Welcome to the second of our summer special episodes of The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. This series will shine a light on how initiatives such as psychological safety, empathetic leadership, job crafting, data driven decision making and a human centric approach can drive innovation, creativity, inclusion and ultimately success in our organisations during these turbulent times.

The COVID-19 crisis is testing our political leaders like they have never been tested before. Leaders who appear to score high on narcissism and low on empathy are failing dismally. It is interesting that those political leaders, especially female leaders, who combine competence, transparency and empathy and are using data and science to inform their decision making appear to be performing much better.

The brilliant Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is my guest on this week’s episode of the podcast. In a recent article for HR examiner, Tomas shared his belief that the crisis will accelerate the retirement of outdated leadership profiles and highlight the need for competence, intelligence, integrity and empathy.

Tomas is an international authority in psychological profiling, talent management, leadership development and people analytics.

He is the Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup and a Professor of Business Psychology at both University College London and Columbia University. Tomas is a prolific writer and his articles in publications like HBR, Forbes and Fast Company regularly feature in my monthly round-up of the best HR and people analytics articles.

Tomas has also written 10 books including his most recent, “Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?”, and is one of the most knowledgeable interesting and engaging people in our field. I know you will enjoy listening as we discuss the role of leadership in times of crisis and change. You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation Tomas and I also discuss:

• Why digital transformation is primarily about people and not technology and what this actually means for leaders, HR and employees

• Why skills is a new currency and why learning is paramount

• How people analytics can be integrated into other fields, such as diversity and inclusion

• How to stay on the right side of creepy when it comes to AI and analytics

• What HR needs to do to drive more value

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested in ethical and empathetic leadership and the role of HR and how both will need to evolve as the use of data, analytics and digital technologies become widespread in our organisations. So that is Business Leaders, CHROs and anyone in a People Analytics, HR Business Partner or Talent Acquisition role.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by Insight222. To learn more, visit https://www.insight222.com.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today I am delighted to welcome Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show Tomas. It is great to see you again.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Thank you, David. Thank you for having me.

David Green: Can you provide listeners with a quick introduction to your background and myriad of roles?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Sure. So I am an Organisational Psychologist and my focus is really on helping organisations apply science and technology to improve their understanding and also their ability to predict human behaviour at work. For the past couple of years I have spent most of my time in my current role at Manpower Group, which is Chief Talent Scientist, where I basically oversee a lot of our strategic innovation initiatives around datafying the vast majority of the people we place in jobs every year.

There are about 4 million people that we are trying to put through AI, analytics and assessments so that we can basically match them to better jobs. In my spare time, which is increasingly not that much, I do a little bit of teaching at Columbia and UCL. I am involved in a couple start ups that I co-founded and I am also advising some other firms who create tools for understanding and predicting behaviour at work.

David Green: Wow. Somehow in all that time you also find time to be an absolutely prolific writer as well.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Yes, that is right, usually very early in the morning before the kids wake up or start to count their needs on me. So I wake up early and I try to spend an hour in the mornings trying to write, which I find a very helpful way to actually understand what you are thinking on different topics and issues, when you write something you understand it better. I also have to say that one of my passions, over the past decade or so, has been trying to evangelise and educate the wider public around science-based or evidence-based HR and talent practices. So I think it is important to reach to a broader audience.

David Green: Well carry on doing it because you are doing a fantastic job. We are going to talk a little bit about some of the articles that you have been writing recently as we go through our discussion.

Obviously we are living in a world of COVID-19 now where we have been hearing quite a lot about how it is acting as an accelerant to digital transformation and the future of work.

When we spoke recently we discussed, contrary to popular belief, that digital transformation is less about technology and more about people. So I thought it would be nice to explore what it means for leaders and what it means for workers.

So let's start with, what does that mean for leaders?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: The main implication for leaders is that they need to understand that you can buy any technology you like, you just pay for it, then you have it and whether you are using X, Y, or Z, you can assess what is better. But actually ultimately the biggest enabler and the biggest barrier, if it's not there to leverage the technology, is your people so, I think most organisations are struggling with their digital transformation efforts because of cultural issues.

What do we mean by digital transformation? I think at its core it is trying to make organisations more data driven and have a data centric culture. That does not happen because you install Microsoft Teams or you outsource your IT function to India, or you are go into the cloud. We need to fundamentally and systematically skill people up so that they do their job differently and they become more data centric and that is a big, big mission for HR and talent management.

David Green: And I think it is something that a lot of organisations overlook.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Yes, absolutely. Because I think that the word digital and the term digital transformation sounds very much like you would engage a consulting firm to come up with a data strategy or a data architecture and then AI happens and solves all your problems. AI, where it is today, can be a very helpful and very useful tool, but if it is accompanied by a dramatic or systematic change in people's mindset.

There is a great book that I always recommend called, Prediction Machines, by the guys from Rodman School of Business in Toronto. They say that basically AI is cheaper prediction and the fundamental change is what happens to human judgment in a world where AI and machine learning have become so prevalent and ubiquitous. They say judgment changes from basically what it used to be, which is more experience than knowledge base to having the ability to know what to do with a prediction.

So if leaders can structure the problems that they face in their everyday work environments as prediction problems, then AI can help them test those hypotheses and then they need to be able to act on that data.

So I think again, one of the misconceptions that I have seen a lot in organisations is we need to find data, harness our data, accumulate as much data as possible.

That is meaningless if you do not have the expertise to translate the data into insights and the culture to act on those insights afterwards.

David Green: Yes, yes. We will come back to what it means for leaders. What does digital transformation mean for workers? So from the bottom up.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: So from the bottom up, regardless of wherever workers or employees are in their skill hierarchy and whatever their professional or industries are, what we are seeing today is no different from what we have seen in previous industrial revolutions, which is that technology is always about doing more with less. It always eliminates certain behaviours and replaces or automates certain tasks, creating a lot more opportunities for people. But that is only if those people, if we have the ability to skill up and add value to the technology.

So a very simple example might be, today most of us don't use travel agents to book a trip. There are still some human travel agents left but what they do when you call them, after you have put up with a long wait on Expedia or whatever, is access the same software that you could have accessed at home and they guide you through the process or do a booking. So you can see when you automate something like the travel agent advice, there is a very marginal need for human travel agents. You can use that kind of analogy or logic for any other job, then ultimately we get to what will leaders do or what will HR professionals do if we are automating or if technology is taking care of a lot of the repetitive, predictable and standardised tasks that they were doing.

David Green: So I guess what all of this is doing, is it is bringing the topics of skills, re-skilling and learning really to the forefront within organisations and I think it is fair to say, we hear a lot about skills being the new currency. What are you seeing around this that is interesting?

You talked about, for example, if you are going to use data you need to develop the culture, certainly if you are in HR, you need to equip your HR business partners to actually be able to have conversations based on data and then, as you said, you need to create the culture to make decisions based on it as well.

What are you seeing in those areas?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: So I think what I am seeing is very fast and almost brutal, but also impactful and extraordinary transformation of what talent actually means and it is happening in front of our eyes.

So throughout our relatively short human history and human evolution of 200 or 300,000 years, for most of that time talent was mostly physical. If you were fast, strong, had quick reflexes, maybe brave and courageous then you stood out from a team and the group thought maybe we will follow you because we are better off being under your wings. Relatively recently after, I think the French revolution, the main kind of currency in the world of talent became expertise and knowledge. So, that was the rise of enlightenment and people who had basically encyclopedic knowledge. It was only until very very recently that that was still the dominant paradigm. I think what we are seeing today is a transformation in the world of talent, where intellectual capital, which means experience, expertise, hard skills, the credentials that you still advertise on your CV or your LinkedIn profile are getting de-valued very quickly. Because knowledge is accessible by everyone and it is very, very quickly outdated. That basically brought about the rise of psychological capital, which is the stuff that we still call soft skills, although they are very hard to find. So what the ideal worker is today is somebody who has a lot of potential rather than a lot of expertise and experience.

And by potential, we mean that they are curious, they are smart, they are humble, they are self critical. They are eager to learn and they are very, very comfortable with the idea that they will end up having to switch careers very quickly and that this six months they are an expert in A, but maybe next year they are going to be an expert in B and C and so on.

I think Google at some point used the term or the metaphor, we hire learning animals, which does not sound very nice, but I do think that to be high on learnability, to be a curious person and have a hungry mind is the number one ingredient of talent and potential today.

David Green: Yes, it is funny, we had Heather McGowan on the show a few weeks ago, and she was talking about learning as your pension. I saw some research from IBM around diminishing half life of skills and also the time it takes to close the skills gap. I think their research said something like it was four days to close the average skill gap in 2014 and that had gone up to about 35 or something like that, correct me if I am wrong, four years later. So the skills gap is getting wider it seems but the need to learn, unlearn and re learn is getting greater as well.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Yes, exactly that. And I even think we are at a point or at a stage where it is not even like you can calculate the distance or the gap between the skills you have and the ones you might need to have in two years time or in six months time.

But every day that gap emerges and every day you have to close it because you have to be the ideal worker or the sought after, in demand talent or employee of today that is able to deal with new problems and new challenges all the time and they know how to go about finding out about things they don't know already.

So that requires the humility to identify knowledge gaps and having the willingness, the passion, the ambition and the intelligence to quickly be productive and entrepreneurial in the way you solve problems. So it is a very, very, very significant change from what we meant by talent 20, 30, or 50 years ago.

David Green: Exciting. No?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: I think it is very exciting. And of course the next step is to understand that if this is true, we can't equate university credentials or a degree or the qualifications that you have to talent. We have to use data and assessment in a way we have not done before to work out whether you really have these skills or not.

David Green: Let's stay with skills. HR is seeing a massive shift in the skills that are required to be successful, both for its own evolution, but also to actually support digital transformation in their organisations. What do you think the most important skills for HR professionals are in a digital context?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: So in a way they are no different from the skills that you want to see in a leader or in any professional, right? Because we want them to be curious. We want them to be humble. I think for an HR professional it is especially critical that they have the humility and self criticism to question their intuition and find out that even when something is not obvious or they don't agree with it, that might be the correct answer to a problem.

So humility, self criticism, curiosity, learning ability. I do think of course that the typical or the prototypical or archetypical HR professional of today is more data driven than their predecessors, 20, 30 or 50 years ago. And of course still, which we have been saying now for some time, one of the keys to having a successful HR professional is their ability to understand the business, to talk strategy and understand commercial, financial and general leadership aspects of the business they are in. Whenever I am asked this question, that I don't like very much, what is the number one skill or aspect of talent or the most important quality that an HR director can have?

My answer is still the same, which is their ability to co-opt the CEO and their ability to actually get buy-in. And so political skills and influence, I know you guys have talked about this a lot in your model of people analytics, is still very, very important. Maybe if the field evolves a lot, we will focus less on style and more on substance in the future but today, if you are the most knowledgeable HR person in the world but you don't have EQ, influencing skills or political skills you will not have any impact.

I think there are some great HR professionals out there that are not amazing intellectually or from an expertise standpoint, but they know how to navigate the intricate politics of their senior leadership or executive leadership teams and that is so important.

David Green: Yes. It was interesting, we did some research when we were setting up the myHRfuture Academy and we asked some HR professionals what they most wanted to learn. The hard skills like people analytics, workforce planning came out, but so did the softer skills such as consulting and influencing, as you said, that kind of political acumen and stakeholder management.

But I think that perhaps what was missing, from what HR professionals themselves said, was the business acumen, because I still see that in a lot of HR professionals and that gap needs closing.

How can HR professionals get better business acumen?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: It depends a lot on, one of the obvious drivers or determinants of that is where they come from.

I think even though the perception of the profession has changed and improved a lot, since Silicon Valley sort of rebranded the field as people analytics or talent analytics, it starts with an image change and then that drives real changes in the type or profile or person who goes into HR. But there is still too many people who have ended up there coming through administrative functions, or bureaucratic procurement or legal functions.

If you think about it most HR professionals still do not know much about talent management or the philosophical aspects of HR, which is what is potential? What is leadership? What is talent? What do you mean by engagement? So the kind of organisational psychology side of things.

Now we also need for HR professionals to understand a little bit about technology. They don't need to be data scientists or AI specialists, but they need to understand how to leverage this and what happens when you inject this capability or this function into HR. So the business, if you think you have the psychology part, the business part, and then the data and AI part, the role of an HR professional keeps on increasing and expanding basically, it has wider breadth than it had before. I think that is exciting because it means that it is a more appealing role for somebody who is more curious and interested in different things and who can simultaneously be more of a generalist, but also it is a more intellectual role today than it was 50 years ago.

David Green: And as you said, it is that blend of science, HR and business really. If you can bring those three things together, then as you said, hopefully the function should have more impact in the future. Which leads us on to people analytics. We always talk about people analytics when we meet Tomas and we have already touched on it a little bit. I know you are as fascinated by it as I am. Given the progression of the field and what is happening in the world, what do you see as the long term prospects for people analytics?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: I think it is very exciting. The field is still growing very rapidly, if anything with the pandemic now it will accelerate that area of innovation as well. You could almost see people analytics as digital transformation happening to HR in a way, because it is HR’s attempt to become more evidence-based, more data driven to harness predictable insights and really elevate its ability to understand and predict human behaviour.

This is leading to really transformational improvement in the reputation that HR has internally and externally and there is still room for improvement, of course. It is still a work in progress. I think for a lot of big organisations that are growing their people analytics function, it is still a bunch of geeks in a windowless basement without access to real people and they are missing the business side of things, but that will change. It is conceivable to imagine that people analytics will, at some point, become HR but HR will continue to evolve in the direction of people analytics so that they become non distinguishable from each other. Because if HR is applying the science of people to improve organisational effectiveness, how else can that happen today, but with a very, very rigorous evidence based framework and the data to back that up. So I think it is really, really exciting and we are just in the beginnings of this revolution, but it is happening right now.

David Green: I think when we spoke a couple weeks ago, we talked about how people analytics could be integrated into other functions and fields that fall under the HR umbrella.

We talked about diversity, engagement, obviously talent acquisition, an area you know well at Manpower. Leading organisations, advanced organisations are starting to do that and I guess they will set the example for others to follow.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Yep and I think that yes selection and recruitment is the obvious area where it started.

Because the science of predicting work-related behaviours started as a recruitment problem a hundred years ago in the military and then it was exported to civil jobs and professions. You can see it now transcending or being applied to every main vertical of HR.

So I think people are talking about diversity analytics or D&I analytics, which is using data to model inclusion, exclusion, whether a network is more or less diverse and what happens to individuals that are different. Are they excluded or not in an organisation. Of course, learning and development and training as a whole area needs to find the data to show that there is transfer ROI etc.

Then you can look at leadership development, that is kind of the last area because to some degree coaching started very much as a reward or a counselling session that you get if you are doing well and if the company believes in you. But now that so much coaching happens virtually and remotely and that technology is scraping and mining the sessions between coaches and coachee, you can see a not so distant future where AI and machine learning is used to enhance the coaching sessions and people analytics can inform you as to whether coaching is working or not.

Data at the service of intelligent HR practices will be transformational.

David Green: Yes and I guess with increased use of analytics, machine learning and AI how do we stay on the right side of creepy and create transparency and trust?

I know this is an area that you have devoted a lot of time to.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: One of the things that is somewhat frustrating is the double standards that people have when they evaluate technology on one hand and people on the other. There is no question that some AI, machine learning or general technological advances or innovations at least seem creepy.

If you told me that you are going to do something with the data that we are scraping from this session and then run some algorithms and then report on my dark side I will probably find it a little bit creepy and worry. Especially because I have so much to hide, at least my guilty pleasures.

But at the same time let's not forget that AI is mostly algorithms that are designed to identify certain signals that predict something else and they are basically software. It is computers, computers don't have the ability to be creepy, to be sexist, to be racist, not that that is an ability but the propensity towards these kind of toxic or dark side behaviours can only be found in humans.

To the degree that the humans that are deciding to deploy these new technologies are ethical, have integrity and are not creepy, we shouldn't worry too much about AI or technology being creepy and sure it can be misused and you can make mistakes when you follow any sort of probability, modelling or any statistical generalisations, but let's not forget that the bar is very low. We live in a world where again, prejudice is ubiquitous where nepotism and toxic politics are the dominant currency in most organisations and where the organisations, even when they are trying to be more meritocratic and fair, they haven't quite managed to achieve that yet. I think technology is a tool that can be used to improve this and largely sanitise or sterilise the toxic politics that govern most organisational cultures is something that requires data and technology.

Even today, most people are working virtually and remotely, this has decreased significantly the amount of toxic politics that you see. Certainly we are going to see less harassment because you are not in person so sleazy managers might find it easier to control themselves and also all the data is being monitored and recorded, so sometimes it is good that big brother is watching.

David Green: Funny actually on that, I think you highlighted a video to Ian around productivity monitoring, if we can call it productivity monitoring. A lot of what some organisations are, according to that CNBC report, actually employing this to actually check what screens and what sites that their employees are visiting during the day.

I think you probably agree with me, this is not good use of technology and really breaks that employee trust that is so hard to gain.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Yes, Ian and I have just finished a Harvard Business Review piece on this subject which will hopefully be out soon, maybe it is already out by the time this goes out. I think it is important to understand that there is a compromise or you have to find a balance between what you gain by using technologies that help you understand and monitor people's behaviour, and sometimes that includes surveillance AI. Maybe it is a way to keep people healthy now and ensure that you can monitor their engagement or wellbeing, but at the same time what you might lose in terms of trust.

Jeffrey Pfeffer had a good article out recently on how trust is going to be more important than ever because if employees do not trust their culture and their leadership even non creepy and non-intrusive AI will backfire.

They might even think that they are using things when they are not. It is a little bit like if you are in a relationship and you don't trust your partner, they might not be cheating on you, but you would still divorce them or be unhappy because you don't trust them. So trust is everything.

At the same time leaders need to rise to the situation and have the responsibility not to misuse and waste that trust because it takes ages to actually get that trust.

So I think the point we are trying to make in the article with Ian as well is that you can deploy any technology in a transparent, non-intrusive way. If I am a typical employee and you are my boss, and you are telling me that you are going to be using some machine learning algorithms or AI to monitor my keystrokes or the words that I say, and that you are going to look after my data and keep it anonymous at the individual level, but use the data to understand what engages me, what improves my productivity and give me some feedback so that I can get better.

I would sign up for that. Why not? What is there not to like, besides you should be doing that as my human boss already, but maybe you are not.

David Green: I think it is about, as you said, having that transparency and thinking about the benefit for employees. It is almost that canteen test, could I talk to an employee in the canteen about what we are doing and why we are doing it and how it is going to benefit them? If I can't, maybe I should not do it.

But we are going to talk about trust now, this is your last book. I think when we were talking last week, we were talking about the importance of leadership obviously and your last book, which for those of you that are just listening is called Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders.

It has received a new level of attention thanks to the crisis and I know it is something you have looked at as well. If you just look up politics, small data set I know, it seems to me that highly competent and empathetic female leaders are trumping, and I think that is a bit of a pun in that particular word trumping, some of their male counterparts at the moment.

What are your thoughts on this and what does the data say? Even if it is fairly limited at the moment around that.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: So I think that with my university colleagues, we used to always say, data tell but stories sell, and this is no different from that. So it is true on the one hand countries led by women have suffered five or six times fewer deaths than countries led by men and that gap by the way keeps widening. On the other hand it is true that it is a small data set because fewer than 10% of countries in the world are female led and in a recent article that I wrote with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, we have highlighted also the rational objections to drawing conclusions from this small sample, which is maybe that those women emerged in these countries because they were already more advanced, had a better educational system and a better health system. Maybe because the standards are higher for women, there is this thing called the glass ceiling already, women who emerged as Prime Ministers or Presidents need to be twice as qualified etc. So all these arguments are fine, but the main point really is that in a normal or logical world, we shouldn't have needed the pandemic to understand that people are generally better off when their leaders are smart, decent, empathetic and humble. Yet sadly we did seem to need to have the pandemic to realise that and every day we are waking up with new statistics that actually support that theory. So I am really hoping that after this the reaction is not, oh all countries need to be run by women or we should have female led countries, but that we revise our flawed and outdated leadership archetypes and models so that we select leaders on the basis of their competence and confidence and on the basis of their humility, curiosity, empathy, and coachability.

In politics it seems like a stretch assignment to say the least, maybe it is unfeasible, but in organisations some of these outdated models still account for the pervasive selection of incompetent leaders, usually men. It is a lot harder for an incompetent woman to emerge as a leader and that is fine, we should not make it easier for incompetent women to become leaders we should make it harder for incompetent men.

David Green: Yes, I don't think I could say it any better than that.

So recently we celebrated the first year of the podcast and Ian managed to persuade me to do an, ask me anything, where I got to answer the questions posed by listeners.

I much prefer being on this side of the table, I must admit. Two of those questions came from Dave Ulrich, so I am going to give you the chance to answer them as I’m sure you will do a much better job than me.

First, what gives you the most confidence about the future role of HR in delivering value?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Oh, what I have seen in the last five years. The fact that the profession is quickly becoming more sophisticated, more data driven, more young smart people going into it and not because they didn't know what else to do or they didn't have other options, but because they are excited by the field. Look, most of my Master's students at Columbia and at UCL end up in some HR function internally or externally and they are really, really bright. 10 years ago they might have wanted to become a McKinsey or Deloitte consultants or do MBAs where as today they are really interested in talent or leadership and actually improve how our organisations manage their people.

I think there is a great talent pipeline. The field is becoming more data driven, more sophisticated and I am excited by some of the changes that are being accelerated with recent events.

David Green: You work with a lot of companies, what companies and leaders, CHROs, Chief People Officers are you seeing out there that are really setting an example for the field?

Because there are different breeds of Chief People Officers that I am seeing.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Yes, so the easy answer is a lot of the people you have on your show, because I think when we curate or look for people who stand out, we have the same criteria. Which is people who have the right competence, who are innovative but without just chasing shiny objects and they are skeptical or even cynical enough to follow the signs rather than fads or trends. When I am asked this question I like to talk about companies and the CHROs or Talent Management Heads that I have personally worked with, not because I am advertising them or the work that I did with them, but because I have a firsthand knowledge of what they are doing.

So I think if you look at companies like PepsiCo, especially the work of Alan Church, around leadership development. Red Bull and the work of Adam Yearsley, Spotify and Katherina Berg, who I know you have had on the podcast as well. A lot of the time it is slightly old school companies, I think newer tech firms are on the one hand very good at advertising what they are doing, because they have found a way to market their HR practices really well. So when Zappos says Holacracy is everything and come here and be your own boss, it sounds great even if it is not true. Netflix, when they disrupt and reinvent talent management, but also because these companies own search or social media or have a monopoly on any area, they probably don't need to be that great managing people.

So look at Amazon, for example, they are certainly hiring a lot of really smart people into their HR functions and very, very quickly driving science-based adoptions in their practices. But I think that is because they want to be around in a hundred years time and 200 years time. Now, today they could mis-manage their people and probably they will be amazing for the next 10 years because of how strong they are. So I think that is an important lesson because to judge whether somebody is doing their people stuff or people management well or not we need to look for more sustainable and long term impact and success rather than the last five or 10 years. I mean, some of the companies that are the most profitable, most successful, impressive, disruptive companies we have today didn't exist 20 years ago. Will we talk about them like we do the GE culture or Coca-Cola culture or a Boeing or IBM in the future. It is an interesting question I think.

David Green: Well I will invite you back on to the show Tomas in 20 years, if we are all still going. In terms of looking at HR, what gives you the most concern?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Well, I think it still doesn't have a great reputation. The reputation is improving, but we are still hearing people having conversations about how to get a seat at the table and if you are not at the table you are on the menu and other kind of cliched jokes that don't get old. HR is still perceived by a lot of business leaders and executives as a kind of a Soviet bureaucratic engine that is out to stop innovation and progress and sort of a marxist union that looks after the people at the detriment of growth and entrepreneurialism. Actually there are still too many people who think HR is the admin side of things, doing rewards and comms and all this stuff that still consultants do this, but that is the stuff that is being automated. Then of course there is the old guard, like in any field, in academia we used to say science progresses one funeral at a time, or, in academia you don't persuade your critics you just wait for them to die. Big organisations will have to experience this struggle right now between the old HR guard and the new kind of a cohort or the new generation. I think what makes me a little bit anxious and not so optimistic is that progress might still be slower than we might want.

Then maybe if you invite me back in 20 years, hopefully we will be alive and still relevant or have something to say, that things will not have changed that much really. I think the ultimate measure is has HR helped make organisations more meritocratic, more talent centric? Have organisations truly made incredible advancements in their ability to win the war for talent?

David Green: Yes and that probably leads on quite nicely to the next question. I think you have already touched on some of this already. So this is a question we are asking all the guests on the show in this series. What can HR do to drive more value?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Be closer to the business, speak the language that leaders care about, be more data driven, persuade people with data and with evidence.

I think prediction is an under utilised tool or weapon here because we tell people, if you do this engagement will go up and then productivity will go up and then that happens. They will pay attention. Then also focus on nurturing and developing talent inside your function not just outside your function.

Also the biggest opportunity to develop talent in an organisation is within HR and I think evangelising and persuading leaders to function more like Talent Management Heads or HR director themselves.

David Green: There is so much that HR can learn from marketing, clearly there is a nuance between customers and employees, but they are people. Marketing is now in pretty much every organisation a data-driven function, it brings data to the table, it really understands and segments their customers. There clearly is an opportunity to do that in HR with employees as well?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Absolutely and I think it is extraordinary how in the last 5 or 10 years marketing has almost co-opted HR as a marketing story or has utilised it, which makes perfect sense because I think most companies will do rather well if they could hire the most faithful or loyal customers and actually the best company cultures are the ones where you can see almost perfect alignment between what you read on the website in terms of what the company culture is, how the brand is perceived and how employees perceive the culture there. So I think there has been a huge synergy enabled by data and technology between marketing and HR. I think this will continue in particular if most companies are trying to provide employees with a consumer like experience, then they need to think like marketeers. And of course, if marketeera are interested in understanding their customers, they need to think like HR people because they need to understand their personality, their values, their interests, and their dispositions.

David Green: Yes definitely can learn from each other there. So before we wrap up what is next for you? I believe you have got a new book on AI and the human interface. What can you share about this? When is it coming out?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: It is a book idea rather than a book. We don't have a release date, but it is with Harvard Business Review and it is under contract. I think probably the area and that has interested me the most in the last three or four years is the interface between AI or artificial and human intelligence. I think there is this misconception or at least this perception that technology and AI is going to de-humanise the work environment and workplaces and work cultures and it is really important that we avoid this from happening. If you think about people analytics and HR we are almost seeing a return to Taylorism or Fordism now from where the field started a hundred years ago when it was scientific management. It was turbocharged by latest technology, AI and machine learning, but it would only work if we make it more humane. So I am trying to really provide an overview of hopefully how we will be remembered in 50 or 500 years time when people look back at 2020 and say, oh, that was the beginning of the AI age.

What were humans doing? How were they changing and how did they interact or did they change their interactions with work? If you think that we can think about, civilisation is a work in progress, so we can think about people throughout the Renaissance and Ancient Greece, Rome, maybe Medieval times, what are humans like in the AI times and how are we going to ensure that we improve or continue to evolve as a species in this exciting, but also daunting era of technology.

David Green: Well it is certainly something to look forward to and I personally believe that hopefully AI can actually make us more human, certainly at work, you can take away some of those routine boring tasks away and allow us to be more creative. But hey I am a glass half full type of guy.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Hopefully, what I can assure you, David, is that the book will be out in time for it to be read by humans rather than algorithms.

So it is written for a human audience, not for an AI audience.

David Green: Good I am definitely very pleased about that. So lastly, thank you for being a guest on the show. I can't believe we have finished our conversation, but please can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you and follow you on social media and read the great articles that you are putting out there?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: Yes, sure. So I think that the simplest way is that they go to my website. It is rather old fashioned to give a URL for a website, but that is still where they can find relatively up to date summary of my activities and writing. So it is drtomas.com and otherwise on Twitter @drtcp

It has been a pleasure to be on your show, I am conflicted because I always listen to your podcast but I never listen to the ones that I partake in so I don't know which side will win. Whether my affinity for your podcast or my tendency to avoid listening to myself.

David Green: Funny you are the same as me, I have listened to every episode of this show except the one where I am the one being asked the questions. I can think a few political leaders that might listen to their own podcast, but maybe me and you are not quite like them.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: In fact the reverse is usually true, Politicians only listen to themselves.

David Green: Tomas, thanks very much. Thank you for being on the show.