Developing talent and leaders in the workplace

Developing talent and leaders in the workplace with Kelley Steven-Waiss

How to be an effective talent architect and mold your employees into their best selves

I'm excited that you're joining me for an interview with Kelley Steven-Waiss, who serves as the Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer for HERE Technologies, a location data, and a technology platform that moves people, businesses and cities forward by harnessing the power of location. Kelley has more than 25 years of executive management and consulting experience in human resources, change management, and corporate communications. She's also the Founder of a cloud-based SaaS talent mobility solution called Hitch that uses machine learning and AI to match project-based opportunities to internal employee skill profiles. Kelley has a new book out with Edie Goldberg called The Inside Gig: How Sharing Untapped Talent Across Boundaries Unleashes Organizational Capability. Kelley, welcome to the Talent Development Hot Seat.

Thank you. It's great to be here, Andy.

It’s great to have you on. We connected on LinkedIn. Luckily, we were able to pull it together. I'm excited to dive in but before we do, I want to get to know you a little bit better. You have a lot going on to be CHRO of a major company, a founder of another company, to write a book and what I didn't mention is you have four kids as well. How do you do all this?

I have a great support team. Somebody asked me this question so I thought deeply about it. It’s how I lead. Also, how I have found capacity and that leadership style, certainly coming from the belief system that if you give people the opportunity for mastery, autonomy and purpose, you build more capacity for yourself. Leveraging both the microscope and the telescope at the right times and being able to inspect but not micromanage people is important. That starts with hiring fantastic people and knowing how to use your time wisely. I'm fortunate to have great people that I work with, having a husband who has been a stay at home dad for years so I have to be honest about that. I don't have a superhero cape. I also had a great coauthor, who kept you cracking the whip on, “This is due tomorrow,” and keeping me on deadline. It is about the people you put around you for sure.

I do a lot of stuff as well. I’m hosting two shows, running a business, a father of two and I try to hit the gym every day. People often ask how do I get all this stuff done. Number one is time management and number two is when you can delegate or have your team help with things that you shouldn't be doing do more of that. I've been trying to get better at that as well and helping other people do the same.

The secret sauce there and it has a lot to do with what Hitch is all about and talent mobility. People are most engaged and productive when they're doing something that they love and they're passionate about. First of all, being a good talent architect is important and understanding how to direct people by asking those questions about what they're good at and what they love to do is a huge part of that. It's a miss in Corporate America. People get stuck in jobs. I don't think we're asking them enough or giving them insights enough to about what they're good at so they can make the best choices for themselves in places where they can be the most productive.

If I look back on my career, the times that I did the best or that I achieved the most, there were certain criteria in place. Number one, I had a leader who gave me a lot of autonomy to color outside the lines. I had a lot of autonomy. I had a purpose. It's something that I cared about that I saw myself in that I could be successful at and I had the environment to do well at that so I could master whatever I was doing. I have always followed that in my career. Whatever I was passionate about is what I leaned into and that's why I ended up in a jungle gym career as I've had.

Have you ever read The Joy of Genius by Dr. Gay Hendricks?

I have not read that book. The book that I'm reading and I haven't finished is Range by David Epstein, which is fascinating. Anything I can get my hands on about the future of work, skills, careers or leadership, I read a lot of that. I'm on planes enough to have the time.

Developing Talent And Leaders: Being able to inspect but not micromanage people is important. That starts with hiring fantastic people and knowing how to use your time wisely.

I'd love to take a step back and know a little bit more about your background, what you've done in your career and how you got to where you are now.

I spent a lot of time in theater and drama which people go, “How is that related?” I realized early on that I had a talent for public speaking and a lot of that was the training. I was a dancer when I was younger so I wasn’t getting in front of an audience. I also was a good writer so I ended up studying journalism in undergraduate. When I got out there was a recession. It was 1991 when I got out of college. There were no jobs. Everyone would interview you and say, “You’re great, but we don't have any openings.”

I had to take a step back and figure out and take some deep analysis of what I love to do. I jumped into retail at that time. Honestly, when I look back on my career, it taught me so much to have to run a retail store. If you think about inventory management, customer service, managing the employees, the customers, the inventory, hitting the targets and inspiring everybody to do so, it set me up for an understanding of the core operations of a business at a young age.

I got the extra exposure to training and development and I took a lot of initiative to rewrite a lot of the training, which got me into instructional design and standing up in front of training people. That landed in org development because I wanted to diagnose organizations. I went to graduate school at USF and got that MSO degree. I started doing consulting and consulting is wonderful because you get exposure to a lot of different industries, companies, and a client inevitably sucks you in for them. That was a common theme.

When you have many interests, consulting was ideal, because you learn so much along the way. I always took the job that scared me to death, where I said, “I'm going to be talking my way into this job. Can I do it?” I don't know and those are the moments and the junctures where I had the biggest learning. You guys might recall a book called The Leadership Pipeline by Ram Charan, which was back in the ‘90s when he wrote that book. He talked about that critical junctures when you're moving from manager to director or you're taking a big leap into something new.

That's where the learning happens the most. That was something that I lean into for the rest of my career. Whenever I was scared of something, I went for it or whenever it was the project that nobody wanted. At Siebel Systems, it was running the tenth-anniversary party for the whole company, customers, partners, former alumni employees, and nobody wanted that job. I was only a director and I raised my hand. It was high risk but high reward opportunities throughout my career. It was a nontraditional path for sure. I was born in the wrong era, because I’m like, “Cut me open. I'm a Millennial.” I also think that there are a lot of Gen Xers that feel stuck in their career. They can't move and I encourage them to reimagine themselves.

You also talked about jumping in, accepting those difficult tasks or projects, and getting out of your comfort zone to grow and learn new things. It sounds like that's one of the big keys for how you were able to rise so quickly and get these senior roles as well as founding companies that you find these opportunities and you don't run away. You run towards them.

I call them catapult moments because they catapult your career and you have to be willing to make things happen. Oftentimes when we start to have that feeling of being stuck, we go into this victim mentality, “I'm not the master of my own destiny. I'm going to have to accept my fate and whatever it is in the organization.” We need to rewire our thinking especially in the future of work because the people that have great self-awareness do the inventory of what they love where their skills are, have a real sense of their strengths and areas of opportunity and lean into those strengths. The people that are willing to learn, unlearn, and relearn as a muscle to keep working on that, those are the people that will succeed. Those are the people that have a growth mindset for themselves.

If you can think about an organization filled with individuals that have the DNA and believe in the growth mindset for themselves, the organization has the growth mindset by default. No longer it’s, “The company will take care of me." You don't have to know your end game, per se. In my twenties, I couldn't even have scripted the rest of my career if I look back. There's not always a linear path. Look at the opportunities in front of you, have what I call personal directors and people around you, outside of your existing organization that you can go to and vet your own strengths and opportunities that keep you honest. Take those catapult moments and make it happen for yourself.

[bctt tweet="People are most engaged and productive when they're doing something that they love and passionate about." via="no"]

The catapult moments jumping into difficult things and having great support around you. You mentioned a growth mindset 3 or 4 times. I love how that's in our almost normal lexicon. For anybody who's not familiar with that, that's from the book Mindset by Dr. Carol Dweck, the Stanford professor, which is a phenomenal book. It’s one that changed my life and has had a big impact on a lot of people. This idea of a growth mindset being that nothing is static, you can always learn new things and there is no failure, only learning.

To take that for a moment, people had said to me, “You've achieved such great things as a CHRO. It took you a while to get there. That's got to be pretty comfortable now so why would you take a risk to begin as a startup leader? Why would you go for that at this point in your career? It seems risky.” It's because that growth mindset is a core value. It’s a belief system that I trust and I will dig deep into not only the capabilities that I have or brings to the table but what I can architect through other people. You're not alone. You don't build a startup by yourself. You build a startup because you have maybe the knack about picking the people at the time by recognizing the DNA that's going to be right for your company. It's no different than when you're a director-level person and you're building a team or a VP, the first time, or even rising to an executive officer. Your role is to be a great talent architect and now and in the future of work, we're going to see more of that.

Being a great talent architect is also accepting that you're going to have people that are outsourced. People that are inside your company that you need to ensure are in the right jobs, excited, motivated to learn and grow. That's what the growth mindset is. It's recognizing that you can build so much more through the power of the people that you put around you. Organizations nowadays miss because they do not know who they have and they're not asking the questions, “What is the work that you love to do the most?” After that, finding a way to put them in the roles where they have the broadest contribution.

The best companies out there are looking at that but most companies are not. I know I've left jobs in the past because I was not utilizing my strengths or my skills or doing anything I like to do. Nobody took the time to figure out what my strengths were and how I might be able to add value to the organization. I know that's happening all the time everywhere out there. You mentioned startup and you've got one of your own. Tell me about the startup you have, Hitch. How did that come about and what do you do there?

When I was in my former job, I was the CHRO for Extreme Networks. I had the great fortune to be a part of a group called CHREATE. That was a group of progressive CHROs and senior HR leaders who wanted to disrupt the HR function. We spent a lot of time on that. That’s what I mean about putting great minds around you and connecting the dots. Those people had some fantastic ideas about how to disrupt HR as a discipline and certainly how we could do the work that we do in our profession differently, how organizations can be run, as we build towards the future of work.

One of the things I recognized was, as learning needed to be more dynamic, and on the job, as people were stuck and not being leveraged as business models were being disruptive. We need to be a lot more agile with our talent. We needed to know who we had and best leverage them. If you use the analogy, and people hear me say this a lot about the talent supply chain, using the supply chain as an example, talent assets are capital assets in the future. They're just as important. In capital assets, you're looking at your inventory and if you let that inventory drop below the demand, you can't get your revenue potential. Much like that, if we look at talent assets, if we let the inventory of critical skills drop below demand, we can't execute strategy. I went off and whiteboard this idea.

If I could build something from the ground up that would allow for dynamic learning on the job that would move people around, enable movement at scale, allow for visibility of skills which I believed were the basis to assign people to work instead of looking at everything like jobs in the future, wouldn't that be fantastic? I went on a search to find it. I couldn't find anything like that. Not many of the HCM systems were thinking that way so I said, “I'm going to build it. I'm going to find a way to build this myself.” I ended up at HERE Technologies. Shortly thereafter, I had the great fortune to meet Edzard Overbeek, my CEO here at HERE Technologies, who totally got it and gave me the opportunity to talk about autonomy. “Go and build that into a proof of concept and come back to me.” It was an intrapreneurial opportunity. “Ring-fence a certain amount of money and find a core team.”

We did that, we built a proof of concept. We delivered that at the beginning of 2017, rolled it to the enterprise in June. After a couple of years of running that on the inside and talking externally about its success, we ended up commercializing that product and that's how Hitch came about. It’s a dream situation for anyone is to have the autonomy to build something that has value. Not only do we use Hitch at HERE Technologies as a core part of our agile and digital transformation, but we now have it in six other companies and a slew of others coming. It's exciting and fulfilling for me. It's my life's work and my professional legacy. It's deeply meaningful to me.

It's great that you can work for a company that completely supports that and allows you to build that both with time and investments or funds, resources, whatever it may be to get it done and now you're seeing how you're able to put it out into the world, which is such a beautiful thing. The core of it is it's helping companies match skills, people with jobs or projects within companies to leverage their strengths.

Developing Talent And Leaders: The number one source of happiness at work is that you feel like you did something, you contributed to the company, or you learned something.

The core of the platform is if you believe that everything is about skills in the future, a lot of our systems don't expose the skills you have and they don't expose your aspirations. Having that type of information and an internal ecosystem, being able to have that visibility to that supply chain gives you a lot of ability to move talent around, democratize the process, and give them choices. Use the AI machine learning to do the matching so you're not human glue to do matching, you're leveraging the technology we have now.

Not only can you get real work done that you have to get done but you have people having a choice in the work they're doing. You’re broadening their contribution, raising levels of productivity, engagement, and giving a great employee experience. You're ticking all of these boxes at one time. If there was anything that was a win-win for both the company and the employee, it would be Hitch. It's a completely transparent platform. There's no AWS behind the curtain crunching data on you and watching everything you do. It's beneficial to the individual who needs to own their career. If you open up that marketplace and give people choice, the work product you get is exponentially better and much higher.

I want to talk more about this concept. You said you're using this at HERE Technologies where you're working as CHRO. We talk a little bit about matching talent to projects, jobs, whatever it is. From a talent development perspective, can you describe the landscape and what's been your big success, initiative or what is the approach to developing talent and leaders at HERE Technologies?

The best part about it is people have choices and when and where they're developed. That's probably the biggest success we have. We unearth not only the skills of our workforce but the aspirations. In our marketplace, we have a way for apprentices. If you think about the drafting behind an expert, so you can learn, this is something that goes way back in time as people were learning trades. What we're doing is, the platform can reach out to you based on knowing your aspirational skills and direct you to opportunities, both project-based and maybe even full-time at a level where you can be an apprentice. That's dynamic learning. That's learning on the job. That's also, if you embedded in your core values if you think about HERE’s core values, which is to be bold, learn fast when together and give back to name a few. We embed that in that core value system of a company. That's the give back that we have.

On the mentorship side, creating communities around skill domains that are most important to the company and this is still in our roadmap and about to come, but allowing apprentices and experts to find community. That builds your supply of critical skills without you or HR intervention. It’s allowing people to build the community to share information, to run hackathons and events. Even in our profiles, we have the ability to push content around your aspirational skills. It's putting people as masters of their own destiny. That’s what everyone wants and if you have the tools and technology to do it as we do, we're providing that. That's been a core part of our development strategy.

I love the idea of creating community, mentorship and apprenticeship, even without HR intervention and bringing people together. Like many people in the entrepreneurship community and others, they find each other outside but oftentimes companies don't create a way to put that together. From a development perspective, do you have leadership development programs or other types of talent development programs to help your workers improve their skills and get better as leaders?

We have training that we can do in classrooms and coursework that you can find on your own both online, etc. The most valuable, and this is a core belief and why Hitch exists is, most learning that is valuable is experiential, on the job, learned from other colleagues, and by doing. The most powerful way that we can learn at speed is by creating a learning organization that's gratuitous by nature. You're learning from other colleagues and it's giving flywheel. It happens without a lot of over architecting.

I used to be in L&D training years ago. We would go off and create these beautiful manuals, perfect specimens that we would then roll out on a big corporate rollout. Not only did we realize when we rolled it out that it’s not what the business needs or individual needs. It's to a huge group of people so it's not personalized or customized in any way, shape, or form. We waited for everything to be perfect. If an organization's desire is to be more digital or agile, this is an agile way of creating a learning organization. It's more customized to the individual, their desires, their aspirations and the path that's right for them. The path to CHRO, for example, could look totally different from one individual to another. I would say sometimes the best CHRO are the ones that came from the most nontraditional path anyways.

It’s like consulting, theater, or anything else.

[bctt tweet="Unearth not only the skills of your workforce, but their aspirations as well." via="no"]

I could have been in musical theater. My mother, unfortunately, is not here anymore. I know that when I went home from school at the semester and said, “I've dropped musical theater and I'm going to go into business.” I didn’t end up in business anyway, I’m an undergrad. I changed my mind again. It's so funny how disappointed she was. The glory of it all is if a college undergraduate could allow students an opportunity to learn a lot of different things as opposed to having them declare.

Declare, “This is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life.”

How can you know that? I have a son who's at Northeastern, who's a double major in Business and Econ and we talk about majors about every two weeks. He's like, “Mom, I like marketing. I'm in this marketing class that’s inspirational.” I go, “What it is, is you love the teacher. You love the person who's teaching you and now, you're getting connected to the content.” Allow yourself the room to explore, discover and figure it out. That's the lovely thing about allowing a marketplace to exist in project-based work. You're allowing your employees to direct themselves to learn and explore and hopefully discover the strengths that they can lean into.

Even at 19, sometimes 25 or 35, we don't know what we want to do and there are still many things we can do with so much time. People are living longer, working longer, and I agree, it's weird and challenging that people needed to declare that major in college. It’s interesting that you're having that conversation with your son every two weeks. My son and I talk about garbage trucks every day. It’s a little bit different.

It's about inspiration and imagination at that age. On that note, not to get on a soapbox, but the most important thing that we can do for kids is not losing that imagination. You don't even want to lose it when you're an adult because exploration is a big part of career development. As all of us struggle with young people, the time they're on digital devices and not learning the art of conversation or spending time building that muscle around the imagination, we're going to lose a skillset in the future around creativity and human connection. It’s important to check ourselves on how much time we spend in the cave on a device versus exploring and building imaginations. Keep your son playing with trucks is my point.

He does and we are cautious with that. He does watch some videos and usually, they're all videos of trucks.

At least he’s consistent in what he loves.

I agree with you that imagination is so important for all of us. If I could go back to what you said about musical theater and everything. If I could take liberty about your mom, she probably wanted you to do something that you loved and it seems like you've ended up in a place where you are passionate about what you do, which is pretty awesome.

A little more personal story about my mom. She was one of the first women to go into the LAPD at 45 years old. They lifted the age ban and she went into the police academy. It was a lifelong dream to be a detective. She was an accountant. She reimagined herself and there's a dedication to her and the story in my book. She reimagined herself in a big way at a time when nobody thought she can do it and she won the award for her class for the Most Inspirational Cadet. Unfortunately, my mom’s life was cut short in the line of duty shortly after she got out there. The message that I learned at a young age because I was 24 so I was in that period of, “What do I do with my life?” All of a sudden, my feet are on the ground and I have to be an adult. I have to put into motion everything I've learned to that point.

As I internalize some of the accomplishments that my mother had and that fire that burns within me now is everyone can reimagine themselves no matter how old they are, no matter what they did in the past. Organizations need to take inventory that every single human being that they are lucky to employ in their organization has a whole story behind them that they may not know. Many life experiences and capabilities that if they choose to put those in play and they’re inspired to do that work, maybe they have it in the background, but you don't know who you have. If you could open that up and leverage the whole story of an individual, our GDP in this country would go up significantly if we do that.

Developing Talent And Leaders: If you lean into your strengths and passions, you’re going to be much more successful.

Many people and their skills are underutilized in this country and the world. If we could do more to utilize that, the productivity, the economy, that GDP, would go up. I want to get more into this concept. You mentioned your book, called The Inside Gig: How Sharing Untapped Talent Across Boundaries Unleashes Organizational Capability. It’s helping companies unlock these hidden skills. Tell me more about how this book came about and what are the big takeaways?

I was fortunate to meet Edie Goldberg as a part of CHREATE and the future of work circuit. I was building technology and we've done some research together. We realized that we had a message around a new talent operating model. She has spent years in L&D and career development and I've been applying a lot of it as a practitioner. We said we’ve got to write down our strategy and our ideas around how this could be done differently. We wanted to start a movement and that's where it began. We wrote a white paper together and we were like, “This isn't good enough. We’ve got to get the message out in a broader fashion.” We kept reading future of work books that were almost scary. The future of work is coming, and you better be prepared but nobody was saying, “What do I do about it? How can I dip my toe in the future of work and prepare myself? How do we get the HR community fired up to disrupt themselves?” It is scary. I learned how to do comp, performance management and succession planning a certain way and we're going to ask you to do it a little differently and change is hard.

Let's put a playbook out there for companies on how to talent optimize and how to think about things differently. We both knew a lot about business and our subject matter, so we combined that. We introduced a new talent operating model, a new way of working around six principles. We have case studies in there, certainly HERE is a part of that case study, but many others who have tried and failed or who have gone first and succeeded and how they've succeeded and why they succeeded. It's a pretty great read for anyone that wants to do something about the future of work.

The future of work is coming, you could say whether you wanted to or not and it's always going to be coming. This is a subject that I love talking to people about as well. I heard something a long time ago that I repeat often, which is, “The rate of change is faster than it's ever been before and yet, it's slower than it's ever going to be.” It's only going to keep changing faster and faster and those who embrace it are ready to try new things are more likely to succeed in the future.

It sounds like you are a big advocate or a believer in the idea that we’re moving something akin to a gig economy where people are doing more project-based work than staying in one role for a long period of time. How can companies, especially if maybe they don't have the resources or technology because I know you're talking about AI and machine learning, take advantage of this and do a better job of leveraging their people skills for these gigs versus sticking with traditional roles?

The core premise, if you think about over the few years, everyone's been talking about the gig economy on the outside. That is a fantastic strategy, but not on its own. What we got away from is the fact we're all sitting on some gold, but we don't know how to mine it, know where it is, and know how to deploy it the right way. The idea around the book is that you can flip that model about the gig on the outside and everything. Why do people go to the gig on the outside? It's because they're looking for mastery, autonomy, and purpose and they think they have to go out to get it. The barriers to entry are low. I can get business cards printed, I can pull up a website, and I could probably do that in a week but what they're missing when they go to the outside is the tribe. The things about an organization that makes an organization so powerful are culture, tribe, community and connection.

What we said is, if companies could adopt this principle of why people go to the outside by taking that concept to the inside, using technology to open up a marketplace to give visibility to your skills supply chain. Also, help people get what they were looking for on the outside but have the benefit of being in a tribe, would that not be the best of both worlds? It’s a win for the company. They’re not turning people over and win for the individual. The last point is, if you're talking about data science as a skill domain, artificial intelligence, machine learning or predictive analytics, these skills are in high demand and low supply. If you have a great brand like Apple, Google or Facebook, and drawing talent to you is no problem, fine, but there are so many other companies that need that talent too. If we could have a strategy to build our own because you mentioned these things have a shelf life of skills, technology, obsolescence, this industrial revolution is collapsing. If you have to have a strategy to build your own, that is a winning solution.

You don't necessarily have to go outside and your employees don't need to go outside. You’re right. Early on, we hear so much about the gig economy without everybody going off to be an independent consultant or something and bouncing around. There are plenty of big companies with tons of great skills within that they can leverage. I love being an independent consultant and doing my own thing but most people want the security of working for a company, having the salary, whatever it may be. They also may want to try different things. They want to make sure that they're leveraging their skills and they're growing. Also, they get a chance to disrupt themselves, move around, have different jobs and different careers. That's the way the world works. Not to generalize, but Millennials, Gen Z and you see the younger generation, they're moving around more. Can they still have those multiple jobs and careers within one company versus having to go out and work in different companies?

The number one reason why people come back from the gig economy on the outside is they don't want to do business development or the insecurity around that. If we can give the best of what you would get on the outside, on the inside, and we got away from ourselves thinking that on both sides. Inside a company, we thought the best thing we can do is outsource talent and get it from the outside and that has its place. Don't get me wrong. There are times when you need on-demand talent, but look on the inside first, you likely have someone.

[bctt tweet="Do what you love and the money will follow you." via="no"]

I can't tell you how many stories we have at HERE, where we would have gone to the outside for that contractor and by putting that opportunity in the talent marketplace, we found the person on the inside. They were working full-time, it's not that they don't have other work to do. It's that they find the capacity to do things where they're learning something and demonstrating a skill they have. People come to work because they want to contribute. They wake up every day, wanting to be productive.

The number one source of happiness at work is that you feel like you did something. You contributed to the world, your company or something in some way, or you learn something. If we can tap that discretionary effort in the right ways, and not everybody has time to be in the marketplace. That's another thing. Not everybody is active on it all the time. It works for itself. It finds the people, it finds you, you find things, and it all allows real work to get done and to tap that capacity that's inevitably left on the table every day.

We've been talking about moving forward, but looking back so far, what has been your greatest accomplishment in your career?

I have to say, putting something on a whiteboard and making it a commercial product is probably one of the things I’m proud of. The second thing I'm proud of is how many people I have had the privilege to help along the way, find their passion, and find their way into a career path. It’s the guy at Gap that was in finance that got an opportunity to participate in onboarding training for employees and that became his career after volunteering. These stories that happen over and over where people were in one part of the org and they found their gold or passion somewhere and it's inspiring me when you see people light up and talk about their work and love their work. It's a fire in them that you're able to see, it's so bright off of them and it's contagious. If you have people around you that have that energy and passion, it is contagious. The more that we can help people inside organizations find the vector between what they love to do and what the organization needs to get done, there is no stopping us. There's no stopping that organization from taking share, higher margins, and ultimately happy employees.

On the flip side with a growth mindset, what has been your biggest failure or mistake in your career so far? What did you learn from it?

Taking the job for the wrong reasons. It is the flip side of that coin. My grandfather told me something that was wise. He said, “Do what you love and the money will follow you.” When you take shortcuts to things that aren't in your core value system and you are the only person that knows that. When you take the job because you think it's more money, and you love the other offer more, that catches up with you in bad ways. However, when you take the scary assignment, you get a catapult moment. When you take the job that's going to lean into your strengths and passions, you do exponentially better and promote faster. It’s the check-in point in yourself to do the homework, to know what you love and have the self-awareness that if I lean into my strengths and my passions, I'm going to be so much more successful.

Are there any trends that you're following in talent development that we did not talk about so far?

One of the things that I'm watching for is this notion of workforce productivity. I sit on a public technology board FormFactor based in Livermore. They are a semiconductor company so they live and die by margins. We spend a lot of time on the productivity of the workforce and one of the things that have always bothered me is this revenue per head metric. I love a challenge and the challenge is, what's the next metric for workforce productivity? How do we measure that holistically? That old school methodology is missing so many things.

As we break down jobs into work units and people contributing more broadly, how do we measure that inside of organizations? I'm going to be working with some students at a local university on this topic to see if we can crack it. Those are people who are higher than my paygrade. They’re mathematicians, statisticians, social data scientists and all kinds of things. Back to my point about talent architecting and knowing when you don't have the answer and how to crowdsource, it is important.

The Inside Gig: How Sharing Untapped Talent Across Boundaries Unleashes Organizational Capacity

Last question for you, Kelley. For anyone out there reading that’s in talent development or HR, looking for ways to accelerate their career improve, be more successful, what's one more piece of advice you would give?

Go and do something nonlinear. I told you about a jungle gym career. Go and take an opportunity, somewhere else in the business, another function, something totally different because you will learn something that will be so valuable as you take that back into human resources. I took a sidestep and that's how you progress instead of promote. I took a consulting gig at Roche Genentech for almost two years at one point between CHRO gigs. It was an industry that I’d never been in. It was a unicorn job where they know the outcomes they're looking for, but they can't put a title on it so you jump in and you bring your skillsets, your strengths to solve the problem.

It was by far the most pivotal gig I've ever done in my life because I came back to HR to disrupt it, leave a professional legacy and apply what I learned about innovation into human resources. When you take a step on the wild side is something you've never done, it's a catapult moment. I was scared to death to go into biotech. I hadn't even consulted on biotech before. I've learned so much by changing my focus for two years. It was one of the best things I've ever done.

It’s great advice. I love it. We've talked a lot about getting out of our comfort zones, learning, trying new things, disrupting ourselves. Kelley, for anybody reading who wants to connect with you, learn more from you, where's the best place to go?

Please reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty responsive to that. You can reach out to me HERE Technologies. I always say my inbox is my virtual door. It's always open and I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear people's ideas or even help them with their careers. I'm passionate about this. My inbox is always open.

It’s the same policy. I'm a big fan of connecting with people on LinkedIn. If you're not connected with Kelley or me, make sure you connect with us. Kelley, this has been fantastic. The book again is called The Inside Gig: How Sharing Untapped Talent Across Boundaries Unleashes Organizational Capability.

You can order it on Amazon. It’s on bookstores. It's a hardback book.

Thank you, Kelley.

Thank you so much, Andy. It’s great to be here.

Take care.

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• HERE Technologies
• The Inside Gig: How Sharing Untapped Talent Across Boundaries Unleashes Organizational Capability
• Hitch
• The Joy of Genius
• Range
• The Leadership Pipeline
• Mindset
• CHREATE
• Edzard Overbeek – LinkedIn
• Edie Goldberg - LinkedIn
• FormFactor
• Roche Genentech
• LinkedIn – Kelley Steven-Waiss
• Amazon - The Inside Gig: How Sharing Untapped Talent Across Boundaries Unleashes Organizational Capability
• iTunes – Talent Development Hot Seat Podcast
• AdvantagePerformance.com/trends