Top Talent Challenges & How To Overcome Them

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Vijay Pendakur: Each context in each sector is so unique, right? And so this kind of context lists, performative optics driven emphasis in leadership level diversity hiring, I think is a lot of noise and isn't that helpful right now.

David Rice: Welcome to the People Managing People podcast. We're on a mission to build a better world of work and to help you create happy, healthy and productive workplaces. I'm your host, David Rice. 

My guest today is Dr. Vijay Pendakur. He is the author of "The Alchemy of Talent" and an experienced executive with some names you might recognize on his CV, including VMware, Salesforce, Dropbox. We're going to be talking about Vijay's new book and some of the biggest talent challenges that companies face today. 

Vijay, welcome. 

Vijay Pendakur: Thanks for having me, David. I'm excited to be here. 

David Rice: So first, just tell us a little bit about you, how you got to where you are and what led you to write the book?

Vijay Pendakur: So a little bit about my background, both my parents were teachers when they were working. And so I ended up no surprise in the family business of education. For 18 years, I worked at five universities around the country, and I spent a bunch of time earning advanced degrees that were normal in that sector.

And the through line for when I look back on those 18 years, I didn't know it at the time, but when I look back, the through line was clearly this curiosity I have around the relationship between the learning environment that students are in and student academic performance and how that environment shapes student performance.

And then through a series of serendipity and hard work, I ended up in a second act of my career that I never anticipated, but I was thrilled with. I led in talent and culture roles in HR at a number of corporations. But really, it was the same lens. How does the environment, in this case, the employee experience, affect employee performance?

So a lot of the heuristics or mental models and my pensions towards behavioral science and data that I developed as a social scientist working with students at universities for almost 20 years really carried over into the way I natively decided to approach solutioning in the employee experience.

Finally, a little bit ago on my 45th birthday, I decided to completely try something else that I launched my own thing as a solopreneur to use language that I think probably I got from TikTok. And I wanted to take everything that I'd learned across well over 20 years of working in complex organizations, global organizations, leading complex teams.

And I really wanted to find a way to bring value to clients as a speaker, a facilitator, as a team effectiveness coach. And very kindly, you asked me how I came to write the book. As I was engaged with clients and speaking at conferences, I just felt internally very compelled to produce something that did two things.

One, give me a chance to clarify my thinking. If anybody listening has written anything from a blog post to a cover letter for a job, all the way through to a book, you know that writing is the ultimate act of rigor and clarification. And I love that. I love that. That experience and the benefit I got from writing this book.

And secondly, it also gave me something more coherent to offer. My clients and the marketplace that is struggling with issues I care so much about was just a more coherent capture of some of my thinking than, Hey, I've done all these things for well over 20 years. I try to solve hard problems in hard environments. Work with me.

I mean, that's a bit diffuse. And so having a book really helps also crystallize my brand and my value prop in ways that it's difficult to do that. 

David Rice: Absolutely. 

We'll just get right into the book. You started the book out talking about disruption fatigue in the preface and that part immediately resonated for me as I was reading it. We keep hearing that disruption is good to the point, I would say, it gets a little bit fetishized at times. But there's a great line in there that I enjoyed and that I think anyone in HR or management can relate to. And you say, I'm just going to read it real quick. 

You say, "My brain is aware that disruption and uncertainty are the hallmarks of life in the 21st century, but my spirit feels out of gas. In this state of disconnection, it is easy for me to react poorly to any new change, even positive changes." That really struck a chord. And I think it's an important way to get started, because if you want to understand the talent landscape right now, you really need to have a little bit of empathy with this experience.

So how do you feel most companies are doing with that? 

Vijay Pendakur: I think, and I, I say this from a place of calling in, I think this is a very difficult moment in company life, but the reality is that I think most companies are missing the forest for the trees right now. We're living and we have lived through just an inordinate amount of disruption or rapid change in the last, let's say four and a half years, going back to 2020. 

If you think about it at the macro level, we're talking global pandemic, global social activist movement, macroeconomic upturn, then downturn, then after supply chain shocks, and then the supply chain shocks were over and then they started again, inflation, right?

A word that as a child of the 1980s and 1990s, I heard about right from the seventies in the US but I didn't think was going to be a huge part of my lifetime in this sort of, it was like lowercase I inflation and then it was like, wait, how much is a burger? And geopolitical disaster war. And then since this is a, show on the employee experience, layoffs, right?

Numerous cyclical layoffs. And those were big picture changes that landed on people oftentimes where they didn't have a lot of sense of control. That's the macro. At the micro level inside organizations, organizations are responding to the macro, right? So employees felt like they were working in a slow motion earthquake.

We're going here now. Nope. We're going here now. Oh, generative AI, massive disruption. Now we're pivoting the whole business model, or a supply chain, complete reorganization. We're moving out of China for whatever reasons. And we're re-establishing with Vietnam and India, just like some big things that employees have had to adjust to a future of work, right?

This shift. I mean, I just heard 80% of U.S. companies have some portion of their workforce now working hybrid or remote. That wasn't the case five years ago. So even the very fabric of the way we are interacting with our employers in the interactional media has changed, right? That's fundamental. 

And a lot of the changes that I've just gone through detailing, we didn't have two hands on the wheel for, right? Just getting back to empathy. Most of the changes we've had to respond to or adjust to happened to us. And to really humanize this, and I think that part of what I do when I, as a team effectiveness coach with the executive layer is really trying to humanize these problems.

If you think about our response to change, David, and, like, think about your life, right? There are times that we actually have two hands on the wheel and initiate a major change in our life. I think about moving all over the country when I was in university life, moving for jobs or when I got married or when I had kids, these are things I wanted and I still had a massive stress response to the things I was choosing to do in my life.

And it goes back to what neuroscientists would call axiomatic or like a truth that humans are really bad at change. We experience major disruptions in our life as a fight flight freeze trigger. Our limbic systems go boom and hit us with that shot of adrenaline, cortisol, take our neocortex offline, like we truly go into a fight flight freeze.

That happens when we actually initiate the change, let alone when we're not driving the bus. And so this moment of empathy, I think is really about helping corporations, companies, organizations see the forest for the trees, that people have experienced so many moments of cognitive hijacking over the last four and a half years that they actually may be languishing. And I think our conversation may get more into this, but if you look at the workforce data on that disruption fatigue, it really does signal that people are stuck. 

A lot of the workforce is stuck right now. Listless, disengaged, languishing. When I am talking to top team leaders, they'll say, I have a lot of folks on my team that were on my team three years ago. And sometimes my high performers are not high performers anymore. It's hard for me to understand.

So we have a huge opportunity. And, that was heavy, right? But the opportunity in front of us is actually to take that mental model of seeing the forest clearly and go, okay, what do I have to do? I gotta reskill my people leaders to help move their teams out of being stuck out of the valley and into a new apex.

And that's actually a lot of what the book is about.

David Rice:  Given some of your your work history, this is someone who knows your name and a little bit about you. They might jump to the conclusion that you're writing a DEI book here, right? But you're keen to emphasize that it isn't just that. At the same time, it kind of is. 

Given what's happening around DEI right now, and the sort of political discourse that has become tied to it, how important was it for you to write this and to attempt to set the tone and direction of the book early, that this was going to be a view based in science and objective truths, like you said, axioms, and all this is business focused rather than being a political argument?

Vijay Pendakur: Well, yeah, well, ask the easy questions, David. As someone with a background in DEI, I was always invested in the science and the data to establish validity, right? Whether I was making a case for change in a college or a university that was underserving its students. My avenue to make the case for change was science and data tied to the ROI of the university, right?

The ROI of future enrollment, the ROI of graduation, the ROI of parental satisfaction, i. e. net tuition revenue, right? Like that was always my MO. And so moving into the EX space or the employee experience space, this also, was very natural for me to root my DEI practice around some of the truths that if we do inclusion right, everyone wins.

So I never really saw it as political argument. I saw it really as the human behavioral science of peak performance. And that's part of the challenge here. I don't want to be naive and say that's what everybody's doing. I'm just naming what I was doing. For me, an inclusive team is a high-performing team, full stop.

So when I went to write a book, it felt very natural for me to write a book about high-performing teams and to bring forward all of this behavioral science and skill-based work I had done for years in complex organizations. But early on when I was engaged with people leaders and I was testing material that I wanted to be in the book, I noticed that I was having to counter signal and noise problems.

Here's what I'm trying to do. Oh, wait, you're getting something back differently than me. And so I had to distill down the frame and I noticed that it was a lot easier in this current moment of polarization to achieve signal clarity by being super clear that this is about high-performing teams. And this is about everyone being able to do the best work of their lives.

And are there elements of inclusion woven throughout the book? Absolutely. But I've deployed that behavioral science on that data agnostically in a way that I think companies and people leaders and executives can hear better right now because of the polarization and some of the third rails and lightning rods in the EX space.

David Rice: So you speak in the section book called the case for complexity about that signal to noise ratio, you were talking about that just a second ago. And there's a lot of that around DEI and I find this fascinating as someone who's, I've kind of worked in the space a little bit and I've sat in on conversations about DEI initiatives and listened and it's happens the signal, the thing that we all want to happen was completely lost in the noise and everything else that goes on around the business around DEI issues.

Without giving too much of the book away, I'd like if you could for you to take us through some examples of this that we see in the traditional sort of DEI value propositions.

Vijay Pendakur: Just to be clear for our listeners, right? A DEI value proposition, like any kind of a value proposition is how do we frame the case for change?

Right? And DEI is inherently rooted in a case for change. Because the status quo in work life up until very recent history was fundamentally inequitable, uninclusive, and homogenous, not diverse, right? So DEI always has to have associated with it a value proposition around why organizations or companies should change.

And so when I was looking at the value proposition toolbox that's out there, I noticed several very popular ones that have gained traction in the last five to ten years. And I saw this issue about signal and noise, and this isn't meant to be critical of any of the DEI practitioners who use these value propositions.

It's just more of clarity around what the state of play is. So for example, one, one D a value proposition that's gotten a lot of traction in the last five to ten years is the idea that diverse companies are more profitable. And you'll hear evangelists say this all the time. And I use the word evangelist carefully, right?

These are the allies to the DEI space. Oftentimes not actual trained DEI practitioners, but people who are champions of this work, the culture carriers, the allies. And they'll say, look, successful companies are more diverse and successful companies that are more profitable and more diverse and they'll just sort of reflexively spit this out because this has become like a talking point.

That's a signal that's really loaded with noise because when you're in the war room and you're in a board meeting or you're facing the C-suite and it's a closed door conversation. And somebody brings this up, I have watched many times executives sort of sit back and cross their arms like with just signaling skepticism, right?

And evangelists who say this are often not able to show the map, meaning prove that out for me, right? Prove out for me that you have to be diverse to be profitable. In fact, there's plenty of examples of companies that are not that diverse that are highly profitable. And so it merits a lot of math that isn't shown.

The challenge is that this value proposition became really spotlighted through the biennial McKinsey study that comes out every two years that correlates highly profitable, successful global businesses with their diversity and particularly diversity at the leadership level. And part of the noise in implementation is that companies that decide to follow this value proposition, there is a pattern of playing the optics game and saying, okay, fine, the McKinsey study puts a spotlight on diverse leadership.

And so we, as a company, are going to, in a very performative way, potentially go out and try and meet the optics requirement of hiring selectively around appearing diverse. So that we quiet the crowd that's saying, look at the McKinsey study, diverse leadership equals profitability. This is really counterproductive in so many ways, because a much better DEI investment is for a company to think about their business model and the ways in which equity inclusion and a hiring or a talent strategy long term makes sense for them so that they can establish relevance and performance in their sector because each context in each sector is so unique. 

And so this kind of context-less performative optics driven emphasis in leadership level diversity hiring, I think is a lot of noise and isn't that helpful right now similarly. I'll give you a second example, because this is such a juicy, sort of item. Right now there's another diversity value proposition that is used to make change.

And it comes from a really good place, right? Because we do need to find ways to provoke change. Again, going back to the fact that the status quo up until very recent history and in many spaces still is homogeneity, non-inclusion and inequitable practice. Right? So if you want some kind of change, you have to have a value proposition for it.

And another one, particularly in B2C spaces, right? Companies that are facing the consumer is to say diversity helps us sell more. We will be able to sell more if we're more diverse. And I get this. You actually, there's some very high profile marketing gaffes or missteps that come from homogenous companies trying to crack new demographic marketplaces or cultural or geographic marketplaces and really stepping in it because they don't have anybody on side from those communities.

So the clean signal here is that diversity is relevant. The world is actually inherently diverse and complex place. And a company's homogeneity or a team's homogeneity is just a threat to their relevance. The problem and the noise of implementation comes when a company is really ham handed and on the nose about, Hey, we're going after the Latino marketplace with our new brand of chips.

So, we got to hire some Latinos to help us crack this marketplace. And unfortunately, there's a fair amount of that behind the scenes, right in, in what happens in, in organizations. And this is bad because it actually sets up many of your new hires to face the stigma of being seen as very narrowly there to just help with the Latino marketplace.

So if you're a new hire and you're Latino and you're on the finance team or you're in supply chain or something, and you're not there for that strategy. You may still be sitting on the team and have people looking at you like, oh, were they brought in because we're trying to move into, well, if marketplace, right?

So this is a terrible position for your new employees to be in. And it really underserves the broader premise that diversity is actually about relevance and that the entire company faces irrelevance risk if we don't move towards being a better reflection of the complexity of the customer marketplace that we're trying to serve. 

David Rice: Couldn't agree with that more. 

As you go on through the book, you break down the catalyst that drive talent results. You also dig into the psychological safety a bit, and it's a phrase that I think gets maybe misused at times, or maybe it's a little user. Like, I would call it surface level, right? So almost to describe just being able to feel human at the workplace or vulnerable, but I like how you've broken it down in the book because I think it's something that you got the three types of safety, which then lead to a fourth type of safety, which is your challenger safety.

And this is something that's lacking in a lot of organizations that I've worked in over the years or have consulted on. Take us through just a little bit, talk about how you drive toward a culture where people can feel safe, challenging leaders within the organization without fear of being targeted or reprimanded.

Vijay Pendakur: First, I would be completely remiss if I didn't give massive amounts of credit and praise to Amy Edmondson, sort of modern godmother of psychological safety research. And then more specifically, Tim Clark, who this notion of a scaffolded model of safety comes from. So my book is a critical synthesis of a lot of the beautiful, amazing research that frontline researchers done.

And so let me walk you through why I think this has so much utility. Like you said, this notion of challenger safety, or let me make this just even more plain. I've never met a company, a leader, a team that doesn't understand that people need to be able to speak up and challenge a leader or give feedback to a leader for that team to win consistent.

Think about all of the famous moments in history where people kept quiet and then a leader made a massive mistake that hurt the team and the organization or the company. So it is widely agreed upon that we need people to be able to step up, speak up, speak out. What's missing though oftentimes from the high performing team's playbook is the reality that you don't just go to challenger safety because there are actually scaffolds, right?

Or, like a ladder that gets you there. And what I think Tim Clark's research is so fantastic at is really codifying that ladder. And the scaffolding is, do you feel, first of all, included just on a basic level? And I'll unpack this really quickly. But secondly, do you have chances to learn? And third, do you have the opportunity to meaningfully contribute at work?

And if you have these three things in his research, it shows that these are the three legs of the stool that actually give you challenger safety. And I think that's just such a beautiful, accurate articulation of the human experience. David, think about your life or listener, think about your life, right?

If you've ever actually taken on the heroic act of challenging a leader or giving high stakes feedback to a leader, your leader, your team leader, you probably, first of all, felt included on that team, right? Understood, valued, respected, had some sense of dignity. You probably felt like you were in a space where you were learning and growing at work.

And third, you had chances to meaningfully contribute on that team, to your work, to the work of the organization. Those are inputs that we can relate to as people that ladder up to. Hey, David. Hey, boss, right? I want to let you know you were practicing your pitch deck for the client meeting. And I think slide six really takes us off track.

And if we do that, we may lose the bit. That's kind of a high-risk moment, right? To bring to your leader. You're not going to do that if you don't have the support to get you up to challenge your safety. And I agree with you that psychological safety can end up in this very hand-wavy kind of space. Partially that's because of the slippage between the really rigorous research and evidence and skill set of psychological safety and then the slippage into just people using terms sometimes in ways that aren't that accurate or helpful.

And again, we're going on signal noise here. This is sort of a recurring theme in our conversation, David. But like noise is people just, you sort of misappropriating the term to mean any form of like how I feel at work. And here's the real issue with this. We're, I would say four or five years into the workforce struggling with signal and noise on psych safety.

And what I see in my coaching and speaking practice is legit, frequent conversations with C suite where they're going, I don't know about psych safety. It just feels like coddling, right? I mean, everybody just wants to be emotional all the time. Like leaders of global organizations are saying this to me now.

Because leaders are exhausted and they're also hitting this noise of psych safety being sort of poorly positioned. So one piece of advice that I give all the time to individuals, team leaders, evangelists for change in the employee experience space is to actually rebrand psych safety as trust. So when I do work inside of organizations and I'm speaking, I'm facilitating, I'm doing team effectiveness coaching, I actually take all of my work on psych safety and I deploy it under the banner of trust.

Trust is language we use in everyday life. It's something that we find inherent value in as people. And it also shows up as a company value for lots of companies, right? It's a top five value for many companies in order to be successful with their customers. And so under the banner of trust, you can actually do all of these same things, right?

Do I trust that I can challenge my leader or give them high stakes feedback? Well, am I included? Do I have chances to learn? Am I able to contribute? These are the foundations that ladder up to someone having trust in their ability to take on the heroic act of challenging their leader. So, again, just that rebrand helps cut through the noise and get back to the clean signal that trust is fundamental to high-performing teams.

David Rice: Alright listeners, we're going to pause there and break this conversation into two parts. This being the end of part one. I want to thank you for joining us today and encourage you to tune back in for part two of this conversation with Vijay where we're going to dig into the crisis of belonging and some of the bigger challenges orgs are facing these days. 

In between now and then, do head on over to peoplemanagingpeople.com/membership and take a look at our community. One of the things that comes with it is access to our live events, and this is something that we're starting to see grow and become more successful from panel discussions to coffee chats and our ask the expert series. Vijay will be joining us on one of our upcoming sessions, so please head on over to the site, check it out, consider joining the community.

And until next time, play with your pets, take a Monday off.