Join Dr. David Rock and recently retired Chief Learning Officer at Microsoft, Joe Whittinghill, on our next Your Brain at Work Live as they discuss the decade of work that NLI and Microsoft has done together in redefining the Microsoft culture, still in place today. In this long awaited episode, Joe will walk through the work Microsoft has done to ensure that the right talent is in place to achieve strategic success, the challenges overcome and what success looks like when a people strategy aligns with and contributes to the company’s larger vision and direction.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: I'm your host today, Dr. Emma Saro, and I am the director of Research at Nli
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Dr. Emma Sarro: for our regulars. We're happy to have you back, and for our newcomers, we're excited to have you here with us. For the 1st time
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Dr. Emma Sarro: in this episode we'll explore Microsoft's approach to ensuring the right talent is in place for achieving strategic success, detailing the challenges faced and how the alignment of people strategy with organizational vision has led to long-term impact
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Dr. Emma Sarro: along the way. We'll also hear about the decade of work that Nli and Microsoft have done together.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Now, as I quickly share some housekeeping notes, please start the chat running, and we love to hear where you're coming in from. I'm just outside of New York City, in Rockland County.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: We are recording today's session. So if you're interested in the replay, be on the lookout for an email later today, this email will also include a survey for feedback and a number of resources that we align with today's conversation and look out for them. Also in the chat along the session we suggest that you put your phone on. Do not disturb and quit your email and messaging app. So you can get the most out of today's show.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: And it also helps with the quality of the audio and visual. Now we do love interaction, as I mentioned, so please continue to share your thoughts and comments in the chat along the way.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: so it's time to introduce our speakers, for today I am so thrilled to introduce our 1st guest, the recently retired chief learning officer from Microsoft, who spent his time in this role, activating Microsoft's culture by building an organization of learn. It alls embedded with a growth mindset.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Before that he served as the managing director of Microsoft's mergers and Acquisitions Adventure Integration Group.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: We have so enjoyed our relationship with Microsoft and are honored to have you join us. A warm welcome to Joe Whittinghill.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Hello.
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Joe Whittinghill: Hello, Emma!
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Nice to have you
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Dr. Emma Sarro: our moderator, for today. You all know him very well coined the term neural leadership when he co-founded Nli over 2 decades ago with a professional doctorate, 4 successful books under his name, and I think maybe one more in the works, and a multitude of bylines ranging from Harvard Business Review to the New York Times, and many more. A warm welcome for co-founder and CEO, of Neural Leadership Institute. Dr. David Rock.
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Dr. David Rock: Thank you very much, Emma. Great to be here with you and Joe. What a delight and great opportunity to have a conversation we were. We had lunch a few months ago, we were having such a fascinating conversation. I was like, we have to do this. We have to like record this talk. It's there's so many interesting insights, so thanks so much for agreeing to to come back and continue the lunch, so to speak. It was really great. We've we've worked together a long time before we get into the partnership. I I'd love to hear your thoughts on
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Dr. David Rock: some of these big, you know big big topic question, big big questions that this sort of question of aligning talent, strategy with business strategy. Right? Talk to us. Sort of where's that idea from. Give us the shape of that idea. And and how do you, you know, align talent, strategy with business strategy, talk to us for a while.
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Joe Whittinghill: You bet, and thanks for having me, David, it's good to see you. We were actually in New York when we had our lunch. I was out there. But now I'm sitting in Seattle, Washington, for those of you, wondering. I see where everyone's saying where they're from. It's great to see the international folks as well.
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Joe Whittinghill: So is David knows I was doing M. And a for about a decade, and really enjoying that work which we probably won't get into today. But
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Joe Whittinghill: It was really a a great experience for me, and it really homed my business acumen, you know, as being an Od professional. But really I spent 10 years doing that.
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Joe Whittinghill: and it allowed me to really come up with this concept that we then used when I was asked to come over and do the job I was in for the last 10 years I was at Microsoft.
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Joe Whittinghill: Which is this idea of being the chief talent and learning officer, and in that role, when we were looking to pivot the company. So Satya Nadella will go down if he isn't already as one of the greatest Ceos in business, I mean globally, and he had a lot of challenges, though, to overcome when he 1st became CEO, and so
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Joe Whittinghill: meaning it wasn't just most Ceos have to change either the business strategy
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Joe Whittinghill: or their technology work strategy, or or what I like to call is the people strategy. But rarely do you have to change all 3 at the same time, and that's very difficult to do. And so.
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Joe Whittinghill: and talking with him. You know, with the other members of the leadership team. It became really clear to me that it's the union and the cohesion between a business strategy, a technology strategy and a people strategy. That is the winning combination. And and I think that people said, Well, what's the difference between, say, a talent strategy, or an Hr strategy and a people strategy.
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Joe Whittinghill: And and what I think is a people, strategy is the super ordinate strategy over the top of an Hr strategy as a functional strategy. So if you know academically, there, there are like 5 types of strategies, and one is called functional
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Joe Whittinghill: and then that's where I would put Hr. And then talent, quite frankly, is even a subset of that. But the people strategy is not just the dominion
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Joe Whittinghill: of Hr. Professionals and leaders. It is really thinking about the totality of things that affect the experience of workers, whether it's at a for-profit company, governmental Ngo. It is what is their lived experience doing the work that they're doing. And even if you're volunteering, there can be a people strategy. So outside of work living your life.
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Joe Whittinghill: the idea of
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Joe Whittinghill: real estate and facilities. You know the places you go to do, work, the places you go to volunteer. You know the artifacts in the company. What is important are there awards? Are there? You know, the importance of a badge of all things really is. These artifacts are as big of an important part of a people strategy as is compensation, benefits, attracting development, etc.
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Joe Whittinghill: and so is over the years. And this is what David and I were talking about when we had lunch is, I've just become more convinced that this
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Joe Whittinghill: amount of work that needs to be done on the people. Strategy should almost equal the amount of work being done on the business strategy and the business strategy. I mean the top level competitive strategy. Again, academically, we would call that the competitive strategy because it goes beyond. Just how do you run the business? But your relationships with
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Joe Whittinghill: your vendors, relationships with suppliers, relationships most importantly with your customers. But this idea of what is the business we're in, and how do we compete to win or to do good, or to deliver what we want, coupled with? Then, who are the humans, and what are the capabilities of the humans.
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Joe Whittinghill: and what are both their extrinsic and intrinsic needs and wants are all part of that people strategy. And I think we'll get into this probably a little bit later.
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Joe Whittinghill: The workforce has changed globally, so dramatically in the last 10 years, and we are. Gonna see that much change again in a more rapid period of time, that the the advice I've been giving a lot. And we're David and I are talking through. Some of this is really getting clear on your people. Strategy, I think, is going to be as big of an unlock, and maybe even more than just focusing on your competitive or business strategy.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, interesting. So you'd say, companies should spend just as much time thinking about their people strategy as their business strategy. It's it's so, not the case, though, is it companies
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Dr. David Rock: so much more? And I think one of the reasons for that is just the way the brain functions, which is that we think about concrete things much more fluently, easily right than abstract things.
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Dr. David Rock: And essentially, it's, you know, things we can activate in our visual working memory and sort of hold in mind, like buildings and and customers. And you know, processes like all that stuff we can activate. But how people feel and how they're connected, and all that stuff is a much sort of softer space. So we just don't give as much attention to those things that are harder to give attention to
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Dr. David Rock: and that ends up happening. But really we should be giving equal attention. I remember a big law firm. I went and met with the CEO of a huge international law firm, and he gave me his like business strategy book. And it was like this thick. It was like beautifully, you know visual, really, really deep thinking on their business strategy. And their business strategy was amazing. And I was like, Oh, what's your people strategy? And he's like.
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Dr. David Rock: I don't know. That'll follow right? I'm like, well.
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Dr. David Rock: you've got all this thinking here. Maybe you should. You know, that was, I remember. So I think I had a similar thought some years ago. Tell me, what what do you think is the most important thing to solve? For in in, you know, in people's strategy. And we're talking sort of people strategy at a very high level.
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Dr. David Rock: Obviously, with many components. What do you think is the most important thing to solve, for outside of aligning it with the business strategy, make sure it really supports it. Or maybe you want to talk about that.
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Joe Whittinghill: Yeah, I you know, there's many measures. But one of the ones I like to talk about is discretionary free time.
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Joe Whittinghill: So a worker is going to get their job done, so they continue to be employed right.
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Joe Whittinghill: But it's on the margin where you start to see things like quality. Go up volume, go up.
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Joe Whittinghill: costs go down
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Joe Whittinghill: where the the worker, the you know, the person who is wanting to deliver, you know a what they're expected, and more for the organization, that discretionary free time which can be both physical and mental.
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Joe Whittinghill: in thinking through how to do things quicker, faster, better
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Joe Whittinghill: thinking how to be more empathetic with a customer and really helping the customer feel that they were heard. And you solve their problem. But all of that means that the organization has to engage the worker in a way where they're turned on.
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Joe Whittinghill: And you know, there's a lot of the old Taylorism
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Joe Whittinghill: type type comments where you walk down the hall and every other office, you're probably only getting 50% of that person's real time, you know whether that's true or not. You can look at organizations even like Gallup has done some great studies in the big firms like Pwc. Of. Are we really getting that marginal effort out of our workers, because it's it's at those edges where you really start to see the biggest gains.
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Joe Whittinghill: But the the measure really is, does the person want to come to work every day and give you their best. It really isn't any more complicated than that. And so I think that
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Joe Whittinghill: and and we know pay is absolutely important and benefits, except we also know those are hygiene factors, because, even though people may say, Well, if you pay me more, I'll work harder. That isn't always necessarily the case. It's usually the relationship, as we know, with the manager, the immediate manager. It's the belief in the mission of the organization.
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Joe Whittinghill: It is the ability to see the results of their work being something that they are proud of, and they can go home and talk about, you know. And that's where you can measure advocacy versus just adoption. It's this idea of turned on engaged workers. When I think you will know that your people strategy is really working.
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Dr. David Rock: Interesting. Interesting. This is sounding a lot like some research we did recently partnering with Akamai the technology firm. And Akamai be long term partners as well, and use our work deeply there. And we they were thinking about sort of this question of of how how connected people feel to the company because there's this big move to like, you know, you gotta all come back to the office so that you feel more connected right. And they were like questioning that saying.
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Dr. David Rock: Does moving people back to the office increase their sense of of connection? And we did some research. And we found this really 4 quite different types of connection. There's a connection to the company's vision, right? You can have someone super passionate about the company and the work they're doing feel really connected emotionally, but actually really disconnected to their own job and their own deliverables. Right and just, not at all like connected to their role. Those can be different things.
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Dr. David Rock: and separately, they could feel, you know, a real sense of disconnection to their boss, for example, but a sense of connection to the team and other people.
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Dr. David Rock: right? And so these were 4 like quite different things that you know, connection to the vision connection, to a boss connection to a role
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Dr. David Rock: or connection to other people. And and really, you want to understand where the gaps are before you start just piling everyone back into the office because it could have, you know, negative consequences that way. So that that was the research we're doing. I think you know what I'm hearing you saying is people, you know, feeling very, very connected ideally to all of these things which requires a very thoughtful strategic, you know. Approach, not just we're gonna tweak some things here. But really, really caring about people's experience, I guess, is the is. The is is the cliff note.
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Joe Whittinghill: Exactly. Yep.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, interesting. So let's You know as as you've like, you know, reflected on on 10 years. And and you've kind of, you know, been working on this.
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Dr. David Rock: I guess. Let's let's go back to the start. You know. I know we met a little bit over 10 years ago. We've done a little bit of work with Microsoft. I know we'd helped you with transforming performance management. Couple of the kind of small projects. But you know, take take us back 10 years. So kind of how the partnership started. And how did you end up finding us, and and kind of what was the journey there?
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Joe Whittinghill: Yeah, you bet. And it's it's it's a story I love to tell, because it worked so well. And and people have asked me, you know. For years they're like, how did Microsoft accomplish what it accomplished so quickly? And I'd say, Look it again. It was all 3 strategies had to change. And so credit goes to so many people trying to do so many things at the same time. And
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Joe Whittinghill: and strategy work is a team effort. There is no singular, you know, expert on any one thing, but again getting people aligned on a super ordinate goal or a vision is what Satya said, he says, I want to give you all a vision of what is possible and what's possible for our customers and us serving our customers. And so, as we looked at that, and it was very daunting. Remember, people forget our stock was between 28 and $42 a share for a decade.
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Joe Whittinghill: And that's why I always when I was working there they'd always say the Pr. Folks like don't talk so much about the stock I'm like. Well, the stock is a great measure for companies that have it, because it or you can use an Mps score of a measure. Are other people believing what you are selling, or what you are saying is, is really driven then, by these external measures like a stock price. And so
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Joe Whittinghill: we didn't do what we did to make the stock go up. We did what we did because we wanted to be better servants and better partners with our customers and our and our partners that work with us.
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Joe Whittinghill: But the task I was given along with my boss, and and obviously all of my colleagues, was to say, how can we really rethink our people? Strategy to accelerate, you know, and when we talk about empowering people and organizations on the planet to do more at the company.
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Joe Whittinghill: and the our function was to say, How do we empower those people who are empowering people?
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Joe Whittinghill: And the, as David knows, I'm kind of an eager amateur neuroscientist. And so, and I learned about David's work when I was in graduate school a long time ago, and then subsequently, through the years. And
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Joe Whittinghill: one of the things that I have said repeatedly. You know, there's not much new in leadership development. Quite frankly. There's lots of books. People will continue to write books on leadership development, you know, for all of history. But
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Joe Whittinghill: the the big breakthrough, I firmly believe. Still was this idea of the neuroscience understanding how it affects leadership.
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Joe Whittinghill: and the military has studied this for eons and and other high performance organizations that have to have people in dangerous jobs look at the neuroscience of How do we do this or surgeons? And when I stepped back I just said, Look.
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Joe Whittinghill: if we're really gonna move the dial here rather than having Hr. Talking to leaders about leadership
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Joe Whittinghill: and appealing to them on. We want you to be a better leader. The the thought was, No, let's talk about. Why do you think and feel the way you do?
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Joe Whittinghill: What happens when you get triggered?
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Joe Whittinghill: What does success feel like? Not necessarily. Let's define it.
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Joe Whittinghill: And so much of that because of what neuroscience has been able to do with Fmris, we can now measure that in the brain plus other factors. And so we stepped back and said, Look, let's take more of a neuroscience approach to doing our people strategy and understand how the neuroscience can really make everything we're going to do. The performance management system was being remodeled when I showed up.
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Joe Whittinghill: and there was great work already started on some of the culture work already underway, and we just stepped back and said, Now, let's make leadership real. But we're going to take a scientific approach to doing it. And frankly, when you work at a company that is predominantly engineers and technical people, it is much easier to
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Joe Whittinghill: appeal to them on an intellectual basis first, st and so we would go in and say, Let's talk about the neuroscience of the brain and the biology of the brain, and why you think and feel the way you do versus saying, let me explain to you how to be a better leader, and quite frankly, it worked very, very well.
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Joe Whittinghill: You know, partnering with with Nli.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, I guess it's speaking in. In speaking to them in a language they they are comfortable with. Maybe it's not. Their 1st language, like English, is their 1st language. But you know science is a close second, and speaking in a hard science is is really helpful, and it's probably a.
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Joe Whittinghill: And on that point, David, like, because we're a global company. And so many other companies are, math and science are really the most universal language.
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Joe Whittinghill: Because, regardless of your spoken language, the ability to then discuss science and math is is really a great equalizer, globally.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, it's interesting. I've often talked about this issue because companies will say, Well, what about you know, how does this work across different cultures. And there are certain things that are actually really, really similar across cultures like, you know, what happens when we start to exercise pretty consistent what happens during the process of giving birth pretty consistent. What happens when you're suddenly put in charge of people
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Dr. David Rock: pretty consistent? It turns out there are certain things that are quite biological. Now you'll use different swear words in these different circumstances, depending on the country you're in, right. But the actual physical process and the biological steps, and all that pretty consistent. And so what we've always found is being out of anchor on the brain
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Dr. David Rock: gives a common language to people from, you know many different countries and provides kind of the sense of in group. I guess we're, you know, we're all learning the same things. And I think that's been that's been helpful.
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Dr. David Rock: Tell me from from your experience, like, what are some of the things you know off the top of your head? What are some of the things that you found kind of really stuck with people that you heard people like reusing and reusing. And and what were some of the ideas from neuroscience, particularly from the brain that you just found just kept coming back and resonating, you know, from the field.
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Joe Whittinghill: So the you know, and what what happened was just so, folks understand? And we'll talk about the leadership principles here in a minute. But through the process we were doing briefings really to bring the organization along. And that's where I I say to everyone, everyone's like.
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Joe Whittinghill: yeah. But these companies are so big, and we don't have the resources to do this. And I I really want to disabuse everybody of that and say it's quite the opposite. So much of what we did had very little to do with having resources to get it done.
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Joe Whittinghill: It had to do with conviction that we were on the right path, and then making sure that we enrolled our leaders in the change, and our leaders believed as strongly as we did, that this was the right way to go about it.
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Joe Whittinghill: And one of the ways we kind of won those conversations, or those at our place, do we call it debate and decide. Some of the Katzen Bach work
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Joe Whittinghill: was was showing some of the studies that like, you know, for example, one that people speak about to this day is uncertainty registers more negatively in the brain than bad news. And so then we would say, You've heard we would open by saying, you've heard the statement forever, like, Get bad news out fast, and people knew that was true. Now we can show you using brain, Mris. Why, that is true.
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Joe Whittinghill: because bad news provides more certainty than uncertainty, and uncertainty causes higher anxiety. So to the extent
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Joe Whittinghill: we explained to leaders. If there is bad news to be delivered. Get it out there because you will reduce the overall anxiety in the organizational system.
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Joe Whittinghill: Yeah, that's an interesting, very simple, very.
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Dr. David Rock: Example, you can show it in slides. You can show it in studies, you can, and sort of people sort of get it. But when they really see the science and then understand.
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Dr. David Rock: You know the fact that it occurs, but also understand how it occurs in the brain and see something, and then go to their own experience and sense it. Now you get this broad insight in the brain that really anchors in, and now, when they have this choice. Next time they'll do something differently, they'll communicate. And we saw that when the pandemic happened we developed some work on kind of 3 ways to create clarity.
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Dr. David Rock: When you can't create certainty, how can you create at least a sense of clarity and the incredible benefits of that? So I think this is. This is one of those things that's sort of a counterintuitive
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Dr. David Rock: thing for leaders who want to protect their people from bad news, and they end up, you know, hoarding information instead of instead of what the brain really needs. I think that's a really great example. But let's yeah. Let's go back to the start. I know when you guys 1st called us and said, You know, we want to rethink leadership. I still remember that meeting. I remember looking at kind of the status quo. I think it was 7 categories with about
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Dr. David Rock: 5 to 8 things in each category. I remember it was like 60 or 70 different elements. And the 1st question was, Can you help us simplify these things? And I think the answer was, No, I can't help you simplify this. What we. What we can do is start from scratch and use a different process. And I remember there was some pausing
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Dr. David Rock: when when I, when I said that like. I don't know if such is going to like that. He loves this. He loves this framework, I was like, okay, let's let's see. Talk about some of that journey of sort of convincing him, and then convincing the Board of, you know, of doing something different.
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Joe Whittinghill: Yeah. So you know, for the practitioners listening the when I came over we knew we had to make some changes, and one of the things I started with, because I had talent, management and learning and culture, and Od,
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Joe Whittinghill: We took a windowless conference room
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Joe Whittinghill: and I said, Print out every single model we're using, whether it's performance management, whether it's management, leadership, recruiting questions, all of that. And we literally put it up on the 4 walls in this conference room.
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Joe Whittinghill: and we would have meetings called model muddle meetings, model muddle. And so we would look at all of these different models we were using. And and we said, who can even keep track of these things? And a lot of them were in conflict with each other. And you know the one of the simple statements you would, you know, try to go, do talent management, and you would sit down with one of these
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Joe Whittinghill: models where there would be 16 categories and 32 bullets underneath each. And you would say to leaders, This is what you need to do to be an effective leader. And it just was immediately, you know, would depress them, because they're like, I'm never going to be good at all of those things on that sheet of paper. And so that's where our idea of we have to come up with something simpler. And so David came in and said, Well, rather than take what you have and remodel it. Why don't we try a different approach? And
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Joe Whittinghill: he said, Trust me, we're gonna end up with about 3, and I was like, there is no way we're gonna end up with 3
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Joe Whittinghill: and well, I was wrong. David was right. I'll admit it publicly. But it took us a while to get there. And so and I think what what the other breakthrough idea was. One.
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Joe Whittinghill: probably 2. There were 2 things we said, one
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Joe Whittinghill: our leadership principles that are still used today are not everything leaders need to do. It's the most important things that leaders need to do to drive success for themselves, for their teams and for our customers.
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Joe Whittinghill: But the second change we made this was something I had said to my boss when I was even interviewing. I just said, look, one of the things that's always griped me is that we we view leadership as something that people, managers and executives do.
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Joe Whittinghill: and I've never personally believed that. I believe everyone can be a leader.
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Joe Whittinghill: You know. You can have somebody fresh out of university who's having to pull together a virtual team to go, make a sale or go solve a customer technical problem. They have no management authority, but they have position, authority by being the person responsible for organizing that that's leadership.
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Joe Whittinghill: And so, I said, we have to change the understanding that leadership is reserved for people, managers and execs, and everyone is a leader. And so our then new leadership principles were designed for everyone, not just a select group of people that's different than our manager. Expectations which followed the leadership principle work which is really for people managers.
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Joe Whittinghill: But this concept of everyone's a leader, and what we did is we enrolled, then, the entire company into the chains of wanting to be great leaders themselves.
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Joe Whittinghill: The second part of that, then, technically is, we went out and interviewed a lot of people, and not only, and it was very similar to what the team had done really good work on the culture work, which was
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Joe Whittinghill: not only ask your employees and your managers and your board. Go ask your customers like, ask your customers what are their hopes and dreams for you. And so we said in terms of leadership. What do you would you like to see of leaders inside of the company?
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Joe Whittinghill: And through that process we then, using some techniques that David had, he and I were about thrown out of the room by our chief operating officer, who accused us of manipulating him. It was really a funny moment, because then his Hr. Leader, his Hrvp. Who is really very quiet but funny. She looked at him and said.
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Joe Whittinghill: well, you are being manipulated, and it's what you do to people every day, so why don't we get on with this? So everybody burst out laughing, and he went through the exercise, but through and look. It took us a while to get to where we were. It is not this
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Joe Whittinghill: serial process you go through, and it has a perfect timeline. There's a lot of trial and error, but in the end, if you put the work in, it'll last, and and for me personally, anything that is durable is something I want to create, so that it isn't a flash in the pan like, Hr thing, it's actually something that is a model that survives. And that's where we ended up with our leadership principles.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, it's been 10 years. And it's still really central and active and a big big focus there. Yeah, I remember that meeting with the coo. It was one of the most terrifying meetings of my life. I think it was hilarious. He really pushed back hard, but I held my ground, and we butted heads and ended up aligning. He was a character. There was a lot of things to say, but I think that I wanted to sort of. Put a point to something you said that
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Dr. David Rock: it's not trying to cover everything leaders do. But the things that you have to do like the most like these things that matter most right. And it starts with this, this idea that people can't really remember much. So tell them just a few things that they need to remember the most. So they actually do something differently. And it's a really different idea to create a complete model and have competencies and levels. And all this stuff. So you're more like nudging
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Dr. David Rock: people like priming a whole organization in a certain way versus trying to kind of assess your way to Paradise. It's a developmental versus sort of assessment
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Dr. David Rock: focused framework, which is, which is interesting. No, remember, I remember it took some time. You guys were like the second or 3rd framework. We've done so. We were sort of still working this out. We've now done over 40 of these frameworks. We've done done them all around the world. And it's it's working well, we we still find it takes 3 months, maybe up to 6 months to really crack this. It's still an iterative process, and there's science. But you know now we have databases and and lots and lots of insights, but we were kind of finding our way at the time. But we're thrilled with.
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Dr. David Rock: you know, the the fact that it's still, you know, really, really central and really helpful. One of my favorite moments with you guys is actually the
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Dr. David Rock: the the launch that we built together, if you remember that? We had some some some wonderful team members Cordelia paylets at the time, and Christine Chesper and a bunch of others who who worked with us for years after that. And I remember, the brief was, we've got 600 people. And
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Dr. David Rock: you, you, your team showed us the program. We basically was moving them around a lot. All these amazing speakers. And you know the Smorgasbord of incredible content. And we looked at it and said, That's a terrible idea.
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Dr. David Rock: We want to keep everyone together in the same room. And, in fact, we're going to put a hundred 50 tables of 4 in to the room, and your people just started sweating and panicking. And it, just yeah, it was. It was a wonderful experience. What was, you know? Tell us your memory of that. What was some of the the lessons learned in that in that event.
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Joe Whittinghill: Yeah, cause. So you know, and what we're talking about now is once the model was locked and and we had test driven it somewhat
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Joe Whittinghill: we wanted to. Then we first, st and quite frankly, one of the other things David and I talked about when we met was, I'm I'm a big believer in being really clear on your implementation strategy. Because I think
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Joe Whittinghill: a lot of times people skip over that and and aren't super clear. Are you doing top down? Are you doing island to nation? Are you doing everywhere all at once, and being very thoughtful? So when we rolled out the leadership principles. It was a top down strategy, and I had many of our senior leadership team. The direct reports of the CEO say.
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Joe Whittinghill: thank you for doing it this way, because what we did is we didn't want leaders being surprised by something coming up to them and starting to use the language. You should probably just state them because they're very simple.
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Joe Whittinghill: you know, at Microsoft what leaders do is they create clarity.
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Joe Whittinghill: they generate energy and they deliver success.
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Joe Whittinghill: Satya had a a bunch of that in his mind already, and he and he was leading us a bit on
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Joe Whittinghill: the the way to think through that.
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Joe Whittinghill: And as we did the work. There was a lot of iteration to get down to those exact words that David could describe the control of all that and the neuroscience of all that. But when we then went to implementation after we did these executive briefings, which was the top 200 people in the company who all complained bitterly. They had to go to these because they were
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Joe Whittinghill: Hi! We never require anything. It's always highly encouraged. And when the CEO highly encourages something, people tend to respond favorably. But even the senior leadership team came and did the sessions as participants, not as a as a group.
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Joe Whittinghill: After that, what David's talking about. We said. We now want to take the next 600 people globally
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Joe Whittinghill: and and and bring them into this. And
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Joe Whittinghill: but we were signaling change at that point as part of the culture work.
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Joe Whittinghill: So we were renaming things across the company, you know, symbolic things changing. We changed our logo as part of this process, our mission statement how we were interacting with our partners. We had a new 10 new principles for interacting with our partners. When I say partners, it's people outside of the company that sell our products or help us deliver them. And for this event we had probably planned just a very traditional rollout, you know. 2 day event, and David's group came in and blew it up.
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Joe Whittinghill: and so we would normally start an event as a representative example, with high energy, music and lots of thumping noises, and and people cheering people walked into a very dimly lit room
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Joe Whittinghill: with these cabaret tables of 4,
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Joe Whittinghill: and there was no music. It was silent.
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Joe Whittinghill: and all of that, though, was signaling. Something was up and something was going to change. And so, as you're thinking about implementation. Be very thoughtful
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Joe Whittinghill: again of the strategy you're using, but also of the symbolism you're using to communicate important concepts. And at this point we were. Leadership isn't necessarily about the charismatic leader or the you know, the very vigorous leaders leadership is an important skill and capability you need to have. And sometimes, you know, it goes after some of David's work on quiet leadership. It's this idea of
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Joe Whittinghill: making sure they understood. We want to bring you into an environment that is very different than you've seen before. We're going to explain something very new to you. And if your reaction is like our Hr colleagues and a lot of our leaders was, it's like this model is never gonna work because it's not complete.
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Joe Whittinghill: And and that would. That is one of the biggest resistance we had, I said, look, this isn't the talent, management leadership, assessment model. You need your executive success. Profiles. I get it. Those are. They have a time and a place. This is about day to day leadership. And in the moment can somebody recall what does the leader do and what I need to do right now is an example, say, create clarity.
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Joe Whittinghill: Or if you're in a really tough spot, stepping back and saying, If we're gonna deliver success, what is that going to take? And sometimes that means a leader has to make a call that is in the best interest of the customer and not necessarily us and we take the hit. But it's this idea of having these global principles that everybody can use. And at that event we took them through one by one, each one of the principles
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Joe Whittinghill: and the practices to get there, and then did these things that David is now inculcated into the company where people stand up and talk to each other.
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Joe Whittinghill: and they were like, what are you talking about? Because we'd only speak for about 12 min, and then we'd have them stand up and talk in pairs, or talk as a quad at their at their table, and and really changed up how we were doing leadership development, because that people who had been through all of our bench programs afterwards said that was completely different than we've ever done before here, and maybe ever I've seen, and they said it was super effective, because I'm now remembering what was talked about over the last 2 days.
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Dr. David Rock: A crazy idea. We just follow brain research in designing large events. There's actually a magic to the number 4, you know, you hear about the magic number 7, which is actually incorrect research from working memory. But it's really a magic number 4 when it comes to designing leadership programs or really any learning experience, because with a 4 you can pair up and then swap pairs
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Dr. David Rock: and then get a get a 4 person exercise going, and by the time you've done all that it's time to swap the tables, and you can mix the tables. So you do sort of 3 different exercises. But the magic of it is that in a group of 4 no one can check out. No one can be like on their phone or something else.
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Dr. David Rock: And but it's enough people that it's actually really interesting, especially if you're swapping tables every break. So over a day you're going to have at least like you know you're going to have at least like going on the math like 10 something new people that you really go deep with versus put people on a table of 8. They literally meet 2 people. So you're really deepening. And it prevents yeah, to Kath's point, social loafing. It really keeps people focused. Go back to a couple of things you said, you know, for from our perspective.
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Dr. David Rock: a leadership model that that is trying to drive culture and get people to do things differently has to be
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Dr. David Rock: has to be something that's really easy to remember. And we, or said differently, the likelihood of this model being useful correlates to how easy it is to recall under pressure. And, in fact, that phrase is something we've really built on over time. Easy recall under pressure is a marker of how you of sort of good learning programs. If something doesn't have easy recall under pressure, it's probably never used.
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Dr. David Rock: If you get easy recall under pressure, it's used all the time. And that's really the goal. And what we found with clarity, energy, success which simplifies a ces as well. Right, ces clarity, energy success, create clarity, generate energy like that sticks. Now you want sticky and valid. That's the hard thing.
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Dr. David Rock: But because you've got that easy recall, you just find people using it all the time, and that's
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Dr. David Rock: now it's nudging the culture because people are saying, Hey, let's bring some clarity to this meeting, hey? I need to generate some energy with this person. So it's nudging, you know, 100,000 plus brains to do things differently. And we also started to see, just around the time we worked started working with you, we started to see this thing that everyone's a leader because everyone has a team they're leading or a customer project leading, or if not, they're going to soon. So this this concept, we did it with you. We did it with you at Packard. We did it with a few people of
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Dr. David Rock: everyone actually should have leadership skills and is is really really important. And the thing that we've studied since is that when it comes to the human skills, we've seen actually that the same human skills from frontline manager all the way up.
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Dr. David Rock: they just get harder.
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Dr. David Rock: So so you should have one framework for leadership. Creating clarity is really important. For a 1st time, manager. Even more important for a CEO turns out to be harder, and you should practice early and get better and better and better at it rather than multiple different models. So that's another insight insight that we had there. Interesting. So there was one other thing I wanted to mention. I think
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Dr. David Rock: just digging back into into into the framework. What was, you know? What was some of the the pushback? Some of the pushback you got sort of introducing this as you know, as we got to launch and kind of got this going? What was, you know, any lessons learned on some of those? Some of the early kind of the early work that was done there.
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Joe Whittinghill: So the the way we describe it is we use analyze methodology. And but we used our content right? So we didn't ask David to come up with the content. What we said is.
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Joe Whittinghill: what do we believe we are going to have to have for our leaders to be successful, and then using the process and including if you're working in, you know, multi country, or even just multi language environments.
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Joe Whittinghill: the words I'll have to translate. We had many people from many countries on my immediate team, and they would translate it themselves, like into Chinese, because we have a very large Chinese. You know we have operations everywhere. But if you look at Japan and China, so you have to also have words that are simple.
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Joe Whittinghill: And so people would fight us a little bit on. They wanted to go, do a synonym war and come up with fancy adjectives or synonyms or verbs, and we're like that's not the point of this thing. We're actually trying to use very bland words so that they translate globally and localize even more importantly versus just translate
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Dr. David Rock: Hmm.
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Joe Whittinghill: There was that we we had I I grew up in Montana, and so I I refer to goat rodeos, which is, there's no real such thing as a goat rodeo, because goats are not very good to do rodeo work with.
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Joe Whittinghill: But we spent a lot of time arguing over servant leadership
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Joe Whittinghill: versus you know, principle based leadership. And frankly, in our leadership development programs. We teach all of the models. And because we ask everyone to say, incorporate your own leadership, stance, create that stance or your own leadership platform from all of these different models to see what will work for you. But here
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Joe Whittinghill: understand what we can tell you to be true. And now we can, looking out over the success over the last 10 years. If you do these 3 things, and underneath. Just so, you know, we pejoratively refer to it, or maybe adoringly refer to the model as the 7 layer dip, because there is the actual principle on top. And then underneath there are 3 practices so sticking with the rule of 3,
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Joe Whittinghill: because kind of being a 1 trick pony on that, because then you can have recall there are only 3 practices per leadership principle, and then underneath that there are really only 3 capabilities that we say, tie up to that, and it goes on and on down to a very deep level.
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Joe Whittinghill: partially because we also have legally validated all of these models, which is a lot of work, and that allows you to then use them for selection, promotion, pay, etc.
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Joe Whittinghill: And the
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Joe Whittinghill: the 1st debate, you know, David to your question was really about, are we doing survey? And I said, We're not picking a model, or I'm a cotter person in particular, because I think the difference between leadership and management is very discreet, and that's the route we took.
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Joe Whittinghill: But and then the other one was. It's not complete, and that was mainly from professional psychologists and from Hr. Professionals saying, we need a complete, exhaustive model. I said, we don't for this purpose. For other purposes. I I'll buy in
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Joe Whittinghill: and then, lastly, it, what happened is, and and I've been quoted on this, and and Jean Philippe Courtois, who is the longest serving executive.
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Joe Whittinghill: an employee at Microsoft from France.
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Joe Whittinghill: He, he and Satcha one day said to me, they said you had no idea these things were going to be this big of a deal, this quickly.
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Joe Whittinghill: because, he goes. By Jpc, Jpc. Went to our annual sales meeting and his backdrop on his stage with the 3 leadership principles. That was about 3 weeks after we released them, and I had no idea he was going to do it, but it it just resonated so well. So back to this point of
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Joe Whittinghill: you know, you have a winner when without intervention, it starts to get used. And when I started getting M. And M's, and playing cards and T-shirts with the leadership principles printed on them back. It's a it's a bad tech habit. I knew we were on to something.
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Dr. David Rock: I never got a leadership principles T-shirt. I'm fairly left out. I want a leadership principles T-shirt. That's hilarious. I wanted to address an interesting question that came up in the chat about types of models, because this is a particular type of model for leadership. And as we've sort of been alluding to. It's not trying to do everything. It's trying to nudge everyone and give everyone a common language.
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Dr. David Rock: And it's designed to be used all the time, and when we did some interviews with with Microsoft folks a year or 2 afterwards it, you know, people were using the language most or every day.
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Dr. David Rock: most days or every day. It was like it, woven into the fabric of how they were seeing the world. And I think that was the beauty of this. So it's not trying to be a, you know, assessment model of every possible competency. It's trying to nudge the culture in a really interesting way. And that's an important distinction. But we actually along the way we studied types of leadership models. And we found that there are 4 categories
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Dr. David Rock: of leadership model. And there's some that are fit for purpose for other purposes. This is this
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Dr. David Rock: We would we would call this a how model it tells you how to lead right? So
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Dr. David Rock: you know, the way we want you to lead at Microsoft is, create clarity, generate energy, and deliver success. That's how to lead right? There's a there's a 1 of the common models is essentially a an acronym model, right? So the star model of leadership or the the focus model leadership. The problem with those is they don't get used in a sentence except as the acronym. Right? We all have to star more. We have to be more stars here, but it doesn't actually nudge people to do something like
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Dr. David Rock: create more clarity, right? It it gets used. And it sort of gets weaponized. And
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Dr. David Rock: it's a chunk. But that Chunk doesn't get unpacked and activate people's actual brains. But that's a very, very common approach to leadership development is essentially the acronym model. Another really common one is we call the Who model.
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Dr. David Rock: and that's 1 that someone put in the chat before, and maybe those are helpful for a company that has no structure at all. And you're trying to get people to sort of think more systemically. But that's like, lead yourself, lead your team, lead the function, lead the organization right? And it's sort of who to lead. But it doesn't tell you how to lead right? How do you lead yourself? How do you lead your team, etc. So the who model we actually see really common in consulting firms. Professional services overall
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Dr. David Rock: often have this this model, maybe because they're so focused on just doing the work. They forget to lead the team, and, you know, lead the customer. So see a lot of that in professional services, the who model the what model is interesting, the what model is a bit of a trap. It tells you like what you should look like. Like, be inclusive, be collaborative, be creative.
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Dr. David Rock: But the problem with that is, you sort of want to look a certain way, and you can accidentally end up in a bit of a fixed mindset, especially as you start to write them, and they
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Dr. David Rock: they also start to sound a bit more like values, which is sort of universal and hard to action. Whereas the how model is like, how we want you to lead here. We want you to go into a meeting and create clarity. Right? We want you to meet a customer and generate energy. We want you to, you know, onboard a new employee and deliver success together. So it literally tells you how to actually lead, which from our perspective, you know, we haven't built any of the other kinds of models every time we've explained it to someone. They've been like, oh, okay, this is the right
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Dr. David Rock: kind of model. Any any comments on that or reflections. There.
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Joe Whittinghill: I think it. It's that type of clarity. When, if you are the person tasked with doing this type of work, making sure you're clear, what are you doing and and having clarity? It's even back to my original starting point. Of
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Joe Whittinghill: what type of strategy are you writing? Because people conflate the various types of strategies, and even in doing like leadership, model development work being crystal clear. What is the model we are building? There are other places where some of those models are very useful.
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Joe Whittinghill: but it may not be necessarily for doing leadership work, because I think the how is exactly what we were going after, and it's intended to be instructive, not directive. I always, I like to say about you have to be careful, you know. Are you teaching a lesson? Or are you teaching them a lesson?
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Joe Whittinghill: And you really want the 1st one which is, encourage them to adopt what you're offering versus telling them they have to adopt it. And that's where you know, with like children, you put a lot of food in front of them and let them pick, you know and eat what they want versus forcing. You know the strange peas every day.
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Joe Whittinghill: It. It's it's important to be clear again about this adoption strategy, and that's where I do think you know my boss, Kathleen Hogan, her bravery of of sticking with which was a very difficult.
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Joe Whittinghill: convincing stage, you know, when we had to go and say we were going to go this direction, but you know she got very convicted very early that we were on the right path, and it was an example of great leadership on her part as another. You know, Testament, to why, this work can be really fun. And at the same time, it's a lot of work to do leadership work.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, it's a lot of work doing leadership development. But just before we wrap up we'll wrap up in a couple of minutes I'll just put the link. Excuse me that, Emma put in before. If you're interested in kind of a quick, easy read about this and want to share it to your leadership team to convince them. That might be a good idea. Microsoft did go from a, you know, challenged company to one of the most successful in the world in this last 10 years. I I won't say, of course, that was all us, but we had, you know, a tiny piece of that. I'm I'm pretty sure it was the business strategy and some great
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Dr. David Rock: leadership and the technology strategy and an overall good people strategy. But if you're trying to convince or just share this work. The Hbr piece that we did back in 2018, I think, tells an interesting story. And the other thing is, if you're from a company and you're interested in chatting to our people about this work. Just put the word leadership principles in the chat and your company name. Someone will follow up in the next week or so. So just put leadership principles, your company name. Someone will follow up and chat with you. As I said, we've done. About 40 of these did a wonderful one with mastercard
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Dr. David Rock: create value, move together, grow fast, really nice one we did one with Colgate cleaned up their leadership framework, I should say, and we've done some really fascinating ones with a variety of organizations. But the one with you guys has been probably the nearest and dearest to our hearts, because it's allowed us to really study and learn what's involved in this over a 10 year period.
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Dr. David Rock: I know, we went on to build a feedback model that aligned with this and high potential work all sorts of other things. But you know, before we wrap up just some closing thoughts, as you kind of reflect on the 10 years.
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Dr. David Rock: you know. Maybe not just the model, but sort of the impact of neuroscience. Any closing comments for a minute or 2, or just the impact of applying neuroscience in an organization full of, you know, full of highly well educated employees.
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Joe Whittinghill: Yeah, it it it believe it or not, it ties to without going down the technical route.
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Joe Whittinghill: This is very similar to understanding. Neuroscience is going to be as important as understanding artificial intelligence. And so I was just meeting with some business leaders from the Philippines.
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Joe Whittinghill: And and I said, Just start playing with AI. So you understand what's going on.
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Joe Whittinghill: But the concepts of using this, what Dave and I were talking about critical thinking and rhetoric is going to be very important, moving forward as humans and technology interact even more conjoined than ever before. And so again, why do we think and feel the way we do understanding. We didn't get into it today, like in and out
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Joe Whittinghill: crowd.
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Joe Whittinghill: And just some basic concepts around physical pain and social pain, critically important, that can help unlock people.
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Joe Whittinghill: And and we've found that once leaders
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Joe Whittinghill: start even to use the words like, I'm triggered, it really allows for better and deeper and de-escalated conversations than what we would have seen say 10 years ago. And so I'm a big fan. I think there's a lot more neuroscience can do for us, not only in leadership, but just in how humans are going to interact and do work.
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Joe Whittinghill: And then I do think that this tie between neuroscience. And AI is going to be a fascinating new frontier for us all to go after.
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Dr. David Rock: Yeah, it's kind of an irony. Thanks, Jose. It's kind of an irony. The more we're getting into AI, the more we need to understand the brain. And we're busier than ever. What we're seeing is a lot of companies launching into AI without considering the humans we're getting into AI consulting to like, actually take a much more thoughtful approach to making the AI choices and rolling them out. We're starting to do that and fascinating.
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Dr. David Rock: fascinating work, but you know. Sometimes I cheekily say, we're sort of the de facto operating system for people development inside Microsoft. In that. It's it's we've kind of built a language for leadership based on the brain that gets used as almost like an operating system for how we interact. And we still got more work to go on that. But it's been an amazing testing ground and partnership to kind of build that language together.
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Dr. David Rock: And really appreciated the partnership. So we'll folks, we'll we'll jump off in a minute. I think. Emma, if you want to put up the poll. So people want to jump off as we. We kind of close off, we'll get the poll from people as to kind of follow up things. But, Joe, just in closing thanks again for joining us today. I think the you know, my insight is leadership is hard leadership of technical folks, even harder they often need human skills. But
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Dr. David Rock: they it's it's much easier to get across when you're using science and the the Pop sign, you know, we were working for like 15 years before we met you to build this language.
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Dr. David Rock: and if you just throw them pop science, they'll rip you to shreds, and if you throw them incredibly complex science they will as well. So there's a sort of just right amount that we've been trying to get, which is sort of simple, sticky models supported by accurate deep science. It took us a long time to get there, but it's been amazing building that operating system together and appreciate the ongoing partnership.
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Joe Whittinghill: Absolutely. It's been great working with you. Thanks for having me today, and I will see you soon.
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Dr. David Rock: Thanks, Joe. Let you jump off there. I'm going to hand back to Emma. Thanks so much. Everyone. Thanks for joining us, and we'll hope to see you next week, Emma. I think we're talking about accountability. Is that what we're doing next week? The science I'm loving, loving, loving the neuroscience at the heart of the accountability habits. There's some really fascinating science. I look forward to digging into that with you. You and I. I think of doing that next week right.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Yep, absolutely. That'll be closing off the year. Yep.
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Dr. David Rock: Fantastic. I'll hand over to you. Thanks so much, everyone see you. I hope to see you next week. Bye, bye.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: Thank you. Thank you both. This was amazing. I think we all got a lot out of it, and I was actually hoping it would go for a little bit longer. So you saw our poll. Please let us know how we can help you in the future, and it'll stay up for a few more moments. As I share just some closing announcements.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: So, as David mentioned, we will be having one more of the year of our podcast before we all, you included, take a much needed break after the New Year. David and I will do a deep dive into the neuroscience of what we're calling proactive accountability.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: creating a culture of accountability means changing the shared set of everyday behaviors and driving everyone to take accountability or be empowered to take accountability, not fear it. So we'll introduce that framework and which is underpinned by some really incredible neuroscience research. So we hope you can join us
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Dr. Emma Sarro: in terms of the insider exchange specifically for senior executives. If you enjoy your brain at work, live, you will love our Nli insider program. We invite you to join this exclusive opportunity, where you can enjoy benefits such as 1st looks at new research, roundtable discussions with leading executives and researchers, and helping us to craft our new innovations. So to apply, please follow the link that's been dropped in the chat.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: And finally, we want to continue to partner with our community. If your organization would be interested in hosting an event with us in the future. Please check out the link in the chat. We look forward to an opportunity to continue to build these positive relationships with our organizations globally.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: So if you enjoyed today's conversation, and I am sure you did you'll love, the podcast show. So make sure, you subscribe. You can hear past Friday webinars on demand and look for your brain at work wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts.
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Dr. Emma Sarro: And now it's officially where we say farewell on behalf of our 2 amazing guests and the Nli team behind the scenes. Thank you for joining us, and we will see you here same time next week. Bye.