Setting up this week’s conversation, Dani promises that this one’s a “must-listen for anyone who's trying to figure out how to make Skills work in their organization.” Bold claim? Not when you realize we’re talking about what a 200,000 person, multi-billion-dollar financial services leader is trying to do with Skills both operationally--and with the help of tech from HR system market leaders like Degreed and Workday. That’s the project as far as our guest, Christopher Funk, Senior Vice President - Talent and Performance Management Platforms over at Citi, is concerned, for sure. It’s a very honest, very detailed, and very open conversation from someone already a way across the seas of The Skills Odyssey; we invite you guys to decide if all that really does make it a “must-listen.” As Dani also says, we’ve all been in too many conversations where 45 minutes is spent arguing over if Skills are a skill or a competency or a capability or a trait or a characteristic; Mike’s got a useful answer for that one, too. So overall, we’re pretty sure Mike cashes the check.

Today’s guest, Mike Groesser, is not just a VP at his employer, Fidelity Investments. He’s also something called a Learning Squad Leader—terminology that may clue at least some of you that we’re dealing with an organization that’s embraced Agile pretty hard. But this isn’t a conversation about that interesting development methodology. It’s actually one (with many rewarding twists and turns) more about the main topic of the Season: Skills—and more specifically, what it looks like when you decide to pay its people more if they can prove they’ve built them, what that looks like at ground level, and most intriguingly, if they build in a non-linear fashion or not. Mike’s an excellent guest, deeply passionate but also very honest about what he’s seeing; definitely one for both the Skills thinker and the Skills practitioner. So: you.

In L&D, we talk a lot about creating the conditions for learning: isn’t that kind of definitional about what we do? Well, maybe we need to tear up the rule book and start thinking a bit harder about what that means in a much more digital, much more automating, much more diverse, and much more unstable world than maybe we all got comfortable with. That’s certainly our read on what Vidya Krishnan, one of RedThread’s favorite learning thinkers and practitioners, is doing over at Scandinavian telco giant Ericsson. And, you’ll be relieved to learn, while Skills is absolutely the key she’s using to unlock some big doors there, marked things like ‘Future’ and ‘Becoming Your Own Career CEO,’ and data the rocket fuel, she says, maybe like you do, that it’s a journey she’s on… maybe, indeed, an Odyssey. But it’s one we can all start, she reassures us in this, one of our best conversations for a long time. Oh, one last thing: you might be wanting pizza near the end. Don’t worry, you can tell the boss it’s for Skills research.

Is today’s guest the epitome of a people analytics scholar practitioner? Well, let’s do the math: relevant PhD? Check. Six years figuring out how to interest Silicon Valley engineers to come work for an industrial firm by drawing up a whole new company-wide Skills matrix that actually reflected what needed to be done? Check. And working in academic contexts persuading quants that while data and machine learning are great, it’s those human skills that will actually help them most—as well as (and how awesome is this!), working out how to use data to build a more just world? Check! We’re so happy to finally get self-styled People Data Enthusiast Heather Whiteman on the show, now she’s at last fully unpacked in her new Seattle base (we tried for the first Skills season): and it was for sure worth the wait, as we get not just detail on practical ways to make Skills frameworks deliver, but also the message that people analytics aren’t to predict the future—they’re to change it. Monkey psychology’s loss definitely our gain, then.

For ten tough years, the king of Ithaca tried to find his way back home from the war--and along the way, he had quite a few obstacles to face down. The good news is he got there in the end: and in a similar way, we think many HR practitioners out there also feel they are on a long journey, full of perils and set-backs and detours, but driven by a similar mission to get ‘home,’ when it comes to really making Skills a tractable thing for their organization’s own ‘Odyssey’ into the future. Hence the driving design principle for this, our third season of Workplace Stories, and the second dive we’ve taken into the wine-dark sea of Skills: that we can help our fellow voyagers by sharing the stories of adventurers, explorers and ambitious navigators just a few leagues ahead of us all in the water. To set sail, in this boat-side chat between Red Thread’s chief petty officers Stacia and Dani and our faithful Ship’s Carpenter Chris, we dip our figurative oars in the Mediterranean and set some possible destinations. Listen, at least Odysseus’ faithful dog Argos recognized him, even if no-one else did, when he finally got home; we are sure there’s a great pooch ready to jump on your lap when you make it, too. And her name’s Success.

“Honestly, in order to make this a reality I believe HR needs more technologists and analytics professionals as a whole.” Now you might expect a RedThread-head to come out with a sentence like that--but it’s in fact from our awesome guest this week, Phil Willburn, Vice President, People Analytics, at HR tech firm Workday. But Phil also believes, as you’ll hear in this fascinating three-way chat between Stacia, Chris and Phil, that data, while absolutely the key ingredient to making DEIB real, isn’t the only thing you need to make the cake come out right; you also need to be able to tell a compelling story—and be able to listen to the stories of others. Maybe listen, really, for the first time ever. But, as Phil reminds us so well in this episode of ‘Integrating Inclusion’… you do have to start.

What’s it feel like when your identity is all about promoting Belonging and a global pandemic comes along that for a time completely wipes out your market, forcing you to lay off hundreds of valued colleagues? Perhaps more importantly: how do you navigate that crisis in a way that’s faithful to your purpose and DEIB commitments? The answer we hear today: with some vulnerability, authenticity, courage, transparency, compassion, empathy—and a dash of curiosity. Welcome to the world of Airbnb’s Director of Learning, Kate Shaw, who shares with us some fascinating insights into how DEIB’s being made to not just work but thrive at her company. Kate’s one of our favorite people, and we think she’ll soon be yours, too: after all, she’s someone fully dedicated to a mission of making work better for everybody. And if that isn’t what you need to make Belonging work… what would?

What if the ways you’re trying to measure the ground-level impact of all your DEIB work in your workplace environment are incomplete? That’s the possibly concerning warning from academic and author Professor Rob Cross--our guest this week, and the co-author this Summer of what we believe to be a highly important intervention that flags the importance of ONA, organizational network analysis, for any serious attempt to understand what the team feels and does day-to-day. But we got a lot more from our dialog than that, insightful as it was. We also hear some interesting findings about the growing strain on us all from the natural human desire to be helpful, which Rob warns translates into insane workloads. We must do something about this and design our work better to accommodate it, he believes, as collaboration is addictive, something we need to acknowledge—as well as figure out how the people, of all backgrounds, who are thriving are negotiating our new world of microstresses and DEIB opportunity. Heady stuff: you’re going to want to turn off Twitter for this one.

Sometimes you feel you’re in the eye of the hurricane: so much is happening in terms of our wider society in terms of changing expectations, changing ways of working, changing life choices. Add the potentially explosive compound called ‘Diversity’ into all this, and it can start to feel a little hot in here. But, advises this week’s special guest and DEIB and L&D expert practitioner Jesse Jackson, CLO for JPMorgan Chase with a special focus on the Wall St’s giant’s consumer community banking business: when it comes to getting DEIB right, it’s not heat you want: it’s light. This is a really fascinating chance to find out from a person deep in the midst of all the changes we’re talking about, but also deep in a blue-chip financial services firm that always has to see things in terms of achievable ROI. We’ll let you decide if you agree that’s what Jesse’s achieving: us, we’re hunkering down in the place where it’s always the most interesting… that hurricane’s eye. Because that's where change happens.

Are there three sets of people in Inclusion: the folks doing the ground-level work on DEIB, maybe the researchers way off in the academic stratosphere, and then the people actually affected by these issues on a day-to-day level in the workplace? If so, could we simplify this and remove a layer? If you think that’s a good idea, then listen today to someone who is doing all she can to fuse the first two roles there—Rachel Fichter, a PhD who also works for a Wall St financial analytics firm, S&P Global… but who sees herself in a fascinating new kind of role in HR and analytics: DEIB scholar-practitioner, helping her firm Integrate Inclusion while also diving into the literature on Belonging in the Columbia U stacks. So: quite a woman. And quite a DEIB thinker. You’re going to like this Workplace Story.