But yeah, also just for you to have those reflections, I mean, I just think that is so important on so many levels.
34:09
Yeah, 1 frame like I’ve used that’s really basic in that space is called the 331.
What are the three things I did last week, the three things I’m going to do this week and what’s one thing or more that I need help with done?
You know, because you could spin around and the thing with the 331, I developed that in a fast moving environment because sometimes we’ll talk, right?
34:27
Phillip will be like, let’s do this, blah blah, blah blah blah, right?
And then all of a sudden everything changes course between that time I talked to you and four days later.
Do you need to make sure that you’re tracking?
So you have to force that function figure out what it is and 331 highly recommend.
A really good idea, yeah.
Do you have any other takeaways or tools that people can use with their teams?
34:45
I mean, I think 331 is a great one.
Is there anything else that you have?
Yeah, 331’s really easy.
You can do that tomorrow.
Just in the spirit of I was just talking about all this new workforce measurement and what you can do.
And I think the coolest tech that I’ve seen in the last two years since I’ve started my business that I’ve done a lot of work with is Neurotech surveys.
35:00
So everybody knows an engagement survey.
So that’s basically, you know, you ask a bunch of questions, people say, you know, I see myself here in two years or whatever.
Like the questions might be what neurotech does.
It adds on another dimension of measuring how you really feel about it.
So it has algorithms built into it that basically will tell you the alignment between what someone says versus how they feel.
35:19
And what you find in the end is this picture of where people are aligned and where they’re not aligned between how they feel and what they say.
So you can imagine, here’s a few thoughts.
So why would this be useful?
Just in general?
It is.
And you’ll find one that people usually, if you said, Susie, what’s going to come out of my engagement survey?
35:35
Listen, you don’t even have to do it.
I’ll tell you right now, it’s I want to get more pay, I want more flexibility and I want to develop.
You don’t even need an engagement survey 99% of the time, less something’s off the charts need of work in your organization.
Outside of that, those are the three that will always come up.
If you do the neurotech survey.
Generally what comes up is comp usually isn’t one of the top ones.
35:52
It has started creeping up because of the affordability pressures and whatnot.
But in general, it’s more around goals, alignment on goals with your leader.
I know my goals are that comes up as a big gap.
Another one that comes up is communication, manager communication.
These are things that usually don’t come up.
The other thing that happens with these surveys is that the leaders, so every leader knows when an engagement survey comes along, their team’s going to get measured on engagement.
36:12
So rarely are they, I really tank out the scores, right?
So you’ll see.
But we actually did one once where people on the leadership team were really low engagement, let’s say 2020 points lower than the rest of the company.
This is concerning.
And I was like, let’s do it again.
Maybe something happened just to test it.
36:28
Same thing again.
So again, they said they were fully engaged when they totally were not, right.
So I think that it can be insightful, but to have this to see what would it say and it bring out these different dimensions of how people feel.
And how does it work so I can include it in the notes?
See the Truth Sayers or the four founders of this.
36:43
So basically they have over 500 billion data points on this.
They’re based in the UK actually, and they work with a lot of big companies.
They’re the back office for Aon, which is the four founders of engagement survey.
So they’ve moved into this new tech.
And then North America, there’s another company called Joam.
But yeah, I think this tech is on point.
36:59
It is very good and you’ll get every result.
Some organizations, if they’re very blunt and very transparent, basically all the results are super aligned.
And I’ve seen one, one organization like this where you’re like, this is amazing.
Everybody is saying exactly how they feel, which is great.
But then there’s always some micro findings, let’s say your most important group of producers, if you’re in a clinic like a dentist or a fertility person, the embryologist, all of these types of specialized roles, you have to watch those closely too to see how do they feel about things really, because these surveys give you a lot of different dimensions of think of how to think about it in every level.
37:28
So even demographics, it’s interesting because demographics usually nobody says anything, but you could see certain groups where I’ve seen that people of a certain ethnic background feel very differently than others.
It’s fascinating.
It’s fascinating to it’s just more data, right?
So why would you go with face value data when you have this other level of data?
37:44
It’s all based off of our very implicit time studies.
So they’re very well researched.
So that’s a cool one.
Thank you.
Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you’d like to tell our listeners?
No, I’m a Team Philippa guy.
I think what you do in your work is amazing that I love that you wrote your book and it’s out there.
So I am happy to support that all day long.
38:01
And yeah, no, you’d luck like on your journey and what you’re doing.
So thank.
You Susie.
Well, we definitely, it’s amazing how we started at Ivy getting to know each other and sort of went on various different routes and have we’ve found our way back to not a dissimilar area.
38:16
So yeah, yeah, it’s so good.
Thank you for being with us, and until the next time.
Yeah, it’s my pleasure.
Bye.
Thank you.
Bye.
Hey everyone, this is Philippa again.
I hope you enjoyed listening.
Now this is your chance to get involved with Ty.
38:33
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38:51
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39:11
Get in touch and I can explain more.
A huge thanks to Ben Naviera for Co producing this with me and for creating the music.
I hope we’ll meet up again soon.
