Marc Effron: How to Build Better Talent and Grow Yourself Faster

Disrupt Your Career Podcast Transcript

Marc Effron: How to Build Better Talent and Grow Yourself Faster

 

February 2022

Claire Harbour 

Welcome once again to the Disrupt Your Career podcast. This time we’re welcoming Marc Effron, who is the President of the Talent Strategy Group. Marc, welcome. Thank you for joining us today from a cold but not snowy Maine.

Marc Effron 

Thank you, Claire. Happy to be here. And looking forward to our conversation.

Claire Harbour 

Great. Well, let me share a little bit about your background with the listeners before we get you to talk about it yourself. So Marc is, as I said, the President of the Talent Strategy Group where along with his team, he helps the world’s largest and most successful companies improve the quality and depth of their talent. That’s the name that we strongly identify with. As the founder and president of the Group, he leads the firm’s global consulting, education, executive search and publishing businesses. He also published himself a best seller, called One Page Talent Management, and this is often referred to as the talent management Bible. He’s previously occupied a series of impressive positions in talent management, in both consulting and from the corporate side, has a BA in Political Science from the University of Washington, as well as an MBA from Yale. So Marc, why don’t you tell us about your own career journey? We know that it includes work includes working in consultancies, like AON Hewitt, and corporations, including big names like Bank of America and Avon, and then setting up this wonderful Talent Strategy Group. And while doing this, you’ve been incredibly prolific publishing books and articles on talent management, how on earth did you get interested in the topic of talent? And how has your career unfolded?

Marc Effron 

Well, my career’s unfolded and my interest in talent have both been very random at the start, meaning that I knew nothing about talent management, but I knew nothing about human resources. When I got to business school, I was a very naive person, I was very fortunate to get into the school that I did. But I wasn’t from a sophisticated East Coast of the US community. My father wasn’t an investment banker like half the people in my school, and I got to business school, and I was taking some classes, and some were harder than others, and one that was really easy for me was on organizational behavior. And it just seemed that I could – I read the cases, and it’s like, well, this connects to here, these people should do this… – and it just all made sense to me. And I was speaking with a professor, a career advisor, and I said, “Can you make money doing this type of thing?” And they said, “Yeah, there are people who do”. So I thought, well, okay, I’ll go down the path of least resistance, which is, I seem to get this a lot better than I get accounting, and so literally, with that much knowledge, just really got a passion for this, and to make a long story a little bit longer, people who know my work know that I always say “start with the science”. I had similarly, no idea that there was so much incredible research about people in organizations and how they work together until I got to business school. And then I realized there is an amazing amount of great insights that have been generated by very smart people over the past 50-60-70 years, that give us so much positive direction for where to go. And so my love of the science of the field really started there as well. And then my career has really just evolved and moving between corporate roles and consulting roles, enjoying both sides. I really enjoy seeing many companies and seeing different challenges on the consulting side. But then I’m also a very practical person. And so I enjoy having my job being actually having to make these practices work at places like Bank of America and Avon products. So it’s been a very enjoyable mix. But I was speaking with someone probably 15 years ago, answering a similar question about my career and I said, “Well, I kind of go where the winds blow me and it’s very…”, they said “Random is not a good way to manage your career. You need to have a goal”. I thought that sounded like a good advice. And so I literally laid out the plan: write books, form a consulting group and see what happens. And that’s kind of what’s gotten me to where myself and my firm are today.

Claire Harbour 

Fantastic. I can so strongly identify with not so interested or good in accounting and wonderfully attracted to OB (Organization Behavior), that was exactly my path. And so I guess, perhaps we could we could help people to detect these things earlier on without having to resort to the last thing. So let’s think about that a little bit. As you think of how you’ve learned and got experienced in all these different activities, you’ve interacted with all kinds of backgrounds and cultures and generations, what message would you give to early career professionals who are looking to set out on their careers

Marc Effron 

Probably two main streams of advice. The first main stream would be get as many different experiences as early and as quickly as you can, to both understand what you’re good at and to understand what you like doing. I think a lot of people have very slow, let’s call them cycles of learning, “I’ll be in this job for five years, it was okay, I’ll be in this job for five years, and kind of like that year and a half, 18 months…” How quickly can you move through a few different experiences that helped to educate you on what you enjoy and what you’re good at? Because I think, too often we’ll sit there at age 40, or 45 and we’ll say, I didn’t really enjoy doing a lot of that, what should I do now? Well, that seems like a lot of unhappiness that’s very unnecessary. Let’s try and discover by the time you’re 28 or 29 what you enjoy doing so that you can plan that career out more, more purposefully. And then the other stream of advice is – and this is really what I threw into my most recent book Eight Steps to High Performance – recognize that the rules of success at work are actually pretty well guided by the science about how people and organizations interact. And the more clear you are about the few things that help any of us be more effective at work, the easier it’s going to be to make whatever profession you choose more successful for you.

Claire Harbour 

That’s very much true. I’m interested in your first point, because I’m thinking as I hear you say it: Boy, you probably don’t need to tell most millennials that anyway, do you? Because they think six months is a long time. So maybe the 18 months is the new five years?

Marc Effron 

Well, I think you’re right, maybe you or I were raised in a world where even though maybe it wasn’t job for life, but it was certainly job for quite a while. And it could be that the average 22-24 year old today is already thinking about jobs as more of sprints as opposed to marathons, in which case, great. Even in that case, I would suggest be purposeful about which different experiences you want to get. So not “I’ll try five things”, well, which five things and for what reason? Because then at least you’ll say, “Yeah, I explored things that I thought I would like and I like 2, I didn’t like 3, or I didn’t like any let’s start again”. But you’ll get through that quickly.

Claire Harbour  08:15

Yes, brilliant advice. So let’s talk about another facet of that, which says, The Great resignation that everybody’s talking about, especially in your us. At a global level, it looks as though the pandemic has indeed led many individuals to rethink the meaning of work and their lives. What’s your take on what’s going on? Is it hype or is it a reality? And how should organizations be responding?

Marc Effron

I have opinions, I’m not sure I have any facts, which I think is a challenge with the whole Great Resignation question. In general, lots of opinions, shouted at various levels of volume. Here are a few different thoughts. At least in the US, the great resignation is not just a spike that simply happen out of nowhere. If you look at the trend in the US, it’s actually a very steady trend upward for the past 10 years of an increasing percentage of individuals looking for new jobs each year. So while the media loves to have a big bold headline that this is brand new, and everyone’s running away from their jobs, it’s really just the next logical step on the line. The trend really hasn’t increased very much at all from 2019, 2020. So I think the first take is to be a little bit less panicked about this because it isn’t that something has suddenly appeared just simply people feeling more comfortable moving the labor market being more effective and somewhat a natural trend. So I would say that’s my first thought. Secondly, as you look at the data, you see a real difference in industries around the Great Resignation. So in industries like hospitality or restaurants the numbers are huge. Well, yes, it’s been pretty horrible for those industries over the recession, so a little more churn probably makes sense. Where in more stable industries you aren’t seeing as much turnover. So part of this is, and let’s not solve a problem, that isn’t a problem in many places. Maybe that’s second thought. Third thought is, who’s leaving? If people are leaving my company I’m curious about who’s leaving? Are my top performers leaving are my specialists leaving, or my bottom performers leaving? I have very different reactions to resignations if it’s my best, or if it’s my least good people who are walking out. And I think we should always be analyzing that, but I think especially before we panic about a Great Resignation, we should understand who’s leaving and for what purpose. If some people say, Look, I just don’t want to work in this way anymore. Fantastic. Understand, go find the next adventure for you. We should be okay with that sad, but okay. But if people are saying you’re a horrible company, no one likes working here. Okay, well, that’s a different level of awareness that we should have. So I think maybe those three different segments, or those three different reactions are my thoughts about the Great Resignation.

Claire Harbour  11:17

Fantastic. Yes, I think that adds a lot of perspective that not everybody may be fully aware of, particularly the growing trend, and I guess, only time will tell what will be happening to that trend, as we come out of the pandemic, and shift to an endemic of some kind, whatever that might be. Let’s go on, let’s think about HR and talent management functions. I’d love to get your feeling of how we could score, HR and talent management today, when we think of these functions, particularly in corporate organizations. Where did we make the most progress? And where is there still a lot of room for improvement? And what advice do you have for HR and talent professionals who want to future prepare and increase their own impact?

Marc Effron

Claire, I think there is a lot of good news, but still some meaningful challenges. The good news is I do think HR in general, and Talent Management practitioners more specifically, have really elevated their game nicely over the past 10 years. They have responded to the challenges, they’ve become more strategic, they have simplified their practices, they’ve looked for more business value in what they do. So I think we’ve elevated our game as HR leaders fairly well. The challenge is that the business has elevated their demands on HR, perhaps more than we’ve elevated our game. So we still need to run really hard to play catch up to meet the needs that our organizations have for better management of people and for talent management specifically. So I think there is good news that we’ve progressed, but we have to recognize we started off perhaps a bit behind, and we may be caught up but the our clients are running very fast ahead of us. I think specifically within the talent management field, what we have done that is wonderful is I think we put some better boundaries around the field. So what is talent management? This, because I’ve been around for many years in the field, I used to be in OE/OD and kind of saw that shift to being defined as talent management. And I think the good news about talent management is it feels like it’s more connected directly to the business and business outcomes than perhaps the old worlds of OD and OE are. I think we put up some really nice boundaries around the definition of talent management. In most cases, it’s about succession, performance management, assessment and development. And so I think we’ve carved out this new profession fairly well over the past 10 or 15 years, which I think is very helpful. I think the opportunities for improvement are a few. One is we can always be more knowledgeable about the businesses that we are in. In the Talent Management Institute that my colleague and I teach at the University of North Carolina here in the States, one of the things that we always discuss is we call it being a business junkie, or think of it as kind of classic business savvy. And we ask the participants who are all senior HR leaders some basic questions like what were your company’s revenue last quarter? What were your company’s earnings last quarter? What is your company’s market capitalization today? And too often we get blank stares. And the challenge is that your CEO, your CFO, even perhaps your CHRO probably know those numbers immediately, and they want you to think in those terms. They want you to understand we’re looking for 8% growth in earnings next quarter, and to understand what does that mean from a business perspective, what does it mean that we need to do differently on the talent side to help generate it. And I think the more savvy we are about the financials of the business and the operations of the business, the easier it will be, for us to come up with solutions that our clients really value. Instead of pushing things like “You should do an engagement survey, that’s a good thing”, let’s talk about, “Hey, we believe that more engaged people deliver better results, you need to increase earnings by 9%, let’s understand how people are thinking about the business today by doing this type of work”. So just making that connection better, I think is a real opportunity. But it means that we needed to take it on ourselves as HR leaders to become much sharper about the both the financials but just the operations of the companies in which we work.

Claire Harbour 

Absolutely. So proper bridge building logical bridge building between the two. What companies do you think are doing particularly well in this respect?

Marc Effron 

Claire, you have asked my least favorite question, which I’m asked all the time. Here’s the challenge. We work with lots of companies around the globe, big companies, primarily, every industry, every geography, and it’s oftentimes not the big name companies or the ones who shout most loudly about what they’re doing with people that are great at this. I’m not going to give you specific names, but what I will say is that great talent management, where we see it around the globe is much more about executing the fundamentals of things like good goal setting, great coaching, good development around succession – much more about flawlessly executing those basics than it is about doing cool new shiny stuff. And I think that’s where a lot of organizations get a good, an undeserved good name around talent management is because they’ll be at the lead end of a fad. But they will not have built the foundation underneath that to actually do good talent management. So the first company that signs up for a talent marketplace, well, that’s really cool. Okay, does everyone in your organization have three goals? No. Okay. Well, let’s focus on getting the basics, right. So that’s a non-answer answer is there’s many, many organizations doing this really well. You’ve never heard of them. And you’re more likely to join the good group by executing the fundamentals than you are by saying what’s new and different this week in HR that we need to pursue?

Claire Harbour 

Yes, indeed, I find that a very satisfactory answer, actually, so thankfully, really good reminder, fundamentals are so important. Now, as you know, Antoine and I are really focused on careers, particularly career transitions. And while we tend to look at things mostly from an individual level, we also know that many companies aren’t doing such a great job on career management as such. And from what we observe, it looks like the topic of career itself is often neglected or muddled in a realm of all the other different practices or processes or fads, or whatever it might be. Can you help us in the listeners to get some sort of clarity on the links between talent management, talent reviews, succession planning, and careers? And how do you think we can make these links virtuous rather than broken?

Marc Effron 

Sure. Let’s start with I fully agree this is the least effective process in most organizations, and it’s the least effective by an order of magnitude below the next least effective process. Most organizations are horrible at development. Which means I would want your listeners to say “I own my career development, not my company owns my career development”, because you may have a wonderful company who has all of the best intentions, but you are not guaranteed that they are looking out for you in the way that you need to be looked out for. So my first urging is pay attention to what you need to do and chart an active path. What that means is think through, if we go back to the 70-20-10 framework, we know that most of how we develop is through the experiences that we have, that’s the 70, which are the experiences that are going to accelerate your development? And instead of thinking about, “Well, can I get these in my company?”, just think very broadly: “I want to get experience as a general manager of a country, I want to get experience on a board…”, think through what are the experiences that you think will be the building blocks of your career, and then proactively approach your company to say “Here’s what I would like to do”. Because your company likely has something in mind for you, but the question is : Is what they have in mind for you the same thing that you have in mind for yourself? I would much rather say I would like to be a country General Manager and go to my boss Claire and say here is my goal, can we make this happen then have Claire say we think you should be a finance director in this location. So firstly, be proactive about your career, own your career and understand you’re going to be more successful based on the more successful experiences that you have. But you should be planful about that. So I’d kind of start with that as one big push: own your career and own them by thinking through the best experiences you need to get. In most organizations, the challenge is that, while again there’s lots of positive intentions going into a talent review meeting, for example, Claire might assess Marc accurately, I think he can go this far this fast. Where the clip is, is translating that into actual development. In fact, we have a little model called the talent production line, which we use in all of our classes, which basically says we should be able to grow people the same way that we deliver successful products and services, and part of that is understanding do we have the right raw material, and once we know that, it’s well, then let’s put that on a great production process to build those capabilities. The gap between assessing the raw material, and actually building is always huge. A lot of companies are good at assessing people, but most are not good at saying then the next logical step for Marc is X, let’s make sure that step happens. So the process exists in theory, in most companies, it doesn’t always exist in reality, which is why we as professionals need to take ownership for our careers, as opposed to hoping that our companies are going to manage them for us.

Claire Harbour

Indeed, hope is a much overused emotion, I tend to think even though we should not give up by the same token. Let’s talk about mobility. There’s been all kinds of stuff going on out in the media and in reality about you turned a little piece of attention to it just a moment ago, internal talent marketplaces. Unilever have done it in a very high-profile way, with Gloat. We definitely love the idea of greater creativity and innovation, as individuals move around organizations or even in and out, bringing their experiences, energies and skills. But can you please tell us a bit more about what’s really going on and how far you think this might actually go?

Marc Effron 

Sure. Let’s start with the old 80-20 rule, and let’s put the talent marketplace on the 80 side, which I think is a good thing. I think a fair workplace is a wonderful workplace. And a talent marketplace is hopefully one way to make the workplace more fair, by allowing all of us to understand what opportunities are out there for me. So I think from a concept standpoint, I’m a big fan. Now, let’s go to practical reality. A talent Marketplace still doesn’t mean that everyone gets the job they want. There are still going to be many people applying for the few jobs that are out there. And so what that marketplace will hopefully do is make more people aware of those opportunities, it doesn’t mean that everyone is going to get the opportunity that they want. And I think that’s part of the challenge of a talent marketplace is, people treat it like the supermarket, “Oh, I can now walk in and get whatever I want to” It’s like no, there are only four apples, and there’s 50 people looking for him. So a few people will get an apple but not everybody. So I think we should be realistic about a talent marketplace enables better matching of people and creates a more fair environment, but it does not mean that everyone gets what they want. It also means that as an organization, if you have this talent M-marketplace, you need to think through how do I respond to the people who don’t get the jobs? Because if I apply for a role in Claire’s group, and I don’t get the job, is there silence? Do I get some feedback on you were the second-best candidate, but you were missing XY and Z. So if you’re going to have that marketplace, what responsibility is there on the company’s part, to say we’re going to make sure that marketplace isn’t simply the sprint, hard transactional cold set of interactions, but that we have got to work that humanity still built into it. That’s the 80. On the 20 side, if I’m sitting in corporate HR, there are some people and there are some jobs I’ve already thought about. So if I know Claire is one of my highest potential leaders and what she needs next is a small country General Manager assignment, then the Finland GM job isn’t on the talent marketplace, because I’m putting Claire in that job, because I know that exactly what she needs. And I think companies also need to be open about that, that while we have a marketplace, we also have a talent production process where we want to build some people as quickly as we can, and we’re going to be thinking forward about what route they’re on. And I’m not sure how organizations are dealing with that right now, but I think, again, to have a fair workplace, we should let people know, we want to make sure everyone has the opportunity to apply for roles that are open. But it isn’t a random workplace, we do have a point of view about the next steps that some people should have, and those jobs might not come open on that marketplace.

Claire Harbour  25:20

That sounds really sensible, and rather pragmatic and practical. So let’s move up to the people at the top, those who might be wondering about and hoping that these kinds of things work well. So, we know that in the end, nothing that HR or talent management is going to think up, however, fantastic, is really going to happen unless the CEO or the top leaders are really behind it. So that’s when it happens. But what sort of advice do you give to a CEO or a senior executive who wants to become a talent champion, her or himself? What sort of questions should they be asking? And what actions should they be taking?

Marc Effron  26:02

Sure, I love the question because my perspective, the perspective, our firm is that great talent management has to start with the CEO. Great talent management does not evolve from the middle, it does not grow up from the bottom, it grows from a CEO saying, “I believe in this, and I need you to believe in this. And I’m going to hold you accountable for making those beliefs show up in our organization.” So whenever I have conversations with CEOs, or any C-suite leader, I reinforce this isn’t about you. It’s not about HR building practices that enables your vision. But this is about you being serious, that better quality talent delivers better results, and you ensuring that you are leading the charge to get better quality talent. So the first step is having them recognize that you’re not going to solve this with new technology, you’re not going to solve this by saying I hope everyone else does this well. The solution starts with you saying I believe in this, I’m going to hold my team accountable. But one of the things that we’ve found to be most powerful with senior teams and getting them aligned and engaged around talent building is this process called Talent philosophy, which sounds like the squishiest HR idea ever, but it’s actually a really strong foundation on which to base your talent practices. It’s as simple as this. It says: Do we, as an executive team, align on the best way to build talent to achieve our strategy? Recognizing there are 1,000 different ways we can manage talent, and a lot of us probably have our own personal talent philosophies on the best way to do things. But do we, when we look at ABC Company, do we have a point of view that we manage people more like this, we’re probably going to be more successful than if we manage them like that. That is an unbelievably simple, but undiscussed topic at most organizations, and once you get alignment, once you make that implicit, explicit, you can then say: If we believe there’s a best way of managing talent, then let’s align everything we do to reinforce that best way of managing talent. If we believe that behavior should be balanced with performance, great, let’s look at every people practice we have an insure it reinforces that. If we believe that more differentiation in how we invest in people is a good thing, great, let’s look at all the different ways that we invest in people and make sure we’re appropriately differentiating. Once we get that alignment as a senior team, you can say we think this is a better way of doing things and will get better talent faster, if we all operate that way. So normally, those are the two things I like to encourage executives to think about one, you own this, not others, you own this. And let’s make sure that we’re linking arms and executive team and saying we all believe that we should manage talent in a consistent, not identical, but consistent way to achieve our results.

Claire Harbour 

That makes a lot of sense. And as you say it’s easy. It may be typically unexplored. It’s an easy concept, not so easy to put into action, but with commitment that comes and that makes that makes great. Let’s go back to individuals: you wrote an article a few years back in the HBR called A Simple Way to Map Out Your Career Ambition. I love the title. You’re basically saying here that it’s easy to be confused about how to grow in your career. And we know that companies don’t necessarily support us in an active way in helping us to do that. So as you’ve said several times, it’s up to us individuals to take charge of our own growth. And your instruction was to start writing two From/To statements, one describing where you are today and one describing your next big, but not necessarily ultimate destination. And that sounds super logical, simple, but what do you tell people who aren’t so clear about that destination?

Marc Effron 

Well, let’s start with that really simple From/To statement. This is as we thought it with my colleague, Jim Shanley, who is my co instructor at Talent Management Institute, unbelievably simple, but unbelievably powerful, because most of us leap into development activities without discussing the journey that you’re supposed to be on. So a From/To statement is simply a way of saying, realistically, where am I today? How am I perceived by the organization, what skill sets or capabilities do I have? Where do I want to be, let’s say five years from now? And not title, “I want to be a director of this”, but how do you want to be perceived by the organization, what capabilities do you want to have? And in getting that clarity on both ends, allows you to then say, what’s the first logical step on that journey? Think of it like Google mapping. If you’re going to Google Map yourself, you need to put in a specific origin and a specific destination. You can’t say I want to go from where I am right now, in Maine, in the United States to Florida in the United States, if I’m trying to get from one specific place to another specific place, it works the same way with our careers. How do you get to that specificity? Well, most of us are wonderfully delusional about our own capabilities, and our own behaviors and so it’s really helpful to ask other people, as challenging as that may be sometime: How am I seen today in this organization? And don’t let them go “people love you”. That’s not the answer I’m looking for. “You’re seen as a technical expert who delivers great results through sheer effort”. Okay, well, how do you think I should be seen going forward? “Well, we’d love to see you more as a team leader, who can execute technical projects by bringing other people along”. That would be a great From/Tto statement to say, you’re very good at what you do today, but that might not be what that that ‘To’ destination looks like. How do people need to see you going forward? And ask your friends about that and ask them to be specific, let them know your feelings will not be heart about either the from or the to. And then just sort through those responses. What did you hear? Is there some kind of commonality or average to say, well, most people think I’m here, and most people think I should be going here. And obviously, put your own opinion into the ‘To’ state, because we are a bit delusional, don’t put as much of your own opinion into the ‘From’, but put a lot of your own opinion into the ‘To’ state. And that should allow you to write your own basic From/To statement. I’m seen this way today, I’d like to be seen this way going forward. And then go back to those same smart people who advised you about the From/To and say, what feels like a reasonable next experience for me to get to start moving down that path.

Claire Harbour

And that is indeed the experience map that you that you refer to in the in the series of actions so where you’re coming from, where you’re going to, and then you have this idea of the experience map the next stage the next experience that I might tackle. How would you explain the difference between this way of thinking and a perhaps more typically described career plan or career path?

Marc Effron 

Sure. I think the challenge with traditional career plans is that companies change. And when you say, well, here’s my career plan over the next 20 years: I’ll go here, and then here, then here, and then here. Well, we all know that companies change very quickly today, and the path you thought you would be on might be blown up tomorrow, because your company’s bought, or your company decides we’re not going to be in this industry anymore, we’re going to be this industry. Experiences, on the other hand, are always valuable building blocks of a career. I have managed a challenging project across continents, okay, that’s an experience, I have rebuilt a team to deliver on technical challenges. All of those things, think of them as almost lines on your CV or lines in your resume. These are building blocks that you can apply to many different career paths. And it gives you a lot more flexibility to say I’ve had 12 experiences, eight of those actually qualify me to do this, as opposed to saying I’m simply going to look at the next job and the next job and the next job as my path. So again, it goes back to if you take control over the experiences that you have, you’re going to open up a much wider variety of opportunities going forward.

Claire Harbour 

Fantastic, and it sounds even as though this experiential way of describing things leaves more room than typical for or some being, as well as some doing, how you’re showing up as a leader, an individual within the organization, not necessarily just the content of what you’re doing.

Marc Effron

It’s a great point Claire, it’s not simply about I have added to my technical skill set in this way in this way. What we find is that the best managers, not only they’re deep, they’re good at something. So our career models be really good at something, and then prove you can be good at something in a variety of different challenging scenarios. And that could be different geographies, that could be different management challenges, so small team, big team, bad team. It could be different organizational scenarios: high growth turnaround, steady state where we need to increase earnings. In how many of those different challenges have you demonstrated that you’re good at what you do? Because if all I do is I’m a really good finance leader in the Amsterdam office. Okay, great. We don’t know if you can do anything else. But if we move you to Mumbai, and you’re really good finance leader there, and then we move you to the States and you and you’re really good finance leader there, and you’ve had a turnaround a team in the States, we start seeing you as being broader and broader and broader in what you can deliver to the organization. And we’re going to think about you for more jobs because of that.

Claire Harbour 

Fantastic. All right, let’s go back to Marc when he was 21. If you could give yourself some advice back then, what would it be? What do you wish you might have known at that stage? And how might we transfer this into some advice and insight for anyone starting out on a career?

Marc Effron 

Well, I’ll start by doubling back to my book Eight Steps to High Performance. In the introduction there, I mentioned that when I was starting the working world, no one ever came to me and said, Marc, there are science proven secrets for how to succeed in the working world, and if you simply follow those, you might not be guaranteed to have success, but you’ll be far more likely to have it. No one ever had that conversation with me, I would suggest that this is the conversation for your listeners, whether they’re 21, or 41, or 61. To recognize there’s a lot that we know about succeeding at work, pay attention to that. And even things that you might feel uncomfortable with, like networking. I’m an introvert, you wouldn’t guess that probably, but I’m a massive introvert, but I know that connecting both at work and with a larger network is absolutely proven to make someone a higher performer. So once we understand what those core factors are, recognize that the more of those things you do, the more likely you’ll be to be successful. So I would start with that: learn the rules of success. They’re out there, read the book, they’re in there. But then secondly, back to our experience conversation, talk to lots and lots of people who do things that you think you would like to do to better understand what’s that job like, what works, what doesn’t what my career path or experiences look like. Because just like having more experiences allows you to better understand your options and opportunities, you can even accelerate that a bit by talking to 20 different people who do things that you think you would like to do, and really investigating those careers or those opportunities through them. So I would say go into your career, eyes wide open, both about what does it take for an individual, any individual to be successful at work, and I’ve looked at 20 different things that sound interesting, and I feel like I’m making a more informed point of view to pursue these four or five,

Claire Harbour

Fantastic. And given that we both know that the world of work is not yet an absolute utopia. If I gave you a magic wand and told you, you could change just one single thing about the world of work, what would that be?

Marc Effron 

I would say if I could wave that magic wand, it would be: increase transparency at work. And that means transparency about everything: about what matters around here, around how well you show up, around the rules of success. Because I find that so many organizations are not transparent or maybe it’s so many people in most organizations aren’t transparent. And that creates a very uneven playing field. And I think the more transparent we are at work, the more human we can be, and transparency, as the great coach Marshall Goldsmith said, transparency does not equal total disclosure. Doesn’t mean you need to tell everyone everything the second you know it, but we should tell people a lot more about “Hey, we see you’re like this – back to our From/To – we see you like this, we would love to see you like this. Here’s how we think that can happen. Here’s the consequences of it does happen, here are the consequences of it doesn’t happen. I think treating adults like adults at work, by being more transparent about all elements of the workplace would make a world of difference for all of us.

Claire Harbour 

Wow, I think you’re so right, and I really hope that every single listener will take this on board, both as leaders and as individuals, whether they’re lobbying for getting more or giving more transparency. It sounds like a wonderful thing to be working on. Just before we start to call this to a close, what else would you like to tell us about exciting new projects or topics that you’re working on in the coming year?

Marc Effron 

Well, I would encourage everyone to think about joining us in April for the Future of HR 2022 event that Dave Ulrich and I are putting on. This is the second step into the event that I started a couple of years ago, to have just workshops of HR leaders to think about how do we get better at what we do. And this is all CHRO speaking and great CHROs and others attending, you can attend virtually, if you can’t make it to the States. But I’m a big fan of improving our profession and making all of us better at what we do. And this is one way of doing that. And I’ll continue that in terms of thinking about the rest of the year, I will be continuing that push over the course of the year through my articles and my speaking, what can we do as HR leaders to be even more effective to help people have better careers to have our companies to be more effective? And we always have a few big research projects in mind. So we’ll be doing a lot of research this year on how do we make performance management more effective in organizations and a few other hopefully fairly interesting topics.

Claire Harbour

Fantastic Marc. Well, we will make sure that there are links at the bottom of the podcast blurb that allow people to sign up for some of those things. I know that seats are selling out fast at the events, so there will have to be some speed involved in getting there. But it sounds like a wonderful event, and I’m very much looking forward to hearing, hearing all that happens there. So Marc, it’s been an absolute pleasure conversing with you. You’ve brought out some absolute gems of ideas and confirmed some of the things that we deeply believe in to so, so far as I’m concerned, it’s been a wonderful success getting you on here and I’ve very much enjoyed it. Thank you.

Marc Effron 

Well, thank you, Claire. I really enjoyed the conversation. If your listeners have any questions, they can reach out to me directly, visit our website, and I look forward to continuing the conversation with them as well.