The guest on this week’s podcast is Lynda Gratton. Lynda is a Professor of Management Practice at The London Business School where she directs Human Resource Strategy in transforming companies, which is considered one of the world's leading programs on Human Resources.

Lynda is also the founder of HSM, the research consultancy and has written extensively on the future of work, the role of corporations and the interface between people and organisations. Lynda's most recent book, The New Long Life, A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World, was published at the end of May and we will talk a little bit about that in this episode. You can listen below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation, Lynda and I also discuss:

• What we have learned about people, organisations and the impact of remote working on collaboration during the pandemic

• The new skills, behaviours and mindsets individuals need to thrive in the future of work

• How to make reskilling stick within organisations

• How individuals, organisations, and governments can navigate the challenges of a hundred year life

• The role of HR and learning teams to help drive the reskilling and learning agenda

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in learning and skills, either from an individual or a company perspective. So that is Business Leaders, CHROs, Chief Learning Officers and anyone in a People Analytics, Workforce Planning, HR Tech or HR Business Partner role.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by Degreed. To learn more, visit https://degreed.com/.

Interview Transcript

David Green: So today I am delighted to welcome Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at London Business School and renowned expert on the future of work to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Welcome to the show, Lynda. Thank you very much for being a guest. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to your background and current activities?

Lynda Gratton: Oh, well, thank you for inviting me David. So I am a Professor at London Business School. I just got a new book coming out, The New Long Life. I run and founded a consulting advisory company called HSM.

David Green: Great, well we are going to talk a bit about the book and I think we are going to talk about some of the stuff that you touch on in your work as well.

We are recording this in August and I think publishing the podcast in September, which will be six months since lockdown or semi lockdown has started, I know you have been meticulously keeping a daily diary as well as polling executives every week or so. Can you share with listeners what you have learned and how that has progressed as we have moved through the last six months?

Lynda Gratton: Well, the diary was a really interesting thing and actually I have run out of saying how many days it is, but I am still keeping a daily diary. I am basically just writing down what I hear people saying. Where we are with it is, March the 14th was when my diary started, we had no idea of what the future was. We knew there was a pandemic, we didn't really know how it was going to play out. So I think the first few weeks was just people trying to work out what is going on around here, what should we be doing right now? Then as that progressed, so the first areas that I talked about... I did webinars, I have a series of columns that I write for MIT Sloan, so those were great in terms of getting ideas out really quickly. The first set of ideas were really about what happens if you are at home and you have got kids. So the first thing I was really talking about was how do you manage boundaries? What is the mechanism by which working from home is different from working in an office? What I said there was, working in an office means you are managing two transitions, going from home in to the office and then going from the office home. But actually when we asked people what is your experience right now? It was primarily one of constant interruption in terms of the transition between working, looking after their kids, working, looking after their kids. By the way that continues to be a real issue. So that was the first thing that became very apparent. The second thing that became very apparent is that as lockdown continued, people's networks began to change. So over time they were spending more time obviously with their our own family, but also more time in terms of Zoom and so on with people they already knew and less time with those diverse networks.

So I was really worried about serendipity, innovation and creativity. I still remain concerned about that.

The third phase, which I think is the phase we are still in, is the new reality and what we found right at the beginning is when we said to people, can you imagine it is going to be the same when this pandemic is over? Everybody said, we don't want to go back to the same way of working. We want to do something different. I think the third phase is really working out what does that new normal look like? Clearly people want to remain flexible in terms of their capacity to work from home. The fact that so many of us have been amazed by how good our digital infrastructure is, but at the same time, they miss their friends and they miss their colleagues. What is an office for? So this is a conversation that I and my advisory group HSM are really engaged with right now. Then the next conversation, the one after that by the way, so if you are listening to me in January or at the end of the year, it is going to be about productivity.

I think we are moving into a recession. People are going to be very, very concerned about how do we really make sure that these new ways of working create a productive workforce and that I think is going to be the next phase.

David Green: We work closely with a lot of People Analytics teams in large organisations and I think all those areas that you touched upon are all top of mind. I think that there has been a lot of stuff out there saying people are more productive at home, but then there is an argument that we are in a crisis so everyone rallies around the flag and it is new so sometimes when things are new, you can be more productive. But how sustainable is that in the future and at what cost are people being more productive in terms of working hours? I think we are going to explore as we go through this, but I was reading something by Michael Arena from Amazon Web Services around how people are interacting more with the people they really know, as you already said, but less with the people that they don't know as well. And then as you said, that how the impact this potentially has on innovation and creativity moving forward could be large.

Let's explore that a little bit because I know your book, Hotspots, which I think published around 2007, correct me if I am wrong around that. You wrote that creativity and innovation comes from chance encounters across networks.

How do we try and ensure that that continues to flourish in a world where we are not bumping into each other metaphorically, that we can only bump into each other online at the moment for those of us that are working virtually. As you said, the new normal probably means there will be some returns to the office, hopefully in some extent, but we are going to be living in a more hybrid world based on what people are telling you and others in their survey. So it would be good to understand that and what are the skills that we need to do that and create all of that important creativity and innovation now in our organisations?

Lynda Gratton: Well, I think that is one of the questions that we are going to have to address, which is how do we stay creative? There is really two ways around that. As I said in my book, Hotspots, that really often creativity comes through those diverse networks that allow you to bump into people you wouldn't normally meet and talk about things that you would normally not talk about.

I think there is two areas that we have got to address right now actually. One is about serendipity and technology. So, when I wrote Hotspots, we didn't have anything like the technologies we have now and for example, my own advisory group HSM were able only last week to join up many hundreds of thousands of people actually to talk about a topic that was absolutely crucial to that company right now. It was a moderated conversation that lasted 75 hours, with people from all over the world. That would not have been possible even five years ago. I do think that we have an opportunity to use technology more to build these big conversations, but that leaves the second question, which is what then is an office for?

I did a really interesting webinar with one of the most senior people from Arup the architectural firm, actually for London Business School so you can see it on our website and it is on the LBS website. That was a question we had addressed. What is an office for? If you think about an office as being a place where people sit in cubicles to work on their own well frankly they can do all of that at home now. There is no need for you to come into the office to sit in the cubicle to work on your own. So what an office is for is for social interaction. One of the things that Arup is exploring as a design concept is, what would it look like if your office was a place for socialising, a place of serendipity? I think that is going to be really important. I have to tell you, I cannot wait to get back. We have this fabulous office in Covent Garden which we had redesigned to be more collaborative, but we were only there four days before it closed down, so that was a very sad day. I can't wait to get back there because I want to meet my team, I want to meet the clients that we advise and face to face is really important. So I don't think everybody wants to stay at home, I think what we want is we want some sort of flexibility. We want to be able to do tasks which are autonomous, which require concentration at home and we want to get together in an office to do tasks that require much more serendipity and socialising.

David Green: What we have not been good at as organisations in the past, even those that do appreciate flexible working, that do allow people to work from home. They'll be like, why don't you work from home on Friday or something like that and I think we are going to need to be more sophisticated about understanding what are the tasks that people do that they can do perhaps even more productively at home? What is the work that we do that we need to be together to do? So creativity, innovation, as you said and its that craving human contact as well.

How can organisations start to identify those types of work and actually, as you said, build workspaces and workplaces that actually enhance that collaboration rather than these cubicles a lot of companies have now.

Lynda Gratton: Many of the people who are listening in September are already going through a process to rebuild the future of work, to rebuild work and my advice would be, and this has been the advice that I have given to those companies that I work with, is first of all think about the work itself and then ask yourself, why is this work done? When is it done? How is it done? Where is it done? And then begin to see that the tasks that are best done at home and the tasks that are best done creatively with other people. I think that level of analysis of work is going to be really important, but that is a relatively straightforward piece of work and one that we are doing at the moment. I think the more important issue is why do people work and what do they want from it? I think one thing Covid 19 has revealed to us is just how diverse our experiences are.

I am a 65 year old woman, I live in London with my husband in a rather large house where we both have studies of our own, we have grandchildren but none of them live with us. So what that means is that when Covid hit we actually became more productive. In fact that is true that from the data we have been collecting from the beginning actually shows exactly that. People who didn't have to commute anymore, who were at home more, who weren’t disturbed, said that their productivity had gone up. Some of my kids have got their own children who are aged under the age of five and are working full time with no care, then productivity has gone down. So we have to realise that not everybody is the same and we have to be much more sensitive to what an individual wants, and what they require at any point at any stage of their life.

So I think that is the second thing. So first thing is try and work out what it is that work is, secondly, understand that people are different in terms of their motivations at any point in time and thirdly realise that it is a process of co creation. So some of the most interesting work that I have been doing over the last month is to work with my colleagues at HSM to really talk to, sometimes tens of thousands of people in a company, about what would you like work to be? That has been a very important conversation. So when you look at job design, it has got to be a bottom up process. It is not a top down process. So how you start having those conversations about what is it you would like work to be? That is going to be really crucial.

David Green: And actually we talked with one of your colleagues at London Business School, Dan Cable, a little bit about this in our podcast a few weeks ago. Unfortunately too many organisations still design jobs based on stuff that they put in place at the start of the last century and actually if you allow people to help craft their jobs, which is effectively what you've just said there, then A] you will probably get better results and B] you will have a happier, more motivated workforce as well.

Lynda Gratton: Yeah, I think that is absolutely right. But let's also remember that the next push is going to be the push on productivity and that is where HR comes in because I don't think that we can let a thousand employees design their own jobs without any sort of framework or sense of what the values are.

So I think one of the analogies I have made in a couple of webinars recently is to say, I don't know how many of you were trained years ago as I was in Change Management, where it was all about unfreeze and refreeze. Well, we are definitely in an unfrozen state but actually the truth is your organisations are beginning to refreeze and you want to be absolutely sure that in the process of refreezing, you build as much productivity accelerators in as possible.

That is the special role of HR and those of you who are skilled in Change Management and culture to do, what are the productivity accelerators?

David Green: Yeah and I think hopefully HR is in a better place than it has been in years past and again most HR teams now have People Analysts working with them so they can actually start exploring some of the data around that as well. Obviously HR has a role in helping learning within the organisation. What are some of the new skills, behaviours or mindsets that workers will need to learn in order to be more productive and more collaborative and innovative in the future of work?

Lynda Gratton: Well, I think there are two areas that are going to really be crucial. I mean, David, it is no surprise that I am going to say digital skills. Everybody really needs to know how to make the best of technology in terms of improving their work performance. I think what was really fascinating for me is the very first webinar I ran, which was at London Business School in March it was the last webinar I did in a studio. I asked a question, we had 2000 people on the webinar, I asked them to tell me what your experience is right now? I gave them five options to choose, one of which was the technology is letting me down. Very few people chose that option and I don't know about you, David, but I think if we had Covid five years ago a huge number of people would have chosen that option. So I think we are all really becoming much more sophisticated, I hate this notion of digital natives, everyone is digital these days. I think that that's been a massive skill uplift for all of us and we need to continue to uplift our skills on how do we put digital first in terms of our productivity? The second skill I think is going to be really crucial is that collaborative team building creativity skill.

Part of that is going to be, how do you manage a virtual team? Which is different than managing a face to face team, but some of it is also, you have got everybody face to face. It is now February or March whenever it is, we are going to get everyone face to face. How do you make the most of those experiences?

So I think that digital and collaboration are going to be the two major skills that we have to build.

David Green: Then for Leaders, I am guessing, learning some of those softer skills as well because I think there has been a lot of focus on the change for people who predominantly worked in offices in the past and are now having to work remotely. As you highlighted there, there has probably been less focus on managers, if you are a manager who has historically had your team in front of you to manage, the skills needed to manage a team virtually are very different. In the future, which is likely to be more hybrid, managers are going to need to be able to manage well with people when they are sitting in front of them and people when they are working remotely as well.

What are some of the skills that managers need to develop in this area? I am thinking particularly about managers that haven't done this much in the past.

Lynda Gratton: Some of my colleagues at London Business School have been asking for some time why do we have Managers? What is the role of a Manager? I have always been a bit of a defender of managers, because I think they play an incredibly important role within teams and that is just going to increase and be more difficult because as you say, David, hybrid. We see this at London Business School right now, we are teaching where half of our students are in the room, they are called the roomers and half of them are on Zoom, they are called the Zoomers. I can tell you that we have had to completely re learn how to be teachers, we are learning that all the time. London Business School has been brilliant and we all as a community have supported each other in trying to learn how to do it. I think Managers need to do the same. If I was a Manager and I was listening now I would be reaching out to all my other Manager friends and saying, how do I do this? Because it is a very skillfull job and really is great in Managers if you ever thought you didn't have a role, you certainly do now.

So what should you be focusing on? Well, I would say the hard and the soft really. The soft is really deep listening. I think that there are real issues arising about people's mental health, about their physical health, you have to listen to the people who are in your team.

And the second is project management skills. I have written a piece for MIT Sloan, which will be out by the time you listen to this podcast, it's not out yet. Which is about what have I learned? What are the final learnings from Covid? And one of them is that project management is very, very important. Knowing how to assign responsibilities, knowing how to measure performance, knowing how to really keep in touch with what is happening in your team when you don't see them. That is going to be crucial because the idea of the way you managed was to go down the corridor and ask yourself who is in the office and does it look like they are working, that is over. So you have to use many more sophisticated ways of both measuring what is going on in your organisation, the sort of analytics that you need, but also motivating people to become, as Dan would say, the best that they can be.

I have, some of you will be a member of this, a future of work consortium and three times a year, we choose the topic we think is most relevant for right now. In our view, the topic that is most relevant for right now is, how do I build trust? How do I build trust at a time when you are trying to build it virtually? And how do I build trust at a time when people are under enormous pressure? We know that both of those things, being virtual and under a lot of pressure, is a natural breaker of trust.

We are currently in organisations where don't be surprised if trust goes down because it is virtual and people are under pressure and research tell us already that that is going to wash away the trust.

So we have to do a lot of trust building and coming back to the point I made earlier, that's a lot about listening.

David Green: Another topic that seems to really be at the top of the agenda at the moment and if anything really seems to be accelerated by the Covid crisis is around re-skilling. What are some of the best practices that you have seen that really helps make re-skilling stick within organisations? I am guessing it is some of the skills that you have already talked about around listening but I guess a bit around culture as well.

Lynda Gratton: Yes well before Covid I actually felt that re-skilling was one of the major areas that we needed to look at and interestingly in my new book, which I co authored with Andrew Scott who is an Economist at London Business School, The New Long Life. We really go in to some detail about how there are two big impacts on our lives, pre-Covid, one is we are living longer and working for longer and that remains the same by the way. The second is that we are living in a time of extraordinary technological developments and both of those lead to the fact that we have to engage in lifelong learning and that means constantly up-skilling and re-skilling. I think organisations have a very important role to play there both in terms of acknowledging that up-skilling and re-skilling is crucial but also in terms of building the tools. And again, there's great opportunities to use online tools in a way that we just hadn't before. I am in two groups, one is The World Economic Forum Council on Work, which has a big re-skilling and the second is a McKinsey Consortium on Adult Education, which again I have been a member of both now for more than five years and in both groups in both networks, there is a huge focus on how you can use online learning as a way of up-skilling and re-skilling. I am not saying that that is a standalone, it isn't, but it certainly gives a lot of people the opportunity to learn new stuff and it really means that colleagues then become supporters of learning. It has been very interesting for us to see during Covid, when we have asked people who have helped you the most through this, we had sort of expected them to say our Managers, but the overwhelming response was It's our colleagues who have helped us the most. So right now when we are designing for companies a way of thinking about up-skilling and re-skilling we have really brought peer groups to the fore in terms of how you support each other to learn fast.

David Green: What examples have you got of companies or organisations that have got the whole re-skilling and up-skilling agenda that they are doing it well? And if so, what is it that they are doing, I hate to talk about best practices, so good practices that others could learn from?

Lynda Gratton: Well, I think one thing I have learned from Covid, maybe those of you who are listening feel the same, is that whatever shape you went into Covid really determined your early responses. So companies that had always had a focus on learning just accelerated that process and I think learning has been very much a sectorial play. So if you run a technology company like Microsoft or Tata Consulting Services, you have already put a big investment into learning because yours is a big digital strategy.

If you are in a professional service firm like PWC, you have always known that human capital is at the centre of your organisational strategy. So those companies, the three I am speaking of Microsoft, TCS and PWC pivoted very, very quickly into that. Similarly, if you look at Vodafone right now they are making a big play on up-skilling and re-skilling because they had that anyway, they were already pushing the new digital agenda. So I think that the challenge is for companies who didn't have learning at the top of their agenda, the Banks for example, some of the Banks haven't had that and they have now really have had to push that. It is a great time to do so because people are very worried about their jobs, they are very worried about their own personal productivity and they are very keen to learn the skills that will keep them employed.

David Green: And as you said, we have the technology now that it is not just about learning in a classroom. As you gave the example yourself, you have got roomers and zoomers at London Business School. There is so much learning that you can do online now, either as a cohort or as an individual and so I think you are right it is just organisations need to promote that learning culture within their organisations and be clear on the skills that they need more of in the future.

And I guess this is where we are seeing technology helping maybe personalised recommendations to employees around things that they might want to learn, based on what they already have, based on what their career desires are and also based on what skills the organisation needs more of in the future. So it does seem that if you have got that culture within those organisations already, certainly the ones you highlighted have, that they are really pushing this agenda further.

As I said, your book is out, you have obviously published a book during Covid but I think it is even more relevant because of the pandemic. I think it essentially provides a guide for navigating the challenges of a hundred year life. So we have looked a little bit from an organisational perspective, but what about individuals? What do individuals need to do to prepare?

Lynda Gratton: Well Andrew Scott and I have worked together before on a book, which was the Hundred Year Life and what has been really exciting for me over the last five years working with Andrew is he is an Economist and a very good Economist, and I am a Psychologist and that is a very unusual combination.

So the Hundred Year Life was both a personal look at how do you manage if you live to a hundred, but also an economic look, a financial look. So for example if you live to a hundred, you are going to be working into your seventies, probably mid seventies and so that was a really important part of that story. Then we decided to write another book together, The New Long Life, which came out last month. What we have done there is to really broaden the conversation to include not just demography or longevity as a force that is going to change your life, but also bringing in technology and also profound social changes such as, what happens when most families have two working parents or what happens when a high proportion of the population is single and living on their own. What happens when communities start becoming isolated? And so where we got to with The New Long Life is really what we would call a framework for flourishing and we talked about three things in terms of how do you flourish. The first thing is you flourish because you have a narrative about yourself and about your life that propels you forward and helps you think about what your possibilities are. You flourish because you engage in exploration and learning right the way through your life and you flourish because you build relationships within your family and within your community that allow you to feel good and allow you to flourish. So that was really what we have laid out and in terms of my own work over the next couple of years, this notion of flourishing is going to be where I am going to be directing my attention.

David Green: Yes so how people can flourish and how organisations can enable their people to flourish. I think also in the book you look at Governments as well and States and what they can do around the education system to actually support longer lifespans.

Lynda Gratton: Well yes and actually not just longer lifespans, David, but also a longer life lived at a time of extraordinary technological innovation. One of the basic arguments we make in the book is that human ingenuity has allowed us to live longer and has allowed us to build all these machines but what we need now is what Andrew and I call social ingenuity which is to say, how do we learn to live and what sort of lives do we want? Obviously the book was written before the pandemic and when the pandemic struck before we launched it in May, we read it again and said, how does it feel now?

And actually the good news for us is it felt absolutely relevant because right now all of us are asking, what do we want our future self to be? You know, do we want to be someone that works all the time or do we want to be at home more? Secondly, we are all realising wow, we are just about to move into a recession we really need to up-skill ourselves. Then thirdly, we have spent a lot of time with our families, how do we feel about that? Also our communities have suddenly become more important to us. So we are actually really pleased that the book is out now. We are also very pleased that we didn't have to write a book about the pandemic because I can tell you there are going to be a lot of those out by January of 2021, I am pleased that mine will not be one of them. We are very pleased with the book and we hope that you as a reader will enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it.

David Green: And I guess some of the things that you were talking about there for example you are talking about accelerated change, the pandemic seems to be accelerating some of these changes even more. There is a great example from Novartis that is in the public domain, I think they had a two year plan to roll out Microsoft Teams, they rolled it out in two weeks and there are many others that I have heard around that as well.

I think actually one thing I have probably said and I think you have touched on this as well, it is not just about longer lifespans but actually because of this massive technological change that we are in the half life of skills is getting shorter and shorter. There was some interesting research that I think IBM published a year or so ago that actually showed the time span of a skill and how you need to re-skill, up-skill and continue to have this continuous learning as a mindset for individuals, but also a mindset for organisations as well.

One of the other things you talk about is the book explores a need for a shift in the perception of the ageing population and the ageing workforce. How might we achieve that shift? What are the unique skills and capabilities that the older generation, which I am starting to think that I am part of now as well, can offer organisations?

Lynda Gratton: If you live, as we are, long lives with significant technological change, then it is inevitable that we will be working longer and that has got an implication, both for the individual and for the organisation. So what does it mean to the individual? Well, when we wrote the Hundred Year Life, people said to me at the time, Lynda what did you do differently after writing the book? And actually I became healthy and that takes a lot of time, I am less healthy now because I have just spent two months in the South of France drinking all the time and eating far too much, but I am going to get back healthy again. I promise. So the individual has got to themselves prepare for a healthy ageing and that is about all the things we know, staying healthy, making sure that you are still connected to people of different age groups and building skills. So I think it is about individual volition, if you want to flourish, you have to flourish as an individual. But I think organisations can do a lot and for me the first thing they can do is stop stereotyping. In the book we have a real pop at generational labels, you know Gen X, Gen Y, Baby boomers, I suppose this new group is going to be called the Pandemics. There is no empirical research to suggest that just because you were born in a certain year that you are the same as the rest of the cohort. In fact, if you gave a Psychologist a whole bunch of data and said, could you predict which age cohort this person is in? Which generational cohort, are they a Baby Boomer or are they Gen X? It will be very difficult for you to know that if you just looked at their preferences. Actually I am a 65 year old person so I would be labelled a Baby Boomer, I am not the same as every other 65 year old and in fact, in some ways, I am rather similar to a 25 year old who is maybe the same as a 45 year old. So the first thing is drop the stereotypes because that really stops you from seeing people for who they are, you simply see them through the lens of a stereotype.

The second thing is realise that experience can be incredibly helpful. It is interesting with my own company HSM, as soon as we went into the Covid lockdown I was very fortunate to have on my board, two people who had lived through the last financial crisis. So they simply said, okay, day one we form a war room, day two we do this, day three and so on. Actually as a consequence my advisory group did better since Covid than we have ever done, we have done better. That was partly because we moved incredibly quickly and we moved incredibly quickly because we had experienced people on the board who knew what to do in a crisis because they had already lived through a crisis. I think we have got to really understand that if we want our organisations to flourish, we need people of different age groups, people with different experiences of how they see the world. The Google data shows that. When Google took a look at all their teams and said, what predicts whether a team does well? Having different age experiences in a team is a wise thing to have.

David Green: Yeah, I suppose particularly if you are a product company and your customer base is all different ages, all different genders, different ethnicities, all the different types of categories that we have, it only makes sense to have a team that actually reflects that and as you said, they bring different cognitive diversity into that. This actually leads quite nicely to the next question, which I think we can expand to encompass this. So the majority of our listeners work in HR, what is or what should be the role of HR teams in supporting their organisations around the whole re-skilling and learning agenda and to help employees flourish within an organisation?

Lynda Gratton: Well, I think that increasingly those of you who are in HR, your focus will be on productivity, remember we are in a recession. So your CEOs will be asking HR to do that and part of your way of building productivity is to help people be as skillfull as they possibly can be. We know that learning plays an incredibly important part in up-skilling so inevitably the agenda is going to be an up-skilling learning agenda. What can you do to help that? I would say a couple of things, number one and it is a point you made earlier, David, which is you have to help people know what they need to know.

I think that companies really have to do that and in fact I think governments should also be doing it, there are some governments who are very good at that, which is just help people to understand if you want to flourish in the next couple of years this is what you should be learning. So I think flagging up the skills that are going to be crucial in the short to medium, possibly even the longer term, that is going to be absolutely incredibly helpful for people.

Then the second thing is to build platforms that allow people to learn in whatever way they can. So for example one of the platforms we have been looking at over the years is created by the learning group at Westpac, which is one of the Australian Banks and that is absolutely great because it helps people to find stuff and to work through stuff. Then the third thing is to really build learning experiences that maximise the time that people are taking. I very much like face to face work and I don't think everyone is going to work from home, I do think that we will be back in an office.

So then the role of the HR is to say, how can we maximise the learning when people are face to face? And I think we have all got to learn how best to do that, that is something that we all have to learn, even London Business School Professors are learning that. Those three aspects, flagging up to people what is the most important thing I should be learning right now, secondly giving them platforms to help them to do that but thirdly, also to realise that peers and Managers and Leaders play an incredibly important role to help people learn.

David Green: I agree with all of that and it leads nicely to this last question actually and this is one we are asking all our guests on the show in this series. We are asking you to look forward Lynda, which I think shouldn't be too difficult for you given the books that you have published in the past, what will be the role of learning and development be in 2030? We are just picking 2030 arbitrarily because it is 10 years ahead.

Where do you see the role of learning and development going by 2030?

Lynda Gratton: Well beyond all the things that you probably heard I am going to make another prophecy, which perhaps doesn't seem so obvious, which is about ecosystems and communities. The world could go a whole bunch of ways right now just as we have possible selves, we have possible worlds.

The world that I would like to see is a world of less inequality and a world of stronger communities and families. That is the world that I would like to live in and to do that people who are responsible for learning need to reach out beyond their full time employees into their communities too, to support them. But Microsoft is doing that right now. Microsoft has announced, as you perhaps know, that they are going to really support people in communities to up-skill and re-skill. So I would say that the learning groups that really make a difference to the future will be those that see learning, not just as something that happens to employees in organisations, but that happens to citizens in communities and indeed in that bigger ecosystem of partners and suppliers. I think that would be a marvellous, marvellous contribution that we could make.

David Green: It is taking a longer term look at learning, it is not just about the here and now and up-skilling our current employee base. It is about, as you said, enabling your communities, maybe the communities where you're based. I am presuming that Microsoft will be doing this a lot in Seattle for example, where obviously they have got lots of potential employees in the future. I like that vision and it is interesting actually, there has been a few things I have seen published recently, I think the likes of BCG, McKinsey and others talking about trying to really emphasise the importance of learning. They are talking about will the Chief Learning Officer actually sit outside HR and be a direct report into the CEO?

Is that a trend you are seeing? Is that something you think will happen?

Lynda Gratton: Whether you will report to the CEO or not is dependent on the relationship you have with your CEO. I have been running my HR strategy program at London Business School for 30 years now and I have met a lot of CHROs. If they are really good and the CEO wants to have a good CHRO they report into them. If the CLO is really good and is important to the CEO then they report into them and then the structure changes. So it is honestly a lot to do with the individual and their skills and it is a lot to do with what the CEO wants. Sometimes I come across a Senior HR person, I think, wow, how did they ever get that job? And then I meet the CEOs and realise  that the CEO wanted someone to sort out car parking and they didn't want anyone super. So it is a lot to do with the organisational structure, but actually if you are a CLO and you want to make a difference to the world, then reporting into the CEO is a fantastic way of doing it.

David Green: Well, Lynda, thank you very much for your time and being a guest and as someone who lived in France for seven years I am slightly jealous of the fact you are enjoying all that lovely wine at the moment.

So can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you and follow you on social media? We will add some links to the stuff we post with the podcast but people like to hear from you as well.

Lynda Gratton: Well my email is lgratton@london.edu couldn't be easier. But actually the main way that people are contacting me right now is LinkedIn so it's just a normal Lynda Gratton LinkedIn. I am on Twitter, you can follow me on Twitter and if you drop me a note we will send you something that has all of my Covid webinars and Covid writings, we have got that actually as a document so we would be really happy to share that. You can just listen to my webinars and the columns, I have been very, very active since Covid.

David Green: You certainly have and thank you from the community for doing that because I think lots of us were scrambling around a little bit and I think people like you, Dave Ulrich and others that have really stepped up to the fore I think providing all that advice has been really helpful for everyone.

Lynda Gratton: Thank you for that David, as you know actually Dave and I are great friends, so we do think that that's our role and so we were really thrilled that we were able to do that and I have learned enormously since Covid, enormously.

Actually what I have done is, I promise I am not going to write a book about Covid. But what I have done is to write a series of columns in MIT Sloan, which means that you write something and it comes out within eight days and that for me has been really important because actually this is all about speed of response. So thank you for those kind words David, I appreciate that.

David Green: No worries Lynda, we will put a link to your column in MIT Sloan, in the publicity we put out with this. Lynda, thank you very much, enjoy the rest of your time in France. We will also put a link to the book as well.

Lynda Gratton: Thanks a lot.