An internal talent marketplace is a system that matches your current employees to open roles, short projects, mentors and learning inside your own company. Employees list their skills and goals. Managers and recruiters post opportunities. Matching logic connects the two.

The idea is simple. The execution is not. A marketplace works only when employees trust it, managers support it and the data behind it is accurate. This guide covers how a marketplace works, what to look for in a talent marketplace platform, and the steps to launch one without it going quiet after month two.

What Is an Internal Talent Marketplace?

An internal talent marketplace is a shared place where employees find opportunities and the company finds people for its needs, without leaving the organization. Think of it as an internal job board that also understands skills, interests and availability.

It sits inside a broader internal mobility strategy, but it is a narrower thing. Strategy answers why and where you want people to move. The marketplace is the mechanism that makes those moves visible and easy. If you need the strategic layer first, start there and return here for mechanics.

A marketplace usually covers four types of opportunity:

• Full-time roles: promotions, lateral moves and transfers.
• Gigs and stretch projects: short assignments alongside a current job.
• Mentoring: matches between people who want to learn and people who can teach.
• Learning paths: courses and experiences tied to a target role.

The broader scope is what separates a marketplace from a standard applicant tracking system.

How Does an Internal Talent Marketplace Work?

A marketplace runs on three parts: a skills profile for every employee, a catalog of opportunities, and a matching engine that connects them. Each part has a human owner behind it.

• Skills profiles. Each employee builds a profile with skills, past roles, certifications and career interests. Good systems pre-fill this from HR records and performance data, then ask the employee to confirm. Profiles are the raw material. If they are thin or stale, everything downstream suffers.
• Opportunity catalog. Managers post roles and projects with required skills, time commitment and duration. This is where many programs stall, because managers must see a reason to post. A project posted today should return a qualified, willing candidate within days.
• Matching engine. The engine compares skills in profiles to skills in postings, then ranks candidates. Employees see recommended roles. Managers see recommended people. Both sides can accept, decline or ask for more information.
• The workflow around it. After a match, the process needs rules. Does a gig need manager approval? Who backfills the time? Mature programs write these answers down before launch.

A working marketplace also shows HR which skills are scarce and which roles sit unfilled.

Why Companies Build Internal Talent Marketplaces

Companies build marketplaces to fill roles faster, keep people longer and see their skills clearly. Research supports the underlying need. Gartner reports that internal mobility rates have stayed flat despite increased investment, and projects that one in five employees will need to be redeployed by 2030. That is a lot of movement to manage by email and referrals.

Gartner also finds that organizations struggle to scale internal mobility because of fragmented systems and low visibility of opportunities. A marketplace attacks exactly that problem by putting every opportunity in one place.

Hiring conditions add pressure. SHRM’s February 2026 analysis of hiring trends notes that hiring is constrained, and quotes i4cp research finding that companies with formal internal mobility programs tend to outperform their peers. When external headcount is tight, existing employees become the best source of capability.

The practical benefits fall into four groups:

1. Lower hiring effort. Internal candidates already know your systems and culture, so ramp time shrinks.
2. Better retention. Employees who see a path stay to take it. Our guide on internal career transitions explains what makes a move stick.
3. Skills visibility. Leaders see what the workforce can do, not just what job titles say.
4. Fairer access. Opportunities are visible to everyone, not only people who sit near decision makers.

How Does AI Matching Work in a Talent Marketplace?

AI matching reads the language in profiles, resumes and job descriptions, maps it to a skills framework, and scores how well a person fits an opportunity. It also infers adjacent skills the employee never listed.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

• Skill inference. If someone lists “forecasting” and “SQL,” the system may infer data analysis ability.
• Adjacency scoring. The engine finds roles that share most required skills, even when job titles differ.
• Recommendation ranking. Employees see a short list ordered by fit, interest and growth potential.
• Gap identification. The system shows missing skills and suggests learning to close them.

A strict match filter hides capable people. A good marketplace lets managers see close fits with a learning plan, not only perfect matches.

AI has limits. It reflects the quality of your data, and it can repeat bias in past promotion patterns. Treat its output as a recommendation, and keep a human reviewing slates. For a wider look at where AI fits in mobility, read our piece on internal mobility in the AI era.

What to Look For in a Talent Marketplace Platform

The best talent marketplace platforms are the ones your employees and managers will use weekly. Features matter less than fit. When you compare talent marketplace platforms, check these capabilities against your own needs.

Skills foundation

• A maintained skills taxonomy you can edit, not a black box.
• Pre-filled profiles with employee confirmation.
• Skill proficiency levels, not just yes or no tags.

Opportunity types

• Roles, gigs, mentoring and learning in one place.
• Time-boxed projects with capacity controls so managers can protect their workload.

Matching and transparency

• Explanations for why a match was suggested.
• Bias monitoring and the ability to audit results.
• Controls for both employees and managers.

Integration and data

• Connections to your HR system, learning tools and applicant tracking.
• Reporting on moves, time to fill and skills supply.

Experience

• Support for your size. Mid-sized companies rarely need enterprise-scale configuration, and heavy setup can sink a small HR team.

Two questions cut through most demos. How long until the first match with our real data? What does adoption look like at a company our size six months in?

A platform is also only one piece. Gartner’s guidance on marketplace implementation points to four tasks: evaluate readiness, align stakeholders, select a solution and sustain adoption. Only one of those four is about technology.

How to Launch an Internal Talent Marketplace: Step by Step

Launch in stages, starting with a clear purpose and a small pilot. Most successful programs follow a sequence like this one.

1. Define the purpose. Pick one primary goal: fill critical roles, reduce attrition in a named group, or redeploy people from shrinking areas. A narrow goal makes every later decision easier.
2. Assess readiness. Check whether your skills data exists, whether job architecture is consistent, and whether leaders will let people move. Readiness gaps found early are cheap to fix.
3. Build the skills foundation. Agree on a skills language. Employees need to describe themselves in terms managers recognize. Our explainer on skills-based career development shows how to structure this.
4. Set the rules. Decide approval paths, gig time limits, backfill policy and how moves are recorded. Publish them in plain language.
5. Prepare managers. Train managers to post opportunities, release talent and hold career conversations. This step decides success more than any feature.
6. Pilot with one or two business units. Choose teams with real openings and a supportive leader. Run for 60 to 90 days and collect feedback weekly.
7. Support employees with guidance. Give people help interpreting their options. A career map shows how roles connect, and our guide to what is career mapping covers how to build one.
8. Scale and review. Share early stories of real moves, add business units in waves and check metrics monthly.

Gartner’s research on internal job applications adds a useful warning. It highlights that many employees struggle to discover and pursue internal opportunities, which means launch communication and ease of application deserve as much attention as the software.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Most marketplace failures trace back to people and process, not technology. These are the patterns to watch.

• Manager hoarding. Managers fear losing top performers, so they block moves or never post projects. Fix this with incentives for developing talent, clear backfill support, and leadership that praises people who release talent.
• Empty marketplace. If few opportunities are posted, employees stop visiting. Seed the platform with real roles and projects before announcing it, and set a minimum number of postings per business unit.
• Stale profiles. Employees fill in a profile once and never return. Tie profile updates to existing moments such as reviews and career conversations.
• No guidance for employees. A list of matches is not a plan. Employees need coaching to judge a move, close a skill gap and talk to their manager. This is where many programs lose momentum, and where human support adds the most.
• Proficiency filters too strict. If hiring managers require a full skills match, internal candidates lose to external ones. Encourage openness to people who can learn quickly.

Which Metrics Show Whether a Marketplace Is Working?

Track adoption, activity, outcomes and fairness. A small set of measures, reviewed monthly, tells you more than a large dashboard nobody reads.

Set a baseline before launch. Without one, you cannot show improvement. Report a few of these to executives each quarter, with real stories of people who moved.

Make the Marketplace Work for Your People

An internal talent marketplace gives employees a map of what is possible and gives the company a faster way to use its own talent. The software supplies the matching. People supply the trust, the time and the follow-through.

Pathwise does not sell marketplace software. We work on the parts that decide whether one succeeds: career coaching for employees, manager enablement and internal mobility support. If you are planning a launch or trying to revive a quiet platform, see how our corporate programs fit your rollout, or talk to our team about your pilot.

Talent development is the ongoing effort to build the skills, knowledge and career paths of the people already inside your organization. It aims to prepare employees for the work the business needs today and the roles it will need tomorrow.

So what is talent development in practice? It is a planned mix of coaching, training, stretch assignments, mentoring and career guidance. These are tied to business goals rather than offered as one-off perks. Done well, it helps you develop talent from within instead of buying it on the open market.

This guide covers the definition, how talent development differs from talent management and learning and development (L&D), why it matters, its core components, a step-by-step strategy, real examples and the metrics that prove it works.

What Is Talent Development?

Talent development is a deliberate, long-term process of growing employee capability in line with business strategy. It covers technical skills, leadership ability, and the career direction that keeps people engaged.

Three features separate it from ordinary training:

• It is forward-looking. It builds for future roles, not only current job descriptions.
• It is individual. Development plans reflect each person’s strengths, goals and gaps.
• It is tied to strategy. Every investment links to a business need, such as a new market, a product shift or a leadership pipeline.

The idea sits at the center of any workforce plan. If your company cannot grow its own managers, specialists and executives, it will keep paying a premium to hire them.

Talent Development vs. Talent Management vs. L&D

These three terms overlap, and teams often use them as if they mean the same thing. They do not.

• Talent management is the umbrella. It covers the full employee lifecycle: recruiting, onboarding, performance management, compensation, succession planning and retention.
• Talent development is one part of that umbrella. It focuses on growth: building capability and preparing people for bigger roles.
• Learning and development (L&D) is the delivery arm. It runs the courses, workshops and learning platforms that build specific skills.

A simple test: L&D answers “what should we teach?”, talent development answers “who are we growing, and for what?”, and talent management answers “who do we need, and how do we keep them?”

Why Is Talent Development Important?

Why is talent development important for a mid-sized company? Because you cannot out-hire a skills gap, and your best people are watching whether you invest in them.

• Engagement is slipping, and managers carry the load. Gallup’s global workplace research found that employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020. Manager engagement dropped to 22%, a nine-point decline since 2022. The same report estimates that low engagement costs the world economy about $10 trillion in lost productivity (Gallup). Developing managers is one of the few levers HR directly controls.
• Career development is a competitive edge. In its 2025 Workplace Learning Report, LinkedIn Learning found that 36% of surveyed organizations had mature career development initiatives. LinkedIn labels these organizations “career development champions.” Those champions reported more confidence in their ability to attract and retain talent, and they were more likely to describe themselves as leading in AI adoption (LinkedIn Learning).
• Formal training time is limited. The Association for Talent Development (ATD) reported that employees used an average of 16.7 formal learning hours in 2025, up from 13.7 in 2024 (ATD). That is still only a few working days a year, so most development has to happen in the flow of work, through coaching, projects and conversations with managers.

Put those findings together. Engagement is down, formal training time is limited, and the companies that invest in careers are pulling ahead. A weak talent development strategy is no longer a quiet cost. It shows up in turnover, thin leadership benches and stalled projects.

The Core Components of Talent Development

Most effective programs combine six components. You do not need all of them on day one, but you should know where each fits.

1. Skills assessment and gap analysis

Start by mapping the skills you have against the skills you need. Use performance data, manager input and self-assessments to build a skills inventory. This tells you where to invest, and it keeps development from turning into guesswork. For a deeper look at how this works, see our guide to skills-based career development.

2. Leadership and executive development

Leadership development builds the next layer of managers and senior leaders. It usually includes training workshops, 360-degree feedback and one-on-one executive coaching. Coaching is especially useful for new managers, who often get promoted for technical skill and then struggle with people leadership.

3. Coaching and mentoring

Coaching gives employees a trained partner who helps them set goals and change behavior. Mentoring pairs them with a more experienced colleague who shares judgment and context. Coaching is typically structured and time-bound. Mentoring is relationship-led and longer.

4. Professional skills training

Communication, delegation, negotiation, project management and data literacy are the skills that carry across roles. Teaching them early makes every later promotion easier.

5. Career pathing and internal mobility

Employees stay when they can see their next step. Clear career paths, lateral moves and stretch assignments let people grow without leaving. A deliberate internal mobility strategy turns open roles into development opportunities.

6. Succession planning

Succession planning identifies high-potential employees and prepares them for critical roles before those roles open. It protects the business from the sudden loss of a key leader.

How to Build a Talent Development Strategy

A talent development strategy is a written plan that links people growth to business goals. These steps work for companies with 100 to 2,000 employees.

1. Start with business priorities. List the three to five outcomes the company must achieve in the next two years. Examples include entering a new market, launching a product or reducing manager turnover.
2. Identify critical roles and skills. Decide which roles matter most to those outcomes and which skills they need.
3. Assess your current bench. Compare current capability to future need. Include readiness for succession.
4. Segment your audience. New managers, high-potential individual contributors and senior leaders need different development. A single program for everyone rarely works.
5. Choose the right methods. Match method to goal. Use workshops for shared skills, coaching for behavior change, and stretch projects for judgment.
6. Give managers a role. Managers shape most daily learning. Train them to run career conversations and give useful feedback.
7. Set metrics before launch. Decide up front what success looks like (see the measurement section below).
8. Review quarterly. Adjust the plan as business priorities and skill demands shift.

Do not skip step six. A strategy lives or dies in the manager’s one-on-one meeting. Building a culture where people drive their own growth also helps. Our article on building a culture of career ownership explains how to make employees partners in their own development rather than passive recipients.

If you want to turn this strategy into a structured offer for your teams, our guide to employee career development programs covers program design in detail.

Talent Development Examples

The best way to understand how to develop talent is to see how it looks inside real organizations. These are representative scenarios, not case studies of named clients.

Example 1: A new manager track. A 400-person professional services firm promotes its top consultants to team lead roles. Many struggle. The firm builds a six-month track that combines a leadership workshop series, monthly group coaching and a peer circle. Participants practice feedback, delegation and difficult conversations on live work.

Example 2: An emerging-leader pipeline. A regional manufacturer identifies 15 high-potential employees. Each gets an individual development plan, a stretch assignment outside their function and an executive sponsor. The company uses the group as a first source for open supervisor and plant manager roles.

Example 3: Reskilling for AI. A mid-sized financial services company sees repetitive tasks shifting to automation. It teaches analysts to evaluate AI outputs, write better prompts and redesign workflows. Roles shift toward higher-value judgment work instead of disappearing. Our guide to AI upskilling for employees shows how to structure this kind of effort.

Example 4: Career guidance at scale. A growing software company cannot give every employee a dedicated coach. It offers a career guidance platform with self-paced tools, plus coaching reserved for critical roles. Employees map their next step, and managers get prompts to continue the conversation.

Each example links a specific business need to a specific development method. That link is what makes them talent development rather than generic training.

How to Measure Talent Development

If you cannot show results, the budget will not last. Track a mix of leading and lagging indicators.

Leading indicators show early movement:

• Participation and completion rates in development activities
• Manager and participant feedback scores
• Percentage of employees with an active development plan
• Skills assessment progress

Lagging indicators show business impact:

• Internal fill rate: the share of open roles filled by current employees
• Retention of high-potential employees
• Time to productivity for new managers
• Engagement scores on growth and development items
• Succession readiness: the number of critical roles with a ready-now successor

Pick four or five measures, set a baseline, and report them to leadership each quarter. Tie at least one measure to a financial result, such as the cost of replacing a leader who left. Avoid vanity metrics like hours of training delivered. Hours rise and fall with budgets, as ATD’s year-to-year figures show, and they tell you nothing about whether capability improved.

Common Talent Development Mistakes

• Treating it as an HR project. Without business leader sponsorship, programs fade.
• Offering the same program to everyone. Different roles need different development.
• Relying on content alone. Courses without practice, feedback or coaching rarely change behavior.
• Ignoring managers. If managers cannot hold a career conversation, employees will not get one.
• Skipping measurement. What is not tracked is the first thing cut.

Start Building Your Talent Development Strategy

Talent development turns your payroll into a pipeline. Employees who see a future with you stay longer, lead better and adapt faster when the business changes. The companies that treat growth as a core operating discipline, not a perk, are the ones with deep leadership benches when it counts.

If thin leadership benches, stalled promotions or low manager engagement are holding your team back, explore how Pathwise supports corporate talent development through coaching, workshops and career guidance, or talk to our team to scope a plan for your organization.

Corporate mentoring programs pair employees with more experienced colleagues so knowledge, judgment, and professional relationships move through the company on purpose. A good program has a defined goal, a clear way to match people, a set meeting rhythm, and a plan to measure results. Without those four parts, it becomes a list of names that never meet.

Corporate mentoring is not training and it is not performance management. A mentor does not teach a course or grade a mentee. A mentor shares experience, asks good questions, and opens doors. This guide covers the main program types, a seven-step build process, how to measure success, and the mistakes that sink most programs.

What Is a Corporate Mentoring Program?

A corporate mentoring program is a structured, company-sponsored system that connects mentors and mentees for a set period, with shared goals and support from HR or L&D. The structure separates it from informal mentorship, which depends on chance conversations and tends to favor people who already have strong networks.

Corporate mentorship covers more than one relationship style. SHRM describes mentoring as a developmental partnership that can be formal, informal, group, or reverse, and notes that each format has different strengths around equity, scale, and knowledge transfer (Shahid, February 2026).

Mentoring also differs from coaching and sponsorship. A mentor shares their own path. A coach works with you on a defined skill or behavior, usually with a trained professional. A sponsor uses their influence to put you forward for roles. Many companies need all three. This article stays on the mentoring piece. For how coaching and training split the work, see our breakdown of career coaching vs training.

Why Workplace Mentoring Programs Matter Now

Two forces make a company mentorship program more useful in 2026 than it was five years ago.

The first is the manager squeeze. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, and manager engagement dropped to 22%, a nine-point decline since 2022. In its previous edition, Gallup also found that manager training lifted manager thriving from 28% to 34% (Moody, April 2025). Newer managers are the group most likely to burn out, and a mentor gives them a place to test decisions before they make them.

The second is the loss of on-the-job learning. Harvard Business Review contributor Marlo Lyons argues that as AI absorbs routine tasks, junior staff lose the repetition that used to build judgment, such as spotting a weak argument in a memo or reading ambiguous data. She recommends that companies redesign mentoring to make implicit knowledge explicit and weave learning into everyday work (Lyons, July 2026).

There is also a motivation gap. SHRM’s research shows 54% of workers with a mentor or sponsor feel strongly motivated to push through career setbacks, compared with 35% of workers without one (Gebreamlak, October 2025). That gap is a retention issue. If you want the retention case in full, our guide to career coaching for employee retention covers it.

Types of Employee Mentoring Programs

Most employee mentoring programs fall into five formats. Pick the one that fits your goal, not the one that sounds newest.

• One-to-one mentoring. One mentor, one mentee, usually for six to twelve months. It builds the deepest trust and works best for leadership pipeline and role transitions. It is the hardest to scale, because every pair needs a good match.
• Group mentoring. One mentor works with a small cohort, or a small circle of peers meets with a facilitator. It stretches senior time further and suits mid-sized companies with a thin bench of experienced mentors. SHRM recommends varied models, including senior-to-junior, peer-to-peer, and circles, to widen access across levels (Ekdahl, June 2025).
• Peer mentoring. Colleagues at a similar level share what they know. It fits onboarding and new-hire ramp-up, and the lower stakes help people join.
• Reverse mentoring. A junior employee mentors a senior leader on technology, customer behavior, or how the culture feels from the ground. SHRM’s executive network describes recommended pairings built around learning goals, regular meetings of 30 to 60 minutes each month, and a psychologically safe setting for candid talk (O’Connell, May 2025).

Many companies run a hybrid: one-to-one for high-stakes transitions and group formats for everyone else.

How to Build a Mentor Program at Work: Seven Steps

Step 1: Define one goal and one audience

Start with a single business problem. Examples include faster ramp-up for new hires, a stronger bench for leadership roles, or fewer first-year manager exits. Name the audience that has the problem. A program built “for everyone” with no goal cannot be measured, and measurement is how you keep funding.

SHRM advises CHROs to define clear goals aligned with organizational needs and to tailor programs to the pain points of the workforce (Ekdahl, June 2025).

Step 2: Decide who can take part

Harvard Business Review’s Andy Lopata argues for a mentoring-for-all approach, where everyone is assigned a mentor and a mentee unless they opt out. He warns that programs limited to high-potential employees miss large opportunities (Lopata, January 2026).

For a mid-sized company, a full rollout may be too heavy in year one. A practical middle path is to launch with one population, such as new managers, and design the system so it can open up to everyone once it runs smoothly.

Step 3: Recruit and prepare mentors

Mentors need three things: time, a clear role, and basic skills. Lopata lists time pressure, unclear expectations, limited training, and poor program visibility as the barriers that keep staff from participating (Lopata, January 2026). Fix each one.

Ask managers to protect time on the calendar, not just approve it in theory. Hold a 60 to 90 minute mentor briefing that covers listening before advising, coaching for independence rather than reliance, and confidentiality. SHRM’s guidance lists those same habits, along with defined boundaries on communication, roles, and time commitments (Shahid, February 2026).

Ask senior leaders to mentor outside their own reporting line. Lopata recommends this because it builds cross-functional connections and spreads learning across the company (Lopata, January 2026).

Step 4: Match people on purpose

Matching is where programs quietly fail. Do not match on job title or seniority alone. Collect short profiles that cover development goals, strengths to share, working style, and availability. Match on the mentee’s goal first and chemistry second.

Allow a reset. Tell participants at launch that either person can request a new match after the first two meetings, no explanation needed. This removes the pressure that keeps bad pairs limping along for six months.

Avoid pairing a mentee with their direct manager. The mentee will not speak freely about the problems that matter most.

Step 5: Set structure, cadence, and agreements

SHRM’s first piece of advice is to start with clarity: define goals, success measures, and a meeting cadence early (Shahid, February 2026). In practice:

• Run the program in fixed cycles of six to nine months, with a kickoff and a closing session.
• Ask each pair to meet at least monthly for 45 to 60 minutes.
• Have each pair complete a one-page agreement covering goals, meeting rhythm, topics that are off limits, and confidentiality.

Step 6: Build mentoring into normal work

Lopata recommends embedding mentoring into core performance and development conversations rather than running it as a side project (Lopata, January 2026). Ask managers to include mentoring goals in development plans. Let mentees count mentoring time as learning time.

This is also where mentoring connects to the broader system. Mentoring supports your employee career development programs, but it does not replace the other parts. Treat it as the relationship layer on top of training and stretch assignments.

Step 7: Check in, support, and close the cycle

Program owners should contact every pair at week four and again at the midpoint. Ask two questions: are you meeting, and is it useful? Pairs that have stopped meeting by week six rarely restart on their own, so reassign them quickly.

End each cycle with a closing session. Pairs decide whether to continue informally, rotate to new partners, or wrap up. Mentees often become mentors in the next cycle, which is how a program grows its mentor pool without extra recruiting.

How to Measure a Corporate Mentorship Program

Lopata advises tracking results at both the individual and organizational levels (Lopata, January 2026). SHRM likewise tells HR leaders to measure and iterate using participant feedback and outcome data (Ekdahl, June 2025). Use three layers.

• Participation and activity. Track the share of eligible people enrolled, the number of pairs that met at least monthly, and the drop-off by week six. These are early warning signs.
• Experience. Run a short survey at the midpoint and the close. Ask mentees whether they gained a skill, a contact, or clearer direction, and ask mentors what they learned.
• Business outcomes. Compare participants with a matched group of non-participants on the metric tied to your original goal. If your goal was retention, compare 12-month turnover. If it was ramp-up, compare time to full productivity. If it was promotion readiness, compare internal moves.

Be honest about what the numbers can prove. People who volunteer for mentoring may already be more motivated, so a gap between the groups is not clean proof of cause. Report it as a signal, and pair it with participant stories and manager feedback.

Review results once per cycle and change one thing at a time, so you know what moved the numbers.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• No owner. A program that belongs to “HR and the business” belongs to no one. Name one program owner with protected time.
• Matching by convenience. Pairing people because they share a floor or a calendar gap produces polite, empty meetings.
• Mentors who are never trained. Good performers are not automatically good mentors. The briefing in Step 3 costs little and keeps advice from turning into lecturing.
• Treating mentoring as a substitute for management. A mentor cannot fix a poor manager. New managers in particular often need structured skill-building alongside a mentor, which is why many companies pair mentoring with first-time manager coaching.
• Launching without a goal. A program with no stated purpose cannot show results, and budget disappears at the first review.

Where Professional Coaching Fits

Many mid-sized companies discover that internal mentors are strong on company knowledge but stretched thin on time and skills. Some mentees need a trained outside coach instead, or alongside, especially for leadership transitions. Pathwise offers coaching for leaders and professionals that can sit next to an internal mentoring program, so mentors focus on context and relationships while coaches focus on skill and behavior change.

Build Your Program on a Solid Foundation

A mentoring program is a small system: one goal, a clear audience, trained mentors, deliberate matches, a steady rhythm, and a measurement plan. Get those right and the rest is routine upkeep. Start with one cohort and widen after the first cycle.

If you want help designing a company mentorship program that fits your size and goals, explore Pathwise for companies to see how coaching and training can support your mentors and mentees, or talk to the Pathwise team about your first cohort.

Career development conversations are structured, forward-looking discussions between a manager and a direct report about where that person wants their career to go and what it will take to get there. They sit apart from performance reviews. They sit apart from weekly check-ins. Most managers are told to have them and handed nothing to run them with.

That gap is why these conversations get skipped, or turn into twenty vague minutes about growth. A manager sits down without a structure, asks what the person wants to do next, hears “I’m not sure,” and both people leave with nothing written down.

This guide closes the gap. You get a four-part structure you can run in forty-five minutes, thirty questions grouped by what they are for, a preparation prompt for the calendar invite, scripts for the three hardest answers, and the operating model HR needs to make this happen across two hundred managers rather than the handful who already do it well.

What a career development conversation is (and what it isn’t)

A career development conversation is a scheduled discussion in which a manager helps an employee define their long-term career direction, assess the gap between current skills and target roles, and agree on specific development actions. It is forward-looking, is not tied to a rating or pay decision, and typically runs 45 to 60 minutes twice a year.

Three things get confused with it, and the confusion ruins them.

• The performance review. A review looks backward at a rating period, feeds compensation, and carries a judgment. The moment a career conversation feels like it might affect someone’s rating, they stop being honest about what they want. If you are preparing an evaluation cycle, how to prepare a performance review covers that separately.
• The 1:1. A one-on-one is tactical and weekly, handling blockers, priorities, and status. Career direction loses every time it competes with a live deadline, which is why it needs its own meeting. For the cadence side, see how to get the most out of your 1×1 meetings.
• The promotion conversation. Promotion is one possible output, not the subject. Lateral moves, skill depth, scope expansion, and internal transfers are all legitimate outcomes.

Development conversations use feedback as raw material but do not exist to deliver it. The art of feedback is its own discipline.

Why managers avoid these conversations

Four objections come up constantly. Each has a real answer.

• “I can’t promise a promotion.” You are not being asked to. The commitment is to visibility and access, not to an outcome you do not control. A manager who says “I cannot promise a director role in eighteen months, and here is what would have to be true for you to be a credible candidate” is more useful than one who says nothing. Ambiguity is what people leave over, not honest limits.
• “I don’t know their options outside my team.” Neither does your report, which is why the conversation matters. Your job is not to be a directory of every role in the company. It is to name two or three people they should talk to, then make the introduction. Brokering three conversations does more for someone’s career than reciting an org chart.
• “I’ll trigger them into leaving.” This objection deserves the most scrutiny, and the data cuts the other way. Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, with manager engagement dropping to 22%, down nine points since 2022, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026. People disengage inside the job long before they resign from it. The conversation you are avoiding is already happening without you, with a recruiter or a friend.

Gartner sharpens the point, naming regrettable retention as a primary productivity barrier for 2026 and noting that internal mobility rates have stayed flat despite rising investment. Keeping someone in a role they have outgrown is a stalled person occupying a seat, and the team can see it.

• “I don’t have time.” Two conversations a year at 45 minutes is 90 minutes per person, or twelve hours for a manager with eight reports. Compare that to a single backfill: the requisition, the interview loop, the ramp.

When to have them

Run career development conversations twice a year, decoupled from the performance review cycle by at least six weeks.

The decoupling is what organizations get wrong. When a career conversation sits in the same month as calibration, employees read it as an audition and give the answer they think helps their rating. Six weeks is enough separation for the two meetings to feel like different things. March and September work well when reviews run in January and July.

Four moments justify an extra conversation.

1. After a promotion cycle closes, whether the person was promoted or not. The two weeks after a decision lands is when someone is most open and most at risk.
2. After a reorg. Reporting lines, scope, and adjacencies all changed. The path someone mapped six months ago may no longer exist in the shape they drew it.
3. At the 12-month mark in a role, roughly when competence turns into comfort, and comfort is where quiet stagnation starts.
4. When someone declines an opportunity. A turned-down project is information. Find out whether it was timing, confidence, family circumstances, or a signal that they want something different than you assumed.

How to prepare (manager and employee)

Manager prep

Spend twenty minutes before the meeting on four things.

• Re-read the last two conversations and the commitments made. Nothing kills credibility faster than forgetting what you promised in March.
• Review their recent work for evidence, not impressions. Pull two or three examples of what they did well and where they got stuck.
• List every internal role, project, and person you could connect them to. You want raw material, not a recommendation.
• Check what you know about openings, headcount, and budget, and mark which of it you can share.

What not to do: decide in advance what their career should be. Managers who arrive with a plan run a meeting where the employee’s job is to agree, which produces compliance and no information.

Employee prep

Paste the prompt below into the calendar invite at least three days ahead. Three days lets people think. Three hours produces improvisation.

This is a career conversation, not a performance review. Nothing here affects your rating or your pay. Before we meet, jot down rough answers to four things and send them over, or just bring them: (1) What do you want to be doing in two to three years, even if you are unsure? (2) What work in the last six months are you proudest of, and why? (3) What is currently in your way? (4) What is one thing you want me to do differently to help? Bullet points are fine.

A four-part structure for the conversation

Use the AROC structure: Aspiration, Reality, Options, Commitment.

AROC builds on GROW, the coaching model developed by Sir John Whitmore and colleagues in the 1980s that nearly every university HR guide on this topic references. Two things changed. GROW opens with Goal, meaning a goal for the session; career conversations need a longer horizon, so AROC opens with Aspiration. 

GROW closes with Will, the coach’s motivation to act, which fits a coach with no authority. A manager has authority and owns half the actions, so AROC closes with Commitment: written, owned, and dated on both sides.

1. Aspiration

Purpose: surface direction before constraints get introduced. Say nothing about feasibility yet.

• “Forget what’s available here. What do you want to be doing in three years?”
• “What kind of problems do you want to be known for solving?”
• “Do you want to go deeper in what you do now, or wider into something new?”

Failure mode: correcting the aspiration in real time. The instant you say “that’s probably not realistic,” you will get safe answers forever. Write it down and test it in the next section.

2. Reality

Purpose: establish shared evidence about where they are now, using specifics rather than adjectives.

• “What in the last six months are you proudest of, and what specifically did you do?”
• “Here’s where I see your strengths, with two examples. Does that match how you see it?”
• “Between where you are and the role you described, what’s the honest gap?”

Failure mode: turning this into a feedback session. One piece of forward-looking, evidence-based feedback is useful. A list of development areas becomes an unscheduled review and destroys the trust the first section built.

3. Options

Purpose: generate more than one path, including paths that lead away from your team.

• “There are three ways I can see to get there. Tell me what I’ve missed.”
• “Who here already does what you want to learn? Would an introduction help?”
• “What would a lateral move buy you that a promotion wouldn’t?”

Failure mode: offering exactly one option, almost always the one that serves your headcount. If every path keeps the person on your team, you are not developing them. An internal mobility strategy gives managers something concrete to point at.

4. Commitment

Purpose: convert the conversation into three to five actions with owners and dates.

• “Let’s agree on three things. What are you taking, and what am I taking?”
• “By when? Put a real date on it.”
• “What should be different by the time we meet again in six months?”

Failure mode: all the actions belong to the employee. If the manager owns nothing, the person correctly reads the meeting as theatre. Take at least one yourself and make it visible, like a named introduction by a specific date.

30 career conversation questions

Pick four to six per conversation. All thirty turns the meeting into an interrogation.

Aspiration

1. If you could design your role two years from now, what would be on your calendar that isn’t today?
2. Whose job in this company would you want to try for a month, and what part of it appeals to you?
3. What kind of problems do you want to be known for solving?
4. When you eventually leave here, what do you want to have learned?
5. Do you want to go deeper in what you do now, or wider across something new?
6. What did you think this career would look like when you started, and what’s changed?

Strengths and evidence

1. What work from the past six months are you proudest of, and what specifically did you do?
2. Which parts of your job do people come to you for without being told to?
3. What comes easily to you that others seem to find hard?
4. What feedback have you received more than once, from more than one person?
5. Where are you stronger than your current role lets you show?
6. If I had to argue your case for a bigger role, what evidence would I use?

Obstacles

1. What’s getting in the way of the work you actually want to do?
2. What are you spending time on that someone else could do?
3. What have you wanted to raise with me and haven’t?
4. Where do you feel stuck, and how long have you felt that way?
5. What would have to change for you to still be here in three years?
6. Is there anything about how this team works that limits you?

Skills and gaps

1. What’s the gap between what you can do today and what your target role requires?
2. Which of those gaps can you close on the job, and which need real training?
3. What skill are you avoiding because it looks hard or boring?
4. Who inside the company already does what you want to learn, and have you spoken to them?
5. What would you need to see yourself do to believe you were ready?
6. What part of your current work is becoming less valuable, and what replaces it?

Next steps

1. What one project next quarter would move you toward this?
2. What do you want me to do differently to support this?
3. Who else needs to know about your ambitions for them to be real?
4. What’s the smallest version of this you could start in the next two weeks?
5. What should we check on when we meet again in six months?
6. If nothing changes between now and then, what will that tell us?

Employees preparing for their side of this can work through how to get promoted before they arrive.

What to do when the answer is no

Most guides stop before this. These three cases are where managers actually lose people.

They want a promotion that isn’t coming. Say so in one sentence, early. Then separate the two reasons, because they need different answers. If it is a readiness gap, name the two or three things that would change your assessment and put dates on them. If it is structural, meaning no open role and no budget, say that plainly. 

Dressing up a headcount constraint as a skills problem is the fastest way to lose someone’s trust, because they will eventually find out. When the ceiling is structural, your job shifts to helping them find scope elsewhere.

They want a role they’re not ready for. Do not say no and do not say yes. Define the evidence. “Here are the three things I’d need to see you do. Here’s a Q3 project where you could do the first one.” 

That converts a subjective judgment into a test the person can run, with a real chance to fail at something visible. If they clear the bar, you have your answer. If they do not, so do they.

They want to leave your team. Your reaction in the first ten seconds decides whether anyone tells you this again. Help them, visibly. Make the introduction. Tell them what you will say if the hiring manager calls. 

Agree a transition timeline that protects delivery. A manager known for exporting talent gets the first pick of internal candidates. Talent hoarding is visible to everyone except the hoarder. Career coaching and employee retention covers the economics behind that trade.

Turning the conversation into a plan

End every conversation with three to five commitments. Fewer than three and nothing changes. More than five and nothing gets done.

• Each needs a named owner, a date, and a definition of what finished looks like. “Explore the analytics team” is not a commitment. “Coffee with the analytics lead by 15 October, arranged by me” is.
• Split ownership deliberately. The employee takes two or three, such as a course, a proposal, or shadowing a colleague. The manager takes at least one that only a manager can do: an introduction, a stretch assignment, a name raised in a talent review.

Record them in the system your organization already uses for goals or one-on-ones. A separate document nobody opens is worse than nothing, because it creates the appearance of a process. 

Then surface them as a standing two-minute item on the next monthly 1:1 agenda. Keep it lighter than a full individual development plan, which is a separate artifact with a longer horizon.

If your organization wants to equip managers for situations like these, PathWise offers manager development training.

How HR scales this across managers

Getting two hundred managers to do this consistently is a different problem from teaching one to do it well. Four things move the number.

• Enable, do not just distribute. A template mailed to managers changes nothing. The skill gap is in handling the hard answers, not running the agenda. Sessions where managers rehearse “the promotion isn’t coming” out loud, with a peer playing the employee, do more than any document. New managers need this most and get it least, which is why first-time manager coaching and becoming a manager for the first time belong in the enablement path.
• Publish a shared question bank. When every manager improvises, quality varies by manager rather than by employee need. A common bank raises the floor without scripting anyone.
• Attach a light completion metric. Track that the conversation happened and commitments were recorded. Do not grade the content. The moment HR audits quality, managers write for the auditor.
• Measure four things. Internal mobility rate, regrettable attrition among high performers, the engagement item on whether someone talks to me about my progress, and the share of open roles filled internally. SHRM’s 2026 Talent Trends Report found that 42% of HR professionals reported difficulty retaining full-time employees in the previous twelve months, while job rotation programs rated 93% effective at closing talent gaps sat below 25% adoption. The capability exists. The routing does not.

Managers cannot point people toward paths nobody has mapped, which is where skills-based career development does work a template cannot. The end state is not a compliant manager population. It is a culture of career ownership where employees arrive with a point of view and managers know what to do with it.

Career development conversations fail for an unglamorous reason: nobody gave managers a structure, and nobody gave them a script for the moment the answer is no. Fix those two things and the rest follows. To make this consistent across a manager population rather than a handful of naturals, explore our employee career development programs or talk to our team about manager enablement.

A mission statement is a short, plain explanation of what an organization does, whom it serves, and the value or impact it sets out to create. It describes the organization’s present role rather than only its future ambitions. 

So when someone asks what a mission statement is, the most useful answer is this: it names the work an organization has taken on and the people that work is for, in language employees would recognize as true.

It is not a slogan, a list of principles, or a picture of the world decades from now. Those documents exist and they matter. They answer different questions.

A Mission Statement in Simple Terms

A mission statement answers three practical questions:

1. What does the organization do?
2. Who does it serve?
3. What meaningful outcome does it work toward?

Some statements add a fourth element: how the organization operates, or what distinguishes its approach. That element earns its place only when the method is central to identity. There is no single correct format and no fixed clause order.

What a Mission Statement Is Supposed to Do

Inside an organization, the statement has four jobs:

• It explains the organization’s role. Employees, customers, and other stakeholders get one accurate answer to what this organization exists to do.
• It gives priorities a reference point. Leaders compare proposed work against the mission before committing budget or headcount.
• It communicates intended value. The statement sets expectations for people who buy from the organization, work in it, or fund it.
• It connects daily work to direction. A support agent, a nurse, and a finance analyst can each see how their tasks feed the same aim.

Mission Statement vs. Vision, Values, and Purpose

These four terms get used interchangeably in strategy documents and careers pages. Each answers a different question, and confusing them is the most common reason a mission statement ends up useless.

Mission statement vs. vision statement

A mission statement describes what the organization does and whom it serves now. A vision statement describes the future state or long-term change it hopes to help create.

Take a fictional company. Riverbend Foods writes its mission as: “We supply fresh, locally grown produce to school districts across our region so students eat better during the school day.” Its vision reads: “A country where every school meal is made from food grown nearby.”

A future aspiration alone is a vision, not a complete mission, because it never names what the organization does today.

Mission statement vs. company values

Company values describe the principles and behaviors that guide how work gets done. A mission describes the work itself and the impact those behaviors support.

This is why “integrity, innovation, and excellence” is not a mission statement. Those words could sit on the wall of a hospital, a hedge fund, or a bicycle shop without changing meaning. They name no activity, no audience, and no outcome. 

Some organizations lean on values anyway: Patagonia publishes five core values, including environmentalism and justice, rather than a traditional mission sentence.

Mission statement vs. purpose statement

A purpose statement expresses the deeper reason an organization believes its work matters. A mission translates that reason into present activity, so purpose sits behind the mission and rarely mentions products or delivery.

Organizations use these labels inconsistently, and some publish one without the other. Readers looking for something more personal than an organizational document may want to clarify your broader purpose first.

Mission statement vs. slogan or tagline

A tagline is written for memorability. A mission statement communicates direction to people making decisions. A tagline can reflect the mission, and good ones do, but four words cannot carry an activity, an audience, and an outcome at once.

What Should a Mission Statement Include?

Four ingredients cover nearly every workable mission statement, and one well-built sentence can carry all four.

• The organization’s core activity. Name the service, product, or change created. Use concrete verbs: provide, help, connect, protect, develop, build, treat, train. Avoid verbs that reveal nothing, such as leverage or enable used without an object.
• The people or community it serves. Define the primary customer, beneficiary, member, or stakeholder group. “Everyone” is almost always a mistake, because a mission that serves everyone cannot help anyone decide what to decline. Specificity is not narrowness: “mid-sized companies” beats “organizations” and still leaves room to grow.
• The value or outcome it creates. Describe what becomes possible because of the work, and keep it inside the organization’s actual influence. “Transforming the world” is not an outcome; “students reach grade-level reading” is.
• Its distinctive approach, when relevant. Include the method only when it genuinely defines the organization. Accessibility, evidence-based practice, community ownership, and integrated service models qualify. Generic value words do not.

Mayo Clinic shows the fourth element working. Its mission is “Inspiring hope and promoting health through integrated clinical practice, education and research,” published on its mission and values page. That integration is the operating model, and the statement would lose meaning without the clause.

Why Organizations Need a Mission Statement

A sentence does not improve performance. It makes recurring decisions faster and more consistent.

It provides a decision filter

Leaders hold a proposed initiative against the mission and ask two questions. Does this serve the audience we named? Does it advance the outcome we promised?

The filter cannot replace strategy, which decides how to win and where to allocate capital. It does help prevent strategic drift: the accumulation of adjacent projects that individually look reasonable and collectively pull an organization away from the work it does best.

It creates shared direction

Different teams answer to different metrics. A clear mission gives them a common answer to why the work exists, which matters most where handoffs happen between product, service delivery, and finance.

It communicates organizational identity

Candidates read mission statements before interviews, customers before large purchases, funders during due diligence. If the published mission does not match how the organization behaves, the gap gets noticed by exactly those audiences.

It supports accountability

A published mission gives employees, board members, and funders a standard to hold decisions against. That works only when the mission matches operations, policies, and resource allocation.

Mission Statement Examples and What They Demonstrate

Each example below is quoted from the organization’s own website.

A mission statement with a clearly defined audience

LinkedIn states its mission as “Connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful,” and its separate vision as “Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce,” both on its official about page.

The audience is named in three words, the activity is connection, and the outcome is productivity. The outcome language could still be tighter, since “successful” carries less information than “productive.”

A mission statement centered on a practical outcome

• charity: water describes itself this way: “charity: water is a nonprofit organization bringing clean and safe water to people around the world.”
• Activity: bringing water. Audience: people without access to it. Outcome: clean and safe water. Nothing depends on the reader already knowing the sector.

A concise mission statement

Khan Academy’s mission is to “provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere.”

Ten words carry an activity, an audience, an outcome, and a distinctive approach, since “free” constrains real decisions about pricing. Most short mission statements fail for the opposite reason: they lost the audience and outcome to make room for adjectives.

A mission statement that reflects a distinctive approach

Habitat for Humanity’s mission reads: “Seeking to put God’s love into action, Habitat for Humanity brings people together to build homes, communities and hope.” Its vision, on the same mission and vision page, is “A world where everyone has a decent place to live.”

The distinguishing feature is the method. Bringing people together, meaning volunteer and partner-family labor, is how the organization operates rather than only what motivates it.

What each example leaves out

LinkedIn’s says nothing about revenue model, Khan Academy’s omits subjects and grade levels, Habitat’s skips financing and building standards. That restraint is the point. Vision belongs in a vision statement, principles in values, service detail in program documentation, and strategy in a plan the board reviews.

Strong and Weak Mission Statement Examples

The examples below are invented, which makes them safe to criticize and rewrite.

Example for a small business

• Weak: “Our mission is to deliver the highest quality service and be the best in our industry.”
• Improved: “We provide same-week bookkeeping and payroll support to independent restaurants so owners can close their books without hiring a finance team.”

Out came “highest quality,” “be the best,” and “our industry,” none of which identified a service, a customer, or a result. The revision names all three, so a request to audit a manufacturing firm now visibly falls outside the mission.

Example for a nonprofit

• Weak: “Our mission is to make the world a better place for everyone.”
• Improved: “We train volunteer tutors to deliver weekly reading support to second and third graders in under-resourced public schools, so more students reach grade level by fourth grade.”

The revision is more credible because it is smaller. It names a community, an intervention, and a change measurable against reading assessments, so funders and beneficiaries can check whether it is happening.

Example for a professional-services company

• Weak: “Our mission is to be the premier industry-leading partner, leveraging best-in-class expertise to drive synergistic outcomes.”
• Improved: “We help mid-sized manufacturers fix cost accounting problems so their leadership teams can price work accurately and protect margin.”

The weak version says what the firm wants to be, not what it does for anyone. A mission written as a sales slogan does not help employees decide anything, and buyers discount it on sight.

How to Write a Company Mission Statement

This process works for a founder drafting a first statement and for a leadership team revising one that no longer fits.

1. Identify the organization’s reason for existing

Ask what need, problem, or opportunity led to this work, and separate that reason from the current product line. Write the answer in plain, unpolished language, because wordsmithing this early hides thin thinking.

2. Define whom the organization serves

Name the primary customer, beneficiary, community, or stakeholder, and decide whether one audience is enough or whether a grouped audience fits better, such as “HR and talent leaders at mid-sized companies.” A statement addressed to every stakeholder at once ends up addressed to nobody.

3. Describe what the organization actually does

Use specific, active language and focus on the central contribution rather than cataloguing every service line. Then remove any claim employees or customers would not recognize as true.

4. State the value or impact created

Describe the meaningful result, and keep it inside what the organization can influence. If the sentence describes a changed world rather than a delivered outcome, pull it back toward the present.

5. Draft several versions

Write three: one concise, one more descriptive, and one built around the audience. Settling core meaning first prevents a leadership team debating single words before anyone has agreed what the organization does.

6. Test the statement

Run the draft against six questions:

• Can a reader unfamiliar with the organization understand what it does?
• Is the intended audience clear?
• Does it help separate relevant priorities from irrelevant ones?
• Would employees recognize it as true?
• Is it specific enough to guide a real decision?
• Can it stay accurate as individual products change?

A draft failing the last question is usually describing a product rather than a mission.

7. Gather feedback and approve a final version

Bring in leadership, employees, and where appropriate customers, beneficiaries, or board members. Ask what the statement leaves out and what feels untrue, not whether they like the wording. 

Open-ended group editing produces compromise language, so name one decision-maker before feedback starts.

Mission Statement Templates

Templates are drafting aids, not formulas. Fill one in, then rewrite the result in natural language.

1. Basic company mission. “We [primary activity] for [audience] so they can [meaningful outcome].” The activity is a concrete verb plus what gets delivered, the audience is a named group rather than “clients,” and the outcome is what changes for that group.
2. Differentiated mission. “We help [audience] achieve [outcome] through [distinctive approach].” Use this only when the method is central to identity, as with a volunteer delivery model.
3. Impact-led mission. “Our mission is to [create change] by [core action] for [community or audience].” This suits nonprofits, associations, and education providers where the change comes first.

Common Mission Statement Mistakes

• Making the statement too vague. If the sentence could describe a bank, a school, and a landscaping company without edits, add an activity, an audience, or an outcome, and delete one abstract claim for each addition.
• Trying to include everything. Listing every service, stakeholder, value, and strategic goal produces a statement nobody can repeat. Operational detail belongs in strategy documents.
• Confusing present mission with future vision. Watch for phrases that describe only what the organization hopes the world will look like, then add the current role that moves toward it.
• Writing for publicity rather than accuracy. Inflated promises damage credibility with the people most likely to check them. Aim for a statement stakeholders can see in budget decisions and hiring choices.
• Allowing the statement to become outdated. A mission needs review after a material change to the audience, services, ownership, or operating model. It does not need an annual rewrite.

How to Use a Mission Statement After Writing It

• Set strategy and priorities against it. Compare new initiatives, investments, partnerships, and service lines to the mission before approving them. The mission supplies direction while strategy decides execution.
• Connect it to goals and performance. Translate the mission into organizational goals, then team priorities and measurable outcomes. The mission is not a metric. It is what the metrics are supposed to be evidence of.
• Use it in hiring and onboarding. Give candidates and new employees a clear statement of what the organization exists to accomplish, so they can judge fit before accepting. It is not a substitute for role expectations.
• Review it when the organization materially changes. Revisit after a shift in audience, services, market, ownership, or direction. If the underlying mission is still accurate, leave it alone.

How to Write a Personal Mission Statement

The same three questions apply to an individual. Instead of an organization’s activity, audience, and outcome, a personal mission statement describes how someone intends to use their strengths and values to make decisions and contribute.

Identify your values, strengths, and contribution

Start with the principles that should guide important choices, then name the strengths you want to use and the people or work you want to benefit. Working through a structured process to identify your personal values gives the rest of the statement something solid to sit on.

Draft a personal mission statement

Use this template as a starting point: “I use [strengths] to [contribution] for [people or cause] while acting according to [core values].”

Two worked examples:

• “I use clear writing and data analysis to help operations teams see where their processes break, working with candour and without blame.”
• “I use clinical training and patience to help older patients manage chronic conditions at home, treating their independence as the goal.”

A personal mission that cannot help you choose between two job offers is not finished.

Connect the statement to purpose and career legacy

A personal mission describes ongoing contribution: what you do, for whom, and how. Purpose addresses why that contribution matters to you, and legacy addresses influence that outlasts any single role. Readers weighing the longer arc of their working life may want to think about your long-term career legacy alongside the mission they just drafted.

Final Takeaway

A useful mission statement names present action, identifies who that action is for, and states the intended impact in language the organization can stand behind. Future aspiration, guiding principles, and service detail all have better homes elsewhere.

Test any draft against real decisions rather than how memorable it sounds. Take the last three significant choices the organization made and ask whether the statement would have pointed toward them.

If your mission is clear but your managers and teams are not yet working from it, that is a development problem rather than a wording problem. Review our structured approach to leadership and team development to see how the gap gets closed, or tell us what your organization needs and we will scope the support from there.

Self-management is the ability to regulate your emotions and behavior, take ownership of your actions, and follow through on commitments without someone standing over you to make it happen. It shapes how you respond to pressure, how you handle a missed deadline, and whether colleagues can count on you when no one is watching.

The skill sits underneath almost every other professional competency. A person can be technically strong and still struggle here, showing up as defensiveness in a feedback conversation, silence when a deadline slips, or waiting for a manager to notice a problem instead of raising it first. 

Building self-management does not require becoming unemotional or flawless. It means noticing your patterns and choosing a better response on purpose.

The Short Definition

In plain terms, self-management is what you do with your reactions, your commitments, and your follow-through when no external structure is forcing the outcome. It draws on a small set of connected abilities:

• Self-regulation: noticing an emotional or behavioral impulse before you act on it
• Emotional control: managing a reaction without pretending it isn’t there
• Accountability: owning outcomes, including the ones that go wrong
• Self-discipline: doing necessary work without someone pushing you
• Follow-through: closing the loop on what you said you would do

Self-management does not mean being perfect, staying unemotional, or solving every problem alone. Someone can manage themselves well and still get frustrated, miss a target, or need help. What sets them apart is how they handle what comes next.

Self-Management Is Not the Same as Time Management

Time management is about planning tasks and using available hours well: calendars, priorities, and schedules. Self-management is broader. It determines whether you respond constructively when a plan breaks down, whether you own a commitment instead of quietly dropping it, and whether you follow through once the structure around you disappears.

A well-organized calendar will not stop someone from getting defensive in a review or avoiding a hard conversation. Those are self-management problems, not scheduling problems.

Need help planning your time and tasks? Read our time management training guide for the systems and prioritization side of this topic. This article focuses on the behavioral side: how you act once the plan meets reality.

Why Self-Management Matters at Work

It Makes People More Reliable

Reliability is built from small, repeated behaviors: meeting commitments, flagging risks before they become surprises, and completing agreed actions without reminders. A colleague who tells you early that a deliverable is at risk is easier to work with than one who says nothing until the deadline passes. Managers extend more responsibility to people whose word consistently matches their actions.

It Improves Responses Under Pressure

An immediate emotional reaction and a deliberate response are not the same thing. Reacting is fast, automatic, and often regretted later. Responding takes a beat longer and produces a choice you can stand behind. This distinction shows up clearly when someone receives critical feedback, watches a project slip past its date, or absorbs an unexpected change to their role.

It Supports Career Growth

Leadership roles depend on judgment under ambiguity, honest communication, and consistency over time, not just technical output. A skilled individual contributor who cannot regulate their reactions or own their mistakes will struggle to earn the trust that leadership requires. Self-management is often the quiet difference between someone who is promoted and someone who is simply competent.

The Core Self-Management Skills to Build

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness means noticing your own patterns before you can change them: what triggers you, which reactions you default to, where your blind spots sit, and when you tend to avoid or get defensive. Without this step, self-discipline and accountability have nothing accurate to work from.

A short set of honest questions surfaces most of what matters:

• What situations make me react too quickly?
• What commitments do I regularly delay?
• What feedback do I tend to dismiss?

Emotional Regulation

Emotional regulation is noticing an emotion without letting it automatically control your next action. It is different from suppression, which is pretending the emotion isn’t there. Suppression tends to delay a reaction rather than resolve it, and the delayed version often comes out worse.

A 2025 study in Occupational Health Science tested brief cognitive reappraisal exercises, reframing how you interpret a situation, with employees over a 15-workday period and found that reappraising the situation itself increased positive emotion more effectively than reframing the feeling or the person involved. 

In practice, that looks like pausing after a tense conversation and asking what else could explain the other person’s behavior before responding. Our guide on how to respond, not react breaks that pause down into a repeatable habit.

Self-Discipline

Self-discipline is doing the agreed or necessary work even when motivation is low. It shows up in small decisions: preparing for a meeting nobody will check, holding a boundary when it would be easier not to, and maintaining your usual standard of work when a manager isn’t reviewing it closely. Motivation fluctuates day to day. Self-discipline is what carries the work through the day’s motivation doesn’t show up.

Accountability

Accountability means owning your actions, the outcomes that follow, and the steps you take to recover, not just the parts that went well. The difference between accountability and excuse-making is specific: an excuse explains a miss without a plan attached, while accountability includes one. 

Compare “I didn’t have time” with a direct version: “I missed the deadline. Here is what happened, what I have completed, and how I will prevent a repeat.”

Gallup’s 2025 workplace survey of more than 23,000 U.S. employees found that creating accountability ranked lowest among seven core leadership competencies, with only 30% of managers rating their leaders as strong at holding people responsible. That gap makes individual accountability more valuable, not less: it is one of the more visible ways a person stands out. Our article on accountability versus responsibility covers the ownership piece in more depth after a missed commitment.

Follow-Through

Follow-through means closing the loop on a commitment rather than letting it fade. That includes confirming the action was taken, updating the people who are waiting on it, completing the work to the standard you agreed to, and going back to revisit anything left unfinished. 

One strong effort followed by silence does less for your reputation than smaller, consistent completion over time.

Examples of Self-Management Skills at Work

• Receiving feedback without becoming defensive. An unhelpful reaction interrupts, explains the decision away, or argues immediately. A self-managed response listens fully, asks a clarifying question, reflects for a moment, and agrees on a next step before responding.
• Managing a missed deadline. Self-management means naming the risk as soon as you see it, not disappearing until someone chases you. A responsible update sounds like: “I won’t hit Thursday’s date because of a dependency that came up yesterday. Here is the new timeline and what I need to hit it.”
• Staying constructive during conflict. Pause before responding to a message or comment that feels unfair. Separate the specific issue from any assumption you are making about the other person’s intent. The respond, not react approach applies directly here: the pause is what keeps a disagreement from becoming personal.
• Following through after a setback. Review what actually went wrong, adjust the approach, and complete the next agreed action. A setback is information about what to change, not evidence of poor character.

A Practical Framework for Building Self-Management

Notice, Choose, Commit, Review is a practical working method, not a diagnostic model. It gives you a repeatable way to change one behavior at a time.

1. Notice the pattern. Identify one recurring reaction, avoidance habit, or follow-through problem using feedback and evidence rather than self-criticism.
2. Choose one behavior to change. Turn a broad intention like “be more disciplined” into a specific action, such as: “When I cannot meet a deadline, I will tell the project owner as soon as I identify the risk.”
3. Commit to a clear standard. Define what success looks like, when it applies, and how you will know you followed through. Our goal setting guide walks through turning an intention like this into a workable commitment.
4. Review and adjust. Run a short weekly check on promises made, actions completed, reactions handled well, and patterns that still need attention. Reviewing the process honestly matters more than judging yourself harshly.

Common Habits That Undermine Self-Management

• Relying on motivation instead of a repeatable habit. Motivation rises and falls with sleep, workload, and mood. A small, defined commitment still works on a low-energy day.
• Treating emotional control as emotional suppression. Ignoring or denying a feeling usually delays the reaction instead of resolving it. Pausing, naming the feeling privately, and then choosing an action works better.
• Waiting until a commitment is already missed. Late communication costs trust and removes options. An early flag protects both.
• Making goals too vague. “Be more reliable” gives you nothing to act on. “Confirm every meeting request within 24 hours” does. Building specific commitments out of broad intentions is exactly what a structured goal-setting process is for.
• Using productivity tools as a substitute for self-management. A planner can organize your tasks. It cannot make you own a mistake, regulate a reaction, or tell a colleague the truth about a delay. Tools support the behavior; they do not replace it.

How to Measure Improvement in Self-Management

Progress here shows up as behavior, not a personality score.

Signs of stronger self-management:

• You flag problems earlier.
• You finish commitments, or you formally renegotiate them.
• You recover more quickly after criticism or conflict.
• You take responsibility without spiraling into excessive self-blame.
• You receive fewer reminders about things you already agreed to do.

Questions for a weekly self-review:

• What did I commit to this week?
• What did I complete, renegotiate, or leave unresolved?
• When did I react instead of respond?
• What will I do differently in the same situation next time?

When Self-Management Requires More Than Personal Effort

Not every struggle with consistency or emotional regulation is a discipline problem. Persistent overwhelm, burnout, unclear expectations, an unmanageable workload, or unsafe working conditions can make self-management genuinely harder to sustain, no matter how deliberate someone is being.

Eagle Hill Consulting’s November 2025 workforce survey found that 55% of U.S. workers reported experiencing burnout, with employees attributing it equally to workload itself and to strained working relationships, and 42% of burned-out employees who spoke up said their manager took no action in response. 

In situations like that, the most self-managed move is often to ask a manager, HR, or a healthcare provider for support rather than trying to push through alone. Recognizing that boundary and asking for help early is itself an act of self-management, not a failure of it.

Explore PathWise’s on-demand L&D support to make employee development consistent without adding headcount.

Final Takeaway: Manage Your Response, Not Just Your Schedule

Planning your tasks and managing yourself are related, but they are not the same job. A calendar can organize your week. Only you can decide how you respond to a hard conversation, own a missed commitment, and follow through once the plan changes.

Pick one situation this week where you tend to react instead of pause. Practice noticing it, choosing a deliberate response, and following through on whatever you commit to next. For the pieces that support this work, our guides on goal setting, learning to respond, not react, and time management training go deeper on each piece.

If a recurring pattern feels bigger than something you can shift alone, a structured conversation often moves faster than another attempt to power through it. Talk to a Pathwise coach about the specific situation you’re working through.

The definition of an internal conflict is a struggle that happens inside one person when competing values, needs, beliefs, emotions, or possible actions pull in different directions at the same time. Nobody else has to be involved. The tension sits between two parts of your own thinking, and both parts usually want something reasonable.

Internal conflict is not a sign of weak character or poor judgment. It appears when two things you care about cannot both be protected by a single choice. Someone who wants a bigger role and also wants slower evenings is not confused. They are holding two real priorities that happen to compete.

What Is the Definition of an Internal Conflict?

Internal conflict is a psychological state in which a person experiences opposing motivations, values, or emotional pulls that cannot all be satisfied by the same decision. The internal conflict definition covers moral hesitation, ambivalence about a relationship, and a career decision that feels wrong either way. The meaning of internal conflict overlaps almost exactly with inner conflict, and an internal struggle definition points to the same experience. Inner turmoil is how people describe it once the tension has been running for a while.

A simple internal conflict example

A senior analyst is offered a director role. It carries a meaningful raise and a path toward executive work. It also carries three evenings a week of overseas calls, at the point when her father has started needing regular help.

She wants the role. She also wants to be the person who shows up for her family. Neither want is unreasonable, and neither cancels the other out. That is internal conflict rather than indecision, because the difficulty comes from a collision between two commitments, not from missing information.

Internal conflict versus a difficult decision

A difficult decision is one where the problem is complexity. You lack data, or the outcome depends on things outside your control. Difficult decisions get easier when you gather better information.

Internal conflict adds a second layer. The options challenge your values, your identity, your financial security, or your relationships. Choosing between two salary offers with identical work is a calculation. Choosing between a higher salary and work you actually respect is an internal conflict, and no spreadsheet resolves it. If new information would settle it, you have a hard decision. If you already have the information and still feel torn, you are dealing with conflicting feelings about what matters most.

What Causes Internal Conflict?

Internal conflict is caused by a collision between two or more of a person’s own priorities, where acting on one means giving up or delaying the other. The cause sits in the structure of the choice, not in a flaw in the person facing it.

Conflicting values and moral concerns

A values conflict happens when two principles you hold both apply to the same situation and point in opposite directions. Loyalty to a manager who took a chance on you competes with honesty about a failing project. Ambition competes with wellbeing.

Moral conflict is the sharper version, appearing when a choice touches fairness, harm, or integrity rather than preference. A supply chain manager who discovers a vendor cutting safety corners is weighing a duty to their employer against a duty to people who could get hurt. Values conflicts resolve slowest, because both sides are load-bearing parts of a person’s identity.

Competing goals and the fears attached to them

Many internal conflicts are not about two options. They are about wanting one thing while fearing what that thing costs:

• Wanting a leadership role while fearing the exposure and being visibly bad at something new
• Wanting to relocate while fearing the loss of a support network built over a decade
• Wanting to raise a quality problem while fearing the label of being difficult
• Wanting to leave a stable job while fearing a resume gap or a stretch without income

The pull and the brake are attached to the same option. That is why listing pros and cons does not help. Both columns describe the same choice.

Identity and role tension

Identity tension is the pull between who you believe you are, who others expect you to be, and who you are becoming. An engineer moving into management feels it immediately. Their professional identity was built on technical craft and solving problems personally, while the new role rewards delegation and sitting with ambiguity.

Nothing has gone wrong, but the internal definition of good work has changed while the old one is still running.

The Common Types of Internal Conflict

One common framework groups motivational conflicts into three structures. These are lenses for understanding a tension, not diagnoses, and a real conflict can blend more than one.

Approach-approach conflict

An approach-approach conflict occurs when a person must choose between two attractive options that cannot both be taken. The American Psychological Association also lists this entry under the heading double-approach conflict.

Two job offers arrive in the same week: a well-funded startup with broad scope and equity, and a respected company with excellent mentorship and a safer climb. The discomfort comes from the loss attached to whichever you decline. This type is usually the least distressing, though it stalls people when the options represent different versions of a future self.

Avoidance-avoidance conflict

An avoidance-avoidance conflict occurs when a person must choose between two undesirable options with no appealing alternative on the table. The APA also refers to this as double-avoidance conflict.

A project manager can accept a demotion and a pay cut to escape a manager who has been eroding her health, or stay and keep absorbing the damage. This type produces the most paralysis, because movement in either direction feels like a loss. People often delay until circumstances decide for them. The useful move is not choosing faster. It is widening the field so a third option can appear.

Approach-avoidance conflict

An approach-avoidance conflict occurs when a single goal carries both attractive and unattractive features, so a person is drawn toward it and pushed away from it at once.

A promotion to head of department brings influence, compensation, and credibility. It also brings performance reviews you will have to deliver and the end of hands-on work you enjoy. This structure can be easy to misread.

People treat hesitation as evidence they do not really want the thing. Usually it means they want it and are accurately aware of its costs. Ambivalence toward a single option is normal, not disqualifying.

Values conflict

Values conflict is not part of the classical typology. The classical types explain the structure of a choice. A values conflict explains what is at stake underneath it. An approach-avoidance conflict about a promotion can also be a values conflict between achievement and presence at home.

Naming the values makes the trade-off visible, and it is more productive to clarify the values behind your decision than to keep relitigating the options.

Internal Conflict, External Conflict, and Cognitive Dissonance

Internal conflict versus external conflict

Internal conflict happens inside one person. External conflict involves another party: a colleague, a manager, a partner, an organization, or a set of circumstances.

The two connect more often than not. A reduction in force creates external pressure, and it also opens an internal split between finding the nearest equivalent job and using the disruption to change direction. The layoff is the external conflict. The tension about what to do next is the internal one.

The remedies differ, which is why the distinction matters. External conflict is addressed through negotiation, boundaries, escalation, or leaving. Internal conflict is addressed through clarifying what you value and deciding which cost you will carry.

Is cognitive dissonance the same as internal conflict?

No. Cognitive dissonance is narrower and more specific. It describes the discomfort a person feels when they hold inconsistent beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors, and the pressure that discomfort creates to restore consistency.

The APA Dictionary treats it as a formal theory in social psychology, not a general term for feeling torn. The practical difference is direction:

• Internal conflict is usually forward-looking. You face a choice and cannot reconcile competing priorities before you act.
• Cognitive dissonance is usually backward-looking. You have already acted, or you already hold a belief, and the inconsistency now generates discomfort.

Believing strongly in transparency while staying quiet about a problem you have seen produces dissonance. The mind then closes that gap through dissonance reduction: changing the behavior, changing the belief, or adding a justification that makes the inconsistency easier to live with. That last route is why the distinction matters. Dissonance reduction often removes the discomfort without resolving anything real.

Examples of Internal Conflict in Everyday Life

Career example: stay or leave?

Five years into a stable role, the work has become predictable. Security, established relationships, and low daily friction sit on one side. Growth, fit, and purpose sit on the other. Vague dissatisfaction is not a decision to leave.

Separate what is broken from what is merely stale, and assess whether your current role still fits against specific criteria rather than a general mood. Some of what is missing can be built inside the current job. Some cannot.

Workplace example: speak up or stay quiet?

You have seen something that should be reported: a safety shortcut, a misstated figure, a pattern of behavior toward a junior colleague. Integrity and the safety of other people compete with job security and reputation. This is not purely a reflection problem, and treating it as one is a mistake.

Find out what protections apply to you, what your organization’s reporting channels are, and what documentation you should keep. Where the concern involves legal or regulatory issues, get advice from someone qualified.

Personal example: protect comfort or pursue change?

An opportunity appears that you would have jumped at five years ago. Now it means dismantling a routine that works. Stability and rest compete with growth and the discomfort of being a beginner again.

Most people here are comparing a familiar present against an imagined future, and imagination is unreliable in both directions. A small, time-boxed version of the change produces better evidence than another month of thinking.

How to Resolve Internal Conflict

Resolving internal conflict does not always mean finding an option with no downside. Often it means deciding which cost you will accept, then acting with your eyes open.

1. Name the conflict clearly

Write one sentence: “I feel torn between ___ and ___ because I value ___ and I fear ___.” That structure forces the two options, the value, and the fear into the open at once. If you cannot name the fear, you are not looking at the real conflict yet.

Then separate facts from predictions. “My manager said the role includes travel” is a fact. “I will burn out within a year” is a prediction. Predictions deserve testing, not automatic belief.

2. Identify the values and needs underneath each option

For each option, ask what it protects and what it provides. An option that protects financial stability and provides autonomy is doing different work from one that protects your reputation and provides intellectual challenge. Once the underlying needs are named, some options collapse. You may find both paths serve the same need.

3. Create more than two options

Internal conflict presents itself as a binary. Stay or leave. Speak up or stay quiet. Binaries are almost always a compression of a wider set of possibilities. Before deciding, generate at least two more:

• A reversible experiment, such as a secondment, a trial project, or a fixed three-month arrangement
• A boundary, such as declining one part of a role rather than the whole role
• A conversation, since many constraints turn out to be assumptions nobody has tested
• A phased plan that sequences both priorities instead of forcing them to compete

None of these is guaranteed to exist in your situation. Establishing that they do not is still worth twenty minutes.

4. Decide what is reversible and what is not

Reversible decisions should be made quickly and treated as data collection. A stretch project or an exploratory conversation costs little and teaches a lot. Irreversible decisions, such as resigning without a plan or relocating a family, deserve deliberate pacing and outside input.

Match your speed to the stakes, then commit to one specific action with a date attached. “Think about it more” is not an action. “Book a conversation with the department head by Friday” is.

5. Set a review point

Choose a date, usually thirty to ninety days out, to assess what new information you have, what your energy looks like, and whether the decision is producing what you expected. A review point lets you act without pretending to certainty you do not have, and it stops a provisional choice from hardening into a permanent one by default.

Reflection Versus Rumination

Reflection is structured and finite. It works on a specific question and ends in a decision, an action, or a clearer question. Rumination is circular, generates no new information, and leaves you more tired and less decisive. Three signs you have crossed from one into the other:

1. You are rehearsing the same scenario without introducing new facts.
2. Your thinking is mostly about the past or about hypothetical judgments rather than a next step.
3. It intensifies at night and produces nothing usable in the morning.

If those apply, more thinking will not help. The way out is a small external action: a conversation, a written sentence, a scheduled meeting, a test. Learning to respond deliberately when a difficult decision appears does more for chronic indecision than additional analysis.

When Internal Conflict Needs More Support

Most internal conflict is a normal part of adult life and resolves through reflection, conversation, and a decision. Some do not. Consider speaking with a qualified mental health professional if you notice any of the following:

• Distress that persists for weeks and does not shift regardless of what you decide
• Difficulty functioning at work, at home, or in relationships
• Sleep, appetite, or concentration disrupted for an extended period
• Coping through alcohol, substances, or other behaviours causing harm
• A sense that you are unsafe, or thoughts of harming yourself

A therapist, counselor, or psychologist can work with underlying patterns that career reflection is not designed to reach.

If you are in the United States and in crisis or emotional distress, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. It is free and confidential; you can call or text 988, or chat online. Its official Get Help page lists current options for Spanish-speaking callers, veterans, service members, and their loved ones. Outside the US, contact your local emergency number or national crisis line.

Making a Clearer Next Decision

The definition of an internal conflict describes a signal, not a defect. Two things you care about are competing, and that signal is worth reading rather than silencing. People who handle it well name the tension precisely, understand the values underneath it, refuse the false binary, and take an action sized to the stakes.

If you are stuck between two paths and cannot tell which one fits, talk to the PathWise team about coaching to work through the decision with someone whose role is to help you see it clearly.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to explain another person’s behavior mainly through their personality while underweighting the situation they were in. At work, it turns a missed deadline into “they are unreliable” and a quiet colleague into “they are disengaged.” The judgment arrives fast and feels obvious. It is frequently wrong.

This matters most where judgments carry consequences: performance reviews, feedback conversations, promotion decisions, and conflict between teammates. Correcting the error does not mean excusing weak work. It means putting evidence before character, so the response you choose actually fits the problem in front of you.

What Is the Fundamental Attribution Error?

The fundamental attribution error is a cognitive bias in social perception. An observer watches a behavior, then treats it as a reliable readout of stable traits, giving too little weight to the constraints, information, and pressures behind it.

It sits within the wider field of attribution theory, which Fritz Heider helped establish in 1958. A 1967 study by Edward Jones and Victor Harris found that people could infer genuine attitudes from essays writers had been assigned to produce. Lee Ross later named the error in 1977. The American Psychological Association’s definition describes the same pattern: overestimating the role of enduring personal characteristics while underestimating situational influences.

The research literature also calls it correspondence bias because an observer infers that a person’s disposition corresponds neatly to the behavior just witnessed.

A simple example at work

A teammate misses a deadline. The fast judgment is a character judgment: they are unreliable. The fuller picture may involve one or more of these:

• The scope changed after the work started and nobody reset the date.
• A dependency arrived late from another team.
• Two stakeholders each marked their request urgent.
• The task required a skill the person was never trained in.
• Workload planning assumed capacity that did not exist.
• There is a real, repeated performance problem.

“Unreliable” is a conclusion, not an observation. That last item belongs on the list, though: situational explanations are not automatically true, and defaulting to them is its own error.

What the fundamental attribution error does not mean

1. Traits still matter. Some people are disorganized. Some avoid difficult work. Dispositional explanations are sometimes correct.
2. Not every failure has an external excuse. Context can explain an outcome without justifying it.
3. The conclusion follows the evidence. Investigate the situation. Do not assume it.

Why We Misjudge Other People So Quickly

Behavior is visible. Constraints are not. You see a colleague arrive late to standup. You do not see the escalation they handled at 6 a.m. or the second manager quietly reassigning their week. You are not weighing a dispositional explanation against a situational one and choosing badly. You are weighing one you can see against one you cannot.

Dispositional attribution and situational attribution

Attribution theory separates explanations into two types:

• Dispositional attribution works through something internal and durable: traits, character, attitude, ability, or motivation. “She pushed back because she is difficult.”
• Situational attribution works through something external: unclear expectations, incentives, role design, available information, deadlines, or resource constraints. “She pushed back because the request arrived after the estimate was committed.”

Neither is inherently more accurate. The error is reaching for the dispositional explanation before checking whether a situational one accounts for what you saw.

Why one incident becomes a character judgment

A trait label is efficient. It compresses a messy event into a portable summary you carry into the next staffing decision and review cycle. Once the label exists, confirmation bias maintains it: a follow-up question reads as pushback, and a quiet week reads as coasting. Where the manager-employee relationship has already frayed, hostile attribution bias can push further, causing neutral actions to read as deliberate slights.

Stable judgments need three things one incident cannot supply: a pattern across time, direct information about conditions, and answers from the person themselves.

Does culture change the fundamental attribution error?

Culture can influence the explanations people habitually prefer, but it should not be treated as immunity from attribution bias. A study comparing individualist and collectivist cultures found correspondence-bias effects in both groups and did not report a cultural difference in that study.

On a global team, do not assume a colleague from a collectivist culture is immune, and do not assume the error operates identically everywhere either.

Fundamental Attribution Error Examples at Work

Performance reviews

A manager writes up an engineer after a weak quarter. The rating language drifts toward disposition: low ownership, lacks drive, not proactive.

What the review period actually contained:

• The team’s objectives were rewritten in week five.
• Two people left and were not backfilled.
• The engineer absorbed on-call coverage for a system they did not build.
• The manager’s expectations were communicated verbally and never written down.

None of that turns a weak quarter into a strong one. It changes the correct response. A capability gap needs training. An unclear objective needs a written goal. A staffing hole needs a staffing decision.

A motivation problem needs a direct conversation. The wrong cause guarantees the wrong fix, and the employee reads the assessment as unfair because it does not match what they lived through.

Managers who give developmental feedback based on specific, behavior-based evidence produce assessments people can act on because they name an event rather than a personality.

Feedback and difficult one-on-ones

Attribution errors run in both directions here.

A manager delivers blunt feedback. The employee reads bluntness as a character statement: this person does not respect me. The manager may be working from incomplete information or carrying pressure from their own review.

The employee then goes quiet, and the manager reads defensiveness as a bad attitude. Likely explanations include surprise, ambiguity about what went wrong, or fear about what the feedback means for their job.

Two people are making dispositional inferences about each other inside the conversation designed to close that gap.

Team conflict and missed communication

A colleague takes two days to answer a message and the inference is dismissiveness. Alternatives worth ruling out first:

• Meeting load left no processing time.
• Ownership was never assigned, so nobody felt responsible.
• Time zones pushed the exchange into a two-day cycle.
• The message asked for a decision the person cannot authorize.
• There is a genuine relationship problem needing a direct conversation.

The last option is real. The error is not concluding it. The error is concluding it first.

Hiring and promotion decisions

Interviews and promotion panels compress a person into a handful of moments, most under unusual conditions. A candidate who presents flatly may be a flat presenter, or may be interviewing for the first time in years.

A strong performer who fumbled one visible launch may have made a bad call, or inherited a scope that was never viable. Structured evidence is the counterweight: defined criteria, more than one assessor, and written examples tied to specific situations.

Fundamental Attribution Error vs Related Biases

The distinctions matter.

Fundamental attribution error vs actor-observer bias

These are not the same claim.

• Fundamental attribution error: An observer overweights another person’s disposition and underweights their situation. This is a claim about how we explain other people.
• Actor-observer hypothesis: The broader claim that people explain their own conduct situationally and other people’s conduct dispositionally. This is a claim about an asymmetry between self and other.

The useful workplace takeaway is not that people always excuse themselves and blame others. It is that both self-judgment and judgments of others need evidence, context, and a willingness to test the first explanation.

Fundamental attribution error vs self-serving bias

Self-serving bias concerns how people explain their own outcomes. Success gets attributed internally: my judgment, my effort, my skill. Failure gets attributed externally: the market, the timeline, the other team.

A project lead claims personal credit for a launch that landed, then explains a failed launch entirely through budget cuts and vendor delays. The fundamental attribution error points outward at someone else. Self-serving bias points inward.

Fundamental attribution error vs ultimate attribution error

The ultimate attribution error extends the pattern to groups. Negative behavior by an out-group member gets explained by the group’s supposed character, while the same behavior by an in-group member gets explained away by circumstances. Positive behavior can flip the pattern, with an out-group success dismissed as luck.

At work, this can show up in how one department talks about another.

How to Avoid the Fundamental Attribution Error at Work

Advice to “show more empathy” does not survive contact with a real performance problem. What works is a sequence you can run in minutes before a review or a hard conversation.

1. Start with observable behavior

“Lazy,” “difficult,” “not leadership material,” and “low ownership” are conclusions wearing the costume of observations. Delete the label and write down instead:

• The specific event and when it happened.
• The expected standard and where it was set.
• The impact on the work, team, or customer.
• The evidence you hold personally, separated from what you heard secondhand.

If you cannot complete those four lines, you have an impression rather than an assessment.

2. Test for patterns and context

Ask whether this is a one-off, a repeated pattern, or a symptom of the system around the person. This is root-cause analysis applied to human performance. Check each before deciding:

• Workload and competing priorities during the period in question.
• Role clarity and whether ownership was explicitly assigned.
• Tools, access, and information available at the time.
• Dependencies on other people or teams.
• Incentives, including what the person is rewarded for elsewhere.
• Capability and whether training was provided.

A pattern across multiple review periods supports a different conclusion than one bad month.

3. Ask before deciding

Neutral questions surface constraints you cannot see. They concede nothing:

• “What made this difficult?”
• “What information or constraint affected the outcome?”
• “What would need to change for the next attempt to succeed?”

Psychological safety is what makes the answers usable. If the person expects their answer to be used against them, you get a defensive account rather than an accurate one.

4. Make the next step specific

End every one of these conversations with something concrete: a change in behavior, a change in support, a process fix, or a revised timeline. Write down what was agreed and set a review date.

Where accountability still applies

Investigating context is not the same as accepting every explanation. If the pattern repeats after constraints are addressed, expectations are written down, and the person confirms they have what they need, the situational explanation has been tested and has not held.

The correct response is a performance conversation, not another round of context gathering. Fairness is a standard of evidence, not a lowered bar.

Using This in Performance Reviews and Feedback

For managers

A written review outlives the conversation that produced it, so the standard is higher:

• Name the cause you concluded and the evidence behind it, so the rating can be challenged on facts rather than tone.
• Record the constraints you found, even where they did not change the rating. An employee who sees their context acknowledged can address the conclusion rather than the process.
• Avoid trait adjectives in written ratings. “Missed three committed dates in Q2” survives scrutiny. “Lacks drive” does not.

For employees

Before concluding that feedback is unfair, run the same test in reverse. Ask what behavior was observed, over what period, and what impact it had. Ask what evidence would change the assessment.

Then supply your context without turning it into a defense. “The scope changed in week five and the date was never reset” is information. “That is not my fault” ends the conversation. Learning to respond deliberately in a difficult workplace moment is a skill rather than a temperament, and it separates a conversation that adjusts an assessment from one that confirms it.

If repeated attribution conflict has you questioning whether the role still fits, it can help to understand the values affecting a difficult career decision before acting on one bad review cycle.

If you want to build these habits across your team, PathWise offers team development workshops.

Better Judgment Is a Process, Not a Personality

The shift is small and mechanical. Replace the character verdict with four questions:

1. What happened?
2. What pattern does the evidence support?
3. What constraints were operating?
4. What still needs a conversation?

Run them before the review is written, not after it is contested.

If you are preparing a performance conversation and want the assessment to hold up, rebuild your feedback process around observable evidence. For applying this in live situations, PathWise coaching works through real conversations as they happen, and you can tell the team what you are dealing with to find the right fit.

How to handle difficult employees starts with one shift: address specific, repeated behavior early, not a label. Back every conversation with evidence. Follow a fair, consistent process instead of reacting to frustration.

A manager’s job is not to diagnose someone’s personality. It is to clarify what the role requires, hear the employee’s side, offer real support, and document what actually happened. “Difficult employee” describes a search term, not a diagnosis. The behavior behind it might be missed deadlines, resistance to feedback, or a pattern of blame-shifting that affects the team. Treating it as a management problem, not a character flaw, keeps the response fair and defensible.

Dealing with a difficult coworker rather than a direct report? Read our guide to dealing with difficult coworkers.

What This Guide Covers

• Performance management for direct reports you supervise.
• Repeated behavior that affects work quality, colleagues, customers, or team outcomes.
• Coaching, fair documentation, improvement plans, HR partnership, and respectful exit decisions.

What This Guide Does Not Cover

• One-off misunderstandings between peers with no reporting relationship.
• A personal dislike for an employee, absent an actual performance or conduct problem.
• Medical, legal, discrimination, safety, or protected-leave situations, which need immediate HR or specialist involvement.

Recognize the Difference Between a Difficult Moment and a Management Issue

Learning how to handle difficult employees starts with telling a bad day apart from an actual pattern. A single rough meeting or a missed deadline during a hard week is not a management issue. It becomes one when the behavior repeats, or when a performance gap is clear and consistent over a defined period.

Common Patterns That Require a Manager’s Attention

• Work consistently falls below the agreed standard.
• The employee misses commitments or deadlines without flagging problems early.
• Teamwork or communication breaks down repeatedly, not just once.
• Feedback gets rejected without any real engagement with it.
• The employee avoids accountability or shifts blame onto others.
• The employee resists a necessary change without raising workable concerns.

Check Whether the Problem Is Actually a Management or System Issue

Before the first conversation, confirm the basics are actually in place:

• Expectations, priorities, workload, and success measures are clear and were communicated.
• The employee has the training, tools, and authority the role requires.

This check is not an excuse for repeated poor behavior. It exists so the manager acts on accurate information instead of assumptions.

Gather Facts Before You Start the Conversation

Fair feedback and useful documentation both start with the same discipline: write down what happened, not what you assume it means.

Separate Observable Behavior From Subjective Labels

Weak: “You are negative and difficult.”

Strong: “In the last three project meetings, you interrupted colleagues before they finished and rejected agreed actions without offering an alternative.”

Specific language gives the employee something concrete to respond to. A label just invites defensiveness.

Identify the Expected Standard and the Impact

State the standard the behavior fell short of: a policy, a role requirement, a deadline, or a team agreement. Then name the actual impact, on a customer, a colleague, a delivery date, or the quality of the work. Skip exaggeration like “everyone is unhappy.” Vague claims collapse under a follow-up question, and they are unfair to the employee if you cannot back them up.

Know When to Involve HR Before the First Meeting

Loop in HR before you say anything to the employee if the situation involves:

• Harassment, threats, or violence.
• Discrimination or retaliation.
• A medical concern, accommodation request, or protected leave.
• Union matters or a serious policy breach.

HR involvement at this stage protects the employee and the organization. This guide is not legal advice. For any of the situations above, follow your internal policy and get qualified local counsel involved.

Have the First Performance Conversation Early

Difficult conversations get harder the longer a manager waits. Hold the meeting privately, prepared, and direct, while the behavior is still recent.

Use a Clear Conversation Structure

A five-part structure keeps the conversation direct without becoming personal, building on the situation-behavior-impact model described by the Center for Creative Leadership:

• Situation: name when and where the issue happened.
• Behavior: describe only what you observed.
• Impact: explain the consequence.
• Expectation: state what needs to change.
• Question: ask for the employee’s perspective and any context you are missing.

Listen Without Losing Clarity

Ask questions that invite a real answer:

• “What is your perspective on what happened?”
• “What is making this expectation difficult to meet?”
• “What support or clarification would help you meet it?”

Listening is not the same as accepting an excuse or lowering the standard. It is how you find out whether the fix is coaching, a resource gap, or a direct accountability conversation.

End With an Agreed Next Step

Close every conversation with three things: what needs to change, what support you will provide, and a specific check-in date with a clear description of what improvement looks like. Managers who give feedback effectively treat this step as part of the conversation, not an afterthought tacked on at the end.

Document Performance Concerns Fairly and Consistently

Documentation is not a punishment, and it is not a retrospective attempt to build a case. It is a factual record of expectations, support, feedback, and progress that both sides can point back to.

What Managers Should Document

• Date, time, and relevant context.
• The observable behavior or work output.
• The expected standard and its impact on the business or team.
• The employee’s response or explanation.
• Support offered, agreed actions, and the next review date.
• Evidence of improvement, no change, or a new concern.

What Managers Should Not Document

• Personality labels or guesses about motivation.
• Irrelevant private or medical details.
• Rumors or secondhand claims you have not verified.
• Conclusions that belong to HR, legal counsel, or a formal investigation.

Keep Documentation Aligned With Company Policy

Follow your organization’s HR and data-handling process for storing these records. Inconsistent documentation across managers or employees undermines fairness and makes later decisions harder to defend.

Coach for Improvement Before Escalating

Give the employee a genuine, structured chance to improve where the situation allows for one. Ordinary coaching and a formal improvement plan are not the same thing, and skipping straight to the second reads as punitive.

Create a Practical Improvement Plan

Effective plans share a small set of features, whether or not they use a formal performance improvement plan. SHRM’s guide to performance improvement plans recommends a minimum of 30 days, with 60 to 90 days more typical for a genuine improvement window. Build the plan around:

• The specific behavior or outcome that needs to change.
• A measurable standard, not a vague impression.
• The support, training, or resources available.
• A defined timeline with regular check-ins.
• What happens if progress falls short, in line with your organization’s policy.

Give Feedback Throughout the Process

Reinforce real progress as it happens, not only at the final review. Correct new issues promptly instead of saving them up. Keep every note specific and tied to the agreed standard, not to how the conversation felt.

Avoid Turning a PIP Into a Surprise

A formal improvement plan should follow earlier, clear feedback, unless the issue is serious enough to require immediate escalation. Build the plan with HR or under your organization’s established process. An employee who is blindsided by a PIP has a legitimate complaint about the process, whatever the underlying performance issue turns out to be.

When to Escalate to HR or Senior Leadership

Escalation is not failure. It is the right step when the situation needs authority, expertise, or policy knowledge beyond what one manager holds alone.

Signs Informal Coaching Is Not Enough

• The pattern continues after clear feedback and reasonable support.
• The issue affects safety, customers, team function, or compliance.
• The employee refuses to engage with the process at all.
• A formal warning, PIP, investigation, reassignment, or termination looks likely.

Partner With HR Before Formal Action

Before you take a formal step, review the evidence, the policy requirements, and how similar situations were handled for other employees. Make sure the employee understands the issue, what needs to change, and the process ahead. Avoid implying an outcome before HR has weighed in.

Handle an Exit Process Respectfully

If the relationship ends, keep the process dignified and confidential, and communicate through the channels your organization has defined. The exact steps vary by employer policy and jurisdiction, so treat this as a decision to make with HR and qualified local counsel, not a script to follow alone.

Common Mistakes Managers Make With Difficult Employees

• Waiting Until Frustration Takes Over

Delayed feedback turns a manageable pattern into a formal problem. A timely, proportionate conversation early is easier for everyone than a heated one after months of silence.

• Making the Discussion About Personality

“Unmotivated,” “toxic,” and “bad attitude” are weak starting points that describe the manager’s exhaustion more than the employee’s behavior. Replace the label with behavior, impact, and expectation every time.

• Being Inconsistent Across Employees

Similar issues need similar standards and similar documentation. Inconsistency is one of the most common HR-sensitive complaints, and one of the hardest to defend after the fact.

• Giving Feedback but Failing to Follow Through

A missed check-in, a vague plan, or a consequence that never arrives damages trust with the employee, and it signals to the rest of the team that the standard is optional.

• Treating Peer Conflict as a Disciplinary Issue by Default

Not every interpersonal problem is a performance issue. If the situation is really a clash between colleagues with no reporting relationship, our guide to dealing with difficult coworkers covers the right approach for that instead.

Manager Scripts for Common Situations

An Employee Repeatedly Misses Deadlines

“You’ve missed the last three delivery dates for this workstream, and each one pushed the release back for the rest of the team. I want to understand what’s getting in the way before we set the next date. What’s been blocking you?” Assume a blocker, not a lack of commitment, until the conversation rules it out.

• An Employee Reacts Defensively to Feedback

“I hear this feels unfair, and I want to understand your side. The behavior I need to change is [specific example], and the expectation going forward is [specific standard].” If the conversation gets heated, pause it and reschedule for later the same day rather than pushing through.

• An Employee’s Behavior Is Affecting the Team

“In the last two sprint reviews, you cut off two teammates before they finished their update, and the team has stopped raising blockers there. That’s the specific impact I need to see change.” Stay on the observed pattern, not on what colleagues have said about the person.

• An Employee Refuses Accountability

“I hear that the timeline was tight. The deliverable was still three days late and wasn’t flagged in advance, and that’s what I need to address. What can you do differently next time, starting with today’s task?” Redirect blame-based answers toward ownership and a next action. If the pattern repeats after two or three redirected conversations, document it and involve HR.

How First-Time Managers Can Prevent Problems Earlier

Proactive management prevents more problems than any conversation held after the fact, and this matters most in a manager’s first year. Our first-time manager guidance covers the fundamentals in more depth.

Set Expectations From the Beginning

Clarify priorities, quality standards, who decides what, communication norms, and how often you will check in. Research from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School points to a simple mechanism: people make better, less overconfident decisions when they know in advance they will be held accountable. 

Ambiguity at the start turns an ordinary performance gap into a dispute over what was agreed.

Make Feedback Routine

Regular feedback and recognition make corrective feedback feel normal instead of alarming. An employee who only hears from their manager when something is wrong will read every conversation as a warning shot.

Build a Record of Support as Well as Concerns

Document training provided, check-ins held, real progress, and any accommodations made, through the right channel. A record that only shows problems looks selective, even when it isn’t.

If your organization wants to equip managers for situations like these, PathWise offers management training workshops.

Be Specific, Fair, and Timely

Knowing how to handle difficult employees well comes down to a short, repeatable sequence: gather the facts, address the behavior early, listen without lowering the standard, document consistently, coach with a real plan, and escalate when the pattern doesn’t change. None of that requires guessing at someone’s character.

If a direct report’s behavior is costing your team time, trust, or output, talk to PathWise about your team’s situation to work through the specific pattern you’re dealing with and what a fair next step looks like.

A lot of people spend plenty of time thinking about how to succeed in their jobs, but far less time thinking about how to choose the right jobs in the first place.

In this episode of Career Sessions, J.R. Lowry sits down with Kelly O. Kay, managing partner at executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles and co-author of Show Up to Win: The Insider’s Guide to Getting the Career You Want.

Drawing on decades of experience advising executives and companies, Kelly shares an insider’s perspective on how to manage your career more deliberately. He explains why you should take the recruiter call even when you’re happy where you are, how to test your value in the market, what makes a candidate’s story compelling, and how to evaluate whether an opportunity is actually right for you.

J.R. and Kelly also discuss why internal candidates sometimes struggle against outsiders, how to recover professionally after being fired, the subtle ways candidates sabotage themselves during the hiring process, and why your reputation can follow you for decades.

Whether you’re actively considering a move or perfectly happy in your current role, the message is simple: the best time to manage your career is before you need to.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/kelly-kay/.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

You’re Always In The Job Market: How To Manage Your Career Before You Need To, With Kelly Kay

Too many people I know spend a lot of time thinking about how to succeed in their jobs and probably too little time thinking about how to choose the right jobs in the first place. For example, when should you take a job and when should you leave it? What are you worth in the market? How do you tell your story in a way that makes someone want to hire you? Perhaps most importantly, how do you make sure that the job you’re trying so hard to get is the right one for you?

My guest has had a front row seat to thousands of those decisions. Kelly Kay is a managing partner at Heidrick & Struggles, one of the world’s leading executive search firms. He has advised hundreds of CEOs and board members and thousands of senior executives on some of the most consequential career decisions that they’ll ever make. He and fellow Heidrick managing partner Jeff Sanders have now distilled what they’ve learned into a great new book, Show Up to Win: How to Land the Leadership Role You Want.

We’re going to talk about how to manage your career more deliberately by learning how to assess your value, tell a compelling story, and navigate the hiring process. We’re also going to talk about when you should take the job and when you should turn it down. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions. Let’s get to my conversation with Kelly.

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Kelly, welcome, and thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting us.

I’m looking forward to this conversation because anytime I get a chance to talk to somebody from the search world, I know I’m going to learn a lot and I know our audience is going to learn a lot. You’ve got a new book out with your partner, Jeff Sanders. Let’s dive into some of the topics that you cover in the book. One of them is around this idea of knowing when it’s time to move. You guys argue that some very successful people are pretty unsystematic about how they manage their careers, including deciding when it’s time to leave a job. Talk a little bit about that.

Why Career Management Can’t Be Episodic

One of the things Jeff and I frame this book is a very practical guide for career management as well as career transitions. The career management part is something that most executives just think about when they’re looking for a new job. That’s typically kind of the way career management happens for most executives. If I want to change jobs or if I’m getting recruited, that’s when I’ll start lifting my head up. It’s episodic in that way.

The reality is, there’s a very easy way to do career management, which is to say yes to phone calls and say yes to get introduced to others. Be strategic and thoughtful about it so you don’t say yes to everything. You’ve been an operating exec, senior exec for many years yourself. These roles, especially in today’s world, they’re all encompassing. It’s hard to find the time to do it, but it’s valuable to do it because it’s like a compounding effect of relationships that you build over time if you start early enough in your career. At the end of the day, my advice and Jeff’s advice start now. If you haven’t said yes to many conversations, start now and just start building those relationships.

I completely agree. I also think there’s times where you take that call and it sparks a thought of, “Maybe I’ve been missing something that I could have been eligible for.” How do you make sure that you are thinking about that decision of whether you want to stay or go or consider other things in a more systematic way, more comprehensive way?

There’s a number of things and frameworks that we talk about in the book for evaluating. Is the time right? One of the things we talk about, we list twelve different common things we hear why people want to change jobs. Everything from, I’ve plateaued, to I’m out of ideas, to there’s been a leadership change and everything in between. The reality is that in order to have success to talk about, you need to stay at a job long enough so you can point to accomplishments in a role. That’s just the ante.

Testing Your True Market Attractiveness

If you haven’t stayed long enough to achieve something and show results that you don’t have a lot to talk about. That is probably a very early filter. I’ve been here long enough to point to results that are impressive. One of the frameworks we use in this book is, I refer to it as the ABC framework, but it’s labeled in the book as the company and candidate attractiveness framework. It was meant to give leaders a lens to say, “In this market, who am I attracted to and who’s attracted to me?”

Most times, leaders who are looking for a change and trying to figure out if it’s time, which is the question, they’re unsure who they’re going to be attracted to and who’s going to be attracted to them. They miss the second part of that. They think, “I’ve had this success therefore I can get it. I want to get a job at this company or this brand or whatever.” The reality is that companies that they view as aspirational may look at them as a C quality candidate, not because they’re not a great executive, it’s just that they don’t meet the requirements of what the company’s looking for.

Fit certainly matters. How do you figure that out when you’re a candidate? A lot of times people have unrealistic views of their market value, either too high or too low or breadth of their market attractiveness, I guess I would say.

It’s a great question and I hope your readers will listen to this part because it’s one of the things that most don’t do the right way. The advice that we give is up to the leader to figure out how attractive that leader is in this market and to what type of company. As a leader, you may say, “I would view these brands or these companies as aspirational.” Forget the role for a minute, just the company itself. You might win 20% of those because it’s a long shot. It’s aspirational.

B quality companies that I would find interesting, I should win probably 50/50 of the ones I’m competing for. C quality opportunities to the executive would be ones maybe where it’s a company in their space and similar domain. Maybe a similar role. They should win 80% of those opportunities they go to interview. Go out and have conversations. Find out who is attracted to you and who are you attracted to? To your point, sometimes when you take these calls and you start to hear things and you start to meet people, your mind might shift to what you didn’t even prepare or expect to happen.

You, all of a sudden, become interested in a brand that you didn’t think of, a role that you didn’t think of, etc. A quick way to summarize that, is it’s up to the executive to go find out how attractive they are and how valuable they are in this market. Different companies are going to pay different comp packages based on the capabilities that you’re going to bring and the problems they’re asking you to solve.

You’re arguing essentially, Kelly, don’t just take the call, but go do one round of meetings.

Protecting Your Executive Optionality

I would argue to do at a minimum, yes. It’s about, as I said earlier, being strategic. When you do take that first meeting, the whole argument that Jeff and I make is keep the optionality on your side. Most leaders don’t think of a process through the lens of optionality. If you think about it, the goal of a leader is to take the time to go meet somebody. The goal is to have the person that they’re talking to want to spend more time with them, want to learn more, want to engage further so that the leader can decide if the leader wants to invest that time.

At the end of the day, we see a lot of times where leaders will approach a meeting and they’ll put up demands like, “I won’t move. It has to be paid this much money. It needs to be this title.” All those are just blockers. Those are all things that can come down the road. Go meet somebody. Go have a business discussion about what the company is doing? What are they trying to solve? What’s the purpose of why they’re looking for this role? That is the starting point for the discussion. What it’s not is, “I need this much money. I won’t move. I need this title.” That is definitely the wrong way to start a discussion.

That’s pretty counterintuitive though to the way that a lot of people approach those conversations, at least from what I have experienced, because they feel like it’s a little bit like round one of a speed dating process in a way. The idea is to figure out relatively quickly whether there’s something there.

We’re talking about the leaders that we place at Heidrick and in this industry are at the peak of their careers. It’s not about a volume of meetings. That’s not what this is about. It’s about trying to figure out, “I know enough about this company. I know enough about the sector. I know enough about this business model.” That is qualifying enough. If you don’t know some of the people, the CEO, the investors, the board, etc., are all good reasons because it may not be about the job that you end up winning.

It may be about, more importantly, the relationships that you build in the process. Remember, as these leaders show up well in these discussions, the company who has that discussion and was impressed by the leader, how they showed up, are going to go back and tell their HR leader, their CEO, their investors, “We didn’t get J.R for this role. He declined to continue the discussion, but he’s somebody we should all keep an eye on because he’s amazing.” That is what we want.

Certainly, that’s what you want. I want to come back to something you were talking about a minute ago, Kelly, in terms of A, B, and C grade companies. How should somebody, I guess in the context of managing their career, think about, “I could go get a job at this level in an A company, and I could get one at this higher level in a B company, and probably this higher level at a C company?” A lot of people would probably say, “I’d rather have the most senior role in the C company.” You guys would probably argue that it’s more nuanced and complicated than that. I’d love to get your view on how a candidate should think about company quality when they’re thinking about their options.

Executive Career Management: Do you know who’s attracted to your skill set in today’s market? Stop guessing your value and start testing your optionality.

Ironically, I hear in this market and you’re starting to see it, CEOs, former CEOs are stepping back into individual contributor. I see roles in high growth, hot companies. Most leaders, accomplished leaders, would rather be in a high growth company that is performing incredibly well than be a senior leader at a company that’s stagnated or flatline growth or a major turnaround. Those, at the end of the day, are very difficult. What we hear is that they’re not fun. The fun assignments are around growth, and that’s what the best leaders are looking for is high growth and huge TAMs.

It may be a little bit counterintuitive if you have the trade-off of a senior role at a company that is less interesting to you, versus stepping back a level or two at a company that is growing and new opportunities are being created every day. Look at some of these LLM companies, these new frontier companies. Imagine if you were a senior executive. If you went in as a junior leader, chances are in twelve months you would be a senior leader again because the opportunities are just exponential. That is the way the best leaders think about it.

If the growth opportunities aren’t there, the LLMAI companies are an extreme example. If I’m looking at two companies in the same industry, we’ll say they’re both growing roughly about the same amount. How about the optionality that going to an A grade company gives me, versus the optionality of going to a B or C company that may have roughly the same growth, but just not the same quality and prospects?

Removing Emotion From Career Decisions

One of the things that we put in the book is how do you eliminate or reduce the amount of emotion that goes into deciding between multiple opportunities? We list an example in the book, which is we talk about identifying for each leader, how do you define what a quality company is? How do you define what a quality role is?

Thirdly, how do you define what a quality offer is? What we talk about in the book and the framework that we offer is very simple. For each leader, this will be different. It’ll be bespoke and unique to each leader, but identify the 6 to 8 attributes that you as a leader would feel are the priority attributes for your definition, your unique definition of what a company is, and your unique definition of what a role is, and your unique definition of what an offer is.

When you’re in discussions and you’ve boiled your opportunities down to two competing offers or opportunities, as you just laid out. Hopefully, you’ve been able to evaluate both of those against the criteria that you have set at the beginning of your process. Now, it’s a framework only for you, J.R, or for the leader. It could change. It’s not meant to be shown to anybody, but where it is useful, whenever asked, because this is a common question by a company. What are you looking for? What is it you’re looking for?

You could easily now come back and say, “I’m looking for the highest quality company.” They’ll say, “How do you define that?” You’ve already done the work. You can say, “These are the types of attributes to me,” and you are much more prepared for this discussion rather than keeping it all in your head, which 99% of executives do, and relying on the emotion.

Let’s face it, when you’re being pursued or there is interest in your candidacy, it’s easy to get caught up in the emotion. We see executives make decisions around the emotion. If you can eliminate all the emotion or as much as possible, you can keep it focused on the attributes that you believe are authentic to you for the right company and the right role and the right comp package. You’re going to make the right decision.

Having that level of clarity is very helpful. Most people don’t. That’s probably where they get themselves into trouble because they are thinking about titles, more superficial aspects of things. Not so much what they want it to be like and feel like day to day.

That’s an overarching theme of the whole book. The feedback that Jeff and I and Heidrick have been receiving is the intentionality. It’s purpose-built career management where you’re doing things deliberately, intentionally, versus randomly accepting a call that you didn’t expect from a recruiter or a company and you took it. Next thing, you quit your job. The reality is, you didn’t test your value on the market. You didn’t test your attractiveness on the market. It may have been an old colleague or a friend that traded on loyalty or guilt or whatever, friendship. There’s a lot that just happens by randomness and by serendipity. It does not have to be that way.

There’s another point in this process that you guys talk about that’s important, which is getting into the heart of the interview process and being able to tell your story.

This is an important part of this whole discussion because telling the story doesn’t happen just when you’re interviewing with the company. It happens when you’re interviewing with people like Jeff and myself or colleagues in the industry. It happens when you’re getting a strategic introduction. One of the concepts we introduce is a strategic introduction. Anytime you meet somebody, it could be in the process or seemingly before the process.

It’s how to understand the buyer, the company who is interested, or the person you’re speaking with who’s representing the company or individuals looking for talent. Understanding what they want, understanding what they’re looking for, and why they’re looking for it. Get curious and make sure that you are clear on what the requirements are, the capabilities, the experience that they’re looking for before you start talking and telling your story. Your story has no relevance if you don’t know what you’re telling it in relation to.

Step one is just understanding what the company is looking for, such as experiences, capabilities, etc. You can then tailor what experience and capabilities that you bring to the table. It could be from the job that you ran or the most recent job, or it could be from a job or two ago, because the reality is, you’re trying to find and map the most relevant experiences and insights into what they’re most interested to hear about. Not, “Let me just give you ten minutes of a monologue of who I am and where I came from, etc.”

One of the quotes that I love in the book, there’s many that I love, but one is from Fidji Simo for OpenAI. Her comment was, “Be clear about who you are, what you believe, how you think and plan to contribute. Bring ideas. Show them how you think.” That quote kind of sums up how to show up to these discussions. It’s not the title, the comp package, etc.

You’ve heard a lot of these stories in the course of interviewing candidates. What makes a compelling story?

The number one thing that will make a compelling story is how well have you listened to what they’re looking for? It has to start there because that’s the beginning part of it, then how well does your experience match what they’re looking for. There are many times and I would say the majority of the time, especially if you’re interviewing for a role you’ve never had. You could be a C-suite level executive interviewing for a CEO role for the first time or somebody not on the C-suite interviewing for the C-suite.

It’s about making sure that even though you don’t have the most relevant experiences because you have not done that role, it’s making sure that you are at least asking the questions at the altitude and the relevance of the role that you’re interested in trying to win. The common mistake is that people will use the lens of the role they’re in to talk about the role that they’re trying to aspire and elevate to. They have to get mentally adjusted to the attitude of the role that they’re trying to win.

I’ve said many times to many leaders, it’s one thing to know how to talk to a CEO if you’re not a CEO, but learning how to speak like a CEO is vastly different than learning how to speak to a CEO. You can go down the hierarchy of roles. It’s the same concept, which is they just need to figure out how to be the most compelling for the role that they’re talking about based on the requirements that they’re looking for.

There’s a high degree of empathy that’s required in that. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the person who is looking to fill that role and think, “What do they need to see in me?” A lot of people, even the ones who are practiced at telling their story, spend a lot of time thinking about, “How do I make myself look as smart or as technically capable as possible?”

Executive Career Management: When recruiters come calling, emotion can cloud your judgment. Define your non-negotiable career attributes before you enter the room.

It’s true. It’s one of these misnomers about interviewing, and we’ve all kind of been raised to believe that when we interview for a role, that it’s a competition and we need to win. As an interviewer, I ask the questions and interviewee, you answer the questions. That is just not true. The reality is that an interview is nothing more than an executive discussion. It could be at the senior level that we just talked about. It could be at the mid-level, even at the entry level. It’s a business discussion. That’s what it is.

It’s not about using AI to get the perfect answer for a question and memorizing the answer. As we all know, there’s no authenticity to it. The second somebody catches that, they’re going to ask one follow-up question and then the interviewee has nowhere to go. The reality is it’s just being authentic to each individual and engaging in a business discussion. That’s what it is.

How do I handle situations where I’ve had some kind of failure? I could have been laid off or I could have had something not go well in my past and I get a question that goes directly at that because somebody’s familiar with that experience or they just ask about something where they want me to talk about a situation where I’ve failed. How do you answer that question in a way that’s not going to be self-sabotaging?

Taking Control Of Your Exit Narrative

Probably one of the things that I’m most interested in is the book. I’ve referred this chapter essentially to so many executives over the years who have been fired or let go. The best thing you can do as an executive is get ahead of the narrative. What I mean by that is if you’ve been fired, there’s a human condition where most leaders want to get back into a role as quickly as possible so they can show their other employer that they’re of value and they are attractive to somebody. That’s the worst thing somebody can do.

The reality is, if you have been fired, it’s best in our opinion to take the time, process what happened, and give it some time if you can afford to stay out of the job market. Now, obviously finances matter for every single human. There may not be enough luxury with finances to do this the way I’m going to articulate it, but there’s probably a middle ground somewhere, which will take at least a few weeks to process, decompress. Most likely, you’ve been in a pressure cooker. If you’ve been fired, you’ve felt the pressure. Not the last day you were there, but for weeks or months or years, maybe.

Take the time to get healthy, recharge, and reconnect. After you’ve cleared your brain and you’re not talking about your former employer, every single sentence that comes out of your mouth anymore, then go back to, I’ll say the 3 or 4 of your biggest critics at the company you worked for. Try and get them to open up and ask them for time to give you feedback. The way you set it up, essentially what you want to do as a leader, you want to get them to feel comfortable and safe to tell you what was being said about you when you weren’t in the room.

The way you set it up is, “I’ve taken time to reflect. I made some mistakes when I was there. Whether you agree that you did, whether you think you did, it has nothing to do with that.” You obviously did because you were fired. You have to admit to each of these when you set up, “I know I made some mistakes. I don’t want to repeat the same mistakes. I’m going to be in the workforce for a long time. I’d love to learn from what was being said about me.”

Now, what we’ve seen when people do that, it’s not easy to do, by the way. I will tell you, of all the people I’ve ever shared that framework with to do it, and they’ve all done it. They’ve all come back and said, “That was powerful,” and here’s why. Once you do that, and if they start giving you the truth, the worst thing you can do in that meeting is to try and correct them. If you get somebody to be open and share and trust, just accept it, say thank you, and not a sentence more. Once you get that, if you do, you have the keys to the kingdom now because the two things, you know what is most likely going to be said about you during references or when you explain what may have happened in that situation.

Think about it this way. Those people that may have been detractors or folks that could have sabotaged your career if they got a reference call, most likely went from Red to Yellow. Maybe in some cases, Red to Green. Simply because you were self-aware. You were courageous. You reached out. You admitted you made mistakes. You listened to what I had to say. You didn’t argue with me. You just took it in. Now, when I go to the company that I want to go talk to, I can say, “Here’s what I did. Here’s what I learned. Here’s what you’ll hear.” When the company goes and does references and back channels you, they’re going to hear just what you said. Now you sound super self-aware.

There’s a lot to what you just said. One is the point about being receptive to hearing it and not trying to contest it, but just taking it in because it shows a desire to learn. The fact that you potentially reduce the temperature of their comments because people will call them and ask about references. The last point is, you know what they’re going to say, and you can come up with your positioning of that when you get asked the question in future interviews but it does take courage.

Anybody reading that has had that experience. Let’s face it, I’ve been fired in my career. A lot of people have. The reality is that it’s the best thing you can do. Think about what’s the alternative, do nothing. When you do nothing, you have no idea what somebody is going to say. The people who are Red are going to stay Red, if not even go Purple. The reality is to do something. At least you have a chance.

I want to talk about internal candidates. I know you do a number of searches where you’ve got one or two or a handful of internal candidates and external candidates as well. One of the things that surprised me in the book is that they don’t tend to fare well. I’m curious to hear, and our audience would love to know, why is that? Why do internal candidates tend to underperform in these hybrid selection processes that also include external candidates?

There’s a couple of very common reasons. One, they might give an ultimatum. They may have been hired with the promise that they are a successor to a role. There may have been an expectation when they came in. For whatever reason, if it’s a public company with fiduciary responsibility at a senior level, CEO level, they’re going to want to make sure that they’ve looked and scanned the market. Even at the C-suite levels as well. There’s some time and expectation with that. It might be expected that’s going to happen.

When they find out they may have to compete for it, all of a sudden, they could offer an ultimatum. We’ve seen this happen fairly regularly, where it’s like, “If I don’t get it, I’m leaving.” It’s just a terrible way to play the hand. It backfires almost every time. That’s one. Two is they become very high maintenance. If you engage an internal candidate too early in a process, these processes take place at a senior level. They take 3 or 4 or sometimes 6 to 12 months. If you engage an internal candidate too early in the process, they’re constantly asking for updates of what’s going on.

At the end of the day, this process of recruiting is a need-to-know basis only. They’re not told a lot other than their own candidacy. They’re not told who they’re competing with. They’re not told where they’re at with the other candidates. They become high maintenance. Pushing both of those aside, the other reason is sometimes they just don’t talk about the job, especially if it’s one that’s going to elevate them. It could be into a C-suite role, into the CEO role, or a role that they’ve not had before.

They look at the opportunity to talk about during their interview internally through the lens of the world they’re in, going back to what we had talked about a little while ago. They’re sometimes afraid to take risks. At the end of the day, if the internal candidate basically says, “I wouldn’t change anything. I would do it just the way the predecessor did it.” That clearly isn’t a very compelling argument. Show some empathy to the context of what the other leader had to deal with and where the companies come from.

At the end of the day, every board and CEO and C-suite is looking for new ideas. They’re all looking for growth. There’s no company that’s not looking for growth. How are you going to grow the company? Go back to Fidji Simo’s comment, bring ideas. Show them the way you think. Those are some things that we see with internal candidates. They just don’t take enough risk in the process. Remember, they have the inside advantage because they know the culture of the company. They know whoever is going to come in from the outside, that’s going to be their Achilles heel. They may bring lots more experience, but they’re surely not going to bring the culture fit, style fit that you would.

Do you think, though, that the bar is somewhat higher for internal candidates? I felt that sometimes the hiring manager and the HR person who’s on point or the head of HR have a bias to go outside because if it doesn’t work out, there’s a higher expectation that it might not work out because you brought somebody in from the outside. It’s almost like it’s a bigger risk, a bigger bet to take an internal candidate and promote them.

I view this whole process as a benefit and risk equation. Every single candidate, it’s going back to the ABC framework we talked about and finding out your attractiveness and your value. Every decision in the hiring process is a risk reward decision. How much risk am I willing to take? What type of risk? It’s not just overall risk. Is it domain risk? Is it role risk? Is it a style risk? What is the risk that they identify?

At the end of the day, boards and CEOs and investors, they want to eliminate as much risk as possible for obvious reasons. They want as much upside and as little risk. For somebody to get the role with a lot of risk, there’s probably a backstory there that is unique because it’s usually the candidate that will have the least risk when you’re comparing side-by-side comparisons with the most upside.

Executive Career Management: Got let go? Don’t rush back into the market on the defensive. Step back, gather hard feedback, and own the narrative before others do.

I want to pull the curtain back a little bit and just talk about what this looks like and feels like from your side. How do candidates hurt themselves from the moment of that, even before the moment of that first outreach potentially from you all the way through the process?

There’s a long list, which is why Jeff and I did want to write this book. Let’s just go through a few of them. I’ll give you a few obvious ones and a few ones that I’ve seen in my career. They’ve never been repeated, but it’s hard to imagine they happened. One is they talk too much. When you’re in a discussion, an interview process, be mindful of the engagement. I don’t want to call it human nature, but we’ve all been programmed to just want to sell.

I’m selling you. I want you to know how great I am. I want to tell you how great I am. At the end of the day, nobody tells anybody how good they are. Let the data tell how good you are. Let the information you’ve achieved, the results you’ve achieved, talk for you. As the person interviewing, you decide if the data I just gave you was compelling versus like, “J.R, I’m a great guy. You should hire me. I want this job.” That’s not compelling.

Talking too much and not being relevant with what you’re talking about for the person who is hiring, because they’re a buyer, let’s face it. You’re a buyer as well, but you’re a seller in some ways. Logistic things, they go silent. You’re trying to reach them and they just don’t reply. It could be for very legitimate reasons. They’re overseas. They’ve had a fundraising round, whatever it is but it’s how to be super communicative, asking for feedback. This is one that shocks me how few leaders ask for feedback. The more senior you get, it’s hard to ask to have the mirror held up to you.

At the end of the day, the hundreds or thousands of people that work for you are all trying to tell you how great you are and how wonderful you are. The reality is, every single leader, when they’re going through a process like this, needs a truth-sayer. Somebody that will hold the mirror up to them. Ask for feedback. Ask for feedback after you’re done with the discussion. Ask for feedback from the recruiter who brought you in. Ask for feedback from the person you met with. Keep showing that mindset, that willingness to learn, and that curiosity. That’s important.

A couple that I will share with you that they’ve never repeated, so it will never happen again, I have to imagine. This is a leader from a while ago. When business cards were handed out, though, they’re not anymore, but this leader took the business card of who he was meeting and set his drink on top of the business card as a coaster. It didn’t go very well. Another one that was kind of unique was when you go into a conference room. There’s a moment where, unless you’re predetermined where you’re going to sit versus the person that’s interviewing, going to sit.

I don’t recommend as the interviewee that you take the head of the table. That’s definitely not recommended. However, people do it. Those subtle signs of etiquette, those subtle signs of consideration, all matter. All of this matters. It’s sometimes not just what people think, “I nailed the interview, but guess what? They were rude to the receptionist when they walked in,” or some other silly thing happened. Those are all things that could ruin a candidate.

This continues through into the offer process as well.

The Unseen Traps Of Executive Hiring

It does. The offer process. A couple of things that trip people up late in the process are one, negotiating. People who get too aggressive in negotiating. That can take lots of different forms, but sometimes there’s a confusion between what offer even means because there’s multiple uses of the term offer. There’s a framework of an offer, a verbal offer, a written offer, or a signable offer. They’re all very different. People get very confused when they throw the term, “I got an offer.” The only one that matters is you get a written offer and is it a signable offer. That’s the only thing that matters because you know your value.

At least for that company, your value. You have a data point. When they try and negotiate too aggressively because they think they have the opportunity in the bag, we’ve seen many opportunities where the company’s cut bait because what they’re viewing you as, and they’re watching you is, if this is the way this leader is going to show up to negotiate, is this how they’re going to show up internally or with our clients or customers? We’ve seen that happen more than a few times.

The other way is when they resign. We talk a lot about the resignation process in the book and lay out a step-by-step program to do it well. People that don’t do it well, they get counter offers. They accept counter offers, and they leave the company that gave them the offer high and dry. Jeff and I had a recent example of this where we were negotiating for a public company CEO role. The person had a written offer, was negotiating it, and said, “If we can get the compensation right, I’m going to take it.” We told that to the entire board. That was on a Friday or Thursday. That following Monday, that individual took another role in another company. Never told the company that they were negotiating with and literally just ghosted them. That is not the way to do it.

You have a lot of examples in the book. Don’t burn bridges.

For that same search I was just talking about, I’ll give you a perfect example about not burning bridges. A name came up to the search committee on this CEO search. Somebody on the search committee said, “I knew that individual twenty years ago, and that person was a jerk. We definitely are not going to consider that person.”

Think about that for a second. Somebody that knows where they were in their career acted like a jerk, had that reputation, burned that bridge. Twenty years later, that individual will not even know what is being said about him or her when they’re not in the room. Whether that person wanted the job or not, they’re not even getting the opportunities because that’s the reputation they built.

Kelly, thanks for doing this with me. I’m sure your book will be incredibly beneficial to anybody who’s in the job market and we all are at different points in our career. Getting these interactions with search firms like Heidrick is important for people. I’m sure this will be an episode that a lot of people will find very useful. Thank you for doing it with me and best of luck with the continued launching of your book.

I appreciate you having us on. I hope that your readers get a lot of value from it. Hopefully, it’s a value.

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Wrapping up the conversation just now with Kelly, let me offer a few takeaways. Most importantly, manage your career before you need to. Don’t wait until you’re miserable, unemployed, or desperate for change to understand your market value, build your network, establish relationships with recruiters, or think seriously about what you want next. Career management should be ongoing, not episodic. If you’re a regular reader to this show, this is something that I emphasize all the time and feel strongly about.

Second, know your story, but don’t turn it into a script. Your resume is going to tell people what you’ve done. Your job is to explain the context, the impact that you created, what you learned, and why that experience makes you the right person for this particular opportunity. A lot of people know that they’re supposed to tell stories in interviews, but if you just tell the same story again and again, and don’t link it to what that person in that seat who’s interviewing needs, then you’re missing an opportunity to connect with them and to show them that what they need and are the right person for that role.

Third, remember that you’re evaluating the company too. The objective isn’t just to get an offer for the sake of getting an offer. It’s to find a situation in which your strengths, aspirations, values and definition of success align with what an organization needs. Kelly talked about the importance of going into a discussion with a recruiter or a company with clarity on that. If you have that, then you’re going to be able to have a much more informed conversation about whether this situation that you’re talking about is right for you.

We build our careers one role at a time. Though we’re changing jobs more often than we used to, you don’t get an infinite number of career tries. You’ve only got a finite number of them. You want each one to count and be right for you, to contribute to your broader success, and to leave you feeling happy and fulfilled every day.

Finally, is just this idea of how you show up throughout the process matters incredibly. It is not just the interviews. Your phone conversations, how you respond to email or tone, or whether you put your drink down on somebody’s business card or sit in the seat at the head of the table. A couple of things that Kelly mentioned in the course of our conversation, all of that gives the company that you were interviewing with data.

You want that data to be good data. You don’t want it to work against you. Yet a lot of people self-sabotage intentionally if they’re trying to be too hard a negotiator or unintentionally by just doing something that rubs somebody wrong. I’ve certainly seen this in my own experience. It’s a great conversation, lots of practical advice, especially if you were in the job market, but the point is you were always somewhat in the job market.

If you found this conversation valuable, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share this episode with somebody who may be looking for a job or just wants to manage their career better. In other words, all of us. You can also sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks for tuning in.

Important Links

• Kelly Kay on LinkedIn
• Heidrick & Struggles
• Jeff Sanders
• Show Up to Win: How to Land the Leadership Role You Want
• OpenAI
• PathWisdom Newsletter
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• PathWise on X
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About Kelly Kay

Kelly O. Kay is a partner in Heidrick & Struggles’ San Francisco office and the global managing partner of the firm’s Enterprise Software and AI Practice. With 22 years in executive search, Kelly conducts searches worldwide for a wide range of technology companies, from high-growth private and public enterprises with revenues up to $100 billion. Kelly specializes in senior go-to-market leadership roles, including board, CEO, COO, CRO, and worldwide sales. He co-founded Heidrick’s Sales & Commercial Officers Practice and is a leading voice on executive talent trends in B2B software. Before executive search, Kelly was a partner at the Center for Corporate Innovation (CCI), a CEO development and strategy organization sponsored by McKinsey & Co., and earlier held senior roles at IBM Corporation and Gemini Management Consulting. A sought-after talent adviser and public speaker, Kelly’s writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal. His HBR article on resignation best practices “Leave Smart, Land Well” was based on a national survey of more than 6,000 CHROs and senior executives and became one of the publication’s most widely read pieces on executive career management. Kelly holds an MBA from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in Marketing from the University of San Francisco.

You may not think of yourself as a salesperson, but every day at work, you’re selling something: an idea, a proposal, your capabilities, or even yourself.

In this episode of Career Sessions, J.R. Lowry sits down with sales expert, author, and longtime podcast host Andy Paul to explore what the rest of us can learn from great salespeople about influence, curiosity, and human connection.

Andy explains why the best way to persuade someone isn’t to push harder, but to understand what matters to them. He shares how asking better questions and truly listening can strengthen relationships, why curiosity is often trained out of us as we move through school and work, and how to avoid making conversations about ourselves.

The conversation also moves beyond sales to a bigger career question: Are you building the career you actually want, or simply following someone else’s playbook? Andy discusses why success is situational, how to find environments where you can be yourself, the importance of choosing the right boss, and why it’s sometimes better to leave a bad fit rather than keep trying to make it work.

Along the way, Andy shares lessons from nearly five decades in business, and a reminder that there’s no age limit on taking on new challenges.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why everyone is selling, whether they realize it or not
• How curiosity can make you more influential
• The difference between listening to understand and listening to respond
• Why great questions create stronger relationships
• How to find work environments that fit your strengths and values
• Why you should define success on your own terms

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available athttps://pathwise.io/podcasts/andy-paul/.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Stop Following Someone Else’s Career Playbook, With Andy Paul

You may not think of yourself as a salesperson, but every day at work, you are selling something. You’re interviewing for a job. You’re asking for a promotion. You’re influencing colleagues. You’re convincing your boss to try something different. According to our guest, the best way to do that isn’t just to be more persuasive. It’s more about becoming more curious, more authentic, and better at understanding what matters to the other person that you’re trying to persuade.

Andy Paul has spent his career focused on helping others become better salespeople, working with everyone from startups to some of the world’s largest companies. He’s the author of a number of books, including Sell without Selling Out: A Guide to Success on Your Own Terms. In his own podcast, he has hosted more than 1,300 conversations with some of the leading thinkers in sales and business.

Our conversation isn’t about being a salesperson. We’re going to talk about why curiosity is an underrated career skill, what great listeners do differently, why following someone else’s playbook can hold you back, and how to build a successful career without trying to become someone you’re not or live in circumstances that aren’t right for you. We’re also going to explore a question that matters whether you’re 25 or 35. How do you stop following the career path that you think you’re supposed to have and start defining success on your own terms? I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions. Here’s my discussion with Andy.

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Andy, thanks so much for being with me on the show.

Thanks for inviting me.

I’m looking forward to it. Why don’t we dive right in? You have massive experience in the sales space. You’ve written books. You’ve done multiple podcasts in that space as well. For somebody who’s not a salesperson, convince them that they are selling every day.

The Hidden Reality Of Daily Selling

Look at it two ways. If you’re in a customer-facing role in any regard, whether you’re in sales or customer service, customer support, every interaction with a prospective buyer or an actual customer is a reflection on you. The customers take that as an example of what it’s going to be like to work with your company. The way people experience you and every time you have a chance to interact with them makes a difference and builds to its perspective or opinion someone has about you or your company.

My job is even at customer services. If I’m talking with a customer, what help do they need from me? How can I be the most helpful to help them achieve what they want to achieve in the shortest time possible? That’s our goal. How can I make the most effective use of my customer’s time? In my mind, there’s no such thing as an insignificant interaction with the customer because they all contribute to their perception of you.

That’s very fair. There’s also the element of just us. We are selling ourselves when we go to work every day. Hopefully not selling our souls, but certainly selling ourselves.

Whether people like the terminology or not, we all do carry a brand. Some of us consciously develop it and others don’t. People are forming opinions of you. If you have certain desires at work, you want to progress through your career or you want to achieve certain things. You have to be mindful of that. Again, there’s no such thing as an insignificant interaction with the people that matter. We increasingly, in our lives, get our work done through other people. Part of our job is, in order to succeed at what we’re trying to do is, we need to have people help us. How do we persuade people or influence people to devote some other time to helping us achieve certain things?

You’ve worked with a lot of salespeople over the course of your career. What can somebody who’s not a salesperson learn from a salesperson about how to do all the things you were just describing in terms of influencing and collaborating without coming across as aggressive or fake or manipulative?

One of the things that I live by is I’m working with you as I’m trying to understand, not just know, but understand what are the things that are most important to you that you’re trying to achieve? How can I help you get those? If I operate in life, it’s saying, my job is to understand the people that I’m dealing with. They all have things they’re trying to achieve that are important to them.

When I’m coming to pitch an idea or something, how does that align with helping them achieve these things that are most important to them? The central part of what I’m trying to do is understand this person, understand what that is. You’re so much better off. As you come from a perspective of, “I’m here to help you.” Maybe we can help each other, but I’m here to help you. I’m here to listen and understand. If you can do that, people think you’re there to serve them as well as yourself, then you’re a much better footing.

I’ve heard that the construct of approaching things with a sense of generosity is applied in networking. Certainly, that’s where Keith Ferrazzi made his name, among others. It’s this idea more generally of negotiations, trying to find a win-win. Not that you’re necessarily going to work every day to negotiate something. The concept of it all feels very similar in terms of trying to find the win-win.

I would go a step beyond that, though, because if you’re saying, “I want to understand what’s most important to you.” I’m not thinking about myself in that regard because I know that if I can help you, I am going to get perhaps what I want, what I’m looking for, and the help I need. If I’m thinking about the win-win, that tends to fall into quid pro quo. I’ll give you something if you give me something, which is the opposite of generosity. Generosity is like, “I’m going to give without the expectation of return.” When you are generous, you do get the return.

I think I said it badly earlier in terms of describing it as win-win, because I agree with the idea that you are approaching this saying, “How can I help you?” If you do that enough times, it will all come back to you.

Zig Ziglar said, “If you help enough other people get what they most want out of life, you’ll get what you want out of life.”

Curiosity In Sales: Empathy isn’t just about sharing a feeling. Learn how cognitive empathy helps you understand what truly drives your team.

It’s very well said. You were just describing a use of curiosity in terms of trying to understand what the other person is trying to get. Whether you’re in a formal sales or not a formal sales situation. Curiosity is central to the way that you think about how to manage your career and your day-to-day work life. How else does it factor in for you?

Unlocking Cognitive Empathy In Conversations

It operates on multiple levels. One is general curiosity about the world and staying informed and abreast of what’s going on and being a lifelong learner. That’s certainly an aspect of curiosity. The level I look at is more important in the long term. It’s being curious about other people. It’s making an effort to truly understand them. I write about this in my book as there’s this gap between knowing something about someone and truly understanding. Unfortunately, we reinforce this gap.

Even though there’s a segment of the population now politically in the United States that thinks empathy is a weakness. Empathy is critical, but we approach and teach empathy the wrong way. What we do is we say, “It’s important to walk a mile in someone’s shoes.” You understand what they’re feeling. We can’t help someone if we just understand what they’re feeling. There’s this difference between compassionate empathy and cognitive empathy.

Passionate empathy is to say, “Walk a mile in someone’s shoes. I understand how they’re feeling.” Whereas cognitive empathy is understanding why they feel the way they do. Now, if I understand why you feel the way you do, then that gives me information to be able to help you. As long as I just know how you’re feeling, that doesn’t give me a clue as to what’s at the root of it and how I can help you.

For me, curiosity is going beyond this knowing, “J.R feels bad about this.” I don’t go that step further and make sure I understand it. Expand that gap between knowing something, understanding it, and understanding why. It requires persistence in questioning and curiosity to get to that point where you develop a true understanding.

Listening has to be a big part of that. What do most of us misunderstand about what it means to truly listen? We think we’re listening, but we’re not.

Breaking The Habit Of Listening To Respond

The biggest thing that I see is that we tend to make conversations about ourselves. There are two things you see. One is, we listen to respond. This is one of the biggest things I see when I’m coaching people and working with people in the sales environment or even in real life. People have a tendency to want to make things about themselves. That is the opposite of what you’re trying to do to truly understand this person you’re talking to.

A perfect example of this is and you may have heard this example before. It’s this idea that when you can respond to someone, your responses fall into two categories. One is called a shift response and one is a support response. Typical example, coming to work. You talk to a colleague and you say, “How was your vacation this summer?” You say, “I showed up at this resort with the entire family,” and they didn’t have a reservation.

Now, what most people do is they say, “That’s horrible. That same thing happened to me.” What you’ve done is you’ve shifted the focus of listening from them to you. Whereas, a support response, “That must be horrible. What did you do next? How did it get resolved?” You turn it back. What’s the next question? Again, you’re trying to understand the situation. When you’re listening, that’s a critical thing because you’re thinking, “What’s the next thing I need to learn in order to understand that?” Extend my curiosity.

Whereas, we tend to turn off our curiosity. There’s very simple things you can do to practice this. One thing I encourage people to do, if they’re struggling with this concept, I say, “Go to a social setting. You’re going to meet somebody new and see how many questions you can ask that person before you have to say something about yourself.” Be able to ask at least three questions before you have to say something about yourself. If you practice that, you get in the habit of saying, “I’ve met somebody new. I’m curious about this person. What can I learn about them?”

That’s just one example that helps you become a better listener because your second and third questions are going to be based on the answer you got on the first one. Simple techniques you can teach people. If you practice these, they become ingrained but just something simple. You ask somebody a question, they give you an answer. “That’s interesting. Tell me more about that.” The response to the person that gets that question is, “This person’s interested in me.” There’s been some studies on this saying that the best way to make yourself interesting to someone else is to be interested in them. If our goal is to try to build some connection at a personal level, that’s a great way to do it.

That exercise that you just talked about is a good one. I will sometimes go through an exercise similar where I try not to say anything about myself for as long as I can get away with because it forces you to learn how to ask those follow-up questions, which is an important skill to have in life. You can also fall back on some of the things you were talking about in terms of like, “Then what? How did that feel? What happened next?” Similar questions that are general enough that you can have them in your repertoire and use them regularly.

When I wrote about the shift response, support response, I got an email from somebody who read the book. They said, “I got back from family Thanksgiving. I was just listening to the conversation. It was all shift responses. When I started practicing support responses, it’s amazing how the conversations start changing.” Again, part of the era that we live in, so much of the focus is on us. Social media is all about us. You have to make an effort to step outside that because that’s the paradigm that people are following these days.

That brings us to thinking about what we were just talking about, questions. What separates a great question from a more mundane one? Whether you’re in a sales situation or at a networking event having a conversation.

The Art Of Asking Better Questions

Have the other person talk about themselves. You want to have people feel comfortable to talk about the things that are important to them. Your job is to understand what’s most important to the other person and help them get that. That plays in every relationship you have in this world. What’s the way to be a better partner, a better spouse? To make sure you truly understand what’s most important to the other person and then help them get that. How do you be a better parent? Understand things that are most important to your kids. Help them get that. I can go through a laundry list of situations where the same thing applies.

I’m curious to get your view as to when you want to just focus on getting somebody to talk about themselves and when you want to focus on getting them to think about themselves, if that makes sense. Ask them a deeper question that’s going to push them perhaps a bit outside their comfort zone.

You have to earn the permission to do that and to get to that point. In my last book, Sell Without Selling Out, I talk about these four core elements of building these trust-based relationships, ability to connect with another person, to be curious about them, truly understand them, and be generous. You have to build that level of trust to start getting the permission to ask those questions. That’s worth doing.

If you’re trying to develop a business relationship, the relationship is not going to go anywhere until somebody reveals something about themselves that you can’t read on a website or that’s just not normally available because that’s what you’re trying to get to. It’s to be able to reveal something about themselves that’s not commonly known.

The deeper relationships are built on that knowledge, but people aren’t just going to give it to you. You have to earn the right to do that. I sound like everything’s so conscious, but we want to get to a point where these things are talking about this connection. The curiosity is ingrained and not performative. If they’re performative, then people sense that you’re inauthentic.

Curiosity In Sales: Curiosity shouldn’t be performative. Here is how genuine inquiry builds trust across teams.

They do. Being genuinely curious and being performatively curious are going to feel like two very different things to people, to your point.

The problem with curiosity, and there’s been studies done on this. I’ve had somebody once challenge me, because I believe, based on my own research and reading, that we’re all born with the same amount of curiosity. Our life tends to train a certain amount of that out of us. I found this especially true with boys because curiosity is viewed as disruptive. You’re asking too many questions. Maybe it happened to you in your life. I know it happened to me a couple times in my life. It’s like, “Enough with the questions. Do what you’re supposed to do.”

That carries on into life where people subconsciously have been coming to believe that, “If I asked too many questions it’s a negative,” and it’s not. It’s coming from a sense of real interest and true interest, then people will let you ask as many questions as you can. I started my career in sales almost 50 years ago now. I’m selling large computer systems to business owners. I knew nothing about computers and nothing about business. It’s a great combination.

I was genuinely curious. This was my first year at sales or it was my MBA. I go and talk to these CEOs and these founders of these companies. I was genuinely interested in how they had built the company, what they were doing, what was next for them. When I approached it from that perspective, I got all the time in the world I wanted with the prospects. That lesson stuck with me.

The other reason that we get enculturated is to not ask so many questions, because especially when we come into a work environment, we feel like we have to have all the answers. Being curious is almost like an admission of weakness.

Yes, it is unfortunate that is the case. I see it all the time in consultant work. The new vice president of sales needs help, but is afraid to admit they need help because, “Wasn’t I just hired because I have all the answers?” No. Somebody hired you because you have potential. Not because you have all the answers, but people find themselves backed into that corner where they refuse to ask for help. That is unfortunate.

You can’t always see ahead of time when you come into a job, but it’s one of the things for people that are job seekers that they need to think about. Success is situational. I can take somebody that is great, performing well at company A and moving to company B, and they won’t succeed. It’s the same level as I did before. They’re the same person, same set of skills. Maybe even selling very similar products, but the environment is different.

It’s important when you’re looking for work, you’re looking for the next assignment or next gig. Is this the right situation for me? Is this an environment I can succeed in? Is this the boss that’s going to be able to help me get to the next level? You should sense a lot of that through the interview process you’re going through. It’s like, “Do they think they just have this nailed or are they open to giving me the freedom, flexibility and the autonomy to succeed in a way that aligns with my strengths and my values?”

That’s important and brings us to another topic that I wanted to discuss with you, which is this idea of finding a way to be yourself. You’ve described yourself as an introvert who didn’t necessarily fit all the stereotypical images of being a successful salesperson. How did you figure out how to make that work for you in a way that was authentic to who you are?

Why Your Career Success Is Situational

Trial and error for one. What I learned was this lesson I just talked about, is finding the right situation. I was about 30 when I was between jobs. I worked for somebody that was a horrible boss. It dawned on me that as much as the company’s hiring me, I’m hiring a boss. I’m looking for someone that’s going to be able to help me learn what I need to learn in order to take the next steps in my career and will support me in doing that. That became most of my sole focus.

The roles that I was interviewing for and trying to get are like, who’s this person that I’m going to be working for? Will they give me not just their knowledge and their experience, but will they also give me the autonomy to try new things, to bring myself to the job? I found that in almost every role I’ve been in, that’s been important. Those where I’ve been able to express myself and the boss wanted me to express myself. I did much better at them.

There was a great quote and I’m going to paraphrase it. I’m a huge soccer fan. If you’re in London, I don’t know if you’re a Premier League fan. This one soccer coach said, “What I want is players who are going to show up and bring their personality to the game. Express themselves through how they play.” I thought it was a great way to talk about it. It’s the opposite of what so much of what corporate America is about. I want you to show up and fit into our process.

I want you to be this interchangeable cog in our machinery. That was just never going to be me. Again, after a few failed experiences in my twenties, once I turned 30, then I was like, “This is what is important.” By and large, I was able to escape when I started my own company, and I was 45. For this middle part of my career, I was able to navigate and find those environments where I was working with smart, talented, capable people that just wanted to say, “Here’s the job. Go figure it out.” That was great. That’s what I wanted.

Using your example of the Premier League coach who said he wanted players to bring their personalities to the field as that player or as a player in a corporate environment, how do you figure out the balance between bringing your own personality to bear but also fitting into the system? The team that you’re playing for, the system that you’re on in a corporate environment.

I don’t think they’re antithetical. I’m sure you see this too in managers, especially younger managers. They’re afraid to step outside the tightly circumscribed bounds of what they think is going on. They have to be more enforcer types and make sure people are compliant with this process. As if they’re afraid to individually manage the people on their team. I see this again in the sales world all the time. It’s like, “You got to follow the process,” but you got this person who’s got these unique skills. Develop them individually. They’re like, “I don’t have the time.”

I said, “What do you mean you don’t have the time? This is your job as a manager.” You’re only going to succeed if they succeed. It’s to help them become the best version of themselves. I’ve seen the shift in the last 20-25 years as to, “Everybody’s got to comply with the process.” It’s so self-defeating because, certainly in the sales world, chapter and verse in enterprise sales, B2B enterprise sales, where people become so focused on the process that they think the process is good and the people are the failures, when it’s the opposite.

It’s the process that’s failed. It’s too easy to point the fingers at the individuals that say, “The salesperson is no good.” When you take that approach, the process is great and the people are failures. You’re failing as a manager. You’re failing to develop them. You’re failing to give them the instruction, inspiration and examples that they need in order to succeed.

Back to your original question. You have to put yourself in a situation where you have the freedom to experiment. As an individual, that’s the critical thing, an environment where I can try new things and bring the best of me to it. Sometimes it involves leaving the situation you’re in and going find another one. Very few people have employment contracts. Go find a better situation.

One of the hardest things about this is when you’re sitting in that job interview. How do you figure out whether this system is going to be a good system for you? There is a system. I hear your point about letting people bring out their individual strengths and I’m completely aligned with you in that. One of the things that I think about and I don’t think I’ve come up with a great answer for yet is, how do you sit in that job interview and suss that out in a way that is not just the tell me about your culture and get the same boilerplate answer?

Curiosity In Sales: You are not just interviewing for a job. You are hiring the boss who controls your daily autonomy.

The hard answer is you can’t. Things are a guarantee. I was talking to a client of mine, a coaching client, where they lied to me in the interview process and I’ve experienced that. I’ve been misled. This was interviewing for a senior position where they showed me a false set of financials. The answer is you can’t be afraid to make a change. It’s okay to say, “I made a mistake.” Why torture yourself for 6 months, a year, or 2 years in an environment that’s not going to be a fit?

It’s not like in the old days where if you change jobs too frequently that used to be held against you. If you find yourself in a bad situation, it’s better to cut it off short and go find that next thing because you just learned a lesson. Don’t make it worse by staying in there because you’re not going to be happy. They’re not going to be happy. It’s worse to be in some place in a year and not have anything to show for it as opposed to cutting the cord quickly and finding something.

More generally, and you write about this in your book. How do you pursue your own definition of success versus the one that gets put onto you or ascribed to you?

Hiring Your Next Boss Deliberately

It starts with defining what you want out of any situation, what you want out of life. I was having this conversation with a client. Bemoaning the fact that they’d had an opportunity to join a reasonably hot AI startup that had announced they were going to go public. They were saying, “They had offered me a job and I hadn’t taken it. I regret not having done that.”

We had talked at the time about it, and I said, “The things that they weren’t offering were the reasons that you didn’t take it. You weren’t going to have the same autonomy that you wanted. You were going to have to relocate. The money wasn’t good enough to replace what you’re currently doing now, but what they were offering was the mythical upside of our equity,” which they weren’t even offering enough to almost compensate for the money this person wasn’t going to make in their salary.

It’s like, “You chose because you wanted autonomy. You wanted the freedom to be able to make the type of money you want to make. The situation wasn’t going to allow you to do that. You made a good decision.” It’s harder when you’re earlier in your career. You gain more perspectives. As you get older, you get a family of obligations, whatever that influences your decisions. You want to be clear headed about, “What are the things that enabled me to go to work and enjoy it?” For me, autonomy was always one.

Even as an individual contributor, one of the things that attracted me is sales in the first place, because I certainly wasn’t a salesperson by nature, inclination. In my first sales interview, the boss I’m interviewing with said, “You’re going to be the CEO of your own territory. That’s the role. That’s why you have to look at it. You’re the CEO of your patch.” That’s like music to my ears. It’s like, “I’ve got control over how I’m going to do this.” That just stuck with me. I always wanted to find those situations where I could enjoy that similar type of autonomy.

You’ve talked a little bit about this already, but what else would you want your younger self to know that you know now or advice that you would give somebody who’s in the early part of their career?

Stress less. You do the best you can. Try to learn as much as you can about the field and the world you’re in and try to have fun. Fun was certainly the element of my career. I’ve had a lot of fun and have had a lot of fun throughout my career. A lot of variety, which was important for me. In contrast with my dad, I worked 36 years with one company and I liked the variety. That’s one of the reasons I started my own consulting company.

The bottom line is I’ve had a good time doing it. I’ve made an effort to work with smart people. I wanted to put myself in situations where I was challenged. I went for a history major. I sold big computers. I don’t think about big computers, big or small. I spent fifteen years in the satellite communications business, selling highly complex technical products. I know nothing about them, but I put myself in a situation knowing I was going to have to learn and it was going to challenge me. I had a good chunk of selling large systems overseas. Again, that was just so much fun.

It’s having a sense of enjoyment of what you’re doing. We all have obligations. Again, try to find those situations where you’re going to be challenged and you look forward to that challenge. Somebody asked me once, how did I choose a particular job? I said I chose this one because the boss scared me. They said, “What do you mean scared you?” I said, “I knew it was going to be a challenge. This guy was so smart.” Especially about sales and he turned into a lifelong mentor.

He was just going to force me to think about everything I did and I loved it. It became so much better as a result and so much smarter in so many different dimensions because of just the intellectual rigor of that. For me, that was important. I wanted to work with painfully smart people. I’ve always tried to do that in my career.

I appreciate your thoughts and appreciate some of the perspectives you’ve brought to taking ownership of your career, being who you are and figuring out who that is and finding situations that allow you to be your best self. Thank you for being with me and sharing your perspectives. I wish you well and whatever is coming next for you, which is probably a lot more variety.

Redefining Success On Your Own Terms

I speak in chapter with you and I talk about chapters before we started. Career is a series of chapters. I’ve been working on my first novel. I’ve always wanted to write an espionage thriller, so I’m working on that. Another sales book I’m working on now. I’ll be stepping back into the sales thing but again, I’m always trying to do it on my own terms. These are the types of challenges you want. I don’t ever envision stopping or not doing anything, retiring completely.

I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. It’s good to pick new challenges and learn something new. My first of these 1,300 podcast episodes, I didn’t publish the first one until I was 60. I didn’t publish my first book until I was 50. There’s no limitations based on age. It’s just based on your curiosity and desire to learn new things. That keeps life fun and interesting.

Yes, it does. Thank you again.

Thank you.

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A great discussion with Andy. Let me cover some wrap-up points to help you take away some things from the conversation. First is to recognize that we are all selling, whether we realize it or not. Anytime you’re pitching an idea, interviewing for a job, asking for a promotion, or trying to influence a colleague, you are asking someone to make a decision based on what you are saying to them. The best way to influence that decision isn’t pressure or clever persuasion. It’s understanding what matters most to the other person.

Second, lead with curiosity, not certainty. Some of the most effective people don’t worry about having all the answers, despite the fact that’s what many corporate cultures seem to want to promote. They’re the ones who ask the best questions and then genuinely listen to the answers. They are truly seeking to understand. Curiosity helps immensely with this. It allows you to understand other people, to challenge your assumptions, to uncover things that otherwise you might have missed. The third point is to build your career on your own terms.

Learn from successful people, but don’t assume that you need to be like them. Understand your strengths, develop your own approach, be deliberate about defining your own version of success and what you need in your life. Ultimately, taking ownership of your career means choosing your path rather than simply following someone else’s playbook.If you found this conversation valuable, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share this episode with somebody who’s looking to become a better leader or build a stronger career. You can also sign up for my membership community, PathWise and our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks for tuning in.

Important Links

• Andy Paul on LinkedIn
• The Win Rate Podcast with Andy Paul
• Sell without Selling Out: A Guide to Success on Your Own Terms
• Keith Ferrazzi
• PathWisdom Newsletter
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• PathWise on X
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About Andy Paul

Andy Paul is a sales expert, author, speaker, and podcast host who has spent nearly five decades studying what makes people successful in sales, business, and their careers. He is the author of several books, including Sell Without Selling Out: A Guide to Success on Your Own Terms, and has worked with companies ranging from startups to some of the world’s largest organizations. As a podcast host, Andy has conducted more than 1,300 conversations with leading thinkers in sales and business. His work emphasizes curiosity, listening, generosity, and authenticity, as well as helping people succeed without sacrificing who they are in the process.

What if you achieve everything you thought you wanted in your career, and still find yourself wondering if that’s really all there is? Former Vertex CEO Jeff Westphal joins host J.R. Lowry to discuss how you can build a Work Life Worth Living when traditional status isn’t enough. Jeff Westphal spent two decades as CEO of Vertex, helping grow the company from roughly 75 employees to more than 1,000 and increasing its value fortyfold. Along the way, he started asking deeper questions about purpose and why listening can be far more powerful than having all the answers. He shares how an intense focus on reflection transformed his leadership and helped him create an environment where employees felt truly invested. They also examine how rapid changes in AI mean distinctly human qualities like empathy, judgment, and connection will define our professional future. Whether you’re rethinking your path or leading a team, this conversation will help you reflect on what truly makes your career meaningful.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/jeff-westphal/.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Success Isn’t Enough: Building a Work Life Worth Living, with Jeff Westphal

When people think about career success, what usually comes to mind are things like promotions, bigger paychecks, and impressive titles and maybe building a company. Those things certainly matter. I would imagine that some of you have reached goals that you’ve probably worked hard to achieve, only then to find yourself asking afterwards, “Was that it?” My guest believes that’s one of the most important questions that any of us can ask. Jeff Westphal spent two decades as the CEO of Vertex and led the company through a 40X growth in value and from 75 employees to more than a thousand by the time of his retirement.

By almost any measure, he’d achieved extraordinary professional success but along the way, he also began asking himself deeper questions about meaning, purpose, fulfillment and what truly makes a work life worth living. Those reflections became the foundation for his new book, which is called A Work Life Worth Living.

In our conversation, we’re going to explore why achievement alone isn’t always satisfying and how to build a career that’s both successful and meaningful, what leaders can do to create workplaces where people thrive, and why these questions are becoming even more important as AI transforms the future of work. Whether you’re just starting your career or questioning your next move or wondering how to make your work more fulfilling, you’re going to find a lot to reflect on in this conversation. Ironically, Jeff is very big on reflection. Here’s my discussion with Jeff.

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Jeff, welcome and thanks for joining me.

Good to be here.

I’m glad to have you on as well. Let’s dive right in. I know you’ve got this view and you write about it in your book that a lot of people feel successful on paper, but still feel like something is missing. You experienced a bit of that yourself. It would be great to hear your own experience when you had that first clue that success alone wasn’t everything for you. It wasn’t enough.

It’s interesting. It’s not like it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t looking for more. I was succeeding to the extent that on paper, at a cocktail party at 28 years old, I would have felt like, “I’m doing as well as anybody here.” I had multiple promotions. I started at my father’s company and sales were doubling twice. I was leading sales and marketing. Not all due to me, but still I felt like I was contributing meaningfully. I was introduced by one of our salesman’s father-in-law’s colleagues who had become a certified seven habits facilitator. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Questioning The True Purpose Behind Your Hard Work

I meet this very poised gentleman who was a former executive at DuPont, the big chemical corporation. He says very nicely, “Why are you working so hard?” I was like, “Is that a trick question? To have more sales?” He’s like, “Why are you wanting more sales?” I’m like, “This guy can’t be serious. What do you mean? Of course you want more sales.” He goes, “I get that, but why do you want more sales?” I’m like, “What is this?” I was literally confused. This man is so calm and smiling at me then he says, “How do you intend to contribute to the greater whole?” I’m thinking, “What is he talking about? Greater whole of what?” I’m like, “I got to know what this guy knows.”

Why Seeking First To Understand Changes Everything

He just helped me realize for the first time that my assumption that I basically knew what I needed to know was completely off base. He gave me the 7 Habits book. In it, I learned about seeking to understand, then I tried that with my wife when we were debating going away for the weekend. I’m like, “I wonder what she’s thinking.” I’m leaning over the chopping block in our kitchen. I’m like, “What is she thinking? Don’t try to convince her.”

All of a sudden, I’m like, “She’s worried about the children. She’s thinking, “How are they going to eat?” I’m like, “We’ll figure it out but she’s worried.” At the time, we had a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and an infant. I want to go camping for the weekend. I’m thinking no problem just like when we were dating. That was a huge epiphany. Between 28 and 30, between experiences like that at home and the questions this man was asking me, my whole world got turned upside down, basically. I started realizing that instead of knowing a lot, I knew almost nothing.

I wouldn’t call myself a 7 Habits disciple. The book kicks around this house somewhere, but certainly that point about seeking first to understand, then to be understood is very simple, which is the whole of that book. It’s also very powerful because we spend so much time thinking we know the answer or wanting to get our point across that we stop listening. We stop observing. That’s what that point is about. You are getting it in both those ways.

He was pushing you to observe more deeply about why you were doing work. Not just for the goals, but what was the real reason. Your conversation with your wife and stepping back and making sure that you understood where she was coming from, which you clearly needed to step back and give thought to.

It’s like a 2X4. What was shocking wasn’t so much what she cared about. That was obvious once I saw it. It was an instant recognition that I never realized before. Ostensibly, I’m a successful guy growing and doing all these things. I had no idea. My next thought was, “What do the employees think? I wonder what they care about.” I was literally a different person at work on Monday morning.

How so?

Building Investment By Giving Up Easy Answers

I went from being decisions while you wait to thinking the measure of my success was how hard I could work to help people by giving them the answers they’re looking for, because I was in a line leadership role at the time. I just realized I don’t even know why they’re asking. The line outside my door was there just like it was most days. Not all day long, but during the day, 2 or 3 people would be coming by. Instead of saying, “Go do this.” I was like, “Why do you ask?” They’re like, “It’s because of so-and-so.” I’m like, “Why is that?” I was genuinely curious, like, “What is bringing you here?”

When they started sharing, it was like, “I’ve been making decisions with practically no information needed to make the decision and the notion that they should have any say in the decision that they were going to implement was a couple of years in the future.” With the help of my mentor, I had that epiphany. He says, “How do you plan to build spirit and willfulness among the stakeholders? He’s using an ancient esoteric technique.

Basically, stretching my consciousness by giving me challenges and questions that aren’t in my current paradigm to help me search for understanding. What I came to realize was, “If you’re not a party to the decision, why would you be deeply invested in the decision?” We then moved into a phase where we became intensely collaborative in the business and it worked out quite well.

I have to imagine that first Monday morning, when you were starting to ask these deeper questions of your staff. They probably didn’t open up just right away. They’re probably like, “What the hell’s going on here?”

Using Intentional Pauses To Foster Creative Solutions

There were times. I said to my mentor, “I’ll ask a question to the group.” There’s silence or they give an answer then they look at me like, “What do you think?” I’m like, “It’s like they want me to dive in and answer for them.” He said, “Yes.” He taught me the trick of just looking at my watch to remind me to not answer, and I wouldn’t answer. It took a while. After a while, they came to realize I’m not just going to come in and give the answer that then they can go execute.

Which keeps all the responsibility and risk on me and no real commitment on them but we’re going to do this together. What emerged were insights about the decisions we were making that none of us had anticipated. Creative solutions that emerge from the intensity of the understanding that was forged that none of us had anticipated but were clearly superior answers than what any of us would have predicted the right answer was going to be. To the point where we knew going into any of these collaborations that there’s a better answer than any of us realize. It’s here to be found and we can do it together. That was ultimately what we developed over a five-year period.

That’s pretty powerful learning for a group to have that realization that they can embrace the uncertainty of a situation and know that they’re going to figure it out. A lot of groups never get to that point.

We never would have if it wasn’t for Jim Patton who was a senior executive at DuPont. He had a heart attack that moved him off the fast track, and he became a certified Covey 7 Habits facilitator at DuPont, among one of the first corporations to ever invest in actual on-staff people to help have more effective meetings. This is back in the ’70s where they started this, but they had a cyclical downturn. They cut all the soft skill people. He was then basically my age at the time. I thought he was ancient. He was 64. He became available as a consultant.

These are highlights of the journey I was on. I’m hitting the good highlights. There were more than a few hard moments where you’re brought face to face with the limits of whatever wisdom you’ve been able to scrabble together at that point. The words experience is the greatest teacher are proven true. When there’s a new product introduction that you believe in and it fails miserably, you have to withdraw it from the market.

When there’s a cyclical downturn like the Y2K collapse and what was 35% year over year sales growth goes to eight. Which was fortunate, but still now you’re looking at laying off 7% of the workforce. Hard stuff. A lot of these difficult lessons from the hard things, including my own mistakes, are in the book, A Work Life Worth Living, because they all ultimately served a deeper understanding of what matters about my work life. It’s not all just the rainbows and unicorns.

It would be helpful to hear you talk more about some of the bad moments that you’ve just referenced, particularly just thinking about how pre-28-year-old Jeff might have handled some of those situations and how post-enlightened Jeff handled those situations.

I wouldn’t say enlightened. I’d say on a path of growth, Jeff, as opposed to unconscious, clueless Jeff. The biggest difference between Jeff graduate, succeeding was only to find out because my mentor asked me that the reason I was working so hard was to prove something to my father. That was an epiphany when I realized, “That’s what I’m doing?” I was like, “That can’t be the basis of a career.” I had to work harder to figure out, “What then is a basis for a career?”

The big difference in what’s in the book is having someone you can talk to who’s not your best friend, a guy you know from the bar, somebody you played rugby with, or your uncle. Everybody has somebody at arm’s length who has a certain level of maturity and wisdom that you just know is there. It’s such a compliment to anyone to ask them, “Could I talk to you about some things that are not going the way I want in my work life?”

You’d be amazed how much clarity you can get when faced with a fork in the road, some surprise of whatever kind to just say, “I’m going to step aside for a second.” Unless the building is on fire, there’s very few decisions that need to be made tomorrow and to talk to somebody who has no dog in the hunt. The most powerful thing I ever realized. It’s not advice, but something to consider if you face that unexpected fork in the road.

Your book emphasizes this importance of reflection. Why do you think so many people avoid it?

That’s a great question. Honestly, first of all, I was never asked to reflect on the quality of my experience when I was in school. From 4 years old to 22, it was just, what’s next? Everything was laid out for me. I had some choice of courses and things, but it’s like, you’re going to take the next step. You’re going through the motions, pause and say, “How was this experience for you?” That begs the question of, “Would you like a different experience?” I can’t give you a different experience because you got to do what you’re supposed to do next. There’s no reflection in all that.

Making Reflection Your Team’s Secret Competitive Advantage

Secondly, when you get to a certain point, you invested a lot of time and energy and where you are and what you’ve done, then somebody says, “Let’s reflect on how this went.” That brings you face to face with the possibility of getting in touch with how much regret you might feel or shame or angst or fear or whatever about how it went or blame or anger. It’s like, “Don’t open that box. Let’s just move on.” That’s what it was like when Jim first introduced the idea of like, “At the end of a meeting, let’s take a few minutes to reflect on the quality of the meeting.” We’re like, “What?”

It became so powerful because we iteratively kept tweaking our process the way we met based upon the feedback people had. It started out like, “I’ll give you a reflection. This sucked.” That’s what it was like at the beginning and he’d say, “I appreciate the honesty that was shared in the room.” We’ll be like, “What are you talking about? Was there something good about this meeting?” Slowly but surely we realized that appreciation fed appreciation and when people felt appreciated, you could then have a better meeting and we were getting better outcomes because it was less of a battle.

It was more of a dance and you realize, “We’re different. I’m in sales and you’re a hardcore research guy but I can talk your language. I can hear you. Can you hear me?” The next thing, it’s like, “He does think that I have some merit even though I’m just a salesman.” Now we can talk about, “I can’t just bring the product specs in and put them in front of a guy and put a price on it and say ‘Buy it or not.’ It’s just not going to work. Do you want to learn more about salesmanship?” This is just so powerful. When you get in a habit of reflection, you can learn from your past experience and apply it to your future experience. When you do it together, it builds on itself and it becomes a positive flywheel.

For a lot of people, they’re intimidated by it for all the reasons that you mentioned a minute ago, like shame, embarrassment, or whatever. It’s a liberating thing to get to the point where you’re willing to accept all of your imperfections and your bad reactions to things and everything else and move on anyway.

I’m not focused on helping leaders because most leaders have some budget for their self-development and there’s coaches. That a custom support system is powerful. I had it and it’s great. That already exists for most people if they want it. What I’m focused on is the people who don’t have that development budget and particularly when it comes to these deeper issues of feelings and purpose. My experience is, even when the leader is a complete zealot for this stuff, a deep believer and everybody knows. It doesn’t mean they trust them because they work for you. Their job security is at stake.

Their pay is at stake and you’ve got a big economic interest in how they contribute. It’s like, “Do you care about what matters to me?” Understandable skepticism in our corporate world. I don’t begrudge folks who didn’t buy into my most gentle invitations to consider what mattered to them. I never asked them to tell me, ever. That would just be way too unsafe.

Point simply being that it’s a delicate road that we tread when we get into deeper personal issues. When we reflect, we open ourselves up to the possibility of realizing that, hey, maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we’re on the wrong path. If you’re on the wrong path and going up the wrong mountain or down the wrong ravine, the sooner it, the better. Emotionally, there’s still a sense of, “Can I afford to acknowledge that I shouldn’t have become a doctor?” We carry a lot.

People are carrying a lot. What I’m trying to do with the book and with the platform, MeaningSphere.com, is create a safe place for people to explore these issues, provide some simple guidance about how to get the support you need to sort through this before you go jump in jobs or worse, jumping off a bridge. People do that too and it’s terrible in the law and in medicine. The amount of mental health issues is in some ways wrapped up in our lack of self-awareness about the work we do.

Yet for most people, there’s very little in the way of resources to help with that aspect of their mental and emotional well-being. I’m attempting to provide people easy access to affordable and carefully curated resources to help because I’m like the luckiest guy in the world. This is my life’s work to see if I can’t pay it forward because I was given so freely these great gifts. None of this is my idea. There is nothing I’m doing that was my idea. My idea was MeaningSphere, to create a platform where people can do this together. But that’s not even a new idea.

Philosophically, certainly what you’re talking about is well aligned with why I started PathWise, the business that I run, because I too have benefited tremendously from the professional development that I’ve gotten over the years. I wanted to be able to give back and democratize some of that for people in a way that was accessible and affordable. It’s rewarding and challenging all at the same time.

I’m curious to get your experience because one of the challenges is that getting people to come to this content and these kinds of resources, a lot of people are happier complaining than they are doing something about what’s bringing them down. That’s a sad statement, but it’s a truism that I’ve discovered the hard way.

For most people, the systems that they exist within, educational and employment, all they’ve got agency to do is complain when they’re not there. Because it’s too risky to complain when you’re there. Where are they? Ever seen an example where something could change or that they could change their situation? I don’t blame people for complaining. At least they’re vending and they’re getting some of it off their chest.

I never thought about any of this stuff. I discovered I had no idea about right. If it wasn’t for both some shocking disappointments and some unplanned and unsought experiences, I wouldn’t know what I know now. No judgment about people who might be stuck or might be feeling like they’re a victim of their career. It’s understandable. What’s evident is, if you’re waiting for the world to change before you can feel better, you’ve got to be waiting a long time.

Come back to your own company and your experience and the journey that you went on with your employee base. The point you made earlier about the fact that a lot of people are hesitant to speak their minds, to reveal their true selves, to do all the things that you’ve mentioned that come with this territory. Their economic livelihood depends on keeping that job and making sure that boss or that CEO or whoever thinks well enough of them to keep them within that organization.

Even if you’re not managing by fear, people carry that fear because you are in a position of power. How did you change the dynamic? What were some of the signals that you got from employees that they were having their own epiphanies, their own wake-up moments about how different life could be?

In addition to forcing myself to not answer my own question, and when you trust people, you are committed to inviting people to share their true perspective, strap on. It is shocking to find out how much people are telling you what they think you want to hear. When they tell you what they think, you’re like, “Are you working in the same company I am? It is amazing.” Yet it is indicative of how little support people get to be able to build a frame of reference around why they’re there.

Connecting Individual Roles To The Broader Human Purpose

Typically, they’re hired for skills to do a job. That some boss tells them, “The goal is this. You’re responsible for that.” We’re in this business. That’s the connection they get to make. What do you think about how your contribution helps move the company forward? What’s that chain of connection between the work you do and the cup of coffee that we serve the customer at Starbucks? How does the tax process affect that experience? Who has that conversation?

Not too many people. When I started having that conversation, I realized that as people were joining the company. I’m like, “How do we do this?” Once we started realizing that transaction tax software is implicit in the entire economy and it doesn’t work without it. It’s way important to use the highly technical term “way.” We realize that talking to people doesn’t work. I would meet with people in groups of 8 or 10 after they’ve been with the company from 2 to 3 weeks to 2 or 3 months in groups and ask them, why do you think the company exists? You’d be amazed.

Not just young people coming in, but people in their mid-30s and 40s to increase shareholder value to meet the customer’s needs. Basically, they give me answers they think I want and be like, “Where’d you buy those boots?” They’d answer and I’d be like, “Why’d you buy them?’ They’ll be like, “I like the way they look or I need them to ride a horse,” or whatever it is. I’d be like, “Did you buy them to help the company increase shareholder value?” We’d start having a conversation about the chicken and the egg in terms of, does the company exist for the shareholder or does it exist for the customer?

If it exists for the customer, then what are we doing? They’d be like, “What are we doing?” I’m like, “Why’d you take the job?” They’d be like, “It had the best benefits. It was a convenient location. It was the best job I could get.” If I would listen, which I would try to do, people would open up. Usually, of the group of 8 or 10, there’d be like 2 or 3 who were like, “This is cool,” and they would get into it. That would make it safe for others. There’s always two who just sat there terrified, like, “I hope this ends quickly.”

That’s what I did for twenty years. As we grew from 70 people when I became president to about 1,000 when I was no longer CEO. I went on the board and was chairman for five years. The point is, it took constant dialogue. We held all employee sessions for full days, where we had professional artists help draw in murals what the employees were saying about why they felt that the work mattered and where the connections were, to try to give them an opportunity.

What I said to everybody was this, “I feel like I’m accountable to all stakeholders to lead the company toward the purpose that we share for it. It’s not my purpose. It’s our purpose. Based on your input and perspective, this is what it feels like, what it might seem like. Is that why we’re here? What do you think?” We spend the day talking about it and then feedback. We did continue engagement for new people

About every five years, we do an engagement program. Engagement meant listening to them, not talking to them. The proudest statistic that I have of my tenure was 4.5%. We had 4.5% total turnover every year for twenty years in technology. We didn’t overpay. We paid P60, but that was strategic. It wasn’t like we were just bribing people.

Did you see, as you were doing those sessions with 8 to 10 new employees at a time, I have to imagine you saw an evolution in how those conversations went. How did you look back and say, “This is different from where we were a year ago or two years ago?” What were those moments like for you? What were they like for your employees?

You would think that’s what I would have seen. Exactly the opposite. That’s why I had the a-ha that what’s needed is MeaningSphere. This is what I need to do with the rest of my life. For twenty years, they came in exactly the same. It didn’t change at all. I’ve been doing this for 10 or 15 years before Simon Sinek publishes Start with Why. That was another. Covey was big. No change. It wasn’t like the movement that we’re aware of that you and I are part of.

It was reaching people and they were coming in and saying, “I’m here because I understand this company stands for something more than just the bottom line.” The bottom line is here to help serve an even higher bottom line, which is, are we enabling an economy that meets the needs of the society or does this culture give me the space to be there for my coworker when they’ve had some life event? Can we be human here together? Those are the things that you’d hope that over 5 or 10 years, you’d build a reputation that people would be able to say those things, at most. You’d hear, “I heard it had a good culture.” That’s about it.

I’m sitting there thinking, with what I know, the amount of research I would do into what a company’s culture is like before switching jobs would be just way more than the product.” You think about what you’re signing up for when you change jobs or in any job. With that environment, it shapes you. It will turn you into a different person. We make those choices in such a cavalier way. It’s because we’re not aware of just what conditioning influences the workplace.

I had spouses come to me in tears on multiple occasions. I don’t know what you’re doing, but he’s a different person and I’m so grateful. I’m like, “It’s not me. It’s not what I’m doing. We’re doing this together.” People would go home and they’d be a little more interested in listening to their spouse. We did communications that were intended to be. Be more user friendly for the significant other about our benefits program and we started to be more conscious of relationships. I feel so very fortunate.

It’s fascinating to me that the cultural things you were doing didn’t manifest themselves in your recruitment process. People came in as uneducated in year twenty as they did in year one.

When you have people who care about the work and want to succeed and have technical knowledge, corporate tax software is a very intensely technical world. This is hard to balance. Your first thought is, “This individual better have the technical ability and skill to meet the demands of the job.” The culture is nice and everything. I love the culture too, but I’m not going to hire somebody because they love the culture.

They got to know how to program. In the hiring process, I had to walk my own talk and not do too much. Frankly, the only times I took over, we never went well. The people who had the skills were way better, even though I had “the power.” I never intervened on this, but I felt like we could have done a much more proactive job of recruiting people with skills who also wanted the culture that we were offering. I don’t know that we were ever very successful with that, honestly.

Fair enough.

Since we had such great retention, even though we were growing, we weren’t hiring as much as other companies because we were losing people.

Now, we’re in this era of AI, which is automating more and more of what we do by the day. How do you think that affects what meaningful work looks like in this new era?

The foundational primary research done in the field over twenty years, peer-reviewed, journal-published, primary research conducted by Dr. Marjolein Lips-Wiersma at the Auckland University of Technology with her partner, Sarah Wright, demonstrated that people care about mostly relationship-related issues with other people.

There’s four quadrants that the research clearly identifies, unity with others, integrity with self, service to others are 75%. This is cross-cultural. The only one that is more skill related is mastery. Mastery is very meaningful. As you develop mastery, the people’s things will become more important. With AI, it will help accelerate mastery if you’re careful and you don’t take it at its word and you do the underlying research but it will have an accelerating effect.

Will it help individuals feel like they’re working with others and in an environment where they can have integrity with themselves? That is all about relationships and the expectations that are present in the environment and your effectiveness in clarifying and negotiating those expectations. Will you feel a sense of unity with others? Do you feel unity with the machine? Maybe. Maybe some people are feeling, at least so far, some level of unity with the machine.

The jury’s out in my mind with regard to how healthy that is. We’ve got some decades of research to find out how healthy that trend might be. Count me as a skeptic. When a robot can shake my hand and I feel a pulse, I feel body warmth, I know it’s a person and I can feel the intensity of that handshake. That is different. I don’t even want to shake a hand with the robot.

Protecting Human Judgment In An Automated World

These human dimensions that build trust, that build a sense that I matter. I matter in a context of how others see me. I feel what makes being human so wonderful and also difficult and challenging. Will AI speed up all the intellectual things in dramatic ways? Absolutely. When you think an AI can decide for you what you care about, that’s where we’ve lost our way. We’re going to recognize that as a society, as a humanity and go, “This power is here to serve us and help us serve why we’re here.”

We’re not here to become subjugated to the power of this intellectual behemoth because life is richer than that. I point out in each of the action step sections of each chapter, a little bit of a hint about, is this a place where AI can be helpful? Two thirds of them, AI can be helpful but I also point out where you’ve got to own the responsibility of taking what AI is telling you and divining for yourself what matters to you. It’s the question confronting us.

It’s a key question. For some people, they will relish the ability to spend more time on deep work, deep conversation and deep interaction. Other people are going to find it terrifying and exhausting. We’re going to have to go through what that change process looks like for a lot of people, potentially. We’re obviously observing that more of the transactional aspects of work can be accomplished in an automated fashion. That’s going to leave the harder stuff and we’re going to have to rise to the challenge. The companies that do the best economically will rise to that challenge, but I hope they don’t lose their souls anymore. Most companies have already lost their souls so far.

We’re going to find out. It’s not going away. I’m an optimist, ultimately. No pain, no gain. Whether that’s working out, learning a new skill or a trade, building a company, there are going to be disappointments. There’s going to be surprises. There’s going to be difficulties, adversity. Those are all learning opportunities. AI is yet the biggest one. We’re inherently adaptable and we care. We care at a heart and soul level. Not at a, “I’m going to say words of caring because the book I just read in an instant tells me that the right word to sound caring is so-and-so,” which is basically what an LLM does.

You’ve got this book. You’ve got MeaningSphere. For somebody who reads your book, A Work Life Worth Living, what do you want their own Monday morning experience to be like after they’ve read the book?

That’s a great question. In a perfect world, the people who read my book would go to work on Monday morning in wonder, just in wonder, “What else might I discover about myself and the world of work and this environment that might not have dawned on me before having read that book? Open your heart up to insight that you might not have had before. Why is the environment the way that it is? What are the unspoken? When you start perceiving those, you start feeling them in yourself. A whole world of new possibilities to take ownership of creating the work life of your dreams becomes possible. That’s what happened to me. I hope that’s what happens for you.

I would just add on to that. Step into the breach despite whatever misgivings or fears you may have. Because it is a bit of a courageous leap to start to look at the world in a different way, the way that you’re describing. People have got to get themselves across that chasm and be willing to move on in spite of everything that comes with it, messy or otherwise.

These old words of wisdom, “No pain, no gain,” things like that. There’s a reason we say them because they’ve been borne out as true and nothing ventured, nothing gained is one of them. It sounds trite, but if you don’t swing the bat, you cannot hit the ball.

It’s very true. Thank you. A philosophical conversation. I appreciate your time and what you’re doing now with your own movement and I wish you the best of luck with it.

You, too. It’s a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Take care, Jeff.

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To wrap up the conversation here with Jeff, I want to leave you with a few ideas that I hope stay with you. First is that success and fulfillment aren’t the same thing. We know this intuitively, but we often forget it day to day. The promotions, titles and financial rewards are important but they’re milestones. They’re not necessarily destinations. A truly rewarding career comes from aligning your work with your values, your strengths, and the impact that you want to have on others.

Second is that meaning is something that you create. It’s not something that you find. Waiting for the perfect job or the perfect organization is probably going to be a recipe for disappointment. The people who experience the most fulfilling careers are intentional about how they show up, the relationships they build, and the purpose they bring to the work they’re already doing.

Third, and you heard this in spades from Jeff, leadership is ultimately about helping other people thrive. The best leaders create environments where people can grow, contribute and find meaning in what they do. Link it to a broader purpose. That’s good not only for employees, but for organizations as well. Vertex is certainly a beneficiary of everything that Jeff did to make that real in his company. Finally, as AI changes work, our humanity is only going to become even more valuable.

Technology will reshape jobs. It will take away certain tasks that we perform. The uniquely human things like curiosity, empathy, judgment and purpose and the ability to inspire others are going to become increasingly important. Building a work life worth living isn’t just about keeping pace with change. It’s also about becoming the person that technology is not going to replace.

If you found this conversation valuable, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share this episode with somebody who’s looking to become a better leader or build a stronger career. You can also sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks for tuning in.

Important Links

• Jeff Westphal
• Jeff Westphal on LinkedIn
• Jeff Westphal on Facebook
• Jeff Westphal on Instagram
• MeaningSphere
• Vertex
• A Work Life Worth Living
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• DuPont
• Start with Why
• PathWisdom Newsletter
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on X
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram

About Jeff Westphal

In the mid-1990s, Jeff Westphal took over his father’s upstart sales tax software business and over the next two decades built it into a dominant industry leader. Under Jeff’s leadership, Vertex became an essential cog in the commerce machine, relied upon by more than ten thousand of the largest companies in the world. Behind this success story is another, more complex story of how a leader found, then lost and found again, meaning in his life and work, and how, by helping his employees create meaning in work as seemingly meaningless as sales tax software, he helped his company thrive. Today, Jeff is a seasoned corporate executive, entrepreneur, philanthropist, corporate culture enthusiast, and conservationist. In addition to leading Vertex for two decades, he has founded two new ventures, MeaningSphere® and Mosaic™, as he continues to give back and encourage others to create meaning in their learning and working lives.

Most professionals assume great work speaks for itself, but solid Product Positioning proves that value never communicates automatically. When competitors offer flashy feature checklists or when crowded markets blur real differentiation, buyers and hiring managers get confused quickly. Host J.R. Lowry sits down with April Dunford, leading positioning expert and bestselling author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch, to unpack why building something valuable is only half the battle. They walk through actionable frameworks to move past surface features, clarify unique value themes, and align internal teams before ever pitching external buyers. Together, they break down how individuals can treat their career journeys like high-stakes B2B products by narrowing focus, embracing natural strengths, and knowing exactly when to walk away from poor-fit opportunities. Finally, they tackle the rise of artificial intelligence, outlining why automated tools raise the bar for genuine business strategy rather than replacing it.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/april-dunford/.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Why You? How To Stand Out In A Crowded Market, With April Dunford

One of the biggest frustrations that exists in business is watching what we would perceive as an objectively good product struggle against a competitor that’s inferior. We’ve all seen it happen in a company we’ve worked for, or a product we’ve bought, or even in our own work. We assume, perhaps naively, that if something is genuinely better, people are going to recognize it, but that’s often not how markets or even careers work. My guest, April Dunford, argues that success is much more than about building something valuable. It’s also about helping people understand why it’s valuable and why it’s different.

That’s the discipline of positioning. Few people have really shaped this field more than April. She’s helped hundreds of technology companies sharpen their positioning, accelerate their growth, and tell a story that customers actually understand. She’s the author of Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It and Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win, two books that have become essential reading for founders, marketers, and sales leaders around the world.

In this conversation, we’re also going to go beyond products and companies and talk a little bit about what positioning can teach us about our own careers, why talented people are sometimes overlooked despite doing great work, and how AI is changing the way organizations and people need to differentiate themselves. Whether you’re leading a business or building a product or simply trying to stand out in an increasingly crowded world, I think you’re going to find plenty here to think about. Here’s my conversation with April.

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April, thanks for joining me.

It’s great to be here.

I’m glad to have you on the show as well. Let’s start in an area that I know you have focused a lot on, and that is product positioning. A lot of people think of that as a marketing exercise. Positioning is one of the classic four Ps of marketing, after all, but you would argue that it is much more fundamental than that. Tell us why so many of us have it wrong.

Here’s the thing. Positioning impacts marketing a lot, but it doesn’t impact just marketing. It impacts products. It certainly impacts sales. What I have found in my experience is that if we treat positioning like a little exercise that belongs in the marketing department and only the marketing department works on it, then what I’ve found is that whatever positioning we come up with, sales doesn’t like it, product doesn’t like it, the CEO founder doesn’t like it, and then there’s always a big fight. Because a shift in positioning really impacts all these other groups, it would make sense to me that we would need a cross-functional team to work on it.

Part of the reason why we want a cross-functional team to work on it is that sales knows a lot about what’s happening with customers, particularly early stages of deals where our positioning matters a lot. Product management knows something else. The founder knows something else. It’s actually good to pull in the information that the other parts of the organization know to actually develop your positioning. Let’s say, for example, we were going to shift the positioning. I work at a company, and it’s a business intelligence tool.

We were going to shift the positioning and say, “No, we’re not a business intelligence tool. We’re a data warehouse.” Imagine me in the marketing department trying to make that decision. I just show up and say to the CEO, “By the way, we’re not a business intelligence tool anymore. We’re a data warehouse.” Do you not think the CEO is going to have an opinion about that? Do you not think the sales team is going to have an opinion about that or the product or anybody else? They would. We cannot treat this as just a little marketing thing.

Although even though it may be marketing’s job to be the steward of positioning once we have it locked down, it may be marketing that if we feel that the positioning is getting weak or off track or something, it may be marketing that puts their hand up and says, “I think we got to pause game here for a second and fix this.” The actual work of doing the positioning and then even the work of making it real out of the market is not just a marketing thing.

You’ve worked with a ton of companies over the years on go-to-market topics. What are they getting wrong when it comes to talking about why their product is different?

There’s a bunch of things. I work specifically with technology companies and, even more specifically, all the companies I work with are B2B. The product is complicated enough that there is a salesperson involved somewhere in the sales process. There might be some product-led growth or zero-touch part of the sales process, but there’s a sales team that gets involved somewhere to actually close the deal. If you look at those kinds of companies, there’s a handful of things that are really common.

Escaping The Speeds And Feeds Trap

One is we’ve got a fairly technical product that we’re selling to sometimes a fairly technical audience or fairly sophisticated audience that understands the product a little bit and what it can do. There’s a tendency for those companies to sell on what my old boss would call speeds and feeds, which is features. You come in and say, “We have this feature, that feature, this feature, that feature.” We’re just going to tell you what all the features are, and you, as the buyer, are going to look at that set of features, understand what the features are, understand why those features are important or not important to your business, and make a purchase decision based on that.

Good positioning doesn’t operate at that level. Good positioning is really trying to answer the question, why should you pick our solution over anybody else’s? To answer that question succinctly, we really need to get at what value these features can deliver for your business. How is this product going to help you make money? How is this product going to help you save money? How is this product going to reduce risk in the business? The features are just how we get that done.

In order to sell this stuff well, we really have to get up to that value level. A lot of tech companies do not do a good job of getting it all the way up to that value level. Occasionally you will see companies that do, but then the problem is, they’ve just got too many points of value. They’ve got like eight points of value or ten points of value. They’ll say, “Look, here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to save you time, we’re going to save you money, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that. Everything with the kitchen sink.”

The customer is left to figure out, “Hang on, there’s a competitor, and they do some of that.” There’s another competitor that does this. There are ten things. I’m not sure I can remember all ten. They’re not getting tight enough on the bigger, higher picture of why pick us versus the other guys. Getting that down to 1, 2, maybe 3 value themes that a customer can really understand, “Your approach looks like this, and the value is this,” versus a competitor’s approach, which looks like this and the value is something different.

What’s fascinating to me is this idea of selling the value or selling the solution. It’s not a new idea. It certainly predates this modern rise of the technology company. Yet so many companies still want to go out and sell features.

What you get sometimes is, and I get it. The sales team will come and say to me, “Value, that’s good, April.” You do not understand. These customers are educated. They come, and they have a checklist of features. We have to show them that we meet this checklist of features. That’s a reasonable thing to say, but then I ask the question, where did the checklist of features come from? They did their research, and somehow, in this research, they decided these are the features that they need to have.

Now, if you look at what makes your product different and special, it’s the features and capabilities that the other guys do not have. Is your key secret sauce on the checklist? Probably not, because they haven’t talked to you yet. If it’s there, great, then you can tell them something. If it isn’t, it’s your job to educate them on what the checklist of features should be and in order to do that, what I’m going to have to do is I’m going to have to tell you a story. I’m going to have to paint a picture where I say, “Look, traditionally every other solution in the market looks like this.”

When we founded our company, we looked at that, and we decided that wasn’t good enough. We took a different approach to the problem. That different approach means we have a different set of features. Why should you care? This different set of features can deliver this value that the other guys cannot, and so I’m going to have to take you on that journey if I’ve got a hope and a heck of a chance of landing this deal.

If I’m the leader in the market, no problem. Their checklist of features probably looks like mine, because I’m the biggest one in the market, where maybe we can get away with that to a certain extent. Until I got a hotshot little AI native startup thing nipping at my heels that comes in and does exactly what I told you right there. They come in, and they say, “Feature Schumacher.” That’s the old way of doing it. Let me talk to you about the new way of doing it.

Different values, therefore different sets of features. Throw that checklist out. If we’re doing a good job of selling this stuff, we get to be able to talk about the differentiated stuff that we do. We cannot just assume that a customer is going to understand that because our differentiated stuff, by definition, is only something we can do.

Certainly, you’ve got the influence of a procurement function, sometimes even a third-party consultant who’s running the process, who comes with RFPs with thousands of questions on them, literally thousands of questions you have to answer, which is the equivalent of the feature checklist. It’s easy to get distracted by all of that. I would argue a consultant community has created a cottage industry for themselves just in running RFPs.

It’s hard when you’ve got that level of, “If we do not have an answer to this question, we’re going to get knocked out of the process. You get so focused on the details. You get so stuck in the weeds that it’s really hard to come up to the bigger picture level and sell the value or the overall solution or the overall differentiation. I cannot understand it.

Especially if you’re not the incumbent. If you’re not the biggie in the industry, chances are if we’re going to RFP, the biggie in the industry, this is the first call they made. They probably built the RFP based on the conversation they had with the biggie in the industry. If you’re not the biggie in the industry, then you have to decide how we are going to change this conversation. Do we have an opportunity to change this conversation? If we do not, maybe we’re not going to respond to them. A lot of the rps that cross our desk because the fix is in, man, the RFP has been built with somebody else, and we’re just never going to run that thing.

Same deal with consultants, right? I’ve worked in businesses where the consultants are really influential and really drove a lot of the purchase behavior. That being the case, we had to go figure out how we were going to get a bunch of these consultants on our side before we went and started wasting our time trying to sell directly to customers because the customer is just going to ask a consultant, and no consultants know anything about us, and no consultants are sold on us. Now we got another constituency we got to focus our sales energy on.

That was certainly true in the world that I’ve been in over the last twenty years.

It’s not uncommon.

If you’re a leader in one of these companies, how can you tell whether you have a positioning problem or a product problem?

Back when I was in-house, I spent 25 years as a vice president of marketing. I was very worried about joining a company where the product was the problem because it’s really hard to change a product if you come in and you’re vice president of marketing and the product is no good. You do not want that job. If I were doing the interview, what I’d be looking for is there traction? Are you selling stuff? Is the churn fairly low? Are the customers fairly happy? Does the growth look okay? If you’ve got a thing in market and it’s selling and there’s growth and the churn’s not too bad, I would run on the assumption that the product’s good enough.

Good enough to do some deals. If we’re doing that and the marketing looks average or not very good, I can come in as the vice president of marketing, and I’ve got something to work with here. We can make it grow because the thing looks good enough. I would always run on that assumption. Now, the harder one is when the company comes to you and says, “Look, it’s not growing as fast as we’d like it to.” We got happy customers. The churn is low. We got some growth, but the growth isn’t as high as we’d like it to be. There could be lots of different problems.

That could be a positioning problem. That could be a lead generation problem. It could be an awareness problem. Nobody knows you exist in the market. I’d be looking at things like what happens when a lead gets to sales and sales does their magic and sales closes every deal, and it’s all good. That’s unlikely to be a positioning problem. You just need more leads coming into sales. That’s a lead generation problem. Now, if the lead comes to sales and maybe a lot of them drop off there, that might be a positioning problem.

Diagnosing Weak Positioning On The Front Lines

It might not. What I would do is, if I took the job when I’m brand new vice president of marketing, I would go down and listen to what happens on a first sales call. The inside sales reps have got a deal hooked, and the customer decides, “Yes, I’ll give you an hour with an AE, and we’re going to go have a conversation.” I’d listen to what happens in that conversation, and weak positioning sounds very specific in that conversation. Often what you’ll get is a customer comes in, and the rep is there, and they’re doing a pitch, and the customer is just confused.

You can see it right from the beginning of the pitch, where the customer is making this confused face. They’re like squinting their eyes. You can see there often is this thing, and I used to see it a lot in sales calls where the positioning was weak, where the salesperson would be telling this story and it sounds pretty good, but they get to like slide 3 or 4 and the customer’s like, “Wait. Just go back and start it again. I missed something. Nothing you’re saying is making any sense.” There’s some missing piece to the puzzle where the customer cannot quite figure out what bucket to put you in.

You’d hear a lot of that where the rep thinks it’s pretty obvious, but they’re going to go back to the end. That’s one. You’d hear this other one where, and this would come up a lot, where the customer would go, “We get it.” You’re exactly like, pick your poison, Salesforce. You’re not, and then the rep is like, “No. Let me go back to the beginning.” You’re getting compared to something that you shouldn’t be getting compared to. That’s generally a positioning problem. The third one, which is actually the worst one, is when the rep gets to the end of the pitch.

The customer is, “I get it. I get who you compete with. I get what I would replace in order to bring your stuff on. I get the value of this thing.” I do not get why anyone would pay for that. Can I just do this in Excel? Can I just have a couple of interns do this thing? They get it, what you’re trying to do. They just do not think it’s all that valuable. The value is not really hitting them in the gut. If I heard things like that, then I would generally take the head of sales out for lunch and say, “Look, this is what I’m hearing in these calls. Is that common? Is it typical? Am I just cherry-picking bad calls?”

If the vice president of sales says, “We actually hear that a lot in first calls.” Even then, I wouldn’t know for sure that the positioning is bad, but I got a pretty good inkling at that point. I’d be like, “Look, dude, we call this positioning. This is how it works. When was the last time we looked at the positioning?” The answer’s like, “Positioning, what’s that?” I do not even know what that is. I’d say, maybe we need to get the gang together, marketing, sales, product, and get the CEO in here. Maybe we spend a couple of days on it and see if we cannot tighten it up.

You get everybody in the room, and you work on it. What everybody wants is a metric. If this metric from this stage of the deal to that stage of the deal looks bad, it’s probably a positioning thing. The problem is weak positioning gets you out the whole way through the purchase funnel. It’s hard to nail that down, but you can hear it in these early customer conversations, customer confusion, putting you in the wrong market category, not understanding the value. This is what I’m usually listening for.

Certainly, it makes it important, if you’re a leader, to participate in some of those sales calls, because what’s hard to tell.

A lot of times, we have gone now. They’re all recorded. You can pull them up. You can listen to it. You do not necessarily have to show up live for the call. This is getting easier and easier to do.

It is getting easier, and you do not even have to get in the car and go to the meeting. You could just listen to the recording afterwards or get the AI summarization of how the meeting went.

You’ve got to be a little careful with the AI summary. The AI summary will sometimes summarize exactly the clues that you’re looking for, so you’ve got to be really careful about that. A lot of the companies that I’ve worked with that are looking for these clues in the call recordings are actually looking at the raw transcript because it’s these little comments where the customer comes in and says, “Wait a second, is that just like Salesforce?” Or “Wait a second, why wouldn’t I just hire an intern to do that?” That might get edited right out of the call notes if you have something summarizing that. You’ve got to be careful.

Fair enough. Those things are probably picked up by most AI tools as being inconsequential to the real outcomes of the meeting. Yet there was information in those moments. Let’s shift gears and talk a little bit about the idea of positioning beyond products and take it to the idea of how you position yourself in the job market, in the job you’re in, the company that you’re working for. A lot of people go through life feeling overlooked. They work hard, they feel like they’re delivering good results, but they do not seem to get the recognition or the opportunities that they deserve. How could they apply positioning principles to help themselves?

I’m going to caveat this by saying I do know nothing about this. To be honest, I wrote a book on positioning called Obviously Awesome. It’s very specifically the methodology I’m describing in there for a B2B tech company to figure out how to do their positioning. When I first took this book to publishers, I had a publisher suggest, “Why don’t you make this like positioning your life or positioning yourself? You’d like to get a job or a date or something.” I was like, “I do not want to be a self-help guru, buddy.”

Treating Your Career Like A B2B Product

No, not interested in that. I can tell you a bit about my own personal experience and how I think this works. Early in my career, I was trying to figure out how to position myself for work, and I think it helps to look at this the same way you would a product, which would be like if they did not hire me, who else would they hire? Who’s my competition? If you look at all the other people that are out there applying to the same job as you, or maybe interviewing for the same job as you, you have to be able to answer the question why should the hiring manager pick you versus anyone else, like what do you have that’s different and special?

A lot of times, I think people aren’t thinking about this when they’re applying to the job or even when they’re coming in to interview for the job. They’re trying to convince a hiring manager that they can do the job. Everybody who’s getting interviewed could probably do the job. How are you going to do the job better? Sometimes it’s not even better. How are you going to do that differently than someone else? Why should the hiring manager care about that? Sometimes it has nothing to do with doing the job.

Sometimes it’s like, “I work really well independently. I take feedback really well. Here’s how I’m going to prove that.” It could be the proof that you could do the job. I’ve actually done a job very similar to this 5, or 6 times. Early in my career, I had an engineering background, and I landed in marketing. At the beginning, that wasn’t all that weird. As time moved on, it got to be more and more of an advantage for me that I knew how to program. I knew what a SQL query was, so I could go in and say, “Look, I’m going to work better with the product management team than people that do not have that because we speak the same language. We come from the same background.”

The developers are not going to be annoyed to work with me and be credible and say, “I’m going to work with the technical side of the business better because I have that. If we were selling to a technical buyer, I could make a case that because I had this technical background.” This was in the early days of people moving from brand marketing to doing some measurement on stuff. I would say, “Look, I know my way around a spreadsheet. The numbers do not scare me.”

That was a thing. As my career went on, I learned different things, and there were different things that I was good at. I had worked at two or three database companies, so I knew a lot about databases. I could come in and make the case for that for some companies. I had done positioning work 2 or 3 times, which is actually a lot of times if you’re an in-house person. You do not do positioning every day. It’s not a thing that every job requires. I could come in and talk intelligently about positioning and how we might fix that positioning in a way that other people couldn’t.

What I found when I was a hiring manager is that the people coming in and interviewing with me often did not really understand what made them special. They’d come in and say, like, all my jobs are B2C, but I really want to do B2B. It’s like, I do not care. I do not care what you want. You’re up against a whole bunch of people that have all this B2B stuff already. You’ve got to answer the question for me, why should I hire you? The answer cannot be because you want to work here. Everybody wants to work here.

I get a lot of that, like people would come in, very almost self-centered that would come in and say, “This is what I want.” I’d be like, “That’s nice, but let me tell you what I want.” By the way, I’m the boss. Here’s what I want. What I want matters more in this specific situation. People need to think about what makes them stand out, what makes them special. Maybe they want to focus their energy on getting in front of people and applying to the types of jobs where they’re a better fit than other people who might be applying. I had this once.

At one point I had done lots of B2B stuff, and there was a period where B2B wasn’t cool anymore in tech. Everybody was doing apps, and B2C was cool, and B2B was no good. I thought, “Man, maybe I should make the switch to B2C.” I applied for some jobs, and everybody gave me an interview. I do not know why, but I’d show up to the interview, and I’d be tap dancing. Maybe like, “How does this experience apply if you’re going to be over here as a consumer?” I did not have very good answers for that. Needless to say, I did not get the job.

In the end, I just did not make the jump. I was like, “Look, B2B isn’t hot right now, but that’s my jam. I compete pretty well over on the B2B side. The pool is smaller, but I think I’m going to have to stay over there.” I did. It was smart for me to do that because two years later B2B was all hot again, and there I was right in the middle of it. I see a lot of people coming in, and they’re not really thinking about the person who’s doing the hiring, and they’re not really thinking about answering that question why me versus the other five people you’re interviewing.

There are a couple of things I want to pick up on in what you just said, April. One is this idea that they’re not putting themselves in the shoes of the hiring manager. I think tied to that is the idea that people forget that when they’re interviewing for a job, they’re selling themselves. That concept feels really foreign and probably even uncomfortable to a lot of people. It really does come down to that. There are multiple people interviewing for this job. Why should I hire you instead of all of the other people? It’s a product differentiation thing. What makes you better than the others? If you’re not thinking that way, you’re missing the essence of the conversation.

A lot of people, I think, just really struggle with that. The other thing is just this idea of repositioning yourself. You were a B2B person, thought about trying to get into a B2C world. That’s a repositioning in essence. Those are always hard conversations because you’ve got to convince that hiring manager, in the case of a job, that what you’ve learned in this other space is actually relevant in the space that they’re in. What are some of the lessons that you can think of from how companies reposition themselves in different markets that would be applicable to how somebody could do that more effectively if they’re trying to reinvent themselves from a career perspective?

Selling Internal Stakeholders First

I can give you some examples. One is, I found that when you’re going to reposition a company, and you see we used to be a database, but now we’re a business intelligence tool. The first thing you had to do was make sure everybody inside the company believed the new position before you took it outside. Everybody inside the company had to get their heads around this shift. I had to sell everyone inside the company before we could attempt to sell anybody outside the company. The analogy to that is, let’s go back to my case. I do not think I fully believed I was a B2C person. Yet it did not stop me from applying to the B2B jobs and going out and having these interviews.

The reason I wasn’t getting the job was that I wasn’t making a very good case for me to be a B2C person. If you want to make this shift, you’re going to have to believe it. The only way you’re going to be able to get your arms around it and believe it is if you’ve got facts to back you up. If you can convince yourself and look in the mirror and say, “I’d actually be great at this. This is why I’m great at this. This is how it applies. This is how I’m going to pitch it.” You’ve got to believe it first before you can go sell anybody else. This is true inside companies. It’s way harder to convince the people inside than it is to convince the people outside.

The other thing is that it cannot just be like, I’ve worked at companies where I’ve gone in, and they said, “Look, we made all our money selling into the mid-market, but we do not like selling to the mid-market anymore. What we want to do is sell to the big companies. Let’s just reposition billion-dollar companies because we’re sick of selling to these little guys.” We’d like to sell fewer deals, but at higher prices and whatever. This is what I call aspirational positioning, which is like we wish we could position up there, but often when we have that, we look at the product, and we’re like, “Does it actually work up there?”

It’s not just the product. It’s the pricing. It’s the go-to-market motion. Do we have services? Can we support these customers? The big guys want 24/7 multilingual support. They want a professional services team. They want somebody to come on site. We’re not going to be able to sell them off the website anymore. We might have to hire a sales team to go and do that. Everything changes. That’s not just a little shift in positioning. Again, if I use my case, I had this little aspirational idea. Maybe I should go to B2C because B2C is hot. The reality was, it was the wrong product. I was trying to sell this B2B thing. Everybody liked me.

Narrowing Scope To Multiply Leverage

I was good at interviews. They’d bring me back for a second, third interview, but they’d all be scratching their heads. They’d be like, “We do not really get it.” We do not know how anything you’ve done applies. I’d be like, “Trust me, I’ll figure it out.” When I gave up on it and I went back, I ended up taking a job at a B2B company, and just the whole tone and everything else of these interviews, I was like, “What was I thinking? I’m a B2B person. I need to stay over here where I’m good.” I knew that thing. This has also been a guiding thing in my consulting business too. B2C companies come to me all the time, and they’re like, “Can you help us with the positioning, April?”

I just say no. These are companies that are literally like, “Take my money. Here it is. We believe in you, April.” I say, “No, I do not know anything about B2C.” They’re like, “We’ll be the first. It’ll be fine. Just take our money. We’ll do it.” The reason I say no is because I do not know if I can do it, and so I do not know if it’s going to be worth it. It is better for me to just say no and stick to the companies where I know we’re going to smash it. That’s my little box outside of my little box. I do not know. Maybe it’s going to work out. Maybe not.

That’s the essence of positioning yourself.

That’s it. You say yes to what you say no to because it just ain’t a fit over there.

We would be remiss if we did not talk at least a little bit about how AI is affecting the types of things that you’re doing. Do you think that AI is changing the way that positioning is occurring or needs to occur in the B2B tech world? Does it simply make execution of that positioning faster?

It’s interesting. There’s a whole bunch of levels to it. The first and most obvious level is that competition is coming from all sorts of corners that we did not expect it to come from in a lot of market areas. There have been companies that have been coasting along. Things have been good. They have competition, but it’s competition that looks just like them. Now all of a sudden they got an AI native company in there that’s taking a completely different approach to the problem. Because they’re taking a completely different approach to the problem, they can deliver value in a different way. In some market spaces, that has really thrown the cards up in the air.

Companies are having to react to that in terms of a shift in their positioning to account for this new type of competitor that can do these things in a different way and that. That’s one thing. Almost everybody in every market is wrestling with this right now. It’s the reason why I’m busy right now. The competitive landscape looks totally different than it did 2 or 3 years ago. The second thing is that not only does the competitive landscape look different, but it’s also harder to get your arms around it. It’s harder to know what’s real competition versus potential competition, but not quite competition yet. Who knows, maybe never competition, but we do not know quite yet.

A lot of companies are in a space where people talk about vibe coding and vibe coding a product. A lot of companies are in a space where theoretically a little dedicated team could maybe vibe code a thing that looks like this. A customer could do it, potentially. I’m working with a handful of companies where, if you ask them, “Who’s the competition, who should you be positioning against?” Folks on the product team will say vibe coding. We’re in big trouble with this vibe coding thing. Now, sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it isn’t, so sometimes customers come, and they’re saying, we’re looking at vibe coding things, but what you got. Maybe we’ll buy you, maybe not.

Maybe we’ll go inside. In which case, they are competing directly with a build-it-your-own vibe coding tool solution. They’re going to have to account for that in their positioning. What is the stuff they’ve got that the vibe coders just ain’t going to get right? Sometimes that isn’t the case. Zero customers are actually doing that right now. Now you’ve got to decide. If you believe that is coming down the track, if you believe we haven’t seen it yet, but it’s coming next year or the year after, then you’ve got a product roadmap problem.

What am I going to put in my product roadmap so that when that happens, we’re ready? At the same time, I do not have to position myself against the ghost. I only have to position against things that my prospects consider competitive. If my prospect’s not looking at vibe coding and I show up and say, “Let me tell you why we’re better than vibe coding, that is dumb.” What you’ve done is you’ve now taught your prospect that they should be looking at a thing that they haven’t looked at. You do not want to be doing that.

You have to be careful that your positioning is meeting your customers where they’re at right now. Now, that doesn’t mean you ignore what you believe to be true or what you think is going to happen in the future. You cannot ignore that. This is a product roadmap problem. Are we getting ready behind the scenes? It doesn’t necessarily show up on your external stuff. It doesn’t necessarily factor into your positioning yet. It’s very hard for customers to determine the line on that. These same companies are probably talking to their investors about the vibe coding thing and the AI stuff they’re doing.

They’re probably going crazy when they’re talking to investors about that. We need to tell that story with customers, yes or no. Right now it has never been so important because there’s so much upheaval and uncertainty in the market. It has never been more important. To really have your finger on the pulse of where your buyers are at, what they’re looking at, what they’re taking seriously, and what they aren’t taking seriously.

Honestly, the difference between what you’re reading on Hacker News and LinkedIn and Reddit or wherever you hang out, where the techie people hang out, what you’re selling to manufacturers, like the difference between those two things has never been starker. You got to be careful not to get so hyped up and so caught up in, like, “Everything’s happening. It’s all happening next week.” If your customers are not there yet, now in some cases, maybe your customers are, but you really got to know where your customers are, and you really got to have this positioning that meets the customer where they’re at, and that right now is really hard.

Customers are all over the map in terms of their level of understanding. I would think, though, that this makes differentiation a lot harder because there are a lot of things that you could vibe code or recreate using some AI tool that may have been secret sauce in the past that now feel like, “I could do that myself.”

Yes and no. I’ve heard this argument that people come and say, “Features do not matter anymore because anybody can add a feature because it could just vibe code it.” It’s like, that’s not how code works. I have an existing product with existing customers. It might speed up my delivery of a feature for me and my competition. We had competition before. We could code things, and they could code things. Now we could both code things faster. What’s the difference? There is no difference. We’re all just moving faster. We have differentiation in the market now. Now everybody has AI.

Confronting Artificial Intelligence Without The Hype

This is not a competitive differentiator. If you could vibe code it, they could vibe code it. They can vibe code a thing that’s different from yours and better than yours. You can vibe code a thing that’s different than theirs and better than theirs. It’s just a matter of speed. We’re all moving, and now we’re all moving faster. I’ve never worked with a company that’s in the market and successful that doesn’t have any differentiation. You have it. A lot of times, that differentiation is that the company has made a deliberate choice to approach the problem in a different way.

It’s not about a feature. The complete architecture of the thing is different. Everybody’s doing it like this, but we came in, and we’re doing it this way. There are very few markets I could point to where the number one, number two, and number three are taking the exact same approach to the problem. It’s just not how markets work. There’s an incumbent in a space, and you come in, and you’re getting any traction at all?

You’ve got serious differentiation. Otherwise, you wouldn’t sell anything. When people have this theoretical thought that anybody can build a feature, anybody, whatever, I’m like, “Tell me the two companies you’re thinking about in your brain.” Like, “Are you thinking that we’re going to vibe code Salesforce?” Now, if I was a little weak company and you said, “Can we vibe code a little CRM?” “You can.” Is it going to look anything like Salesforce?

No, it’s not going to look anything like Salesforce. Salesforce would probably be overkill for that company anyway. Can we vibe code little things? We can. Can we vibe code big things? We can vibe code big things too, but I do not think if someone’s going to come in and challenge Salesforce, it’s going to be somebody that’s taken a completely different approach to solving the problem of CRM.

That’s who’s going to beat Salesforce. Not somebody that comes in and says, I got a copycat Salesforce. It’s just like them. Except none of our people have any experience, and we do not have a professional services team, and we do not have any of the partnerships. We do not have any of the integrations. We do not have any support either, but otherwise the features are exactly the same. That’s not how this is going to play out.

Using that example, part of their competitive moat is all of those things. It’s not just the code base.

That’s right. It’s not just the features. It’s everything else. We have the whole issue, too, of there being existing code bases and existing customers and how people switch from one thing to another thing. A lot of these traditional SaaS businesses are now trying to figure out how to compete with themselves. They’re taking a big lean back and saying, “Should we just rewrite this whole thing to make it AI native? How fast could we do that? If we did, what would that look like? What do we do with the existing customer base? How do we move them over?”

All these things, these are big questions. It goes beyond positioning. What is going to win? It’s building a thing in a way that it’s different. It’s building a thing that can deliver something that’s unique. The other guys cannot have this new set of tools that operate in a different way. That should give me the ability to approach the problem in a completely different way. If you see the AI companies that are doing a really great job out there, the ones that are growing really fast, they’ve come into a market, and they’re like, with this new set of tools and this new set of capabilities, we can start from the ground up and build something completely different. They’re winning because they’re telling that story.

There’s got to be a certain element of reinvention of how the product works and is conceived. To recreate Salesforce, to recreate any incumbent SaaS product, would be the wrong way to think about it.

Whatever beats Salesforce is not going to be a thing that’s set out to copy Salesforce. It’s going to be a thing that said, what if we had the opportunity to start from scratch and build everything new, knowing what we know now? When Salesforce was built, our concept of what we wanted to do with CRM was completely different. Knowing what we know, you would approach it completely differently. You would redefine what CRM even means at this stage.

I’m sure people at companies, traditional SaaS businesses, most of the ones that I talk to, are having this conversation internally with themselves. They’re like, “What if we started from scratch and built this? What would it look like? What would we do differently?” Knowing what we know now, because when we built the original thing, it was. However, many years back. We thought about these things differently. I think these are the more interesting things that are happening with AI and any big shift in technology.

These architectural shifts have been going on for decades, and the people who succeed in these new errors are the ones, to your point, who rethink the business model, the delivery model, the value model, not just, “We’re going to take our on-prem software and dump it into Microsoft’s public cloud or Amazon Web Services and say, ‘Now we’re a cloud product. Everybody sees through that.’” The same will be true here. Having an AI chatbot that sits on top of your crummy software product that needs to be rethought is probably not selling an AI-powered product. It’s a lot different.

I’m telling you, two years ago, that was everybody’s gut reaction to it. We’re going to take a chatbot. I got a chatbot on it now. We’re AI. I think two years down the road, now we think very differently about that. Now it’s like, that ain’t it. Now we’re talking about agents. What can we do with agents? It’s very different. I do not think we’ve seen, and I do not think we’ve seen the end of that evolution yet. We’ll know a lot more about how this all shakes out and winners and losers and what this really looks like in the next year, two years, three years. A lot of what people are predicting is going to happen just ain’t going to happen. Some of it is, but a lot of it isn’t. We just do not know the difference between the two right now.

We’re definitely in that in-between era right now. With all this said, what would you want to leave our audience with in terms of the lesson that you would want them to take away on positioning their companies, their products, or themselves?

Replacing Gut Instinct With Repeatable Process

Here’s the big thing, and this has been my life’s work. The big thing with positioning is that positioning is very hard to do well if you are trying to do it from gut instinct. Now, not impossible, but if we can do positioning using a process, a structured process, like step one, step two, step three, step four, it just makes your whole life easier. If you are really good at this stuff, and maybe you think, I can feel this, Having a process so that everybody understands how you got to where you got to, and it wasn’t just your genius thought in the middle of the night.

It’s going to help everybody understand what the positioning is. The other thing is that when you do this gut-feel positioning, sometimes it works. When it works, it’s amazing, but it generally doesn’t work forever. At some point you’re going to have to shift that positioning. You got a new competitor, something changed, you changed, you did an acquisition, something changed. It’s very hard to shift that positioning because you did not use a process to get to the positioning in the first place.

If you really want to tame positioning and you really want to feel comfortable with your positioning, the number one thing you can do is use some process to say, “This is how we got to where we got to.” Doing that is going to help you in the long run. It’s going to help you when you need to shift. It’s going to help you even figure out, do I need to shift this right now or not? It’s going to have to get the whole team on board. That’s the last thing I would leave you with is that having a structured process to do this stuff is going to save you in lots of situations.

Thank you. It’s been a fun conversation. We won’t be able to vibe code our way through all of that for sure. I appreciate your time, April.

Thanks so much for having me on.

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What should we take away from the discussion just now with April? The first thing is that being better isn’t enough if people cannot see why you’re better. Whether you’re launching a product or growing a business or trying to advance your career, value doesn’t speak for itself. You have to help people understand what makes you different, why that difference matters, and who benefits most from it. Positioning isn’t spin, and it’s certainly not the purview of marketing alone. It’s something that everybody in a company needs to be clear on, and it’s something that you need to continue to work on by putting yourself in your client’s shoes.

The same is true if you are looking for a job or trying to convey your value in the job that you’re in second, and we did not talk a lot about this, but it’s an important thing that April mentioned at the end. She’s not out there trying to support everybody. She wasn’t the right fit for B2C jobs. Many times you can actually grow better by narrowing your focus as opposed to broadening it. When you go too broad, it’s harder for customers to understand who you really are, and the same is true for you individually.

You have to make it clear where your depth is and what types of circumstances you would be good in a company. That means being clear where your product fits and where it doesn’t, and when you do that, things often just come together much more naturally because you are focused on your strongest points, not trying to be everything to everybody. Third is that in an AI-enabled world, differentiation is going to become even more important. AI is making it easier to create content, build products, and automate routine work.

Those capabilities, therefore, are becoming less distinctive. The competitive advantage shifts to understanding customers, making sound strategic choices, communicating a compelling story, building trust, and ultimately solving problems. Technology can help you execute all those things faster, whether it’s AI or anything else, but it cannot decide what truly makes you worth choosing.

Those same lessons, again, can be applied to individuals. As always, I invite you to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or YouTube or whatever your favorite platform is, and if you found this discussion enlightening, you can sign up for my membership community, which is called Pathwise, or our newsletter, Path Wisdom. Thanks. See you next time.

Important Links

• April Dunford on LinkedIn
• April Dunford on YouTube
• April Dunford on Instagram
• April Dunford on X
• Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It
• Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok
• PathWise on Twitter

About April Dunford

April Dunford is a globally recognized expert on positioning and one of the leading voices on helping companies stand out in crowded markets. Over a 25-year career as a marketing executive, entrepreneur, and consultant, she has helped hundreds of technology companies sharpen their positioning, accelerate growth, and communicate their value more effectively. April is the bestselling author of Obviously Awesome, a practical guide to product positioning, and Sales Pitch, which focuses on turning positioning into a compelling sales story. Today, she advises primarily B2B technology companies, helping leaders understand their competitive alternatives, identify differentiated value, and give customers a clear reason to choose them.

What’s the real job of a leader?

According to Dave Ulrich, it isn’t having all the answers, building your own reputation, or even telling a compelling story about where you’re going. Great leaders help the people around them build their stories and create value for others.

In this episode of Career Sessions, J.R. Lowry sits down with Dave, one of the world’s most influential thinkers on leadership, talent, and organizational effectiveness, for a wide-ranging conversation about what great leadership looks like in a rapidly changing world.

They explore why many of the fundamentals of leadership are timeless, even as technology and workplace expectations change dramatically. Dave explains the critical distinction between values (what matters to you) and value (what your actions create for someone else). He also shares a simple question leaders can use to rethink how they spend their time: What will happen in someone else’s life because of what I do today?

Dave and J.R. also discuss the choices and trade-offs that come with ambition, why our definition of success should change at different stages of life, and what Dave learned from deliberately stepping back from his own career while raising his children.

And, inevitably, they tackle AI. Dave argues that AI makes distinctly human capabilities more important, not less. As information becomes ubiquitous, leaders will increasingly differentiate themselves through vision, innovation, emotion, judgment, and wisdom.

The conversation also explores learning agility, navigating uncertainty, admitting when you don’t know the answer, and becoming comfortable figuring things out alongside the people you lead.

Whether you’re a first-time manager or an experienced executive, this episode is a reminder that leadership ultimately isn’t about you. It’s about what becomes possible for other people because you were there.

Looking to build the leadership lessons from this episode into your organization? PathWise offers leadership coaching for companies.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/dave-ulrich/.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Real Job Of A Leader, With Dave Ulrich

Whether you’re a first-time manager trying to lead a team, a seasoned executive navigating constant change, or simply someone wondering how to stay relevant in an AI-driven world, leadership has arguably never been more challenging or more important. My guest has spent more than four decades helping answer a simple but fundamental question, what makes leaders, organizations, and careers successful?

Dave Ulrich is widely regarded as the father of modern human resources, but that title doesn’t begin to capture the impact of his work. He’s advised many CEOs, worked with organizations around the globe, authored more than 30 books, and helped shape how businesses think about leadership and talent, organizational capability, and value creation. His ideas have influenced not just HR leaders, but executives across virtually every industry.

In our conversation, we’re going to explore how leadership is evolving in the era of AI, why experience is no longer enough to sustain a successful career, what separates people who continue to grow from those who plateau, and what Dave’s learned from a lifetime spent in the boardrooms and the C-suites of some of the world’s most successful companies. Whether you’re leading a team or simply trying to build a career that remains valuable tomorrow. You’ll come away with some practical insights and perhaps a different way of thinking about what it means to create value. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions, and my conversation with Dave starts now.

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Dave, welcome. Thanks for joining me on the show. It’s a real pleasure to have you with me.

What a privilege. I’m honored to be with you and our guest.

Honored to have you as a guest, so let’s get rolling. You have had a very distinguished career working with a number of companies and CEOs. If you think about leadership relative to when you first started back in the ‘80s or ‘90s. What do you think has fundamentally changed and what is different from the way it used to be?

Sometimes, we have experiences that shape the way we think. I listened to Peter Drucker once, and Peter Drucker said, “The greatest leadership ever was the pyramids.” I thought, “We haven’t changed anything since whenever that was in Egyptian history.” My sense as I take away that experience, a lot of the leadership principles are timeless. His comment was, “Look what they did in the pyramids with no technology, and no operational machinery. They built these incredible monuments to their legacy.”

A lot of the fundamental principles are the same but the practices and timely stuff do change. We’re not the same as we were 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. A few years ago, we were all obsessed about COVID and how do you manage remote workers? Now, we’re obsessed about AI. A few years ago, AI was just a dream, and we’ll talk about that. Some of those timeless principles are so important. The one I’ll just highlight because I want to make it a setting for our discussion.

Helping Others Build Their Story

One of the things I find among the best leaders is every leader has a good story to tell. JR, you have a great story. I’ve looked at your background. Your life and your story is great. Leaders don’t tell their story. They help those they lead create their own story. Leadership is not about what I know and do. It’s how what I know and do helps and you know and do what you need to do better. This episode is not about, “Dave, let’s tell your story. Here’s your research. Here’s your ideas.” Your job as a leader is to help others build their story. I hope that’s the theme. We’re here to help those reading create their story based on our experience.

We’re certainly going to get into some topics aimed to help people think about how to think about their careers and how to think about leadership. You mentioned AI. I’m going to go right there because it’s so prevalent. It’s dominating conversations at the board level, C-suite, all the way down to the front line. What do you think that means? Given what you just said about leadership and what changes and what doesn’t change. How is AI affecting leadership? What becomes more important in this new AI era? What may become less important?

We could spend the next 45 minutes on it. Let me just highlight a couple of things and I’ll try to highlight just two or three. One of the things, AI is not the goal. It’s a means. It’s access to information that we never had before. I was doing a talk at a university and I said, “I’m interested in how Plato compares with Thomas More’s Utopian society.” Boom. I had a polished report in less than 30 seconds. I thought, “When I was a graduate student, I would have been paid a semester to go create that.”

We have ubiquitous access to information. In fact, it’s interesting. AI gives you polished reports, information data that we’ve never seen before. As a leader, I can get information quickly. What’s missing is the human ingenuity to turn that information into productive knowledge. I’ll put that in a formula. HI or human ingenuity times AI or artificial intelligence. How do I navigate the balance between those? AI gives me capacity. Human ingenuity gives me capability. I’ve got to manage both.

If I avoid the AI, I’m not going to have the information I need. If all I’ve got is the algorithm and the AI and not the human ingenuity, I’m not going to differentiate myself. Quick tips, use AI. Don’t become dependent on it. There’s some amazing research coming out about cognitive decline, cognitive replacement, and cognitive surrender. Be careful to not get seduced into AI as a solution. It’s a set of ideas, a set of knowledge. It will give you a polished report. It will not give you guidance on how you have the confidence to make that report happen.

To me, and certainly one of the things that I hear coming up in conversation is that human judgment, critical thinking, and the ability to collaborate are some of the things that AI is going to have a harder time replacing. Those are the things that become more important. To your point, if you abdicate responsibility for doing your critical thinking to an AI tool and have it doing all of it for you, your critical thinking skills are bound to diminish over time. That’s what the research is starting to show.

The VIEW Framework For Human Ingenuity

By the way, my background is taxonomy. I love to take complex things and simplify. Let me give you a way to think about what you just said. What is human ingenuity? I’ve got AI, which is an algorithm, which gives me information, data and ubiquitous access to knowledge. What does human ingenuity mean that I uniquely bring? I’m going to suggest four things. That’s my taxonomy. Vision of the future. If somebody says to you, “What do you bring that complements the AI work going on?” AI can’t create the future. It only summarizes the past. Vision of the future. Innovation in the present.

What’s that beautiful human element where you get at the back of your head, your hair goes up, you get a nudge, like, “That’s cool.” Peter Drucker said the Egyptians were the most powerful leader, vision, innovation, emotion in relationships. You just said it, AI is not emotion. It’s an algorithm. It’s fake emotion. The one that you highlighted, and I’m going to call it wisdom, critical thinking, judgment, wisdom in decision-making. Vision, innovation, emotion, and wisdom view.

Human ingenuity gives me a view. I’m saying, “We’re doing a lot with AI.” Don’t get seduced. What’s the vision of the future? Look forward, not backward. What’s the innovation? What’s new here that its system didn’t give? Emotion, empathy, relationships, and then judgment, critical thinking. I hope those things are helpful. I know I miss a lot. I’m not naive about that. To me, that’s the compliment to the AI agenda that the algorithms give.

My final tip, I’ve gotten into discussions on social media with an algorithm. Don’t get into a debate with an algorithm. It’s not going to be a very good debate because they will keep flowing and flowing. I want to build a relationship. I want to look at somebody. I want to feel somebody with that emotion. Debating an algorithm is not going to be a very successful outcome.

Leadership Value: AI gives you capacity, but human ingenuity gives you capability. Strengthen your vision, innovation, emotion, and wisdom to stand out.

One of the things that relates somewhat to AI, but more generally that I’m thinking a lot about, and I want to get your perspective on. A lot of managers that I talk to are saying that their jobs are becoming harder. Expectations are rising. They’re being asked to manage more people. The pace of change is getting faster. Now, we have AI taking away some of the things that their individual contributor team members used to do, and frankly, that they used to do. What’s left for them, I’m hearing a lot of them say, feels genuinely harder. Are you hearing that in your own travels as well? I would love to get your thoughts on it.

I have two responses. The first is no question. What AI does, it doesn’t replace jobs, it replaces tasks. If you look at any process, let’s say staffing process, hiring someone. There’s ten steps in hiring someone, defining the skills, getting the resume, etc. AI can do four of those ten tasks efficiently. Sometimes leaders like doing those tasks because they are easy and they let us do something. I can’t do the more complicated tasks that require vision, innovation, empathy, and emotion. We’re stuck with those.

At one level, it is tough to be a leader now. At another level, if I went back and talked to some older leaders, they’d say, “It wasn’t all that easy in the ‘60s when we had revolts. It wasn’t that easy in the ‘70s when we had major crises.” Leadership has never been the easiest job in the world. Again, this will be the last time I mention Peter Drucker’s Pyramid. Go back to building the pyramids. I don’t imagine it was easy. They were built through horrible command and control logic, slavery, etc. It probably wasn’t very easy back then either.

Leadership has never been easy. What I’m finding around expectations that I like is people are getting more conscious and intentional about their expectations. Do I want to be a leader? Leader comes with a price. We talk about mid-career. It’s like, “My career is stalled out. Am I comfortable doing what I’m doing now or do I want to pay the price of ambition to move into other leadership positions?” It’s hard to be a leader working twenty hours a week remotely from Montana or from an island South of Boston. It’s hard to lead.

Paying The Price Of Ambition

A lot of people say, “I want the flexibility that comes in the world.” You have every right to that flexibility, but recognize it comes with a consequence. I faced that early in my career. I went off to be a professor at the University of Michigan. We had 2.2 kids. That tells you where we are in that status. My wife started a PhD program. We looked at each other and said, “We are choosing not to outsource our kids. We are going to raise our kids and muddle through parenting.” I can’t believe I’m getting emotional because it was a tough decision. For the next five years, I cut back.

That wasn’t the greatest time of my career to cut back and stay home while my wife did her PhD. I stayed home two days a week. I took the kids to school. I did stuff. I paid an ambition price so that I could do some other things that I chose to do. I’m not advocating that anyone should make those choices, but that was our choice. I ended up not getting tenure. That was a conscious choice. Sometimes, as careers, we say, “I want to have it all. I’m going to be the greatest. I’m going to be the greatest everything in the world.”

I hope leaders are clear about their expectations with intentionality. By the way, I wouldn’t change anything we did because it allowed us to balance. When my wife finished her PhD, we looked at it and said, “Here’s what a psychologist makes. Here’s what a consultant makes. I’m going to go do a little more consulting.” She said, “Go,” but we then still negotiated. Our deal was I would never be gone on weekends. You know what travel is. I’ve looked at your career map. Travel is tough, especially from the United States if you’re in the Gulf States. I love the Gulf States.

You can’t travel and not be gone on weekends if you’re going to do work in the Gulf States. I didn’t do any work in the Gulf States for fifteen years because that was the deal. Takeaway, we’re helping you create your story. Be conscious. What do I want? Recognize it’s a long career. When our kids left home, my wife looked at me and said, “You could be gone more.” That may not be the best solution and answer, but the decisions we made then were good for them and good for us.

They aren’t good for anybody else, but those decision records may change. I spent 15 or 20 years on the road a lot, and that was a choice. I’d ask leaders the question, “What do you want? How do you define your success?” Recognize that’s not a one-time answer. That may change at 25 when you’re single, at 30 when you’re newlywed, at 35 with kids, at 40 or 45. At my age, it changes again. What do you want? Be intentional about that. Be clear about what determines my definition of success and value? You pay a price. Long answer to a very fair question about expectations.

There’s a lot to take away from what you just said. Probably most important is this point at the end about the fact that what works for you then is what matters. It’s going to change at different stages in your life. Your story highlights that perfectly. As long as you’re intentional and thoughtful about it, it’s hard to look back with regret because you’ve made conscious choices.

May I tell a quick story? This one, I love to tell. I’ve told it before, but it’s a powerful story. This was a CEO. I would not recommend this for almost anybody, but he’s a very successful and very senior CEO in New York. I’ve been coaching him. I go in and he’s down. I say, “What’s going on?” He said, “Work is fine and we’re dealing with all the issues, but my fifteen-year-old son and I aren’t getting along very well.” I said, “That’s never happened before. Tell me about your son.”

He’s like, “My son’s terrific.” I said, “What does he love?” He said, “He loves baseball.” I asked, “Who does he love?” He said, “The New York Yankees.” I looked at the CEO and I said, “They’re in the World Series and it’s going on. Go to a game.” He gave me one of the dumbest answers of a smart executive I’ve ever known, “I don’t have a ticket.” I said, “Your son is You are a total doofus. What do you mean you don’t have a ticket? Get online. Get great seats. Get your son out of school. Get a car. Go eat hot dogs. Get sick. Go to the game.” He said, “Can I do that?” I said, “Are you kidding me?”

He called two days later and said, “You reminded me of what mattered most. My son and I had a great night. We’ll remember that for decades.” I hope at your level, wherever you are in your organization, don’t be afraid to do those kinds of things because they have such meaning and such impact. When I was traveling so much, my mother was retired. We had three kids. I was doing work then around the world. I called mom and I said, “Mom, do you want to see Hong Kong?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “Good. Let’s go.”

My mother has traveled with me to some of the greatest spots in the world with my three kids. She watches them during the day, then we have dinner. There’s a lot of ways you can begin to manage the life balance that I hope those who are reading make conscious choices. Now, where did this start? Don’t assume that you can have everything and still be promoted and move up. There’s a price that you pay but the price that you might pay is a good one. There are other people who make another choice. I want to move in my career. I enjoy the status. I enjoy the power. I enjoy the influence through hierarchy. If that’s your choice, we have the right to make that choice.

You’ve talked about defining success and also defining value. You mentioned value in passing, but I know this is a very central concept to the way that you think, this idea of what value are you creating. Talk a little bit more about your thoughts on that, because it’s going to set up this idea of how people can stay relevant over a long and uncertain career journey.

Connecting Values To True Value

Great question. There’s two words, values and value. Values are, what is my identity? What am I known for? When COVID hit, it changed my career. I was traveling. Guess what? You’re not traveling. What’s my core value? What are my values? I want to learn. I’m going to have to discover a new way to learn because I’m not going to learn by flying around. I’m going to learn through webinars, through doing things like this, with podcasts, through social media. I’ve never done social media.

My first question to somebody is, what are my core values? What matters to me? That’s the question we started. What do I want? How do I want to be known? What’s my identity? What’s the story I want? That’s 50%. The other 50% is, how do my values create value for someone else? If my values don’t create value for someone else, it’s not long-term viability. It’s narcissistic. It’s hedonism. Leaders are not hedonists. The leader affirms their success by the ways others behave when the leaders aren’t in the room because their values have created value for someone else.

I love to talk about what you value and how your values create value for somebody else. As a leader, first question. Who am I serving? Is there somebody I can serve and create value for? I got that headset. That’s what senior leaders do in a company. Who are you creating value for? How will my values help them build their story? I’m going to go back to that story metaphor. I’m not here just to create my story and impose it. I’m here to create my story so that you can create yours even better.

Particularly in the frame of a leader, this idea of giving up the self for the other is an important mindset shift that not all leaders remember every day. They start to believe their own hype. They forget that there are many people around them who’ve made them successful over the years. There’s a lot of people who depend on them. That constant, who am I here to serve and how can I create value for them? If you can ask that question of yourself, it will help keep you grounded. That’s something that I take away from what you just said.

The So That Query For Calendars

I love it. By the way, I love simple exercises. That’s the taxonomy PhD. Look at your calendar and say, “Who am I going to meet with? What am I going to do? What’s going to happen in their lives because of what I do?” Teach a class. I won’t go through the class in detail, but I was looking at utopian society and how do you build organizations that are utopian? What do I want those students to leave with? It’s the same question. I want to set a vision for that. I want to manage change so that. Who’s going to benefit because of what I do as a leader?

Leadership Value: Having values is only half the battle. The real question is how your values create tangible value for someone else

I want to engage my people so that those employees feel ownership for the work we do. I want to set a vision so that our customers are more likely to buy our product. I want to be disciplined about making change happen so that an investor gives us a premium in price earnings ratio. The so that for me turns my calendar into outcomes for somebody else. It’s a very simple little query that I have found helpful for me. The so that takes me out of my values into the value that I create for another.

I love it. It’s a very simple framework that’s easy for our audience to take away. Thinking longer term, there’s this idea that you hear a lot about. How do I future-proof my career? I would love to get your thoughts on the fallacies of trying to future-proof your career and what you can do.

Staying Sharp With Learning Agility

Two thoughts. One is in the research that Bob Eichinger and the Center for Creative Leadership have done, they look at skills that leaders have that seem to be predicting long-term success. Learning agility comes out high. When is 50% of what I know out of date? I’ve been a professor. I was a professor in Michigan for 43 years. When I teach that course every year, what percent of my teaching notes are new?

There are some professors you can tell the time of day by their jokes because it’s no longer a course. It’s a Broadway play because the joke is scripted. I never went there. My rule of thumb in my world, and everybody’s got to determine their world, about every 18 to 24 months, I should have 25% to 30% new stuff. Am I learning agile? Am I continually reinventing and experimenting? That, to me, is part of what you do. I’m going to give two tips for reinventing your career. Learning agility, keeping fresh, and try new stuff.

By the way, I share this with students sometimes. One of the worst things about, in order for me to be learning agile, I’m going to teach 125% of what I know. You’re not perfect the first time out. The first batch of cookies is never very good. I’m always going to experiment. I’m going to weave into my sessions new stuff. Leaders, try new things. Go experiment. They go, “That didn’t work. I’m not going to do that one again.” There’s a great insight.

The second tip, learn to navigate paradox and tension. Everybody says, “I’m going to manage the paradox. I’m going to be like this.” We live in a world of inherent paradox. Am I long-term or short-term? Yes. Am I top-down or bottom-up? Yes. Am I focused on individuals or teams? Yes. Am I focused on profit, performance financially or caring for the people? Yes. One of the things I love to see in leaders is they say, “This is an inherent paradox. Do you want to be the servant or the master?” Yes.

I love leaders who can say, “I’m navigating paradox and I’m going to lean a little bit this way, then I’m going to lean a little bit that way. I’m going to constantly navigate.” I don’t know if you’ve ever sailed or flown a plane, but you’re always navigating. You’re moving back and forth. Learning agility and paradox navigation become two of those process skills that you can begin to apply as you go forward.

Have you felt like over the course of your career that there have been things that you’ve had to let go of that were central to your way of thinking as the world continued to adapt?

Many. Let go of, did I have an answer? Let go of, tell me the answer. What do you think? I love that question. I don’t have to have an answer. What do you think? Let’s talk. That I have to be prepared. One of the things I’ve learned as I’ve gotten more senior in teaching is a lot of teachers say, “You’ve got a three-hour workshop with executives on pick a topic, like talent or strategy. What are you going to do in 90 minutes? What are you going to do in 120 minutes?”

Lately, I’ve gone into those classes and said, “We’re going to talk about talent. We got 15-20 people here. What’s the biggest talent challenge you face? We make a list on the board. Vote. Good.” We’ve now spent 10-15 minutes. We have three new challenges that are on top of your list. Let’s take the one with the most votes. By the way, I tell people that when I do workshops they freak out. What are you going to do 90 minutes in? I don’t even know the topic 90 minutes in.

I have enough confidence that we’re going to co-discover what’s real. I’ve had to learn to have confidence in the process of learning with the people I lead and the people I work with and sometimes you have no clue. I was in one. They said, “How do we manage the mobility of our employees in China who change jobs so often?” That got a top vote. I can tell you a secret. I have no clue. I said, “I have no clue. What do you think?”

We spent twenty or 30 minutes thinking through the principles of mobility and how they may apply in that Chinese context. People said, “That was helpful. You didn’t just share your latest statistics or research.” That’s the piece that has been helpful for me. It’s just trusting the process to get there. It doesn’t always work perfectly. I’m not stupid about that but I love that dialogue. Question and answer is literally a question.

Listening to what you just said, it feels like it touches on a lot of the things we’ve talked about in terms of how more of the world is going to work because we’re all going to have more of these conversations that are about bringing our collective wisdom to bear. It sits on top of all the factual knowledge that we can now get at our fingertips.

I posted a thing with Charles. It used to be that you learn it at the training program, you know, and then you go do. Flip it upside down. AI tells you what to do. Now you got to figure out what you need to know to make it happen. I love your comment about collective wisdom. If nobody knows, let’s talk. Let’s discover. Let’s co-create. To me, that’s exciting because that’s how we also stay fresh, is learning together and we’ll make mistakes.

There’s a great line, “I’m not failing. I’m learning.” It comes from Carol Dweck’s work in Mindset, “Failure is an opportunity to learn.” In fact, I say to leaders, “Tell me about a failure recently. What did you learn? How did you make that better?” Those were the lessons where people at any career stage, early, middle, or late, to stay fresh.

I think the idea of learning agility in particular, just adaptability. Take your example of how we do mobility for employees in China who are switching jobs all the time. These are new problems. Nobody has necessarily figured out the answer to them. The same is true of what the world is going to look like in ten or twenty years because of AI. Nobody has a clue. There’s some perspectives that are better informed than others.

What that means for you as an individual is you need to accept the fact that there’s a lot of uncertainty about how the world will unfold. You need to make sure that you’re giving yourself optionality. You give yourself optionality by being adaptable. You can’t go much further than there. Your workshop analogy probably fits here, too. You’re 90 minutes in, same things. You can’t predict what you’re going to be doing ten years from now.

One of my favorite workshops is when we bring in senior HR leaders, small groups, fifteen, and we say, “What’s on your mind?” Some of those are some of the most creative discussions that I just find delightful because we’re allowed to co-create and get ideas out that will be interesting. I find that fascinating. Let me just pick up on your comment. We live in a world of uncertainty and we love to solve the uncertainty. Let’s do scenario planning.

Anchoring In Certainty Amid Chaos

What I love to do in a world of uncertainty is start with certainty. Don’t chase the uncertainty. Stop. What are you certain about? Let me go back to where we were. In the world of COVID, when’s travel going to open up? Is it going to come back? I have no clue. What am I certain about? What are my values? I am committed to learning. That’s useful. In a world of uncertainty, we don’t know what’s going to happen with interest rates, inflation, tariffs, regulation, elections, and toxicity. We hope we can get over toxicity.

My first question is, what are you certain about? How can you then live your certainty? How can your certainty help others live their lives better? That’s the value in values. I hear people, “The world is uncertain. It’s ambiguous. It’s volatile, uncertain, and complex.” The VUCA world that we’ve talked about and they get all obsessed. Let that go. How can you live that value and make that value a value to somebody else? In that world, I don’t know what your career will look like but if you’re living your life with certainty. I shared that it was spending time with young kids. For a while, it’s been something else. Those things become helpful in navigating certainty in a world of uncertainty.

Leadership Value: Reinvent your career before it stalls. Experiment with new ideas and refresh your knowledge base every eighteen months.

A lot of people reading probably still feel some level of discomfort because we take mortgages that have 30-year paybacks. We’ve got commitments to family and other things that are important to us. Yet the ability to safely say, “Am I going to have a stable income stream for the next 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, or however many years?” It’s hard sometimes. That level of uncertainty is still challenging for people because they’re forced to make some decisions that hopefully won’t go against them.

They may go against them. I didn’t get tenure. That’s not a good thing. Sometimes putting those things in context. The other side is people said, “How did you handle PhDs, muddle and careers?” We simply muddled. We didn’t have a perfect vision. We didn’t have everything laid out. We muddled. Muddling means you try it. It didn’t work. You experiment. It didn’t work. You learn quickly, fail fast. Our kids now have kids. We have grandkids. Our kids are going, “Dad, life is complex. It’s tough. Are you muddling enough?”

Live with the muddle and it’s okay. Again, I empathize. Will I have a career? Can I pay for a mortgage? No question. Those are demands that are so demanding, but muddle. I don’t know where the word muddle comes from, but it captures the feeling of what it’s like to be in the middle of all of these demands and just muddle.

Brené Brown uses a similar concept when she talks about braving. Being willing to be vulnerable and find your way through all of this in spite of the uncertainties and the doubts that you might have.

I like that word, too. Be brave, muddle, try it, and then fail fast. That didn’t work. Good. Here’s a great insight. Guess what? Stop doing that. That’s not always easy. By the way, it’s much easier to look back and say that than it is to be in the middle of it, which I appreciate.

You forget all the pain from the moment. Last question. What gives you the most optimism about the next generation of leaders?

Spending time with them, just listening to them and seeing in their eyes the bright lights, the curiosity, the ambition. I don’t know about you. I’m so glad I’m not 25 again. When I’m around them, the most optimism I ever get is spending time with the next generation. I walk away knowing they’re going to struggle. You’re going to have struggles. You’re going to have difficulties.

I can give you a preamble to that. I can prepare you for some of that, but I can’t take it away. The struggle is part of the healthy thing. What gives me optimism is my granddaughters from two different parents, email me two or three times a week and text me and just say, “Grandpa, what do I do with this?” That just gives me optimism. Our hope is in the next generation. If we can help that next generation discover their story, that won’t be mine at all, that gives me great optimism.

You especially get to do that with grandchildren, and that’s part of the joy of being a grandparent.

I’m not going to end it yet. What gives you optimism? We never get to learn from you. What gives you optimism?

In the scheme of things, it’s easy to get down about all of the things that are going on in the world, and yet the human spirit seems to persevere. If you think about the world we live in, in 2026 and what it was like 100 or 200 or 300 years ago, it was a lot harder back then. It was a lot more uncertain back then. It was a different uncertainty. You were worried about whether your two-year-old child was going to die of the flu.

You were worried about whether you were going to have war with the tribe or the clan or whatever that was five miles away in another village. We don’t have that to the same degree now. We have different issues that affect us, but we find a way to keep carrying on. It’s not always easy, and there are certainly harder times than other times, but we will find our way through this.

Each generation proves we all have doubts. We all look at the teenagers, when we get older, and we say, “They don’t know anything. I can’t believe this generation is the way they are.” That was certainly said by our parents of us and their parents of them, but every generation finds their way eventually. They are the future, so they will be the future leaders too.

Thank you. That’s very helpful.

Thank you as well.

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As we wrap up our conversation with Dave Ulrich, there are a few ideas that I hope you’ll take with you. One is that leadership isn’t becoming less human because of AI. It’s becoming more human. The leaders who succeed in this new era are going to be the ones who understand what gives them uniquely human skills. That human insight and wisdom that Dave talked about in the conversation and how to marry that with artificial intelligence and all of the other tools that we have at our disposal to do good work in service of others, to create value for others. That is the essence of Dave’s message.

That brings us to this notion of how he defined value. Thinking about what your values are, but then how you can use those to deliver value to somebody else. Getting up every day and thinking about that, whether you’re an individual contributor or a frontline manager or a leader who’s moving up through an organization or a CEO. All of us are delivering value in our work environments to support others. Be they our colleagues, the shareholders, vendors, customers, whoever. That’s what the world of work is about, is creating value.

If you’re constantly thinking about that and adapting as the world moves on, you will continue to be able to create value and have continued success. That requires, and this gets to another point Dave made, learning agility, being willing to adapt, to let go of old thoughts, to bring in new thoughts, to bring in new sources of information, and to create new ways of learning. Go into conversations where you don’t know the answer and say, “I don’t know. Let’s figure it out together.”

That will become especially important in an era where knowledge is readily available, but wisdom isn’t quite as available. The collective intelligence of bringing people together to solve problems together and to learn from each other will still be a unique part of the human experience and a way that we work even with all of these great AI tools that are coming to bear. A lot to think about from our conversation with Dave.

I hope you found this conversation valuable. If you did, please subscribe or leave us a review. Share this episode with someone who is looking to become a leader or build a stronger career. You can also sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and our newsletter, PathWisdom. Thanks for tuning in.

Important Links

• Dave Ulrich
• Dave Ulrich on LinkedIn
• Dave Ulrich on X
• Bob Eichinger
• Center for Creative Leadership
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
• The RBL Group
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About Dave Ulrich

Dave Ulrich is the Rensis Likert Professor Emeritus at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan and a partner at the RBL Group. He has published over 200 articles and book chapters and over 30 books. He edited Human Resource Management for ten years, served on editorial board of four other journals and on the Board of Directors for Herman Miller (16 years), has spoken to large audiences in 90 countries; performed workshops for over half of the Fortune 200; coached successful business leaders, and is a Distinguished Fellow in the National Academy of Human Resources. He posts weekly and comments daily on LinkedIn (over 380,000 followers and 3,300,000 page views in 2024) and has a free weekly newsletter with over 230,000 subscribers. His work creates ideas with impact about how to deliver stakeholder value through human capability: talent + organization + leadership + HR.

Finding a job has never been easy, but today’s hiring process can feel particularly frustrating. Hundreds of applicants compete for a single role, AI is reshaping how candidates are screened, and qualified people often struggle to get noticed. At the same time, employers insist they can’t find the talent they need. So what’s really going on?

In this episode of Career Sessions, J.R. Lowry talks with Lorena Prego, founder and CEO of Prometeo Talent, who has spent two decades in recruiting and helped companies make more than 5,000 hiring decisions.

Lorena takes us behind the scenes of the hiring process to explain what recruiters and hiring managers actually look for, and what separates candidates who consistently land opportunities from those who struggle to break through.

They discuss why applying to hundreds of jobs may actually hurt your search, how to take more control of an interview, what recruiters notice when comparing your resume and LinkedIn profile, and how to build productive relationships with search firms. They also explore how AI and remote work are transforming recruiting and why communication, critical thinking, adaptability, and the ability to keep learning will become even more important.

Whether you’re actively looking for a job or simply want to position yourself for your next opportunity, this episode offers a practical insider’s guide to getting noticed, telling your story, and managing your career for the long term.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/lorena-prego-ojeda/.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Why Hiring Feels Broken (And How To Get Hired Anyway), With Lorena Prego Ojeda

Finding a job never feels easy, but for a lot of people now, it feels harder than ever. You submit dozens, perhaps even hundreds of applications, and you hear nothing back. You spend hours tailoring your resume only to wonder if a human being is even going to look at it. You hear that AI is screening candidates, recruiters are overwhelmed, and companies can’t find the right talent. Which is it? Why does hiring seem broken for everyone? In this episode, we’re going to go behind the curtain and talk about how hiring works with somebody who does it for a living. My guest is Lorena Prego, who is the Founder and CEO of Prometeo Talent.

Over the past two decades, she has helped companies make more than 5,000 hiring decisions, particularly in technology and engineering. That gives her a unique perspective on what separates candidates who consistently land great opportunities from those who struggle, even when their qualifications may look the same on paper. We’ll talk about how AI is changing recruiting, what recruiters look for, and the biggest mistakes candidates make.

Also, how to build relationships with search firms before you need them, what catches a recruiter’s attention, and what skills will matter more as AI continues to shape the economy. Whether you are actively looking for your next role, hoping to future-proof your career, or responsible for hiring great people yourself, this conversation will be packed with lots of practical advice that you can start using immediately. Let’s get started.

—

Lorena, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you.

I’m looking forward to our conversation. You have been involved in a lot of hiring over the years. I think something like 5,000 people you have been involved in the hiring of. What’s fundamentally different about hiring now compared with even five years ago or when you started your business?

I started my business in 2010, and I’ve been a recruiter for the last twenty years. It changed many times in many ways. Lately, what changed, everybody’s talking about AI and technology. Companies have access to a lot of information of candidates. Huge databases of candidates. That changed a lot. We use a lot of AI tools. We use tools with AI as well. It changed in that way.

I want to come back to AI later, but across these hiring decisions. What separates the candidates who consistently get offers from those who seem on paper equally qualified, but don’t end up getting the nod in the end?

Overcoming Poor Interviewing Tactics

In my perspective, first of all, candidates are able to communicate properly their experience. I always say to candidates, “You have to be prepared that the interviewer is not very good interviewing.” Hiring managers are not used to doing interviews. They are managers and once in a while they have to interview people.

They’re not usually trained properly, so you have to be able to present yourself. Even though the hiring manager is a bad interviewer. Communication is very important. Preparation is another thing that is very important. Gather information of the company you’re applying for. Organize the things you want to express and communicate in that interview. That’s important.

That point, not all hiring managers are good interviewers. You’ll get some who will have a checklist of questions. They’re going to run you through methodically. You’ll get others who will want to have a casual conversation. Your job is to make sure you get your message across no matter what. For a lot of candidates, they will respond to the questions and think they’re doing great. They will respond to the conversation and think they’re doing great, but they’re missing the opportunity to get their message across.

Correct. Sometimes, I go with hiring managers to interview the finite candidates. I remember once that I was having an interview with a hiring manager. A finite interviewer. I said, “I want to see the way you interview and everything.” The interview was a hiring manager talking all the time. The candidate didn’t say anything. At the end, the hiring manager said, “I love this candidate.” I said, “Why?” They said, “I like her.” I was like, “Why does she want to change now? What is she doing now?” She’s without a job.

I asked him like two or three things. He said, “I should do this interview again.” Usually, hiring managers are based on feelings. I like this person. I identify with this person. This person went to the same university or did the same path. This is crazy. You should try to prepare yourself and organize the things you want to communicate because this person you have in front of you is a manager. Not an interviewer.

A lot of them never get trained on how to do an interview, which is just mind blowing to me.

Correct. It’s not that frequent for a manager to do interviews. They forget. It’s not them to blame. It is what it is. Candidates do not understand this. As a candidate, you have a lot of power in you to be able to have more chances to get hired.

That’s very true because when you’re out doing interviewing, you’re doing a lot of them. You’re better practiced coming into that interview than the hiring manager is going to be. You need to remind yourself, “I’m here to make sure they know this.” Even if they don’t ask those questions, I got to make sure that gets across.

For me, this is fascinating because I do interviews all day. I love interviews and interactions. If you ask me one book that helps everybody to do better interviews like the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dave Carnegie. At the end, you have a person with small things like thank you and you want for them to like you. That gives you a huge advantage. It’s a small thing. At the end, you have a person in front of you that needs to like you to work with you at the end of the day.

It does matter, but sometimes we overemphasize, “Do I like this person? Do I think they will fit into the team?” We don’t zero in hard enough on their actual technical skills. You’ve got to get it both if you’re the interviewer.

That’s why as recruiters, we train hiring managers as much as we can or we are allowed to, but we are not always allowed to do that.

Has remote work significantly changed how companies think about who they are willing to consider in their hiring pool relative to what might have existed pre-COVID?

Navigating Remote Work Timezone Hiring

It changed dramatically in a huge way. The way we work as well in our company Prometeo, because our clients are asking for time zones. They don’t care about countries or cities. They ask for, “I like this time zone plus two hours.” We do look at the map and search for people where they want to search. It changed everything because before that, you had to be in a city or in a specific place to have more chances to be hired. Now, you can be in a small town where cost of living is lower and you’re able to have a great job as well.

Out of curiosity. What percent of jobs that you’re involved in are they willing to consider a remote candidate?

All of them. All of our clients search for remote talent. Eighty-seven percent of our clients are in the US. They search in Latin America and in Europe.

Do you think that’s a consequence of the mix of business you’re in? I know you do a lot of technology recruiting, or do you think it’s because of general factors? I thought at one point, LinkedIn or Indeed, one of them was reporting even a few years ago. That percent of listings that were remote peaked at something like 15%, and then it started to decline again.

In technology, you have this advantage that you’re able to work from anywhere because everything is in the cloud. On the other side, the shortage of talent is something that keeps hiring managers awake. They want to have a bigger pool of talent in a huge geography to be able to find talent. For example, we are hiring AI engineers in Poland because Poland is a great hub of AI engineers, but the company is in the US.

I said we’re going to talk about AI, so let’s talk about AI. It’s hard not to talk about AI when it comes to recruiting. It’s pretty much seeped into just about every aspect of it. From your perspective, where do you think it’s helping? Where do you think it’s hurting?

Leveraging AI Tools Without Spamming

It’s helping in the sense that you’re able to use AI to automatize a lot of admin, and be centered on the most important things. Making the right decision or searching for the correct profile. Sometimes clients do not know exactly what they’re searching for or what they need. On the other side, there are companies that are overusing AI. For example, sending a lot of messages through LinkedIn without any personalization. In a way, spamming candidates and the ratio of responses. At least on LinkedIn, it’s getting lower and lower. You’re able to use AI, but if you use it incorrectly or too much in the wrong way, you damage the process.

For candidates who are frustrated with the fact that they apply to a job on one of the big job boards, they attach their resume, they click the button, and it goes into a black hole, probably viewed by an ATS, an applicant tracking system of some form. Whether they’re using AI or not. How do they get themselves around that process and gain traction when they’ve got a job that they feel like they’re a strong fit for? When you see 500 or 1,000 people applying for a job, even in like the first 24 hours it’s posted, it’s a numbers game that’s hard to win.

Escaping The ATS Application Hole

It is, but to be honest, I’m on the other side. My nightmare is that I need to find talent and I do not find enough good talent. I’m on the other side of the coin. With AI, both sides, candidates are able to apply to many hiring processes at the same time. Companies and agencies are able to access more data. I still believe that you should be applying to hiring processes that are aligned to your skills or your experience. It’s not winning the AI. It’s applying to a position that you are aligned to because if not, you’re getting frustrated, but you’re not necessarily aligned to that position you’re applying.

When people are applying to 100 or 200, when I see these posts online, I applied to my 500th job. My reaction is, “I don’t have a ton of sympathy for that because you clearly are not being focused in your job search.” If you picked 50 out of that 500 and worked at them, you probably would get more traction than you’re getting by blasting 500 resumes out to 500 different firms for 500 different jobs.

Correct. I totally think that as well.

Beyond the recruiting process, specifically, Lorena. How do you see AI changing the kinds of careers that people should be preparing for over the next 5 to 10 years?

Cultivating Essential Future Proof Skills

It’s a tough question. It’s hard because we don’t know exactly what is happening and the scope of what this change means. If you ask me, to be honest, this applies to technology very well. The people in technology and technology changes very fast. The people that go well in their careers are people that are able to learn how to learn and quickly. People that are able to learn new technology or new apps or new ways to do things is the key.

Things are going to start changing and the cycles are getting quicker and quicker. People that are able to learn by themselves, and people that are able to communicate well. Critical thinking is another massive thing because you have a lot of information from AI. Now, you should be able to analyze and think what are you receiving, if it makes sense or not. It’s not only data. It’s the human in the loop. The human that is you as a candidate, you should be able to have critical thinking and process that information in a critical way. Learn how to learn. Be able to communicate properly and have critical thinking.

Some of those critical thinking, decision-making, and problem-solving type skills will always be room for that. You highlighted the importance of continuing to learn. If you’re not focused on making yourself relevant, no matter what the change is, it’s AI now but it was data analytics, was machine learning, mobile applications, and internet many years ago. I can go as far back in business history as we want to go, but it’s always something that’s changing. You’ve got to make sure that what you’re doing professionally is relevant. For a lot of people, that message just doesn’t fully sink in terms of the way that they manage their careers.

Correct. It’s critical to keep on learning, studying, and improve yourself. It never ends.

It does never end. Let’s talk a little bit about this from the hiring perspective. You said a minute ago that you’re out there trying to find talent and there’s a shortage of talent. I see that more and more, this sense of both sides are frustrated. People who are looking for jobs can’t seem to get hired. People who are looking for candidates can’t seem to find the candidates that they’re looking for. Where’s the disconnect from your perspective?

That’s a trick question, and I ask myself that question very frequently. I sense this frustration on the candidates and on the clients as well, because they’re like, “We need to hire a good candidate.” It’s very hard to find a good candidate.

Maybe use an example or two of where that’s playing out in something you’re working on. Is it the companies in a bad location or the salary’s not enough or they’re asking for things that are unrealistic? I’m just curious where the bottlenecks tend to be from the hiring firm’s perspective.

Resolving Corporate Hiring Bottlenecks

You’ll be surprised. Usually, the first gap that we find in our clients is that they’re searching for something that they don’t need. They’re searching for a person that in technology is full stack is front-end, back-end, DevOps, and QA. These are four roles in one. It’s like, do we need to find this person? Where is the priority? What is the problem or the challenge you need to solve?

Therefore, we help them to organize their hiring process or their job description and determine that what they need is only a UX or UI, like a designer, for example. This is the first gap. Every company’s CEO or COO main challenge is to have their costs under control. Every hiring, in a way, is an investment for the company. It should be controlled. They try to solve many challenges with one role. I don’t know if it makes sense. That’s the first gap.

The other ones are, for example, they want someone with a lot of experience, but the budget is very low. It’s like, are you able to hire someone junior and go through the gap of training this person? If not, we need to hire someone with this seniority or sometimes the company is not willing to invest or they want to hire someone they’re not able to hire.

Sometimes you get a hiring manager who just wants to have another person on their team. DevOps, full stack developer thing. It’s like wanting a unicorn because they don’t know exactly what they need. They just know they want somebody else.

Exactly. There are many problems. Sometimes, in the hiring process, the problem you find is that the chair manager and the hiring manager are not aligned. They interview someone and then the hiring manager is interviewing someone else. They’re not aligned and they’re searching for different things. The candidate goes through the interview, but then the hiring manager says, “I don’t like this person.” I have a fintech and we’ve been searching for six months and one says yes and the other one says no. The HR says yes. There’s no alignment or whatsoever. It’s very hard.

Which I’m sure is very frustrating to all involved. If it takes you six months, there’s a message in there for the hiring firm that they need to rethink what they’re looking for and what they’re willing to give.

When this happens, what we agree with the client is that what you need is a consultancy process. Not a hiring process. We do start working as a consultant in terms of who is involved in the process, how we can align this process, and why you’re not getting any results because the company is frustrated as well.

What are some of the other things that tend to separate the organizations that are good at hiring from the ones that are just more average?

The companies that are good in hiring first are the ones that they know what they’re searching for. Not only skills, but culture. That’s very important because it’s important for you to hire someone that is aligned to the company they are going to be working at. The other one is that the companies that train their hiring managers in interviews are. These companies that are able to understand that they don’t need to hire replicas of the hiring manager. They need to build a team and the team members should be different from each other and from the hiring manager. If you find a team that everyone is the same, like a replica, we are in a huge problem.

Diversity is a benefit. Whether you’re thinking about it in whatever form, but certainly diversity of thought, background and experience in a team makes a huge difference. To have 5 clones or 10 clones of the hiring manager just means that you’ve got a collective blind spot because they’re all good at the same things.

Correct. Another thing that is getting great hirings is candidate experience. That the candidate has a great experience through the hiring process. The companies that are working on their employer branding. That is, they start communicating what they’re doing internally to be able to connect with potential candidates in the future when they want to hire. They’re investing on communicating what they’re doing inside.

A lot of companies, like a lot of candidates, most candidates don’t worry about this until they need a job. Most hiring firms don’t worry about what they’re looking for until they need to fill a role. Both sides need to do more to prepare.

Exactly. Companies that work on their employer branding get better applications and candidates because they are all out there already.

Anything else as a recruiter that you wish hiring organizations would do better or differently to make the process better?

Flexibility. Usually, we get frustrated. It’s hard to work with the client that is rigid. We go to the market and we give the clients a lot of data. Where is the client located geographically? What are the skills and the salary ranges? We give them a huge scope. Especially with AI, you’re able to scrape data and you’re able to have a lot of information. When they say, “I don’t care about this data. I want to go there because I want to.” I’m like, “This is going to be hard.” When we give the clients feedback, they are able to fit things a bit more flexible.

I want to come back to the candidate’s side. You talked earlier about the best candidates being better communicators. What are some of the mistakes that you see candidates making when they’re trying to tell their professional story?

One is not knowing that they have more control in their interview than they think. Sometimes candidates talk too much and are not accurate about the position they are applying for or their skills. The candidate should be responding with what they’ve been asked. The candidate’s so nervous that they start talking nonsense. Be accurate. When you said what you wanted to express, make a pause. If the interviewer is not very good, they don’t know how to manage time and how to interrupt you a bit to do another question because they have a list of questions they have to do. If you talk and talk, you are going to make yourself worse in the process.

I’ve certainly seen candidates who ramble. It is hard for most hiring managers to pull that back in to make sure that you end up getting the questions answered, then 30 or 45 minutes or 60 minutes goes by and you’re like, “I didn’t get all my questions asked.” That’s a problem for you in the end, because then you’re making a less informed decision or you have to have the candidate come back again, which is a bad use of everybody’s time.

At the end of the day, as we said before, prepare for the interview, and understand what are the topics you want to talk about, but be accurate because this person is going to interview many people. Not only you. Probably three at least. If you’re not accurate, this person will forget what you said.

What advice would you give candidates in terms of how they work with you? The search for morals is fairly opaque to most people, but what’s the best way to work with recruiters who tend to work in the markets that you are looking for work in or working actively in?

To give you data. In our database, we have 100,000 candidates. They’re current candidates. They are not older than eighteen months due to GDPR. If every candidate wants to search for a job, contact me through LinkedIn saying, “Could you find me a job?” It’s very difficult because I’m searching for the positions that I have.

Usually, what I recommend is for candidates to connect with the recruiter after they apply for the position they want to and tell the recruiter, “I found a hiring process that I could fit for.” It’s something to connect and then the recruiter will look at your LinkedIn and if it makes sense, will make you go through quicker. If you connect with the recruiter every time you want to search for a job and it’s not in their pipeline of hiring processes. It doesn’t make sense.

Does it make sense if part of the traditional wisdom has been that you should build relationships with recruiters when you don’t need a job because then they know who you are? In this era of databases and artificial intelligence, do you still need to have relationships with recruiters or do you just need to be in their databases?

Both. If you’re not in a database, it’s harder for us to search for you. What I would say is that when you participate in a hiring process, although you’re not hired or you’re not moving forward, make a professional way through the hiring process. Do not disappear. Don’t be a non-responsive candidate. Things that make you look unprofessional.

In the future, when this company or agency has another hiring process, we’ll consider you as a potential candidate. You never know. Make a good impression. Behave professionally in every hiring process because you never know. That’s building a relationship with an agency or recruiter because we have notes on our databases and we say, “Strange behavior. Non-responsive. This is not professional.”

As a simple example. A lot of people don’t take calls from recruiters. They ignore them. I always tell people, why not pick up the phone and take the call? At worst, it’s going to be ten minutes out of your life but you have an opportunity to at least get on somebody’s radar. Maybe get something favorable entered in their database about you as opposed to something unfavorable about you. Why would you not seek that opportunity? For a lot of people, it’s like, “I’m not looking for a job. Why should I talk to a recruiter?”

Maybe as a candidate in the future or now, you can have more data about what your value is in the market now or other conditions that you can ask for your current employer. There’s nothing to lose.

I agree with you. You must look at an awful lot of resumes and LinkedIn profiles. What types of things catch your attention positively or negatively?

Aligning Resume And LinkedIn Profiles

For example, what we do is that we ask for the candidates to attach their LinkedIn profile, paste the link, and also if they want to, attach their resume. The thing I do now is compare their resume to their LinkedIn profile. If they’re incoherent, because LinkedIn is public. My guess is that the candidates are more honest with on LinkedIn than their resume. It’s like, if there is a huge gap between both, this is a huge red flag for me.

On the other side, jumping from one job to another, gaps in their experience, and things that are too big. You’re not like, “I’m the manager or responsible for,” and you’re not clear on what. If you go to the LinkedIn company, they are the only employees there. Probably, it’s their own company. At the end of the day, we want transparency from the candidates. It’s both ways. I’m very honest when I find some candidate that is not suitable for the company. I tell them, “I don’t think this is the right position for you. Anyhow, if you have any questions for the future, let’s get connected.” Again, for the candidates, we expect the same.

I just think a lot of candidates don’t think enough about these kinds of things and the way that they’re coming across. It’s pretty hard to be invisible. Some people actively take themselves out of all forms of social media as a way of maintaining some semblance of privacy. The vast majority of people don’t do that.

All these data points connect a perspective on you. You can go to pick your favorite AI tool and say, “Tell me what about me.” That’s the same thing you’re doing, I would imagine. When you have a candidate that you haven’t had any exposure to before because it’s a way for you to gain information about them. If you don’t like what you’re reading, as a candidate, you probably need to do something about that.

The senior candidate or the profile is, the more information as a recruiter, we’re going to search for. The company they work for, the consistencies, and inconsistencies. You should be more aware of these things.

Last question. From everything we’ve talked about, Lorena, if you were going to leave our audience with one bit of advice from all of these thousands of hiring decisions that you’ve been involved in. What would it be?

If you ask me, I should say, do what you love. Working takes a lot of time. I know it seems romantic. Maybe I romanticize, but if you have to be someone that needs to be learning all the time, improving yourself all the time, because it’s very competitive. You’re competing against the whole world. Not the whole world, but it’s geographically bigger.

If you enjoy what you’re doing, you’re always improving yourself, studying and getting better and better. One thing is do what you love and keep on learning. Keep on listening to podcasts. It’s very realistic. It’s not like a book that was published many years ago. No. Keep on searching for information to improve yourself and your career nonstop.

Very good advice. I agree with the notion that you should continue to invest in your career journey because otherwise, things are going to run out of rope for you at some point. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it. I’m sure our audience will get a lot of good insights out of the discussion that we had. Thank you for spending the time with me.

Thank you very much for this episode and the invitation.

—

What do I want you to take away from my discussion with Lorena? Hiring has changed a lot since 2021. It started with the pandemic and the impact that had on remote work. Now, we’ve got AI to contend with. All of those things have transformed how companies recruit, but employers are still looking for people who can solve problems, who communicate clearly, who will create value, who will collaborate well with their colleagues. That’s what you need to be showing them in your social media profile, in your resume, in your cover letter, in your interviews, and your references. It all needs to be coherent.

Second, remember that your resume gets you noticed, but your story is what gets you hired. You have to get that across. The strongest candidates connect the dots. They explain their impact. They make it easy for employers to see why they’re the right fit. Importantly, if you’ve got a hiring manager that is not letting you get at that, you need to find a way to get that message across when you’re in the interviewing process.

Third, think of recruiters not as career agents. They are business partners. Understanding how they work, when to engage them, how to interact with them, how to build relationships with them will dramatically improve your career opportunities over time. You definitely want to be in their database, but you also want what’s in their database to portray you favorably.

Finally, treat your career like a long-term investment. Not just a series of job searches with a drab job in between. The people who are consistently landing the best opportunities are building skills, growing their network, strengthening their reputation, and staying visible long before they need their next role. That’s what true career management is about. As always, I invite you to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. If you found the discussion enlightening, please sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

Important Links

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• Prometeo Talent
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About Lorena Prego Ojeda

Lorena Prego is the Founder and CEO of Prometeo Talent, an international recruitment firm connecting companies in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America with exceptional talent. A psychologist by training, Lorena transformed her understanding of human behavior into a career that has shaped the hiring strategies of startups, scale-ups, and global organizations, helping companies make more than 5,000 strategic hires over the past 15 years.

She is also a professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, speaker, and a recognized voice on leadership, careers, and the future of work. Few people spend as much time studying the tech talent market as Lorena. She follows the industry, analyzing how artificial intelligence, new technologies, economic shifts, and changing workforce expectations are redefining the way companies hire and professionals build their careers.

Her perspective comes from the front lines. Every week, she works with founders, executives, and candidates making critical hiring decisions across multiple countries. That combination of psychology, business strategy, and hands-on recruiting gives her a unique view of where the market is heading and what separates companies that consistently attract outstanding talent from those that struggle to grow.

AI can already draft, summarize, analyze data, write code, and find patterns faster than most of us. So as these capabilities become increasingly commonplace, what will make you valuable?

In this episode of Career Sessions, J.R. Lowry talks with Liat Ben-Zur, former senior executive at Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Philips and author of The Bias Advantage, about how AI is changing the skills that matter most, and why some of the experiences that once made your career harder may actually have prepared you for what’s coming next.

Liat argues that the answer isn’t trying to compete with AI at what it does best. Instead, we need to double down on capabilities machines struggle to replicate: judgment, adaptability, empathy, ethical decision-making, creativity, influence, and the ability to see what others miss.

They also discuss why hard work alone isn’t enough to advance your career, how to make your impact visible without becoming overly self-promotional, why nonlinear careers may become increasingly valuable, and how to use AI to strengthen your thinking rather than replace it.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Which human capabilities will become more valuable as AI gets better
• Why career setbacks and being an outsider can build unexpected advantages
• How to make sure your contributions are recognized, not just delivered
• Why career range may be more valuable than narrow specialization
• How to use AI as a thinking partner without weakening your own judgment
• What leaders will need to do differently as AI reshapes organizations

If you’re wondering how to remain relevant, differentiated, and valuable as AI transforms the workplace, this conversation offers a practical roadmap.

Explore PathWise’s custom learning and development programs for teams adapting to AI to help your people stay valuable as work changes.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/liat-ben-zur/.

—

Listen to the podcast here

How To Stay Valuable In The Age Of AI, With Liat Ben-Zur

Artificial intelligence is changing the workplace faster than any technology we’ve ever seen. A lot of the surrounding conversation is focused on what jobs are going to disappear, what new skills we’re going to need, and how organizations can adopt AI more quickly, more thoroughly, more effectively. What does AI mean for leadership itself? In particular, is it changing what is required to be a successful leader? Is it simply exposing some things that were already broken?

How organizations make decisions, who gets promoted, what voices get heard, and what we value in our leaders? My guest Liat Ben-Zur argues exactly that in her book, The Bias Advantage. Drawing on decades of leadership experience at companies like Microsoft, Qualcomm and Philips, she makes the case that many of the people who’ve spent their careers navigating uncertainty, overcoming bias, and succeeding as outsiders may be the best prepared to lead in an AI-driven world.

In our conversation, we’re going to talk about why merit alone has never been enough, the leadership skills that AI will make even more valuable, how to build influence in organizations and why some of the very qualities that may have held you back in the past could become your greatest competitive advantage in the future. I’m J.R Lowry and this Career Sessions.

—

Liat, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

We are going to talk a bit about your book, but also about your career journey. You’ve led a bunch of technology shifts over the course of your career. Why does this AI moment that we’re experiencing feel fundamentally different to you?

A lot of the previous shifts changed how we worked. AI is changing how we think. I think about when we went from desktop to mobile, from on-prem to cloud, we were changing a lot of the plumbing of how we worked or where we worked. It was about speed, access, connectivity, convenience, and all those things but AI is different. For the first time, technology is not just giving us this faster tool or shovel. It’s moving up the cognitive food chain, if you will.

To some degree, I feel like it’s commoditizing basic intellect like drafting, summarizing, and coding. As more of that intellectual work becomes automated, the new skills that are becoming more valuable shift towards judgment, ethics, creativity, empathy, and humanity. This transformation is forcing us to rethink where we, as humans, add the most value. That’s why it feels so personal because for a lot of folks, their work is their identity. That challenges our identity in some way.

That’s true at the individual and the leadership level because it is changing what we do as individuals. It’s also changing the way that people lead. Let’s talk about those two things. Maybe we’ll start with the leadership piece because you make the point that AI is not just changing leadership. It’s exposing leadership and it’s making visible some things that have been there all along as flaws.

Exposing Organizational Bureaucracy

I do think that AI exposes bureaucracy and you might have experienced with some of the companies you worked at. Companies could hide their slower decisions, weaker judgments, decision avoidance behind committees and processes and these endless meetings. AI is compressing the time between decisions and their consequences.

We’re seeing markets move faster. We’re seeing products launching faster. Mistakes are scaling faster. The security blanket is gone and AI is holding this mirror and exposing which executives are able to lead through all these changes, which ones are highly paid gatekeepers who know how to manage processes well, but they freeze when they have to make a fast high stakes judgment. To your point, I don’t know that AI breaks the organizations, but it shows everyone where the bureaucracy and leadership weaknesses are.

At least in your circles, do you think that the senior level people and companies realize that this is what’s going on or are they still having the wake up call themselves?

They’re having a wake-up call. Many of them are still used to the old way of how things are being done.

What about at the individual level? This is a big identity shift. How do you see people responding to that?

AI is shifting power at two levels, a societal level, and then also at a business and individual level. At the societal level, AI is increasingly impacting who gets hired, who receives a loan, whose medical claims get approved or denied or who’s getting removed from a certain platform. As I explain in the book, AI is not neutral. The algorithms are only going to be as neutral as the data that trains them. Since a lot of these systems are learning from the past, if the past was biased, we’re going to scale that bias at machine speed.

If we’re not careful, the result of this is that we could accelerate inequities and create an even bigger disparity between the have and have nots at the societal level. Inside companies and at the individual level, AI is also shifting the balance of power. What we’re seeing there is just flattening hierarchies. I see this a lot in the boardrooms. A junior engineer with access to an LLN can build a prototype in an afternoon that used to require a seasoned team of twenty and a million-dollar budget.

Powers are flattening and democratizing in ways that destabilize leaders who are used to their own positions of power. AI can democratize power and it can concentrate power. That’s why ethics and fairness can’t just be bolted on because by then the damage already scales. It’s very interesting how AI is changing and impacting us at different levels.

One thing that’s interesting on the societal level. I thought you were going to say that what you didn’t say, is just the fact that AI is also creating this incredible wealth opportunity for a very small number of people to the degree that we’ve probably never seen. We talk about how much money Elon Musk has, but we could potentially create ten or 100 Elon Musk in the next five years with AI. I feel like that’s a societal impact that people don’t fully appreciate. The incredible amounts of money going into this and the valuations that are being put on AI technology. Things that didn’t even exist five years ago are just mind-blowing for me.

That’s a good point. On the one hand, we can say it opens it up for a small group of people. On the other hand, you can also make the argument that opens up to anyone that wants to start to play with the tools and use the tools. The nuance is in the details. A lot of what I talk about in the book is some of those details. I’ll give you a simple example. I’m trying to create some business pages for the book, like Facebook, Instagram, all those things to build awareness campaigns. I use AI. I use my agents to help me set those things up.

Meta decided to block me from building those because it probably noticed that there’s AI agents that are helping build those pages. The pages get built a little bit faster than you would if you were doing it by yourself. The irony in that is like, everything Meta is trying to do is push their AI and have humans use their AI. When a solo entrepreneur is trying to use AI to empower herself to be able to get these pages built faster and accelerate my about page, it’s blocked. That’s the societal thing that I’m talking about in terms of impact.

He holds the power of the platform to make these decisions. Another good example of that is healthcare. There’s a lot of data that’s showing the number of denials from insurance companies is going up because they’re using AI. They’re using AI at a platform scale. Individuals get a rejection later. They don’t understand. They don’t all have AI to fight back. There’s good intentions everywhere but if we’re not very thoughtful about the ramifications, it’s not always fair.

Leadership Skills In AI: Overcoming workplace challenges builds an invisible muscle that transforms early career friction into long-term strategic advantage.

In the scheme of things, we’re seeing a lot of those things that you’re talking about. It is becoming harder to fight the onslaught of companies using AI. You see the same dynamic in recruiting. It’s okay if the recruiters use AI to interview you. It’s not okay if you use AI to work on your answers to those interview questions. Professors can use AI. The students can’t use AI. It’s created different power dynamics that we’re still working our way through.

Let’s come back to AI a little bit later, if that’s okay. I want to talk a little bit more about your book, The Bias Advantage. The title of your book is provocative. Given that most people think about bias as something that limits us, you’re making the point that it can prepare us to lead. That it can be beneficial. Talk a little bit about how you came to that point of view and made it your title.

Building Strength Through Friction

Bias itself is not the advantage. I’d never romanticize exclusion or being underestimated or being paid less but navigating bias can build an invisible muscle. That’s what the book is about you learning to read the room. You notice the gap between the official rules and the lived behaviors. You learn to sense what’s not being said, versus what is being said and to pull in voices and the data that may otherwise be ignored or missing. You tend to learn to adapt more quickly, to spot risks that others often miss because the system hasn’t always worked for you. The scar itself is not the superpower, but the muscle you build around it may be.

One thing that I was thinking about in going through your book was this idea about whether it’s about bias or about adaptability. Everything you’re just talking about is you going through adversity. You learn how to adapt. You learn how to overcome challenges. Is bias the way that people develop these capabilities or is there something that you think is more unique about bias in the way that it helps people develop the capabilities that you’re talking about?

I like that you added that. I do think it’s about both, but bias is like an intense school for adaptability. Ordinary adaptability can mean that you’re learning a new tool. You’re changing how you’re working. Navigating bias tends to be a little bit more personal. You might deliver great results and still be told that you lack, let’s say, executive presence. Which often means, there’s something about you that makes us uncomfortable but we can’t quite say what it’s. We don’t know how to put our finger on it. That experience teaches you to decode the context, to adjust your approach, to fit specific environments, and to build pretty high emotional intelligence and a thick skin because the stakes are very personal.

I think you’re right. I asked that question to get your point of view. I don’t have the same ability to draw on that as a White male. I just imagine that because it is more personal, because it hits more deeply than other forms of disadvantage that somebody might have to overcome. That it gets much more deeply steeped into who you’re and how you operate and how you see the world.

Therefore, you can approach these situations to be able to read the room, look at people more deeply, the things that you just talked about. For somebody who doesn’t see themselves as an outsider, what lessons can they draw from people who have spent their careers or their lives having to navigate these systems that weren’t built for them?

I would start by not assuming that the system itself is neutral because it’s worked for you for many years. I would encourage folks to just voluntarily put yourself in situations where you’re uncomfortable. Where you might be the minority, where you don’t know the rules, where your credentials suddenly don’t carry weight. Take on some of the messier, undefined projects, and then pay attention. Pay attention to things like who’s missing, who’s not being included in the conversation or in the data. Whose ideas get repeated, whose ideas get ignored, who tends to get credit, who tends not to get credit.

Your goal is to try to notice what the algorithms might miss. People who have navigated exclusion often develop a wider field of vision. Frankly, any leader can learn this discipline. First, you have to admit that your own field of view may be incomplete because you’re never going to correct a blind spot that you refuse to admit that you have.

That’s very true, but I also think it’s hard for people to see that for the very reason that it is a blind spot. One of the key things that certainly you try to teach people in terms of diversity type training is how to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes to see things through their eyes. To imagine what it would be like for them to understand all of the unconscious biases and the micro things that happen. I know we’re losing a little bit of that and calling it all woke but there is a lot to it.

In the workplace, even more and I’m sure, as someone who’s done a lot of consulting in your career, you’ve noticed this. When you go into a company, you are the fresh eyes. You’re the outsider going in and observing and giving feedback on the opportunities, the challenges. My analogy is, it’s like a fish that’s been swimming in the same ocean for years. They’re in that ocean. It does not occur to them that it’s salty, misty, dirty water, that they don’t have good visibility.

That all the other fish that are around them are dark and menacing. You come from another sea and you share with them like there’s other beautiful, light water, colorful fish, other places that have great visibility and reefs that you can go to. They look at you like, “What are you talking about? We know what the ocean is. We’ve been swimming in it for many years.” It’s not just a diversity story. It applies to everybody. It’s just that ability to think outside of your own historically peripheral vision.

Bringing this back to the AI topic that we started the conversation with. These skills that you’ve talked about. Again, reading the room, being able to understand others. When AI is taking away a lot of the rote stuff, all that stuff moves much more to the forefront. Let’s talk a little bit more about what makes somebody valuable in this age of AI. You talked about democratizing the idea of a developer being able to do in an afternoon what used to take a team of twenty months to do.

If AI is doing all of this drafting, summarizing, coding and content generation. What does that end up meaning in terms of how human value needs to evolve? For example, if information is becoming abundant and those capabilities that AI has are becoming more readily available. What’s becoming more scarce where that value is going to lie for the human beings in the world?

Prioritizing Human Discernment Over Output

A good analogy might be to think about it like music synthesizers. They made creating sounds incredibly cheap and easy, but that didn’t eliminate musicians. It raised the premium on unique style and curation, soul and that authenticity of the music. When content, code and analysis becomes infinite, and virtually free over time. The thing that becomes more scarce is also going to be curation, taste, ethical judgment, radical empathy and accountability. AI is going to give you ten options very quickly but the human leader has to have the discernment and the stomach to figure out which one is the best and to take ownership and accountability if it fails. You can’t blame the machines.

Using your music example. There are instances where people have put all of the biggest hit songs through algorithms and figured out what common traits they shared. They’ve created a song that includes all of those capabilities and people hear it and they like it. If I’m a music creator, that ought to make me pretty scared because it starts to beg the question of what’s going to be left for me.

First of all, it has made a lot of the music industry scared, and it’s also opened up a lot of new opportunities for the music industry. The same exact way that Napster and Spotify scared the music industry and then opened up a lot of new revenue opportunities over time. I would be careful about looking at those things and seeing them as a storyline that says it’s replacing artists. What you see there is the interesting way that the technology can show you which of the rhythms are getting the most traction, and how to put them together in different ways.

Most of the stories where those AI generated artists took off, it doesn’t last that long. Once people understand that it’s AI generated, there’s not that human connection. There’s not that sense of authenticity of soul or whatever. It’s usually a quick spike. That’s a lot of the essence of the book, too. From a leadership career perspective, you need to find that.

If you’ve defined your identity for 25 years as the expert who’s the best at analyzing these finances or writing this code, some of the tasks associated with that work may shift and go away. What are the human centric things that you bring to that table where you can oversee twenty of those versions of you doing the tasks and bring the human connection, the empathy, the accountability, and do the things that the machines can do.

I would certainly think that AI may be able to create the next hit pop song that sounds like what a lot of other people do. What it’s not going to do is to create a new musical genre that’s never existed before. It probably could, but you think about the things that have happened in the work world or the music world or any world. It’s like these brilliant strokes of creative genius that take something in a completely different direction than it’s gone before. When AI models, as they are now, are being largely trained by what’s existing in the past. They’re much less likely to come up with those creative things.

Bringing this back to your business point from a second ago. The idea of a leader who rests on their laurels, their title, the positional power they have, or whatever the case may be. This is going to expose that they need to be much more creative, bold, adaptable and fast moving. That’s what you argue is going to be the key in the future, correct?

That’s 100% it. That’s spot on.

transforms early career friction into long-term strategic advantage.
Leadership Skills In AI: Don’t let your critical thinking atrophy. Use automated tools to stress test your strategy rather than draft every decision for you.

How do we deal with some of the practical things that we’re seeing? For example, all the work slop that’s out there and the risk that people are overusing AI. They’re using it in the wrong way and it’s eroding their cognitive capabilities and their critical thinking because they’re using it to be lazy as opposed to legitimately making themselves better.

First of all, there’s a bunch of research out there that’s showing that this is a real thing, cognitive atrophy. GPS is like a great example. It’s a good analogy for us to use. It made navigation easier, but most of my friends can no longer find their way out of a paper bag without their GPS. To some extent, the same thing is happening to our brains with AI. If you are letting the LLMs write every single memo, make all your decisions, your critical thinking will atrophy.

Preventing Cognitive Atrophy

I’m a big proponent of using it to stress test your thinking. When I’m working on a strategy, use AI as a sparring partner more than, let’s say, a ghostwriter. Have it find the biggest holes in your plan, challenge your biases, expand your perspective, and sharpen your arguments. In the book, I talk about assigning a rotating devil’s prompt master role inside of your organizations. Their whole job is basically to challenge the AI-driven conclusion or recommendations that are coming out of the various product teams.

What that does is that makes dissent part of the quality control instead of treating the AI skeptic as that annoying person that’s holding up the meeting. The purpose of that recommendation, why I suggest it is not necessarily to catch AI making a mistake. It’s to keep humans willing and able to say, “This result may be mathematically clean. This recommendation may sound well, but it doesn’t make sense in the real world. Here’s why.” I’m already seeing teams where folks are afraid to do that. They’re afraid to question the machine. They’re afraid to question the results. They feel the AI said it must be true. We need to make sure that we’re not building AI so we stop thinking, but we’re using it to think better.

To some degree, listening to what you just said, my immediate thought was people would do that with their bosses. It’s like, “The boss said so, we should just go do it.” We think it’s stupid, but we’re going to go do it anyway because we’re absolving ourselves of responsibility because it was the boss’s idea to do it. Now it’s the AI machine’s idea to do it. To me, it’s a lot of the same bad habits that people develop in their careers, which is not thinking for themselves. Not being willing to express an unpopular opinion. To your point, we need to be rewarding that more.

First of all, there are a lot of people in your career who are those types of people. The yes people and who just do what they’re told and don’t shout. You also know a lot of people in your career who weren’t afraid to challenge and ask the questions and ruffle the feathers and say the unpopular things. What the premise of this book is, in the AI era, some of the stuff that we’ve rewarded in the past for leadership needs to change. It’s because it is exactly these things that were not always popular in leadership circles in the past that we need more than ever to avoid some of the negative ramifications of AI usage.

What are some of the other capabilities that you would recommend to somebody who is in the first ten years of their career that they need to be over indexing on?

What I wouldn’t want them to do is try to beat AI at being an AI. Don’t try to be like a better expert because AI is always going to retrieve information faster than us. It’s going to write our first drafts better than us. It’s going to find patterns across massive data sets better than us and faster than us. Instead, it’s important to build some real depth in something. What I mean by that is, not just learning the basics because of an expertise in the data. It’s learning the exceptions, the failures, the messy realities that never make it into the textbooks.

Developing Cross-Functional Range

Since you’ve been working with it so deeply, you see the mistakes, the failures, how customers react to things. You understand incentives. You understand how decisions get made, be it internally or externally by customers, and why they’re making those decisions. After you become an expert and you understand some of these things deeply. Over time, you want to build a range. I encourage folks that I mentor to work across functions.

You want to get close to customers. You want to understand the product. You want to spend time with people who see the system differently than you do. AI does a great job at finding patterns in what already exists. Your advantage has to come from seeing what doesn’t fit the pattern. The non-obvious stuff. The AI says the customer is going to want a black box that looks like this, but you understand something about what’s happening in that customer’s personal life, family life, or geopolitical issues. That would be the reason why they don’t want a black box that looks like that. You can bring that nuance to the table.

Your point is well taken that we’ve got to encourage people to develop skills that are grounded in what AI can’t do in human-to-human interaction and the things that go with that. In thinking about the art of the possible, I hate that expression, but being able to think about what doesn’t exist. I wonder as a very simple example, whether an AI tool would have ever come up with the idea of getting into a car with a stranger and having them take you where you want to go or whether it never would even come up with that idea because it was an out-of-the-box idea when it was first developed. Those are the kinds of things that are going to be more necessary in a world where the machines get more and more capable to continue to be uniquely human.

Left on its own devices, it probably would. Add another horse to the carriage versus building a completely new machine. With the right leaders prompting it, guiding it, providing the right guardrails, and asking the non-obvious questions, challenging the answers that it gets back. It could very well also lead to the invention of some of these things that you’re talking about, the art of the possible. Even open it up to more possibilities.

It does require some of that handholding. That’s what leadership is. if it’s not fighting the machine per se, not rejecting the machine, and not ignoring the machine. Also, it’s not accepting everything that machine is using and allowing the machine to accelerate the existing processes and add another horse to your carriage.

It’s about shaping it to allow for some of the innovations that otherwise we would never unlock. Also, in a responsible, ethical and thoughtful way that humans need to be part of that loop to understand, to understand the downside bias that the machine doesn’t necessarily think through. The machine’s optimizing for a certain goal, optimizing for a certain KPI. It’s not thinking through those human implications.

I want to spend a few minutes before we break on some of the other things you brought up in the book around the myth of meritocracy and the fact that other factors play a key role in driving whether people move forward in their career or get stuck. You talk about the difference between performance and perception. Which probably makes people feel uncomfortable because it immediately evokes politics. What’s the difference between strategically managing your reputation and simply playing office politics?

First, I’ll say many of us have been fed a lie for many years that if you work hard, the cream is going to rise to the top. In corporate America, that’s not always true. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it. It may have made a sound, but it’s probably not going to get promoted. If you’ve generated $10 million in revenue for your team, but the people that are making talent decisions don’t understand the role that you played in that. They can’t properly value your contribution.

How is that going to help you move forward? If you’ve solved a major problem for your organization, but nobody outside of your immediate team knows about it, understands or can properly value that work and then reuse it in other areas, how does that limit your impact across the organization? The real purpose of that conversation around performance versus perception is not to encourage people to become some self-promoting peacock.

Translating Results Into Reputation

God forbid. There’s so many of those already. I don’t want anyone to tap that as a takeaway. It’s to point out that reputation management is about translation. It means making your impact, the things that you’ve done, clear and connecting those things to what the company cares about and what the people who need to understand them can impact your future pathways. Know about them at the right time, in the right place, and in the right way. There is an art to that.

Oftentimes, when you’re early in your career, no one talks about that. They just say, “Keep your head down. Do the right things and everything will come.” For many people, especially those who don’t necessarily fit into the system or are outsiders, that’s not true. That’s why there’s a section in the book about that.

It’s especially not true for people who are underrepresented. I think it’s true for everybody because at the end of the day, I feel like when somebody tells you, “Put your head down. Do good work. Think good things will happen.” It’s almost like what they’re saying is, “Leave me alone. I can’t do anything to help you. Go off and do work because there’s nothing more that I can do to be beneficial to you.”

I like that. I recognize that, too.

I certainly have seen that a lot in my past and some of the people that I continue to coach and mentor who feel stuck. They get told, “Be patient. The opportunity will come.” My advice to them generally is leave because what you’re being told is, “We don’t see it. We’re unlikely to see it.” Unless you completely reinvent yourself, which most people have a hard time doing. We’re never going to see it. What I say to people, if you believe in yourself, you should leave because essentially, you and whatever organization you’re working in are not gelling and you should go find someplace else that will be more appreciative of what you think you can offer but don’t be patient.

test your strategy rather than draft every decision for you.
Leadership Skills In AI: Delivering strong results isn’t enough on its own. Strategic reputation management means translating your impact into the language your leaders care about.

I’ve given that advice plenty of times

You also argue and you talked earlier about the idea of learning multiple functions. What are some of the other ways that you would propose to people to embrace nonlinear career paths?

Leveraging Nonlinear Paths

This is an important concept that may not be so obvious to a lot of folks, but what AI is doing is collapsing the boundaries between functions. Between sales and marketing, finance and sales and customer support. The hardest problems to solve are no longer sitting very neatly inside of product or finance or marketing. People that have had very nonlinear careers are often very good translators.

They’re able to connect ideas across domains and see waste that insiders who have only lived in their function for a very long time stop noticing. If you’ve had this zigzag career, say that you were in engineering and then you were in marketing then you spent a year in a nonprofit. You build this unique cognitive fingerprint. You can import your ideas from one industry to solve problems in another industry in ways that aren’t always obvious in other industries.

Consultants are a great example of this and see these patterns matching all the time. When things are very stable, like from a geopolitical perspective, from a career perspective, having that winding path can sometimes look unfocused. I’m sure you’ve met folks who you’ve looked at their career path and you’ve even given that advice to them like, “You’re so unfocused.” I’ll tell you what, in a very rapidly changing world, which is what we’re having with AI. It builds range.

Range is what you need when AI is collapsing the boundaries between these functions, because you need leaders who are able to look at problems and ask, why do we need to do it the way that we do it? Why don’t we get rid of all that and do it this new way? Everyone will nod to it and go, “We don’t want to accelerate or build new processes.” Easy to say, very hard to do because people have a very hard time imagining things when they’ve been doing work a certain way for fifteen years and it works for them. It’s one of the hardest things in AI transformation that I run into again and again in a lot of my clients.

This idea of range can be valuable for a couple of reasons. One, you can connect the dots, as you were just describing. In some ways, it’s also a bit of a portfolio play on how things are going to play out in the future. If you’ve got range, you have more situations, more functions, more corporate situations, more whatever that you have some relevance in.

If some of those get cut off because of AI or other external factors that you don’t have any control over, you still have other things you can fall back on. If you are single threaded, you’re putting yourself in a very precarious situation. Last question. If readers were to remember one thing from your book and how you’re thinking about everything around your book. What would you want that to be?

The qualities that you always thought made you easy to overlook or not fit in. The qualities that sometimes pushed you to the outside may be exactly the very qualities that make you extremely valuable. I say this to a very broad audience of folks who oftentimes don’t feel like they’re AI experts. They are feeling like they’re left out of the AI revolution because they didn’t come up in tech or they don’t know all the latest and greatest with AI.

You have the skills we need more than ever to lead the AI revolution now. If you’ve had to learn how to read the room, how to question the rules, how to adapt quickly, how to build influence without authority. If you’re great at seeing what others miss, you’ve been training for this moment. The very struggles that made your path harder, have built what I believe to be the skills that we need more of in the era of AI.

Empathy, judgment, adaptability, ethical clarity, resilience, if anything, AI is making those capabilities more valuable. A lot of companies don’t even realize that. They’re still hiring and promoting based on the old leadership playbooks. Those of you who understand this, understand the shift, understand how power is changing, you can position yourselves now to play critical, valuable roles in advancing AI transformation in your company.

You’ve said it quite powerfully. I will not add anything on top of that because it’s a critical message that you’re leaving people with so thank you for that. Thank you for the broader conversation.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

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A wide-ranging discussion with Liat. Let’s talk about what we can take away from that. First, AI is definitely raising the bar for leadership. The more AI takes over information gathering and routine analysis, the more valuable uniquely human capabilities become. Some of the things she talked about, judgment, curiosity, ethical decision-making, relationship building, adaptability, and the ability to make sense of ambiguity. That means that the leaders who thrive in the future aren’t necessarily going to be the experts, the ones who know the most. They’re going to be the ones who can think the best, make decisions the fastest, and adapt.

The second is the idea that your greatest career advantage may come from some of the challenges that you’ve already overcome. This is what Liat meant in the title, The Bias Advantage. If you’ve ever felt underestimated or overlooked or you had to work harder than others to earn credibility. Those experiences may have developed exactly the capabilities that organizations now need. These are going to become leadership advantages more so than in the past.

Third is that hard work matters, but it doesn’t speak for itself. The world has never been a meritocracy, and the idea of that is just a myth. Delivering results is essential, but so is making sure that the right people understand the value you’re creating. Building relationships, developing sponsors, communicating your impact, shaping your professional reputation is not office politics. It’s part of doing the right things for your career. You don’t want to be that tree that falls in the forest that nobody hears.

Finally, is the idea that you should not use AI to replace your thinking. I beg you not to use AI to replace your thinking. Use it to elevate it. AI is an extraordinary tool, but it’s still just a tool. Don’t accept its answers without question. If you do, your critical thinking will suffer. That’s not what you want to happen because it’s going to be more necessary in the future.

Use AI to provide challenges, add context, strengthen your judgment, and combine machine intelligence with human insight so that you can make better decisions. As always, I invite you to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. If you found the discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

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About Liat Ben-Zur

Liat Ben-Zur is a technology executive, independent board director, and AI advisor with more than 30 years of experience leading product innovation, business transformation, and billion-dollar growth at Microsoft, Royal Philips, and Qualcomm. As Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, she helped turn declining consumer services into businesses generating more than $14 billion in revenue, revived Microsoft Edge, and led the launch of the world’s first commercial GPT-4 experience with Bing. At Philips, she led the Internet of Things and connected health strategy. At Qualcomm, she launched the company’s first open-source IoT initiative, AllJoyn, and helped build a global ecosystem across smart home, automotive, and smart city markets.

She holds a magna cum laude BSEE from UC Davis and an MBA from UCLA Anderson, holds multiple patents, and serves on public and private boards. As CEO of LBZ Advisory, she advises executive teams and boards on high-stakes AI decisions across strategy, governance, and execution.

A gay woman who built her career in rooms not always designed for her, Liat learned early that friction can sharpen vision. That lived experience, combined with frontline AI deployment at scale, makes her uniquely qualified to write The Bias Advantage and show how unconventional leaders can win when the rules collapse.

Liat lives in Seattle with her wife and their two children.

AI can write, analyze, summarize, code, and create, and its capabilities are advancing at a remarkable pace. So as machines become more intelligent, what will keep humans indispensable?

Johan Roos believes the answer lies in what he calls “human magic”: the distinctly human capabilities that technology can support, but never replace. Johan is an internationally recognized strategy scholar, former business school dean, co-creator of LEGO Serious Play, and author of Human Magic.

In this episode of Career Sessions, Johan and J.R. explore why our advantage in an AI-powered world comes not from trying to compete with machines, but from becoming more human as AI gets smarter.

They discuss the five capabilities at the heart of human magic (curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration) and why practical wisdom and sound judgment are becoming increasingly valuable. They also examine the danger of “cognitive offloading”: relying so heavily on AI that the very skills that differentiate us begin to atrophy.

Johan shares what leaders should be doing differently in the AI era, including asking better questions, creating the conditions for their teams to think deeply, and focusing the AI conversation on transforming tasks rather than eliminating jobs.

The conversation also revisits the origins of LEGO Serious Play and what Johan learned about creativity, collaboration, and better decision-making by getting people out of conventional meetings and thinking with their hands. Those lessons may be even more relevant as organizations figure out how humans and AI should work together.

The takeaway: use AI intensely to prepare, but when the room is watching, show up as a human.

Preparing your workforce for the shift Johan Roos describes? PathWise offers human skills training for AI-exposed teams.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/johan-roos/.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

How To Stay Human In The Age Of AI, With Johan Roos

Artificial intelligence is changing the way we work at a remarkable pace. Every day, it seems like there’s a new tool that can write, analyze, summarize, code and even create. It sparked an important conversation about productivity, but perhaps an even more important one about people. As AI becomes more capable, what’s going to keep humans being indispensable? Will it be our knowledge, our experience, or could it be something even deeper like our judgment and creativity? Our ability to navigate ambiguity, or our capacity to lead other people through uncertainty, or something else perhaps.

My guest Johan Roos, has spent decades exploring these questions even before AI became mainstream. Johan is an internationally recognized strategy scholar, former dean of several leading business schools, and one of the pioneers behind LEGO Serious Play, a groundbreaking approach that’s transformed the way that organizations work, think, collaborate, and problem solve. His latest work, a book called Human Magic, explores how leaders can preserve the uniquely human qualities that technology can support but never replace.

Defining Human Magic And Core Human Capabilities

In our conversation, we’re going to discuss what wisdom looks like in an age of algorithms, why better leadership starts with better thinking, and how each of us can continue to create value in a world where intelligence is increasingly abundant, but sound judgment still remains remarkably rare. I’m J.R. Lowry, this is Career Sessions. Here’s my conversation with Johan.

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Johan, thanks for joining me today. It’s good to meet you.

Good to meet you, too.

Let’s get going. You have a new book out called Human Magic. You’ve spent decades studying strategy and leadership in organizations. Talk about what you mean by human magic and why it matters in particular now.

I define human magic as a set of distinctly human capabilities that machines can support but never replace. In the book, I group this into five, such as curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. The magic is not mystical. It’s what happens when a person, you and I, frame the question that algorithms hadn’t posed or we hold the room with real conviction. That’s what I mean with human magic.

This is particularly important now in an era where AI seems to be able to do more and more things every day. For the average person who’s thinking about how to survive in this world of AI from a professional perspective. What advice would you have for them about how to think about these uniquely human capabilities and to sharpen their thinking and use them to their advantage?

You’re right that the time is now to think about these things. The AI tools are amazing. I’m a user. I’m sure you are too and all our audience. We should do that. I’m a techno-optimist and techno-positive person. There is a certain danger to this as well. There is a seductive danger. Seduction is great. When things are nice and it flows and things are effortless, we are fantastically enchanted by this. There is a risk of a slippery slope that we, in a sense, stop doing certain things and we delegate.

I wouldn’t say our soul, but we delegate some of these capabilities or a part of our human magic to machines. We should be careful about that. Overall, it’s about being careful to think about what you’re doing. There’s lots of research now showing some dangerous patterns. Be careful and don’t get too enchanted so you go down what I call in the book the slippery slope of erosion rather than using these tools to amplify yourself and your human magic, you can say.

I’ve heard the expression cognitive rot to refer to at least one part of what you’re talking about, which is that people become so reliant on these tools that they start to dull the very skills that they need, like critical thinking, as an example. You’ve got the fact that the tools sometimes aren’t as great as we are at doing things. Hence, the idea of work slop and people handing over something that an AI tool has done and saying, “This is finished work,” without trying to add their human intelligence on top of it is another issue. We’re seeing both of those things, at least from my perspective.

You’re absolutely right. There’s plenty of words for this. The lighter touch, which is started with, I believe in ’24 or ’25. People started the word cognitive offloading. That doesn’t sound so dangerous, then there was like a cognitive surrender, cognitive replacement then I’ve heard brain rot. That’s a little bit too much because rot means you can’t go back. There’s something to this. Think of it as a muscle. I often tell people, “If you don’t use your muscles, what happens? They atrophy. If you don’t use your language skills, for instance, they atrophy.”

If you don’t use your jelly bean, it will atrophy. It is what I mean by the danger. These tools are so good now that they become almost effortless, then it’s very easy. None of our audience, neither you and me are lazy, but some people are lazy. It becomes like, “It’s so nice. Why don’t I just let the machine do this?” I start the morning and I immediately get my coffee and the screen up and running. I stayed there all day.

If you deduct AI from what you need to do? What’s left? It’s more just give it a thought. That’s why I have, after each of these chapters, a very friendly, nice little self-assessment. Not judgmental. It’s like, where are you on your creative thinking? Where are you on creativity? Where are your curiosity on communication? I’m not pragmatic. It’s like flagging a little bit of a warning. That’s all I want to do.

Part of the irony is that the people who are likely to pick up your book are a subset of the people who need your book. They’re probably the ones who are most already focused on continuing to keep their critical thinking, communication and collaboration skills sharp. This is something we all need to be working on. You can either let the tool take over for you, or you can figure out a way to harness these AI tools to your advantage. That’s going to be a key determinant as to whose careers are better than others.

Johan Roos: Don’t get too enchanted so you go down the slippery slope of erosion, rather than using these tools to amplify yourself and your human magic.

First of all, a lot of people will pick up the book. I’m super delighted that it came up on McKinsey’s list of AI books. I trust that they have some good judgment but I also trust that people then say, “This is an interesting book. Why don’t you pick it up?” It’s for everybody. I addressed the book to all AI-anxious and AI-excited professionals of the world, of which there’s many on various levels. For most things, there’s a short-term thing and there’s a longer-term thing.

Focusing On What AI Tools Cannot Replace

We tend to exaggerate all kinds of short-term impact of new technologies, and then we forget about the potential long-term radical consequences that we may not be seeing. You can say there’s going to be the have and the have-nots, the do and the do-nots, and the can and the cannots. Now, a lot of the tech brokers people respond to the question, what should young people do now? They say, “You should learn all of these amazing tools and you should be capable.” They’re right but it’s half true.

If you only try to run after what the tools can do, you will always be a little bit behind. I always tell people maybe you should focus more on what the tools cannot do. That is, they cannot be you. This is the grand message or almost the irony of the time. That the more capable the algorithms become, the more value humanism becomes. You cannot be replaced. Part of you can be replaced but your experience, your curiosity, creativity, and way to communicate cannot be replaced. It can be mimicked but your living experience cannot be replicated. Ensure that you continue to gain this living experience that is you.

That is an important point because as the tools are able to create a higher baseline answer for about anything, then what you add on top of it is the stories and the experience that you’ve got. Which the tools by definition aren’t going to know. For a lot of people, this is going to require becoming better storytellers and thinking more about what they can add on top of the tools. That’s going to be a challenge for some people that some will grab onto. It’s a challenge that others will probably feel intimidated by.

You could say storytellers, but also story creators and all of these fundamental things. Again, I have a whole chapter on communication. I start that chapter and each of the chapters you’ve seen with an anecdote about ancient times. We met some famous historical people. In communication, we meet Cicero, the famous consul in ancient Rome who was known because his slave Tiro took notes, stenography from what he did. We know that he could sway an audience in an amazing way.

He’s one of the first that has been documented on how you sway the audience. He didn’t do it by standing, holding his hand and talking, or telling people to sit down, shut up and listen to him. Rather he used what the Romans called the eloquence of the body. What we would refer to as body language and almost theatrical skills. I use some theatrics in this.

I urge people to say, “No machine can hold the room. You can hold the room.” That’s an extraordinarily important capability as a human being. We are social and we work. We work with other people, so we have to communicate. We have to explain. We have to describe. We also have to persuade. In doing that, we should learn even more how to use the eloquence of the body. Those are incredibly important skills to not forget.

Johan Roos: Shift the whole idea that you should know everything. Instead, focus on being able to ask really good, penetrating questions.

I would agree with you. At the leadership level, organizational level, what advice would you have for companies and other organizations about how to lead in this era of AI in the right way or how they are using AI in the right way?

I’ll speak as a scholar of strategy and leadership, but also as a leader because I’ve led several organizations. I’ve been part of the leadership team of several organizations. As a leader, often you think you should have the answer to all kinds of questions, and pretty quick because then you’re smart. You have a quick answer to things. These days, you can say that data is almost free. You can have anything around you all the time.

It shifts the whole idea that you should know everything. Instead, I often tell people, and I’m not the only one, a lot of people have been saying this. That you should be able to have some good questions. I’ve been reporting to five board of directors in my career. The best board members are the one that pesters you with good penetrating questions. Not to embarrass you or anything. It’s like a good academic reviewer. Not the one with a bad attitude.

It’s like somebody who’s asking these questions to help you. Now, that is a tremendously important leadership skill. Number two is creating the context in which your people, your team, your amazing teams can try to answer this. They’re probably closer to the action. Closer to the front line where things are happening. They probably know the best. They know the answers. If you can work on those two things, asking good, smart questions and creating the context of it then the algorithm will help to find the answers, challenge some of these questions, come with suggestions, and simulate whatever.

Leading With Judgment And Asking Penetrating Questions

The tools are amazing, but you should hold on to some of these things because no machine will have the lived experience you would have. With all the scars that we have, being through all of this, and anyone who’s done change processes and all that. All of the scars we have is your experience from which you draw, you intuit, and you bring things out. Invaluable. That is how you climb the value creation ladder in this world.

As a leader, you should be extraordinarily careful to delegate some of your judgment. Judgment for me is the behavioral output of wisdom, and nota bene. In 2024 and 2025, I was chairing a global group of very senior people in the context of another global organization. These were very big names and they were all CEOs or board members.

The only thing they talked about was efficiency. How many people can we get rid of because of the ChatGPT at that time? The conversation has shifted now because they start to see efficiency isn’t everything. Effectiveness could be a good thing. Peter drops his stuff, doing the right thing or doing things right. That’s very important.

I wonder how much of that is because of some of the backlash that they’ve been getting from employee populations. They want them to use these tools and the employees are like, “All you’re telling me is you’re going to use these tools to get rid of me. Why should I use these tools?” There’s been a bit of that tug of war that’s been going on between leaders and employees. I wonder how much of the shift that’s happening at the executive level is because of that. I wonder how much of it is more just they’ve had their own rethinking of this.

It feels to me like the conversation around AI has been very fluid over the months. We’ve gone from it’s something that people aren’t familiar with to, “It’s going to eat all of our jobs,” to, “I hate it and I don’t want to see it.” There’s this Gen Z rebellion against it. Now, there’s a bit of defensiveness going on among the big AI players and companies about trying to reposition it. It’s been fascinating to watch that play out. I’d love to get your views on that.

It’s equally fascinating because, as I said, you’ve spent the last couple of months meeting God knows how many CEOs, board members, CPOs, learning and development managers in 7 or 8 cities in different countries. The conversation is shifting but it should be shifting. The backlash is because of bad leadership. I say that generally, because how do you expect people to use some new technology if you scare the heck out of them?

If you start to look at the data now, there was a Microsoft report out in May about how co-work is used in the office suite. You can see almost more than half of it are like thinking tools, persuasion tools. It’s about decision and thinking. People are using this as well. The problem is when you start to talk about jobs, I keep telling people, “Don’t do that. Talk about tasks instead. Shift the unit of analysis from jobs to tasks.”

Here’s an anecdote. I met an interesting person whose CEO months ago said, “We’re going to be an AI agentic workforce.” With 25,000 employees, a big global company, and B2B, everybody said, “What does that mean?” He said, “I don’t know. What we should do is that we should develop more than 50,000 AI agents in six months.” Everybody goes, “Wow.” He said, “Nobody will be fired because of this. You’ll get fired because of something else but we will do this together.”

Everybody, the receptionist to the CEO should develop agents of various levels and stuff. Internship and interns and everything. Lo and behold, six months later, they had developed 54,000 AI agents with awards and ceremonies and all cool stuff across all functional areas of all levels. It’s super interesting. I said, “How many are useful?” They said, “A couple of hundred are useful and can help efficiency and effectiveness.” People were very happy and people were positive towards this. This was good leadership. You can say we get what we ask for if you scare people. That’s how it is.

Johan Roos: Don’t talk about jobs; talk about tasks instead. Shift the unit of analysis from jobs to tasks.

It’s a great example of how you turn it around and say, “We’re going to do it together. Not to you.” It completely changes employees’ mindsets about this. I see that happening in my own travels. I see that happening more lately where companies are encouraging people to use this and trying to demonstrate from the top down that it is about how to do tasks differently. Not necessarily how to replace people.

The Origins And Strategy Behind Lego Serious Play

I want to shift gears a little bit because before you wrote this book, you were one of the co-founders of LEGO Serious Play, which has had a massive impact on the business world. The idea of LEGO® and SERIOUS PLAY® is unconventional at first glance. Talk about the origins of it and the problem that you were trying to solve when it was first created.

It’s a bit of a baby for me. My colleague Bart Victor and I were professors at the IMD in Switzerland, a top renowned executive education place. For various reasons, we ended up doing experiments and stuff. People particularly thought I was a bit crazy because I pushed pretty hard. The real problem was this, and it’s very similar. The real problem was lack of depth in strategy conversations. I was a strategy professor and strategy consultant. I was teaching and doing a lot of stuff, working with companies. I found that I used the same tools, the same language, the same models and the same consultants and expected a different outcome. Which we know what that is. I thought that in these strategy conversations, it was pretty superficial.

The obvious people talked. The more introverted people were silent and so forth, so we changed the playing field. We changed the mode of what we call intentionality from, “Let’s not just have serious work. We could be a little bit playful,” then we changed the medium of communication from 2D flatland, Post-It note, flip charge or whatever, to physical stuff and it happened to be that LEGO® bricks are pretty useful but it’s not about the LEGO®. It’s the physicality of the stuff. What happened was, when people started to build their strategy or build their environment, their competition, their customer relationship, first of all, using their hands, they started to see different things.

Johan Roos: When people started to build their strategy using their hands, they started to see different things. Neurologically and sociologically, they started to talk to each other in a different way.

This is neurologically very interesting. Sociologically, they started to talk to each other in a different way. Almost anthropologically or psychologically, the introverts started to talk. The silent people got a voice. Suddenly, you got more out of the group than before. You had people say, “I didn’t know you thought that. Why haven’t you told me? We’ve been working together for five years.” Somebody leaned back and said, “I haven’t seen it this way before because they could look at it in 3D and they can change their perspective.” That was extraordinarily gratifying.

Out of that came a developmental process, and I’ve written about that. It is extraordinary what can happen. This is now, as you say, is used from NASA to small companies, universities, all over the world. Tens of thousands of people are using it. I’m super proud of it. It was a depth problem. My buddy Barton and I published a paper on what this method can be used for in the future, namely to get the same depth in specifying and designing the work that AI agents should do.

Now, you sit and do this. All the agents should do this and give me a prompt. We should have sub-agents or eight sub-agents doing this but that’s very superficial. Most of this research shows it already. Most of these are not super good. You can do much more. We’re proposing in a sense that if you use these kinds of more experiential, more almost creative arts therapy type of approaches, you can very quickly get to a better design, better specification of what AI agents should do. The same method, different problem, but same principles.

Clearly, creativity, collaboration and communication, the three of the five C’s that you talk about in Human Magic are also deeply enmeshed in LEGO Serious Play. I’m curious to get your perspective about how those three things and others, if relevant, evolved in the way that you think about them, creativity, collaboration, and communication and that LEGO Serious Play constructs how we interact with AI tools.

It is interesting. I’ve drawn on data from different sources, three sources. First is my own experience as a scholar, but also as a leader. Also, having implemented one of the first AI implementation projects globally in higher education two months after ChatGPT. The other source is talking to a lot of leaders about what do you think is going to be the impact of AI on leadership throughout 2025. I even designed an AI voice assistant to interview people to do this. It’s super interesting.

The third one is a 2024-2025 research project on LEGO Serious Play facilitators. I did study how they used AI tools in their facilitation. That’s where I got the inspiration for this. You can say that the five C’s, and which we haven’t talked about, practical wisdom, the overarching capability, is all through LEGO Serious Play.

Practical wisdom has a manifestation in a behavioral manifestation in judgment. When we make a judgment call, we say, this is good versus bad. This is the right thing versus the wrong thing. In fact, also this is beautiful versus not. It is also about, what in LEGO Serious Play, we call the simple guiding principles. That typically comes out of things. It’s your guidelines. Your gut feels articulated, which is an integral part of an LSP process.

In a sense, these are intertwined. LSP is in this and this is in LSP. All of it, all of the five Cs and practical wisdom. I’ll make that very clear in the next book, which we call Mastering LEGO Serious Play. I’m super delighted because in this world of AI and algorithms we can go back to hands-on, minds-on physical stuff and see how powerful that remains in order for us to remain and develop us as humans.

As you said earlier, just the very nature of working with your hands has a neurological impact that sparks different brain patterns than would happen if you were just staring at a whiteboard and trying to have the same conversation or sitting around a conference table. That’s the piece, coming back to the idea of human magic, that people need to grab onto. That’s the idea of how you are tapping into your human uniqueness as opposed to replicating things that increasingly a machine could do for you.

You’re right. My good professional friend, Mitch Resnick, who is the director of MIT Media Lab and who’s kindly endorsed the book as well. He’s written about this for a long time. They’ve done wonderful stuff. He’s written about kindergarten throughout life. Think about that. When we put our children or grandchildren in kindergarten, what do we tell them to do? What do we encourage them to do? Play with their hands. Eat some dirt, maybe. Use some bricks or some clay or Play-Doh or paper drawing.

All of that stuff is wonderful because why? We know it’s experimenting. There’s old theories about how we experience the world or we discover the world through our hands. What happens when we put them in school? Sit down, be silent, and listen. His idea is we should have this kindergarten feeling throughout life and I am so with him. LEGO Serious Play is an attempt in all modesty to encourage that feeling in the spirit of human magic.

Practical Wisdom, Ethics, And The Limits Of AI Thinking

Many people lose that childish nature. Almost everybody does by the time they become adults, certainly. You’re essentially trying to tap back into that to get them to step back from a problem. See it in a different light and have fun with their colleagues. Those things don’t happen very often in workplaces anymore. Yet they can unleash great, collective, and creative ideas. That’s the power of the whole thing.

It won’t happen if you scare the heck out of people by saying, “Use these tools and we can make you redundant.” That’s not the way to go. Hopefully, collectively, leadership has learned and approached this as a smart way. We cannot be naive. There are fields where we have to push hard and do hard stuff. I do talk a little bit about defense and the military in one of the final chapters. What happens in a world where we delegate these decision calls, the ultimate one as well, to a machine?

I do refer to some of these amazing science fiction authors at the end. You have Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke. They are not just movies, but good quality literature on imagining a world where the machines decide what happens when humans are either drugged or through pleasure, as it is in A Brave New World, or through fear, as it is in 1984.

We do Robert’s dream of electric sheep. It’s a very good question asked by Philip K. Dick many years ago. I often urge people at the end, I’ll say, “Read more stuff. Expose yourself to what’s happening out there and broaden your mind and show that you as a human are broad enough,” and move ahead so that you’re not bitten in the rear end by the machine.

This comes back to your idea of wisdom relative to intelligence. There’s a difference between the two. We’re realizing now, to your point from earlier, practical wisdom is much more important and much more human than mere intelligence. You can find the answers to almost anything online now. It’s amazing. At the snap of a finger and written in a paragraph form for you or whatever form you want for that matter. The interpretation of that, the judgment of that is a very key human skill that we need to hang on to and get better at.

Isn’t it interesting that when we talk about wisdom in a sense, we visualize wisdom typically by somebody looking like Dumbledore? You’re wondering what is wise about this person? It’s almost like a life experience. You think of it as somebody who’s experienced a lot in life and that’s what it is. This is nothing new in it. Throughout different cultures, there are words for wisdom. It’s the habit of making a decision and taking actions that are good, not just for me, myself and I, but for the community I’m part of. This was the idea that leaders should have more than intelligence, know what, or technical skills like know how, and being a little bit street smart.

They should also have this above idea of looking after the community. It’s so true today. I define it in the book as the almost emergent property of these five Cs, or even the orchestrator, you can say also. These are things we should pay extraordinary heed to and be careful about cultivating. When people say to me, “What is it?” I said, “You can think of it as the ability to answer in the way I just said. That’s good not just for you, but also for others. The question, what matters? What is right? What resonates where you are in your context? What will work in your situation?”

It’s very context-specific stuff. If you start to delegate these questions to the algorithm, you are moving from green to amber towards the red light in your warning signal system. You should be extraordinarily careful so that the last question will not be or should I think, what is right? What works? When you do that, you are almost like abusing a large language model assuming it’s a large thinking model with ethical standards and living experience. Sorry, folks, it’s not.

The tools are so good. We’ve talked about that at several points in the conversation they will give you an eloquent answer to just about any question that you ask. They do a pretty good job of imitating thinking. Not just a probabilistic collection of words strung together that turns out to be pretty gosh darn good. Most people don’t understand the technical underpinnings of a large language model. They take it more at face value because they see the outputs of it. That’s where you start to get into the slippery slope that you talked about earlier.

The producers of this, as smart and brilliant as they are, also read psychology. They know what happens if you add to an output or you start an output and answer with. This is brilliant. What a great question you’re posing. You get sucked into it. This is like a smart move. I’m just awaiting an advertising model for this and then it will be dangerous for us but this is very important. It’s very important for young people to be aware of this and be made aware of this. I met parents in different countries who are very worried about their 8 to 12-year-olds, for example, who challenge them and say, “No, mom. ChatGPT says, or perplexity says this. You’re wrong.”

Also, I’ve had parents who are senior professionals, and they bring up these issues such as, “How will our children be able to communicate and collaborate? There’s evidence that people are using this. This is when people withdraw.” You almost like to reduce your emotional intelligence. You reduce your critical thinking. You reduce your sense of engaging with others except online. There’s some real warning signals out there about young people’s first best friend or boyfriend or girlfriend is now an AI tool.

Critical Thinking And Optimism For The Future Of Work

I’ve heard some of those same stories, too. People are using it as a replacement for therapy because therapy is hard to get, especially here in the United States. We have a shortage of therapists available, so people are turning to these tools for that. We have to keep reminding people, and we saw this with social media. There is a dark underbelly to this whole thing that you need to be aware of. If you’re not aware of that or you’re ignoring the perils of it, you’re going to be slipping down that slope.

You’re so right. I was at the Luxembourg School of Business and met Joel Mokyr, the Nobel Prize winner in Economics in 2025. When asked, he said very clearly, “AI will answer your questions. It will not tell you which questions matter,” which of course is a statement anyone can say but said from such a strong person and super charming man. It’s a good reminder. You can get answers to anything but who’s in charge here? You or the machine? Who should ask the question? You can bounce things. There’s a wonderful way of using the tools as a critical thinking of yourself for a reviewer.

You have to work hard on that. If we don’t work hard on this, we will go down the slippery slope. If you work hard and I work hard with these tools, I work 25 versions of this and I challenge myself. I go back and forth. I’m a professor, so I’m used to tough reviews, but go for it. If you don’t do that, it’s so easy to take this first thing and say, “This is my output.” It’s potentially devastating. Three of the big four consulting firms in the last nine months have had to retract and pay for things that were wrong in their major report.

Which is always embarrassing when you’re a big consulting firm.

Potentially devastating.

With all of this in mind, what gives you optimism about the future of leadership and work?

I am an optimist in myself. I’ve always been an optimist and I’m a techno-optimist, but to quote Mokyr, “What could possibly be wrong? Political stupidity.” It is in a sense. I think it’s fantastic. New tools have always come to us and we’ve used them in the same way. First, there’s a hype and then we know the curve and then go down. It’s always changing. This one is just bigger and faster than anything else we’ve seen.

We’re humans. We survive. It’s a species we survive. One or two of us may fall around, fall outside but as humans, we will survive. We are super agile. It’s going to be a rough ride here, but it’s going to be a heck of a ride. I’m very positive in a sense that this will be a better world. It’s very easy to be a doomsayer. A lot of people make a lot of money, selling books and saying the world will go under or technology will kill us and all that. We love to go and see all of these movies about Terminator and all that but we will prevail.

We will come up with new stuff. There will be technologies throughout history. We’ve seen these technologies that change things dramatically. It will destroy and will pollute. There will be new technology that will take care of the pollution and it will reduce things. There will be like two steps forward, one back. Three steps forward, one back all the time. We have a bright future ahead of us.

Last question. If there’s one idea that you would want our audience to take away from human magic in particular about the way they lead or the way they make decisions or the way they approach their careers, what would it be?

I can do an overall and a little bit more practical one. Overall, in a sense, our advantage is to become more human as AI gets smarter. Not less human. Our advantage becomes more human as AI becomes smarter. Not less. For anyone who’s working as a professional, we like to do things. We read stuff. We prepare, and then we present them. We do all of this stuff. I will say use AI at full intensity to prepare but then show up as a human when the room is watching.

Johan Roos: Our advantage is to become more human as AI gets smarter, not less. Use AI at full intensity to prepare, but show up as a human when the room is watching.

It’s been a fascinating conversation. It’s certainly a very thought-provoking one and a very timely one, given that AI is upon us in full force. I thank you for being with me. It was great also to hear your perspectives as one of the co-founders of LEGO Serious Play, which as I said earlier, it’s a huge impact on the business world and beyond. Thank you for your contributions. Thank you for your thoughts and your time.

Thank you. If anyone is interested, it’s very simple, I’m at HumanMagic.one. If you do dot-com or org, you’ll get into the magician’s society.

Good enough. Thank you again.

—

Key Takeaways: Cultivating Your Human Advantage

Lots to think about from the conversation that I had with Johan. First, as AI becomes more intelligent, it becomes even more important for us to tap into our unique human capabilities. Things like curiosity, creation and collaboration. That’s because it’s becoming less important to be the person who knows the most. It’s about becoming the person who has sound judgment, who can navigate ambiguity, who can ask better questions, who can build trust with others, who can help others make sense of complexity. These are the capabilities, as Johan said, that become more, not less valuable as technology advances.

Second is that leadership is increasingly about the idea of creating conditions for better thinking. Johan started down this path when he first conceived the idea of LEGO Serious Play. In fairness, he probably was thinking about it before then. He changed the world in the way that people started to look at how you can take something like playing with a bunch of Lego bricks and use it to foster better judgment, decision making, collaboration and creativity in an amazing way.

In our era of AI, this becomes even more important. The way that you can tap into our human uniqueness and help people harness it in a way that will help make them better as individuals, as teams and as organizations. The third thing that I would highlight is the fact that how you use these tools is important. If you are using them to do your work for you, you are just hurting yourself in the long term because you are going to erode your strengths. The things that make you human, the creativity and the curiosity and all of those things.

If you use AI to make you better, then you are tapping into its strengths without giving up the things that make you strong. That, to me, is a huge difference that will determine whether you thrive in our era of AI or potentially struggle in our era of AI. I would encourage all of you to think about how do I make these tools work for me as opposed to being imposed upon me?

All of that will come together in the way that we go through our careers, the way that we progress through organizations, the way that we lead others, and ultimately the way that we coexist with AI and aren’t undone by it. It’s an important moment. I hope you took a lot away from this conversation. As always, I invite you to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Spotify. If you found the discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise or our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

Important Links

• Johan Roos
• Johan Roos on LinkedIn
• Human Magic: Leading with Wisdom in an Age of Algorithms
• LEGO Serious Play
• Mitch Resnick on LinkedIn
• Joel Mokyr
• PathWisdom Newsletter
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on X
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram

About Johan Roos

Johan Roos serves as Senior Advisor to the Global Peter Drucker Forum, where he helped initiate the Next Management initiative on leadership, and he is Professor in Strategy and Executive Advisor at Hult International Business School (Boston, San Francisco, Dubai, London). Throughout his career, Johan has been driven by curiosity about how people and institutions learn, adapt, and rediscover their imagination when technology changes the rules. This interest led him to co-invent the globally adopted LEGO® Serious Play® methodology, enabling thousands of organizations to tackle complex challenges through imaginative, hands-on exploration.

His latest book, Human Magic: Leading with Wisdom in an Age of Algorithms (Routledge, 2026), distills multi-year research with executives and organizations into a practical framework for preserving curiosity, practical wisdom, and human agency when intelligent machines can provide instant answers. Across his roles as educator, advisor, investor, and speaker, Johan’s work is animated by a simple conviction: management, at its best, is humanity at work.

Why do some teams consistently outperform while others, with equally talented people, struggle with endless meetings, constant interruptions, and burnout?

In this episode of Career Sessions, J.R. Lowry sits down with organizational psychologist and bestselling author Ron Friedman to explore what separates exceptional teams from average ones. Drawing on research involving more than 6,000 workers for his new book, Super Teams, Ron reveals that only about 8% of teams qualified as “super teams,” and that what distinguishes them often runs counter to conventional wisdom about productivity, collaboration, and where work should happen.

Their conversation covers:

• Why how a team works matters more than where it works, and what that means for the ongoing debate over remote, hybrid, and in-office work
• How excessive meetings and always-on communication undermine productivity, and why great teams establish clear meeting guidelines
• Why individual productivity hacks can actually create bottlenecks for the rest of the team
• The importance of protecting focused work and why “brainwriting” can produce better ideas than traditional brainstorming
• How active recovery outside of work can improve performance, and why leaders’ recovery habits can affect their teams
• The three ingredients of workplace trust: competence, caring, and consistency
• Why shared goals, role clarity, and interdependence are essential for creating a true team mentality
• Practical ways to take control of your workday by looking forward, looking backward, and staying present
• Why working longer hours eventually produces diminishing (and even negative) returns
• How high-performing teams are approaching AI differently, including openly sharing prompts and learning from one another rather than hiding their AI use

The central message is simple: great teams aren’t built by assembling the smartest people or forcing more collaboration. They’re built intentionally, by creating the conditions that allow talented people to do their best work, both individually and together.

Whether you lead a team or work as part of one, this conversation offers practical, research-backed ideas for reducing friction, building trust, protecting people’s time, and creating a team that performs at a higher level.

Subscribe to Career Sessions on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts for weekly conversations on careers, leadership, and the changing world of work.

Explore PathWise’s corporate training workshops to bring the ideas from this episode to your whole team.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/ron-friedman/.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Why Great Teams Work Differently, With Ron Friedman

Think about the best team that you have ever been part of. Odds are you didn’t just accomplish more. You looked forward to going to work. You trusted the people around you. Meetings felt productive instead of draining. You challenge one another and you learn from one another. The whole truly became greater than the sum of the parts. Now, think about the worst team you’ve ever worked on. Probably the same level of talent, if we’re honest. The same good intentions. Yet, somehow, everything felt harder.

Communication was difficult. Meetings multiplied. Progress slowed. Often, by the end of the day, you and probably everyone else went home exhausted. What separates great teams from the average ones? Is it the leader? Is it the culture? Is it the talent? Are we asking the wrong questions altogether? Our guest Ron Friedman, believes we have misunderstood teamwork for years. He is an organizational Psychologist, Bestselling Author, and one of the leading experts on human performance at work. His new book, Superteams draws on years of research into what the highest performing teams do differently.

Many of the findings are surprisingly counterintuitive. In our conversation, we’re going to explore why most teams never reach their potential, the hidden habits that separate exceptional teams from everyone else, why so many modern workplaces make collaboration harder rather than the easier and how AI is posed to reshape teamwork in the years ahead. Whether you lead a team or work on one, this episode will change the way you think about what it means to perform at your best. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions.

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Ron, thanks for joining me.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Let’s dive right in. You have spent years studying high-performance teams across a broad range of industries. Before we talk about what the best teams do. What strikes you most about what the average or less than average teams do?

Eliminating The Time Drain Of Meetings And Messages

The tragic thing when you study average teams is how much of their time is wasted. According to our data, the average worker spends eighteen hours a week in meetings. They then lose another eleven hours a week digging themselves out of messages. The question is, what does that leave for actual real work? It’s about a day.

What happens when you have to do a week’s worth of work in a single day? You find ways of creating more time. You come in early. You stay late. You work weekends. That approach is what is contributing to burnout. We spend so much time wringing our hands saying, “Why are people getting burnt out?” A better question is, how do they manage to get any work done in the first place?

I know you talked about a lot of things that go on, not just meetings but other things that we do at work. They’re well-intended, but they end up working against our individual and collective productivity. Talk about some of those.

Why Individual Productivity Hacks Fail Teams

When you look online, you see a lot of productivity hacks. You see things like, “If you want to get work done, put your phone in the other room, or turn off your notifications, or only check your email a few times a day.” That approach might work for the individual. When you’re working on a team, one person’s deep work becomes another person’s bottleneck. When we studied what high-performing teams do differently, we discovered that the productivity tips that you would assume would lead to individual productivity. Therefore, team productivity ends up not working that way.

They end up having no effect on a team’s productivity. Again, it’s because it slows down the team as a whole. The better solution and this is what we find on high performing teams. They coordinate together to say, “We’re going to take 90 minutes on a Tuesday. Nobody has to check their email. Instead, everybody can get their deep work done.” Once that’s over, we’re all going to check our email together. That enables teams to get more done by coordinating their efforts. Instead of relying on people just coming up with their own rules for themselves.

This is one of the interesting things that you bring to bear. There’s this assumption, as you said a minute ago, that individual productivity translates into team productivity. I was in a meeting where we were incredibly still talking about returning to office and how many days people need to be in the office. We’re having this debate about individual productivity versus what an end up meaning for the team. This is a counterintuitive thing that comes out of your research that individual productivity does not necessarily translate into team productivity. It certainly ought to be driving people to rethink some of the things that hacks or not, they’ve been told.

To your point about a team’s location. That’s another counterintuitive finding that we uncovered in the research. This might be a good opportunity to take a step back and just explain how this research works. My team and I interviewed over 6,000 workers in a wide variety of industries and we asked them two simple questions about their teams. 1) How effective is your team at achieving its goals? 2) Compared to other teams in your industry, how would you rate your team’s performance?

We took the teams with a perfect score. It was a very small group. About 8% of teams qualify. We call them superteams. We look to see what the super teams do differently. We looked at everything from how they structured their day to how they run their meetings. To even how they recover during their off hours. What we discovered is that superteams share three key strengths. The first is they get more done by better managing their time, energy, and attention.

They don’t get stuck losing half their week to meetings. They are much more deliberate with their time, and we can talk more about how they go about doing that. The second strength is, they don’t just collaborate well. They actively make one another better. The third is, even when things are going well, they’re not satisfied. They’re constantly looking to build their skills and improve over time. The encouraging piece. Is every one of those strengths learnable? Which means by building the right habits, any team can dramatically improve its performance.

Focusing On How Teams Work Over Where They Work

Now, within that research, we looked at what locations are high-performing teams, most likely to form it. Are they most likely to form in remote teams? Are they most likely to form in office teams? You might assume, because they’re more collaborative. When you’re in person, maybe that’s the key or maybe it’s the best of both worlds. You want hybrid teams to improve the chance of having a high performing team. What we discovered is that location doesn’t matter. The reason it doesn’t matter is because how a team works is vastly more important than where a team works.

You can have everyone at the office but if all they’re doing is getting on a Zoom, which they could have attended two hours ago. That’s not bringing out the best in people. The same issue arises and slightly different flavor in remote teams. What happens with remote teams? They over compensate for not being in the same room. They’re sending more emails and spending more time in meetings. The bottom line is, taking advantage of how a team works is critical and you have to plan around what the team is trying to achieve. Not simply bringing it down to where we are going to work because that oversimplifies the problem.

That short statement that you made in the book, how a team works is more important than where a team works. It has been in my head since I heard it as I was listening to the audiobook. It’s something that probably flies in the face of what a lot of people think, and certainly forms the basis of all of these debates that are happening about how many days people should be in the office. The other thing that you’re bringing up that’s important, and I don’t want to go buy it. It’s this idea that these teams talked about how they want to work together and how they want to use their time. I can’t think of any team that I’ve been on in recent memory that has gone through that stuff.

That’s unfortunate. What it comes down to is being aware of some of this research. Once you have that awareness, that how a team works is more important than where a team works. You can start asking some important questions like, what constitutes a good meeting? The easiest way of eliminating these unnecessary meetings is getting clear with your team on what deserves a meeting and what does. I call these meeting guidelines.

Implementing Decision-Driven Meeting Guidelines

One of the most interesting things I covered while doing the research on high-performing teams. When you look at superteams, they’re much more deliberate with their hours in meetings. Within my team, we have a very simple meeting guideline. No decision, no meeting. If you have a question, pick up the phone or send an email. If you have an update, send a video capture or share a spreadsheet. Unless there’s a decision to be made, we’re not going to pull people away from doing their jobs.

Another example of a meeting guideline that I came across while doing the research for Superteams is no spectators. This is a meeting guideline by the company called Percolate in New York City. They have a meeting guide line. No specters. If you’re not contributing, you don’t need to be in the meeting. What all of these meeting guidelines do is ensure that people’s time in the office is well spent instead of having it just completely monopolized by things that feel like they’re setting people back. Which then forces them to make up for lost hours by multitasking or coming in after hours.

The meeting point certainly was a big focus in the first few chapters of your book and the amount of time people spend in meetings, that surrounds the time that they spend in meetings, and that negative effect that has. It leads people to multitask, which as you point out in the book and we know, doesn’t work because of your task switching. It’s got a cognitive drain that comes with it. You get into some of the things that people are doing like trying to get rid of all the recurring meetings. There’s another example you have in the book that talks about that. Maybe you can share that. I thought that was all a good way of very good practical tips for how to think about the scourge of recurring meetings.

Again, when we talk about the strengths of Superteams. What separates them from average teams? The first one is they get more done by better managing their time, energy and attention. That, for better or for worse, starts with getting rid of unnecessary meetings. We talked about meeting guidelines. That’s one pathway. When we look at the data, superteams are 50% better at avoiding unnecessary meetings. Their 54% out of voiding recurring meetings. Recurring meetings are particularly problematic because they’re so difficult to get off your calendar once they’re on.

High Performing Teams: Individual productivity hacks don’t equal team success. When one person goes dark without coordination, it creates a bottleneck for everyone else. Learn how super teams align their deep work.

In order to get rid of a recurring meeting, you have to have a very uncomfortable conversation with a colleague and say, “I don’t feel like our time together is as well spent anymore.” It’s almost like breaking up with someone. People refer to a voice in that conversation and so they put it off and they keep going to the same useless meeting week after week. There are a number of ways of limiting those. I also think that a big part of this is having some better hygiene around who needs to be in the room. No spectators. There’s one guideline.

More importantly than that, it’s raising awareness of the fact that the more people you have in the room, the longer the meeting becomes and the worse the decision-making becomes. What happens is, more people in the room mean everyone feels like they need to contribute. The meeting is more likely to go off the rails. We have research showing that in the past seven people, the decision-making quality plummets by 10% and it gets worse the more people you add.

In Superteams I give an example of a sample email that you can send the next time you want to diplomatically uninvite someone from a meeting. What it basically comes down to is saying to them, “I’m having this meeting. I would love to share your point of view. What do you think is important for me to point out? I’m happy to circle back with you and let what was determined and what the next steps are.” A lot of times, people think they want to be in the room. What they want is they want a disability and be able to contribute. When you allow them those two things they no longer feel compelled to be in the meeting.

There’s a lot of great tips in the book about how to deal with meetings. Meetings probably along with managers would be in most people’s top three things and annoy them about work. It’s probably policies, managers, and meetings. Not necessarily in that order. You also talked about the fact that I don’t want to gloss over it that focus work is one of the defining characteristics in terms of the more productive teams.

A lot of times, organizations say they want collaboration but what they get is constant togetherness. I use that term because when we are working with our email on, with our slack on, with our text messaging right next to us, it becomes difficult to get actual work done. When you look at what differentiates superteams, it’s the ability to do real work during regular work hours. This is the big challenge that most people have with work and this is why so many people prefer to work from home. It’s because of the constant disruption.

One of the interesting findings in our research is that we asked people. We gave them a very long list of amenities and we said, “Which of these do you have in your office?” Included things like ping pong table, the office dog, collaborative spaces and then private offices. As it turns out, there’s only one amenity that predicts having a superteam. That amenity is a quiet space to do focused work. Again, it speaks to what matters when it comes to having a high performing team. It’s allowing people to do real work during regular work hours.

You look at a variety of highly creative teams. In the book I talk about the examples of Fleetwood Mac and Abba and a variety of other creative acts. The key to their success often comes down to is the ability to toggle between individual focused work and then coming together as a group to refine those ideas. A great example in the research that is worth considering is, a lot of times in offices, we say, “We’re all going to go into the conference room and we’re going to brainstorm because we want to be creative. We want to pull everyone in and get everyone’s ideas.”

Replacing Brainstorming With Brainwriting

When you look at the research, what you find is, if you want more ideas and higher quality ideas, the solution isn’t to brainstorm. It’s to do something called brain writing. What brain writing involves is having everyone as individuals come up with their own ideas and then take those into the conference room and exchange them with one another so that we can build on people’s individual ideas.

What happens when you brainstorm is, the first person who speaks ends up anchoring everyone around the same idea. Now, we’re evaluating whether that idea has merit, instead of coming up with our own ideas. It’s a great example of, if you want people to do their best work. You need to allow them the opportunity to get real focused work during work hours. Otherwise, it’s never going to happen.

That leads naturally into linkage between being on one of these superteams and health and enjoyment as well.

It’s remarkable. Being on a high-performing team isn’t just about being more productive. It’s about being healthier. A big part of it has to do with the fact that the superteams are using their off-hours differently. They’re recovering much more effectively, and part of it is the understanding that when it comes to recovery, simply not working is not enough. A lot of people assume that when they’re not working, they’re automatically recovering.

What the research shows is passive activities. Things like scrolling Instagram or binging Netflix. That can help you unwind, but it doesn’t help you recover your energy quite as effectively as active recovery. Active recovery is doing things like building new skills or challenging yourself in new ways. In the research, they’re called Mastery Experience.

That can mean playing a new song on the piano or trying out a new dish in the kitchen or entering a pickleball tournament. The key is to try something that stretches your skills and brings out challenges in you in a new way. A lot of times, when it comes to recovery, people think it’s time to slow down. It’s time to relax. A better approach is not to slow down, but to accelerate in a different direction.

That distinction between active recovery and other restful activities is an important one because most people lump it all together.

At the end of the day, we’re so exhausted. We just want to just do nothing and zone out. The challenge with the way that we’re zoning out is we’re exposing ourselves to new stimuli. It’s more processing and more thinking. The more scattered your thinking, the more difficult it is for you to feel like you’re restoring your energy. One of the more interesting findings in the research to me is how a leader’s recovery impacts the team’s performance that next day. That’s counterintuitive to me.

High Performing Teams: If there’s no decision to be made, cancel the meeting. Establishing strict team meeting guidelines protects focused work time and accelerates execution.

If you’re leading a team, and you go out with your wife dancing. Your team is more likely to perform better than the following day. Now, what is the way you recover has anything to do with the team? It’s because a well-rested leader is in a good mood. When the leaders are in a good mood, the team is more committed to their work and tends to do a better job. Far from thinking about this as just something extravagant. It’s like, “They recover better and good for them.” No, this is a pathway by which superteams become more effective.

There’s an emotional contagion that exists in any group of people. Workplace teams wouldn’t be an exception to that. If people come in energized and committed, the teams are going to do better work. The manager of that team probably has an outsourced impact on the emotional contagion within the team. My wife and I don’t dance, but if we did go out dancing, I would probably come in the next morning feeling energized and that’s entertaining.

Here’s another counterintuitive finding along the same lines of accelerating in different directions. We found in our data that on superteams, the leaders are more likely to be supportive of the employee moonlighting outside of work. That’s very counterintuitive. A lot of leaders think, “I want my employees to be focused on this job. I don’t want them taking on another job. That’s not good for them.” What we find in the research is that when people moonlight, or they take on a side gig, so long as they’re doing it for reasons of wanting to expand their skills and be good at something. That is energizing and leads them to be more engaged in their day-to-day job.

If they’re doing it because they’re struggling financially and they need to make ends meet. That’s not quite as effective for recovery. If they’re doing it out of passion or interest or curiosity, it’s beneficial. The best leaders are supported because what it goes to show is that the leader is authentically behind you as a person. They want you to succeed in life, grow and be energized. They’re not selfishly thinking about what’s good for them and their department. By contrast, if a leader does say, “You can’t do that. I’m not going to support it. I don’t want to hear about it.” That tells you that the leader is self-interested. It creates friction in the relationship.

Let’s talk also about trust. You have a fair amount of focus in the book about how these superteams build trust and some of the different practices that they use to do. Talk about some of the things that distinguish the way that they go about establishing and maintaining trust and how that differs from what the other 90% odd of teams are doing.

You might remember this. I didn’t write about trust in my first book, The Best Place to Work because I felt like trust was obvious. What I discovered while doing the research for this book is you have a lot of new interesting research about how trust gets built and how to sustain it. To build a trusting relationship is a skill, and anybody can develop that skill. It starts with understanding what the three factors are that contribute to trust in a workplace relationship.

Building Trust Through Competence Caring And Consistency

In Superteams, I talk about what those are. I call the three Cs. Its Competence, Caring and Consistency. The first one is competent. If you don’t feel like your teammate or your manager is competent at their job, you’re not going to trust them. Pretty obvious. That’s how trust is built. Trust is built on competence. The second thing is, it’s not enough to be competent. You also need to feel like they care about you. If that person is super competent but they don’t have your back or they’re selfish, you’re not going to trust them. You need both things.

The third thing is just as crucial and it’s consistency. If that person that you’re dealing with or your colleague or your manager is competent and caring but they’re not consistent. Sometimes they disappear for days at a time. You can’t trust them. The bottom line is, you need to focus on all three in order to build trusting relationships, and the challenges all of us fail at these at one point or another. It’s not because we’re bad people. It’s because we experienced a time crunch that makes it difficult to focus on all three.

The biggest example, and probably the least obvious is consistency. You might be a caring person. You might be a confident person, but if you are slammed, you’re not going to check your email for days. It’s a natural reaction to trying to prioritize and triage. What this research tells us is if you want to be a high-performing leader, it’s crucial that you respond to people consistently or to anticipate that busy period and say, “I’m going to be under the gun for the next few days. I may be slow and responding but you can text me if it’s urgent.” That rebuilds that consistency that might break in advance preventing people from distrusting you in the future.

I like that chapter in particular. What stood with me about it is that it doesn’t deal in the vague ideas of what trust might be. It doesn’t make the assumption that trust is obvious to everybody because to your point, there are specific things that we can do to build or erode trust. It’s important in a team to work at having the balance of those things skew toward the things that build trust. Again thinking from personal experience, a lot of teams put too little focus into thinking about the deliberate ways that they can build trust with each other.

I appreciate your point about not having very much that was abstract that you’re seeing my bias. If a term is like, even remotely abstract, it’s gone. My job is to entertain people and make it accessible. If I’m using an abstract word, then people are tuning out. I try hard to make this stuff relatable and actionable. To your point about trust, I do believe it’s a skill.

Once you understand that caring, competency, consistency are at the core, it becomes easy to build that trust. Especially at the beginning of a relationship, it’s like, “I need to demonstrate that I care about this person. I need to show my competence. I need to be consistent.” If you do that with a new client or a new colleague for a period of a couple of weeks, they’re going to trust you and it’s because you understand the formula and you execute it.

I want to zoom out and talk a little bit more about the macro level. Before we do that, for our audience that’s reading, if you are going to give them one or two key tips to drive near term performance of their team. Where would you tell them to start?

It depends on what the pain point is but let me use this opportunity to talk about where a lot of teams go wrong. That is, a lot of leaders don’t have an understanding of how you build a team mentality. A lot of people work in what are “teams,” but they don’t have that team mentality. It’s because they don’t attend to the three basics of forming that team mentality. Here’s what those basics are, and every team needs these.

You tend to see these more often in sports than you do at work. It’s part of the reason why we have so many dysfunctional teams. The first thing is, you need a shared goal. You need an outcome that everyone is pushing forward together. In sports, the shared goal is obvious. It’s a victory, but it works. It’s often not obvious. If I’m a designer and you are a copywriter. It’s not clear that we have a shared goal sometimes.

A lot of times, you have people who are sitting together next to one another for years and don’t know how their work contributed to one another. People need that shared goal. A lot of times also people have different goals at work. If I want to go home at 5:00 to drive my kids to soccer, and you’re trying to get a promotion. We’re going to have conflicting goals, then that’s going to lead to tension. The second thing you need once you have that shared goal, you need role clarity. I need to know what I’m responsible for. I need to know what you’re responsible for, and I need to know how those two things integrate to one another.

If we don’t have role clarity, we’re going to drop some balls because it’s your responsibility and you think it’s my responsibility or we’re going to have turf wars, because both of us claim the same responsibility. We need to be clear on what our roles are. The third thing you need is interdependence. Interdependence is just a fancy psychological term. All it means is we need to feel like we need each other in order to be successful.

High Performing Teams: Trust isn’t abstract, it’s a skill. By mastering competence, caring, and consistency, leaders build resilient and high-performing workplace relationships.

A lot of teams have competitor teammates. For example, if you have two salespeople and they each have their individual quota. Not only do they not have that shared goal or interdependence. They are now viewing one another as competitors. You need to feel like you need each other in order to be successful. When you have those three things, that shared goal, the role clarity, and interdependence, that’s when you create that team mentality. A lot of teams don’t have that. It’s why their teams are basically a recipe for dysfunction.

One thing you didn’t mention in that list was processes. I think about the grippy framework of why we have conflicts. Conflicts run goals, roles, processes or interpersonal relationships. You’ve covered goals and roles. Give everything you said about the importance of teams talking about how they work. Processes to come into the picture at some point, too.

I would subsume that under role clarity because the process is part of it. What I will say is, we’re not talking about creating a high-performing team yet. We’re just talking about how you create a team mentality. I need to know what my role is. Ideally, it’s part of a dial in process. In order to feel like a team, you can apply this framework quite easily. If you think about people entering an elevator, they’re strangers. They don’t know each other. They’re not a team.

The moment the elevator stops working, now they’re a team. What happened? They have that shared goal. That’s the key. It’s all about creating that team mentality. A lot of organizations don’t have that because it’s everyone out for themselves. We could talk about building trust until the cows come home but unless people have that team mentality, there’s no value to establishing trust. You need to start with the team mentality.

Come back to the tips that you give to people one or two things where to start.

For individuals, one of the things we looked at within our research on how high performing teams are managing to be so much more effective in terms of productivity was how they structure their hours at work. This is something that anybody can do as individuals, regardless of how your team is performing. It’s just getting more done and feeling more proactive with your day. By the way, that’s the key to having a successful day. It’s to feel like you played offense. You weren’t just playing defense reacting to people’s emails, phone calls and meeting requests. You got done what you intended to get done.

Part of how they managed to do that so effectively is they used some advanced planning. They time box. I talked about this as a framework of looking forward, looking backward and staying present. The looking forward part starts with Friday afternoon or Sunday morning. Look at your schedule for the following week and then take some empty time slots and indicate on your calendar. Set an appointment with yourself about what you’re planning to do during that time slot so it doesn’t end up being eaten up by someone else.

Set an appointment with yourself. Some people call this time boxing. That’s one of the keys to how high performing teams get more done. The second part is looking backwards. That means reflecting on how your time was spent. Part of this is people in high-performing teams tend to time track where the time went during the day to reflect on, was that a good usage? Was it a bad usage of time? What am I going to do differently next time?

Another part of it is, when you have a good day, here’s a simple way of doing it. If you’re not time tracking, when you have a good day, think to yourself, “That was a good day. How do I have more days like that? What can I learn from this?” Conversely, if you had a bad day at the office, think about, “That did not go. How do I avoid days like that in the future?” When you have that ongoing reflection, you’re going to get better with using your time more effectively.

The final point of staying present. When we are transitioning between tasks, that’s when we’re at our most distractible. If you think about when you check your phone, it’s when you’ve completed one task and you’re about to start another. The fewer transition points, the less distractible you become. If you’re able to, try to batch similar tasks together so that you have fewer transition points. You now have the formula, look forward, look backwards, and stay present. That’s how members of super teams get more done.

We’ve talked a lot about what individuals can do and also what a team should do collectively. At the organizational level, what would you recommend ahead of HR or people in culture or a CEO about how to apply what you’ve covered in super teams to their organization? What would you tell them to stop doing?

Selfishly, what I would like to suggest is that everyone get the free discussion guide for Superteams because it comes with the book. I’m going to do a little plug. At SuperteamsMasterclass.com, if you get the book, you get this discussion guide. What’s beautiful about the discussion guide is that it takes teams through each chapter and asks prompts for the discussion to happen so that you’re implementing the insights from the book as a team. Again, it’s completely free.

That’s a great place to start. A lot of the challenge for people on teams is that they’re not the ones in charge. It’s difficult for them to offer these changes. Even if they feel like they would work. If they were to say, “Why don’t we take a meeting free afternoon on Tuesdays?” It’s hard to suggest that sometimes because you feel like implicit criticism. What I often recommend people do is that they suggest the team run an experiment.

The reason I suggest framing it as an experiment is because it’s difficult for people to say, “We should not do that experiment.” The experiment tends to be more welcome because people understand that it’s not a lasting change forever. It’s a great way of introducing new ideas because even if they do reject the experiment, it still makes you look like you’re proactively trying to suggest an idea that could be helpful.

Now, in terms of leaders, there’s a lot that can be useful for leaders in this book. I would urge everyone to start with meeting guidelines. Have a discussion with your team about what are some of our best meetings. Differentiates those meetings from bad meetings, and then how we create some guidelines that everyone can try out for a week to see and do these to improve the way we work as a team.

Come back to this idea of what you would tell them to stop doing. How are organizations most significantly working against their own interests here?

One of the things that is worth mentioning is there’s a lot of confusion about effort and results. A lot of people think that the harder you work, the more successful you are at work. That turns out to be true to a point, and that point is generally 55 hours a week. The more you work past that, the more mistakes you’re going to make, the more errors and judgment. You’re going to focus on the wrong things. You end up spending more time correcting your mistakes than contributing valuable output.

In the book, I talk about how the best teams work to limit the amount of hours that people can work because they recognize that people are more productive with fewer hours spent past a certain point. I talked about things like how on Superteams, leaders are more than twice as likely to encourage their team to disconnect from work after hours. We talked about what they thought last time you and I spoke about one of the habits that leaders have is often they send emails after hours.

The challenge with that is that people are trained to respond to those emails after hours. It makes it difficult for people to recover their energy and they feel like they’re constantly working even when they’re at home. A good solution to this is not to avoid writing those emails but rather to schedule those emails to arrive at a later point.

You can do this on your email, on Outlook, or in Gmail, which is the to send later function so you can send your email at 11:00 at night and have it arrive at 8:00 in the following morning. You can even do this with your text by clicking the plus button on your iPhone. It allows you to send your text messages later. It’s a great little tip because what it allows leaders to do is to behave in a way that aligns with the culture they’re trying to build.

I’ll put one caveat on that from personal experience. Don’t match them all to go out at 8:00, Monday because nobody wants to get slammed with ten emails from somebody at 8:00 in the morning on a Monday. Last question. How is AI changing the way that superteams will work?

Leveraging Collaborative AI Practices

We just completed a new study on how AI is being used on super teams versus average teams. The results were interesting in terms of how surprising they were to be consistent with everything else we’ve said so far. On average teams, people hide their AI use from one another. They’re ashamed of it. They fear AI is going to take their job because they’re not sharing with one another how they’re using it. On superteams, it’s very different. They’re sharing not only their use of AI but they are more likely to share effective prompts with one another.

What that does is, it enables the entire team to get better as a whole because people are constantly learning from one another including their use of AI. On average teams, you find people are far more about losing their job. On superteams, they’re much less worried because they recognize that it’s helping the team improve together. You’re seeing how their contributions lift the team, and they feel like they’re team is getting better than other teams in their industry.

A good place to stop. There’s lots of practical advice here. Thank you for doing the discussion with me, and I would certainly heartily recommend your book to people that I know, because there is a lot of great practical guidance in it for lots of different aspects of team effectiveness. Thank you for that, and for the discussion, Ron.

Thanks for having me.

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There’s lots of practical takeaways from the discussion with Ron. Let’s highlight just a few of them. First of all, great teams aren’t built by accident. They are built with intention. High performing teams succeed not because they have the smartest people. In fact, having a team of the smartest people generally works against you and the research has shown that for decades. It’s because they create the conditions that allow talented people to do their best work individually and together.

The second point is that more collaboration isn’t always better collaboration. Endless meetings, constant interruptions, brainstorming sessions, always on communication, can undermine performance. The best teams know when to work together and when to protect time for individual focused independent work.

Third, the quality of your team shapes the quality of your work life. This is probably fairly obvious but it’s something that we all ought to be thinking about more. Exceptional teams create better trust. They create stronger relationships. They create higher energy, but they also create an environment where people genuinely look forward to coming to work.

Finally, AI is going to change how teams work, but it’s not necessarily going to change what makes them great. Technology will probably take over more routine tasks, but the human skills that drive exceptional teams things like trust, communication, judgment, creativity, and shared purpose will become even more valuable. As always, I invite you to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. If you found the discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise or our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

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About Ron Friedman

Ron Friedman, Ph.D., is an award-winning psychologist who helps leaders build high-performing teams. He contributes regularly to Harvard Business Review, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, NPR, CBS, FOX, NBC, Fast Company, The Washington Post, Forbes, and Inc.

He is the bestselling author of The Best Place to Work and Decoding Greatness, and the founder of Superteams, Inc., where he delivers keynotes, develops leadership training programs, and advises senior executives on building stronger, higher-performing organizations.