Talent leaders know that people programs make the best impact when everyone aligns to a shared goal — yet many struggle to get deep buy-in from company leadership. This hurdle can spell trouble for learning, development, and other talent initiatives, especially amid economic uncertainty. In this episode, we explore actionable insights for getting the CEO — and the whole leadership board — on board with your talent initiatives. We'll show you how to elevate your pitch and successfully connect your initiatives to the outcomes that leaders beyond the HR function care about most.
Talent leaders know that people programs make the best impact when everyone aligns to a shared goal — yet many struggle to get deep buy-in from company leadership. This hurdle can spell trouble for learning, development, and other talent initiatives, especially amid economic uncertainty.
In this episode, we explore actionable insights for getting the CEO — and the whole leadership board — on board with your talent initiatives. We'll show you how to elevate your pitch and successfully connect your initiatives to the outcomes leaders beyond the HR function care about most.
This podcast is taken from our regular webinar series, Your Brain at Work Live. You can find the video version at this link: https://hub.neuroleadership.com/season-9-episode-01
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Leadership Buy In- Deb, Marshall, Joy
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0:00
Talent leaders know that people programs make the best impact when everyone aligns to a shared goal. Yet many struggle to get deep buy in from company leadership. This hurdle can spell trouble for learning, development, and other talent initiatives, especially amid economic uncertainty. Join us in this season premiere of Your Brain at Work live as we explore actionable insights for getting the CEO and the whole leadership Board on board with your talent initiatives. We'll show you how to elevate your pitch and successfully connect your initiatives to the outcomes that leaders beyond the HR function care about most.
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I'm Shelby Wilburn, and you're listening to your brain at work from the Neural Leadership Institute. We continue to draw episodes from our weekly Friday webinar series. This week. Our show is a conversation between Marshall Bergman, senior vice president of global sales at the Neural Leadership Institute joy Verplink, Senior insight strategist at the NeuroLeadership Institute and Deb Bubb, chairman for the Board of Advisors at the NeuroLeadership Institute. Enjoy.
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1:01
Shelby. And thank you, everyone, for joining today. Shelby, you brought up that this has been going on now, your brain at work life for about three years, and it's really interesting reflecting on that. I remember when we started your brain at work live. It was great in the midst of the pandemic, and it was really an opportunity for us to try to keep the community connected, take care of each other, and really focus on what mattered. And I just am so humbled that every week, week in and week out, we have such a great community of folks who are interested in moving the mission forward and making organizations more human through science. So I just want to thank you all for being here. Thank you for joining us today. And hopefully we've got a great kickoff to season nine for you. So I've got two amazing guests with me today. Obviously you've heard about Deb and Joy. The Joy fan club is in the house, apparently in the chat there. So well done, Joy. You're more popular than you even think you are. So it's very exciting to see. And today our session is going to be a real nice mix of practical advice from the workplace, things that Deb, myself, and Joy have experienced as we've tried to build buy in and get sign off from executives on important talent initiatives. But we're also going to be introducing some really interesting some really interesting research from neuroscience around what does it really take to get someone to buy in, what happens in their brain? And if we understand people's brains a little bit better, how can we more effectively craft our messaging in order to get the results that we're looking for? So we're going to organize this next 50 minutes or so into three chapters. Chapter one, we're going to talk about how to identify the business needs of your organization. I'll be doing some interviews of Deb and Joy and share with you a little model that should help you do that. Number two, we're going to talk about how can you actually build a business case to actually make the case in a compelling way to your leaders about why talent initiatives are going to help drive their business results. And step three, we're going to introduce a model about how to communicate in a way that really activates insights and gets buy in. And also share with you some example business cases for one of our most anticipated, anticipated solutions right now, which is Team the Neuroscience of Psychological Safety. We're actually going to give you some example case studies there that you can take, use, improve on whatever you need, if that's of interest to you. So we'd like to make this session as interactive as possible. So please type in questions in the chat as they come to you. The three of us will be monitoring, as well as Shelby and Evan, so we'll try to address all those at the end of each chapter, we'll take a pause and we'll try to address questions, or we might address them right in the flow of the discussion, but why don't we just go ahead and get started? Let me start with a little bit of shared context on where I think most of this audience is right now as talent leaders for large government organizations, large private, public organizations, or even small organizations as well. It's January. You've just been through the holidays. We have just been through a whole lot of end of year work. You've probably just closed out on your performance cycle work. You're probably to be beginning to do some new development planning and prepping for a leadership or board meeting in January. You're probably starting to think about your budget allocations, where do you need to invest your money? What are the needs that your organization has? And I'm a finance guy. From a business perspective, it's earning season every day. A company is on CNBC talking about their results, their new strategy, how they're going to grow, how they're dealing with changes in the economic situation as well. And add to all that, we've got this looming potential recession. The economic data looked great yesterday, but companies, from my experience, are still being cautious. They're making small investments as opposed to big ones. And so that adds a whole nother layer of sort of complication and thought that needs to go into advancing your initiatives. So. 2s Let's
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talk a little bit about that and let's go to Deb. So deb as a talent leader who's led several talent organizations in the past, and you've been responsible some really big transformative initiatives in organizations. As someone who's been there before in this sort of environment, what are some daily best practices that you try to keep in mind to make sure that you're focusing yourself and your team on the things that matter most for the business?
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Well,
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Marshall, first, thanks for having me and for convening this conversation. I agree with your assessment. And just thinking about that list of things that most HR leaders and talent leaders have on their plates right now, and thinking about it in the context of the time we've been in, which is the time of incredible relevance and importance of the HR function to every employee and to every business, coming through a period of incredible challenge,
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5:56
and then entering this period where we've learned so much about the consequences of overwork burnout, trying to do too much or trying to figure out how to use our resources in the right way, and moving into a period of increased financial pressure and scrutiny. I think the key message here is you can't do everything. And so prioritization in this context becomes a really important skill set. 1s I think prioritization is the result of really a shift in mindset. I think it comes down to three things, really thinking about relevance, thinking about effectiveness, and thinking about value. 1s So when I think about those questions and how I tried to approach it as a leader, I thought about in the space of relevance, really getting clear about what's important and relevant to the business I'm serving,
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to the employees in that organizations and the communities that support our business. And so that sort of idea of combining a real intimacy with the business, a business relevant sort of set of questions or curiosities with being human centered and understanding
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what's important to the people who are in that business and constantly asking myself the questions who are we trying to serve right now? What outcome that's going to make a difference that matters? The second set of questions or sort of mindset that I would carry is the sort of question about effectiveness. And this is about understanding what change we hope to see by taking whatever action we're considering. And do we even have the right data or measurements to understand if change is happening over time? So here it's about selecting the right interventions, the interventions that we think are proven and have the best chance of making a difference, forming and testing hypotheses and being able to use sort of data and science to know if what we're doing is actually making the difference that matters. I think about this as a set of sort of habits or practices around being data driven and science based in my approach. And then lastly, I try to think about value. And here it's about thinking about what matters most in terms of the impact we're going to make. You might think about this in financial terms as like a cost benefit analysis, but I think it's actually bigger than that. Value is about setting priorities. Value is about leadership. It's about making choices as a leader that focus our efforts on the things that are going to make the biggest difference to the organization and deciding what happens if we do nothing at all. Because in this environment of not being able to do everything, what we choose to do and what we choose not to do has a huge impact on our business, it has a huge impact on our employees and it has a huge impact on the communities we serve. So those are kind of the three mindsets I try to occupy when I'm thinking about this question of prioritization and I really try to keep those habits daily in the questions I ask, the perspectives I take, the initiatives that I pursue in order to, I don't know, THR in in really challenging times. 1s That's amazing. I'll just repeat for everyone. So the relevance of the initiatives, the effectiveness of the initiatives and the value of those initiatives. And I liked specifically how those lead to different questions, right? So relevance, for example, I heard you say is important to the business as important to employees, is it relevant to our communities? Right? Those are three different questions. And if you applied that question to two different solution options, you might get some very different answers, right? 2s And
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then you had the effectiveness. So, again, I'm playing through the scenario here. I've got two options. One is proven, one's experimental. The experimental one might get better results. But am I willing to invest a million dollars in right now or should we pilot it first? I think I heard you saying something like that. Is that right? Exactly
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right. Exactly right. There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, but they provide sort of a landscape for you to make decision trade offs and to decide where do you want to put your energy in a scenario of scarce resources. And I sort of like to manage a complex portfolio, one that has a few big bets, some more experimental, but it has some proven solutions. So I know I'm getting the value that really matters to my customers and really thinking about my constituencies as well. So that portfolio is balanced to be rich, to be value generating for the business and for employees and for our communities, having the right mix of innovation and proven solutions to get us where we need to
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go. Yeah, I even love you using that language of portfolio management as business leaders, people often think about business strategies. We've got our core business that's going to produce our cash cow business, that's going to produce good results. We know how that's going to but we're going to make some investments and some bets in some areas that might get us into new markets or grow over time. You're thinking the same way about your talent initiatives as well. And what I really love, and I think what I always encourage folks I work with is the more you're talking in the language that a business leader, a COO or a chief financial officer thinks portfolio management, these are my big bets, these are my experiments. They understand that because they're thinking the same way about the different divisions of their business, et cetera.
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Yeah, I think aligning our work to the business strategy is super important. And thinking about ourselves. I think it's one of the material shifts that our function has needed to make over the last several years is as opposed to thinking about ourselves as process owners, the owners of a particular discipline or a particular function. Instead thinking about ourselves as business leaders equally accountable to the thriving of the business, as other business leaders who own functions that have historically been described as more directly related to the PNL. But talent is at the center of many of the biggest questions facing our businesses today. So making that mindset shift from measuring the success of my function to influencing the success of the business and managing a portfolio of strategies and investments to get that done, really thinking about outcomes that help move the business and our employee population and our communities forward is kind of where I'm trying to live as a leader today.
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And frankly, it sounds a lot more fun. 1s Sounds a lot more fun than just asking for budget for things, right? So it's real strategic thinking, it's real heady work and it's great. So shifting gears a little bit on that. So you talked about these three categories relevance, effectiveness and value. What are the practices that you engage in day to day or that you think everyone on this team should engage in day to day? To make sure that you are getting the right answers to that question, making sure you know what's relevant, making sure you know if things are effective and if it's going to have value to the business. What are some day to day practices?
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13:10
Yeah, well, I really value sort of growth, mindset and learning in the way I approach my work. So I feel like one of the core characteristics of being a leader who's able to be agile and responsive and effective in our environment is the ability to respond quickly, anticipate, to think through the maybe intended or unintended consequences of the decisions we make and to drive solutions that are going to create conditions for growth and performance in our organization. So to do that, I read a lot anybody who's been part of my organization knows about this. I have sort of a daily habit, a very consistent daily habit. I start my day with at least ten to 30 minutes of just reading. So I read industry articles, I read anal list reports, I read the annual report. When it comes out. 2s I really try to think about and stretch 1s my thinking into places where I may be less familiar, where I need to maybe ask for support or learning from another person to augment or enrich my learning and understanding. And I try to share that learning in my organization. So people are very familiar who've worked with or around me, of me forwarding articles and saying hey, what do you think about this? I didn't understand that art. Or can you tell me a little bit about what this inspires for you? Because here's what it's inspired for me and really try to continue learning and understanding more deeply the business conditions, the environmental conditions, and the underlying behavioral science that is emerging that's helping us understand how to better optimize the conditions for people and businesses in our world. I also am really a big fan of mentorship, so I try to, wherever I am, form really deep relationships with the adjacent disciplines that help drive our work. A finance mentor, an analytics partner, an engineering or technical leadership mentor who can help me think about the business from their angle. And those can be really powerful kind of mutual relationships. I think earlier in my career I thought of them as fairly one directional. I need to partner with finance to better understand the PNL so I can figure out how I'm going to be evaluated. I feel like early in my career it was super helpful, also fairly transactional. In contrast, now I try to think about them as really mutual relationships. My colleagues in finance and technology and operations are also trying to be better leaders and drive better talent, greater environments for contribution. So I try to think about what can I give back as I'm getting so much rich insight from those business mentors about how to tune solutions that make a difference in the business. And then lastly, I meet with leaders from every business and function on a regular basis. And they're not only social check ins or understanding the quality of the support that's being given. I really try to dig into the business and the strategy from their point of view. I come with a lot of questions and I try to be fearless in asking questions. Sometimes it can be embarrassing to ask a question. I don't know what this technology is, can you explain it to me? Or what is happening in the PNL that we continue to get this result despite our efforts. And I really try to push these leaders to explain it to me in that I can understand it. Because if I can't understand it, my guess is that many people in the organization can't either. So being fearless in the quest to really understand what's going on and then circle back with my team and ask my team the same questions and figure out do we actually understand each other
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so that we're able to
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support one another in a way that makes a meaningful difference.
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It's wonderful. Yeah. So those are all and I saw in the chat people lighting up a couple of things around, sharing different sources of interesting information. I'm a huge fan of reading the quarterly reports. You can get those downloaded, hearing what the CEO is talking about, hearing what the analysts are asking about. As a sales leader, I'm constantly sharing those quarterly results reports and comments from the CEO with my team because you'll get all sorts of insights about what they care about. They literally are there to tell you. These are the things that I'm focused on right now. So if you can find ways to get your initiatives aligned with what the CEO is telling Wall Street, you're going to be in a great place. And even if you're not a public company, 1s there's team meetings, government organizations, they're always sharing what goals they're trying to achieve. Being aware of those, how they're changing, is really important. So I'll throw out one of my favorite websites, is a finance website. It's called seeking Alpha. You can get transcripts of every quarterly report. It's great, and it's probably something that's not on every HR person's reading list, but it should be. It's really fantastic. Joy, I wanted to bring you in here as well because Deb talked a lot about talking to people and understanding things, but you had some interesting insights when we were prepping for this around. Sometimes what people are saying isn't actually what they always need. Tell me a little bit about that
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right when you're having those conversations, observable behaviors can speak volumes. So, for instance, 2s in a military setting where I came from, if you know that the trends are showing that human performance optimization can be improved with mind, 1s but you know that everybody's really focused on combatives. 1s You may need to change your approach a little bit and say, okay, we're going to call this mental toughness and we're going to incorporate it
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in hand to hand combat training with our toughest person. And since it's about lunchtime here in Vermont, I'll say it's kind of like if all of your industry trends are saying kale is the superfood and everybody that you're talking to is saying, yes, we need the Kale, we need the kale. But you go into their offices and all you see is donuts, don't be afraid to add some maple syrup to the Kale. The palate a little bit.
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Well, Joy, you know, it's tapping season, it's sugaring season here. I'll be drilling some holes in maple trees this weekend, actually. So you're speaking to my heart when you talk about maple syrup. But yeah, that's great. And I think that a lot of times what I find, and we even do it here at NLI, we get so excited about an idea and we hear people say they love that idea, but when it comes to actually getting buy into that idea, there's language that needs to shift. I mean, Dei has been a constant effort to shift language to make it most applicable and most effective so we can get the highest rates of adoption and change in organizations. So I love that you're pointing out Deb's point of getting out there and talking and listening, but also observing and saying, hey, I'm hearing what you're saying, but I'm seeing this. I need to find a way to combine those two data sets into a more compelling message. Deb, anything to add to that at all?
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Yeah, and I love your turn into sort of observable behavior and then also observable data. And I think this is one of the most profound shifts in our sort of function over the last several years, is the rise of people analytics and the power it gives us to help us understand the dynamics of a business. Really understand not only what people are saying is important or what they might subjectively experience and in their perspective think is important, but what are they actually doing?
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And how do we understand the difference between what I say and what I do? And then what is the intended outcome of it? And how do I
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intersect that system and identify the right priorities, habits and systems to influence behavior change? So on my reading list. Every single I mean, literally, I can't tell you how much I consult David Green's sort of monthly roundup of HR analytics insights, or there are a million good sources for it, but really understanding how to leverage analytics and data to understand your business and what's happening and then share those insights, hopefully with a little kale and a little maple syrup. This recipe is a little sketchy from my point of view, but putting it together in the right way to get to the right insight and drive. The right behavior, I think, is a super powerful thought.
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Fantastic. So we're going to go in a little bit into chapter two in just a moment. But I did want to address there was a comment, I think Mona put in a question for you, Deb, because there was a question about how do you find a good mentor? And it sounds like you're sort of thinking of a mentor evolved and maybe quick response there.
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Yeah, 2s I think mentorship is one of those words, kind of a big word that can be used in a lot of different contexts and mean a lot of different things. I mean, finding a big M mentor like the people who are going to use their own personal experience and create a developmental relationship with you that can change your life. That's an ongoing process of understanding yourself, understanding who you admire and who you want to emulate. Building mutual relationships and really investing in vulnerability, sharing authenticity, mutual benefit to help grow yourself. 3s That's a big project here. I'm talking a little bit about small M mentorship. Like in every business I've ever been part of, I have formed a relationship with the CFO of my business. And I have asked questions like, I need to understand the PNL of this business. There's understanding finance basics and then there's understanding the PNL of this business and the business strategy and plan of this business. And forming a relationship with the person who sits over that and drives all those processes and has that is a very powerful way of becoming knowledgeable and increasing effectiveness of your own practice. And so when I think about that relationship as a mentor relationship, I think about it as you're sitting over the business PNL and all these insights and you can help usher me into that relationship. And I'm sitting over a different set of disciplines and expertise that might also be helpful to you. How do we form a mutual learning relationship? So I would look to finance, I would think about all of the leaders who own core product or business functions, engineering, technical, what are the big levers of your business and think about who in
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that business is talking in a way that resonates for me. Can I form a relationship with them that can help increase and deepen my understanding? So that's how I think
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about it. Thank you for that and to comment. Wynn put a couple of questions in the Q and A. I just want to make sure when you knew we address them. Talked about how Josh Burston says that HR professionals need to migrate across the top of the T. So getting to all those different business units, building those relationship, that's understanding what their goals are. You might have one business unit that's trying to innovate and grow their business. You might have another one that's trying to reduce risk. Those are two completely different talent challenges. And if you don't understand what their business objectives are, you can't prescribe the right sort of people solutions to help them achieve their goals. So understanding that is going to be really critical.
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I can give a pretty specific example of that early in my
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career. 1s I worked with a leadership team that had acquired like 40 different businesses in the communications space. And I was not an expert in communications technology at all, so I was drinking from a fire hose, really trying to learn about the market, the business, the technology, why it's different. And as I worked across that tea and met with the head of Finance, the head of Technology and Architecture, the head of Product and Market, all of those different parts of the business, I learned about, I
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think about eleven, maybe twelve different initiatives that each of those individual functional silos were engaging in to try to improve the business. And they were pointed maybe five to ten degrees differently, some driving more innovation, more learning and development, more efficiency, more control, more reduce this, grow that. And I got together with the head of finance and I said, how are we possibly going to make a difference if we're pulling everyone in all of these directions? And these directions don't actually align? So we convened sort of a council of the heads of these different initiatives and started to pull them together. And it formed this big efficiency and innovation initiative that ended up being truly transformational for that business. And many other things 1s account for this, but we ended up moving that business from a $500 million loss to a $300 million profit in 18 months. And I think a big piece of it was just that observation, that sort of observation that we're not quite working together strategically. It's just, I think, an example of how this kind of work can be so powerful even when you don't hold 2s the single source of expertise
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26:19
well. It's a nice capstone. You asked a lot of questions from different people. You had that relationship with the finance person so you could say, hey, I saw this. What does this mean to you? And then you actually were able to bring that together and help drive the business in a way that they didn't know. So that wouldn't have happened without your unique expertise, your boldness to go out and ask questions, and your connection with the finance department, which is a great example of sort of what you've been describing. So I want to shift gears now and talk a little bit about, let's say, using that one as an example. You said you found this problem in the organization, and now you need to start to build a business case for it. Right? So what would be the four questions that you actually what I'll do is, what are the four questions that you think are really important for any talent HR leader to be thinking about when they're trying to create alignment between an initiative they think is going to be critical and how it's going to help the business?
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Yeah, I mean, this is definitely a challenge of high quality assessment, really understanding the opportunity or the challenge, and then really brave experimentation. I think about it. You may know, because you know me, that my background is in social work and psychology and that background has me thinking about things in terms of kind of internal, intra and sort of systemic kind of lenses of analyzing a problem. What are the business priorities? What are the personal habits or organization habits and what are the systems? 1s That can be influenced to create the kind of change we're looking for. So if you've got about four questions to answer, I would say starting at the highest level, you want to think about what is the outcome my organization is trying to deliver. And that is about asking questions to understand from the language of the business or from the language of the employee population you're serving, what is the out come they're looking for most concretely? And then you can ask the question, well, if that's the outcome, what do we need to be great at in order to deliver that outcome? What capabilities would need to improve or what sort of special differentiating features would need to be true about us as a business or an employee population in order to make that true? Then you got to think about, okay, well, if we have to be great at that, are we great? What barriers might be in the way of our greatness? What needs to be moved or shifted or amplified? Or what strength do we want to build on in order to be as great as we can be? And then I might ask the next question underneath that, which is, well, are there any behavioral outcomes that could be shifted that would accelerate the removal of that behavior, the acceleration of that strength, in order to be great at what delivers that outcome? So you can see how the questions kind of dive deeper and deeper trying to get through those systems, like, what are the priorities? What are the habits? What are the system supports? What are the shifts that need to be made in order to deliver the outcome we're trying to
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deliver?
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29:30
Great. So I think I just put up can everyone see that those are those four questions that Deb just listed there on the screen. And Joy, I know that you spend a lot of time in the probably the
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29:43
two,
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three, and four less than the one there, but when I think about talent leaders and I think about the group and I feel like we spend a lot of time on that bottom section there, and it's really powerful. Any suggest suggestions that you have about how you want to think about sort of behavioral shifts or barriers or things that we need to be great at? As someone who's designing solutions on a regular basis, I
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always lean on Bloom's Taxonomy or some other type of taxonomy for that. 2s One of my broken records is, what's the learning objective? So for an an instructional designer, that's key don't come to me and say we need a course. Tell me we need an outcome, tell me we need an objective, and then I can train to that. 2s Love that. Yes. So what I'd like to do now is we're going to actually throw in a little bit of a poll here because we want to dig into the areas that you all, as an audience, struggle the most at. So we're going to put a poll up here if you feel that you'd like us to dig a little bit more into how to help communicate what the outcomes our organization is seeking to deliver, we'll dig into that. If you'd like us to talk more about how do we find out the barriers that are in the way, we'll talk more into that. So we're going to choose your own adventure here for the audience, and we'll see how that goes. So poll should be up there right now. Feel free to pick as many as you like, and then we'll dig into a little bit of detail in each of these. 2s And Evan and Shelby, I'll let you all decide. And any questions while we're doing the poll that came up that I might have missed? Joy, did you see any that we wanted to address? Deb, anything? You see,
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31:25
first question is, I think an excellent question, which is, how has our decision making shifted, given the volatility of the current environment? And I think it's such a great question. I think strengthening the habit of thinking from a relevance, effectiveness, and value point of view actually enables us to be much more responsive to the volatile and kind of uncertain conditions that we're occupying today because we're constantly able to find that North Star. If you really understand where we're headed and what the sort of shift is we're trying to make, you can constantly adjust direction, adjust your experiment, adjust your hypothesis testing. You can make the kind of minor adjustments that keep us flowing in the right direction rather than, oh, we're doing a completely different strategy now. Oh, we're going to stop that and start something else. I think it allows for more fluidity and responsiveness and maybe even seeing the rocks that are coming or the waterfall over there. It allows you to kind of I don't know. I'm not a big white water rafter, so I may not be perfectly using this analogy, but I think it allows us to be more responsive to the environment we're in in a more thoughtful way that your organization then can see and follow the logic
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of. 2s Excellent.
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32:49
Thank you. And then, oh, here we got the results. So it's mostly even but interesting. So I actually would have definitely thought that it was me. More answers about what are the outcomes my organization is seeking to deliver, but instead people want to get a little bit more focused on to what behavioral shift might a solution deliver to close the gap, which, hey, we're in the behavior change business at NLI, so I'm not going to complain about that response there. Let me just show you as well too, just some examples. We built out this slide a little bit, so just to get a sense of what this might look like if you were doing this process. So when we talk about outcomes an organization is trying to deliver, we think about things like our business wants to expand to new markets by launching new products and new market segments. We think what we need to be great at. Clearly, if you're trying to launch new products, you need to be better at innovation or you need to be great at innovation. Lots of people want to be good at innovation, but there's all sorts of reasons why an organization might not be good at innovation. They might be unwilling to take risks. They might be in an environment where people aren't listened to. They might be in an environment where people aren't exposed to external stimuli. There can be lots of barriers. And last but not least, we talk about the behavioral shift that solution might deliver to close the gaps. Challenge the status quo would be an example of a behavioral shift that we think you could use to make the case that, hey, if we need to achieve this goal as a business, we need more people challenging the status quo and being listened to in a way that's productive for the organization. So Joy, I'm going to shift over to you since you're our behavior change expert here. When you think about 1s what a good behavioral shift looks like when you're making it part of a business case, what are some of the criteria that you would use? Or how do you think about it? How does the team, when we're developing solutions, think about that?
U3
34:39
So do you mean like the behavioral shift that we're going for in the learning solution or how to convey your
U1
34:47
yeah, let's just take through this example. So if we start at the top and we followed our way down to we've identified that people in our company are unwilling to take risks. There's probably 1000 solutions, behavioral solutions to that problem. They're not willing to take risks. Right. How do you decide what the best ones are? Yeah, I think you might chunk that into threes. We know that the brain likes chunks and three is a good number for that to keep it front of mind. So you might create three different business outcomes and then them under that. So for an example, 2s if you've got reduced liability and organizational risk as one of your business outcomes, that could appeal to every type of industry and every type of business. What we need to do to be great at that is learn from our mistakes. 1s Ah. What are the barriers that get in the way of that? Zero tolerance for mistakes. Everything has to be perfect all the time. We're afraid to admit our mistakes. We fear those repercussions. So the behavioral shift that we're looking for, there would be more mistakes not happening, but being shared. We know those mistakes are going to happen. When we can bring them to light and share them with each other. That's when that shift is going to lead us to develop more mitigation strategies. That's
U3
36:19
the way I would go through that.
U1
36:21
Yeah. It reminds me of the example that I've heard David Rock share sometimes, which is, if your goal was to make everyone in your organization more healthy physically, 1s there's a lot of things that you could be great at. There's a lot of barriers that are in the way, and there's probably a thousand habits. If you Google, how do I be more healthy? And so I would see bring this back to, I think what we were talking about, what you said, and then add in some of the stuff Deb was saying earlier, like what's relevant, what's effective, and what's going to bring the most value. So if I can only change three habits, you're only allowed to change three behaviors. What are the three that are going to have the biggest impact? That are going to be the most likely to be effective and be relevant to our organization. Going back to your kale example. So eating kale might be the best way, but it might not work in my organization, so I need to find the right behavior. So, Deb, I just brought in kind of your model there a little bit as well. What do you think? Does that make sense, how you think about the problem? That's
U4
37:19
exactly how I think about the problem. And sometimes we sell a solution or we internally lean into a solution because it makes sense to us from our chair. But you can do all of the, I don't know, increasing people eating kale you want. If the problem isn't greens in my diet, I'm not healthier, I'm just sadder.
U1
37:43
So
U4
37:44
really understanding the opportunity or the problem to be solved or to be enhanced is the key here. And that's why I think building our assessment skills and being able to look in a multidimensional way at what's driving the outcome I'm getting today and what might be needed to drive the outcome I'm really looking for what strengths can I leverage, and what things can I maybe eliminate from my environment? So I might look at things like, well, what are my engagement analytics telling me about the environment I create when I look at my workflow, what is evidence of the behavior I like, and do I see enough of it? So in this innovation example, you might say, oh, well, innovation, the thing that really predicts innovation is the health of our design win funnel. And we know that for every design win we get, we have an X percent higher chance of getting an actual product in market or actual revenue. So we know our design win hit rate is about 40%. So I need more design wins in order to bump revenue. Okay, well, what produces more design wins? Oh, we can do a correlative analysis and look at things like the skill set and duration or retention of technical talent. The. 1s I don't know the knowledge sharing systems we have and how readily people share knowledge and information about new ideas. We can look at participation in innovation forums or the number of ideas that are generated in meetings. And maybe you look at qualitative data out of our employee engagement survey that suggests, hey, I'm not getting listened to in meetings and that's why I'm leaving. Or you can do your sort of investigation to break it down into I love Joy's idea of chunking. Break it down into smaller and smaller chunks until you get to something that really feels like a root cause behavioral shift that if we were to make it, we would start to see a positive, really positive behavior spiral that produces different outcomes that are actually quantifiable and more closely approximating the kind of innovation culture and innovation outcome we want to create.
U1
39:56
And there are a couple of really neat things that came up in the conversation with both of you here. Number one was that idea of just continuing to ask why and then testing and then not getting caught up in your own initial beliefs. I mean, Joy, we've had lots of conversations with our clients over the last several weeks. I mean, it's been going on for a year now. We need psychological safety. Our organization needs. And I know that one of your first questions when you come in and you're talking about is like, why do you need psychological safety? Right? You
U3
40:28
physically become a toddler. Why? 1s And if that doesn't work, then you shift your what do you think you're going to get out of this? So just keep asking those questions. Why do
U1
40:40
you yourself and your team 1s wonderful. So great coverage on that topic. So what I want to do right now is actually want to go shifting over to Joy and talk a little bit about, like so let's say we've got this terrific business case. We understand our clients trying to grow the business. We understand we need to build this behavior change program around status quo, et cetera. So, Joy, is this how the human brain works? I put this awesome PowerPoint slide deck together, I present it, and then they just write me a check? Is that how the world works? Is that how people's brains work?
U3
41:15
You could get that
U4
41:16
lucky, but there's some things you can do to improve your odds. And the neuroscience of persuasion can help when you understand persuasion and conformity. 1s Those are two different things. Conformity is what you want somebody to do. You want their behavior to change. You want them to make a decision based on what you've presented to them. You can do that with brute force. And the response might be, and I may or may not have experienced this response fine Joy, we'll do what you want. 2s That is probably not going to get the long term in impact that you desire. As a matter of fact, they might come back a week later and go, I've reconsidered. That may not be for us. So you're not really going for conformity, which can happen just with like peer pressure. You really want to use persuasion, which is the process that you follow to get to when somebody really wants to accept what you're telling them. And you really do that with three different methods and if you can combine all three into your approach, even better. So cognitive elaboration, that is the analytical approach. This business case that both of you have been talking about, 2s you're taking logic and reasoning and facts and presenting your case. And for most people that will land well, there are sometimes that a core belief system may prevent your message from getting through and 1s prevent them from really receiving those facts. We wrote an article last year about how just changing the word from privilege to advantage can keep you in the conversation long enough. So just be aware of, again those obstacles that you may need to anticipate.
U3
43:00
And then there's effective appeal if you can make an emotional connection. I'm not trying to convince people to make people cry or get them
U4
43:10
angry, but bring the relevance back to something that's significant for them as a person. Anytime you can be compelling in your story to get them to understand it deeply, that emotional effective appeal will have an impact and then social influence, 2s so long as it's from a credible source. You wouldn't want to go to your CEO and say, you know that person that you hate and you think is really a dope, yeah, they're doing this. That sounds obvious. But you really want to make that social influence a strong case with credibility. And then we've got this model that can help you understand how to best get buy in. Thank you for sharing that. You build the case with the data that supports the business objectives and then you want to tell the story in a compelling way with support from your business leaders. And I think Deb, you've got some have offered some really good examples on that. Any
U3
44:08
additional ones? 1s Yeah, all I would say is I think this is a really important place where data visualization can be powerful. All the data talk I've been sort of introducing here, this is a place where showing potential data and telling the story, showing potential deltas and sharing the story in a compelling way with data is very powerful. And also making sure to the extent we can lean on other parts of the business and support knowledge quotes. So the story comes not as a generic. XYZ is the flavor of the month, and it's good generically, but rather, leaders here find it important and relevant. Telling stories in our own language, in our own words, is very important. And then the last thing I would share here is just a note, like a quick note to ROI, making sure you understand the full cost and share the full cost, and that you can articulate the full benefit in a very simple way. This is a great place to partner with finance and data analytics to tell your story in a simple, data driven, financially clear way. And this
U4
45:20
doesn't have to be. You have to get an MBA to do it.
U1
45:24
Yeah, I think that's a great point, too. We're not expecting everyone to have an MBA, but you have the logic and the thinking to go ahead and say, hey, just like Deb said before, if more people are doing this, what sort of result might we get? What percentage might that be? And that's literally what finance people do all day, is they just do their best guesstimate analysis on what they think the impact of a new technology system would be or more marketing would be, and we can do that same thing. So I really encourage that. And joy, I think. Cognitive elaboration. Was that your term that was coming up in the chat, that people were getting
U3
45:55
cognitive elaboration?
U1
45:57
Wonderful. And also, I'll put a plug for my favorite video that I share everyone with everyone. If you ever want to know about the power of emotion people, remember the show Mad Men. If you watch Don Draper pitch the Kodak carousel, it is the most compelling seven minutes of selling I've ever seen. And it's all about emotion. And I get teary thinking about it right now. It's crazy. But just watch it and you will see what Joy is talking about. And it's literally the Kodak people are there and they say, oh, we want to highlight the new technology and how fancy it is. And he's like, yeah, it's pretty good. But if you tap into their emotion, it's a lot more powerful. And so, yeah, Evans got that in there, so please watch that. And it may make you cry, but it's good to watch. Joy, one last thing on this model, give it time for reflection. So what's that about? Should I wait? What do I need to do here? What's that mean? Well, I think a lot of us may or may not have learned at an early age that if you pressure mom and dad for that bite, you may not get the answer you want. So sometimes, maybe let them marinate on it a little bit. 1s The case that you're presenting is solving a certain need. They may eventually, through the process of something called Aria, which we've written about and actually makes an appearance in our solution team. 1s Oh, thank you. Awareness, reflection, illumination, and action. Sometimes you need to shut it down and let people connect the dots on their own. So when you make them aware of new information, if you're with them at the time, you can recognize this path to insight. They might look off into the distance. If you see that happening, might be a good time to stop talking, let them make those connections. When you see that spark of insight happen in them and they go, oh, you've just made a connection, that's the time to get them to commit to action. That's the time you hand them their checkbook.
U3
47:55
Because there is a motivational driver in that spark of insight. So moving it from 1s the illumination to action, that's a good point there. It's another tool in your toolkit as you go through this process.
U1
48:10
Awesome. Yeah, I think we use insight as a way to create the spark for learning and behavior change. And essentially, it's that same science being applied to whether it's getting an initiative signed off on, getting the budget approval, whatever the case may be, but looking to create those insights for people through the connection of the clear. Business case, the compelling emotional data, other you know, the the testimonials or commitment from other folks that the people apply and then just time for them to process. That's great. And so it's, it's not, you know, it's not the way you see it on TV. Oh, they made the pitch, they won the deal. Go high five and have drinks. That's not the way the real world works and not the way our brains work. And we need to respect people's brains. So thank you for sharing that, Joy. What I want to do now is just give a little bit of like, an example of what these might look like. So we've been working at NLI. I mentioned our new solution team, which is focused on psychological safety. And Joy took the nice time. We've got a great consulting team here together. So on the blue there, you can see the different sorts of those are three examples of business goals or business objectives that a CEO or a division head might be focused on. There's countless other ones. If you need help, by the way, with making a case for anything, our consulting team is here to help you. So we're not going to go ahead and build out every case, but we did just kind of want to walk you through how this process might look for a solution like psychological safety. So, Joy, just to make sure everyone knows about team and psychological safety, why don't you just give us a quick overview of what the solution does or what psychological safety does, and then maybe walk us through these examples of how it would help achieve a specific business objective.
U3
49:53
Sure. So psychological safety is a shared belief that people won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Some of the outcomes include some things that certain types of leaders might be threatened by, like challenging the status quo and debating and critiquing their ideas. So while we've got some language about the results of psychological safety, it may be appropriate to narrow and specify from all of the different outcomes that you can achieve. 1s And this is an example of how you can just kind of select three of them to target the outcomes.
U1
50:31
Got it. For example, if you're an organization who is focused on reducing liability and organizational risk because they're in a very regulated market and they're being called up in front of Congress to talk about, you might want to be better at learning from your miss stakes so that you make fewer and you can get better. And one of the reasons why that might not be happening is because either people have fear of sharing that there were mistakes or there's just no tolerance. And so the goal that you're looking for is more mistakes being shared and mitigation strategies developed. In fact, I think in the chat there was this whole chat going on around an article that was released. I saw it on LinkedIn, and Amy Edmondson jumped in and said, hey, it's not that teams of psychological safety make more mistakes. It's that they're actually willing to report those mistakes and learn from those mistakes. So that's the goal. It's not that there's more mistakes. There's mistakes CEO. You're just not hearing about them, and you're not getting the chance to learn from them. Right. And again, another again, same solution, psychological safety. But it can help you expand your business and grow. Why? Because we need to have people speak up and share new ideas. I mean, our data is what I think 25% of people, when they have ideas, actually share them. If you multiply that by 10,000 employees by 52 weeks, amount of ideas that are lost in organizations is just absurd. It's like brain drain on steroids. And then last but not least, maybe your organizations are going through lots of change and they need to be agile. And you can, again, see what we need to be great at barriers that get in the way. So just some examples of how you might apply this model with a particular solution. I want to also throw in we put in do. I did some nice research here. And remember that story piece? How do you make it relevant? This is the Don Draper part, right? So, hey, we made the case. These are behaviors we need. But let me just make it real for you. So we work in manufacturing. Our work has serious consequences. Do you remember Pan Am, 2s the Pan Am disaster of 583 people were killed. That was because people weren't comfortable speaking up. And do you remember when Sully landed that plane on the Hudson River? Why? Because he was willing to do something that he was not supposed to do, that he actually spoke up and changed his behavior. So finding that emotional connection that's relevant to that person, that business, something they even experienced, is going to make that argument that much more powerful. So just, again, a combination of some of those different pieces, and again, just wrap things up and we can head out. But again, we've had a great conversation today. So thank you, Deb and Joy, on helping us understand kind of the high level practices that HR and talent leaders should be involved in day to day. So you make sure your initiatives are aligned and you understand what's relevant and effective and going to create value for your business giving us. The framework of the four questions you need to answer to build a compelling business case with data and then telling your story in a compelling way that connects with people emotionally and gives them time to actually make a decision and have some insight. So thanks so much. Joy, anything you want to add before I wrap up?
U3
53:45
Sure. To borrow from Team the neuroscience of psychological safety anticipate opt goals. Have your if then plans ready as you're building your business case.
U1
53:56
Thanks and deb to you too. Any final thoughts?
U2
53:59
No, just thanks so much for coming and looking forward to all that we'll achieve together as a discipline and a community in 2023. I think there's a poll up that we need to get folks input on. 2s Your
U4
54:13
brain at work is produced by the NeuroLeadership Institute. You can help us make organizations more human by rating, reviewing and subscribing wherever you listen to your podcast. Our producers are the NLI marketing and brand team. Original music is by Ravel and Logo. Design is by catchware.