The Gartner Talent Angle

As the Chief People Officer at Microsoft, Kathleen Hogan is responsible for the company's cultural transformation.  She joins us to talk about how Microsoft is using a technique called "Screening In" to drive cultural change through diversity.   Hogan is new to the HR function, but not to talent management. Previously she was vice president of Microsoft Services, a team dedicated to helping businesses and consumers maximize the value of their investment in Microsoft technologies. Hogan has also served as corporate vice president of Customer Service and Support, responsible for the strategy and delivery of consumer and commercial technical support and customer service for Microsoft products and services.  *This spotlight episode is excerpted from our 1 hour interview with Kathleen in 2016

Are there professional ways to dealing with complainers in the workplace? Complaining is like bad breath - you notice it when it comes out of someone else’s mouth, but not when it comes out of your own. Needless to say it happens all the time. Will Bowen, author of A Complaint Free World, shares five ways to identify chronic complaining when it slips out and how to silence those complaints with easy-to-remember solutions in this episode of the Talent Angle. For a deeper look into combatting complaints, check out Will Bowen’s newly published E-book titled G.R.I.P.E. - How to Identify and Stop Complaints, available for free at https://www.dropbox.com/s/dbwvc5kwy5z4yme/GRIPE%20-%20How%20to%20Identify%20and%20Stop%20Complaints%20MASTER.pdf?dl=0  

For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But today, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. Through his research, Adam Grant argues that at work, most people operate as either takers, matchers, or givers. Whereas takers strive to get as much as possible from others and matchers aim to trade evenly, givers are the rare breed of people who contribute to others without expecting anything in return.  Using his own pioneering research as Wharton's youngest tenured professor, Grant shows that these styles have a surprising impact on success. Although some givers get exploited and burn out, the rest achieve extraordinary results across a wide range of industries. *This podcast was excerpted from our original season one podcast on Originals and Give and Take  

Is it possible for businesses to simultaneously drive social impact, innovation, and financial returns all at the same time? More than ever, employees are making their career and purchasing decisions based on a company’s purpose and societal impact. In this episode of the Talent Angle, Wendy Woods, Senior Partner and Global Leader of BCG’s Social Impact Practice, discusses how companies that strive for Total Societal Impact can achieve positive returns in their brand, engagement, PR, and the long-term sustainability of their business models.

Where does great culture come from? How do you build and sustain it in your group, or strengthen a culture that needs fixing? Daniel Coyle, author of The Culture Code, joins the Talent Angle to discuss what makes some of the world’s most successful organizations tick - including Pixar, the San Antonio Spurs, and U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six. Coyle offers specific strategies to help you trigger learning, spark collaboration, build trust, and drive positive change to ultimately unlock the hidden potential of teams.

Learn how to design your life through the same techniques that innovators use to design products and new technology. Dave Evans, Stanford Lecturer and New York Times best-selling co-author of Designing Your Life, talks to us about following your passions in life, and how you can design a process to figure out what will ultimately make you satisfied and happy. Dave holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford. While en route to biomedical engineering, Evans accepted an invitation to work for Apple, where he led product marketing for the mouse team and introduced laser printing to the masses. When Dave’s boss at Apple left to start Electronic Arts, Dave joined as the company’s first VP of Talent, dedicated to making “software worthy of the minds that use it.” Dave holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and a graduate diploma in contemplative Spirituality form San Francisco Theological Seminary.

Lack of Agility is the kiss of death. It is no secret that large, mature organizations can struggle to innovate. But Michael Arena, Chief Talent Officer at General Motors, argues that even the most bureaucratic organizations can make innovation and adaptability a part of their DNA. Listen to this episode of the Talent Angle to learn how to create an Adaptive Space, where you can enable novel and creative ideas to flow freely into and throughout your company. Discover the role you play in your own network and where you can interact most effectively by taking the following 20-minute network assessment or by visiting https://www.adaptivespace.net/assessment To learn more about how you can foster connections among people, ideas, information, and resources check out Michael’s new book, Adaptive Space: How GM and Other Companies are Positively Disrupting Themselves and Transforming into Agile Organizations.

Andy Walshe is a globally recognized leader and expert in the field of elite human performance. For over 20 years the Australian native has been focused on the goal of “de-mystifying talent” by researching and training individuals and teams across a vast network of world-class programs in sport, culture, military and business settings. Dr. Walshe is currently the Director of High Performance for Red Bull, where he works with hundreds of international athletes and cultural opinion leaders; supervises a team of industry-leading scientists, engineers, physicians and technologists to develop and implement elite performance models. Dr. Walshe was the Performance Manager for Red Bull Stratos, leading the performance plan for Felix Baumgartner’s record-breaking jump to Earth from the stratosphere in 2012. Prior to joining Red Bull, Dr. Walshe designed a highly successful performance program for the U.S Olympic ski and snowboard teams, guiding their athletes to victories on the world stage. Dr. Walshe has also held senior consulting roles at the Australian Institute of Sport, NSW Institute of Sport and Queensland Institute of Sport. Dr. Walshe consults directly with numerous organizations and institutions in his field, including the Armed Forces, Fortune 500 companies, technology companies, artists and athletes worldwide. Dr. Walshe has been invited to participate and share his learnings at a number of global events and conferences, and has had projects featured in numerous US and global leading publications. Dr. Andy Walshe joins to CEB Talent Angle to discuss how principals from elite athletics can be applied to developing executives and leaders. Teams will invest money and energy into athletic talent to get the best out of them; Dr. Walsh advocates we apply the same model to business and treat business leaders like the elite talent they are. By focusing leaders on becoming better at who they are before becoming better at what they do, organizations can make leaders the best version of themselves so that they can set the tone and culture across the organization.

Morning Espressos are 5-minute insights and lessons to help you build the skills researched by some of the top minds in the world.  Charles Duhigg recommends that you spend time creating your own narrative and visualizing your day.   "One of the things that we know is that the key to building mental models, to being able to sort of sharpen your focus, is to be able to tell yourself a story about what’s occurring as it occurs. One of my favorite examples of this is a series of studies that were done with people like for instance firefighters. They found that the best firefighters are the ones who walk into a burning building. As soon as they walk in, they start telling themselves a story about what they expect to see. And so as a result, when they walk into a room that’s on fire, they tell themselves, okay, I’m walking into this room. I expect to see in that corner flames. There’s a staircase over there. I expect to see that there will be a bunch of flames on that staircase because staircases burn quickly. And then when they walk in and they looked in that room and what they don’t see is they don’t see a bunch of flames on that staircase, it sets off alarm bells in their mind, and it tells them, look, there’s something wrong with that staircase. Don’t go walk on that staircase because it doesn’t look like what you expected it to look like. Similarly, we know that people who are most productive at work, who tend to almost have this ESP about what they should be paying attention to and what they can safely ignore, they tend to be people who tell themselves stories about what they expect to have happen during meetings or what they expect to happen in the morning versus the afternoon. This is a really important lesson which is that our brain tends to make sense of the world by finding some narrative that it can grasp onto. The best way for us to try and determine what’s going to happen next or what I expect to happen this afternoon or what I should focus on tomorrow morning is by telling ourselves a story about it because when we tell ourselves stories, our brain has this ability to take that story and to expand upon it, to use it as a template for determining this is what’s important and this is what’s not important. Once we do that, we’ve sharpened our focus to a degree that we have the ability to decide almost within milliseconds that, oh, when someone comes in and they interrupt me during my meeting, I can safely say, no. Let’s put this off until tomorrow because I don’t have time to talk about it. But when the phone rings and it’s someone I’ve been trying to get ahold of, I should pick up that call because that fits into the story about what I’ve been telling myself about what I expect to get done today."

Traditional management often assumes that motivating people at work is simply about paying them enough--but Barry Schwartz, the author of Why We Work, believes the real motivation to work comes from finding meaning. Everyone--whether they’re a lawyer or janitor, painter or salesperson--can perform at a higher level by finding meaning in their work. Listen to this episode of the CEB Talent Angle to hear Barry discuss how our conventional wisdom on motivation at work is wrong, and how managers can help their employees connect to the good they do in the world.