#98: How We Can Think Differently About The Workplace By Listening to Our Youngest Talent
Reflections on What The Next Generation of Talent Wants Out of Work and Careers
Hello, and welcome to this week’s Edition of the Work in Progress Newsletter. If you’re new here, drop me a line and tell me who you are, what you do, and how work is going for you right now!
Here is what’s on tap for this week’s newsletter:
What Young Professionals Want Out of Their Careers and Employers
What I’m Following
🏢What Young Professionals Want Out of Their Careers and Employers🏢
As I mentioned in my previous newsletter, I spent the entire week in Austin, Texas attending the AICPA’s Future of Finance Summit. The Summit brought together Finance leaders from 80 companies committed to advancing the finance and accounting profession and sharing knowledge, ideas, and opportunities to help build best in class finance organizations.
The AICPA and specifically the Advisory committee planning the event has been polling their members about their top business challenges over the course of the year, and starting in mid-2021, talent started coming up as the top challenge.
That challenge around talent hasn’t waned, if anything, it’s increased in 2022. In addition to a number of presentations on issues and priorities facing CFOs and Finance leaders, there were a number of sessions dedicated solely to the future of work, and the topic of talent.
I was able to moderate a panel with three young professionals in the finance profession about what they are looking for out of their career, their employer, and their profession, as well as their general attitudes and preferences regarding the workplace today.
One of the points I was able to make in my panel was great ideas can come from anywhere, whether you’re the Gen Z analyst just hired out of school all the way up to the CEO.
And between the thoughtful and prescriptive answers from the three panelists as well as the thoughtful questions from the audience really proved this point. Below, you can see the incredible visual drawing that the graphic illustrator & facilitator put together that highlights some of the key themes and talking points from our hour long discussion.
We covered everything from hybrid work, work-life balance, learning and development, what makes a great manager, career development remote vs in-office, what we want out of leaders, and anything else in between. There isn’t a shortage of ideas about ways in which we can solve these challenges, not just to attract the next generation of talent, but to truly make the workplace better for more people so they can contribute to the business in a meaningful way.
So if great ideas can come from anywhere in your organization whether you’re the new hire or the CFO, how do we take a hold of these and make them happen?
In our opening keynote, Kerry Brown, provided us with a nice and simple framework of Listen. Look. Act. On the listen front, it means not only accepting feedback and specific insights, but actually making sure you are doing something with them.
Furthermore, I also encouraged the audience of leaders in my session about the importance of perspective taking. When you’re a leader making decisions on policies and programs that impact people who often have a different set of calculus and needs than you, it can be easy to miss the forest through the trees. But it’s really important to actually use a significant amount of empathy to truly understand not just what people are telling you, but how that makes sense given their set of constraints, priorities, and wishes.
On the Act piece, we had the privilege of hearing from Pascal Finette and Jeffrey Rogers, who encouraged us to embrace agile principles when we move from strategy to execution of new ideas, especially around iterative development and feedback loops. Trying to solve retaining talent in one fell swoop seems insurmountable, but building in some small experiments, testing them, getting feedback and building new improvements on top of them is a much more progressive approach to solving this challenge.
As you can see from the image above, Finance leaders face no shortage of challenges with respect to the workplace and attracting and retaining talent. But after 3 days of learning, knowledge sharing, relationship building and creative problem solving I’m optimistic about what these individuals can take home to inspire change and improvement in their own organizations, which leads me back to the youngest generation, Gen Z.
I can’t help but not be inspired and cognizant on how the newest generation in the workforce is pushing all of us to think differently about how we see the workplace, organizations, and leadership.
Generations are the byproduct of what they observe and see growing up, and Gen Z certainly has seen some things, ranging from the Great Financial Crisis, proliferation of college & student debt, COVID-19, mental health issues, and more.
While they may not be as experienced or have as much knowledge on some of the constraints and realities of the world and workplace, I would argue that is exactly why we should be listening to them, hearing their perspectives, and thinking about how we can integrate their thoughts and ideas especially on how we approach the workplace, careers, and learning and development.
We’ve been working with the same mental models and frameworks of workplace and leadership for decades. If we truly believe that we must continue to evolve our products & services to meet the changing market, the same must be said for how we lead organizations, develop people, and promote career growth.
Alberti Einstein once said, “you can’t use an old map to explore a new world.” Gen Z Talent is helping us build the new map, and if we listen, learn and act on what they are telling us, perhaps we can build a better future of work for all of us.
👀 What I’m Following 👀
🕶 Managers: How Kraft Heinz Boosted Manager Training (HR Brew)
Manager training is a hot topic these days in the learning and development and leadership development world. I’m going to be exploring this topic in depth in 2023, but for now, this is a good short case study on how Kraft Heinz developed a new approach to manager training that included bite sized chunks of learning, tech enabled solutions, and an emphasis on coaching. All of these are common themes in manager training programs I look at today
🕶 Talent Development: The Critical Role of Talent Development (Edge of Work Podcast) This week, I spoke to Ann Parker, Associate Director for the Association For Talent Development (ATD) - Ann runs programs for senior talent leaders who are members of ATD, and it was great to hear from her about some of the trends and themes she’s seeing amongst talent development leaders
🕶 Retaining Talent: Talent in a Changing Market: What Now? (Mckinsey Talks Talent)
McKinsey has some of the most robust writers and researchers on talent issues out there, and a handful of them got together and did a quick podcast about some of the talent challenges companies are facing in a fluxy world. If you listen in to some of their client examples, you’ll realize that while some of the solutions to these challenges are not flashy or new, (ex: paying more, flexible shifts) they can actually make a huge difference.
🕶 Leadership: Defining Your Own Agency and Career Success (Sustainable Ambition Podcast)
I had the privilege of going on Kathy Oneto’s Sustainable Ambition podcast for the 2nd time this year. This was a thoughtful and deep conversation about my journey to defining my own version of success, and some of our thoughts on how leaders can help their employees think more expansively about how they develop their careers
🕶 Leadership: How Busy People Can Develop Leadership Skills (HBR)
I love a good leadership development program more than most, but finding time to develop leadership skills if you’re an informal or formal leader doesn’t always have to be a grand event. This article gives some suggestions on how if time is your constraint how you still can continue to develop as a leader
🕶 Leadership: Why Leaders Struggle with Collaboration (HBR)
Across my work in corporate and higher education, collaboration has been one of the top topics for training and workshops this year. It’s essential to pretty much any white collar knowledge worker job these days. But simply just expecting leaders, formal or informal to collaborate doesn’t just work, you actually have to be pretty intentional about how you structure it and do it. This article walks through some of the challenges, and how to do it right.
Thanks For Reading!
Hi, I’m Al Dea. I’m the writer of the Work In Progress newsletter and a speaker, consultant, and facilitator. I help companies make sense of emerging workplace trends to attract and retain talent and then work alongside to train their employees to be human-first managers and leaders.
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