The future of HR and work

The future of HR and work with Josh Bersin

Developments and technologies in leadership and development

I'm excited that you're joining me. I have a fantastic interview for you with the great Josh Bersin, who is a researcher, consultant, and thought leader in the HR and talent development space. He has nearly 800,000 followers on LinkedIn. Many of you probably follow him, read his articles, and go and look to him for the latest trends in HR and talent development. I do as well. I'm especially excited, not only about this interview, but the fact that he is going to be giving the opening keynote at the Talent Development Think Tank, which is the conference that I'm hosting with my friend Bennett Phillips in Sonoma, California. If you've been following along, it's been rescheduled due to the wildfires in Sonoma. We're grateful that we're able to keep Josh on the ticket along with Liz Wiseman and the other keynote and breakout speakers. We're excited. He's still giving the opening keynote. I know he's going to be talking about all the latest trends and defining the future of talent development of what things are going to look like in 2020.

Later that day, we're going to be doing some design thinking. You can define the future of talent development and what it means to your organization and take that back with you some real ideas and best practices. We're going to solve some real problems and give you a great bang for your buck when you come to this. This is going to be the best event out there in the HR and talent development space. It's going to be one that everybody’s talking about, so if you don't have tickets, head on over to TalentDevelopmentThinkTank.com.

You don't want to miss Josh, this event and all the great connections that are going to happen there in addition to the knowledge, the learning, upskilling, and everything that’s going to be happening. Josh is going to be talking about all things about the future of work. In this interview, we talked about the future of work, where things are going, learning, technology, talent development, reskilling, upskilling, and all the things that you are thinking about. I try to ask the questions that people want to know from him, and these things are changing all the time. He also gives a little preview of what he'll be talking about at the Think Tank. Here is my interview with the great Josh Bersin.

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I'm excited that you're joining me because I've got a conversation for you with a man, the myth, the legend, Josh Bersin. Josh is a global research analyst, public speaker, industry analyst, and writer on the topics of corporate human resources, talent management, recruiting, leadership technology, and the intersection between work and life. He founded Bersin and Associates, which was acquired by Deloitte and has launched the Bersin Academy, where he is the dean and founder. Josh has a huge following on LinkedIn and Twitter and speaks at conferences around the world. I'm excited that he will be speaking at the upcoming Talent Development Think Tank in Sonoma, California. Josh, welcome to the Talent Development Hot Seat podcast.

Thank you, Andy. I’m excited to be here.

It’s cool to have you on. I’m excited to have you speaking at the conference coming up. I know a lot of people in the HR and talent development space. They know your name and follow some of your work as I do as well. We had a chance to finally meet in person at the LinkedIn Talent Connect conference in Dallas and spent some time talking, planning, and thinking about the future. I got to see your talk there. I know that's something that's always in flux and changing based on what's going on in the world of HR, talent, and technology work. I'd love to get into some of your thinking on some of those things. Before we do, for those that are not that familiar with you, maybe we could start with a little bit of your background and how you got to where we are.

Non-Traditional Background To Leadership And Development

It's a little bit of a non-traditional path. I studied engineering in college and worked as an engineer for a couple of years in an oil company as a mechanical engineer, and then did project management and I didn't like that. I decided I was going to go back to school and become an academic. I spent two years getting a master's degree in engineering and decided I didn't like that. That was at Stanford. I left and went to work for IBM in the early 1980s and got fascinated by the tech industry. It wasn't called that at the time. I spent ten years at IBM in sales and product marketing and then left there ten years later. I went to work for a software company Sybase and worked in the database industry for eight years. I left Sybase, which was an incredibly interesting company and went to work for a little eLearning Company in 1998. I never had any experience in training or HR, other than a consumer of all those things.

We started building the software to manage online learning way before the internet was popular. To be honest, next to the internet wasn't out there quite yet. There wasn't much going on. We ran out of money. We sold the company to a bigger company called DigitalThink, which was a successful dot-com publicly traded multi-billion dollar online learning company. I was the head of product marketing and the head of product management there for about 1.5 to 2 years and then got laid off during 9/11 and went home instead. Luckily, I had an experience working with IDC, the analyst firm at the time, and they were looking for somebody to do a research report on online learning. Having been interested in doing research all my life, I thought, “Maybe I'll do that.” I have nothing else to do and there were no jobs, if you remember that particular point in time.

I started doing research and that's been what I've done for many years. It turned into a great business selling research to corporations and HR departments, and then we sold it to Deloitte. I spent 6.5 years at Deloitte as a partner, doing all sorts of things working on the human capital trends. I left Deloitte in May of 2018 and built up this Academy. For many years, I've been an avid analyst, researcher, and consultant in HR and learned so much about what this is all about, and I’m constantly learning. I feel like it's a never-ending, constantly changing area. As you know the technology, workplace, culture, consumer life, and demographic changes. I find myself almost spending half my time as an economist trying to figure out what's going on in the economy and why we have these issues at work. What happens to HR departments and L&D departments is they get thrown into situations caused by workforce or workplace stress that the CEO or the head of HR says, “We need a solution to X.”

They run around and try to figure out what other companies have done. It used to be that you could copy what GE or Pepsi did and you could be sure that they were way ahead of the curve, and if you copied what they did, it would work for you. You can't do that anymore. It's all being invented independently by different companies. It's a fascinating market and I've enjoyed it. The fact that I had twenty years doing other things first, gave me an outside perspective on all the things we do inside HR. I have incredible respect for this domain and all the people in it. I'm constantly trying to make sure we can help people be more relevant every day. That's a long story. I don't know if you want that much history.

It's fantastic and it's cool that you have many different angles to it. You're not like some cerebral academic who studies it at a university and gets some advice that way. You've worked in different capacities, coming from engineering, getting the consulting and the technology experience, working and running your own company being within a large professional services firm like Deloitte. You did so much of the research yourself in working with others. Before we get into the learning trends and working trends, for my entrepreneurial perspective, it seemed like you set out to run your own business but you ended up with that with your own consulting company. When Deloitte came calling, was that something that was a relief or were you hesitant to give up?

It was a lot of soul searching. For those of you that have run, you guys are going through this and many people reading this, if you ended up running a business. Peter Drucker said, “There's only one thing that makes businesses successful, and that's having customers.” You spend all this time figuring out what people want to buy, solving their problems, listening to them, iterating, improving, dealing with competition, and marketing. You start hiring people, then you start hiring more people and then you have to keep the company profitable. We were at the point where when we’re acquired, we had about 75 people. I was probably a little bit at my wit's end as a leader because I liked being an analyst. I'm not a professional CEO. I was reasonably good as a CEO, but I was better as an analyst.

The Deloitte Opportunity

I was schizophrenic. One minute, I'm running the company and the next minute, I'm trying to talk to a client and write a research report, so it was hard. We were doing fine. We were profitable and we were growing. When Deloitte came along, the opportunity they gave me, which was a magical opportunity, was to take everything we had done in our own little company and leverage it to a global footprint all over the world that Deloitte could build consulting around. I've got jazzed about it. It was hard to give up the day-to-day management role. I sold it, but in retrospect, I needed it and my wife said, “You're doing this. It’s time for a change.” It was a good experience and I learned a lot. Deloitte is an incredibly interesting, well-run company.

[bctt tweet="Most entrepreneurs who are successful to some degree reach some point where they say they are not capable of taking it to the next level." via="no"]

Through the leaders, the partners, the guy that bought the company was an amazing person, and the partner that led the acquisition. I learned a lot at Deloitte and got a chance to travel around the world. Most entrepreneurs who are successful to some degree, reach some point where they say, “Either I'm not capable of taking it to the next level or I don't want to take it to the next level or I'm ready to do something else with my life.” It's hard to get out of it. My brother-in-law runs a real estate business and he wants to retire, but he can't because he's got to find somebody to run it. I feel I was fortunate that it came along when it did.

Something that a lot of people don't think about is that it takes different skills sometimes to get from one level to the next. That's why you see some of the most successful or famous startup founders who bring on professional managers like Sergey Brin bringing on Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google early on. You touched on something that I want to ask about. You mentioned this tough situation you were in of wanting to be a researcher, which is what you enjoyed and also having to be a professional manager with these people under you.

As a talent development consultant myself, someone who goes out and speaks to a lot of clients, and also interviews a lot of people on this show. The number one challenge in talent development and the working world is this idea that earlier career professionals get promoted because they're good technicians, engineers, salespeople or whatever it is. All of a sudden, their managers and they're being asked to, oftentimes, continue that job and manage people without much management experience. Is that something that you're hearing a lot about and seeing? I'm curious about what companies are doing about that?

This is something about all the time and I’ve done a lot of research on it. It’s particularly a good issue because many young people in the workforce are ready for management roles. Oftentimes, it’s being thrust into them or being held back because there's somebody older who's sitting in their way. There's maybe 2 or 3 things. First of all, becoming a people leader is a challenge for everybody who's ever done it. It's a developmental opportunity for people who get that opportunity. Some people are naturally good at it.

My wife was an incredibly good manager. She has the personality for it. For me, it was a new experience. I had to lead people another role at other companies, too. I learned it over the years and I'm still learning. I have to think hard about how to deal with different situations all the time. It's a journey, and when you go into it and become a leader, you have to think about it as a career change, not a job. You aren't doing your old job and managing people. You're now in a new job, which is managing people and maybe some of the other stuff, too.

You have to give yourself time, talk to other people, do a lot of listening and read a lot of books on the deep domain of what it takes to be a great leader. The second interesting thing is that we don't need the same kind of leaders that we did in the past. In all of my early first twenty years of my career, the manager was the boss and they told you what to do and what not to do. They 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 of the work environments are agile and dynamic. The working people doing jobs know way more about the job than the manager. That's always been true, but it's even more true now.

If you think you're going to be micromanaging 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. In some sense, the job of a manager is to select people so they are in the right place. Also, help them learn, improve, facilitate and solve problems on their own through connecting them to other people, developing them, and giving them feedback. Sometimes, they need direction, too, but it's not the same boss in the corner office job. That's also a different model for people. A lot of young people are looking for role models to teach them how to do that. Both of my kids, for example, they're both constantly telling me, “I want my manager to teach me this.”

I feel sorry for their bosses because they have a lot of expectations out of what they want out of their bosses, and that's the way the workforce is. We're in a situation where many of us will be working for people younger than us. I spent almost seven years at Deloitte working for people 15 to 20 years younger than me, who had none of the experiences that I'd had in my career, but they had a big job and they had a lot of responsibility. They knew a lot about Deloitte, which I didn't know. That was an interesting challenge for them and me. There's a lot of new things going on in the space. If you find yourself caught between management and doing the work, make sure you're taking your managerial role seriously. That's probably the most important part of your job if your organization is set up correctly.

You mentioned this idea of younger employees being frustrated and they want more guidance. I probably do more anecdotal research than you do with the harder research. Seeing that with a generational shift, something that the younger employees are wanting way more than maybe past generations is that defined career development. Knowing where they are going, what options they have, or what skills are they going to be developing. If they don't get that, they're going to start looking around. It's easier than ever to find a new job. I feel like that's affecting turnover and a lot of places that are not investing or not giving employees that guidance and yet, can be frustrating to managers as well. Are you seeing this as well?

The Importance Of HRs Designing The Ideal Work Environment

Yes. First of all, it's not new. It's always been true. People early in their careers want to be developed and they want to know what to do next. It’s heightened and it's particularly acute because it's easy to find another job. It used to be that if you change jobs every two years, you were labeled a job hopper and nobody would hire you. It's hard to believe that, but it was a stigma to change jobs. If you've worked at five companies in ten years, that's great. Look at all the experience you have. It's easy for somebody to say, “I don’t like my boss. I'm a little fed up with this company. I'm not getting where I want to go. These guys keep calling me. I'm going to go work there.” There's a lot of jobs and the unemployment rate is low, at least in big cities. I don't think it's 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 I'm working in a big company and I go to my manager and say, “I'm sick of this. I want to do that,” I'm asking my manager to go find me a job. They may or may not want to do that. They may not know how to do that. They may not have the connections to do that. If the HR department hasn't built a talent marketplace or a place for me to go, get a coach and help me find the next role, there's not much the manager can do. It's this problem for organizations and managers, and it's on the top list. To tell them mobility is high on the list of almost every CHOs agenda is making that better and easier.

They've got to give managers guidance on how they can help their employees. On the other side, one thing I've been talking to people a lot about and I created a new workshop on this because of the demand and I spoke to a company about how to take ownership of your career. The earlier career professionals, employees need to take more ownership of their careers and be able to come to a manager and say, “This is what I want. I want to move over to finance. Can you help me do that?” Instead of waiting for them to give them guidance or direction.

The Future Of HR: Management is a developmental opportunity for people who get that opportunity.

That's happening. Young people feel more empowered and comfortable demanding what they want. Part of it's because we're in an economic cycle where they have so much power and nobody wants to lose an employee. If we ever have a session, it's going to be a little bit different and people won't be quite as pushy.

We're moving into this topic of the future of work. This is something that a lot of things you talk about when you speak in different places are connected to this. A lot of people are trying to figure out what this future of work looks like and the world's always changing. One of the most important things is knowing the skills that are going to be important in the future because that's always changing. Jobs are changing. What skills do you think are going to be the most important in the future of work for you to find that down the road?

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. When I got out of college in 1978, and I went to work for IBM in 1980, we had the Office of the Future. We're going to get rid of paper. There'll be no more paper. A few years ago, I still had a paper on my desk and I still have a printer.

You probably don't use nearly as much as you used to though.

The idea that you're going to write a book on the future of work and you're going to read the competencies and say, “Let's do these,” is silly. It's constantly changing. Yes, we do know quite a bit about it. The routine work is going away and the skills of the future, IBM did a big report on this, are much more behavioral communication, interpretive, pattern matching, collaboration, and listening. They're much more behavioral and emotional because typing information into Excel or a spreadsheet is being done by an RPA robot, even at McDonald's. I spent 4 or 5 years as a McDonald's employee. I used to wait on customers, cook the hamburgers, make the milkshakes, clean the bathrooms and all that stuff. I went by McDonald's in an airport. There was a kiosk doing all that stuff and then there's a person handing you your food. That person has to be nice to you, but they don't. That's a routine job, too. Eventually, the food comes out of a little conveyor belt and probably with your name on it.

The jobs are becoming a higher level. They're also becoming more hybrid. I wrote an article 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, database, operating system, applications, 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, HTML, graphics, and a little bit about analytics.

These jobs are 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. I've had a lot of meetings on this. There are people selling stuff along these lines, but I don't think it's going to be that successful. 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, “We need these skills, not those skills.” If you look at the jobs that are open, there's machine learning engineers, AI, chatbot trainers, and these new jobs that have been created out of the ether. They appeared out of nowhere.

Some manager thought them up and then went out and looked for people that knew how to do them without even knowing what they were, but that's not new. When I worked at IBM in 1980, we had steno pools, typing memos, and then we got word processors, and then we got computers. The problem is not listing the skills, but creating an environment where you can identify the skills and then go out, 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 companies build hierarchical levels of jobs. First your level one, then your level two, and then it goes up to 62 levels.

When a new job is created, let's suppose you want to hire somebody to do something. What level is it? Write the job description. What's the title? Are we going to use the title we already have? All of that gets in the way of creating a job. We're going to end up with a much more dynamic, flattened job architecture. We're doing a big project with a big company. We're helping them with their workday implementation. They spent a year trying to take their old job model, their old job architecture, and put it into the new system. Thank God, they didn't do it because it would have completely gotten them nowhere. We need to build a more dynamic system-oriented talent environment so that we can create these jobs as needed. That's all challenging and that's what's going on. 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, and software engineering.

We finished launching a big development program on people analytics and what we found is that people don't need training on statistics or correlation. They know that. They got it in college and 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 problems, diagnose solutions, and then apply data in a scientific method to a problem so that people can use the result as opposed to doing the big analysis. Technical skills are important, but they don't stand alone. I like this idea of the T-shaped career or the T-shaped capability model where you have deep skills in some areas, but you also are broad in other areas. Those are the skills of the future. There are lots of Ts, lots of depth and breadth, and we all have to have both.

The future of work is always changing because there will always be a future. Work will always continue to change and we have no idea what's going to exist years from now. You couldn't have predicted that someone could have a full-time job as an Instagram manager creating stories on Instagram. Social media didn't exist.

That job got created in some company or some people came up with it. The other thing is we don't want to give managers guardrails, so they create a job that's not a good job because we thought it up in the conference room.

[bctt tweet="Jobs are becoming more interesting as they are augmented by technology." via="no"]

Necessary Skills For The Future

Especially if it's something that you don't have the specific skills to draw from. You need someone that can develop those skills as we're building this, as it's something new. I also thought it was interesting. I feel a little bit vindicated in this based on my own opinions that you talked a lot about the importance of emotional skills and people's relational skills. It’s not as much about science and technology when a couple of years ago, we heard all the time about STEM.

STEM is still important, but what the research shows is that people are getting a lot of STEM education earlier in life. My nephew programmed computer games in high school, so he's in business school. You can throw a programming assignment in him and he’ll figure it out, but he doesn't know how to work with people yet. He doesn't know how to lead projects. He doesn't understand what organizations are like. “Why do I have to talk to this person versus that person?” Those are the things you learn over time. Technical skills are always going to be valuable, but they're not complete.

We talked about computer programming and everything. I assumed the computers will program themselves in the future. My kids are young, so by the time they're in the working world, the robots will be running everything but the most important skill will be human relations. Can you work with other people? Can you still sell? Can you still build relationships? Can you get people to do things?

I don't think computers will ever program themselves. There will always be technical jobs, too. I think about it sometimes in terms of the construction trade. There are people who have been building things probably since the 1500s. There are carpenters, plumbers, and electricians. They know a lot about their trade. They know the tools of their trade. When they don't know, they know where to go for help. They know how to solve the complex problems that they haven't seen before. They know how to deal with their clients usually. If you look at those, they're technical in one sense, but they're more complex than that. That's the way many jobs are becoming.

Speaking of that, as jobs are changing, a couple of words that I've been hearing a lot more, and you mentioned them in your talk when I saw you in Dallas, was upskilling and reskilling. As jobs change, employees need new knowledge and need to be able to do jobs differently, otherwise, they’re going to get left behind. A lot of my readers in this show are in talent development, learning, and development. They want to help develop their people. How are companies approaching that? What's the best way to approach that now and prepare them for that?

Approaches To Talent Development

My new mantra is what I call the Capability Academy, which I've been writing about and it's starting to pick up speed. The idea is rather than thinking 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 and sometimes, it’s a supply chain, where being a good salesperson is a complex problem. You need to know the basics of lead generation, qualification, communications, proposal writing, products, pricing, competition, how our systems work, how to use Salesforce, how to get in price approved, and where to go for help. It's complicated. If you try to do it in a course, nobody will ever finish the course. It will be too boring. If you think about it as an academy of developmental opportunities around sales led by the sales leaders, not HR, not by L&D with L&D facilitating it, that's where the best learning will happen. Including formal learning, microlearning, developmental assignments, projects, mentors, experts, public speakers, outside consultants, and academics.

All these digital tools we have in L&D, the learning experience platforms, the microlearning tools, and all the relevant tools, they all can be used along those lines, but throwing them out there and saying, “Here's our new self-directed learning environment, go learn everything you need to know about sales,” people won't use it. They don't have time and they won't find it. They don't know where to go with it. The most successful companies are building these. I like the word Academy a lot. I chose it for our thing because it's more than the 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. 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 telecommunication systems. Another company I talked to has a massive academy around the supply chain because so much of their business is around the supply chain and moving parts around the world to different customers.

I finished a conversation where we're going to do a project with a company that's building an academy for advanced manufacturing because they're a large manufacturing distribution company in South Africa. I can help them build all sorts of courses, but it's bigger than that. That allows you as an HR professional to think about the problem holistically and get a business leader to sponsor you. I call myself the dean of our academy because I'm worried about all of it, but I'm not building all of it. I'm working with some other guys to build it. We need the same thing. We need a dean, a CEO, 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. An academy is a place to go where it's safe and powerful to learn. It might be a physical place or a virtual place, but it's a whole series of things. That's one paradigm that is starting to pick up speed.

We're talking about how jobs are changing, the increased importance of emotional and relational skills and how companies are investing more in the academy’s upskilling and reskilling. Do you think that changes traditional education on how companies recruit or place the importance of recruiting from saying, “Great universities,” versus saying, “We can take somebody with great capabilities and we have a great academy, we don't worry about that?”

A little bit slowly, it's happening. There are a lot of companies with specialisms. The job market is tight in some areas. A lot of companies are changing their recruiting standards and eliminating college degrees as criteria. They’re taking college degrees off the interview. If you want to have an unbiased interview schedule, don't show the name, age, and a college degree. Only have this human being walk in your office and talk to them because all of that introduces bias.

Have them stand behind a barrier with a voice.

The reason universities still are a big part of recruiting is that Malcolm Gladwell first said this, “Universities are like a modeling school. The modeling school doesn't make you beautiful, but it selects beautiful people. Universities don't make you smart, but they select people. They're academically in nature.”

The Future Of HR: Young people now feel much more empowered and comfortable demanding what they want.

They do the job for you.

It's a selection mechanism. There's always going to be a lot of that, but there's a lot of companies pushing well beyond that because they can't find enough people in those pools.

Let's get back into the world of work. You mentioned the keys to success of being a manager. You talked about learning all the time, reading, studying, and that sort of thing. A lot of people would tell you, “I don't have time for any of that. I have so much going on.” When I saw you speak in Dallas, you talked about this idea of time famine and productivity, not keeping up a GDP.

Managing Your Own Time

I hate to say it, that's baloney. I'm as busy as everybody else. I read books. I spend time going to conferences and listening to other people. It makes me better at my job, and it saves me time. I've been doing the 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, write a proposal or whatever it is that I'm supposed to do. I feel like I'm not being productive. It's important for me to have a skill of saying, “It's time for me to go for a walk. It's time for me to go to the gym. It's time for me to talk to my kids, read a book, or leave and come back later.”

Everybody has to have that innate ability. In fact, the number two 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. 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. Maybe that means you skip some meetings, you delete some emails, and you don't respond to every Slack message when it comes in because you have other things that are more important. You read a book, you listen to a podcast, or you go to a course, and you come back five times more productive.

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. I could be home, writing an article, and doing interviews. Every time I did it, I would say, “That was worth it. I met some people, learned some things, and saw some things that I never would have seen at home.” When I get on the plane, as much as I don't like it, I'm thinking, “This is the path. I'm doing it.” Everybody has those similar opportunities to learn in your company that you have to force yourself to do. You have to learn. If your boss is not letting you do that, then you’ve got to find a new boss because that's not good management.

This is something I harp on all the time and everybody has the same amount of time. I deal with this by hyper-focusing on how and where I'm spending my time. I get up early every morning and spend time reading every morning at the gym between 5 and 7 days a week. I find that makes me a lot more productive. Some of it is time management. You mentioned in the talk I saw in Dallas that productivity is not keeping up with GDP despite people working more. We know there are tons of distractions.

The productivity data is a big issue. It's way bigger than me. Economists haven't figured it out. There's a whole bunch of reasons. Commute times are longer and the average American spends an extra 24 minutes a day commuting than they did years ago. That’s ridiculous. That's infrastructure, traffic, and cities. We get too many emails, messages, and distractions. You can't turn it off. Thank you social media companies for giving us all these messages, but 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 good at telling people what not to do. It's hard.

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, and leaders have to be able to do that. One of the new roles of leaders is the focus. This is what the employee experience programs are all about all over the world. Organizations have to figure out how to reduce noise and clutter, and simplify processes, get rid of old systems and all that. That's a lot of work going on.

L & D Technologies For Learning

There's a lot to be done. Companies are contributing to it, social media, and all the different forms in communication. There are many different things. You mentioned you're simplifying systems and things like that. Let's move to technology because we have a lot of technology available to help us with learning. In theory, it makes things better and easier. Yet, I've heard you say the average L&D department has 23 technologies for learning, which means it's confusing, I would assume, if not frustrating for a lot of people. What's going on there? How do companies deal with that? How do they solve this?

I've been thinking about this because I have to write this piece. This idea of being a full-stack professional, you can't 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. You can't just buy an LMS and assume it has every feature in it. It doesn't work that way anymore. From the standpoint of an L&D person, either you, the person reading this blog or somebody in your organization, should be the learning architect, and there's a job title called learning architect of people that know all these different tools. You can hire consultants. You can hire people like me. There's a lot of people like me out there that keep up on this. You then get to know the systems as you use them.

None of them are perfect. Some of them are good at this and that, 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. You'll make some mistakes and some of the tools will drift off. Two or three years later, you realize they're no good anymore, and then other ones will be flourishing into great companies. That's the way it is. A lot of times, the reason people go to conferences is to see what tools other people have bought and how well they work. That's a valid way to do it. You can talk to analysts and you can go to conferences. That's the reason the top conferences are filled with companies and people. There's a lot of options. It's like buying a car. You could go down and buy a car, drive home, and probably be happy with it. You're probably a little better off shopping around and looking at what the options are.

[bctt tweet="The future of work is always changing because work always changes." via="no"]

You still want to touch it, feel it, and talk to somebody about it.

You might want to ride it and take it for a test drive.

I'm invested and passionate about this idea of conferences and bringing people together because I'm creating this one that you're speaking at. It's interesting because, in this increasingly digital age, we're more connected to people everywhere and yet, people are more hungry than ever for that real personal connection. I have had executives tell me when they go to conferences, that's where they go to check out what vendors are available because they can't take all the calls and cold emails. It's way too much clutter. They'll invite you to go to a conference where they can talk face-to-face to people and say, “I remember you.”

You talk to a peer in your industry that's doing something like you are and you’re like, “I love Novo Ad,” or “I love Degreed,” or “I love that cast,” or “I love this.” They're like, “Let's talk to them.” That's good, too, because you have a reference.

You've talked to someone else who's using it besides just the salesperson. Let's finish with this idea of learning in the flow of work, which I know you've talked a lot about. I've heard you say learning in the flow of life. Where are you on that? For those that haven't heard you talk about it, what does it mean?

It was an idea that came to me when I was looking at all the technology provider s, and I did a lot of work on it, built up the idea and talked to a lot of vendors. It's clearly happening. All of the learning tools and content systems are developing interfaces into Slack, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Workplace, and all of the systems of productivity, including email at the office. Microsoft's going to do this, too. 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, it corrects your typing. There's no reason why I wouldn't say, “Here's a video on that topic,” if you don't know what it is. That's all happening. The technology is happening. As far as how L&D departments use it, that's a little bit trickier because it's still new. What is important is to put together an architecture of macro and microlearning working together, so that you have well-defined prescribed formal learning at different points in your job.

Also, microlearning to supplement that. We don't let people throw all this microlearning out there and assume that it's all going to work. I'm becoming a little less excited about LXPs because I've talked to quite a few companies that have bought LXPs, but content libraries stuck them out there. They found out that they aren't being used because there's too much content. Learning on the flow of work will get better over time, but you still have to architect it and build it into a series of programs or academies that solve a problem. Clearly, the idea took off because everybody's talking about it and using the phrase in different ways. It makes sense to me because the paradigm of the world is we're living in the stream of content, emails, meetings, and information. Learning can't be a big box like a brick. It's got to go into the stream.

It's got to fit in with everything else and learn in the flow work. Josh, are there any other trends that you're excited about that we haven't talked about?

The only thing I'll touch on quickly is we're in a world in HR and learning where we don't know everything, so we need more data. I don't like the word people analytics because people analytics tends to connote this PhD science project group. It's doing a good job of instrumenting our companies and collecting data, whether it be ratings up down or five-star ratings. What did you like, what did you not like, and Net Promoter score, so we know when we launch into something, what are the problems people are trying to address? Are we doing the right job of solving them for this particular group of people in the company?

Every group of people in the company has a slightly different set of problems. Getting data, looking at data and making more intelligent decisions on how to build all these programs, and then, the basics which are to get out of your seat, get out of your office, 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, and follow them around. You’ll develop a way better learning by doing that, than diddling around with the LMS or the LXP to try and make it look a little better. They'll tell you what their problems are and you'll see it. That goes back to performance consulting, which is not a new topic.

Looking for information to inform the decisions you make instead of making assumptions. You are giving the opening keynote at the Talent Development Think Tank conference that I'm hosting with my friend Bennett Phillips in Santa Rosa right down the street from you in the Bay Area. For those who are attending or people thinking about buying a ticket, what can they expect from that opening talk?

It'll be something I haven't even thought about. What I'm going to try to do is I'll try to paint the big picture of where talent development is going in 2020. I'll talk about the Capability Academy, talent marketplaces, and the role of L&D. I'll give you 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. It'll be a big refresh of what I did at LinkedIn.

The Future Of HR: Managing your own time makes you more effective at work.

I'm excited about your opening talk at the Think Tank. What's cool is that you're going to be talking about what's going on in L&D and what's going to be happening in 2020. After your talk, later that day, we're going to be doing some design thinking to define the future of talent development and let people get involved, share their ideas, and brainstorm some things. Also, come up with some things that they can take back with them to their jobs and their companies. We want this to be useful and impactful for people to get a great ROI on their investment in coming to Think Tank. Josh, this has been awesome. It’s great to have you on. For anybody reading who doesn't follow you or wants to follow you or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to do that?

You can go to LinkedIn. I'm all over LinkedIn. My website is JoshBersin.com and then the BersinAcademy.com has all of our Bersin Academy content and all cool stuff in it. Any of those places.

Josh, thank you so much for spending time with me and all of our readers, talking about everything that you shared, and all of your experience and wisdom. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Andy.

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That is my interview with Josh Bersin, who will be giving the opening keynote at the Talent Development Think Tank conference, which is coming up again in Sonoma, California. We would love to have you. If you haven't gotten your tickets yet, head on over to TalentDevelopmentThinkTank.com and get your tickets or get on the waitlist for next year if you can't make it this year. This is going to be an exciting and a fantastic event. It's one you don't want to miss.

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