In the Hot Seat: Josh Bersin on the future of HR

Topics in the podcast

Josh Bersin addresses the following topics in this episode. Click a link to jump to the relevant subject matter.

• Changes in the HR space
• Leadership
• Talent development
• Skills for the future of work
• Up-skilling and re-skilling
• Time management
• Productivity
• Technology
• Learning in the flow of work
• Trends
• His keynote at the Talent Development Think Tank

On changes in the HR space

"It used to be you could copy what GE did, or you could copy what Pepsi did, and you could be pretty sure that they were way ahead of the curve, and if you copied what they did, that it would work for you. You can't do that anymore. It's all being invented independently by different companies."

On leadership

"We don't need the same kind of leaders that we did in the past. You know in all of my early, first 20 years of my career, the manager was the boss, and they told you what to do, they told you what not to do, and they kind of put the box around your job for you.

"That's true in some companies and some roles, but it's less true than ever because more and more of the work environments are very agile and dynamic and the working people doing the jobs know way way more about the job than the manager. That's always been true but it's even more true now.

"So, if you think you're going to be micro-managing somebody working for you, a) it's a bad idea, and b) it's a mistake. They're going to know more about the job than you are.

"So in some sense, now the job of a manager is to select people so they're in the right place, and help them learn and improve and facilitate and solve problems on their own through connecting them to other people, developing them, giving them feedback, and sometimes they need direction, too. But it's not the same boss-in-the-corner-office kind of a job, and that's also a different model for people. And so a lot of young people are looking for role models to teach them how to do that."

On talent development

"It's always been true, that people who are early in their careers absolutely want to be developed and they want to know what to do next. It's heightened now and it's particularly acute because it's so easy to find another job.

"You know, it used to be that if you changed jobs every 2 years you were labeled a job-hopper and nobody would hire you. And it's hard to believe that, but it was actually a stigma to change jobs. Now, you know, 'You've worked at 5 companies in 10 years, that's great. Oh, look at all the experience you have.'

"So it's pretty easy for somebody to say, 'I'm not going, I don't like my boss, I'm a little fed up with this company, I'm not getting anywhere I want to go. Hey, these guys keep calling me. I'm going to go work there.'

"Because, you know, there's a lot of jobs, the unemployment rate is low, at least in the big cities, so it's pretty important that the company, not just the managers -- I don't think it's just the manager's job -- the company and the HR function have to design an environment so that everybody can develop themselves and can find new opportunities. 

"You can't throw that only on the manager anymore because the manager has a little bit less control than they think... If the HR department hasn't built a talent marketplace or a place for (employees) to go and get a coach, and help (them) find the next role, there's not much the manager can do, so I think it's this problem for organizations and for managers and it's on the top list. Talent mobility is very high on the list of almost every CHRO's agenda now, is making that better and easier..."

"I think young people now feel much more empowered and comfortable demanding what they want. And, again, part of it's because we're in an economic cycle where they have so much power. Nobody wants to lose an employee right now. Now, if we have a recession, it's going to be a little bit different.'

Skills for the future of work

"There's been a little bit too much writing from people who are trying to define the future of work.  You can't define it. It's always been going on...

"So the idea that you're going to suddenly write a book on the future of work, and you're going to read the competencies and say, 'Okay let's just do these,' it's kind of silly. It's constantly changing.

"So, yes, we do know quite a bit about it, that routine work is going away, and the skills of the future are -- and IBM just did a big report on this -- are much more behavioral, communication, interpretive, pattern matching, collaboration, listening. They're very much more behavioral and emotional because, you know, typing information into Excel or typing information into a spreadsheet is being done by an RPA robot now, even at McDonald's...

"So the jobs are becoming more higher level. They're also becoming more hybrid. I just wrote an article over the weekend called The Full Stack HR Professional about this idea of a full stack professional. In engineering, there's this idea of a full stack engineer that knows the hardware, the database, the operating system, the applications, the user experience, and all that stuff.

"All of our jobs are becoming like that, where you have to learn the adjacent domains to be successful. You can't only do email marketing. You need to know SEO, and you need to know HTML, and you need to know graphics, you need to know a little bit about analytics.

"So all of these jobs are becoming, you know, because they're augmented by technology, they're richer, more interesting, human-related roles. I don't think an HR department can sit down and  figure all this out in a project. Rather, and I've had a lot of meetings on this, and there are people selling stuff this along those lines, and I don't think it's going to be that successful.

"I think the future is creating an organization that dynamically figures this out on its own, without you sitting around in a conference room and trying to map out, 'Well, we need these skills and not those skills.' Now, yes, if you look at the jobs that are open, there's machine learning engineers, there's AI, there's chatbot trainers, there's these new jobs that have just been created out of the ether, they kind of appeared out of nowhere.  Some manager just thought them up and then went out and looked for people who knew how to do them without even knowing really what they were, but that's not new...

"When I worked for IBM in 1980, we had steno pools typing memos, and then we got word processors, then we got computers, you know, so I think the problem is not listing the skills, but creating an environment where you can identify the skills and then go out and develop them and hire for them on an ongoing, regular basis.

"One of the things we've found that gets in the way and prevents companies from doing this is the job models and the job architectures of the past. Many many companies built hierarchical levels of jobs and, you know, first you're level 1, then you're level 2, and then it goes up to 62 levels. And, so, when a new job is created -- you know, let's suppose you want to hire somebody to do something. All right, what level is that, write the job description, what's the title, are we going to use the title we have -- all of that gets in the way of creating a job. So I think we're going to end up with a much more dynamic, flattened job architecture.

"And we're going a big project right now with a big company, Were helping them with their workday implementation, and they spent a year trying to take their old job model, their old job architecture, and put it into the new system, and thank God they didn't do it, because it would have just completely gotten them nowhere.

"We need to build a more dynamic, sort of, system-oriented talent environment so that we can create these jobs as needed.  So that's all very challenging and that's kind of what's going on, but definitely there's a lot of data that shows that there are certain technical skills that are in high demand -- all the AI, analytics, algorithmic skills, software engineering, analytics.

"You know we just finished launching a big development program on people analytics. And what we found is that people don't really need training on statistics or correlation, I mean they know that, they got it in college, they might go to a workshop or something and get a brush-up course. What they need to know is how to ask good questions, identify the right problem, diagnose solutions, and then apply data in a scientific method to a problem that people can use the result as opposed to running, you know, doing the big analysis.

"So the technical skills are important, but they don't stand alone. I like this idea of the T-shaped development, the T-shaped career or the T-shaped ability model where you have deep skills in some areas but you also are very broad in other areas. Those are the skills of the future as lots of Ts. Lots of depth and breadth. And we all have to have both."

On up-skilling and re-skilling as jobs change

"Well my new mantra is what I call the capability academy, which I've been writing about, and it's starting to pick up speed. And the idea is rather than think about your solution as a bunch of courses and programs, which is a part of the solution, think about it as a whole tapestry of developmental activities and programs around a set of capabilities.

"The best example in most companies is sales, sometimes it's customer service, sometimes it's supply chain, where being a good salesperson is a very very complex problem. You need to know the basics of lead generation  and qualification and communications, proposal writing, you need to know the products, you need to know the pricing, you need to know the competition, you need to know how our systems work, how to use Salesforce, how to get a price approved, where to go for help, blah, blah, blah. It's very complicated.

"If you try to do it in a course, nobody will ever finish the course, it'll be too boring. But if you think about it as an academy of developmental opportunities around sales led by the sales leaders, not HR, and not by L&D, with L&D facilitating it and including formal learning, micro learning, developmental assignments, projects, mentors, experts, public speakers, outside consultants, academics, that's where the best learning will happen.

"And all these digital tools we have in L&D, the learning experience platforms, the micro learning tools, all the other development tools, they all can be used along those lines.  But just throwing them out there and saying, 'Here's our new self-directed learning environment, go learn everything you need to learn about sales.' People won't use it. They don't have time. They won't find it, they don't know where to go with it. 

"So the most successful companies are building these, I like the word academy a lot, I mean I chose it for our thing, because it's more than just courses. It's a bigger idea. It's a place you go to learn things because sometimes you do have to leave the work environment to immerse yourself in the topic and then come back with a better perspective.

"And not every company will have the same academies. ... One of the companies I talked to has a massive academy of customer service, it's a big cable company, because they have all these cable boxes and telecommunications systems. Another company I just talked to has a massive academy around supply chain because so much of their business is around supply chain and moving parts around the world to different customers. I just finished a conversation with, we're going to do a project with a company that's building an academy for advanced manufacturing because they're a global manufacturer, they're actually a very large manufacturing and distribution company in South Africa, and I can help them build all sorts of courses, but it's bigger than that.

"And that allows you as an HR professional to think abut the problem in a holistic way and get a business leader to sponsor it with you. Like I call myself the dean of our academy, because I'm sort of worried about all of it, but I'm not building all of it. I'm working with some other guys to build it. I think you need the same thing, We need a dean and as need a C.E.O. or a leader, or a series of leaders that want to be a part of it. And people love that idea of having a place to go I think of an academy as a place. It's a place to go where it's safe and powerful to learn.  It might be a physical place, a virtual place, but it's a whole series of things. So that's one paradigm that I think is starting to pick up speed."

On time management

On not having enough time for development: "I hate to say it, but that's baloney. I mean, I'm just as busy as everybody else. ... and I'm talking to you, and I read books and I spend time going to conferences and listening to other people, and it makes me better at my job. And it actually saves me time.

"I can tell, I mean I've been doing this same thing long enough that I can tell when I've slipped into a low productivity zone of the day. I'm not writing well, my thoughts aren't clear, I'm not ready to do the deal or write the proposal, or whatever it is that I'm supposed to do, and I just feel like I'm not being productive. And so it's important for me to have a skill of saying, 'OK, it's time for me to go for a walk or it's time for me to go to the gym, it's time for me to go talk to my kids, read a book or just leave and come back later. And everybody has to have that innate ability."

"In fact, it's the No. 2 skill that came out of the IBM study on advanced skills, is learning how to manage your own time to make yourself more effective at work, and that doesn't mean taking a time management course that shows you how to fill out a little workbook with your checklist. It means understanding what makes you productive and what makes you unproductive and being brave enough to not do the unproductive things. And maybe that means you skip some meetings, you delete some emails, you don't respond to every Slack message when it comes in, because you have other things that are more important. And you read a book and you listen to a podcast or you go to a course and you come back 5 times more productive. And you have to develop that sense of confidence.

"I've developed it over many years... I used to hate getting on a plane and going to conferences because I always thought about how much time I was wasting. And you know, I could be home, I could be writing an article, I could be doing interviews. Well, every time I did it I would say, 'Wow, that was really worth it. I met some people, I learned some things, I saw some things that I never would have seen at home.' "

"So now when I get on the plane, as much as I don't like it, I'm thinking 'OK, this is just the path, I'm just doing it,' and I think everybody has those similar opportunities to learn in your company that you just have to force yourself to do it, you have to learn. And if your boss is not letting you do that, then you've got to find a new boss because that's to me not good management. ..."

On productivity

"The productivity data is a big big big issue. It's way bigger than me. I mean, economists haven't figured it out yet. There's a whole bunch of reasons. Commute times are longer. The average American spend another 24 minutes commuting than they did a year ago That's ridiculous. That's infrastructure, traffic, cities. We get too many emails, too many messages, too many distractions. I mean, you can't just turn it off. Thank you social media companies for giving us all these messages. Now we have to figure out what to do with them all. They've managed to figure out how to addict us to them.

"And then managers have to be really good at telling people what not to to. It's hard. I think one of the most valuable things a leader can do is tell people where not to spend their time. To be able to go to somebody and say, 'I don't want you to work on this. It's not worth your time. Let's skip it. It's fine with me. Let's focus on this.' That is a huge relief to somebody to hear that. Leaders have to be able to do that, and that's one of the new roles of leaders is focus.

"And then I think organizations, and this is what the employee experience programs are all about all over the word, organizations have to figure out how to reduce noise and clutter and simplify processes and get rid of old systems and all that, and that's a lot of work going on."

On technology

"I've been thinking abut this because I have to write this piece, this idea of being a full stack professional. You can't really be a good L&D professional if you don't understand the tools. You're going to have to dive in and get to know what these things do. Not all of them, but at least a few of them because you're going to have to select something. We can't just buy an LMS and assume it has every feature in it. It doesn't work that way anymore.

"So, from the standpoint of an L&D person, either you ... or somebody in the organization really should be the learning architect. And there's a job title called 'learning architect,' people that know all of these different tools. And you can hire consultants, you can hire people like me and there's a lot of people like me out there that keep up on this, and then, you get to know the systems as you use them, and none of them are perfect and some of them are good at this and that, and then you have to work with the vendors and push the vendors to give you the features that you want if they don't have them, and you'll make some mistakes and some of the tools will drift off and 2 or 3 years later you'll realize they're no good anymore.  And then other ones will be flourishing at the great companies. And that's just the way it is.

"A lot of times the reason people go to conferences is just to see what tools other people have bought and how well they work. And I think that's a very valid way to do it. Like I said you can talk to analysts, you can go to conferences, that's the reason that conferences are so filled with companies and people. There's just a lot of options. It's like buying a car. I mean, you could go down and just buy a car, and drive it home and probably be happy with it, but you're probably a little better off shopping around, looking what the options are ... and you might want to ride it, take it for a test drive."

Learning in the flow of work

"It was an idea that came to me a couple of years ago when I was looking at all the technology providers, and I did a lot of work on it, and sort of built out the idea and talked to a lot of vendors. It's clearly happening now. All of the learning tools and content systems are developing interfaces into Slack, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Workplace, you know, all of the systems of productivity, including email and Office, and, by the way, Microsoft's going to do this too. And so if the vendors don't do it, they're going to get crushed because the Microsoft people have figured this out – that when you're writing an email, you know just like it corrects your typing, there's no reason why it wouldn't say, 'By the way, here's a video on that topic if you don't know what it is.' So that's all happening, the technology's happening.

"As far as how L&D departments use it, that's a little bit trickier because it's still very new. And what I think is important is to put together an architecture, like I talked about in that presentation, of macro and micro learning working together so that you have well-defined, prescribed, formal learning at different points in your job and then micro learning to supplement that.  And we don't let people, sort of, throw all this micro learning out there and assume that it's all going to work.

"I'm now becoming a little less excited about LXPs because I've talked to quite a few companies that have bought LXPs ... stuck them out there and found out that they aren't being used because there's just too much content.

"So I think learning in the flow of work will get better and better and better over time, but I just think you have to architect it and build it into a series of programs or academies that solve a problem. And clearly the idea took off because everybody's talking about it now and using the phrase in different ways.

"And it makes sense to me because the paradigm of the world today is we're living in a stream. We're living in a stream of content, a stream of emails, a stream of meetings, a stream of information. And so learning can't be a big box, sort of like a brick. It's got to go into the stream."

Other trends

"We're in a world in HR and learning where we don't know everything, so we need more data. And I don't like the word people analytics because people analytics tends to connote this, sort of, PhD science project group. I think it's just doing a really good job of instrumenting our companies and collecting data, whether it be ratings up-down, 5-star ratings, what did you like, what did you not like, net promoter score, so we know when we launch into something, what are the problems people are trying to address and are we doing the right job of solving them for this particular group of people in the company because every group or set of people in the company has a slightly different set of problems.

"So, getting data, looking at data, and making more intelligent decisions how to build all these programs, and then, the basics, which is get out of your seat, get out of your office and go spend time in the business and see what's going on. Spend a day there, do a design session with the people you're trying to train, meet with the managers, follow them around. You'll develop way more better learning by doing that than diddling around with the LMS or the LXP to try to make it look a little better.

"They'll tell you what their problems are, and you'll see it. So that goes back to performance consulting, which is not a new topic."

What to expect in his upcoming keynote at the Talent Development Think Tank conference

"I think what I'm going to try to do, I need to think about it. I'll try to paint the big picture of where I think talent development is going in 2020. I'll talk about the capability academy, I'll talk about talent marketplaces, I'l talk about the role of L&D, I'll give you guys some new data on the workforce  and some of the drivers of employee needs, I'll try to do a little bit of talking about the science of learning, as much as I can, and try to pull together what's going on in the tech space. So it'll be a pretty big refresh of what I did at LinkedIn."