Hey - could you hand me that soapbox pls?

...in which the author gently disagrees about the depth of our current discussions on AI and the Future of Work

Asked MidJourney for a bullhorn sitting on a soapbox

OK…so there is a recent article in HBR, Talent Management in the Age of AI, by Ryan Roslansky who just happens to be the CEO of LinkedIn. The article is all about how Ryan constantly gets asked about the future of work (a logical question to ask the CEO of LinkedIn) and how his response has become “The world of work is changing this fast and the most important thing to do is realize that the old playbooks, especially around talent management, will not work — now, it’s time to adapt.” Could not agree more.

He then goes on to posit three shifts that he feels will help a company become more adaptable and resilient in the face of these changes: Redefine jobs as a collection of a skills and tasks, not titles, bring skills and workforce learning to the center of talent management, and embrace AI to focus teams on human-to-human collaboration. Again, I think those are all fine and important shifts to engage with and act on. Do you sense a “but” coming?

Let’s be positive…how about a “yes and” instead of a but? Yes these are all important AND we need to go further. Strike that, we don’t need to- we should - we have the opportunity, but we don’t need to. We can keep doing things the exact same way we’ve been doing them and by current measures, be really successful. I am reminded of a lesson learned from building a sales game years ago.

The game was for a large box retail chain and was intended to help train the salespeople on the floor. The biggest lesson in this game was that the win condition wasn’t did you make a sale or not, it was how big of a sale did you make relative to the customer’s willingness to spend did you make? So let’s say in the game you make a sale of $50. Great. What if though, the customer was willing to spend, if they’d been engaged the right way, something closer to $150? Was that $50 sale still a success? I feel the same way about these shifts.

Let me lay it out like this (I’m a simple man and attracted to bullet points):

1. Redefine jobs as a collection of a skills and tasks, not titles: Yes, but are we thinking deeply enough here about the change? Are we thinking about how we can shift those bundles of skills and tasks into higher value production (either for the company or the customer)? If we just keep automating more and more tasks, then are we pushing toward some point of diminishing returns? And how are we thinking about redefining pay in this scenario? How will I get paid for my skills and tasks if the underlying reward system is still focused on titles?

2. Bring skills and workforce learning to the center of talent management: I LOVE this one. As someone who has spent a long time in learning and development, I love this focus coming from someone like the CEO of LinkedIn. I’m also in violent agreement with statements like “we need to prioritize and accelerate workforce learning” and that “leaders need to foster a culture of learning. Not just to boost AI literacy, but to build great soft skills, like leadership and problem solving, and create a workforce that’s resilient and agile in the face of change.” Can I get an AMEN!? My issue is that I’ve heard this for so long. So, so long. Make no mistake, the dawn of easily accessible AI is making this an incredibly sharp point but are we addressing the issues that have blocked us for so long here? Have we addressed the fact that employees are counted as liabilities and costs and not as assets (never mind what our posters say about people being our biggest asset - ask the CFO - they’re actually the biggest cost). So let’s do something crazy here…let’s get the CFO, the CHRO, the CLO, and the CEO in a room and figure out how we account for people as assets to be grown and invested in and not costs to be minimized. If we don’t, we’ll be singing this same song for the next 20 years (albeit with the help of AI music).

3. Embrace AI to focus teams on human-to-human collaboration: Again, love this idea that with AI, “recruiters can save time and focus on the more strategic parts of the hiring process — like speaking to and building relationships with candidates.” As someone in the middle of that process and on behalf of the beleaguered recruiters I know, that would be so cool. Think about it - technology could enable us to have more human and more humane relationships with each other. I have to ask though - are we also talking about the metrics by which the recruiters rated and assessed? Have we thought deeply about the questions we ask and in a prayer to Heaven or whatever Higher Power you may or may not believe in, have we looked at the systems that we use to intake applications for open jobs? Again, as someone in this process, I really can’t imagine a more exhausting and demoralizing process if we set out to design it that way.

I’m stepping down off the soapbox now. I hope some of this makes sense and I hope what comes across is that I really do agree with the sentiments in the article, and I hope that we take advantage of this moment of change and flux to really and truly think deeply about how we re-engineer some of our basic systems so that these exciting new changes will have the best chance to succeed.