The Shortlist Retrospective: Best advice on leadership, DEI, talent and wellbeing

We’ve welcomed over 40 unique guests on our weekly podcast, The Shortlist, over the course of the last twelve months. From CPOs and Heads of Talent, to inspiring authors, industry experts, and pioneering thought-leaders, there has been no shortage of insight. So, while we’re preparing for the new season to come, we thought we’d look back at some of the best advice we’ve received.

Every guest we’ve had on has contributed immensely to our shortlist, graciously imparting pearls of wisdom on all the topics that have shaped this incredibly uncertain year. So, to dive into this cornucopia, SocialTalent CEO Johnny Campbell and our Director of Content, Holly Fawcett, pulled together some of their favorites quotes and discussed these nuggets of advice in relation to all the major themes that have affected organizations in 2022. Let’s dive in!

Episode highlights:

• The importance of wellbeing [3.26]
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion [13.40]
• The transformation of talent acquisition [22.30]
• Leadership [32.51]

Transcript:

Johnny Campbell:

Welcome to episode 125 of The Shortlist. My name’s Johnny Campbell. I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of SocialTalent. I’m your host today for The Shortlist. And today’s special holiday season Shortlist is a wrap up of 2022. We’re going to examine all of the guests that came onto the show during the year. Over 40 unique guests joined us in 2022. And we’re feeling nostalgic. I want to look back and say, “What did 2022 stand for? What were the big themes? What was the best advice?” Because every guest we’ve had on has contributed immensely to the shortlist of advice that we gather from everyone. They’ve imparted pearls of wisdom on all the topics that have shaped this incredibly uncertain year.

But I’m not going to do this on my own. I am not capable of doing this on my own. And it wouldn’t be an end of year wrap-up without my fantastic colleague, Holly Fawcett. So Holly Fawcett, Director of Content at SocialTalent, is joining me and also your fellow host on The Shortlist. Holly, welcome to The Shortlist. Our first time this year together.

Holly Fawcett:

It is our first one this year together. And I’m not a body double for Johnny. We do actually exist as two completely separate people. It’s rare that we are seen in the same place at the same time. But yes, very glad to be here as a guest, which is cool, rather than hosting to be on the other side.

Johnny Campbell:

Well folks, we’re going to dive in. We’ve got tons of content to go through, lots of clips to play as well, some of the best parts of The Shortlist this year. And myself and Holly, when we went through, and when I say we went through, I mean the fantastic David went through all the episodes, summarized it, pulled it all together, and we just have to sit through a meeting of his recommendations. So all credit to David for doing this for us and for Simon for putting together all of the clips that you’re going to hear today. When we look through this, we came up with four unique themes. We’re going to take you through those big themes we saw during 2022 and take you through some of the best advice that we heard.

Holly, I’m going to hand it over to you first for your first theme that you identified through the year and the cause you felt that stood out for you, that you feel are worth sharing back with our audience on today’s episode.

Holly Fawcett:

Yeah. The first theme actually, which was probably surprising in a way coming from a talent acquisition podcast that it wasn’t about talent acquisition but certainly was in the realm of HR and caring about one another, and that main theme was about well-being. It was really surprising how much of a focus so many of our guests gave to the well-being of their employees, the well-being of the people that they serve, being at the forefront of all of that. So really, it was beautiful to see at the same time coming out of the age of our second and a half year of a pandemic to really look forward to how organizations are putting well-being at the center of their people services and their experiences with their employees. So we’ve picked out a couple of wonderful quotes, two in particular that we’ll play in a clip for you. The first is from Jason Lauritsen. Jason Lauritsen is a founder. He’s a well-renowned author and social talent speaker as well. And Paul Phillips, who’s the Global TA Head for Avanade.

Johnny Campbell:

I love those quotes. Jason’s one particularly hits me, Holly, because we look back at Christmas 2022 and compared to last year, there was a new strain of the virus running rampant last year. Christmas got canceled for pretty much everybody, and travel was canceled and we went back into lockdowns in many parts of the world. And I wonder how many people have held up that promise, that promise to check in with the people that matter most. I wonder whether it’s on a personal level, people are still doing that. And maybe more relevant to this podcast, on an organizational level, if leaders are still doing that with their teams, checking in the level they would’ve checked in last year. What are your thoughts?

Holly Fawcett:

Well, obviously I’ve no data to say whether or not individuals are feeling less alone than they were in the depths of the pandemic when we genuinely were just, it was a fear mixed with mixed isolation. And those two things don’t go very well together, of course. Our brains make up stories of all types of things, and we tend to retreat into really weird places when that happens. And that can be very true of work as well. When you’re isolated from your colleagues or you’re isolated from the information, we can make leaps in our minds as to what’s going on. And so this year saw the great resignation as well as the great rehiring and the great reshuffle, the great lots of things. But certainly in the great resignation, people were just like, “Do you know what? Actually, I’ve had enough of my organization trying to put a carbon copy of our office into a virtual environment.” They’re not doing virtual very well. “Everything has to be synchronous, and that’s not really how I work now. I want something that’s a little bit more flexible.”

And we’ve seen people really and truly take matters into their own hands when it comes to their career, which has been phenomenal. We have truly seen people go into completely new careers. They’ve taken lots of courses online during the pandemic, et cetera, and it’s given them huge career opportunities. And it’s meant that organizations who didn’t capitalize on that, who didn’t check in with their employees, that those employees left. And so I think organizations have learned a lot of hard lessons this year where they’ve seen that kind of attrition, that kind of unforced attrition, and people just leave their organization in droves.

So from a personal point of view, I certainly have made it my mission to make sure that I’m checking in with people, whether it’s a text message or a FaceTime call or hopefully seeing them in person. But I think we all have to be kind with one another as well and realize, “Look, people are going through different things,” and just even reaching out to say, “Hey, you don’t have to answer this, but just let you know I’m thinking of you. And when you’ve timed for catch-up, I’d love to chat to you.” So there’s definitely those kinds of moments to do. So in work, I think it’s really important that every employee feel connected to their business and feel connected to the information and to the team. Otherwise, you’re going to lose your great people. And this year, it’s going to be tough when it comes to hiring and finding the budget for hiring in some organizations. So retention is going to be pretty critical for me, I think.

Johnny Campbell:

Couple of the quotes that occurred to me as well from other guests. Jason Lauritsen is a good colleague on our training on our platform. Linda Jonas was on the show during the year, and she expanded a little bit more on that concept of checking in with people by saying intentionality, clarity, and checking in. Check in with people on a personal level and ask how they are and not just as a general statement. I know this is something that Linda and Jason advocate for and train leaders to do to make it a deliberate part of your weekly or biweekly routine with your team, is to separate time to just check in with people versus, and this is probably more towards Paul Phillips’ point, not just the tasks that are at hand and checking up on the tasks, but separately checking it on the person and making that intentionality around that is super important.

Holly Fawcett:

Yeah, 100%. And I do love Linda. She is just wonderful. And I love Jason and Linda’s check-in method that they are advocating for, which is so simple and really easy to roll out.

But similarly when it comes to that human piece, there was a wonderful conversation with Jennifer Henderson of TiLT. TiLT is an organization that helps people do leave of absence management in a much more human way. And I think what Paul was talking about, creating space for the human, not just the task, just really, really resonates with what Jen is saying as well. And that when you are optimizing leave of absence management, which can be a huge headache for a lot of organizations and for a lot of HR teams to completely understand that. But of course the human of who’s going through the need for leave of absence, whether that’s because they’re going to become a parent, whether that’s because they have an elderly unwell family member, for example, who they need to care for, whether that’s because they are going to go traveling for a while and see the world now that our borders have opened back up again and we’re able to travel a little bit more.

Whatever those experiences are driving the need for somebody to go on a leave of absence, the human should be looked at and should be dealt with as that human. And I know that there’s so many people who have told their managers and who have agonized before telling their managers or senior leadership team that they’re pregnant, for example, agonizing over telling them that information because they fear, again that absence of a distance from the information, they fear that if they were to tell them this, that promotion opportunities would stop, that one-to-one conversations around their career would stop, and that everything would be focused around the fact that they’re leaving for a time. I’m like, “My gosh. In the grand scheme of things, it’s such a short space of time.” And also, they’re pregnant. They’re having a baby. This is amazing. So treat them as that human is really key.

And Jennifer’s story really struck with me around that well-being and how much her career was just literally put a stop to it because she had revealed that she was pregnant. And after so long of trying to become pregnant in the first case, it was just heartbreaking to hear that. And I know that she’s one of thousands and thousands, unfortunately, thousands of parents who have gone through that, both from an IVF perspective but also then to have the joy of that being taken away from them at work. So yeah, it was really, the human piece I think is such a lovely theme to end on with Paul.

Johnny Campbell:

It overlaps with the second theme I’m going to introduce, which is a theme that arguably, and I’ll admit, we probably drove ourselves on The Shortlist with our choice of guests and our choice of themes, and that is the theme of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or equity, diversity, inclusion, or IED, depending on which order you want to put that in. But unfortunately, it may have been a theme that generally lost a bit of steam during the year with corporates and was less talked about. I think on the show, we talked about it just as much as we had in the previous years, but that was probably more deliberate than anything else. But it continues to be an issue. And I think we’re seeing it as moving into the wider ESG category of issues being dealt with by organizations talking about sustainable talent.

And I’m particularly talking about equity. I think equity to me, which was probably the lesser of the three in terms of how it was spoken a couple of years ago, with much more talk about diversity, much more talk about inclusion, a lot more talk about equity in the last year as being the thing that organizations are striving for as being that core center of DE&I, if that makes sense. And I’ve chosen two quotes to play back for our audience just to give a bit of context to this. One is Annie Boneta. Annie is a good colleague or friend, John Vlastelica of Recruiting Toolbox and herself, a senior TA leader for many, many years who’s worked in industry in the West Coast of the US for a long time. And also Yasmin Sheikh who is herself a disability rights activist lawyer as well by training, who became disabled later in life and found herself in a wheelchair being treated completely differently than she had been the week before. And has a fantastic story and does amazing work. And as well, it’s a pleasure to have both Annie and Yasmin on the social channel platform.

But there’s two quotes here I wanted to share with our audience, remind them of, that I think really summed it up for a lot of the talk we had during the year on DE&I on the show.

Holly Fawcett:

Hear, hear. I think for Yasmin, gosh, that conversation was eye-opening, and was for Annie as well. My goodness. Both were phenomenal around the subject of DE&I and opening that lens of opportunity to people. But gosh, the conversation with Yasmin, I was hugely moved by that and educated as well, I have to say. And particularly around some of the pieces around language of disability for example, that’s really important to be intentional around some of that. But when you recognize that anybody could become disabled at any point in your life, it’s not something that you’re born with necessarily. You could possibly become disabled even for a period of time as well.

So the onus is there’s so many people out there who are trying to make the world of work a much fairer place because they have family members, for example, who have a disability, who maybe they have a child who has autism, for example. And they are passionately advocating for reform within their workplaces on not making assumptions about people, and really making sure that we reach out to communities where people feel that they are pigeonholed in some way, and recognizing the talent that lies within the human, not the task, as Paul was saying as well. But this is so important that we open our doors to people from all walks of life and put them through our paces in a bit. We can’t just take the proxy of what school they went to, what companies they’ve worked at before as saying, “Oh, you must be a wonderful potential employee if you worked at this company and went to this college,” or whatever. We always can find amazing diamonds in the rough. That’s where they come from in the end.

Johnny Campbell:

It’s funny you mentioned autism and those on the spectrum, and it’s wildly suspected. He hasn’t publicly confirmed it nor does he ever have to, that Messi who arguably won the World Cup for Argentina last week had Asperger’s. And you look at that talent, that if ever there was an example that’s so out there of the potential of people that may otherwise be put in a category and not noticed, not given that space, that air, Messi is that person. He just exemplifies all that is good about the sport of football perhaps compared to Ronaldo. Not to get too controversial on a live show where people might complain with their football opinions, but Messi is very much that team guy, fantastic advocate you’d want every young kid to turn out to be if they were passionate about football. And it is about recognizing that talent is everywhere.

I recall a conversation we had on the show with Nick Mailey who’s VP of talent acquisition over at Equinix. He was on the show, I think, in September time. And he talked about the efforts that Equinix have done, have gone into to find talent where talent is not typically found, when the opportunity is not given to anyone at this point. And they didn’t do this as a diversity initiative. They do this as a, “Let’s find great talent and find where no one else is looking.” Why wouldn’t you look where other people aren’t looking? Why look for talent where everyone’s looking and it’s really difficult? Go look for places they haven’t discovered yet. And they’ve found rich communities of talent with disabilities, underrepresented minority groups, and they’ve made fantastic hires that have outperformed their peers, have longer periods of loyalty in terms of their commitment to the company, and it costs less to hire from these communities. Not that we need a business case, but if there ever was one, it’s there. I think that just again back to being Yasmin’s point to it, not making assumptions about people.

You and I spoke to our work colleague during the year, Holly, who shared his disability around an illness that he has that caused real stress for him and worry and sickness when he had to go to a physical office. And remote working has just freedom of that and sent his illness into remission and completely changed his mindset. And I know when that was shared with me, I just never even thought about somebody with that kind of a chronic issue and how the traditional workplace would make a difference to them. I think that’s, to quote someone else who was on the show, Jessica Havens. She said, “If you’re in a position of leadership, invest in yourself first around DEI. Be open to the fact that all have a lot to learn.”

I have a lot to learn. I’ve been talking with folks who are much more intelligent and well-read on this subject than I for the last eight years. I never stop learning, and I want to have more conversations with more people because shining a light on stuff you’ve never seen before highlights just how much you don’t know in terms of the empathy you need to show to people that you haven’t thought about before. And the opportunity that’s out there in untapped talent pools.

I’m conscious of time. I know we could talk about that particular topic for ages, Holly, and lots more quotes in there. But tell me your second theme and our third for the show that stuck out for you.

Holly Fawcett:

Yeah. This was definitely a year of tumult and strive amongst talent acquisition professionals, and there was a lot of really fantastic speakers who talked about reshaping or transforming their talent acquisition departments. And it was big enough theme because suddenly for a hot minute, recruiters were really, really, really important and we’re talked. The CEO was ringing up recruiters going, “What’s happening with talent acquisition? We can’t hire people fast enough. Come on, come on.” And suddenly, recruiters were like, “Woo, okay. We have all the power. This is great.” Now, that did die down quite a lot in some instance, some firms. There are a lot of organizations who are still really struggling to hire, and recruiting is really showing up differently as a talent advisor. And that’s really part of that talented position transformation. So yes, we have two great quotes, one from Andrew MacAskill who is a phenomenal candidate experience advocate, and the other is Kevin Green who is the chief people officer at First Bus. You’ll hear from Kevin first.

Johnny Campbell:

Gosh, it’s amazing Andrew making that quote when just before, a whole bunch of recruiters are probably going to go back out to the job market and find themselves looking for a job. There might give another very similar quote from Jeff Moore who’s the VP of Talent over at Toast based out of Boston, ex-Google. And Jeff said, “Changing jobs is really stressful. It’s one of the most stressful things you can do in your life. And if you as a recruiter don’t treat you with that level of reverence, you’ll never be good at this industry.” And it’s just such an important reminder, as Andrew says, to not forget what it feels like to be on the job market. That if you’re in this business of talent and talent acquisition, you need to think about what it’s really like. And maybe it’s going to be healthy for some folks to experience it and experience the job market and know what it’s like, and maybe drive more humility next year when those folks go back into new roles in new TA and talent teams and start working with candidates again.

What do you think, to Kevin’s point, around challenge everything you needed to do? In 2023, what would you do differently? What would you recommend folks do differently or do more of if already doing different things?

Holly Fawcett:

Well yeah, certainly for Kevin, the level of influence and pushing the boundaries that he’s able to do at First Bus has been phenomenal because it has seen tremendous results amongst his HR teams. But ultimately, I think the next phase for talent acquisition is really where for talent acquisition teams to be able to do things differently, they have to be looking at departments in their organization that do have power, influence, decision-making, control. First of all, why do they have that? What is it that they bring to the table when they are getting and securing this type of influence? They’re usually bringing data and numbers, usually with dollar signs in front of them, and this gets everyone’s ears pricked up when they realize that there’s actually financial impact against this.

And talent acquisition has a huge financial impact on an organization. It’s an incredibly responsible job. Going back to what Andrew was saying as well, but understanding the human experience behind that and linking back in with what Paul Phillips was also saying about never forgetting it’s a human, not just the task. But ultimately, it’s looking at those in the organization who do bring an awful lot of influence into different conversations and emulating that. Bring the data. Go find the data.

Something that Allyn Bailey actually spoke about also in around this team is having an opinion. And if you don’t have an opinion yet about TA transformation, go find one. Understand where is our organization going and why is it going there? Try to be that good bit more strategic and start putting dollar signs in front of your numbers. Link it constantly back to what the organization cares about, which ultimately is its bottom line, and where great talent can hugely drive towards that. I think that’s really what I hope for 2023 that recruiters and TA folks do more of this year.

Johnny Campbell:

I was asked in a podcast earlier today a question that I get asked all the time given the nature of social talent speakers. And you probably get asked a similar question, Holly, and it has to do with skills that recruiters need in the future. What are they? And it reminds me of a quote from John Vlastelica who joined us on the show during the year as well, and wrapping up that theme, said, “Show up more with a voice, with a point of view. Get curious. Find allies in the business. Understand the why, and challenge. Be willing to push back a little bit.” And I think that sums up to me the type of recruiter that perhaps Kevin is talking about, that they’re challenging assumptions, they are looking at the solutions to the why and really understanding what the why is as opposed to saying, “Oh, you want to hire that? Great.” It’s saying, “Why you need to hire that person? What are you trying to achieve?”

Digging into those what have been called the softer skills. We call them more the core skills that folks have across many different disciplines. I think it’s more of that and less of when you and I started in this business, Holly, we were teaching people sourcing skills and running, building, and search strings. That is not the skill of the modern recruiter. It is much more that consultative advisor pushing back. And even just I think giving more than just talent acquisition solutions as well.

Holly Fawcett:

I think there’s also an extra piece in there around being that more consultative type of recruiter, is while you do have an idea or you’ve seen things before, don’t get too attached to ideas. Because being able to be collaborative, in being collaborative in compromising of particular things, you’re able to actually get much more healthy types of things going on. You can start completely brand-new initiatives that you’ve never would’ve come to, and it comes to that as a recruiter. But ultimately, and a trait that Kathy Iverson has actually just put into our LinkedIn chat there, curiosity. That is hugely key. Not getting too attached to ideas, constantly listening for what’s going on, and being able to bring up these types of ideas in that moment in time, that’s what builds your business acumen and that ultimately is what’s going to pave at your whole future in recruiting, is just be interested in hoovering up different types of information and be ready to present people with them in the future. You don’t have to be specific to your ideas or your brand-new information, but if you’re able to be the sharer of information, that’s amazing.

Johnny Campbell:

And just a quick shout out to Garick Chan who commented earlier live when we were talking about the topic of diversity, equity, inclusion saying, “When it comes to DEI, I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut even though I normally have quite an opinion. I notice that others also keep their mouth shut, and it’s mostly white people who carry the conversation.” I think Garick’s point is about we should all listen more and take the time to listen, I guess. When you’re always talking, if you’re the person doing all the talking, maybe you need to just be a bit more quiet and take more time to listen to other point of views, other voices. And I’d argue, Garick, use your voice only to encourage others to speak. Perhaps, I wouldn’t keep quiet. I’d use that voice but only to give others the opportunity to share their voice, perhaps those who aren’t as willing or don’t get the opportunity.

Which probably brings me to my last topic and our last topic of the four, Holly. We can keep going for hours, but it is good and I’m going to-

Holly Fawcett:

I’ll stay the year, come on.

Johnny Campbell:

We’re going to celebrate tomorrow, right? So for me, a big theme, it’s a big theme of 2022 for me, but it’s been a big theme pretty much since the beginning of the pandemic, and that is that of leadership and it’s showing that leadership. And there’s been so many folks who’ve come on the show during the year who’ve given really amazing advice that I think any leader could take and would make a great leader.

Two that I’m going to signal for playback in just a moment are from Rick Kelley who runs Facebook here in Ireland. And Rick also runs Facebook’s Global Gaming Business, awesome guy with just amazing insight and perspective, and he’s just achieved so much in his team around diversity, equity, inclusion. But it’s the topic of leadership I want to signal him out for because I think his lessons are a lot more broader than that. And then Joe Gerstandt, our good friend and contributor to the SocialTalent platform who has been a fantastic ally of ours as an organization just really drives home that whole psychological safety piece but does it from a place of education and just from a really good… His insights are fantastic. He’s super practical, gives great advice. So I’m going to finish off my last section with these two quotes from Rick and Joe.

Johnny Campbell:

I love those two quotes. I don’t know about you, Holly. I’m scared to ask you the question because you spent most of your career working in SocialTalent. But I know that I have worked under leaders, many of them great, but a couple who, to Rick’s point, I remember because of the things they do or did that I would never want to emulate. And that’s actually a really strong thing. Just as we have our heroes that we want to be more like, there’s folks that act as maybe the opposite of a North Star. Maybe it’s the South Star, is that a thing, of the people you don’t want-

Holly Fawcett:

Death Star?

Johnny Campbell:

Death Star, Death Star. Don’t be the Death Star are particularly the trait that’s reflected there is really important for you. Any Death Star that you’ve come across? And for the sake of Joe’s point, happy with disagreement if it’s me as well, we’ll take that as Death Star examples. But do you think those two quotes ring true to you, the thing about disagreement being a proxy for diversity from Joe and how learning as much from people you don’t want to be like as people you do want to be like?

Holly Fawcett:

Ah yeah, absolutely. And look, you and I thankfully had a lot of healthy disagreements over our 12 years in business together, which is wonderful, to also be able to disagree and come back to work the next day and everything’s still fine. And that’s great. And truly we as an organization, I think we can always be better in disagreeing more constructively and with less emotion and things like that. And those are things that you have to learn. And that’s frightening for managers, I think, to have to learn how to do conflict well. Because conflict is around us all the time, and what ends up happening is that we end up just keeping stones sometimes, back to Garick Chan’s point in the messages here in LinkedIn, just talking less and just agreeing more because you don’t want the hassle of conflict. And that’s awful.

But yes, unfortunately I have had poor managers who I definitely have felt, “You know what? I just never want to be like them.” And especially when you enter your first managerial position, often your only North Star so to speak are things that I don’t want to do. And you know, “Okay, I know I don’t want to be like this,” but you may not necessarily have a great role model of the things and the behaviors that you do want to do. And when you find a manager like that, you will know from an HR point of view, you will know the managers who are great based on the retention of their team. The team are hugely loyal to them but also stay with them and are really productive and really well.

And the things that they will say about them may not necessarily be like, “Oh, we get the most amazing results. I’m smashing my target every single year.” It may not necessarily be that, but it’s ultimately that, “I feel I belong. I feel I’m respected. I have a voice here. I can do well here. I’m cared for here.” Those are the types of things you know is an inclusive manager and has the behaviors that ultimately will make them succeed. And that’s what every organization should really be striving for, I think. So definitely, they definitely ring true for me.

Johnny Campbell:

It’s hard to do though, particularly to Joe’s point. We say, “You should ensure and prove that it is safe for your people to tell the truth to you.” That sounds like a, “Yes, I want people to tell the truth.” And they’re going to email them all and say, “Tell the truth to me.” I realized in the last year that that’s actually much harder to do. Reminding me of a quote from Lee McQueen who you interviewed on the show during the year who said, “Have a look at what you want to be as a business, what type of people you want in your company. Start with the culture and values and work down from there. Most organizations that are successful will have a successful value or cultures at their core.” And I think that that principle of disagreement being a great proxy for diversity is bang on.

But I recently started reading, as I know you’ve read, Erin Myers’ book that she wrote with Reed Hastings on the Netflix culture, more of an update and they go quite deep on the structures and processes that are you need to have in place to create an environment where a disagreement not only will happen, but is allowed and encouraged. They talk about how an individual contributor go against the will of their manager if they believe in something. And if the manager is proven to be incorrect, she must celebrate that and share how she was incorrect and how brilliant it is that the outcome was fantastic. And so they have a lot of processes in place quite deliberately to build that culture where telling the truth happens every day. `.

So I think we can quote something like that and go, “Disagreement is a great proxy for diversity.” Brilliant. We should encourage disagreement. The reality is it’s harder to do, requires a lot of work like most of these things. I think that’s probably what culture is. Culture to me is do you actually put the work in to your organization to make that come to life, or do you just say it every once in a while but everyone goes, “Yeah, but if we tell her that real truth, it’s not going to work out well. So let’s just nod our head and say, ‘Yeah, disagreement’s brilliant,’ but don’t disagree with her because you know how it ends.” I think that’s that.

I think leadership’s hard. I think that’s what we’ve all learned coming out of the pandemic. It used to be just the thing someone was in charge and they ran meetings and they did all these things. And I think we’ve woken up to the reality that leadership is a very specific job that requires a lot of training. There’s a lot to learn from others, and it’s hard to do, right? Would you agree?

Holly Fawcett:

Absolutely, yes. And especially these last two and a half years has proven the difficulties and challenges of having to do remote leadership because proximity bias is strong in all of us. When we can see people in front of us, when we can build relationships with people who are physically in our space, that comes second nature to people because that’s all we’ve known for not just our entire working lives, but our entire lives in general. And so having to do so now and do so in a very deliberate way is definitely more challenging. But ultimately, none of us learn how to do conflict well in our lives. Either if you have to ever been to marriage counseling or anything like that, I’m sure you may learn some of those tools, but ultimately reframing any type of conflict by saying, “Look, it’s not you versus me with a problem in the middle. It’s actually both of us on the same side. The problem is over there and we have to figure out this problem together.”

When you reframe it like that, it suddenly becomes, “Ah yeah, of course.” Because ultimately the behavior and the value is, “Look, we know each other. We like each other.” If it’s a significant other or a family member, “We love each other. And we want to resolve this conflict because ultimately, we don’t want this to become something that splits between us.” So it’s not a skill that any of us are taught. It should be something I think we teach in school, how to do conflict well, because that being able to learn the truth from somebody even when it’s unpleasant or unexpected, like having to learn the truth through Glassdoor. When a Glassdoor review is a complete surprise and then ultimately deep down in your head, you’re going, “They’re probably also right.” That’s when people aren’t able to tell you the truth in person. That’s a good way of indicating, “Okay, I could probably do a little bit more here with seeking the truth, seeking real valued opinions unbothered so that we can have this conversation and resolve this conflict.”

Johnny Campbell:

I tell you, I have forgotten every good comment that may have been made about me on Glassdoor. I remember every bad one. They’ve kept me awake for nights because initially, I’m sure any leader who’s in a position where they see a review like that, whether it’s in a HR system or if it’s 360-degree reviews or if it’s on a Glassdoor, you’ll be annoyed, you’ll be upset. You’ll say, “That’s not fair.” But to your point, Holly, it’s bang on. Deep down, you’ll know there’s some truth in it or maybe a lot of truth, and that’s the hard thing.

Holly, we’re at time. Can you believe this? We flew through.

Folks, thanks for everyone who spent time listening to the episodes, the 50 plus episodes we put out during the year, and for the 40 plus guests who’ve joined us as well on those episodes. And to yourself, Holly, for hosting many of those wonderful episodes. And hopefully, you’ll also join me next year in welcoming a whole new list of guests. We’re going to have a bit of a rebrand of the podcast in the New Year. We’re going to go in a broader direction with some really interesting speakers and content to just keep building on the fantastic conversation we’ve had as well so far in the last couple of years. But before we close out, Holly, thoughts and reflections on next year. I dare use the word predictions, but what do you think are the big themes that we’ll be discussing this time next year when we do our 2023 wrap-up?

Holly Fawcett:

I think we’ll be discussing how we’re doing retention better. I think retention is something that every organization is suddenly put on its radar. It’s something we really need to work on. And I think some of the solutions to that is internal mobility. So I think we’ll be talking about internal mobility and retention a lot next year. Fingers crossed.

Johnny Campbell:

Yeah, I agree. Mobility, I’ve spoken with this to somebody this morning. It’s actually about sustainability. When we talk about sustainability, we typically think of natural resources and we say, “Well, there’s a limited amount of natural resources and we’re running out of them. So we have to think about renewable energy.” There’s little amount of talent and we’re running out of talent in many, many areas and not just sustain. You can’t get a pint in a bar in Dublin these days because there’s no staff. You can’t get a sandwich at lunch in a coffee shop because there’s no staff.

So sustainable talent is going to be a big issue, and that’s what drives internal mobility but also requires great leadership. Leadership’s going to be a big topic next year. In fact, we’re going to have our first STLive, our free webinar show that we run for 90 minutes every three months, in January. You can register at socialtalent.com/live. I believe that’s the third week of January. And we have a whole bunch of CPOs, CHROs joining us to give us their predictions from talent at the highest level in big organizations around the world, including the fantastic Pat Wador who is the former Head of People over at LinkedIn who’s going to be joining us, and many others giving us their predictions of the year ahead. What are their priorities? What are they working on at a C-level in their businesses? So be sure to register at socialtalent.com/live for that fantastic event, and we’ll dig into the year with gusto.

Holly, thanks for joining me, and thanks to our guests for joining us as well. And thank you to you joining us on this Christmas special, this holiday special roundabout the year. We’ll be back next year. But in the meantime from me, I’ll say a happy Christmas and New Year. And Holly?

Holly Fawcett:

Happy holidays and happy New Year.

Johnny Campbell:

Thanks everyone. Have a great year. See you in 2023.

The Shortlist is a workplace, thought-leader focused talkshow that broadcasts every Wednesday. You can watch it live on LinkedIn and on YouTube. Or, why not stream as a podcast after?