This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. Well, we mentioned earlier are Bloomberg Business Week story and how kids are going into the office actually office daycare while their parents continue to work remotely from him, I find would you imagine, yes, all of our kids running around here. I'm just trying to think of all the expensive art my son would break exactly, playing on the fish to the core piant
don't touch. Well, it's interesting. What we're seeing is the workforce innovating, adapting, changing. Workers are increasingly picking where they want to work based on the flexibility they get. Tim, A lot of that's going on. Well, let's talk a little bit more about this with Whitney Johnson, the CEO of Disruption Advisors. She joins us on the phone from Lexington, Virginia. Whitney, how are you. I'm fine and nice to be with you.
Tim and Carol, Well, happy New Year. You're also the author of Smart Growth, How to Grow your People to grow your company. Into Carol's point, you know, we we we There have been a lot of stories about returning to work and what the new normal looks like, you know, when we finally do get there. What is the right way for companies to think about tapping into either human capital right now to make sure that they're growing in
the right way. Yeah. I think one of the most important things for companies to remember is that growth, for all human beings is our default setting. And one of the things that we're seeing coming out of the pandemic, and psychologists have seen this. The research is that when you undergo your stress, it can lead to personal transformation or post traumatic growth. And so people not only wanted to grow, but now they're ready to grow as a
consequence of the pandemic. We've been disrupted, We've dealt with it, we know how to disrupt ourselves, and so this, this is so called great resignation. Actually, in many respects, is the great aspiration. People want to grow. What wait, wait, what do you mean people want to grow? And why is it all of a sudden They're like, okay, we want to do it, like explain it a little bit. Yeah.
So so again it's our default set. But the psychologists have seen that when people undergo tremendous stress, one of the things that happens is there as Oftentimes we talk about post traumatic stress, but there's also post traumatic growth. And so there's this sense of people now know how to do it even better, and they've seen that they were capable of doing it much more resilient than they even expected. And so because of the pandemic, all this
movement happened whether we wanted it or not. And so now people are saying, oh, I can move, I can change, I can grow. Now I want to take charge of it. And so coming out of the pandemic, I want I'm not necessarily resigning from I'm aspiring to something more, which is maybe why we've seen some people leave the great
resignation is that? Why? What's the connection there? Sorry, Carol, Yeah, So so I think you know there's a sense of Okay, people are leaving, Yes they are leaving, but what they're really saying is I am aspiring to some thing more.
And so this so to your question of what employers can do, is they can recognize that if they bring, if they make it possible for people to grow, then they're going to not only be able to get great recruit great talent, but they're also going to be able to retain them because whether or not a person stays in an organization. Working for a boss, working for a company is very much dependent on do I perceive that
there is growth upside for me? And so if you will make it possible and very um explicit that yes, if you come here and you work for me, you will have the opportunity to grow, then they're going to be able to both recruit and retain people. I do think you're spot on. I've had a lot of conversations with people who have actually left a place and sometimes they're going back to school because they're like, Okay, because
I'm not growing anymore. I don't see the opportunities. I don't see the path, like where do I go next within an internal organization? Or they're switching departments because they don't see the growth or there aren't the growth opportunities. There always a case to be made, um we need that leaders and companies can always find new growth pathways
for employees. Are there in some cases like maybe an Amazon distribution warehouse there maybe there is no path that you can go from from you know what I'm saying like, is there certain parts within an organization that maybe the growth path just stops? Yeah? Sometimes there isn't a path in that particular department or even in that particular organization.
But one of the reasons that um the s cravel learning that we talked about, which is this very simple visual model that allows you to think about what growth looks like, and that's what we've talked about in our our book Smart Growth, is that it gives you this artifact or this this model, this way to start a conversation with people on your team, so that if you are in Amazon Distribution Services and there isn't an opportunity to grow there, they can then say to their boss,
it's not that I don't like Amazon, it's not that I don't like looking for you. It's just that I need to grow. I'm not getting any more dopamine that comes with a challenge. And so then the boss doesn't feel like, well, it's not that they don't like me, it's just that their brain says, give me growth, please. And so then you can have this conversation, so what
will growth look like for you? Maybe it's somewhere else, But then if it's somewhere else, you become the boss that the person remembers ten twenty years later because you made it possible for them to grow, and they they become an ambassador for you and for your organization. You know, Whitney, you work with a lot of companies that are very well known to our audience, Morgan Stanley, s d Lawder,
Citizens Bank, hub Spot, a lot more. Do you feel like companies in general get it that things have changed forever or do you believe that things have changed forever when it comes to the relationship between employee and employer because of COVID. I do think they get it. It's really interesting. There was a study put out by agon Zender just a couple of months ago where they had surveyed at thousand CEOs and they ask them a question about transformation and they said of them strongly agreed that
they needed to transform themselves, and the organization agreed. What's interesting about that is that prior to the pandemic that number was only so it went from So I do believe that CEOs are now aware, Oh, if I want to transform my organization, I need to transform myself. I need to make it possible for myself to grow, and I need to make it possible for my people to grow. So yes, people are starting to get it. What does that look like, What does that actually look like? How
does that manifest itself at companies? Well, it starts the fundamental unit of growth, and every organization is the individual. And so it looks like, UM manager. You know, you Tim as a manager, you UM Carol as a manager, sit down and have a conversation with someone on your team and you say, where do you think you are in your growth? Here's where I think you are in this particular role. Let's come up with the plans so that you can get to the top of your s
curve of learning and you can grow. Because what will happen is as you aggregate the growth of five and then ten, and then a thousand and then fifty th people, all of those people are growing, all of those people are reaching their potential. Then they, working together, are going to be able to transform the organization. It's just starting with that fundamental building block of the individual. It's interesting.
Are there certain industries, certain companies, certain leaders that you've said that are like man, they just get it spot on and they have figured out um how to help grow their people and it's really had an impact on their company. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I just um interviewed a company, and we just highly highlighted them in the Harvard Business Review this month. Um, it's the Sixers,
the Philadelphia Sixers and the NBA t they they get it. Um. There were four years where they were the losingest team in the n b A and yet um, because they were focused on developing their people Scott O'Neil, Jake Reynolds, Jill Snodgrass. They focused on helping their new recruits, um, straight out of college, learn how to sell, how to
develop them. And as a consequence, in four years when they were losing all of their games, they were number five in terms of new season ticket sales, and the number three, and the number one and the number one. So you had a team that was not winning, and yet because they were willing to develop their people, they were able to sell tickets. That to me is a classic case of if you grow your people, you will be able to grow your organization. Okay, so here we are,
what is a day three of two? A lot of people are thinking of thinking about themselves in terms of Okay, what are the changes that I can personally make to feel better to have a better year. Um, what are the some of the things that that you can offer our listeners from from your own practice of working with some of the biggest companies out there to transform individuals. Yeah. I think the first thing that I would do is just recognize that each one of us, um as I
said earlier, growth is our default setting. We all want to grow. And if you recognize that as a leader, as a manager, and say to yourself, how am I going to help the people on my team grow? That is a great starting point. Um. The second thing I would say is that whenever we're starting something new and post pandemic, we're all starting something new. Um, we have
to deal with a drop in dopamine. So one of the ways that you can counter that is to allow people to set very small, ridiculously small goals so that they can build momentum going into the year. And the third hack that I would suggest is for you, um, every day, once you make a list of things you want to get done, make a list of five things, and if you're pacing well by noon, don't add to the list just to say, good job, I got those
five things done and those three things put together. Focusing on growth building momentum will allow you to again retain that locus of control, which is you build momentum in too the year and and start to feel like you're you're going to have some traction as you move throughout the throughout the year, um and moving up that curve of your career and in your current role. Any book that includes Star Wars and Yoda is uh, definitely good
in my case. But what's interesting, and I'm thinking about Whitney, you know, employees who are listening to you right now. Leaders which this is our audience are listening to you. So what's the first step and employee can take in this growth process? And what can a leader do to encourage its employees in this growth process? Yeah, okay, I'll give you a quick example. So a company called chat Books, Um,
they turn Instagram photos into books. They the CEO, Nate quickly came to us and said, you know, we've got a lot of people. They're fantastic, they've been here a long time. I'm worried that they're they're not going to feel like there's opportunities for them to grow. And so we administered s curb insight tool. Found that many of them were in mastery along the curve, but they now had a language to be able to have that conversation.
In one case, one of the people said, Oh, there aren't any more growth opportunities for me in this particular organization. So they figured out a way for her to go somewhere else, which may feel like in the short term isn't a good thing, but long term, as we said earlier, they become an ambassador for you and your organization. The second thing I would say is that when you have this artifact of what growth looks like, it gives people permission to say, I am about to start something new.
I have this language to talk about something new, and that something new is going to be awkward and uncomfortable, and I'm going to feel impatient and discouraged, but everybody knows that. So you've now normalized people doing new things.
And so by having this language to talk about when things are new and uncomfortable, by having a language to talk about when people are feeling a sense of I need a new challenge, Um, there's this way to talk about it normalize the experience this emotional arc of growth. And that is something that you, as a leader can instigate, and you, as a person working for that leader, can do as well. Yeah, I figure out how to have the conversation makes sense. Hey, Whitney, thank you so much.
I really appreciate Whitney Johnson's CEO of Disruption Advisors for new book. It's called Smart Growth