Jason Cerrato and Steve Goldberg discussed the strategic HR imperative, emphasizing the need for HR to align technology investments with business goals. They highlighted the shift from traditional HR to a more dynamic, agile approach, driven by AI and other technologies. Steve noted that HR must earn the right to lead change initiatives and assess readiness for transformation. They shared insights from research, revealing that only 18% of HR leaders fully align their strategies with business objectives. Practical examples included Coca-Cola’s focus on mission-critical skills and Bayer’s dynamic shared ownership model, which improved innovation and cost efficiency.

Introduction

• Jason Cerrato introduces himself as the Vice President of Talent-centered Transformation at Eightfold and mentions the topic of the webinar: “The strategic HR imperative: Leveraging technology for measurable business outcomes.”
• Jason recalls meeting Steve Goldberg at an Oracle HCM World event in Dallas about a decade ago and expresses excitement about collaborating with him again.
• Steve Goldberg confirms the memory and reminisces about their walk at HR Unleash, where they started discussing the ideas for the current talk.
• Jason shares his admiration for Steve’s writing and experience in the HR tech space, noting their shared interests in music and HR tech.

Evolution of HR technology and challenges

• Jason discusses the theme of aligning HR technology investments with business goals, emphasizing the challenge of balancing speed and judiciousness with budget constraints.
• Steve Goldberg reflects on the evolution of HR technology, noting the shift from Excel spreadsheets to the diverse array of HR apps and platforms used today.
• Jason presents a chart from Quantum Work Advisory on the evolution of AI for HR, highlighting the rapid advancement of technology and the need for HR to experiment wisely.
• Steve emphasizes the importance of HR earning the right to have a seat at the table by being embedded in the business and acting as advisors to business leaders.

Steady state vs. dynamic HR

• Jason and Steve discuss the contrast between steady state HR and the dynamic environment of today, where HR is leading transformation efforts and change initiatives.
• Steve explains the three operating environments: external, internal, and the human worker, and how agentic AI has become a top topic in recent years.
• Steve shares his alternative ERP acronym from his HR days: engagement, retention, productivity, and being an employer of choice.
• Jason and Steve agree that HR’s role has evolved from optimizing processes to transforming the organization, with a focus on making the invisible visible through AI and other tools.

Research insights and practical applications

• Jason presents research findings from a study conducted in 2024, showing that only 18% of HR leaders fully align their talent strategies with organizational business objectives.
• The 2025 study with Harvard Business Review reveals that while 64% of organizations prioritize AI, only 21% involve HR leadership closely in AI strategy decisions.
• Steve highlights the importance of assessing readiness for change and the role of HR in leading transformation efforts, emphasizing the need for people, skills, and tools.
• Jason and Steve discuss the concept of organizational agility, with Steve sharing his personal brand as “Mr. Org Agility” and the importance of platform attributes over features.

Audience interaction and mistakes in aligning technology

• Jason engages the audience with a poll on the biggest challenge in aligning HR tech investments with business goals, revealing common issues like lack of clear business objectives and too many disconnected systems.
• Steve identifies misalignment around timing as a common mistake, emphasizing the importance of synchronizing technology investments with strategic plans.
• Jason and Steve discuss the need for HR to focus on the problem rather than the tool and the importance of understanding the art of the possible with technology.
• Steve shares his experience with developing use cases for AI in HCM and the importance of personalization beyond content.

Blueprint for organizational agility

• Jason introduces Steve’s blueprint for organizational agility, highlighting the importance of making skill gaps visible and the role of HR in resourcing and talent development.
• Steve emphasizes the need for HR to be a hub of research and experimentation, learning from past mistakes and adopting efficient practices.
• Jason and Steve discuss the concept of resilience and adaptability, with Steve highlighting the importance of small changes to build confidence in larger transformations.
• Steve shares insights on the role of communication in change management and the need for HR to demonstrate alignment with business goals to earn the right to be involved in strategic decisions.

Examples of high-performing HR teams

• Jason shares examples of high-performing HR teams, starting with Coca-Cola Euro Pacific Partners (CCEP), which focused on career development and succession planning by identifying mission-critical skills.
• Steve praises the approach of focusing on a manageable number of skills and personalizing development for employees based on business strategy and functional needs.
• Jason discusses Bayer’s initiative of dynamic shared ownership, which created a new organizational structure to drive agility and innovation by organizing teams around customer and revenue relationships.
• Steve highlights the importance of skills visibility and the role of HR in facilitating talent flow and project-based work in a dynamic environment.

Final thoughts and audience questions

• Jason and Steve address audience questions about the role of HR in driving strategic initiatives and the importance of data quality and reliability.
• Steve emphasizes the need for HR to understand the nuances of the business and demonstrate alignment with business goals to earn the right to be involved in strategic decisions.
• Jason and Steve discuss the importance of focusing on the problem rather than the tool and the need for HR to be proactive in driving change and innovation.
• The webinar concludes with Jason expressing gratitude for the partnership and collaboration with Steve, and both looking forward to future opportunities to learn and share insights.

Jason Cerrato 00:00
I’ve been looking forward to this webinar for quite some time. For those who don’t know. My name is Jason Cerrato. I’m the Vice President of Talent-centered Transformation, here for Eightfold AI today, we’re going to be talking about “The strategic HR imperative: Leveraging technology for measurable business outcomes for the agile enterprise.” But I’m really excited because for the hour, not only are you joining me here, Steven Goldberg, who Steve, you and I met, not sure if you remember, almost a decade ago at an Oracle HCM world event in Dallas, and in that room, back when I was an analyst, I was first introduced to you.

Steve Goldberg 00:59
I do remember that, and I also remember the walk that you and I took just a walk around at HR unleash, and we started to, kind of started to plant the seeds, eventually doing the talk that we’re doing now. So thank you.

Jason Cerrato 01:32
Yeah, and part of this came from, you know, I’ve been following you and reading some of your writing ever since, as I’m really interested in a lot of your thoughts and experience in this space. You know, you’ve been a practitioner, you’ve been an advisor. You have a lot of experience in this space. And I think, you know, we have a lot to listen and learn from you today, but also, as I’ve gotten to know yet, we also have a lot in common. So over the last year or so, we’ve come to find out we have a similar taste in music. We have an affinity, we have an affinity for the likes of folks like Rod Stewart and Joe Cocker. While I have you here, what’s a favorite Joe Cocker song?

Steve Goldberg 02:27
Well, it’s a Beatles song. A little help from my friends. I love doing it.

Jason Cerrato 02:33
Always a classic. I’m quite fond of “Darling Be Home Soon”. But I love the fact that you and I always talk about HR tech and music, little music mixed in HR tech today.

Steve Goldberg 02:52
I saw Janice Joplin in concert, because I’m an old guy, and that was your last concert that was special.

Jason Cerrato 03:53
So a big theme is going to be, you know how to align HR tech investments with the highest impact business goals, and this has always been a challenge. I mean, Steve, has there ever been a time with your space working in this area where this wasn’t top of mind for leaders? But I just think with the pace of change and the wide array of tools, this is ever more present in the world of let’s move fast, but let’s also be judicious with our money. Don’t you think?

Steve Goldberg 04:27
Yes, and there really was a time only, because I’ve been operating on all sides of the space for 42 years. So there was a time when Excel spreadsheets were used for an HR system. I actually ran the bonus process for a couple of Wall Street firms in the 80s and 90s using Excel. So there weren’t that many tools back then, but the 90s, the 2000s and beyond, the diversity of tools. I think the average mid to large size organization is probably using at least 20 HR apps and platforms of different types.

Jason Cerrato 05:07
And I’m sure no one on this call is using Excel or Google Sheets today, right? We’ve all moved well past that, right? But just to show you a quick little chart, this is from our friends at QuantumWork Advisory on a recent white paper that they had published just on this evolution of AI for HR. And they don’t have years attached to this, but if you think about it, this isn’t that long of a span for how fast this technology has advanced. And just recently, I was getting a briefing, and we were talking about agents of agents. So the world is moving quickly, and for people trying to get their hands around this, I think this is one of the biggest challenge, challenges, especially in the world of HR, where you don’t have a lot of budget to to play around with, you kind of have to experiment and choose wisely, because you’re often potentially at the back of the line for funding. Don’t you think, Steve?

Steve Goldberg 06:08
You have to earn the right I think that’s the kind of the Achilles heel or or the extra kind of, you know, challenge that HR has, historically, HR was not great at earning the right to use the overused cliche of having a seat at the table, but in recent years, I think HR has gotten its act together. And, you know, still there’s some resistance, but you have to get embedded in the business and immersed in the business, and you have to be an advisor to business leaders, or you’re just going to be relegated to trying to save money and optimize the HR process, which is old school.

Jason Cerrato 06:59
Yeah, I love how you use the word optimize and old school, we talk a lot about this thinking of old HR and new HR. And if you think about just this chart here, there’s a significant functionality increase in these different steps. And you know, this isn’t just incremental change. Some of these are exponential increases in functionality or capability. So when you think about this concept of strategic HR, what does that mean, in a world where there’s constant change, you have a dynamic world, you have potentially dynamic technology and an increasingly dynamic function. How has the definition of HR strategy evolved over the last few years?

Steve Goldberg 07:46
Yeah, I love the question, let me, let me draw a contrast of, let’s say steady state HR. We’re not in that now, because, as you’ve said, things are more fluid than ever. And we’re really talking about three operating environments having high fluidity. We’re talking about the external operating environment, internal operating environment and the person, the human, the worker operating environment. So things are changing so rapidly. I mean, agentic AI, who talked about this two years ago now, it’s like a top five topic for everybody. So, I’ll just frame it, the contrast as steady state, steady state slash traditional HR, versus where we are today. I think again, as you said, from my HR days, I was a global practitioner for 15 years, and back then, I was lucky enough to report to some pretty forward thinking CHROs in investment banks in the US and Europe. And I headed up HR tech in any event. So back then, we used to think about I came up with an alternative ERP acronym stood for engagement, retention, productivity, so I would say back, yeah, if I was to encapsulate what we focused on back then, it was my alternative ERP acronym, engagement, retention, productivity, and being an employer of choice, which is all about hiring and retaining top talent. That’s what we focused on back then, and I’m sure a lot of that has carried through, but now overlaid on top of that foundational stuff in today’s very rapidly changing environment, where I believe, you know, the HR departments that are really distinguishing themselves and earning the right of their business leaders, leaders to be to have that seat at the table. They are leading transformation efforts. They are leading change initiatives. When an organization is thinking about a strategic pivot, operational, technological, or or just in terms of the operating model, a strategic pivot, HR is now in the middle of that. Why? Because HR is really the most logical function in the organization to assess readiness, readiness to embark on this strategic initiative, the HR transformation, going into a new market, changing your product mix, it all really comes down to readiness, and readiness mostly comes down to people. It’s skills, it’s attitudes, and it’s having the tools and the data and the visibility into ability to execute, right? Who else in the organization should own the ability to execute and have that visibility, and what are you basing that on? So I think that’s, for me, the major contrast between HR in the last few decades and HR now really being thought of as the most rational, logical function to lead change efforts, and all the dimensions and dependencies that roll into change efforts.

Jason Cerrato 11:11
I love that. And I love you know how you said, this is moving beyond optimization, because there’s a big difference between, you know, optimizing something and transforming something. And as much as you said, you know, the word “agentic” is in the top five in every conversation you’re hearing. So are the words transformation, right? So, so transformation, because people are realizing what AI does to the organization, what AI does to decision making, the way the world of business is changing, and some of our strategies have to adjust and adapt. This is an entirely different approach. One of my former colleagues that worked on a transformation team with me, I was just reading something that he was working on the other day, and he was sharing, you know, the past is an illusion. There’s only forward, right? We have to kind of break away from these historic constructs of how we’ve done things, and you know these rule books, and you know, what are these processes we’ve always lived by? Because now, not only is the world demanding it, but some of these capabilities are unlocking a whole entirely new way of looking at it.

Steve Goldberg 12:22
It’s a non linear way, sometimes a counter intuitive way. And as you know, one of the phrases I use when I give talks is make the invisible visible. Right? Make the invisible visible relates and kind of breaks down, cascades down into so many areas where HR can be leveraging AI. What is the most important? What skills are becoming more or less important based on business plans and priorities, what retention risk is most important for us to preempt and have a handle on and mitigate those retention risks? I mean, there’s just so much ramp up time when you’re moving somebody from a lateral that’s in my mind, all part of making the invisible visible. And I’ll stay, I’ll research that. And who was this from? I think it was from McKinsey. They said that 1/3 the research found that 1/3 of employees had skills that the organization didn’t even know about, and those skills were relevant 1/3 so that’s, I think, where HR has to step up, leveraging AI and other tools to make the organization aware of what it’s capable of doing and and there’s always five options for executing from a step from a resourcing standpoint, hire, get a contractor, train up skill, redeploy, outsource. HR has to be in the middle of that equation as well.

Jason Cerrato 14:05
Yeah, and I think you know, a big part of this is in the past, the biggest barrier to workforce agility, sometimes was technology. Now, as technology has caught up, it’s often people that are getting in the way. It becomes a leadership conversation. It becomes a culture conversation, and that’s what’s often standing in the way of strategy. So when we talk about these conversations, it’s no longer just reviewing tools and reviewing technology. It’s talking about change. It’s talking about leadership, it’s talking about culture, and that’s where these conversations around driving HR strategy are so important, because it’s the integration and the meeting of all of these efforts and initiatives. But one of the things that we see, we still see there’s an issue going on. So we did a research study in August of 2024 where we collaborated with 360 Insights, a research firm that you know well. We surveyed 500 HR leaders at the VP level and above, at companies with 5000 plus employees across six different countries, with 1200 employees or more. And when we asked all of these individuals to give us some feedback, here are some, some results that came from them. Half of the HR leaders said they were regularly collaborating with the C suite on strategic initiatives. Right. Let me see if I can build this slide better. Less than 44% said their talent strategies fully aligned with the organizational business objectives, and 52/53% said they were fully involved from the outset in the development of execution of the company’s overall business strategy. So a little more than half, a little less than half on all three of these measures. But what was the alarming thing? When we looked at who answered yes to all three, only 18% of the respondents answered yes to all three. So there’s an issue where, if you’re not leading this on the front foot, getting ahead of this, it’s very hard to one, be involved, and two to drive strategy if you’re always being told the decisions that were already made, or reacting to how the business has already moved, and you’re playing catch up. So this was something we saw, we saw in 2024 but flash forward. This is a research study that we just ran in 2025 where we partnered for additional research at Harvard Business Review and a bunch of HR leaders, and we saw that this problem continues. So again, a firm agreement. 64% agree that the pressure to create value using artificial intelligence has increased. 61% agree that their organization, C-suite, is prioritizing AI, but only 21% said their HR leadership is closely involved in decisions about the organization’s AI strategy. So when we’re saying how fast things are changing, how fast the technology is evolving, and how fast these decisions need to be made to keep up with the pace of change, in many cases, we’re still operating on our back foot and sometimes often the last to know or the last to be involved. Anything surprising?

Steve Goldberg 17:32
It’s disappointing. It’s not surprising. The source of optimism for me about HR, stepping up to the much bigger mandate that an HR function should have these days. Because, like I said, and like you said, it’s all about assessing readiness for change, right? I mean the organizational change management, the front end the book ends of change management, assess readiness for change, sustain the change. Often that gets shortchanged. So you know when you when you think about here’s another research finding, I think it is that more than half of all mid to large size organizations going through a transformation, business transformation, which includes, of course, the HR dimension, the HR transformation dimension, half of all of them are going through a major transformation every 18 months. It’s hard to imagine, but if so, you have to be thinking about when you’re going to need to pivot, how you’re going to need to pivot again. What are the dependencies? What are the business risks, what are the business opportunities? That’s how you really have to look at this. And thankfully, we have AI to assist if you are able to bring to bear the right types of capabilities.

Jason Cerrato 19:03
So keeping that in mind, I want to hear a little bit from the audience. So I think we have a poll here. So with the help of our technical assistance, we’ll see if we can get this to work. So we’re going to ask the audience, what’s your biggest challenge when aligning HR technology investments with business goals. And we can see a couple options here, A through E, so we’ll give them a couple seconds to answer and get their feedback. But as they’re doing that, I want to ask you a question, Steve, what’s the biggest mistake HR leaders often make when trying to align technology with business goals? Do you see a common thread when things tend to go astray?

Steve Goldberg 19:42
The kind common thread, there’s a few, but I’ll just highlight one. It’s a misalignment around timing, timing of how long it’s going to take to get the value that you need from your technology investment, timing related to midterm versus long term goals. You know, organizations I happened to work for years ago for Wayne Huizenga, the guy that founded Blockbuster and waste management and automation, and he actually bought 500 companies, and I was doing HR M and A work for him, like, 20 years ago. Yeah. So, yeah, I was like, by default, a famous guy in South Florida, because I worked for Wayne. But so many business integrations post the acquisition go awry, right? And so again, it’s being out in front of what can go wrong, what could kill us, from a business integration standpoint. And most of those risks relate to people. Do they support? Are they living in fear of losing their jobs, etc? Of course, skills are the center of the conversation. But support skills is this the right time? And oftentimes the technology and extracting the value and leveraging the value from the technology is not in sync with that strategic plan, which is typically not a three month strategic plan. It’s a three year strategic plan.

Jason Cerrato 21:18
And if time is often an issue in getting things to synchronize and sync up, the intervals of time are only getting faster, and with so many variables, I can only imagine that there’s more opportunity for those things to misalign. So let’s see what the results are here. Lack of clear business objectives, difficulty measuring impact, limited stakeholder buy in too many disconnected systems. We don’t have this challenge. Ooh, 9% don’t have this challenge. I want to know where they work. 27% we have a tie. Lack of clear business objectives and too many disconnected systems. I would say that’s a pretty par for the course right there, Steve.

Steve Goldberg 22:03
Yes, I agree.

Jason Cerrato 22:05
So stay close. We’re going to have another poll coming up, but appreciate your participation. So we’re going to move on to practical ways to improve agility and decision making across your people strategy. And we’ve already talked a little bit about how this behaves, that this isn’t just an initiative or a project. It’s designing for change. It really is an initiative that is continuously ongoing. Increasingly, some people that are in our audience may know of Tina Gupta. She’s the senior vice president of talent management at New York Life. She’s been on stage at several conferences. She spoke at transform. She’s been on several podcasts. I follow her on LinkedIn. She was just posting something about the AI initiatives that they’re doing at New York Life, and I love the quote that she had. She said, run your AI program like a change initiative, not a tech rollout. And I just think that that summed it up pretty clearly. But let’s get into this. I think a key word there is agility. So if we’re talking about what are those things we’re hearing frequently, you know, probably change management, transformation, agentic, I would say agility is probably up there, huh?

Steve Goldberg 23:21
Well, yes, and it’s actually become, in a way, part of my personal brand as an ever aspiring thought leader to some people calling Mr. Org Agility. So how did, how did this come to pass probably six, seven years ago, when I had one of my kind of minds melds. And thinking about everything I had learned from the practitioner side, I kind of came up with this notion of an ascension test. What does it take for an organization to ascend the ranks within its industry sector? And I came up with three things, elevate organizational agility, improve employee productivity, because the most modest upticks translate into big dollars for any appreciably sized organization and be an employer of choice, attract and retain top talent. But I still, based on all the research I’ve read that’s org agility related, I’ll just give you one data point. Think this was from Forbes, organizations that consider themselves highly agile are typically in the upper quartile of financial performance. That’s a big deal. You’re highly agile, you’re in the upper quartile of financial performance. I would say another stat I saw was 97% of C suite C suite executives felt that elevating organizational agility was a top three business imperative, and yet only 27% considered their organizations hardly agile. So I have focused on agility. How do I operationally define it, being out in front of business risk and business opportunity, things like making the invisible visible, and, you know, and I think we’re going to drill into it a little bit more, you know, the different pieces of organizational agility. But to me, this is the most reliable path for an organization to ascend the ranks, becoming more agile, And there are various reasons why it may not be adopted. Another phrase I use is platform attributes much more important than features, platform attributes, interoperability, configurability, usability, scalability, those attributes take a long time for a vendor to really materially improve on usability, scalability or interoperability. Features can be rolled out in a matter of days or weeks. So you know, I would definitely keep that in mind for the buyers, current or future buyers out there, they have to think about if there’s gaps in an offering. Think about, is it a feature gap or a platform gap? No ladder takes longer to fix.

Jason Cerrato 27:01
Now, one thing I want to ask you is, there’s, we’re often here, don’t, don’t fall in love with the tool. Fall in love with the problem, right? And focus on what you’re trying to solve for, rather than forcing a tool on something. But in today’s world, with the technology and the tools changing their capability so fast. Don’t you think it’s important to know kind of the art of the possible for what some of the technology can do in thinking of the possible ways to address the solution?

Steve Goldberg 27:37
Yes, what technology can do, clearly really, really important, but I think it is related to what it can do. And again, I’ll use the word dependencies. What are the dependencies to realize the gains and the benefits that the technology can help with? What’s the operating context, and are we ready for those great and wondrous capabilities that can be brought to bear? Are we ready? But oftentimes, HCM solution vendors, and I think eight fold, does this a little bit too. You kind of play down some of the sophisticated capabilities because, you know, the audience isn’t ready for these. So that’s why readiness is so important, in my opinion.

Jason Cerrato 28:29
Yeah, and I hear often, a lot of times, people discover some of the capabilities and then all of a sudden realize additional use cases they weren’t thinking of that can be applied and often a word is unlocked. What does this unlock for us? Yes, what this capability and this evolution of technology unlocks for us? We weren’t even thinking of it. So I don’t think it’s a chicken or the egg conversation anymore. It’s kind of everything everywhere, all at once, right?

Steve Goldberg 28:57
Yes, let me make a point here. So at the beginning of the AI and HCM craze, I spent some time developing a few 100 use cases around AI and HCM, and they kind of fell into five categories of use cases: personalize, predict, prescribe, understand, and curate. I just want to mention something relative to personalization for years in the learning space in particular, and to some extent in recruiting, when you’re giving a candidate a reason to be interested, that personalization was often related to content, and it stopped there. Personalization is so much more than content, right? Just in the learning space, how a person learns best, that’s probably more important than the content, in a way. So you know everything is relative. And take it one step further. When you think you have a fix on it, on a capability set, think about what would be the next step, and then ask your vendor partner, you guys support this. Is it any roadmap, whatever.

Jason Cerrato 30:06
So I want to pick up on that word agility. And this is kind of my phrasing. It’s a nicer way of saying finding your way. But I think part of that is because we’re in a bit of a perfect storm. There’s a lot of factors and forces acting on leaders. And I grabbed a couple quotes from a variety of research reports that independently are impressive, but when looked at in concert with each other, just show how difficult some of this work is. So this first one came from a global AI confessions report, 82% of CEOs think AI will be an essential competitive differentiator within the next three years. So they think it’s a competitive differentiator, and it’s almost 100% 82% is rather a strong percentage. However, this doesn’t say exactly what, where, how or why, right? Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 and I’ve heard some reaction to this, where some people said they thought that was overstated. I actually think it’s understated. If you read about the news that Johnson and Johnson made a few weeks ago, they were talking about how they were very quickly piloting projects with AI in their organization and determining that only 10 or 12% of them were actually driving impact, and then they were scrapping the others and focusing on those 10 or 12, and then iterating on what were the next ones that were going to drive impact. So I think, but like we said, this the way we used to do it is out the window, and there’s only forward. This kind of iterate, learn, experiment and go and fail forward and fail fast, I think, is increasingly we talk about this pace of speed, and pace of timing is kind of this new, this new way of work. Almost 40% of CEOs say their company started to compete in new sectors in the last five years. So this carries on with this concept of pivoting, or new industries, or new ways to deliver to customers right? New competitive set, new competition for talent. However, employee retention and workforce upskilling emerge as the most critical drivers of business success, with 75% and 70% of companies rating them highly impactful. So put these things all together and lay them on each other. CEOs are being driven to compete very quickly. Most projects are going to end up being scrapped. Organizations are pivoting into new industries and new areas in the most recent time, and employees want to be up, skilled and developed, but into what, areas, where, when, how and why. This is a recipe for the need to be dynamic and agile, and move and change and read and make the visible, make the invisible visible, so that way you’re not on a path that’s leading to nowhere, right Steve?

Steve Goldberg 33:14
Yeah, and speed is important with agility, but it can’t be speed at the expense of other objectives here. So you know it fails fast. Iterate involves speed, but you have to have and develop over time as an organization, kind of a you have to become a hub of research as an HR department, and being a hub of research and experimentation means you have to be efficient. Be fast, but be efficient and be efficient means learn from your past mistakes. Learn what works best, you know, get a representative group to try it out on, and don’t make assumptions based on thin air. You know, assumptions about adoption of different capabilities have to be based on going around the organization and seeing how important those capabilities are. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah. 300% Yeah. And by the way, we haven’t mentioned the word resilience, but adaptability and resilience are kind of like they go hand in hand. Because, I mean, the human brain is not a big fan of change. Personalities and people are not a big fan of change, but they know, in order, you know, they know that in order to improve their situation in life or professionally, they have to, they have to embrace change. So part of I think the adoption cycle has to deal with, has this group or this individual experienced a lot of change? And have they been successful? They have to feel confident that they’re able to step up to it. So even small changes make you feel self confident that you can take on bigger things.

Jason Cerrato 35:46
So, Steve, you mentioned resilience, and you know, we hear a lot about change fatigue. We’ve gone through digital transformation, the pandemic, going to virtual, to remote, to return to office now, talent transformation. It’s been nothing but change. How do organizations avoid this agile conversation becoming synonymous with frantic or saturated or constantly pivoting and just creating stress or strain and this in this feeling of fatigue.

Steve Goldberg 36:25
And thanks to whoever posed the question. There’s no easy answer here or easy antidote to experiencing that. You’re going to have to go through it and see what works in terms of the pace of change, picking out the parts of the new, incremental capabilities that you could bring to bear to get a few quick wins. Quick wins pick up people’s kind of optimism that, “Hey, this is going to work.” It’s going to work for the organization. It’s going to work for me and my career, so make sure it’s a cliche, but make sure you have an opportunity through quick wins, and you know throughout your change cycle that you check you’re checking on the pulse of people, and are they with you? They still align. Change invariably brings insecurity about jobs. So, yeah, there’s a lot more expectation of senior management now to communicate clearly around why we’re doing it, why we’re doing it now as opposed to last year, and why we’re confident that we can execute. You know, that’s all part of communication, and it’s a critical component of change management, as we know.

Jason Cerrato 37:48
So Steve, up on the screen here we have your blueprint for org agility. And I think we may have touched on some of these, but now we have them all summed up together. Do you want to walk us through this real quick?

Steve Goldberg 38:02
Yeah, so in the first sentence, skill gaps can’t be prioritized unless you see them. So skill gaps, you know, one of the phrases I used when I was in PeopleSoft with Jason, I talked about latent competencies and skills, same thing as making invisible visible. A person has these capabilities and skills, but you don’t know because they’re not brought to bear in the job they’re in. So you really have to know what your people can do, what they want to do, to be out in front of business risks and business opportunities. So that’s, I mean, I’ve already gone over a few of these things in terms of making the invisible visible and and even the resourcing. Those five resourcing options get a regular employee, a contractor, Up skill redeploy or outsource when you’re up skilling, what’s the ramp up time? That’s a key factor. What’s the ramp up time? And do you need an expert in that job, probably not. You need a viable resource and a viable resourcing option. And so you don’t need an expert from a proficiency level standpoint. So what’s the ramp up time to be a viable resourcing option? So a lot, you know, so a lot of this is, I think we covered, you know what? One other phrase I’ll mention is peeling the onion, on, on, on analytics and the visibility we have into different analytics, right? You know, one of the ones from my practitioner days, one of the metrics our CHRO wanted, was, are we winning the battle against our direct competitors in terms of top talent? And so the first, first go around, my team came up with the metric of, is our turnover higher or lower than our direct competitors? Then somebody said, Well, let’s look at another metric. Are we losing more people to them than they’re losing to us? Then somebody said, Well, do we care about the people we’re losing or gaining? So this is just one of many, many examples of peeling the onion and organizational agility requires a lot, not in a very painstaking way, a lot of quick onion peeling.

Jason Cerrato 40:26
See one of the one of the questions that came in from the audience is, and maybe it’s part of working up towards this blueprint for org agility. Why do you think HR is being left out of these decisions, or not being able to work proactively and still being driven rather than driving.

Steve Goldberg 40:48
Well, part of it is what I alluded to earlier, and they have not the function the department has not earned the right has not demonstrated to their business area heads clients that they really understand the nuances of the business from a people standpoint, and they and they have a finger on the post of things like engagement, because engagement is directly correlated with productivity and when. And it really comes down to cues and signals, and are they picking up on those cues and signals the business leader, business leader clients, internal clients, have to be confident that HR has at its disposal not just the right technology, but the you know, but the right practices in terms of really keeping the finger on the pulse of what can be executed in the past. I’ll just say one more thing, data quality and the reliability of data has, for many years, been the downfall of a lot of HR tech rollouts. My teams in the 80s and 90s were rolling out HR tech, and I would go to the head of fixed income at a Wall Street firm, and he’d say, nobody trusts HR data. Now there’s been a lot of improvements in that, in that domain since then, but find out what they don’t trust. Find out what they’re skeptical about, and earn the right by demonstrating that you’re aligned, you understand their business, and that’s, that’s what a partnership is all about.

Jason Cerrato 42:30
Love that. So I snuck this next slide in here and this and this came courtesy of our friends at talent tech labs. And I did this because everyone focuses on skills. So pardon my skills, skills, skills title. But what this was, was a chart they created from their position as an analyst in the market, what they’re seeing in terms of the success rate of skills based initiatives. And their big takeaway here was the skills based initiatives that preside primarily within the HR span of control are the ones that are more successful when they start to move beyond HR span of control and incorporate other functions, other leaders, other areas of the business, is where it starts to fall down. That was their takeaway for how they included this in their research. I had two reactions to this. One. Not everything is skill based. Some things are skill informed or skill influenced. So when we’re talking about skills, sometimes we’re over rotating on skills when we’re thinking about moving towards a skills fill in the blank process, right? So that’s one thing, and the other thing is, oftentimes people discuss this and talk about this as if skills based is the outcome, skills based is the input. Of course, the outcome is what was the business challenge they were trying to achieve or trying to overcome or trying to unlock that they couldn’t in the traditional way they were doing this. And this chart, this chart isn’t taking into consideration maybe it was only those few levers or variables that actually fix that problem, right? So again, the goal is not to become skill based. Its goal is to solve the problem, and the problem should be rooted in the business.

Steve Goldberg 44:44
Yes, and since you mentioned skills three times on top, I want to make sure we just have soft skills, behavioral skills, as part of their part of the, you know, laser focus here on skills. Because if we think about change, what skills are most important in a very fluid operating environment, the ability to thrive during periods of change, that is a soft skill. You know, ambiguity, uncertainty. We know we’re changing a lot. You may not know exactly what your job is going to look like in three months, but you are buying in, and you believe in this organization doing the right thing. So you want to be part of a successful organization, go along with it. That’s a soft skill. And I think soft skills have really moved ahead of the pack. I saw something recently where, like out of the top 100 skills that an organization could identify, at least 80 were behavioral and soft skills in nature. Yeah, our Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Ashu Garg, talks a lot about how the AI tools themselves may change over time. You know, Gemini, it’s Perplexity, it’s ChatGPT, it’s whatever the leading tool of the day is. Don’t necessarily focus on the tool. Focus on a person’s willingness to adopt the tool or willingness to experiment with the tool. That’s a skill in itself. Yeah, more of a soft skill? Yeah, yes. Somebody came up with a framework that I liked, that I read years ago, the ready, willing and able framework, when it comes to people and ready is, I understand organization while you’re doing this. It makes sense. I haven’t bought in, but I understand the logic behind it. I understand and yeah, I’m supportive of the decision to go in this direction. I view myself as really being a key part of the new way we’re doing things. I want to be a change agent. It’s a big difference between I understand why you’re doing this and I support it, and wanting to be a change agent.

Jason Cerrato 47:07
All right, folks, if you are staying with us and near your device, we have another poll question coming up. So let’s see here, where is your organization today when it comes to using talent intelligence to drive internal mobility skills development or agile workforce planning. And you can see here we have a couple options leading the way, making progress, early stages, not yet started or not sure. So we’ll give you a couple of seconds to fill that out. And while you’re doing that, I have a question for Steve. What questions should HR leaders be asking before investing in new technology to ensure it supports enterprise wide outcomes? I think this talks a lot about the CHRO/CIO partnership when we’re thinking about enterprise wide scale.

Steve Goldberg 47:58
Well, so questions of whom, who are they being asked of?

Jason Cerrato 48:04
So is this potentially of vendors? I’m thinking this is being asked at what questions should HR leaders be asking before investing in new technology to ensure it supports enterprise wide outcomes?

Steve Goldberg 48:13
Sure. So thanks. I would ask. I mean, the simple, the first question, perhaps, is, who are customers that have the same business goals and the same operating context that we have? How are they benefiting from your solution? Right? So I would start there, and I would also before I’m in front of that vendor, my team would probably be well served by, I think you had it on one slide. What pieces of it are? A technology piece versus a mindset piece versus an operating model piece? And you have to do that analysis to figure out, hey, if technology is 20% of the problem, fine, but keep in mind, if you spend an awful lot on that technology, people will say, we’re still not getting the results, and that’s because technology was only 20% of the problem. So you know, do that analysis and share if, once you’ve narrowed down the field to who you may want to partner with from a technology standpoint, share the analysis with them. See what insights they have on maximizing value and compressing time to value.

Jason Cerrato 49:37
Here comes that variable of time again. All right, let’s see our Let’s see our results here. No one feels they’re leading the way. We have some modest folks here making progress. 21% early stages. 35% not yet started. 35% we have a tie. 7% not sure. So appreciate the folks that joined us today, because hopefully you’re getting some things to think about, if you haven’t yet started, or you’re in the early stages. But you know, it’s nice to see we have 21% that are making progress, and it’s very telling, again, that the future, the future, is the way forward, and we can’t rely on our history as much no one feels they’re leading the way, because we’re all building it together, right?

Steve Goldberg 50:28
Yeah, and what makes me more optimistic than anything with the very, very fast pace of change is that change readiness has come to the forefront and assessing change readiness and the fact that every business leaders that should be on their radar and HR should be kind of coaching business leaders and how they assess readiness in their groups.

Jason Cerrato 51:01
So I want to move on to the last section here with some examples of high performing HR teams and what they’re doing differently, and hopefully this gives some audience some ideas of potentially how they can start now, or maybe how they can use these to start a conversation within their organization. The first one is an organization called Coca-Cola, Europacific Partners (CCEP). We recently had them on stage at our Cultivate conference, and this is their VP of Culture and Leadership. Sue Eilfield with our Co-CEO, Chano Fernandez, and what they talked about was how they rolled out talent intelligence for their internal employees, first, because they were trying to focus on career development, succession planning, employee career pathing, but also trying to get their hands around the changing nature of skills and what new skills the business would need going forward. And that’s often a conversation people have for where do I get started? And it often feels overwhelming, but one of the things that I liked in their approach, rather than try to take on everything and boil the ocean, they met as a leadership team and focused on 100 skills that they found to be mission critical to the business, and they they refer to these as the 100 skills that make the boat go faster, and from there, they at least created a manageable place to start. And from there, they then personalized development by identifying a subset of three to five key skills for each employee to guide their growth based on business strategy and functional needs. And they’ve already seen 80% of their employees are leveraging this personalized guidance and this marketplace. They have data that shows the people that are involved in these initiatives are three times more likely to move. They’re seeing an increase in cross functional movement and a 2% reduction in turnover, which can be significant in a large organization. So people are already putting some of this into action, but also thinking about the need to do this in a more dynamic way that incorporates dynamic information. You mentioned some of that personalized approach, but also personalized and informed in a way that delivers it in a more digestible, adoptable delivery mechanism.

Steve Goldberg 53:26
Yes, and I would say organizations like this one, I’m sure have figured out this is not a binary thing, where you either have the skill or you don’t, right, so you have to, you know, that’s why ontologies became popular a few years ago, because we’re looking at skills from different angles, adjacent skills, skills, you know, the relationship between skills and people and jobs and people’s aspirations and career goals. So the more we can unpack that, I think organizations will be better off. I applaud this group.

Jason Cerrato 54:03
Another example is Bayer and their CEO came in a few years ago and created this organizational initiative that he refers to as dynamic shared ownership. And basically this was creating an entirely new org structure, where they remove the barriers and bureaucracy to move quickly, to try to drive organizational agility. And as part of this, they needed to think about how they organize their team. And we talked earlier about the talent transformation. It is around helping talent flow to work, which is different from how it may have been organized in the past. So one of the things that they do is they’ve created teams of people and organize them in how they relate to the customer and how they relate to how they generate revenue, versus how they organize around leaders and how they organize around specific functions, and what happens is they are working in 90 day cycles where it’s increasingly project based. And as a result of achieving that, they needed the skill visibility to unlock who they had in the organization, but also the nature of work that was being completed, work that was being requested, and who was available to join those teams, as these cycles and intervals were moving much faster. And one of the things they’ve already seen is it’s helped with innovation, as they are developing products faster. It’s helped with cost efficiency. It’s helped with decision speed and worker engagement.

Speaker 2 55:45
Skills visibility, as you know, a lot of recruiting these days is when it’s not obvious someone has the skill. You’re inferring they have the skill, and the system is inferring. So a lot of skills, visibility into skills right now is based on inference. It’s not, you know, a panacea, but, but, you know, but there’s also the other side of the coin, which is, if you can infer is there’s a lot of things that you can infer to get to a successful equation. And does the person want to do the job? Do they view the job as being in line with their career goals, etc? So yeah, I just wanted to bring up the skills. Inferencing and also verifiable skills is really important. You know, how much time is being spent to really verify that somebody has this skill?

Steve Goldberg 57:55
Yes, and let’s keep in mind that business strategy is often a byproduct of business plans and business priorities change, and they’re changing more often than ever.

Jason Cerrato 58:08
And with that, we’ve been trying to pull in some of the questions through the chat along the way, and we find ourselves at the top of the hour. Appreciate everyone who attended, Steve, I’m so happy you joined me. I’m a little ashamed it took us so long to get together and do something like this, because this was a lot of fun, but I appreciate your partnership and the ability to listen and learn from you. I’m sure people in our audience have a few nuggets that they can take back to their team, but appreciate your partnership and always good to learn from you and look forward to doing some more.

Speaker 2 58:44
Thank you. Thanks everybody.