The Gartner Talent Angle

Employees and leaders frequently grapple with the challenge of insufficient time. This scarcity often serves as a legitimate rationale for incomplete tasks and unmet objectives at work, prompting employees to explore various time management strategies and tools.

Oliver Burkeman, acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller "Four Thousand Weeks" and "Meditation for Mortals," offers a contrarian viewpoint on the Talent Angle podcast. Oliver suggests that time management is inherently flawed, and introduces the concept of the "efficiency trap," where increased efficiency paradoxically leads to heightened busyness, undermining the very goal of effective time management. He points out that in recognizing this paradox employees and leaders can be liberated and enabled to more effectively prioritize tasks.

Oliver Burkeman is the New York Times and UK Sunday Times bestselling author of “Four Thousand Weeks,” about embracing limitation and finally getting round to what counts, and of the newly released “Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations” and “Make Time for What Counts.” His other books are “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking” and “Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done”.

Caroline Walsh is a managing vice president in Gartner’s HR practice. Her teams help HR leaders build and execute talent, diversity, rewards, and learning strategies and programs. Caroline has also led Gartner research teams on commercial banking strategy and leadership. She holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies from Columbia University, and a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University.

Author Caleb Gardner argues that while change has been constant for some time, organizations are still unprepared to address it. In his latest book, “No Point B: Rules for Leading Change in the New Hyper-Connected, Radically Conscious Economy,” Gardner lays out his vision for how organizations should approach change in the new environment. The founder of the consulting firm 18 Coffees joined the Gartner Talent Angle Podcast to share examples of organizations undergoing transformation, and he extols the virtues of effective communication, adaptive capability and revised assumptions.

Caleb Gardner is the co-founder of innovation consulting firm 18 Coffees and author of the new book, “No Point B: Rules for Leading Change in the New Hyper-Connected, Radically Conscious Economy.” Caleb’s career has spanned from working at Edelman and Bain & Company to running U.S. President Barack Obama’s Twitter account. Caleb’s insights about building more ethical and effective companies have been featured in publications such as NBC News, Wired, Crain’s, BBC News and Cheddar News.

*This episode is an excerpt taken from our 2022 interview.

As the pace and complexity of work continues to increase, employees can feel trapped in a cycle of execution, leaving them without the time or capacity to think strategically about their careers. Dorie Clark, author of “The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World,” joins the Talent Angle to outline how HR leaders can support employees in reaching bold, fulfilling career goals. Dorie offers recommendations that help employees carve out time to think strategically, prioritize opportunities at work and remain committed to their long-term goals.

Dorie Clark is a consultant and keynote speaker and teaches executive education at Columbia Business School. She is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of “The Long Game, Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You and Stand Out,” which was named the No. 1 Leadership Book of the Year by Inc. magazine. Dorie has been named three times as one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50. You can download her Long Game strategic thinking self-assessment at dorieclark.com/thelonggame.

Caroline Walsh is a managing vice president in Gartner’s HR practice. Her teams help HR leaders build and execute talent, diversity, rewards, and learning strategies and programs. Caroline has also led Gartner research teams on commercial banking strategy and leadership. She holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies from Columbia University, and a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University.

Business leaders today are struggling with managing their well-being, working with other leaders and mitigating their blind spots. Gartner analyst Rob O’Donohue joins the Talent Angle to discuss his research on how the most successful leaders thrive despite rising employee burnout and employee-employer mistrust. Rob advises how leaders can manage their workloads and take care of their own well-being. He also shares his insights on how leaders can build cohesion within their leadership teams and how they can better receive and implement challenging feedback from their teams and networks.   Rob O'Donohue is a vice president analyst in Gartner's executive leadership research group focusing on C-suite dynamics, executive leadership development and transitions, organizational culture change, talent and DEI. He advises executives on the future of work, hybrid work design, culture change, solving talent challenges, advancing leadership effectiveness, creating high-performing teams, and enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion within the organization. Rob creates evidence-based actionable research to empower executive leaders to lead more effectively.   Brent Cassell is a vice president of advisory in Gartner’s HR practice, and he has spent the past 19 years in Gartner’s HR and CIO practices. His job is to help clients find the research they need, to help them understand that research, and to coach them through the implementation of those best practices in their own organizations. Brent is the contributing editor of the HR Leaders Monthly journal. In 2022, he won Gartner’s award for Outstanding Thought Leadership for his work on Redesigning Work for the Hybrid World.

Succession planning is an integral component of an organization's talent management strategy, but HR leaders are often unsure if they’re identifying the best-suited candidates for succession pipelines. 

Martin Gutmann, a professor at the Lucerne School of Business in Switzerland and the author of “The Unseen Leader: How History Can Help Us Rethink Leadership,” offers a solution to succession planning uncertainty by looking to leaders of the past.

Martin describes historical leaders, ranging from well-known figures to those less recognized, and examines the qualities that made them exemplary leaders in their respective eras. He explains the risks of prioritizing individuals who excel at managing crises and potentially overlooking those who preemptively mitigate issues.

Martin Gutmann is an author, speaker and scholar interested in how the past can illuminate today's most pressing challenges. He is a professor at the Lucerne School of Business, Switzerland, and the best-selling author of The Unseen Leader: How History Can Help Us Rethink Leadership. His writing and thought leadership pieces have millions through platforms and magazines, such as Forbes, Big Think, Fast Company, and Minute Hack. Martin holds a Ph.D. in history from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, an Executive MBA from IE Business School in Spain, and higher education teacher’s training from Harvard University and ETH Zurich.

Caroline Walsh is a managing vice president in Gartner’s HR practice. Her teams help HR leaders build and execute talent, diversity, rewards, and learning strategies and programs. Caroline has also led Gartner research teams on commercial banking strategy and leadership. She holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies from Columbia University, and a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University.

Employees and candidates consistently value pay transparency, but before HR leaders alter their rewards strategies to meet these expectations, they must first consider their holistic impact on the organization. Peter Bamberger, Professor at Tel Aviv University’s Coller School of Management and author of “Exposing Pay,” joins the Talent Angle to detail what pay transparency means for employers, employees and society. He shares the history of the pay transparency movement and relevant academic research to explain how a culture of transparency impacts outcomes like pay equity and productivity. He argues that organizations should ultimately pursue a path toward more transparency.   Peter A. Bamberger is the Domberger Professor of Management at Tel Aviv University’s Coller School of Management, and Research Director of Cornell’s Smithers Institute. His research examines rewards management, teamwork and employee well-being. Author of several books including “Human Resource Strategy” and “Exposing Pay,” Peter has published over 100 refereed journal articles. An elected Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the Academy of Management, he served as an associate editor of Academy of Management Journal, and editor-in-chief of Academy of Management Discoveries. Peter currently serves as president-elect of the Academy of Management.   Caroline Walsh is a vice president in Gartner’s HR practice. Her teams help HR leaders build and execute talent, diversity, rewards, and learning strategies and programs. Caroline has also led Gartner research teams on commercial banking strategy and leadership. She holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies from Columbia University and a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University.

Despite ongoing obstacles to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives — such as employee pushback — author and consultant Lily Zheng argues HR leaders should continue to drive DEI outcomes by balancing ownership with individual accountability. Lily joins the Talent Angle to offer advice from their book, “Reconstructing DEI: A Practitioner’s Workbook,” based on their book “DEI Deconstructed.”   Lily situates the current DEI landscape within its broader history and outlines how DEI leaders can increase their impact while protecting their own well-being. They also dive into actionable steps for managers who want to advance DEI outcomes yet worry about saying or doing the right thing.   Lily Zheng (they/them) is a no-nonsense DEI strategist, consultant, speaker and author who helps organizations and leaders achieve the DEI outcomes they aspire to. A dedicated practitioner and advocate named a Forbes D&I Trailblazer, 2021 DEI Influencer, and LinkedIn Top Voice on Racial Equity, Lily has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, New York Times and NPR. Their bestselling books, “DEI Deconstructed” and “Reconstructing DEI,” describe cutting-edge, accountable, and effective practices that can enable any leader to create the diverse, equitable and inclusive organizations we all deserve.   Caroline Walsh is a managing vice president in Gartner’s HR practice. Her teams help HR leaders build and execute talent, diversity, rewards, and learning strategies and programs. Caroline has also led Gartner research teams on commercial banking strategy and leadership. She holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies from Columbia University, and a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University.

Employers and employees are putting in tremendous effort in trying to make work better. There are now more ways for employees to connect with each other, more opportunities to learn at work and more tools to help work get done than ever before. However, neither employers nor employees are seeing the expected increases in results such as productivity.   Jessie Knight, vice president of research in the Gartner HR practice, joins the Talent Angle to discuss how organizations can shift their thinking on how people, skills and tools can work together for the betterment of everyone.   Jessie Knight is a vice president of research in the Gartner HR practice. She leads research teams to identify best practices and new opportunities to address HR executives’ most urgent challenges. Her areas of focus include employee experience, organizational culture, change management and the future of work.   Peter Aykens is the chief of research for Gartner’s HR practice. Peter is responsible for building and leading research teams within the practice to address clients’ key initiatives. Before his current role, he spent over 25 years at Gartner leading research teams focused on banking and financial services strategy, producing numerous studies that addressed business strategy, channels, marketing, customer experience and product challenges. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from St. Olaf College, a master’s degree in international politics from Aberystwyth University (formerly known as the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth) and a master’s degree and a doctorate in political science from Brown University.

After working from home gained widespread adoption out of necessity, organizations must now optimize their remote work strategies for the long term. Stanford Professor Nicholas Bloom joins the Talent Angle to explain the implications of return-to-office mandates for organizations and their workforce. Drawing upon data on employee sentiment, workforce productivity and organizational performance, Bloom shares how organizations can set the right strategy for their context. He argues that, in many cases, remote work enables enough profitability to outweigh leaders’ concerns about productivity, and shares how to approach collaboration in a hybrid world.   Nicholas Bloom is the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University. Nick’s research focuses on working from home, management practices and uncertainty. He previously worked at the U.K. Treasury, McKinsey & Company and the IFS. He has a BA from Cambridge, an MPhil from Oxford, and a PhD from University College London. Nick is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of the Guggenheim and Sloan Fellowships, the Frisch Medal and a National Science Foundation Career Award. He was elected to Bloomberg50 for his advice on working from home.   Caroline Walsh is a vice president in Gartner’s HR practice.Her teams help HR leaders build and execute talent, diversity, rewards, and learning strategies and programs. Caroline has also led Gartner research teams on commercial banking strategy and leadership. She holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies from Columbia University, and a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University.

Increased automation and use of tools like robotics and generative AI have fundamentally changed the expert-novice relationships that organizations and knowledge transfer are built on. Professor and author Matt Beane joins the Talent Angle to share his insights on how learning and development (L&D) leaders can play a strategic role in unlocking human ability in the age of intelligent machines. Drawing upon examples across industries and eras, Matt explains why challenge, complexity and connection are key drivers for effective learning in today’s working environment.   Matt Beane is an assistant professor in the technology management program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Matt does field research on work involving robots and AI to uncover systematic positive exceptions that we use across the broader world of work. He received his Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the information technologies department. Matt also took a two-year hiatus from his doctoral studies to help found and fund Humatics, an MIT-connected, full-stack IoT startup.   Peter Aykens is the chief of research for Gartner’s HR practice. Aykens is responsible for building and leading research teams within the practice to address clients’ key initiatives. Before his current role, he spent over 25 years at Gartner leading research teams focused on banking and financial services strategy, producing numerous studies that addressed business strategy, channels, marketing, customer experience and product challenges. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from St. Olaf College, a master’s degree in international politics from Aberystwyth University (formerly known as the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth), and a master’s degree and a doctorate in political science from Brown University.