Manager Effectiveness: How To Upskill Your Managers at Scale To Drive Performance

So we've got a really great agenda plan today. But as a, as a quick intro, uh, you know, my name's Dave and I, we built KC because relationships are really at the core of learning talent opportunities, career paths. Uh, and there's something that are so important for people managers to have relationships, to knowledge share. And, uh, we built KC to help organizations build, manage, and scale the right type of relationships to learn and share from each other. And with people managers, I think we've all seen the reports, especially in the last months where it's the year of the people manager. And we often joke, it's probably not just the year, it's probably gonna be the decade of the people manager, where we really have to figure out how to enable people to drive high performing teams. And when we think about, you know, what actually create really great, uh, people, managers, so much of that is knowledge sharing, institutional knowledge sharing, connection, community, creating relationships. And that's what we've been innovating on with so many of the familiar logos that you see here and with people like Tiffany. And so excited to share some of, uh, really tactical takeaways, best practices and innovations with everybody here for how you can enhance and enable your people manager programs to make it not only the year, but hopefully the decade of people, managers at your organization by helping them with the experiences that, that make them so successful. Uh, when we think about people manager experiences that, you know, there's, there's so many different types of, uh, social learning, connection, relationship type experiences that, that you can add into your talent and learning programs. These are just a few of the examples that we'll probably touch on in, in some way, shape, or form. That KC is of course, offering and continuously innovating on where you can think about those learning and talent programs and how to enhance them with these types of experiences so that you can make the year or the decade of people, managers a success at, at your organization. And so with that, I wanted to, uh, have our panelists say a, a quick hello, but I'll do an, an intro first. Um, so first we have Brian Elliott, uh, I think based in San Francisco today, um, and is an author of the book that you can all take away, um, but has also played, uh, a really exciting role at both Slack and Google, running some really core businesses. And so I like to say that Brian, although knows so much about culture, has actually run many, uh, businesses at some of the biggest organizations in the world, uh, and has been a real business partner with talent and learning leaders. So, welcome Brian to the virtual stage. And then we've got Tiffany and I, uh, where do I begin with Tiffany, because she's somebody that was, uh, coffee chats that I've had since we built KC brainstorming some of our earliest feature sets, many, many moons ago at RBC, which is one of the biggest banks in the world and is now leading talent and learning and development at MLSE, which she'll be familiar with the Toronto Raptors, Toronto beliefs, uh, Tiffany, uh, and, and a few other sports teams. But Tiffany now leads their talent practices and has been innovating a ton around making people, managers and leaders successful. And a big part of that is around community connection and the outside of the classroom experience. Uh, so we'll be able to pick her brain on that. So welcome to the virtual stage. Uh, Tiffany, Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here. So just to set some context and, uh, would, as we go through this, we are gonna provide the audience of an opportunity for questions. So if you do have questions or wanna jump in, please use the q and a feature or, or the chat feature. I've got. I'll be looking at my phone here and there. I've got, uh, a live feed of questions coming in from Giselle. So, uh, ask those questions, jump in and always enjoy the banter, uh, virtually in these conversations. Uh, as I shared earlier, we've seen no shortage of reports from the biggest org biggest research organizations telling us it's time for us to prioritize people, managers. It's critical to managing all the change and transformation that's happened in every organization. Uh, and here's just a few kind of jarring stats that, uh, help us really show why we have to think about our People Manager Pathways, the learning and talent programs that make them successful, and look at how we can enhance and enable those with the experiences that actually create outcomes. Uh, I think one of the, the most important stats is when we think about retention of top skills and talent really comes down to whether managers are ready and enabled to make high performing teams. A lot of organizations have people manager programs and they're doing amazing work. But when we think of what are the experiences like what a , model, how do we enhance the % of people manager experiences with the %, the social learning, connection, relationships, mentors, pairings with others so that beyond the classroom, we're creating the right types of collisions and experiences that help actually create action and, and put knowledge into practice. Um, so by no means are people manager programs not working or not great. I don't wanna ever leave that impression, but there's just a new opportunity to leverage technology to enhance and scale the types of % experiences that, that make those effective. And to also make those developmental experiences and interactions with colleagues actually measurable and create visibility and kind of enablement around those just like we did with the % over the last few years. And so I think that's one of the main areas that we're gonna touch on today, is how to elevate those programs with things that drive institutional knowledge, continuous learning, and create efficiency and scale. From an institutional knowledge perspective, % of workplace learning happens through interna interactions with peers and, and colleagues. So a huge portion of actual learning enablement happen in ways that maybe traditional l and d tactics couldn't create. But now with technology like, uh, platforms like kc, you can scale those experiences just like you scaled the delivery of formal learning. Creating continuous learning is also really important where it actually helps increase the ability to innovate and navigate all of the change. And lastly, I think all of us are probably feeling the leanness of our teams and how we need to find ways to be more efficient, reach more people with a much smaller team, um, but leveraging technology, AI, and ML to create the right connection, create the right pathways around social learning, um, can help companies save up to % of their training costs by actually incorporating things like peer-to-peer connection, uh, and, and those beyond the classroom experiences. So lots of innovation happening and we'll touch on some of the best practices for how those are are taking place, but hopefully you can all get inspired with, with these. And of course, if you all wanna follow up, um, with Tiffany or Brian or or our team to, to get the real plays on these, we're always happy to do so. Um, so with that, I'll stop sharing and, uh, maybe we will just launch the first poll question. 'cause it's always nice to get a sense of where everybody's at in the audience. Uh, and so we'll, we'll launch this first poll question and, um, in the meantime, maybe as a, as a kickoff point, and we'll have Tiffany start and then Brian go next. Tiffany, we'd love to get your, just like state of the nation on what you are doing around people manager and leader enablement and, uh, just the, the state of the nation on that front. And then Brian, I'll pass it over to you and what you're seeing with the many organizations that you're working with. It's interesting. And, and thanks Dave for setting the context. Um, I found actually the most interesting percentage that you shared there was that the % haven't received training. And a big one for us is actually what do they perceive training to look like? What does learning and development look like to managers and more broadly employees? Because, um, from my perspective, that's a great starting point. And what we've been trying to do is talk about this growth mindset and talk about learning and development and dispel this notion that everything happens in the classroom. And you mentioned that sort of model that's really been where we've been leaning in, in, how do you say you're %, we can provide that formal training, but how are you learning in your every day and incorporating this? And we talk work life balance. What a, what element of learning, um, is included in that and how do you think about learning and development every day? And now I'm a bit of a nerd about this. I've, my team made me a shirt that's like, if you're not learning, you're not living. And I wear it proudly, um, because I do believe that we need to talk more about that. So that stat around % haven't received training. I would argue, well, is it that we've defined training as that % rather than actually blowing that up a bit to look at that social learning element and coaching and continuous feedback. And I think that's probably the case that we just have to redefine what that looks like. But manager effectiveness, it's not, it's interesting 'cause you see a lot of new white papers, it's not necessarily a new problem, right? Or a new challenge that organizations are seeing. There's two issues that kind of combine with this manager population, which is sort of the, the real meat of your organization is you've got this huge population of culture champions or potential culture champions and leaders of change. Their influence can be really powerful, but how do you create, um, programming that is scalable but also sustainable? Right? And again, that's why I mentioned the definition of learning because that's where that sustainability comes in. Because if you think training is just gonna happen in the classroom and then you don't see it again, you think, well, that was once and done, but it's never once and done, right? It is always a continuous learning, you know, uh, mechanism in place thinking about that growth mindset. I think right now though, what I'm seeing is you're managing hybrid teams and how leaders do that while mitigating bias is very difficult, right? They're used to that. FaceTime means that I'm gonna get the promotion or, um, you know, they're not showing up does not showing up equal productivity or lack thereof. And there's a big question mark, uh, that you, you need to, you know, untangle with your business. Um, the second, you know, so there's hybrid workforce, there's this perspective that our managers have to create psychological safety to then be there for their team in a different way. And a lot of them don't know what that looks like. It's difficult to define. Um, and I think we're still like figuring that out a bit. Um, but our people need it and our people want it. So we have to, you know, arm our managers with the ability to understand it a little more and take that next level of, you know, everybody was like EDI training. No, no, no. It's how do we foster inclusive environments and understand what that looks like at an individual level when we're so busy managing the macro, right? Um, the third thing I would say is, you know, there's a lot of portfolios. Nobody came out of working their hour at home day in isolation and said, oh, I'm ready to give this work back. I don't have time for it anymore now that I have my life back again. And so we've got all these demands and managers have those too, but they've also got these, this workforce that not only leads to have a psychologically safe environment, but also wants reassurance to bring their whole selves to work. And that's a lot for managers to handle. So they've got, you know, they're leading up, they're leading down, they're leading across their portfolio of work. The demands have are relentless, and now they've got this extra element of inclusion and hybrid work and all of those playing at this. So now more than ever, we need to put our arms around our leaders and understand and acknowledge the impact this has on them and think innovatively around how we support them because it's not gonna be a classroom. The classroom creates loneliness. We know loneliness is a problem in the workforce, and we need to really foster a growth mindset. So the challenges of, of manager effectiveness, how do we scale it, how do we sustain it? All of those that's not new. The elements of how we're defining the challenges that are, um, getting in the way of that are something I'm seeing is really sort of heavy and important today. Brian, I'm, I'm sure you're, you're seeing the same things, but probably also have a additional perspective on that. Yeah. Love everything you're saying, Tiffany. Um, just to sort of build from a background perspective, I spent years, uh, leading and building teams startup, CEO, Google, slack leading business units. In , though, I started this thing called Future Forum, uh, with two co-founders, which is a think tank around future of work that became very much focused on flexibility, uh, remote teams, distributed work, and how people were coping. And we got, uh, a lot of research done in those three years, but also gathered groups of, uh, especially talent leaders and chief people officers. And everyone's concern almost to a person was our frontline managers aren't equipped for this moment. Um, that most managers were people who had been promoted into the seat because they were the most senior person in the team. Their level of learning was not spectacular in the first place. And suddenly we thrust them into a much different environment where they were being asked to deal with a lot of things simultaneously. How do I manage people where I can't see them every day, where I'm not monitoring them, but, you know, through butts in seats, which is by the way, a horrible form of management where those people are having all kinds of real fundamental issues, uh, at home in terms of health and welfare that all of a sudden they're being asked to shoulder and deal with. Um, and those issues really brought to the forefront the need to think about what we do to enable managers not through just one-off training and resources, but day-to-day, week to week, uh, sets of capabilities for them. We're still facing sort of three fundamental issues, um, that I hear continually in the conversations I have with, um, operating executives as well as people leaders. How do I lead and manage distributed teams? Most organizations have gone not just from the assumption that everybody shows up in an office, but people don't even live in the same city any longer. Look, management by walking around was always the weakest form of management in the first place. Just because someone shows up doesn't mean they're working on the right things. Doesn't mean they even get why they're there. You've gotta help train managers on how to think about aligning people around. What goals are we trying to accomplish and, and where are we going? Second big issue is real generational shifts and real demographic shifts in the workforce. I'm a plus year old white guy. I learned certain ways of working that worked really well for me, especially as a nine primary caregiver. You have to be willing to listen to other members of your team and understand that they are just as ambitious as you are, but they may need to find other ways and other time to actually get that accomplished. And how do you bring those people together and get them aligned, is the second thing I'm seeing people grapple with. And the third is burnout. Uh, we're now two years into the ongoing pressure around efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. In fact, a lot of organizations stripping out layers of middle management because they're seen as being inefficient in the first place. And the, that, that combination of three forms of pressure means that it's almost always your frontline manager, uh, group that's always, that's also the most stressed and the most burnt out. So it's not surprising to me looking at the poll that the number one answer is managers themselves lack the time as well as the resources for training because they're curing their own individual contributor load and burden, as well as managing a team often for the first time. So this is a very big issue, and it's one that I think is gonna determine the success or failure of a number of organizations in terms of whether or not they can carry off the initiatives they're trying to, uh, pull off in the first place. Yeah. Incredible. I've, I, we see tons of questions coming through, and I think somehow this hour is gonna fly by because there's so much to unpack from, from what both of you had shared. I think one of the, the, so when we look at this poll question, you know, %, almost % of the answers were around managers lacking time and like, resources for training. I think what you've both talked through is that so much of quote unquote training is not just done through classroom and course content. It's actually through knowledge sharing, application connection, working with decentralized teams who are all over the place, but there's not typically like resources to do that. That's usually doing at the old fashioned way, which is probably one of the most inefficient processes, is to like, go and start to navigate the relationships of an org. Maybe like what advice, maybe Tiffany, I'll, I'll have you start and then Brian add in, but what advice would you have for organizations for how they can make it easier to navigate the outside of the classroom experiences that help them learn so that they can do more with less time? Um, what would be some of, of the advice of the other heads of talent who might be thinking of how do they make it easier for managers who are already feeling like they have no time or effort to actually go and get those, uh, non-traditional formats of learning where there actually is the majority of outcomes? I Think there's a, a couple things to this before I I go into that is not only do managers not have, have the time, but HR has been leaner and leaner and leaner. And so I'll look at it through my lens. I, I didn't have the resources to provide at scale programming to meet the needs of a population, which yes, is centralized, but very much distributed in terms of the operations and the work that we do, the hours of work that are involved in that. And, um, you know, the travel involved in sports teams and things like that. And so, um, I would say that I always started, it's a, the me problem too, uh, with talent and hr, like I don't have the resources to chase. So you always have to start with how are you going to measure success, right? So like, what are the outcomes that you're looking for? Um, and, and how are you gonna measure success? And, and to have that frank conversation, because sometimes it is just, I need people to be there. I need to know that they're showing up. I need that, you know, understanding that they're doing, they're having connections, right? So there's just an, it's a numbers game or it's, I have a engagement survey and I need to make sure that manager effectiveness is increasing year over year. Okay, so what are the scores that you're looking at specifically, and what would, what would get you there, right? What would help bridge that gap? Um, and then it's also feedback, right? If you don't have a formal engagement survey, it's you're, you wanna do surveys, you wanna figure out, um, there's a lot of survey fatigue, so I can speak, I'm attest to that, not necessarily being the best, um, way to move forward, but I have a lean team. I've got a big problem to solve once I get there. You've gotta look at your tech enablers. Enablers and not, and again, my big thing is optimizing your tech stack. I wanna bring it down. I wanna make it lean and I wanna make it work for me so that I can be more, I can add the value where I add value, which isn't chasing people down and asking for participant lists and things like that. Um, and so not to toot your horn, uh, Dave and organizationally, but that's where, you know, we brought in , coffees as one of those opportunities as a platform so that we could, here are the outcomes we need, how will we measure success? How will we get that data? How will we get that feedback? It wasn't the only solution, right? It was combined with in-class experiences, which were important to us and what we learned very quickly because they wanted the, like almost cohort connection. It's that network, it is that we're all in this together. And so it, you know, when we used , coffees, it was to enable one-to-one and group mentorship. So introductions and mentorship depending on the business need. Um, but it was also, we needed that, you know, in-class cohort development, we needed some socializing as well, you know, quick, amazing races around our building. Can you find the Taylor Swift photo? Um, you know, that's the, the benefit of working in the arena. Um, but I think that in addition to that, it was how do you want those conver, what do you need from those conversations? So, um, for me, I needed a tool as well where I could make it do the work, not only in terms of, um, creating connection, but providing a framework of what that connection could look like. Because people, there's a, it's hard in hybrid especially, it's hard to get a conversation started, and it's sort of like, who's gonna sit here? And I'm the, I'm the one, I can't stand silent, so I'll be the first in there, but then how do I make sure I'm not taking over the room, right? How do I create space for all voices in the room? So being able to provide a consistent curriculum to everyone to kind of prompt it and make it easy and take the prep work out of their hands so that they could just show up and know this is a guided conversation. And I had visibility of what those conversations look like. I mean, that to me was the dream. Look at your resources, figure out what you can accomplish. Again, focusing on scale and sustainability. Identify then from that, um, what your outcomes are, and then find tech enablers that will help you get visibility to that and maintain a level of consistency because you don't have time for full control. So that's kind of where I've found some success in, um, identifying what's gonna work for us. Amazing. I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you three things that, that I, that I've seen work in a couple different places. First, sort, building on what Tiffany was saying about measurement, uh, knowing what problem you're trying to solve, uh, in the first place, you know, is a big part of this. And so what I've done with, we did this at Slack and I've done it with other organizations figuring out like broadly, not just from a manager effectiveness perspective, but from a team level perspective, what are the sets of issues we're trying to solve that are actually most impacting the business and where we're going? Is it a retention issue? Is it an employee engagement issue? And where explicitly does it, does it show up? So we would do, um, quarterly pulse surveys and short quarterly pulse surveys work. If you do two things, not more than or so questions that take people a limited amount of time to do it, and you actually do something with the results, people will take surveys if they're actually seeing something coming out the back end of it. So we would shift the focus, for example, from people feeling like they had a loss of connection, putting together programming for managers and employees that was targeted around that to make that better until we saw the results get better. Then we moved on to the next issue was lack of focus time or lack of clarity around goals, right? Being able to move from one problem to the next meant that we could focus limited resources on addressing those problems. Second, don't be afraid to get really tactical with people, especially with frontline managers. The amount of people who don't know how to run a good one-on-one is sort of astounding in terms of just what do you do on a week in week out basis with a half hour you've got, which by the way, you should have every week with all of your direct reports. And here's the three things you should do. Like training people on some of the basics, uh, can go a long way, giving 'em the content and materials. But then that brings us to step three, which is you've gotta build communities around this in two forms. Managers have to have communities where they can turn to each other as well as to you for support and for, I've got a question or for examples of problems they've run into and how help others have helped solve it. But the other part is broader communities, those tactical tips, like how to run a good one-on-one. I've seen a lot of success with companies taking that and putting that in front of everybody inside of an organization, because there's always gonna be a team member who sits there and goes, my manager's not doing that, but I think it's a great idea and we should pick this up and do it. I'll give you another example. Um, a lot of teams feel like they've lost the social connection in a virtual environment. If you kick off a team meeting with a simple icebreaker exercise, what's your, what's the worst haircut you ever had? Where do you stand in pumpkin spice latte? You know, it goes a long way to building some degree of, of social connection. If you say that to a hundred managers, of them will give it a try. If you say that to a thousand people on variety of different teams, I guarantee you you'll get a lot more adoption of those tools and tips. So measuring limited number of things, you're going after being tactical and giving people tools that they can use. And then how do you sort of build, um, social and community support at the manager level and across all your employees goes a long way to making these things sticky. Brian, it's interesting you talk about actually limiting that and it's this sort of recognition through repetition. Um, when we started leadership, uh, development programs again, and we started them back up, uh, I, I said, we just need three things, three areas, communication, accountability, and collaboration, and okay, three things, but the double click in each of those gives you a lot of wiggle room to play with different options and bring in different, you know, elements to it. But, you know, it all anchors there and it's, you know, they said, okay, so what are we doing next year? I said, we're doing the same, we're gonna keep working on these because we haven't checked the box on. We're all amazing communicators and everybody's understanding of, of accountability and how to prioritize resources. It's like, we've gotta keep working. So just even being able to sort of create those, narrow it down, but keep with it. And knowing that your topics or the way you approach it over time might change, but people are starting to kind of, okay, we get it, we're working on these things and it's gonna be a continuous growth pattern. Again, getting away from that like once and done training methodology, it's like growth over time. That's right. That's right. You start small and keep building that rock and, and getting it bigger. Yeah. I love, so thinking about what both of you shared and, and lots to unpack on that. So thanks for sharing such like, concrete examples as when we, we compare what you both shared. And then the answer to the poll question, the number one skill that our audience, uh, considers most critical for their managers today is building trust and relationships. And so, on one hand, Tiffany and Brian are talking through the importance of creating social community and safe places to apply their knowledge to brainstorm things. And on the other hand, we know that relationships and building trust is actually a skill. It's not something that's necessarily just, you know, we're born with. It's actually something we have to work on all the time. And so when we think of those two things, what would be the advice that you would share with everybody on this call who's designing their talent and leadership programs? And maybe Brian, I'll have you go, go first. Yeah. Building trust, there's a saying, uh, trust is built in drops and lost in buckets. Um, it takes time and effort on an ongoing basis at any given level to make it happen. There's a big part of trust, which is transparency. And I think a lot of, uh, especially, uh, older leaders and long and long tenured organizations that have used like knowledge is power. Um, face a lot of challenges these days because there's a lack of transparency in terms of decisions decision making and, and why it happened. As a manager, you wanna train, uh, you wanna train managers and enable them to build trust through being transparent with their teams about what the goals of a team are, about how they're performing against those goals, but also the decisions that impact people on a day in, day out basis. Why were those decisions being made? Uh, that goes a long way towards getting people together and, and going, uh, in the same direction. It's really hard to do if that's not sort of the culture and ethos of your organization though. So that can be a, a really sizable challenge within a team itself. You build trust also slowly in one step at a time. Even simple things like getting common understanding of how each of you operate, uh, can go a long way. A a favorite like tactical tool of mine is personal operating manuals. Um, this can sound a little bit like, you know, personal operating manual is my, um, my, uh, Myers-Briggs type and, and my, my, um, horoscope type, but it's, but it's starts with more fundamental things. Like I'm a morning person. I'm better at consuming, uh, content that's written than I am in video form. That happens to be my style. Uh, I'm a, a writer, uh, not a speaker. Like just getting the fundamentals out from different people and things like, Hey, by the way, I coach a kid's soccer, uh, ga uh, team every Thursday at three o'clock, I've gotta take off to go and deal with that. You build a trust within a team by actually getting people to know and understand one another, what they're like, how they operate. And then you can go deeper into backgrounds and then you can get into, I've got your back and I'm gonna cover you when you've got needs. But it's, it's at both of those levels. People have to feel like they have trust in the organization, uh, to make the right decisions, or at least to inform them why decisions are made. And they have to feel like they have trust in one another that they're able to, um, uh, have each other's back and, and be real with people about what their own challenges are. And I love that. And I think, you know, trust, uh, you mentioned it Dave earlier, is that skill that you have to sort of nurture just as you are and enable just as you would with any other skill that you're developing. And you have to be really intentional with that. Um, I have, you know, experience, I'm sure everybody has. I walked into, uh, like an executive dinner, uh, and I remember it a few months ago, and we had just sat down for the meal and the person hosted the event, said, when you look back at your childhood, what is one tragic event that has shaped who you are professionally? And I just went, what is this? And I came back to the office the next day, I said, I just had the weirdest dinner. And they said, oh, it's, it's trauma bonding. Guess what? Putting me in that position because you wanted to create trust around the table is artificial. It's uncomfortable. Uh, my advice to everybody around here, because you know, I, I don't know how this executive round table got to where it was, but it's, that's, that's not how you build trust, you know, it's like, like those okay, fall back into me and, you know, then you drop on your head and now you're dealing with a health and safety concern, right? That's not it. It's little things. It's the marbles in a jar over time. I don't wanna be thrust into something, I need this nurtured. And so again, I go back to what are the nudges, what are the enablement opportunities that you have to keep this a build? You're building the muscle, you're building it over time, and it needs attention and you need to nurture it. You can't force it. And the, you know, if I went to the gym, I do go to the gym, but if I, if I hadn't and I went back, or I tried to do a workout with you Dave Wilkin, I would suffer the next day, right? And so let's think about that muscle of trust and let's be gentle with it and build it with consistency, nudge it as we would in our programs, add it as a core capability. It's like when we call out, um, EDI, right? No, no, no. First of all, take the di d out, look at equity and inclusion and make that the foundation for everything that you do, right? And I feel that you're fostering a culture of inclusion with trust at your core. So make that a part of everything that you do. Prompt people, nudge people and, and again, call out what bad trust development looks like so people don't go down that path because you're gonna erode it really quickly. You're gonna end up with a pulled muscle and you'll never work out with Dave Wilkin again. I promise. It's not that scary. But, uh, you know, um, I think, you know, when we think of, we, you both spoke a lot to trust, but the other side of that is relationships. And what, how do you create relationships as a skillset in an organization that's hybrid, decentralized, more generations than ever before? I think a lot of leaders, I mean, with KC being the technology platform that combines almost online dating matching with like learning pathways to help people build relationships and learn, we often hear from heads of learning and talent, well, that side people should just go do on their own, which kind of assumes that they don't look at relationships as a skill. They look at relationships as something that everyone just knows how to do. Um, but again, more generations, more polarity in the workforce, more geographic, decentralized teams. What are some of the TA tactical next steps that maybe we'll have Brian and then go, Tiffany, go next. You know, if you were to just give these people advice who might think that the relationships happen just on their own and should just be something they prompt people to do and hope that it happens, how should people think about that differently as they they go and design their manager enablement and manager programs? There's a, um, so I, I spend a lot of time on this these days because a lot of organizations that are more distributed are wrestling with like loss of connection. You, you may have decent, uh, strong ties, meaning the connection in with your own, uh, individual team may be pretty decent, but your weak ties of atrophied or your, or or your strong ties aren't great either because you've got a a manager issue, uh, and related set of problems. There's a really key element of getting people together. Um, I've looked at data from a number of companies. Atlassian's got some great studies around this. Getting teams together three or four times a year goes a long way towards building deeper relationships faster than either not getting them together or having it be a complete free for all in terms of people happening to bump into each other, uh, in, in the hallway. And what that means is not just getting together and doing a day of death by PowerPoint in the basement of some hotel someplace. It's a couple of days together where you're spending half of your time on social activities, on meals together, on volunteer activities. Doesn't have to be a trustful, but ways in which you actually are, um, doing things together and meeting, uh, other people and interacting with each other in social circumstances, as well as getting deeper into the work, doing an asking me anything with the boss, um, doing group breakouts to work on a specific problem set. Those type of activities really accelerate, uh, connection. And it's also an opportunity to think about it from a how do you design it in the first place? I, I, I'm thinking about a, a, a senior executive group that I did this with, uh, six months ago and said three days with each of your teams together, and half of it is social and relationship building. And I'm pretty sure all of them looked at me and went, I have no clue what I would do in the social and relationship building part of it. So, um, I'll use a case study example. Zillow actually has a four person team in their, um, in their, uh, in central, uh, talent, uh, success group that actually helps orchestrate events. Uh, they orchestrate what they call Z retreats, which are anywhere from to person to person gatherings where they're helping leaders figure out how to drive agendas that are effective, how to think about including interactions with one another. There's also, um, really good research out of this, uh, HBS professor Raj Hurri who did a study that showed if you, if you orchestrate these events and find ways to rematch people, you actually build diverse connections. If you don't, if you leave people to their own devices, you get a birds of a feather problem, all the guys flock together, all of the, your white employees and your black employees don't commingle with one another. So you literally have to think about the design of some of these activities in ways that get people to commingle to help build those relationships. You can also, by the way, take the other side of this, which is, um, generationally we now have two generations of digital natives in the workforce. Gen Z is just as comfortable and facile building relationships online as they are, you know, in a physical environment. And those of us who are a little bit older and need to learn to get into the tools, because we've gotta actually start being in places where the social conversation is happening as well as the, um, in the office conversations. So it's a both end. You need both physical gatherings of people to build connections that are well designed, and you need to think about the role of digital tools, not just from a productivity and training standpoint, but from a way for people to connect with one another through those, whether it's a training event or even just a collaboration tool. So on so many, and Tiffany, I'm gonna set you up for, just, 'cause I think there's a bit of a double click that I know you've been like innovating on and I think are ahead of the curve for a lot of talent and learning leaders. But Brian, what you shared, I think is a really big point, right? Where if you leave the social relationships and connections, a if you say, Hey, we're gonna build social relationships and connections, it's actually surprising how people look at you and go like, what the heck does that actually mean? Right? Whereas if you say, we're gonna go do training, everyone kind of gets what that means. But when you say, let's go do the social connections, that actually requires a lot of facilitation and guide to make those, uh, uh, that are well designed as, as you said. But I think the second part that's really important is birds of the feather flock together. So if you have people, managers and you just hope that they go and build what we've all agreed are so critical to making managers effective and enabled, underrepresented managers are gonna be less likely to have the successful connections than, than others, which is not really not good for the board metrics and diversity metrics that we all need to aspire to get way better at. And so maybe Tiffany, you can speak to what are some of the technology like templates and programs that you're now activating in your manager and leader pathways that help, you know, create purposeful connection and outside of the classroom experiences, but also remove the bias, often unconscious in how relationships are created. Um, and I'm, I'm gonna speak to like a KC solution because of what you've discussed here, um, with what we implemented with group mentorship. So I'll give you an example. We had our vice presidents as mentors and our directors as mentees, and we use KC to bring together a six month group mentorship once a month, one hour a month. And we built a curriculum so that mentors and mentees all had prep going into this that included courses that they could see in advance, articles that they could read, as well as structure to the conversation. Now, I, I mean, in theory, this all seems like things you can do outside of a system, right? Group mentorship put people together, but we wanted to get people together who naturally had interest, and then we wanted to actually look over that group connection to see what's the diversity and enrich that in whatever way that we could through our talent lens and our organizational insight of what that was. The best feedback I got from the program anecdotally, um, was someone walking by my desk and saying, you know, it's so interesting that you have a tool to do this. 'cause like, yeah, this is something we should always be doing, but you don't, but you don't, you don't do it. You don't come together, you don't create the space in your calendar. You don't know how to prepare. You don't know how, as a mentor to guide all the voices in the room. We prepared you as a mentee. You feel nervous, you might not show up, or when you show up on WebEx, you might feel that you're at a disadvantage, but we've given you comfort that you're not, and you might not know how to approach the conversation or what is, you got a meeting put in from a VP group mentorship, no agenda, or a let's just connect. That's for individuals from a, in a our neurodiverse society. We need to be more considerate of that. And so it was really the best feedback I got was, you don't need a tool for this, because I knew that's when it was working because they were starting, it was starting to be something that they did. But I had oversight. I knew everyone was prepared, and I knew the richness of the conversations that were coming out of that because, you know, people were excited and energized and, um, you know, felt heard, uh, and now they're asking for it. Oh, you know what? My mentorship group isn't meeting anymore. Why is that? Well, because you don't do it on your own. And what I love about that, and it comes under our pillar of collaboration, is, you know, our VPs were, um, increasing and enhancing their communication skills right through this. They were nurturing, they were coming in prepared. They were understanding how to create space for all the voices in the room, which we needed to strengthen at an executive end. But when we looked at collaboration, that was where we started to p see people problem solve outside their silos. Not because we stuck them in a room and said, here's a business case to solve, or here's m LSCs, you know, current challenge we're facing because we gave them, you know, curriculum about conversa. Like, it was, it wasn't conversations related to our business, it was just getting to know each other. And through that we saw cross-functional collaboration to solve business problems. This a outcome. And so I think that, um, that in and of itself, we were really intentional. We guided, we ca you have to enable people. You can't expect they're going to do this on their own. You have to give them the tools and resources required. And again, coming back to talent resources, that is, you know, congratulations if you have the resources in your team to do this. I think now to do that as one element of an overall program and to scale it to the size of leadership that you have, especially as you start to go into the manager level, um, is a, is a task that far surpassed our resources. Um, and would've actually taken away from some of the value add that we have around the advisory work, around the skills assessment, around the things that naturally, you know, our portfolio should be leaning in on. So, um, that was really where we enabled this conversation and connection across the board that has now, you know, we're ready for the next level, we're ready for. And now it's interesting 'cause we find the directors who participated as mentees now saying, I wanna do this with managers, great, because that was always the, the, the plan, the master plan. We just needed to get you on side because if, if you didn't participate in it, you wouldn't have seen the value to yourself to then understand how to pay that forward for others in the organization. So it was, it was a really incredible opportunity for us. And it's not as if we hadn't tried mentorship or group connections or collaborative exercises and activities before, but the way that it happened, it really, it, it, it moved the dial significantly for us. That's awesome. Any, uh, I think when we look at the poll question, a lot of our participants are looking at how to create the right skills, especially for managers. And that intersects with a, with a, uh, a second around mentoring and networking. And I think we, you know, I know at KC with examples like Tiffany had shared, and the the other two organizations we work with, uh, a lot of how we create the right relationships between people to knowledge share and learn together really is the next generation of mentoring and networking. Where in the past we might've looked at mentoring, networking, as you know, junior interns getting advice from leaders. But really what it, what it is, is the experiences, uh, that help knowledge sharing and help create community. And, uh, that is kind of the, the next stage. So it's, it's really less of, and I'd encourage everyone to, to stop thinking of let's launch another mentoring app where people, a bunch of junior talent can ask senior leaders for a promotion or career advice. That's fine. And you can, you can do that. But instead start to think of how you can add to your talent and learning programs, ways to create knowledge sharing and peer-to-peer opportunities group mentoring experiences because like Tiffany had shared without actually prescribing, nudging and measuring, it's probably just gonna be something that people forget to do, even though know it's, it's critical. Um, I think that measurement piece is also important to, to kind of emphasize for, for everybody here is for, for all of you, I I doubt you would, uh, skip the measurement and just hope that people take the formal courses, right? I think if, if any learning leader just hoped that formal learning courses were done that were critical for maybe people, managers or any other formal learning that you offer, the chances of that happening are probably pretty low unless you actually prescribe it, assign it, and, and measure it. And that's the same thing with, uh, all of the, uh, knowledge sharing peer-to-peer opportunities that we're all talking through here. Um, and if anyone's interested in learning more about that, we're always happy to do best practices sessions you with another client that's been able to innovate those areas. So just reach out directly and I know, uh, in the chat here, you'll see some links that you can take a look at, uh, somehow we are eight minutes away from, from wrapping this up. So I'm, I wanted to just do kind of a, a quick buzzer beater, uh, with, with Brian and uh, Tiffany. Um, but when you, uh, think about kind of the, the main talent or learning programs where these experiences should be added, uh, what advice or where should people look to first? Um, you know, from, is it the high potential? Is it your formal people manager conferences? Is it your sales con? Like where would be the talent or learning programs that people should start with, where they should add these kinds of experiences to help make the people manager journey that much more, um, effective? Maybe, uh, Tiffany, I'll have you go first and where you started, and Brian, I'll have you go next and then we'll, we'll wrap up. I start at the top because you need to maybe set the, well, you do need to set the tone at the top. And so that's where we started with leadership development. Get in the room with your top executives and align and make sure that they go through this because they need to be the example from, you know, both the perspective of participation, but also in behaviors. If I'm not seeing what I, what is being shared with me is an expectation happening at the top of house that really, again, that erodes trust, right? It kind of just feels inauthentic and you're asking me to do something that, you know, someone twice my paycheck is, is not even capable of. And so if they don't have the skills, why should I bother? Um, so that's where I always start, start from the top. And then as we've gone through, actually we've, we've started to hit through the senior leadership this year, we're really leaning into manager effectiveness and that's where we're gonna sort of start up. Yep, that new, um, the new ,, uh, KC program around manager effectiveness, that's where we're gonna pull that in. And at the same time, we realize in our talent planning, so we have an opportunity for bipoc talent, um, to really accelerate development at certain management levels. And so you don't have to pick singular, but you do have to focus. And so our focus now is continue and, you know, in the routines that we've developed with senior leadership, build manager effectiveness and start to really move the needle in getting them exactly what we brought to our senior leaders, uh, more broadly. And again, it's a bigger beast of a cohort, but something, you know, we feel we can tackle with programs at scale. And then really lean intentionally into accelerating at a management level, bipoc talent so that we can see and nurture and, you know, look at them from a future leader perspective, uh, for those next talent moves. And so it's, you've gotta look at an integrated talent management picture for this and really start to see, but again, understand that if I don't see what's, what, what's expected of me at the top, you're going to create mis like, like there's gonna be a lack of trust, uh, in, in your processes. Uh, strong, strong, strong. Second on the start with the top, if, if leadership isn't, um, walking their talk, uh, everybody knows it. Uh, so the, all the, all the manager development programs in the world to try to treat, to try to get managers to build trust in their teams aren't gonna work if they don't feel like they've got the trust of the senior leadership in the organization. It just doesn't happen. Um, I'm gonna take my answer in a slightly different direction though too. 'cause everybody these days, almost every organization is talking about AI on a nonstop basis and what AI capabilities are gonna develop. And this kind of goes to your bit in the survey about like skills development was number one, but you know, mentorship and, and networking was number two, the skills development only works if you do the other part. Um, the only places I've seen this actually be effective, and I've seen a lot of organizations that have been trying to drive adoption of these new tools. If it's go take the class to learn how to use, use Microsoft copilot, or hey, engineers start using, uh, GitHub copilot, you get the adoption rate you would expect, which is some people gravitate towards it because they like the cool new thing and they get into it and they do it. But that's all the sort of solo one at a time type of exercise. I've seen a lot more traction by the way, at the top level as well as the mid-level of putting people into, um, programs that have snippets on a multi-day basis of exercises for them to do, to learn to use these new tools. But they're also in a cohort and they're also seeing what each other are doing, and they're in an interactive environment with someone who actually knows the content really well and can ask questions. I've done some of this myself, like, what you learn is a lot more sticky, and if you're doing it within your organization, it's gonna be much more relevant to your needs than some generic training program, uh, that doesn't have everybody else involved alongside it. So I really think it's gonna come down to combining those two together, whatever the skill is in especially these days, you know, adopting new AI capabilities combined with doing it in a group, in a cohort that helps, um, make it sticky and pertinent to you and support you on your journey. Yeah, well said. And I think, you know, how do you create the, to actually apply all these great things like co-pilot or others to get these people together, get them to share, whether it's in groups or one-on-one and there's, uh, I think that's one of the reasons we're so excited to launch, uh, our manager effectiveness experiences now widespread. These are programs that have been leveraged, tried and tested by some of our biggest organizations, but we've now bottled these up to allow other organizations to add them into their learning and talent programs. And we are seeing, like Brian and Tiffany both shared, these are usually started with your managers and leaders because a, they are the, the lifeblood of a great culture and they're the ones who need it most, but they also set the tone from the top, but they're the people who need those experiences. And there's a number of templates that you'll see on the right that you can turn on or turn off that really take the best practices that organizations are seen and be able to turn them on right within their learning and talent programs. Um, all of that gets pushed right through Microsoft Teams workday or whatever platform that, that you might have. So really think big with technology and how you can get some fast efficient wins through your existing tech stacks by adding things like these templates. Um, and as, uh, as we, we wrap up, uh, I'd also look at how you can leverage data to ensure that this is happening on scale. Uh, it's important to look at whether and get predictive metrics to see who are getting these experiences and, and who aren't because the people that aren't, I think is a really predictive opportunity for you all to know probably where you're gonna have issues. Whereas the people who are getting these experiences you're gonna see are gonna likely be talent magnets, people that are applying things like the new innovations or new skills. And so knowing where these kinds of collisions and learning moments are happening doesn't have to be a mystery like it might be today. It can actually be something you have full, uh, visibility into. So, uh, with that, we're at time and would like to say a huge thanks to both Tiffany and Brian for inspiring us with some really key takeaways and to think of relationships like skills and to build those into our talent pathways just like we have with things like the % or classroom and course-based, um, content. Uh, we're doing a ton of innovation around this. If anyone's interested in joining more events or round tables with other leaders like yourselves, let us know. We're bringing people together all the time to have these important discussions. But Brian and Tiffany, thank you so much for spending an hour and diving deep into your worlds and hope everyone is able to fill up that survey to get, uh, Brian's book. And with that, uh, everybody have a great final stretch of the week.

‍