371 LinkedIn’s First CHRO and Author of Workquake Steve Cadigan on the Future of Work

***DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following AI-generated transcript may not be 100% accurate and could contain misspellings or errors.***

[00:00:00] Mahan Tavakoli: Steve Cadigan, welcome to partnering leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me. 

[00:00:05] Steve Cadigan: Great to be here today. 

[00:00:06] Mahan Tavakoli: Can't wait to get some of your thoughts and insights. But before we get to that, Steve would love to know a little bit more about you, but your upbringing and how it's contributed to who you've become.

[00:00:17] Steve Cadigan: I was born in America at the age of two. My parents decided they wanted an adventure and moved from St. Louis, Missouri to South Africa, where we spent the next four years. Then unfortunately, after four wonderful years, we were taking a vacation and had our visas pulled.

And they said, when you 30 days to leave. So we were politely told That you're no longer welcome in South Africa. And we settled back in the East coast in Connecticut, small sort of working class town, if you will. And that's pretty much where I spent most of the rest of my education all the way through high school and university.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life going into school in the university and had less of an idea when I graduated from university. I was a history major because I loved history and those are the classes I seem to do the best in. And I was raised in a home of a social worker, my mother and a minister, my father.

And I was told business is not really the path that we think is right for our family. So I graduated saying, I think I want to go into business. But I didn't know where to start. And one of the two on campus recruiting firms was a firm in San Francisco that recruited me and I'd never been to California before.

So I took the opportunity to move to California. I started with this company and within about a year, I discovered this role in recruiting and I fell in love. I think I fell in love with recruiting at first because it was everything about sports that I loved, which is matching people and situations and teams and leaders to produce great outcomes.

And in fact, I was surprised they were going to pay me to do that. Really young and inexperienced. experience. I had no business recruiting, assessing talent, but it was a great entree into the world of talent. And so I did that and took on increasing roles, responsibilities and moved to several firms until I hit a high tech in about 1994, it's probably eight years into my career.

And I just fell in love with the dynamism of high tech companies moving really quickly, making decisions, taking risks, experimenting with all kinds of things not only in the world of developing products, but also with people practices. And that, so that was another stroke of luck. In 1998, I was asked to be the first person to found and build the acquisition integration team for Cisco systems, which at the time was starting to acquire companies.

really aggressively. And over the next four years, after taking that job, we acquired 50 companies in four years with employees in almost every country of the world. And I grew that team from just me and my boss into me running the whole thing with a team of 30. And so in one year we did 26 deals and had 13 going on at the same time.

And that was the sort of beginning of my ascendancy into sort of career Growth. I had I was recognized in the wall street journal, fortune magazine as world class integration practices. It wasn't because of me. It was because of the company was great. And we had great leadership and we had really good principals.

I still do a lot of MNA consulting on the side. And then after the dot com bubble burst, We stopped buying companies in 2001 and I moved to Asia and I was running human resources for all of Cisco Asia, which was a phenomenal experience. Had my first son in Singapore. And then after two years of that, they wanted me to come back to the States.

I said, no, I want to. Stay in Asia. And they said, no, you need to come back to expensive land, California. And I said, nope, I'm not going to do that. And so I started looking for a role and I found one in Western Canada and I moved from us to Singapore for two years and then to Western Canada, Vancouver, which is still for me, one of the most amazing places I've ever lived.

And I regret having to leave, but the next four years I was there in a small chip company called PMC Sierra, which was Probably the place where I had the greatest career satisfaction, just great team, tough business, beautiful environment, really I really felt like I made more of a difference there than any place I've ever worked which was a great, but no one's ever heard of that company.

So when they look at my CV, they always think, Oh, Cisco, LinkedIn. And they never asked me about that one, but that was a great ride. And I do use that a lot in coaching students today. So there's some amazing opportunities out there in places you've never heard of that are not brand names, and there's a lot of people who've had miserable experiences working for brand names.

So it doesn't have to be the brand name to be a, just a game changer, career experience. Anyway, so after four years of being there I got my CEO at the time, decided to retire. And I, it left me feeling very vulnerable in a city. That's really more of a lifestyle city than a career town. And so I became open to opportunities and a video game company, electronic arts came after me, wooed me back to the United States, moved my family.

And I had pair of twins born in Canada. So now I'm a family of five. They wooed us back to the States. And so moved back to the U S and I was happy to be back now because my raising my kids away from family's heart, those of you who've raised kids away from home know what I'm talking about.

It's really nice to have a little bit of a, shock absorber mom or dad coming over so you can go see a movie with your wife or something like that. So we had. Moved back to be closer with family, which was great. And then 2008, second mortgage crisis hits and my job basically shrivels up and doesn't really provide the same meaning I was hoping it would at Electronic Arts.

So I was open again to a different opportunity. Somehow through friend of a friend, LinkedIn called and said, Hey, would you be our first head of HR? And that led me to go to my first sort of startup, if you will. Five, six years old, 400 people. And the next four years, I grew that from 400 to 4, 000, two countries to 17, two offices to 26.

And it was in the bell tower at New York stock exchange the day we went public and really built what I think is still today, one of the greatest corporate cultures that's out there. So it did that for about four years. Again, this is a very A big marker in most of my careers experiences. It's about four years after that, I decided to take a breather and left.

And the last 12 years I've been working on my own, helping leaders, organizations, cities, and countries build great talent strategies three years ago, I published a book called work quake. Which is really designed to help people make sense of the future work companies and employees, and that's done really well.

And so it's led me to doing a lot of teaching. I've given a few graduation talks at Stanford and University of San Francisco and it's just been really fun

[00:06:43] Mahan Tavakoli: what rich experiences, Steve, each and every one of them, we can have hours long conversations because you have so many different perspectives on talent, whether it is the cross cultural elements of it to having worked in different size organizations all throughout, you got involved with talent in technology.

And one of the things that in my mind. set technology initially apart is that the value of talent was a lot higher than many other industries. Let's pick manufacturing at the other extreme where machinery was really important over the decades. Now, the value of talent for all kinds of organizations is a lot higher.

So we'd love to get your thoughts and perspectives on how the role of talent in your view has shifted over these past couple of decades. 

[00:07:44] Steve Cadigan: What's happened, I believe in business over the last few decades is every company's increasingly had to leverage technology more.

And leveraging technology more means leveraging software engineers more. And that is a bigger , proportion of every organization, including traditional organizations. Let's take manufacturing. Let's take banking. Let's take insurance. Banking is now experienced by most consumers. On a phone. What do banks know about phones?

They didn't know a lot. They didn't have to know a lot And so what's happened is as your proportion of talent switches to being more technically oriented and experienced You've now got to hire a different Demographic than you did before you no longer have a captive audience of a pool of people Or markets, if you will, competition got a lot tougher.

And so that's, someone said to me, and I quote this in my book the war for talent's over and talent one. So especially technical talent has a lot more leverage. And I think that's changed the game. If we look at the pandemic, what the pandemic did was serve. As a wake up call to a lot of organizations because many people during pandemic made very different career choices.

I'm going to switch industries. I'm not going to work here anymore. Now that I could work from home, I'm deciding that I don't want to go back to an office. And so a lot of organizations were not prepared to compete for talent. They didn't have to before. And now we have countries competing for talent.

Germany has changed their immigration laws to the point where they've recognized if we don't have 400, 000 new knowledge workers imported into our economy every year, our economy is going to be in crisis. And that's something, what happened during the pandemic was talent, global talent migration stopped for two years.

And in the United States where I pay a lot of attention to the talent trends, free print pre pandemic, knowledge worker migration, and we're talking college degrees, PhDs and so forth into our economy was around a million people a year. Okay. Now we're also exporting and people going on assignment and people leaving and so forth and people dying and things happening that million to million to went to zero for two years.

So people look around like, Hey where did the servers go? Where'd the dishwashers go? Where did the people that were, manning this retail store that's now only open three days a week. And it was open seven. What happened? What happened was everything went cuckoo. And and so that's caught traditional business, non technology completely on their heels.

The last, since 1994, when I got to technology, if you're in technology, you are fighting for talent all the time. You have to make core. And if you're in Silicon Valley. Every one of your employees is getting pinged for a job opportunity every day. So you better have a great environment to hold onto that talent.

And all these companies that look out, they're like, Oh my gosh, these people have low morals. No, the people are deciding to go work somewhere where they want to work and it's not you. So you better raise your game. And I think at the end of the day, I'm sorry for those businesses that never had to compete, but came on, right?

[00:10:55] Mahan Tavakoli: What a beautiful way of putting it steve. It requires a shift in mindset I hear a lot of ceos a lot of friends of mine that I interact with in the business community many clients complaining and talking about talent and how the talent isn't willing to do what the organization wants.

The way you are framing it is that maybe the mindset needs to be different in retaining and energizing talent. 

[00:11:24] Steve Cadigan: Listen, I hear the same thing and I get asked a lot of times, Steve, can you come and talk to us about generational differences? And I go why do you want me to talk about that?

Every generation? I don't know. There's a generation history that looks back and says, wow, those young people are just, they work harder than we do. Is that really new? But listen, I really feel like if you're with someone or you're listening right now, and you've got a little bit of an edge against these young, this young generation, I want to have you reframe that for a second, because it's not about.

Career sugar high, shopping for promotion, disloyal, work ethic. That's not what's at play here. What's at play is a demographic that sees more choice of places they can work than ever before. When I got started, every opportunity I thought, sought after was essentially something in a newspaper.

And it was doctor, lawyer, teacher, fireman, policemen, businessmen. Those are the five or six choices, and now my kids see choices to work for themselves to be the, some of them want to be YouTube influencers and that's not even working for someone else. And so when I go to these executives who are saying that young generation, I go, first off, it's the generation of your children that you raised with your values.

So you have some ownership. Number one, number two, if you were starting your career 50 years ago and you could see More new industries being created than at any time in history, which means more new potential career paths, which means more confusion. What's happening right now in universities is really something that to pay attention to.

And I'm on a panel at a university in a few weeks talking to parents about careers. What's happening is more students are changing majors than at any time in history. Now, why is that? I think it's because they're not sure which study domain is going to give them the greatest financial independence or the shortest pathway to financial independence.

When you see cryptocurrency and you see these, coin bases and Bitcoin, and then you see, an Airbnb or driverless technology. Like what is that the future or is it not the future? And so that's causing massive career confusion. Second point is. Thank you social media or no thank you social media.

I now know as an employee more of what I don't have in my company, what someone else has than ever before. They're going on a trip to Hawaii. They're taking their whole company on a cruise in the New York Hudson. Like they're implementing this, a crazy bonus plan over here. I never saw that.

Like I see right now, which is again, adding to my concern. Wow, did I make the right choice coming here? I think I want to go over there. And so we haven't adjusted to this new world of infinite career choice. And then you add on a third dimension, which is the pandemic made most companies more comfortable hiring remote staff.

So it's not always about where you live that is determining where you can work. And and we're, and that's continuing to be a bit of a point of tension for a lot of organizations in the news every day is, Oh, everyone, Amazon just announced when we're recording this, they just announced in the last week, the new CEO, everyone back five days a week with weeds, the best way for us to build culture and teamwork, and they're not apologetic about it.

. I think the worst thing you can do as a company right now is say , maybe this, maybe that, and keep swinging back and forth. You got to know what your position is and just be honest with your people so they can plan their lives.

[00:14:49] Mahan Tavakoli: So once you recognize that this is not just a generational issue, or this is not just a post pandemic challenge. It is a real shift, as you had also mentioned in Workweek. What do leaders need to do differently?

Part of it is the recognition that this shift has taken place. They need to approach talent differently. What do you tell them that they should do? 

[00:15:17] Steve Cadigan: Great question. Really good question. And I think the first part of your question is the most important one. I think we're still at the acknowledge we have a problem face and very few organizations are saying, let's act on it.

So I'll give you an example. The most obvious data trend that I share with business leaders today is around turnover, particularly among knowledge workers. But I was just talking to the largest John Deere distributors a few weeks ago and I said, what's your biggest problem? They said, we can't find the people we need.

And when we do, they don't stay, they're not staying as long. So then I go to we can talk about why that's happening, but there's a bigger question than why people are leaving. The bigger question is, do you think that's going to change in the future? Do you think in the next five or 10 years, people will stay in companies longer that we're just going through a cycle.

 And every single leader I talked to says no. I don't think they're going to stay longer. 

[00:16:11] Mahan Tavakoli: What an outstanding question to get people to focus on the real problem and address it because that gets them to think about and verbalize. , because , in many instances, the assumption is things are going to go back to the way they were and they are not. So that is such an outstanding question for people listening to think for themselves.

Do I seriously expect? The future three years from now, five years from now to be different for people to want to stay with my team and organization for 10, 15, 20 years, or do I expect the current pace of turnover or challenges and then adjust accordingly? 

[00:16:57] Steve Cadigan: Yes. And that's worth the bold underline that you just did.

So kudos to you for recognizing that it is really huge because if you are prepared to answer that the way that I think most business leaders do say yes, people will. And the answer is usually delivered with such apprehension and disappointment. Yes, they probably will not stay. Like then you have to look and say, okay, every architecture of work that we're using today, Is built around seniority and longterm.

So every in the United States in particular, the longer you stay, the more vacation you get, the longer you stay, the more 401k match you get, the longer you stay, the more opportunities for promotion. If you look at most traditional team building training, it's around building a team that stays together for a long time.

If you look at human resource bonuses, it's how low you keep the turnover. So all of our rewards, all of our architecture was built with the belief. The longer a team stays together. The more likely they are to win, right? Built to last the biggest selling book in the history of leadership. Collins and Porras built, build 100 year company.

I would argue if Collins and Porras put that book together today, they would rename it built to win right now because the future is so uncertain. So let me address point number one, which is that paradigm really holding true today that the teams that stay together the longest are the teams that build the most?

Disproportionate value. And the answer is I got a couple of companies you might have heard of whose tenure is median tenures around two to four years. And they're the most innovative, creative, highest market value companies in the world. Google, Apple, Facebook, Tesla, Airbnb, Microsoft, Uber. Those companies are around two to four years median tenure.

It's not because we have 40 year employees that we're crushing it. It's because we have a lot of new employees. With new ideas and new ways of solving problems and the ultimate example of this and I apologize in advance because this is the over most over benchmark company in the world and it's run by a lunatic but Tesla is now worth more than Ford, General Motors, Honda, Toyota, Mercedes and BMW combined.

They've been around less than 25 years. Their median tenure is about two years. After the current layoffs that they're going to do, who knows it's going to be less. And so what I like to ask business leaders is why do you think the investor community is putting a premium on Tesla and not on the organizations that have been doing this for a hundred years?

And they inevitably say, because they can innovate. And I said, that's right, because the hundred years of policy and bureaucracy and paradigm entrenchment and rigid thinking is now an inhibitor in a world that's changing quickly. And the companies, the Googles, the apples of Facebook, I'm not here to sell, Oh, technology is the greatest.

There's a lot of problems with technology companies and Silicon Valley is not a perfect world. So don't get me wrong. I'm not drinking and drunk on the Kool Aid, but you cannot argue that disproportionate creativity and innovation is happening in high velocity turnover environments. So what I like to help leaders understand to your point let's get practical here.

What are you going to do about this? First you have to acknowledge, okay, let me prepare my team business and how I create value in a, for a world where people won't stay long. No rule number one in a world where more people are leaving, I have more alumni than I've ever had. I've got more ex employees.

Am I talking to him? Do I have an alumni community? Am I getting, quarterly or monthly memos, emails, newsletters to them? Am I inviting them to come back and help out on some things? Usually, the answer is no. They quit. We don't like them. They don't think we're sexy. They're not sexy. We went to the Tony Soprano School of HR, which is you quit and you're dead to me, right?

And it's just broken. It's broken. So step number one, you got more people leaving. Talk to them. Maybe they'll come back and recognize everyone's got more ex employees and they need to be your angels in the universe. So that's step number one. Step number two, I'm a big sports fan. That's why I love HR.

Let me look at places that are dealing with crazy turnover, college basketball. 15 years ago, they changed the rule in college basketball so that you don't have to be four years before you can go into the pros. And now you only have to go for a year. In some cases, you don't even need to go. The best high school players now only stay in a college one year.

And so what college, the best college teams have had to do is say, I have to teach a simpler offense. I have to teach a simpler defense. I don't have four years to build team chemistry. I've got four months to build a world class team every year. And the good news for me is everyone else is struggling with what I'm struggling with.

So I've got to create value. I've got to accelerate team building. I've got to accelerate onboarding. I've got to make the jobs so that it doesn't take three or four years for someone to understand. And that's what I would tell business leaders. If someone on your team leaves today and says, Oh no, Sahad is the only person that knows how to do that.

We're screwed. That's on you because you knew Sahad was going to go. You just told me, they're probably not going to stay as long as they did. So what are you doing to share knowledge? What are you doing to move people around? And that's uncomfortable because you don't want. You don't want a lot of fluidity because we've been taught that's destabilizing, that's going to lead to inconsistency.

A lot of people who care about customers, it's like my customers don't want someone new every other year. That's not good for relationship. I'm not, I said, yeah, but the person you're talking to your customer is also changing every other year too. So we're all in this together. Maybe instead of one person per client, you have three people per client so that if one person goes, there's still familiarity.

You see what I'm saying though, that we have to change the architecture to expect people are going to go and care about them for their whole career, not just when they work for us. And those are just so counter. To what we've all been taught. And when I share that with business leaders, they're not doing what you're doing right now, which is smiling and saying, wow, this is really hard.

They're going, no, , I don't know that I can do this. It's really hard. Absolutely. 

[00:23:11] Mahan Tavakoli: Brilliant. Steve, . I've run into very few organizations that do this. McKinsey has, I think, done it at least for a couple of decades, which is viewing people who leave as alumni and nurturing ongoing relationships with them.

You're absolutely right. Where you walk out the door, you're dead to me. Doesn't matter how long you were with the organization, what benefits there could be. The other one, I love the perspective you shared on college basketball and viewing the team as people who are going to be with you for a shorter period of time, therefore, what systems and structures do you need to thrive when people are with you for a shorter period of time?

In your experience, what are the systems structures or approaches that could make that a little easier for leaders to implement in their organizations? 

[00:24:13] Steve Cadigan: I think it begins with the very first conversation you have with someone, which is why do you want to come here and where do you want to go when you leave?

 I had a leader in our sales organization at LinkedIn. He said, and the first question he'd ask is where do you want to be? And what do you want to do when you leave LinkedIn? And it would disarm every candidate.

Can it be like, no, wait a second. We're talking about my exit interview. You didn't even make me a job offer yet. And we're talking about me leaving. He says, let's just be honest. It's Silicon Valley, like three years. It's 10. And you're going to go somewhere else and I want to know what you want to get out of this so I can make this the greatest learning journey of your, of your career.

And so that's the challenge is in a world of infinite career choice that we have with the talent that we're hiring, they have so many choices today. Not everybody, but a lot of professional workers have a lot more choice than ever before. I deal a lot with the Hospital Associations of America. They are in, they're in code red right now.

We've got more nurse turnover, more doctors leaving more early retirements than any time in history. And nurses have more choices to work from home. To do telemedicine, telehealth to, do it, home to home visits rather than be subject to this just brutal hospital schedule, which doesn't fit their life or as a parent.

And so the hospital was like, what do we do? I'm like, you're going to have to build an ecosystem. You're going to have to build. You're going to have to hire nurses and rotate them on this brutal schedule, but also let them work from home and then let them go work somewhere at another hospital system.

Cause they can make four times as much money. If they go to another hospital system, that's not in their postal code because we need to have nurses. And they're like, no, our system isn't built like that. I'm like good luck then, and so that, that's really hard, but I think it has to come with, we have to start recognizing that, a, it is hard But if we don't do this, we don't have to get it right, but we got to do it a little better than our competitors for talent.

I think if we don't do this, we're going to continue to, suffer significant losses because nobody believes people are going to stay longer. And let's be honest, we're also scaring the hell out of the workforce right now by telling them that robotics automation and AI is going to take their jobs.

More white collar people are under threat. Thank you media. And we're not having the right conversation about AI, which is a whole nother podcast we can have, which is why don't we use AI to make jobs more interesting, impactful, exciting, and dynamic. What we're doing right now is using it to cut jobs. To cut head count, to make people work harder and be more productive.

How, I think there's another, instead of focusing on the bottom line, let's focus on the top line, creating more exciting new stuff for people. And that to me is like 1 percent of what AI can do is cut costs. 99 percent is build value, different ways, come up with new ideas and new ways of solving problems.

And that's a real miss. And again, I, I go to organizations say they're like, Steve, how should we leverage AI? I go. Why are you even having the conversation? Like you've got a horrible culture right now. Why are you even talking about AI? And is the first implementation of AI going to be to cut headcount? Let's just play that out for you. How's that going to work for you? How is it going to be received by the next people you want to hire? Hey, look, we just cut 400 customer service jobs at AI. Can you come in and help us learn how to cut your job? What, how is that going to work? 

And I spent a lot of time trying to change that conversation because it's really not constructive right now.

[00:27:40] Mahan Tavakoli: It is important for us to be able to do that. And change that conversation. Steve couldn't agree with you more on it. Now, I want to circle back to a point you made earlier, which also connects somewhat to AI.

You mentioned the fight for technical talent in all organizations, in part, as a result of the shifting landscape of work and what work and knowledge work is all about. Therefore, how do you see. AI having an impact on that. 

[00:28:14] Steve Cadigan: Yeah, this is a great question. I think about AI every single day. , every morning, I probably spend an hour or two, depending upon my calendar, learning, reading, talking to people about this.

What are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are you doing? We are, really at the, we're not even at the starting line of understanding what the impact of AI is on work. I think I agree with what you said, which is initially I'm coming out on this as AI is greatest in augmentation. And it's also great that it's going to mean our value is our humanness.

In the future of work, we're, AI does not have context. This cannot understand context. And so we can't. We understand empathy. We understand, body language. We understand so many things that I think are worthy of being unlocked. That's why I think if I look at, the future of work, I think every business is going to need to become a business school.

I think the need for new skills is going to continue to accelerate. And most business models were made. For you, the employee to produce value, and they're going to have to shift to, I'm going to have to invest in you, give you new stuff to grow and learn. Otherwise you're going to go somewhere else and grow and learn.

And I also want you to produce, but I've got to find that. And that's a mix that many business models are not built for. They're built for you produce. 99 percent of your time. And what's really sad to me, if I ask every business, what's the biggest challenge you have is like finding talent. I was like, yeah, okay.

And what's the other one? Oh, and building growing talent. I said, okay, so why in every layoff that you've had the last 30 years, did you, the first people you let go where you're training and development people? Why is that? Just a waste of time over there, Oh, the managers can do it.

People can self, teach online. I was like, you're not playing the long game here. And I think the open market, because of the need for more technical talent, I think what we're finding is we're going to have to grow it more than we've ever done before. We're not going to find it in the open market.

And now it's a big lesson. This is. 12 years old coming out of LinkedIn, we're building a new industry. There's nobody with the talent we need doing exactly what we've done. We're going to have to grow. We're going to have to put people in jobs that have never done it before. And that's fundamentally unsettling for a lot of people.

But there's also a lot of cognitive research that's starting to come out, which says. Doing something you've never done before unlocks enormous creativity and energy. And I saw that and that's why I look at Silicon Valley. Again, not the perfect, demographic of the world for a lot of reasons, but I don't think anyone can argue in the most fluid demographic of workforce in the world.

There's more creativity, more innovation, more market value being created. And so it's something's going on that we've got more people doing something they've never done before, unlocking great creativity. And that's not how we've built business is I'm not going to hire you unless you've proven to me you've done this.

And so there's a lesson there, there's a lesson there, but it's really hard to make the shift and I'm not really sure how AI is going to play, but I'm trying to help people like, let's have the right conversation here. Let's introduce AI first. To make people more successful.

Isn't technology here to serve us? And I think the biggest thing that we should be talking about with AI is to win back our relationship with technology. Last point, and then I'll turn it back to you. If you, the question I like to ask organizations that are struggling with AI, as I say let's talk about first your Yeah.

History, adopting technology, what confidence you have of adopting new technologies. And immediately someone's brain goes to what's the last ERP that we had, workday, SAP, Oracle, like what is the big last one? And I'm thinking, no, I want to go something more rudimentary. How's email going for you?

How's the adoption of email? Has that made you more productive and effective? No, it hasn't. You've not mastered email and you think you're going to master AI. We've used email as a vehicle to put everyone else that we're working with behind to give them impossible amounts of information to consume and give ourselves a little sugar high that we've got that off our plate.

Now it's on someone else's plate. And, that's the kind of stuff that we should be looking at a AI to solve is how do we free up. The brain power for our people, not stress them out by giving them something different. And that's what I'm focused on right now is let's have the right conversation about what we should be thinking about AI.

And I think every AI initiative and every company should have what I call a AI nutrition label, just like food has, Protein, calories, sugar. What is the ethical impact of this? What is the cultural impact of this? What is the people career impact of this? What is our customer impact? Let's put a nutrition, AI nutrition label on everything that we're doing.

And we have to start there, here's the other thing, AI showed up yesterday and all of us already feel behind, do you notice that? We weren't talking about this five years ago. And now it's the only thing we talk about and everyone's behind. 

[00:33:14] Mahan Tavakoli: One of the points that you're making, Steve, that really resonates with me is that many of the tools that we've rolled out in organizations, when not thought about well, and when not. Done will have added to the overwhelm. . Now, one of the other points that you made, Steve, that I find the vast majority of my clients and CEOs I interact with and organizations have a really hard time. You highlighted a point where you talked about.

You shouldn't necessarily be focused as much on experience because you want people to be doing new things, creating new things as roles evolve and change in organizations. But I have to tell you. Every single organization that I know, when they're looking for people to do a job, one of the top requirements is experience of having done the same thing in the past.

So how do you approach that when you're giving advice to clients and organizations?

[00:34:22] Steve Cadigan: If you ask any executive, what was the seminal moment in your career journey that changed the game for you? Okay. What was that moment? And they will almost always say that moment where someone I was working for put me in a role that I didn't think I was ready for.

I didn't think I was qualified for. I took it on. I didn't think I could do it. And it was the most amazing experience I've ever had. Every executive will tell you that is the biggest pivotal moment in their career. I promise you. And yet we've architected for that not to happen, right? This is the subject of the book that I'm in the middle of producing right now.

And it's called my working title is talent hacking. This is something I think about all the time. And I completely get the sort of the catch 22 here. I want to have confidence. My team will create and succeed. I do, but listen, if you're spending months and months not filling that job, what's the tax on the people who are doing two or three jobs in your team because you can't fill that job?

What's the tax on that? And what would the difference be if you hired someone who's 50 to 60 percent qualified and built an organization that fills that 30, 40, 50 percent gap? And expects it, or you're going to hire someone faster. And this is what kind of what I learned at LinkedIn. When you hire more people that have less experience than you want, you turn more of your existing staff into trainers and mentors.

And that it turns out plugs into our very human desire of giving and the human motivation we get from that. And the adrenaline rush that we get from that is I think really unappreciated at scale. And so I completely, I want. The best people and I want the best people to stay. But today most of my clients cannot find the best people as fast as they could and they can't hold on to them.

So I got to build a system that says, how can I do that? Let me give you another example of hacking this a little bit, if you will, that I'm increasingly suggesting that organizations look at. Especially big organizations. So at one point, this is probably 2009. We realized that LinkedIn, that the future of programming was going to need to be cloud based, programming.

So we're going to have to hire Python engineers. Python happens to be a very, adopted accepted technology for cloud computing. I'm out of my element as a non technology, just talking about this, but admittedly, but so we looked around and said, do we have people that know Python?

And can we go hire people that know Python? Cause we need more of those people over here. And we, because we were linked in, we looked at the database Nope, there's not a lot of people in Silicon Valley to fill our needs. So we're going to have to build it. So then we did something interesting. And one of our engineers said, let's go look at everyone who's doing Python today and look at what languages they knew before, what experiences they had before, what kind of work they did before to give us a greater confidence.

They'll be good at Python. So I think it's important to try to mitigate your risk, your learning velocity risk, and say, these people all have the signs, they're That they could learn Python. So we found a dozen people. We went and said, Hey, would you like to go to a four month boot camp? Fully on Python.

You don't have to do your day job. This is all you're going to do. And then you're going to focus on applying this new language. It's like you would do that. Yeah, let's go. And so it was a disruption for the dozen or so people that we had to backfill and scramble and so forth, but it was a great investment.

And that is something that I think we increasingly need to do most organizations that have a recruiting problem. And this is a very powerful point. I want to make sure the audience. Listen to this very carefully. Most big organizations I go to say, we got a big recruiting problem. We can't hire people.

And I said, okay let's put that on a side. Can you show me all the skills and abilities and experiences that your current employee population have? And the answer is. Usually a deer in the headlights like what I'm like, yeah How do you know you have a recruiting problem if you don't know and aren't aware Of all the skills and abilities of the people that you have because I'll tell you this has happened to me You know when I left singapore, I got all these job opportunities From people saying, would you go back to Singapore?

Why? Because you've been in Singapore. I'm like, yeah, but I thought I did a pretty good job there. And I'd never been there before. Did you understand that? Or when I left LinkedIn and they would call me and say, Hey, we're thinking of going IPO. You had a really good IPO you want to go do that? I said, no, I never did it before.

And by the way, because I never did it before I wasn't working with blinders on how it should be. And I wanted to do something amazing. And I wanted to have a little white space, to, to play with. So again, this is a really big. It's a big leap and it's worthy of, and I don't have all the answers honestly here because we are really at the tip of the spear, but I do know doing it the way we've always done it is going to lead to,  ineffective and frustrating outcomes.

[00:39:09] Mahan Tavakoli: This is a powerful point as the roles. And what we end up doing shifts at a faster pace. We need to be more comfortable hiring people who've never done it before to do that well, though, Steve, then what do you look for?

[00:39:31] Steve Cadigan: Depending on what you're hiring for, what I would focus on and what I do focus on, and I strongly recommend that people do is focus on the most important skill that anyone should have today. And that is learning velocity. I want to know with a high degree of confidence that you got a pattern in your life and your work experience that shows me you've got a high degree of learning velocity.

Now, in some places of the world, you're not allowed to find this out, but in some ways you're able to find it out without having Literally finding out and that is, it turns out people who've moved from one country to another, sometimes not because of their choice and had to learn a new language and learn a new culture, adapt really well as kids if they did that, I was thrown out of South Africa and I got teased mercilessly when I moved to the South American schools because I had a very strong South African accent and, I was using words like veranda.

And, people like, what is the veranda Like? It's a porch. They're like, call it porch. We don't use veranda here. Very proper sort of African or English. And that shaped me, and it made me learn when I'm in a new environment, all the adaptive skills, which I think grew a high a high capacity to be empathetic.

Like, why are they looking at me differently? How, how can I be perceived differently? And as a child. That led me when I was learning French in high school to have a really good accent and like, how do you have a good accent? I said, cause I'm putting myself in the position of, and I've heard sounds in other languages and at a very early age, those are some of the clues that I look for.

Like in your life journey, or I'm looking in the CV when you're showing me, you're using certain technologies or languages that are early in the adoption of those languages, like you just, so getting into the domain of growth mindset and curiosity, I'm really looking for those, the people and you need people who like, I just want to do this.

That's all I want to do. Don't bother me. Those are, I call those people like sustainers, like you need. If everyone wants to be, Growing in and you're going to have a cannibalistic society a little bit, but you want hungry, you want thirst, you want grit. Because everyone knows if I, just like I asked all the business leaders, do you think people are going to stay longer in the future?

They say, no. I said, do you think everyone's job is going to be stationary? No. Do you think someone's more motivated doing the same thing they've always done or doing something new? I say, doing something new. I said, okay, so why do you, why are you surprised that you're having trouble hiring someone to do something they've always done?

And now all you're arguing about is a five to 7 percent increase. Like really? That's how you're going to break away from your competition. Just, playing the mediocre, game. Is that really what you want to do? So that's what I try to do. I was like, try to get into their competitive juices a little bit and say, listen, if you're just playing to survive, great, good for you.

But if you want to really break away, this is how I would think about it. 

[00:42:22] Mahan Tavakoli: Part of the challenge that I find, Steve, is that people assume when they hire someone for a role, that static job description will stay That way.

And it doesn't. So why look for a person who is a perfect fit for something that in six months is going to become outdated. 

[00:42:42] Steve Cadigan: I know. Listen, every listener, if I go to your job website, Or your career website or any job that you've posted and you've got a job posting out there. I promise you 50 to 75 percent of those are things you've rehashed and manufactured and just pushed forward.

And if it was on a Xerox machine, it's probably got all nasty. Come on, we can do better than that. And I pride myself on writing job descriptions that people like, what, this is something different, most of the job descriptions I see is oh, I'm going to be a zombie pretty much.

That's what I'm going to be. It's just boring, blah, blah, blah. You're going to be doing, counting pebbles and looking at the clock, desperately hoping the day's over. That's what that job description tells me, just I'm telling people I was in a conference with a whole bunch of HR executives recently are concerned about recruiting, not from Silicon Valley.

I said, listen, if I don't motivate my people to want to stay, then I'm going to lose them. So I got to build a great culture. That's the best recruiting investment you can make is be the place. The best people find. Not the place that's like really good at closing or we got the best salaries or we've got a chef or onsite childcare that those things will matter to some people, but what will really matter is to be a place where people can do their best magic.

And that's what we were able to do at LinkedIn. Cause I had a leadership team that saw. Oh, shoot. We're in the shadows of Google. They're making more profit in a day than we make in a year. If we don't have a competitive advantage here because we can't pay what they pay, we can't have the buildings that they have.

We can't offer the sushi chef and LeBron James coming to shoot free throws with our employees. We're going to have to do something that doesn't cost anything. And what's that? Oh, create the greatest. Experience of working that anyone's ever had. And that doesn't cost anything. It doesn't, it just costs commitment.

And so again, easier said than done, I made it happen. And that's why I'm in demand and having these conversations with great people like you, but truly, it's counter to how we've been taught. I started my career, like you're lucky to work here. You're lucky to have a job, Quiet down, pipe down, go back to your place.

Or, I'm going to , put you on probation. You can't do that anymore. 

[00:44:49] Mahan Tavakoli: couldn't agree with you more. 

Now, I would love to also get your thoughts and perspective. on how all of this is impacting both education and ongoing training and development. 

[00:45:02] Steve Cadigan: I think , traditional education particularly at the university level has been a real unfair, easy target for a lot of people. I talked to a lot of universities.

I teach at a bunch of schools just as a guest lecturer and I say, what's the biggest challenge? And they say we go to the business and say what would you like from us to help prepare our students for a future with you? Yeah. And they don't know, they don't know. And so for, for talent, my answer is very simple, invest in being curious, invest in the Ted Lasso mantra.

You invest in being curious all the time. My son asked me recently, dad, should I study, should I major in data science or finance? And my answer was yes. He goes, no. Which one I go, it doesn't matter, just pick something. And I said, I love finance because everything in business relates to finance.

So it's like a, and he likes a fantasy football and like I do. And I said, investing in finance is just like fantasy football. Like you're going to have to look at all the dynamics and what players are playing in what circumstance. So that's my answer there. My, my response for education is stop businesses, stop relying on universities.

And start building your own talent, start creating jobs that include new experiences and new learnings and new opportunities. All the greatest, much smarter people than I have always said, the best development happens through new experiences, not from sitting in a classroom. And so I do see because I am guest lecturing a lots of places, many institutions doing things like group project learnings and assignments and, taking on tasks from businesses in some cases, which for businesses is great because I'm getting to see a pool of potential candidates work in solving my problem.

But that, so I think the other thing is, and this is the last chapter of my book work quake is I think the future of work is building ecosystems where businesses are, have close relationships with universities, community colleges and so forth in junior colleges and high schools, the hospital systems I work with that have the fewest problems are the ones who built an ecosystem.

Because they're, nurses, nursing schools are having to, sell being a nurse. They never had to do that before. Accounting firms are now having to sell the accounting profession. They used to just be able to go in and hire the best accounting majors. And now there's fewer accounting majors and fewer people who want to be accountants because they've realized with my data and science background, I can go do some pretty cool other things other than what doesn't seem to be so sexy accounting.

Accounting can be sexy, but they haven't sold it as that. And so we're going through this, we're all trying to learn here right now, but I would say if I'm a business right now, I got to learn how I'm going to grow my talent and doesn't mean a big learning and development team. It means my leaders have to lead differently.

They have to part teach and coach and mentor. And I need to build an ecosystem. 

[00:47:47] Mahan Tavakoli: And brilliant insights that you share both in Workquake and the other work you're doing, including the book that you're writing on how leaders can do that, so for the audience, Steve, to learn more from you, , where would you send them to?

[00:48:06] Steve Cadigan: I would send it to my website, Steve Cadigan dot com. It's easy to find. I'm on LinkedIn clearly. . If you want to email me, Steve at Cadigan ventures. com. I love hearing stories from people or having questions from people. Also, if for comedic  pleasure. I have a very expansive set of stories on Tik TOK.

I have a series, they're called true stories from corporate America of all some crazy things that I've seen over the course of my career. And we just hit over 1. 6 million likes recently, which has been pretty fun for me. I think I might be one of the oldest people with the most likes out there, but there's a lot of good competition, but those are the places.

And again, it's super great conversation here. Thank you so much for having me. 

[00:48:47] Mahan Tavakoli: Thank you so much for the conversation. Steve Cadigan.