ASHLEY GOODALL

>> Craig Gould: Ashley Goodall is the former Chief Learning Officer at Deloitte and the former Senior Vice President of Methods and Intelligence at Cisco, a role that focused on gathering and analyzing internal data to aid in the leadership of Cisco’s 85,000 employees. He is also a noted author and contributor to the Harvard Business Review. And we discussed the findings of his most recent book, the Problem with Change, where Goodall argues against change for change sake and advocates for the sanctity of teams. And my conversation with Ashley starts now on Master Move.

>> Craig Gould: Ashley Goodall, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. Ashley, you are the former Chief Learning Officer at Deloitte, you are the former SVP of Methods and Intelligence at Cisco, and you’re a noted author. You previously had a book, nine Lies, about a free thinking leader’s guide to the real world, and most recently the book I want to talk to you about today, the problem with change and the essential nature of human performance. But Ashley, a lot of times I like to start with taking this back to your early days. Ashley, what was your first job? What was that like?

>> Ashley Goodall: My first, first, first job, sure. I was a customer service representative for.

>> Ashley Goodall: A financial company in the uk and.

>> Ashley Goodall: I used to go into the office.

>> Ashley Goodall: Every day, and log into a.

>> Ashley Goodall: Dumb terminal that spoke to a computer.

>> Ashley Goodall: 200 miles away that we called a mainframe and used to put my headphones on and the switchboard would put people through to me and I would say.

>> Ashley Goodall: Customer service, how can I help you? And they would talk to me about the loan product that they got from this company and what they didn’t understand or why the payment was late or.

>> Ashley Goodall: What was difficult or. And I would try to help them out. That was actually my first, first, first my first paid, employment.

>> Craig Gould: So were there any lessons from that job that you still carry with you?

>> Ashley Goodall: I think millions. I mean, I think our first jobs shape us in so many ways because it’s our first sort of exposure to the real grown up stuff. I mean, I can remember thinking people.

>> Ashley Goodall: Have purchased financial products and they have.

>> Ashley Goodall: No idea what they’ve, what They’ve got no idea because they thought they were purchasing a car. And you sign here and you get.

>> Ashley Goodall: The car and then Ashley calls up.

>> Ashley Goodall: And says, we need you to send Ashley a check. And you’re like, I got the car from the car dealer. So, I mean, that was, that was, that was one. It was interesting to see how different folks from different backgrounds came together to form a team, which has been an internal interest of mine and how, you know, I was there fresh out of, fresh out of undergraduate.

>> Ashley Goodall: And the guy sitting across from me.

>> Ashley Goodall: I think had just started work when he was 16. And, you know, we were doing the same job. the one that I remember most which is actually relevant, possibly the conversation we’re going to have today, is that one day one of the senior managers from the office that contained the mainframe computer, so head office showed up and we were in a big open plan office. Probably, you know, 150 people across this office sitting in rows of desks. And there wasn’t a PA system. So he stood on a desk at.

>> Ashley Goodall: The end of the room, he climbed.

>> Ashley Goodall: Onto the desk and we were like.

>> Ashley Goodall: Why is he climbing on the desk? And then he called out to the.

>> Ashley Goodall: Switchboard, stop the phones, hold the calls. And then he said, I’m terribly sorry, you’re all to be made redundant. We’ve decided to close the office. your managers have details of your severance packages. Thanks very much.

>> Craig Gould: Wow.

>> Ashley Goodall: And, that, that was a moment of change. And you know, for me it was in my first job, I was going to find another job. I’d been doing this job because I needed a little bit of income and I was sort of figuring out where my life was going to go.

>> Ashley Goodall: for some people, they’ve been there for 15 years.

>> Ashley Goodall: For some people, that was their income, that was their livelihood gone. And, it was sobering to see that.

Clayton Christensen: Nokia gave employees an entire year’s notice

>> Craig Gould: So, ah, on one end of the spectrum there’s the guy from the home office standing on a desk and on the other end there’s the story you tell in the book about Nokia giving employees an entire year’s notice.

>> Ashley Goodall: Exactly.

>> Craig Gould: Which is crazy. I mean, I mean, I guess m. Crazy good because, I mean, tell me about that because, I mean it really shows a, keen interest in the people. I feel like a lot of organizations would be scared to give their employees that much notice, thinking that they would check out. Can you kind of pick that apart for us?

>> Ashley Goodall: The thing I keep running into going around the world and talking to people in businesses and talking to employees is.

>> Ashley Goodall: That most People want to do the.

>> Ashley Goodall: Right thing and most people are grateful.

>> Ashley Goodall: If their employer upholds their end of the bargain.

>> Ashley Goodall: so I don’t know, I mean, I read the story of Nokia and you know, just to fill in some of the picture here, Nokia announced a big layoff and said, everybody, you’ve got a year.

>> Ashley Goodall: we’ll provide assistance for you to find other jobs, we’ll provide coaching on.

>> Ashley Goodall: Your resumes, we’ll connect you to recruiters.

>> Ashley Goodall: And we are going to judge ourselves not by how much money we save.

>> Ashley Goodall: On the layoff, but by how many of our people have their next thing lined up when they leave here.

>> Ashley Goodall: So that was a profound shift in.

>> Ashley Goodall: Attitude and spirit and objective and measure. you know, today when we, for the most part, when we do big layoffs at work, our, measure is how much money can we save and.

>> Ashley Goodall: How quickly can we get you lot out the door?

>> Ashley Goodall: how first can we get you off the payroll?

>> Ashley Goodall: And so what Nokia did was very, very different. I wouldn’t be worried if I were.

>> Ashley Goodall: A Nokia leader that people are going to check out.

>> Ashley Goodall: I would expect a little bit of.

>> Ashley Goodall: Checking out because you just turn their.

>> Ashley Goodall: Lives upside down and it’s hard.

>> Ashley Goodall: And I would expect a little bit of time spent looking for other things. But, you know, if you talk to.

>> Ashley Goodall: People who are in companies right now who are in the midst of downsizing or changing direction, or.

>> Ashley Goodall: Most people show up every day, most people do what’s expected of them.

>> Ashley Goodall: I think a little bit of insight.

>> Ashley Goodall: As to why comes from actually some of the studies of soldiers in foxholes, which is another thing I touched on, somewhere in the book. And, you know, the lesson from that is that actually when you go and talk to, people in combat and say, why don’t you just quit and go home?

>> Ashley Goodall: They don’t go because this is a just war.

>> Ashley Goodall: They don’t go because the strategy is one I believe in.

>> Ashley Goodall: They go because I need to look.

>> Ashley Goodall: After my friends, I need to look after my, teammates, I need to.

>> Ashley Goodall: Look after my platoon mates, I need to look after my buddies.

>> Ashley Goodall: So I think, I think what happens in, I think what we get wrong is that we confuse organizational thought, strategy, mission priority, resource objective with human thought, affiliation, belonging, motivation, pride, energy, fun, humor. And when we try and have one satisfy the needs of the other, really weird stuff happens.

>> Craig Gould: I think one of the things I really took away from your book and what I found really interesting was the, you know, kind of going back to this military sort of example is that the role of the team, or in the military example, you know, the role of the platoon, those relationships, the team is more integral. The longer a team works together, the more efficient it becomes. In these relationships are built where people work for each other. But in this generation of Christiansen saying that we need to disrupt things, we’re kind of constantly blowing up platoons and putting them back together. I guess Christensen’s thought is that disruption can be a catalyst for change, but in a lot of ways, disruption can actually pull the brake on an effective workforce. Right?

>> Ashley Goodall: Yeah. I think the main point that I’m trying to get across in the book said in one way, is that if we think about company things and then human things, as I said a minute ago, and it’s, it’s tricky or dangerous or counterproductive when you impose company level ideas on human level trends or traits.

>> Ashley Goodall: one of the company level things.

>> Ashley Goodall: Or economy level things is this idea of disruption. And if you say, well, at a company level, disruption is something we need.

>> Ashley Goodall: To face into because otherwise we could lose our business. Okay, I can argue for or against that.

>> Ashley Goodall: People have argued for and against it.

>> Ashley Goodall: One person who argued in favor of.

>> Ashley Goodall: That thought was Clayton Christensen, as you said. But that doesn’t mean that constant disruption.

>> Ashley Goodall: Is something that works particularly well for humans at a human level.

>> Ashley Goodall: And so there’s a conundrum to be unraveled. There’s a tension, there’s a, there’s an explanation of why life in large companies.

>> Ashley Goodall: Can be so hard.

>> Ashley Goodall: Because at, the sort of.

>> Ashley Goodall: At the organizational level, people are going.

>> Ashley Goodall: Well, we’ve got to change this and we got to change this and we got to change this and we got to change this and we got to fix this and we got to tweak this and we got to reinvent this, we got to upgrade this, we got to reboot this, which by the way, is constant in any organization of any size.

>> Ashley Goodall: Meanwhile, at human scale, people massively struggle with. You changed my team. I don’t know what’s coming next.

>> Ashley Goodall: I don’t know how any of this makes sense.

>> Ashley Goodall: How come you’re saying we should tack to the right and the last guy said we should tack to the left, and the guy before that had us tacking to the right again. How come we have decentralized and then recentralized and then decentralized again? How come it’s all about the customer.

>> Ashley Goodall: Then it’s all about the market, then it’s all about the customer, then it’s all about the market.

>> Ashley Goodall: Make sense of all of this. For me, I can’t.

>> Ashley Goodall: And that, that is something that I think any good capitalist business leader,

Milton Friedman says managers should think of employees as less than human

>> Ashley Goodall: Trying to maximize the yield of people’s honest effort should pay great attention to.

>> Craig Gould: Well, you know, in the book you talk about, Milton Friedman placed the focus on managing through the eyes of shareholder value in that number driven motivation kind of turned around and resulted in management thinking of the employees as less than human. In you, I think you refer to them as coin operated people. Like the one simple solution for any problem is throwing money at a person. Well, instead of looking at how do I meet the human needs or the psychological needs of my employees, well maybe I can just throw more dollars at them. And if this person doesn’t want those dollars, I can find somebody else who does.

>> Ashley Goodall: Yeah. And that’s to fundamentally misunderstand what makes us all tick.

>> Ashley Goodall: There’s a lot of, let’s put it.

>> Ashley Goodall: Like this, there’s a lot of thinking.

>> Ashley Goodall: Out there that explains from an economic.

>> Ashley Goodall: Or an economic theory or a finance perspective how a company should be running.

>> Ashley Goodall: My observation is that a company contains.

>> Ashley Goodall: An awful lot of humans and that.

>> Ashley Goodall: What we lack in the world is.

>> Ashley Goodall: Any systemic, rigorous understanding of how thinking.

>> Ashley Goodall: Through the lens of what do people need to do their best work should.

>> Ashley Goodall: Inform how we run companies. And if you, if you if.

>> Ashley Goodall: You started down that path and you said, all right, let’s, let’s never mind Friedman for a second, never mind Christensen, never mind the market for a few.

>> Ashley Goodall: Minutes, put all of that stuff aside.

>> Ashley Goodall: And think instead from first principles about how would you build a place for.

>> Ashley Goodall: People to do great work?

>> Ashley Goodall: Because if we can build a place.

>> Ashley Goodall: For people to do great work, maybe at the end of the day the.

>> Ashley Goodall: Market will be happy. Maybe at the end of the day the economists will be happy, maybe at.

>> Ashley Goodall: The end of the day the customers will be happy. so a non crazy proposition. Think from the, from the people up and out.

>> Ashley Goodall: And you then started off by drawing a list, drawing up a list and.

>> Ashley Goodall: Saying, well, what actually impairs people from doing their best work? Top of the list would be constant change and disruption.

>> Ashley Goodall: Top of the list.

>> Ashley Goodall: So, I think there’s room for a rethink of not only what we.

>> Ashley Goodall: Do in our organizations, but where those ideas come from, what we’re trying to solve for.

>> Ashley Goodall: We are not, I would argue, solving.

>> Ashley Goodall: For short term economic efficiency.

>> Ashley Goodall: We are solving for long term value and prosperity.

>> Ashley Goodall: And the second you say long term.

>> Ashley Goodall: You have to solve for humans, you.

>> Ashley Goodall: Have to solve for the people who are going to produce the innovation over by the way decades, most innovation isn’t done in a financial quarter. Most innovation isn’t done in a year either.

>> Ashley Goodall: I mean, we’re all, you know, desperately, trying to catch up with AI at the moment. but that wasn’t somebody that somebody started thinking about in 2023, to be clear. before that you can go back and look at, I don’t know, I think one of the things that’s massively.

>> Ashley Goodall: Changed our worlds is global positioning.

>> Ashley Goodall: And there’s a technology that took scientists in all sorts of different places decades.

>> Ashley Goodall: To come up with. Probably started, you could argue it started in the 1950s.

>> Ashley Goodall: So innovation is not a turn on.

>> Ashley Goodall: A dime thing, and it requires humans to contribute their best ideas. And there is an environment in which.

>> Ashley Goodall: That is easy, and there is an.

>> Ashley Goodall: Environment in which that is hard.

>> Ashley Goodall: My argument in a nutshell is that it’s probably not a horrible idea to try and create the environment in which it’s easy.

You discuss importance of acknowledging the employee’s voice in your new book

>> Craig Gould: Well, you know, I think one of the things that keeps demonstrating itself throughout the book is how important it is for employees to feel like they’re being heard. you know, you referred to terms, like learned helplessness and you know, lack of agency. Can you kind of touch on the importance of acknowledging the employee’s voice?

>> Ashley Goodall: I’m not sure I would say voice.

>> Ashley Goodall: I think the real thing is that when, at a human level, when the link between cause and effect is eroded, our, brains get scrambled. So if I’m doing something every day.

>> Ashley Goodall: Because I’ve been told this will make.

>> Ashley Goodall: Things better, and then somebody. And I can’t, but I can’t see that it makes things better, that’s really, really hard. If I’m doing something every day because.

>> Ashley Goodall: I’m told this is my m. Job.

>> Ashley Goodall: And this is make things better, but then someone else comes along and says.

>> Ashley Goodall: No, the opposite thing or a different.

>> Ashley Goodall: Thing will make things better. And the other thing you were doing actually didn’t think make things better.

>> Ashley Goodall: We see little erosions between my effort and some outcome in the world beyond me.

>> Ashley Goodall: And I think it is certainly from the, from the research I’ve done, it is fundamental to human sanity to be.

>> Ashley Goodall: Able to connect things we do with some impact, some change, some, Some bearing some friction on the world outside us.

>> Ashley Goodall: And that’s what we erode. so learned helplessness, of course, is a series of experiments that show that when you train an animal or a.

>> Ashley Goodall: Person that nothing they do makes a difference.

>> Ashley Goodall: In other words, that none of their.

>> Ashley Goodall: Actions has any impact on the world.

>> Ashley Goodall: Outside, then they Stop trying. so, yeah, you know, again, it’s.

>> Ashley Goodall: It’S about connecting the dots.

>> Ashley Goodall: What’s weird is that we go about.

>> Ashley Goodall: This because I think most of us.

>> Ashley Goodall: Have the seed of this idea that it’s, it’s, you know, it’s a healthy.

>> Ashley Goodall: Thing to be able to see I made a difference.

>> Ashley Goodall: I actually feel it’s more than healthy. It’s probably an essential thing to feel that I made a difference. now the way we typically go about this in large organizations is we.

>> Ashley Goodall: Tell people the difference that they’ve made at the scale of the organization, and we tell people the difference by putting it on a slide with worthy words. So we say the purpose of the organization is this. Now then you all happy because now everything you’re doing advances that purpose, doesn’t it?

>> Ashley Goodall: And it’s a lovely purpose and we’re all very excited about the purpose. And you should come to work because of the purpose.

>> Ashley Goodall: And there we go. Purpose is done. You now have meaningful work because we have written down for you the meaning of your work. But meaning isn’t one of those company level things we were talking about before.

>> Ashley Goodall: Meaning is a human level thing. Meaning is something that I arrive at for myself.

>> Ashley Goodall: I look at the world around me and go, what does my work mean to me?

>> Ashley Goodall: Now for me to do that, my.

>> Ashley Goodall: Work actually has to be coherent in some way.

>> Ashley Goodall: I’ve got to be able to see that I have some impact in the.

>> Ashley Goodall: In the world beyond me. But then once I’ve got some impact in the world beyond me, I determine what that means. I determine where the spiritual value is in that or the economic value or.

>> Ashley Goodall: The familial value or whatever matters. To me, it’s another case of it’s.

>> Ashley Goodall: Got to come down to the teams.

>> Ashley Goodall: and teams are a beautiful place to do this because you can see the impact of a team on other teams around it.

>> Ashley Goodall: And you can see the impact of.

>> Ashley Goodall: You within a team. You can see your colleagues can come.

>> Ashley Goodall: And say, thank you for doing X.

>> Ashley Goodall: Thank you for doing X is a beautiful piece of micro evidence of meaning, if you like, that you never get from a sort of statement of organizational purpose.

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Craig: You talk about the importance of one on one meetings with managers

Now back to our conversation.

>> Craig Gould: There was one part in the book that is closely related to what you were just discussing, where you were talking about the importance of the one on one meetings with the manager. And, it reminded me I have, someone close to me who recently changed jobs. And, at her last job, her manager was scheduled to have a one on one with her every week. But that would only happen probably once out of every four weeks. There was constant rescheduling, missing for one thing or another, and it was a source of sort of constant frustration. And you talk about that in the book, how important it is to maintain that obligation, to be able to provide that feedback so that the employee understands that, well, there are a lot of different benefits there. Correct?

>> Ashley Goodall: Yeah. And if you get really good at it, the thing that’s happening inside the one on one is not feedback, it’s attention. I mean, what we, what I’ve introduced at a couple of different large companies.

>> Ashley Goodall: Is, a weekly one on one where the agenda is driven by the.

>> Ashley Goodall: Employee, not by the team leader. So it’s not show up and pin back your ears and I’m going to.

>> Ashley Goodall: Read out my list of things for.

>> Ashley Goodall: You to do this week and my.

>> Ashley Goodall: Feedback on the things you did last week.

>> Ashley Goodall: And you’re going to write them all down and nod your head and do.

>> Ashley Goodall: The whole active listening thing that we.

>> Ashley Goodall: Were all taught to do so that I don’t get annoyed with you and.

>> Ashley Goodall: Then off you go.

>> Ashley Goodall: It’s not that. It is. Hey, Craig, thanks for, thanks for making the time.

>> Ashley Goodall: What are your priorities this week and how can I help with them? What other help do you need from me?

>> Ashley Goodall: And, what lit you up last week and what frustrated you last week?

Let’s talk about those two. Of the relationship between employee engagement and innovation

Let’s talk about those two. And it’s attention.

>> Ashley Goodall: It’s attention.

>> Ashley Goodall: It’s a series of questions where the employee goes, okay, this is my world and this is where I need somebody to check me and confirm I’m on the right track or somebody to move things out of the way. and once you understand it’s attention that we need not Feedback, attention. Then you understand why canceling three out of four of them is crazy making for somebody. Because when you get attention like that, it’s fabulous.

>> Ashley Goodall: You get half an hour of solo boss time. And it’s not focused on boss’s agenda.

>> Ashley Goodall: It’S focused on your agenda. That’s super helpful, super helpful, super energizing.

>> Ashley Goodall: Super motivating, super satisfying, and quite a lot of fun.

>> Ashley Goodall: So you get one of those and.

>> Ashley Goodall: Then you’re like, oh, that’ll be great. Well, next week I’ll take an, I’ll.

>> Ashley Goodall: Keep some notes and I’ll prepare for next week’s and I’ll have some more list of things for my, my boss.

>> Ashley Goodall: and then the day before it’s canceled, and you’re like, well, okay, so.

>> Ashley Goodall: You do the next thing, the same thing the next week, and again it’s canceled. And sooner or later, again, you start phoning it in.

>> Ashley Goodall: At Cisco, we quantify this in terms.

>> Ashley Goodall: Of the relationship between employee engagement and.

>> Ashley Goodall: The frequency of a check in conversation. And what we found was that once.

>> Ashley Goodall: Every three weeks is sort of flat. Engagement neither goes up nor down.

>> Ashley Goodall: once every two weeks it goes up once every week. It goes up a lot.

>> Ashley Goodall: And here’s the weird one, especially with.

>> Ashley Goodall: Regard to the example you gave. Every four weeks it goes down.

>> Ashley Goodall: So you are better off as a team leader, not having one on.

>> Ashley Goodall: Ones than you are doing monthly one on ones. Because monthly one on ones annoy people for the intervening three weeks. And the annoyance outweighs the value of.

>> Ashley Goodall: The check in in the first place.

>> Ashley Goodall: And frequency is the thing, not just.

>> Ashley Goodall: In one on one conversations.

>> Ashley Goodall: Frequency, frequency of rhythm of event is.

>> Ashley Goodall: A thing in, in human psychological health. That’s why we like rituals. It’s why we’re like knowing that a.

>> Ashley Goodall: Weekend is a thing.

>> Ashley Goodall: Like, there’s no, If you look at divisions of time.

>> Ashley Goodall: Years and months and days all come from the heavens. Weeks don’t. We made weeks up. There’s nothing astronomical that happens on a weekly basis. But seven days with one or two days of rest at the end, seems to work really well for humans. It gives us a rhythm, it gives life a periodicity. Those things seem to be very psychologically healthy for us. So there are all sorts of things.

>> Ashley Goodall: That live according to rhythms. And one of them, when you, when you think about attention to me at.

>> Ashley Goodall: Work as the product of a ritual.

>> Ashley Goodall: A rhythm, you realize that it’s very.

>> Ashley Goodall: Helpful because attention has a half life.

>> Ashley Goodall: And you know, again, your boss has one check in with you and it’s Magnificent. And then ignores you for three weeks. You spend the three weeks resenting your boss and working maybe a little bit.

>> Ashley Goodall: Less hard, certainly being less engaged in your work.

>> Ashley Goodall: So, rhythm is a rhythm, and frequency and periodicity are a beautiful thing. And then maybe the last thing to say about all of that is that that is not a constraint on innovation.

>> Ashley Goodall: That is a foundation for innovation.

>> Ashley Goodall: if you pick the most sort.

>> Ashley Goodall: Of stereotypical but also probably important example.

>> Ashley Goodall: Of innovation, in American corporate history.

>> Ashley Goodall: You finish up looking at Lockheed Martin.

>> Ashley Goodall: And the development of the Blackbird, you know, the first sort of stealth spy plane, first deploying, first use, creation of stealth technology and a thing that went at three times the speed of sound.

>> Ashley Goodall: How did they create that thing? What they did is they took some engineers and put them in a thing that they came to be called the Skunk Works. And they had a separate building, separate resources, separate management, and all sorts of stability.

>> Ashley Goodall: They said essentially corporate life is inimical to innovation.

>> Ashley Goodall: So we need you to protect, be protected from us, from the rest of us. We need to take you away from us, otherwise you won’t be able to do breakthrough work.

>> Ashley Goodall: This is the opposite thinking of how we think about innovation today, where we.

>> Ashley Goodall: Think, if I leave you alone, you’ll sit there and do nothing.

>> Ashley Goodall: But if I prod you, with great frequency and increasing energy to be.

>> Ashley Goodall: You know, move fast and break things and turn things on the head and.

>> Ashley Goodall: You know, shake stuff up, then you will somehow produce innovation. that’s actually not how innovation works and it’s not how humans work.

>> Craig Gould: Yeah.

There is a phenomenon called decision fatigue where people get tired of making decisions

I found a really interesting conversation in your book, the conversation about routines. And I don’t think I’d ever really thought about the importance of routines in terms of, it allows more room in my working memory to be able to process things right. In terms of a computer. It’s freeing up, my RAM to be able to handle more tasks on my desktop because, you know, if I relocate, if I’m, you know, if I’m taking on a new job, there’s so much of the new that’s, taking up my working memory that there’s no capacity left for other things, the things that are most important. Right. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of just routines?

>> Ashley Goodall: I mean, you said it very well. when you don’t have to decide every day anew, from opening your eyes in the morning what sequence you’re going to get ready for work, how.

>> Ashley Goodall: You’Re going to choose your outfit for.

>> Ashley Goodall: The day, how you’re going to get.

>> Ashley Goodall: To work today, Am I going to.

>> Ashley Goodall: Drive or take the plane or have my personal helicopter come and pick me up or cycle or hang glide?

>> Ashley Goodall: You don’t have to think about any of those things.

>> Ashley Goodall: Am I going to have coffee in the morning or tea, or am I going to have breakfast?

>> Ashley Goodall: If you, you know, my, my favorite example of this is actually the number of things, the number of choices that.

>> Ashley Goodall: You make on a daily basis between.

>> Ashley Goodall: Opening your eyes and sitting down to work, whether you work at an office.

>> Ashley Goodall: Or at a home office.

>> Ashley Goodall: And if you actually wrote a list.

>> Ashley Goodall: Of all of those, it would be a big, long list of decisions to make.

>> Ashley Goodall: There is a thing called decision fatigue. people have discovered, for example, that parole boards are more lenient at the end of a session than at the beginning of a session. So you want your case for parole to come up just before lunch or.

>> Ashley Goodall: Just at the, just at the very end of the day because it’s just, they get tired of making, they get.

>> Ashley Goodall: Tired of making decisions. So there is a thing called decision fatigue. And if you think about the number of decisions in a day that we automate, or even just between opening our.

>> Ashley Goodall: Eyes and showing up at work, there’s.

>> Ashley Goodall: A lot of decisions.

>> Ashley Goodall: So if you’re not having to answer.

>> Ashley Goodall: All of those questions for yourself on.

>> Ashley Goodall: A daily basis because you have your beautiful phrase morning routine, that makes things easier, that shows up at work as well.

>> Ashley Goodall: We don’t show up at work on our team on a Monday and go, should we have a staff meeting this week? What day should we have it on? Who should be invited? What should be on the agenda? You have a staff meeting.

>> Ashley Goodall: It happens on Wednesdays. We do it on every, we do.

>> Ashley Goodall: It every Wednesday at noon or whatever. And these people come and this is the agenda. So that’s another piece of architecture that we don’t have to design for ourselves every single time. Do I have a one on one with my boss this week, this month, this year? Does my boss do one on ones? I don’t know. What’s Monday’s choice? Let’s decide it again on Tuesday. Let’s decide it again on Wednesday.

>> Ashley Goodall: You don’t work like this.

>> Ashley Goodall: So there are certain ways in which.

>> Ashley Goodall: Having a bit of a, social.

>> Ashley Goodall: Architecture and an architecture of interaction frees.

>> Ashley Goodall: Your, frees your mind up. And again, it’s not just that you don’t have to decide, but it’s also.

>> Ashley Goodall: That you can look out in the future and know it will come round again. And know it will come round again. Ness is really, really helpful because then when you have a thought for your boss, you don’t have to send the email to your boss, you can write it on the list for the check in.

>> Ashley Goodall: And then when you have a thing.

>> Ashley Goodall: To share with the team, you don’t have to spam the team with the.

>> Ashley Goodall: Whole thing that they’ve all got to.

>> Ashley Goodall: Read and be interrupted.

>> Ashley Goodall: You can save it for the team meeting.

>> Ashley Goodall: So it allows us to create containers for interactions.

>> Ashley Goodall: So it’s not just reducing the decision.

>> Ashley Goodall: Load, it’s having these future containers where you go, oh, this goes in this, this goes in this, this goes in.

>> Ashley Goodall: This, this goes in this.

>> Ashley Goodall: Now, if I have an exception to all of those now I can get.

>> Ashley Goodall: Into email or IM or ping someone or whatever. it provides structure for collaboration and collaboration.

>> Ashley Goodall: You know, we tend to think of.

>> Ashley Goodall: Collaboration as something that is necessarily free form, but I actually think it’s something.

>> Ashley Goodall: That benefits very much from a little structure, not of thought, not of contribution, not of idea, but of where those.

>> Ashley Goodall: Things will be shared and presented and wrestled with and shaped.

>> Craig Gould: I remember back during the financial crisis, unemployment was high, money was tight. And, I remember walking into a Starbucks and the marketing signage that they had put on the window outside was take comfort in rituals. And I always thought that was a really astute observation that, you know, hey, it was as if they understood, you know, money’s tight, you’re going to be choosing to pinch pennies, but you need to invest in rituals. And I thought it was really clever that they were tapping into that.

>> Ashley Goodall: Yeah, I mean, that’s, that, that’s, there’s beauty, and it’s a very human sort of beauty.

>> Ashley Goodall: Take comfort in rituals.

People who were working from home during the pandemic say this is normal

>> Ashley Goodall: The other, I mean, the other interesting.

>> Ashley Goodall: Linguistic thing that happened in the pandemic.

>> Ashley Goodall: Was when we all started working from.

>> Ashley Goodall: Home full time, or those of us.

>> Ashley Goodall: Who were, working from home full time, people said, this is the new normal.

>> Ashley Goodall: And of course, no one knew.

>> Ashley Goodall: You couldn’t possibly opine in, I don’t know, April, May, June of 2020, whether the pandemic was going to last forever.

>> Ashley Goodall: Or whether it’s going to last for.

>> Ashley Goodall: Another four weeks and whether people will go back to the office or not.

>> Ashley Goodall: You couldn’t possibly opine. But everyone was like, no, this is the new normal. And that is, again, a reach for.

>> Ashley Goodall: Certainty, a reach for.

>> Ashley Goodall: If we tell ourselves that this is the new normal, then we can all.

>> Ashley Goodall: Adjust our minds to it and then.

>> Ashley Goodall: We can get back to work.

>> Ashley Goodall: Whereas if somebody says, no, this might.

>> Ashley Goodall: Not be the new normal, it might.

>> Ashley Goodall: Change again, and it might change again, and it might change again.

>> Ashley Goodall: Then it’s very difficult for people to.

>> Ashley Goodall: Go, all right, I can’t get back to work because where am I going to be working? I don’t know, is it what’s what? So there is a, you can.

>> Ashley Goodall: See in all of these little expressions, embrace ritual. This is the new normal.

>> Ashley Goodall: You can see this yearning for stability.

>> Ashley Goodall: Stability is a foundation for health. And stability, in a way, is a foundation for contribution. You can get back to doing what you do. It’s okay, here’s the container for it. Here is the shape of the world. Worry less about the shape of the world. It’s fine.

>> Ashley Goodall: Those are, ah, that, that’s what people are trying to say to other people.

>> Ashley Goodall: And it is an implicit recognition of.

>> Ashley Goodall: The colossal value of stability, the essential.

>> Ashley Goodall: Nature of stability to human contribution.

>> Craig Gould: Towards the end of the book, in the summation of all this, you talk about this sort of Venn diagram of two circles. People focus, performance, focus. And we think of those circles as not touching, barely touching. It’d be great if there was a larger amount of overlap. But it just really becomes obvious the awkward place that human resources often finds itself where it’s sitting outside of this structure. My wife was speaking with somebody once who is a human resources professional and was like, oh, I think I would, I think I might like human resources. And the person was like, I don’t know if you would, because you, you really can’t be anyone’s friend.

There’s a tension between what humans want at work and what the business wants

Can you tell me about the awkward place that this third state that human resources finds itself.

>> Ashley Goodall: So it starts by, and you know, here’s, here’s the, here’s what I hope feels like an insight, that.

>> Ashley Goodall: The interests of a business and the interests of the people in the business.

>> Ashley Goodall: The human interests of the people in the business are not one and the same thing. So the way, again, the way we.

>> Ashley Goodall: Tend to think about organizations is there is a bunch of economic interests, there’s a bunch of fiduciary, Judas duty to shareholders, there’s a bunch of company level things. And everything in the company exists to.

>> Ashley Goodall: Serve those and everything.

>> Ashley Goodall: And it is in everybody’s interest to do nothing but serve those things.

>> Ashley Goodall: So there’s this big. And in the book, I say you.

>> Ashley Goodall: Can call this the first circle. This is the circle of company interests.

>> Ashley Goodall: And we’re all here to serve those. But then you quickly realize that actually if you think about human interests and human interests at work, that there are some things which actually aren’t very much.

>> Ashley Goodall: In the Interests of the company. People like to go home at the end of the day now our employers.

>> Ashley Goodall: Have now given us cell phones so they can reach us 24 7. But, you know, back when I came up and I was doing my customer.

>> Ashley Goodall: Service job that we talked about at.

>> Ashley Goodall: The beginning of our conversation, at 5.

>> Ashley Goodall: O’Clock, somebody shut the phones off and everyone went to the bus and got.

>> Ashley Goodall: And went home and that was it.

>> Ashley Goodall: And that was lovely. That was massively not in the interests of our employer. If the employer could have had us work 247 and not had to stop.

>> Ashley Goodall: Work, obviously they would have done that. But there’s a recognition that, okay, there’s.

>> Ashley Goodall: Some human stuff and we’ve got to.

>> Ashley Goodall: Take account of the human stuff. We sort of say to ourselves in.

>> Ashley Goodall: Broad terms, you know what, the fact that the human interests and the business interests aren’t completely aligned, we will address.

>> Ashley Goodall: That by paying people and we compensate you.

>> Ashley Goodall: And it’s compensation for the fact that there’s some stuff here which isn’t really in your interests, but having money is in your interest. So we’re going to sort of balance all of that stuff out.

>> Ashley Goodall: Then you come to HR and you.

>> Ashley Goodall: Go, all right, in this world, the interests of the business or the interests of the humans, where’s HR sit in that? And for the most part, hr, ah.

>> Ashley Goodall: Ah, has been told by the business and has come to believe that it exists to advance the people.

>> Ashley Goodall: Elements of the business interest do the peopley stuff in the first circle.

>> Ashley Goodall: So when the business says it’s in.

>> Ashley Goodall: Our interest to cut labor costs, we’re going to lay off a thousand people. It’s HR’s job to make sure that that’s done humanely if you like, or efficiently or without breaking labor laws.

>> Ashley Goodall: this I think is why the friend in your story said, people.

>> Ashley Goodall: Aren’T necessarily going to like you if.

>> Ashley Goodall: You’Re in HR because you’re the, execution arm of a bunch of business.

>> Ashley Goodall: Interests that sometimes are, ah, in marked conflict with human interests.

>> Ashley Goodall: So that’s the first thing. There’s a tension between what humans want at work and what the business wants.

>> Ashley Goodall: But then the second thing, and I.

>> Ashley Goodall: Think this is where all the magic is, is there’s an overlap between human interests and business interests.

>> Ashley Goodall: There are some things that make people.

>> Ashley Goodall: Joyful, that also make businesses better.

>> Ashley Goodall: We’ve talked about innovation. People love coming up with new ideas. It makes us happy. It makes us feel like, oh my.

>> Ashley Goodall: Goodness me, again, there’s a connection.

>> Ashley Goodall: Between a thing I did and some.

>> Ashley Goodall: Impact out in the world.

>> Ashley Goodall: And I can see my idea could strengthen that connection. I could contribute. That would be lovely.

>> Ashley Goodall: I’ve come up with a new way of doing this.

>> Ashley Goodall: Wonderful.

>> Ashley Goodall: Every business wants people who come up with new ways of doing things. People like to grow their skills.

>> Ashley Goodall: There is, there are few things more psychologically rewarding as getting better at something. That’s a, that’s a remarkable feeling.

>> Ashley Goodall: To have, a remarkable piece, of awareness about yourself, that you are a machine, if you like, that can grow.

>> Ashley Goodall: You are a muscle that can be strengthened.

>> Ashley Goodall: That’s enormously, that’s a wonderful feeling to have. And of course businesses love people who.

>> Ashley Goodall: Get better at doing their jobs because look, we don’t have to hire other people who are better at your job than you are. You are now better at your job than old you was.

>> Ashley Goodall: people love being part of teams.

>> Ashley Goodall: People love being part of little communities of belonging and reinforcing and support and social connection.

>> Ashley Goodall: And companies are smart enough to realize.

>> Ashley Goodall: That if they don’t have good teams.

>> Ashley Goodall: They don’t have good anything.

>> Ashley Goodall: So there are some things that are.

>> Ashley Goodall: In the human interest and the business interest. And my argument is that HR hasn’t made enough of a priority to address.

>> Ashley Goodall: Those things, to understand those things, to advocate for those things, to preserve those things at the expense of things that are only in the interest of the business.

>> Ashley Goodall: Because one of the things that isn’t.

>> Ashley Goodall: In the intersection is constant change.

>> Ashley Goodall: Constant change detracts from human contribution. but stability, ritual, predictability are actually.

>> Ashley Goodall: The foundation for a whole bunch of things that are very good for the business.

>> Ashley Goodall: And they’re good for the business because.

>> Ashley Goodall: They are also good for the humans in the business and help us do our work.

Given your experience as SVP of methods and intelligence at Cisco, I imagine you have opinions

>> Craig Gould: Given your experience as SVP of methods and intelligence at Cisco, I imagine you have opinions about the best practices for, gathering and analyzing data from your own employees.

>> Ashley Goodall: Yeah, I can give you some thoughts.

>> Ashley Goodall: About what’s not a best practice. Just to start off, we’re having this conversation in election season.

>> Ashley Goodall: There is an awful lot of opinion.

>> Ashley Goodall: Polling going on right now. And I don’t want to get into the niceties of political opinion polling, but.

>> Ashley Goodall: I’ll tell you what, the salient features.

>> Ashley Goodall: From a, ah, information gathering from a data reliability perspective are of opinion polling. you do not poll 300 plus million citizens of the United States.

>> Ashley Goodall: When poll, you poll about a thousand of them.

>> Ashley Goodall: And then the art of polling is.

>> Ashley Goodall: To make sure that the thousand you speak to are in some way a reliable microcosm of the 300 million you didn’t speak to.

>> Ashley Goodall: That’s how opinion polling works. And because it is, it uses this.

>> Ashley Goodall: We take a small sample that we.

>> Ashley Goodall: Hope is representative of the big.

>> Ashley Goodall: You can do it very quickly so you can have ongoing halts.

>> Ashley Goodall: Now here’s how we do this at work. We go, we were a little.

>> Ashley Goodall: Bit confused about the thousand person thing. We want all our employees to answer.

>> Ashley Goodall: The annual engagement survey.

>> Ashley Goodall: So clearly we can only do it.

>> Ashley Goodall: Once a year because it’s a big effort to get everybody to answer the thing. but anyway, we’ll have a big. And because we’re only going to do it once a year, we’re going.

>> Ashley Goodall: To have a big long list of questions. So we’ll have 60 questions. We’ll launch them in the fall.

>> Ashley Goodall: It’ll take us three months to harangue.

>> Ashley Goodall: Everybody to respond to the questionnaire. In the end we’ll get half the.

>> Ashley Goodall: People and we’ll go, that’s pretty good. And then we’ll do the analysis and.

>> Ashley Goodall: Then we’ll show the results.

>> Ashley Goodall: And in March your team leader gets a call saying the engagement of your team is this.

>> Ashley Goodall: And they go, well, it’s not this. It was this in the fall when you started. But since then 82 things have happened. And so what you’re telling me is.

>> Ashley Goodall: You’Re giving me six months ago history when you do it one year over year, year over year, all the team leaders have changed because we love changing stuff up. the economic environment has changed, the teams have changed. It’s, it’s a very, again, it’s another one of these things where constant light touch frequency is super valuable and is.

>> Ashley Goodall: Much more valuable than massive, in depth, unwieldy thing.

>> Ashley Goodall: So the way that, the way that.

>> Ashley Goodall: We did this at Cisco was we.

>> Ashley Goodall: Took the approach, the polling approach and.

>> Ashley Goodall: Applied it to sentiment surveys.

>> Ashley Goodall: So we would have a 3,000 person sample of the organization, which at the time was about 75,000 people.

>> Ashley Goodall: So a fraction of the organization that we chose for representativeness.

>> Ashley Goodall: And we would go to go to.

>> Ashley Goodall: Them and we would oversample a little.

>> Ashley Goodall: Bit so that if we got 2,000 responses, we could make sure we chose the 2,000 that were a microcosm in.

>> Ashley Goodall: Demographic terms of the entire organization. And you could get an engagement survey every quarter or every month or every how often you wanted to ping 3000 people and ask them to respond to a survey.

>> Ashley Goodall: And you know, there were enough.

>> Ashley Goodall: Groups of 3,000 people in the organization.

>> Ashley Goodall: That you didn’t need to trouble anyone more than once a year and you.

>> Ashley Goodall: Could get an ongoing sense of it.

>> Ashley Goodall: and then the other, the other.

>> Ashley Goodall: Thing that got really, really interesting, and I think probably there’s much more to.

>> Ashley Goodall: Be done here, is that, with the advent of machine learning, and a little bit AI, but there was a lot of machine learning in this. You can actually have, a system that will analyze open text responses.

>> Ashley Goodall: So you can say to people, you give people a text box and say.

>> Ashley Goodall: Describe your relationship with your boss and they type. And you can have a piece of.

>> Ashley Goodall: Analysis, look at whether the sentiment in.

>> Ashley Goodall: There is positive or negative and certain.

>> Ashley Goodall: Other characteristics for how somebody is feeling expressed in their words. so from a very small sample.

>> Ashley Goodall: In other words, you can get a very rich collection of data, but the.

>> Ashley Goodall: Only way you get there is to give up the big, long annual thing.

>> Ashley Goodall: And get to the small, local, but representative, frequent thing.

Ashley says she has one good idea about every four years

>> Craig Gould: Well, Ashley, I really appreciate your time today. The book the Problem with Change and the Essential Nature of Human Performance is available wherever people buy their books. And this has been a great conversation. And is there another book on the horizon, Ashley?

>> Ashley Goodall: Oh, it’s funny, people have asked me that question and I’ll tell you what I feel, My feeling in response to that is that, I come up.

>> Ashley Goodall: With one good idea about every four years.

>> Ashley Goodall: And, you know, we sort of.

>> Ashley Goodall: Talk about ideas and innovation as though.

>> Ashley Goodall: You can just sort of crank the handle and out they come. I’ve never found that to be true for me.

>> Ashley Goodall: I’ve probably had in the course of.

>> Ashley Goodall: My career, eight really good ideas. And so it might be a while.

>> Ashley Goodall: Before the next one comes along and I can write about it.

>> Ashley Goodall: But if it does, I would love to, because I love, I love putting.

>> Ashley Goodall: Thoughts into words and the discipline that.

>> Ashley Goodall: That forces on you to be clear in your thinking. And that’s something I enjoy doing very much.

>> Craig Gould: Well, I hope it’s not four years before we speak again, but I really appreciate you joining us today.

>> Ashley Goodall: Thanks for having me.

This has been Master Move. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast

>> Craig Gould: This has been Master Move. I’m Craig Gould and I’ve been your host. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an interview with another inspiring leader. And if you’re looking for more exploration, exclusive content and behind the scenes insights, check out MasterMove IE for additional resources, premium articles, premium episodes, and more. I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s conversation, so feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me a line at craigastermove IO until next time. Remember, leadership isn’t just about making decisions.

>> Craig Gould: It’s about making moves that matter.

>> Craig Gould: Master move.