Summer Special: How to Help People Love What They Do At Work (Interview with Dan Cable)
Welcome to the fourth of our series of summer special episodes of The Digital HR Leaders Podcast that collectively provide an outside in perspective on HR.
In many respects the COVID-19 pandemic is essentially a people crisis and it has been heartening to witness that many organisations we work with at Insight222 have put the safety and wellness of their workforce at the centre of their response to the crisis. However, multiple studies show that an alarming majority of employees are actively disengaged and un-motivated. They are not helping their organisations and by suppressing what neuroscientists call “our seeking systems” organisations are not helping their employees by focusing on making work routine instead of creative and joyful.
Our guest for this week's episode is Dan Cable, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Dan explains that because we spend most of our waking hours at work, his mission is to spend his working hours trying to understand how people can feel like work is part of their real life, rather than the long commute to the weekend.
After recording this episode with Dan, I had an extra zest and spring in my step for the rest of the day. I am confident that many of you will experience the same positive reaction after listening to Dan's energy, passion, ideas and the evidence he provides that backs this up. You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.
In our conversation Dan and I discuss:
Why biology as opposed to lack of motivation causes the malaise of workplace disengagement
How by galvanising three triggers, leaders can activate their employees seeking systems and drive exploration and learning
How HR can use job crafting to drive engagement, stimulate learning, create innovation and essentially enable people to bring their best selves to work
A three-step process for people to stimulate their full potential as outlined in Dan’s upcoming book, Exceptional.
This episode is a must listen for anyone interested in how neuroscience can help drive culture, engagement and wellness in their organisations. So that is Business Leaders, Organisational Psychologists, Chief HR Officers, Senior HR Leaders and anyone in a People Analytics or HR Business Partner 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 Dan Cable, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show Dan, thanks for your time. Please can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to your background and what you are currently doing?
Dan Cable: Okay, great. I am here at The London Business school with Organisational Behaviour, which has a lot to do with how people act at work. The thing that I am fascinated by and I have really tried to focus a lot of my research on, is why most people treat work as a necessary evil, sort of a commute to the weekend.
I am thrilled when I find organisations and employees that feel that it is a joy, that it is like a real hump of their life and the difference between that is palpable. So that is what I try to focus my time, energy, research on.
David Green: I think we both have a shared ambition to try and make work better, I know we are going to talk about that over the next 40 minutes or so.
So your book, Alive at Work, actually looks at the neuroscience of helping people love what they do at work, but we know in most cases people are disengaged and lack motivation. What are some of the things that are causing this malaise?
Dan Cable: I think one of the interesting parts of this for me is a general culture that seems to teach us, or even brainwash us, that work is something you want to do less of. This is something I grew up with, my father was a Truck Driver, my mom was a Secretary and just the culture in our household and our community was that you would try to do as little as possible because it was work. I will even take a step farther my Dad once told me “of course you don't like your job, that is why it is called work”
Almost the idea of well, if you liked it, then they wouldn't pay you or you would never want to like it because it is work and anyway, I think a lot of us grew up that way and I don't think that is something we are going to fix on this call. But I do think it is interesting to remember that there is something out in the ether, that we are supposed to not like it.
David Green: And I guess now where a lot of us are, we will talk a little bit about the impact of COVID-19 at some point, but now of course we can be contacted far more easily, particularly those of us working in white collar jobs.
The danger is that work will become even more of something that people hate because they are getting emails from their boss at night, for example.
Dan Cable: In a postmodern world, you would look at this and say, we have been taken captive at this point, we are fully locked in to the corporate machine.
We are gladly and willingly giving it away because we all carry these devices around 24/7.
The thing that the book concentrates more on and the reason why this is actually important to transition out of what I might call sociology into psychology and even neuroscience is there appears to be some ideas about the way we originally set up organisations that conflict with the way that our brains are built.
And when you asked a very good question, why is there so much malaise? A more practical answer would be that, in the 1900s when we made big organisations, we really became fascinated with reliability, predictability and scale. We needed to, I am not saying that that was evil, I am saying that is what the goal was to try to create global and not just village wide distribution.
But as part of that, we made people into processing units that could be interchanged and we made scripts and very, very small job responsibilities so that people could become really, really efficient. They even call it hyper specialised. I am not saying that is evil but what it does is it conflicts with a part of our brain that urges us to look beyond what you already know and try new things and learn and experiment and look for your effect.
When you act, what is your effect on the world? And we have created workspaces that shut off that part of the brain and so I can talk a lot, maybe we will talk a lot, about what are the triggers for that part of the brain, why is it that it creates this feeling of malaise and even depression.
But I think that at that top level, it is kind of our fault in a way as we created an organisation that seemed great for scale, but that was not consistent with how our brains evolved.
David Green: And I guess in many organisations we have still got those hierarchies, that kind of very tight restrictions around what individuals do within organisations. Maybe as you said, maybe that was fine for the 20th century but now we live in a much different world yet still big organisations have these hierarchies, they are still trying to restrict what people can do and as you said, that can be quite frustrating because most humans are naturally curious and want to do other things and we are quite creative as well.
I think a lot of our organisations actually stop that.
Dan Cable: That is right. There is so much to be said about this area. One of the things that I am most curious about right now, is the idea that the speed of change seems to be increasing. As an example, if we go back to 1905, when we started making automobiles. Henry Ford, the big innovation was to bring the assembly line to this process of making an automobile and so we made people have very structured tight briefs in terms of their daily activities. So you are basically repeated the same activity a hundred times a day and it is interesting that when he did that change wasn't as rampant. So the idea that they painted that car the same colour black for 13 years before tastes changed, that really is strong for me. Here is another one, when they invented the telephone, this will be from 1900. To get 50 million of those sold took 70 years. By the time you got to the internet, in four years you had 50 million people using the internet. It is just this idea that the distribution is at a different pace than when we invented these big organisations with these tight scripts, because the tight scripts presume repetition, reliability over many, many years and maybe decades. Now we don't get many years, we don't even get many months. If you are in IT you don't even get weeks, the competition and the rate of change and the rate of innovation and adaptation.
It is almost like we are still trying to use a 1900’s era form of work and then drag into a world that doesn't bear a lot of resemblance to it. The reason why I love you bringing this up, David, what it means is this malaise is not just bad for humans and they have to trudge through it but it is great for organisations, it used to be that way. Now it is terrible for humans and terrible organisations because they become rigid, hard to adapt, they become dinosaurs. We are in a lose lose situation in many cases right now.
David Green: It is making Senior Leaders in organisations realise that there needs to be a different way and if they create the space for people to be more creative and to be more motivated and to be more innovative and experiment, perhaps their company will be more successful because their company will innovate against the competition, which as you said, time can go so fast at the moment. New entrants can come into markets very quickly and quickly gobble up quite a lot of business and take that away from more traditional organisations who actually are maybe too rigid to adapt.
Dan Cable: That is so right. I don't want to steer too much, but I just want to say at some point during this conversation, it would be fun to talk about the difference between recognising something cognitively and acting different behaviourally. Because certainly the listeners of this podcast are all going to understand the need for organic adaptation, the need for innovation in every seat.
They are going to get that, the vast majority. What it implies about organisational form and the structure of the organisation is scary to probably many of the listeners, advanced thinkers that are going to be hearing us talk right now. It is also the case that if they are in charge of changing that organisation, they become a threat.
They become a threat to the stability of a hierarchy that has a lot of incentives to say they get it, but they still want it to run the way it used to run. Then in my own experiences this is one of the things that is almost like an organisational killer. It is almost like there is a gap between knowing and doing it.
David Green: You almost need the organisation to start feeling the pain before the leaders actually decide to do something about it, which isn't really how it should be because when organisations feel the pain, it is the workers that suffer.
Dan Cable: Yes. There is so many great examples of that. Can I tell you one right now real quick?
David Green: Please, please.
Dan Cable: We are doing a study right now with, I am going to leave the organisation nameless for now because it is yet to be seen whether this is a good story or a bad story. But we are doing something really exciting with them where there is going to be five times a week where they are going to allow the employees to dedicate their time, to use their own strengths, to solve the organisation's problems.
So this is a time when they are going to do deep work, they are going to shut down their browsers. They are going to shut down their phones. They are going to shut down the emails and they are going to spend two hours, five times a week, just working on the thing that they think they are most equipped to help.
Everybody is excited about this and they are far flung because they are all working at home and so it is a way for them to craft their work according to their strengths, to solve the organisation's newest problems. It sounds great. The senior leaders loved the idea until we got to the point of saying, shutting down the emails and shutting down the phones, they were like whoa, whoa, whoa, don’t we need to be managing that? And right there, there is this rod, this tension. It is a friction where it is like, Oh no, I mean yes, we want them to be engaged and empowered, but whoa, we need to be able to tell them don't we. It is almost like it is hard for them to step outside of the normal and just let this thing go.
It is only six weeks. It is just an experiment, but what we are seeing is a lot of discomfort giving up the power.
David Green: Yes, I suppose it will be when the ideas come and then hopefully the leaders will be open minded and think, wow, these are amazing. Because who better to come up with how organisations should evolve than the people that work for it.
It isn't just a board of people at the top, usually all white men in their fifties, you want the people that are interfacing with customers every day, people who are responsible for developing products or services, surely they are the people that can come up with the best ideas.
Dan Cable: Isn't that interesting. So I am going to hand it back to you, but maybe one of the things that can come up toward the end of this is how interesting and how much potential there is in this situation we are in. To the extent that this is something that would be valuable for organisations, but it is still rare and seems very hard for leaders to get their head around but it seems like there is a lot of potential for competitive advantage for firms that can do it. So that is really exciting to me. The potential in that seems very large.
David Green: Well, I think you probably touched on the next question I was going to ask actually, that openness from leaders to try something different. What are the steps leaders can take to turn around the malaise that we were talking about and drive engagements, stimulate learning and create innovation?
Dan Cable: And the great news is and I really want this to come off as purely optimistic, the great news is we all have a part of our brain that has evolved across time and is ready to serve. Leaders do not have to invent that technology, evolution has done it. So if you want the technical name for that part of the brain, it is called the Ventral Striatum.
But the term that some researchers use is called the seeking system, that is the term that I used in the book Alive at Work. I put it right at the centre because it is this part of the brain that is urging us to look beyond already. It is the part that is saying, say you are bored because you have done the same thing 2, 3, 400 times over the last five months. It is the part of the brain that gives you boredom and says you are better than this, it is urging you to expand your impact and look beyond what you already know. And this part of the brain there seem to be at least three triggers or stimulants that I will tell you about, they are very practical and they also don't take much money. This is the part of it that gives me so much hope. You don't need a 2 or 3 million pound budget to make this thing work, it really is more about getting a mindset of giving employees the chance to trigger what they already want to trigger.
But in any case, the thing that is so exciting about this, when you talked about these malaise conditions, these are emotions, emotions like boredom and malaise and even the feeling of depression. A lot of that has to do with certain chemicals and I am not a Neuroscientist and I know I am not even pretending to be one, I am a Psychologist. I read a lot of that stuff, but almost everything I read talks about dopamine and it is a neurotransmitter, it is a drug, it is legal and it is free, but it is a drug. And the feeling of this drug is some really positive emotions. They are emotions of excitement and enthusiasm. They are emotions of zest, the word zest is one of the most exciting words that I understand and I really mean this. When you feel zest the feeling that life is a joy. That what you get to do is like a treat that you get to have. And the opposite of zest is depressive symptoms. When life feels like a hassle that you have to get through and dopamine seems to be the magic elixir that makes you feel zest.
It makes you feel quite up, and again it is like the legal cousin of cocaine, I think it is because it is not the kind of drug that just makes you want to chillax and get comfortable. It is like stimulating that makes you want to do more, it is effervescent so it makes you want to give and create impact and use your strengths.
So what is so exciting about this to me is that if leaders can find a way to activate this part of the brain, you are giving people a gift and the gift is like more living in life.
David Green: So if leaders are able to understand this and think, how can we trigger dopamine in our employees, the organisation is going to benefit and the employees are going to benefit.
And I guess one of those things is by stimulating things like learning and innovation and allowing people to be creative, not necassarily do what they want, but apply a little bit of freedom around how they do their work.
Dan Cable: Absolutely. Now you have said it so well right there, I will just play with that for a minute.
The word freedom is really important. The freedom has to be within a frame and so the frame of that is getting the product delivered on time, meeting customer promises, meeting brand promises, meeting regulations. We are not saying, just be you for you just go out and create whatever you want to create. What we are saying is yes the organisation will win when we deliver effectively, but the most effective way of delivering, we may not know as Senior Leaders because we don't do the work.
These three triggers that I wanted to bring up with you, they are not hard to understand they are just kind of rare because of the way that we invented management, frankly.
Okay. So let's just walk through them and then you will help me unpack them to the amount that you think is useful. So the first one that most people already know about and lots of organisations are already playing with is experimentation. And this would be allowing people some space to try it in a way that they think would work better. Sometimes that doesn't go perfectly and that is called learning, but a lot of times leaders are very averse to learning. They say they love it until employees do it and then when employees do it and they find out, Oh, well, that didn't work as well. Then there is punishment, there is the slap on the hand, there is the take the raise, take the bonus, take the rewards. And so then they shut it down, but I am sure most of our leaders have heard of Psychological Safety. This is Amy Edmondson's work and she is at Harvard and she has written a great book called The Fearless Organisation.
David Green: I interviewed Amy early this week, so she is going to be on the Podcast episode two before you, so yeah.
Dan Cable: That is really, really nice because she kind of literally wrote the book on this concept and the idea of giving people space to experiment and play seems to light up this part of the brain. So I have dedicated two chapters on that, it sounds like she dedicated the whole book. There is a lot of evidence on that topic.
Okay, so that is the first one, the second one and by the way, when I said you don't need much money, you really don’t. I helped a company here called Deal Logic right here in London, they also have offices in New York City and in Budapest, we operated on all three of them and we just did this hackathon kind of stuff and we are now doing it three times a year. To be honest, you can just watch people light up. We let them form their own teams and then they think about a project that they think would help the organisation. They get together, they work really hard. Sometimes they stay there, 12, 14 hours working on their own projects.
Some people don't go home, they pull all nighters because it is just so much fun to see what they can do and then they present that the next day at noon on a Friday to the bosses, to the supervisors, to the leaders and say, here is what we did. Then the leaders that like it, they invest energy and money, but more, time in those ideas. What they really do that is the most valuable, there is a little bit of money in a little bit, but really what they do is they say, okay, in the next week I want you to spend another day as a team, get back together pursuing that project more.
The second one that I wanted to mention is this notion that we all have strengths. We have things that seem to call to us in terms of what we are capable of. So like for me, for whatever reason, I use a lot of humour. I use humour when I am teaching, I laugh a lot and what I find is if I am able to bring that style into my teaching, into my podcast, in to my research relationships, things just go better. Like I laugh more and life feels better.
That is not to say that other people have to do it that way. It is not to say that you have to be a funny teacher, there are lots of authentic ways to deliver value. This notion of playing to your strengths and understanding who you are at your best and getting feedback from the external world about how you make your biggest impact.
But evidence is really strong that this lights people up and that it makes any tasks seem more meaningful, more purposeful when you are bringing what is best about you to it. Now it doesn’t take money, but it takes dedication. It means that leaders have to allow employees to craft their work around their strengths. The evidence suggests this works really, really well, but it means you have to take your foot off of draconian control. If you have 10 people doing a certain job with the same job description it used to be, in Henry Ford's day, that you all had to do it the same way and all the reward systems assume you are going to do it the same way. This new approach says, well, you might need to create the same impact but the way you do it and the way I do it might be very different.
David Green: Yes, as you said, if the goal is to deliver a product by a certain day and people go about that differently, but they still deliver a great product on that day what is the problem.
Dan Cable: What is the problem and sometimes you try it your way and it doesn't work as well. Let's look at what we have learned there.
The third and we can dig into all of these more because I have got studies and stories for each of these, these are very evidence backed concepts. These three that I am talking about are not just three that I pulled out of a hat. These are three that I can defend with evidence and in my book each of them gets two chapters where I actually cite the evidence as well and I mean, this is published in the top scientific journals kind of evidence. That is really important to just say out loud, at least for me, there is a lot of things in the world that sound nice, but then it just doesn't work that way.
David Green: Yes. I think one of the things that we are doing with our customers is around people analytics and using data to make better decisions, but then actually measuring that those decisions were the right decisions.
So you have got the evidence then to do that and sometimes the evidence would suggest that it wasn't the right decision, but always you want to learn from that. So, I think it is good. Lets unwrap the third one and maybe then look at the evidence from a couple of them.
Dan Cable: The third one has to do with personalising purpose.
Purpose is a real big topic right now. It is a huge concept. Most leaders know they are supposed to talk about purpose and lots of leaders will create these offsites where they will go and kind of structure a purpose and then they will come back and feed it to people. Personalising purpose is very different from that.
This part of the brain called the Ventral Striatum, the seeking system, it is an emotion not a cognition. So a leader or leadership team can not ignite the part of the brain by giving you the purpose. They can't go off and say, we have decided this is it and this part of the brain will just hum, it is neutral. What it has to do is see its impact firsthand. It has to say, who am I impacting. When I do my job, who is affected? Why does my work matter in the world? And so the way that our brain evolved is seeing that, witnessing it, experiencing it. It is very different for a leader to say, we are here for the customers.
It is very different when a customer is yelling at you, when a customer is very grateful to you, the gratitude or the anger, those are emotions that our body feels and then has to respond to. So what I am really keen to do is help leaders not give people the purpose, but create environments where people can feel the purpose firsthand.
And so the book is chockablock full of these ideas, but let me give you one example right now. I was interviewing some people at Microsoft and they have one location in Europe where the country manager. I don't know if you know a lot about this, but Microsoft is moving away from a software company and toward a solutions company and so they are doing a lot of customisation around their work. But anyway, they will do a thing where rather than one person, the Client Management person, going on site and trying to understand a hospital who is trying to go paperless, they will take a whole team of people. They will take 15 people, they will take Programmers, they will take Project Leads, they will take Leaders to all go on site and they will interview the people that they are serving. They will interview a Secretary who is going to have to go paperless and say, what are your worries? What are your concerns? They will interview Doctors, Nurses, Radio Technicians and what they will do is they will get a full blooded view of what is the problem, what are the concerns?
And then they will all go back and solve that problem. Now through the old pair of glasses of the industrial revolution, well that is stupid, that is a waste of time, why would you take a Programmer to talk to a Nurse? That is the Client Reps job, right. But the new pair of glasses is because you want to personalise the purpose,
You want each of those people to understand why they are doing what they are doing and what impact their work will have. I could go on and on, but the evidence is really clear that it not only ignites people's positive emotions, it also makes them more resilient so that when you hit roadblocks and the problems that come with a project they are much more willing to overcome those, they are much more able to bounce back.
So again, if I had to dismount, this is not only really good for organisations because you get resilience and you get adaptability, you get innovation, you get people's enthusiasm. That is great and you get that for no more money. You don't have to give them raises to get this, you just pay people fairly and allow this part of the brain to thrive. But more importantly, this is good for the humans, this means they are less likely to get sick, they are less likely to get headaches, they are less likely to hate work where they spend most of their waking hours. So I get so excited because I think this is so humanistic.
David Green: Well I suppose what the example you gave me about Microsoft is that brings variety to that programmer's role, he or she is not just sitting in an office programming, they are actually getting to see the potential, get to see the result of the work that they are doing and as you said, understanding the problem before they go away and do the work and it just seems to make sense.
Otherwise you are just relying on one Client Manager to make sure that they get the brief properly, they understand it at all the different levels they would need to understand there and then actually translate that to all the various people in the team. It is far better to hear it upfront for those 15 people in the team who probably have different strengths, different areas of the product or solution that they are looking to build for that hospital. It just makes sense, doesn't it.
Dan Cable: As you are talking right now, I am smiling inside because while our listeners will mostly understand what you just said, I am smiling because there are so many leaders out there in the world that don't fully respect their employee's brains and their abilities. They hire them as a widget, they hire them as a transaction, they hire them as a maximum only functioning robot app and they would be very surprised and even reticent to believe that by giving more power, freedom, information, they would get far better ideas, insight, solutions.
They still have a “I am a great person” image of themselves where they have to come up with the solutions and then teach them because they are the smart one and boy, is it painful to try to help these people. I mean, I don't think this is the function of your podcast. I don't think this is where we want to go, but I do think this is one of the largest problems that I see right now. It is usually not the HR Leaders that have trouble seeing this, it sometimes is, but often it is the people with even more power that just see people as interchangeable widgets. They are still using like 1910 models of organisation and they are almost creating conflicts with HR Leaders because then the HR Leaders are like no, we can't create a budget for the next quarter because we don't know what the solution is yet.
We have to work in a more agile way where we have to give people freedom to learn. But those top level leaders say, but no, no, we need the budget. There is a back and forth conflict between 1910 organisation and 2021 organisations.
David Green: Obviously there has been a lot of press out there talking about resets and what is going to happen after Covid. We are still in the middle of the crisis at the moment so perhaps people are being a bit premature perhaps, but that is just my opinion. I think we can probably talk about the challenges, but maybe it is more interesting to talk about what opportunities does this create? and to remove some of these routine and unnecessary tasks, which organisations have done because they have been implementing technology in weeks instead of years. Does this give, to use the term reset as that seems to be used a lot, does it actually help force a reset and change some of that thinking that you have talked about, in some of those leaders?
Dan Cable: I am really glad that you asked this and I love how you are framing it as an opportunity and not a threat, that is really smart. There is at least two things, there is probably many, many more, but the two that I have seen are number one, there is a case that has now been proven that the old ways of working are not necessary. That people can work autonomously, remotely that organisations don't need to continue insisting on that micromanagement, literally looking over your shoulder control. I think that for a lot of Leaders, they are having to learn that. They would have never done this experiment but the experiment has been done to them and I think that that is worth its weight in gold. There are a lot of organisations that are not going to go back now because they are seeing, Oh my god, why are we renting all this space? Why aren't we putting all this control and all those old performance management systems, wait, you are telling me we don't need those. Well then why are we doing them? Their rational self interest is going to help them and it is going to help us. That is wonderful. There is something really positive and we can talk a lot more about that, but I have seen that happen.
The second one has to do with how it has felt to the employees to be forced to craft their work, to be forced to rethink their work, we can almost use the word reset. The way that I used to do my work, meaning the scripts, the policies, the procedures that I had to follow. Well I can't do them anymore, plus the customer doesn't even want it that way and plus, I can't even do it that way anymore because that whole shipment is not possible that way anymore. Now I have to invent and even reinvent what I do, but I still have to solve the same problem. That type of how would I best solve my problem? How would I use my strengths to quickly adapt? That is called job crafting and there is a whole stream of evidence that suggests that it is the future. It's also deeply disruptive.
David Green: Tell me more about the job crafting then, I think that sounds really interesting.
Dan Cable: Well, okay let me tell you at the high level and then we will dig in.
At the high level the industrial revolution was started on job descriptions, being replicable, being very directive and controlling. The leader figured out what they wanted done and then they broke the job up into these little chunks, sub jobs, and then you give each of those to a person. You tell them specifically, deliberately, this is what we want you to do.
All of HR is built on that. How do we hire people? Go to the job description. How do we pay people? Go to the job description, do a job evaluation. Because you have 10 people, how do we compare them? Look at the job description, look at the metrics. This is a way of running and controlling organisational life.
Job crafting is really disruptive because what it starts with is you don't know what the job is until you know the person. The job depends on the person's strengths, you might know what the job needs to create today, but it will be different next week. It will certainly be different next month. So it is silly to think about the job description as static because the world is not static. We could invent the job and pretend, then say, oh, we should pay it this amount. But all of those things are based on a fiction, which is it will be the same next year. We are still using it, we are largely still using job descriptions as the basis of everything, but job crafting disrupts that and says each individual has to be given maximum information about what the job is for, so that they can use the best strengths they have and bring the best thing that they have to work and then solve the organisation's problems.
It is much more of a partnership model. It starts with the assumption that the employee needs to be given information and power and they have to be listened to and then, oh my God this is so disruptive. The leader's job is to try to help them, a lot of leaders still think that the employee's job is to help them.
But you need to flip it so the leader's job is to help employees solve the actual problems of the organisation. If the leader is not helping them, they are not really adding much value if you think of it, because they are just overhead. The leader doesn't make anything, doesn’t speak to actual customers. The only job of the leaders is to help actual employees create actual output, but this is so disruptive for many leaders and I have to tell you a lot of hierarchical leaders actually get a bit angry with me when I bring this stuff up.
David Green: You have talked about a couple things, are there any companies out there that either you are working with or that you know of that are doing this well? That are actually doing job crafting?
Dan Cable: I think so. One that I am working with right now quite a bit is called Randstad. They are doing some incredible stuff right now about how they respond to their local conditions using metrics and data, but then giving the metrics and data to the employees themselves and having them come up with solutions that will help them make those local metrics thrive and soar. They are just investing really deeply and giving up power locally while trying to have the frame of a successful organisation. I think that they are doing really wonderful things, I am working carefully and closely with them. I have another book coming out in 2021, it is going to be called Alive at Scale, something like this. It is how you do this, not in a team of 20 people, but in an organisation of 20,000 or 200,000. How do you bring the whole organisation totally alive? I think that is an organisation, I don't know the whole level, but this level of how they serve customers using metrics and a frame, but then giving freedom and humanism within that they are doing a great job of this.
I mentioned Microsoft, I don't want to oversell them because I think that it is in Vogue right now to talk about Microsoft doing so great. But I will say that I watched them go from being a know it all organisation, very top down and the goal was to be the smartest person in the room, very masculine, chest beating. Then they moved, very much for Satya Nadella, to a learn it organisation where the point is to be curious, the point is for leaders to try to understand how to customise, to not be draconian but to more be empathetic and listening. I think it is an organisation, if you look at how they are doing in the marketplace, they are really thriving right now.
So, do you know this company called Dairy Crest?
David Green: Yes. Yes.
Dan Cable: I am not going to go on and on about it, but something that I wrote about in my book that was very interesting, although I didn't name names in the book. When Ocado came in and offered a lot of delivery options for groceries, Dairy Crest was really floundering and they needed ideas, concepts and innovations from the actual drivers, but they created a really draconian, bureaucratic, top-down type management style.
And one of the most successful things that they did is they decided to take these weekly meetings where they used to yell at the drivers about what they messed up and they flipped it and instead they started asking, how can I help you deliver great customer service? And it took a little while, i am not going to say that in the first week it was perfect, but within about two months the ideas that were coming in from the drivers were so exceptional. The entrepreneurial-ism that they invoked, that they had ignited was really palpable.
Anyway, I wrote lots of stuff about that in the book and I don't want to go on about it, but what I am learning is almost any organisation can do this because organisations are full of employees who all have seeking systems and they all have so much more energy and ideas within them, but they are being constrained often by these old systems of HR, frankly. It is an HR problem ultimately because theoretically HR's job is people systems, people analytics, I don't know what words we want to use anymore. But the people that are in charge of how do we get the most out of people? I don't think that we have done enough. I don't think we have moved the ball that far.
David Green: Let's explore that a little bit because one of the questions we are asking everyone on the show over the summer is, what can HR do to drive more value? I think you have got some very original ideas here that I think people would welcome listening to.
Dan Cable: Absolutely. I mean, I wish I knew, is the quick answer. I wish it was like something in a bottle.
David Green: It is probably not, but yeah.
Dan Cable: The things that need to happen, lets start there, this whole thing that started in the nineties where HR became a partner in the business, I don't think we have made as much progress on that as possible.
Sometimes, I am going to be really profane, sometimes I wonder if we don't need to blow up the function in some way that is a little bit more structural. I don't mean that the people listening don't do their jobs well, I do mean that it is badly branded. It is still seen as like, not in all organisations but many organisations, oh yeah bring HR in because we are gonna have to deal with the people stuff. As we start thinking about AI and machine learning as new ways of working, as we start thinking about the speed of change and how organisations have to adapt, not on a yearly basis but a monthly basis. As we start thinking about how hyper competitive it is to get these very best employees in place, those are the business makers. How we work is now how we win. And I don't think that we, meaning organisations and even humanity, have really given that function the centrality that it will need to have.
So I think what I am saying here is, and I think this is a bit profane, HR needs to be ingested into all leaders in a way that I still don't see it often happening.
It has to be consumed within, it has to live in every leader instead of it being, hand that off to HR. HR used to basically be like accounting and payroll.
David Green: It is changing I think, when you see, you mentioned Microsoft, or other more forward thinking organisations I think HR is getting much more involved in understanding and improving employee experience.
I think everything we have talked about today is stuff that could improve the employee experience by providing more freedom within a framework. Perhaps by allowing people to be more creative and more innovative and asking them for their ideas, simply doing that is surely a great way to improve experiences.
Dan Cable: And maybe that is what we play with in terms of the most practical things. I am glad you brought that up, David, because if you consider those three triggers as evidence based mechanisms that stimulate a part of the brain. Let's call that like the biology of adaptation. That is like literally looking at, if you want the organisation to adapt, this is the biology that will get you there.
These triggers are evidence based, meaning they pretty much work, not every single time. It is not that nothing can go wrong, but these are your best path. That is HR’s goal then is how do we create an organisation where people are feeling safe to experiment and learn and then share that learning so that we become a learning organisation?
How do we create an organisation where people get information about who they are at their best, so that they can feel affirmed to bring those unique perspectives to the team? To bring those individualistic behaviours or those idiosyncratic ideas, how do we unleash those? And then how do we help them personalise purpose so it doesn't feel like management stuffing purpose in their mouth, but instead they are noticing it and experiencing it firsthand. If those became the domains that HR broke itself into, not incentives and comp versus training. It could almost become the way they thought of themselves, those can become the functionalities that HR delivered.
That is exciting to me, that is really exciting.
Can I say something else that I didn't touch on earlier? The book that I have got coming out, it is called Exceptional. It starts with something around your best self, most organisations, and I mean 99.8% of organisations are not doing this. But what we are doing, I started a company that is doing this, is we are taking an individual, say David, and we are allowing you to tell us about family, friends, colleagues, ex bosses, mentors, high school friends, college friends, professors, you give us people that know you quite well and then we go out to them and we say to each of these people, do you have any memories about a time David was at his best? A time that David made his biggest impact? Can you tell us about that? Write that down in a narrative. Usually it is a paragraph, sometimes two, sometimes it is a whole page and then we will gather those up.
Sometimes we will get as many as 30 to 40 of those and then we compile them and we give them to you. That is called like a highlights reel, it helps you see who you are at your best and David, that is something that organisations are not using at all. I cannot tell you the power that it unleashes, the energy, the enthusiasm, the animation, the inspiration.
I have five studies that is coming out in a publication pretty soon, The Academy of Management Journal is going to publish this. It really helps open up people's unique ideas and bring them to the team. It helps them contribute more to the team, all the evidence is that this works. What I can tell you is no organisations are using this and basically I am excited about the potential of doing this and that clearly evidence based works.
I just wanted to say that because that is the theme and the centre of this next book, Exceptional, is why is it that we wait till people die to give them their eulogy? Why don't we structure ways to learn while they are still alive how they make their best impact and let them know now?
David Green: Well, yes, because I guess everyone else in the team probably doesn't know half of this stuff as well and then you really start to understand, this is how we gel together as a team and really achieve.
When does the book come out?
Dan Cable: It is coming out September of this year, so September 20th of 2020. There is going to be, I hope, a fair amount of fanfare. But what I love about the book for me is it is not written for leaders it is written as how can humans form better relationships and feel more energised about life. It is very much written at the level of, you could do this with your kids, you can do this with your Aunty you don't have to be a leader to do this. Everybody is a leader in that sense, but it is certainly as applicable to the HR space and it is certainly as applicable to getting people to affirm who they are at their best and then personalise the impact that they create and use their strengths. It is really built around everything we have just talked about, which is experimenting with your strengths to solve the organisation's problems to feel more impact and more purpose and more needed.
David Green: Well, I think that is the perfect line on which to end our discussion, I wish we could talk for longer. For those listening, we will provide links to Exceptional, Alive at Work and I am looking forward already to Alive at Scale when that comes out next year. Thank you for being a guest on the show Dan, can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you and follow you on social media as well?
Dan Cable: Sure. I use Twitter the most and so that is @Dancable1 That is what I use and I put something out about every day and the second thing is my website which is actually getting better. dan-cable.com
I am putting all my talks and things up there so there is a lot of digital assets that people can just go and watch if they would like.
David Green: Fantastic. Well, we will link to that in the commentary around this podcast. Dan, it has been an amazing conversation. I feel inspired now for the rest of the day.
Dan Cable: Thank you so much, David. I also feel really good.
David Green: Thank you very much and I hope we get to meet at some point in the not too distant future. We are both in London, so it shouldn’t be too hard.