Treating Employees Like Grownups (with Amy Leschke-Kahle)

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In today’s episode, we explore the revolutionary idea of treating employees like responsible grownups with Amy Leschke-Kahle, a renowned thinker in the people and business space.

Her mission is to solve hard problems you can’t see, bust workplace myths, and design solutions for people working in the real world.

Before starting her own advisory, Amy served as Vice President of Talent Insights and Innovation for ADP. She led HRIT, people analytics, and learning & development organizations for several Fortune 500 companies. 

You’ll likely know for her writing in Fast Company, Forbes.com, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Fortune.

In this conversation, we'll dive into how rethinking HR structures, embracing AI, and fostering a culture of trust and autonomy can transform organizations. 

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Key Insights from Amy Leschke-Kahle

My discussion with Amy unveiled several critical insights into modernizing HR and workplace culture:

1. Treat Employees Like Adults

‍Amy passionately argued for treating employees like responsible adults. If you treat your employees like responsible, super smart grownups, they will thrive." So, foster a culture of trust and autonomy, empowering employees to take ownership of their work and make meaningful contributions.

2. Separate HR Functions

‍Amy emphasized the need to separate operational functions from talent amplification in HR. Distinctly separating compliance and payroll from coaching and development functions can streamline operations and enhance focus. Consider reorganizing HR departments to delineate between operational and talent functions, ensuring each gets the attention it deserves.‍

3. Embrace AI for Connection

‍Amy highlighted how AI can help us be better coworkers, which highlights that AI isn't just for automating tasks; it can enhance human interactions and relationships at work. Implement AI tools that facilitate better employee communication and understanding, using data-driven insights to foster stronger workplace connections.‍

4. Courageous Leadership for Transformation

‍Amy discussed the importance of leaders willing to make bold changes, saying, "It takes courageous leaders willing to take a pause and make that switch." Insight: Significant organizational change requires leaders who are brave enough to disrupt the status quo. Pilot innovative structures and processes, creating a culture that supports experimentation and growth.‍

5. Focus on the Work, Not the Person

‍Amy pointed out that focusing on work rather than personal traits reduces unnecessary friction. Emphasizing work outcomes over personal characteristics can create a more objective and fair environment. Develop performance metrics and feedback systems concentrating on work quality and outcomes, minimizing personal biases.

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Transcript:

Daan van Rossum: What is HR's role in the changing world of work? Obviously, there are so many massive changes right now. I just mentioned remote work. We're now lending maybe more on hybrid work. Skills are now a big trend. AI is obviously coming in. What does HR look like now and in the near future?

Amy Leschke-Kahle: I think it doesn't look like it needs to. HR looks very, very much like it has for a long time, as long as I've been in the workforce and as long as you've been in the workforce. We are still structuring HR, doing a lot of the same programs and processes, maybe with a different font. We update things. We change the font or put little curved lines around it and call it, Ooh, this is a new approach.

But we're very much structured the same way as HR practitioners in almost every organization. Someone called; maybe it's a Chief People Officer or a Chief Human Resources Officer, whatever you want to call it. But it's interesting because under that CHRO, the top HR job, they have everything to do with people, and the role of HR and the functions that fit under that are very different.

And if you think about and often think about the analogy of money flowing in and out of an organization, sales say something. Accounts receivable finance, for example, takes the money in. You may have a different kind of accounting department. You've got an IT department that's doing all the systems that relate to that.

But yet, in HR, we smush all of the processes, compliance, and benefits. Oftentimes, payroll, or sometimes payroll, will sit in finance, and then all of the talenty things also sit underneath HR. So, you've got this almost like friction that's created around the same organization having responsibility for compliance, which is super important—a lot of money.

Payroll tends to be... that budget line tends to be the highest in almost every organization. Then you have this talent stuff, which is really a whole different world. So HR continues to be structured with these two things smooshed together.

But in the new world of work, particularly, I think this has been true for a long time, but especially now, if organizations are going to use their talent to differentiate, which is all they have left, like knowledge is great, but as soon as you adopt it, everyone else has adopted it too. It's no longer a big differentiator.

We've squeezed the orange, if you will, to a large degree around process improvement. I have that in my background as well, but we've learned processes and programs and continuously improved a lot. So, we're in that incremental improvement stage, which is fine, but we're just about to reach this place where we really need to, as leaders, as practitioners, as folks who are committed to amplifying the talent in our organizations, continue to create and sustain differentiated value and contributions to our clients, to our customers, to our boards, and to our communities. You've got to think differently about how we do this. It no longer fits the world of work.

Daan van Rossum: Yeah. It seems like that old system doesn't really fit the world today. And then definitely not the world where we're heading. So what are some changes that we have to make to make it work? 

Amy Leschke-Kahle: I don't know if these are the right changes or not, but the way that I think about it is really separating out the operations functions. So things like benefits, payroll, compliance, and maybe HR analytics, I don't know, but separating those functions out really clearly from the talent kind of amplification part, the coaching, the development, and those things organizations do to help our employees do more of their own unique best work.

That's a totally different mindset. It's different skills, different training. It's a different background. So I think it should be thought of as having incredibly separate functions. And do they report to the same person? I don't know, maybe, but I think we have to stop trying to create too much of a Venn diagram about those things.

Daan van Rossum: That's great. So it sounds like we need a lot of change. Now, obviously, the question is whether we're always busy enough. We have a lot of work to do. It's very hard to change things, especially big, systematic changes, while we have all the fires burning. What do we need to do to even get out of that? How do we even get out of it? My day-to-day is too busy to make that change. How do we get out of that? 

Amy Leschke-Kahle: It takes courageous leaders. It takes a leader who is willing to take a pause in some of the other things and make that switch. Could you experiment with it? Could you try it? Could you pilot it? Maybe depending on the organization, but I think it really needs one of those big, giant transformative shifts to flip the switch and go. We are going to restructure ourselves in a way that better aligns with our business and better aligns with our employees.

Daan van Rossum: Another big change that's obviously coming is what we talked about before with AI. I totally empathize with a lot of people that I'm speaking to when they say there's a lot of interesting stuff happening, surely, but it's a bit daunting. It's a bit scary. I think especially in HR, but we can look at this broader than just HR.

There's also a lot of questions about the potential, but there's also the threat, and I think a lot of people are almost hesitant to start using AI, whether it's in the HR team or outside of it, because they don't even know—am I just automating myself away? Am I starting to create a condition for the company to eventually replace me? In all those changes that you just talked about, where does AI sit? 

Amy Leschke-Kahle: I think it's a good question. I think clearly it will be part of everything that we do in the world of work. And I think it's going to be faster than most people think. And it's already there, even if your organization is saying, We're afraid of AI, or we don't have our policy built yet, so don't use anything.

We have it. BYOAI: Bring Your Own AI. People are using it, whether we want them to or not. They're using it on the phone. They're using their home computer. They're using it all over the place. I think that's definitely something for us to think about.

But when you think about it from the practitioner perspective, as you just mentioned, we are constantly fighting fires. We have all these things that we're working on. Everybody's coming at us for all kinds of different things, and we need this policy done, and you need to deliver this training. We have this problem, employee. We have this one that we want to promote, like all of the things.

So it's hard for the practitioner to find this space to even think, How might I utilize this? Again, I think there's friction in the system right now, and people are a little bit hesitant. I think naturally so, and they should be. They should be concerned about security. They should be concerned about privacy.

And we also, at the same point in time, need to embrace: How can we create space for people to learn some new skills? Just before we started, you don't have to be an expert in technology to effectively and efficiently use artificial intelligence. How can we use it to help people? Number one: automate those tasks that we probably don't need to be doing quite frankly, but also when we use it to create space for people to do the unique, extraordinary work that they're capable of doing.

I think lot of pluses in doing that. We, as leaders in organizations, have to open up our mindset a little bit and yet be cautious and reasonable to protect the assets and intellectual property of our organizations.

Daan van Rossum: And it sounds like, from your perspective, it goes back to, again, this idea of courageous leaders where someone needs to step in and say, We need to make time for this. We need to make room for experimentation. We need to make room for people using this and applying it to their work, because that's what AI is good at. 

It's actually good at taking out all this mundane work, answering frequently asked questions, doing repetitive workflows, and all that stuff.

So in order to create that space, someone needs to step up and say, We're now going to make this a priority. And I think we've seen now over the last six months whether it's Klarna on the maybe-not-so-good side, leading all the way to Moderna having this great case study. Microsoft HR Global has these great case studies. 

This is really about maybe a little bit of education, but then mostly about just letting people experiment because, as Josh Bersin recently said, no one knows the work like the people who are doing the work. Don't try to solve this on a company level. Give people the tools and let them experiment; let them do it. And then, if that's on a company platform or on a company account, at least you have control over where that data goes, because the whole bring your own AI movement is pretty dangerous when it comes to data privacy and data security. 

Amy Leschke-Kahle: Yeah, absolutely. And it goes back to what we talked about a little bit earlier about grown-up-ifying work. If you treat your employees like responsible, super smart grown-ups, which almost all of them are, then almost all of them are super smart adults.

When you create that partnership with them and say, How might we use this to help your job, to help your work be better, to help make your work more efficient, to give you space to do some of those things that you wish you could do, but you never have time for to create the space for people to go? How can we better serve our customers? Or how can we better serve our internal partners?

To me, that's the most exciting part of AI. That is really creating the connective tissue. I think we are still in the place. We have a lot of great point solutions. I use some of the tools that you just talked about in one of your recent posts about the top 100 AI tools. So I go through them, try lots of them, and experiment.

But we still have a lot of really good point solutions. But I think when it's going to get really transformative, not that it's not transformative now, but really transformative. It's when we can use AI as the true connective tissue in the organization, when essentially point solutions become invisible to us, and it's simply us interacting really efficiently, and we have trust in the data that we're getting back.

And of course, keeping your data internal and all the security things are super important. So, I think we're going to see that in the next few years. I don't think it's going to take very long, but that's when we're really going to see this be transformative in the world of work. So, it's not just a chatbot that's going to help my call center employee. It's going to connect everything together into a single system. That's easy to interact with.

Daan van Rossum: Yes. This episode is not brought to you by OpenAI Enterprise or Microsoft, but that's obviously what the vendors would love. You would say instead of everyone using all these little individual tools, just take it for everyone and get either Open AI Enterprise, Copilot, or even Gemini, which is doing it now too.

Then, the real benefit is there because it has that connective tissue. It digs into your actual documents and can reference all the material and all the knowledge in a company, and then it becomes very powerful. You then also overcome some of the issues around what my employees are typing into Perplexity AI or what they are putting into ChatGPT that gets reuploaded into the model.

And that's why we saw it really early on. A lot of companies are putting bans on using AI because JP Morgan doesn't want their proprietary data or client data to go into the training models. So that may be the next step. 

But again, that's a lot of work. Companies already have a lot to do. 

In your conversations, do you see this becoming a larger topic right now? Are companies starting to realize that this is actually the important thing that we knew it was? 

Amy Leschke-Kahle: They are. And I'm starting to see, at least, that I was just at a conference today with a bunch of executive learning leaders from the Midwest. About a hundred of us all got together today and talked primarily about change, but a lot of it centered around AI, particularly in that learning space. Number one, it's really fertile ground for making things more efficient, but also for the ability to personalize and conditionalize.

It's not just that we talk about personalization in quotation marks, whatever sort of personalization. But when you think about the ability, for example, in the learning and development world to have much more real time in the flow of work, it is not an extra thing. And the possibilities are amazing.

If you're sitting here talking to your colleague and you have a little pop-up or a little nudge that comes, this is: Hey, you might want to ask this question. I know that this happened to him yesterday, and he was experiencing work in this way. And I know how he tends to like to be communicated with, and he doesn't like this.

I don't need to know all of that. I don't need to know any of it. All I need to know is a little pop-up that says, Hey, you might want to ask Daan this question when you talk to him in five minutes.

Daan van Rossum: And that's where the idea of the copilot, the co-intelligence, comes in. It's not really about replacing. It's about augmenting. You may not have that perfect memory, but the AI does, and therefore it can answer that question. 

Amy Leschke-Kahle: Hopefully, it's smarter when we think about the relationships and connections that we have as humans. Everybody's talking about empathy. Oh, we should have empathy. That's not me. I'm not a terribly empathetic person. I don't think you can teach it to me. You can make me more aware, but when the chips are down, I am who I am.

But AI can help me with that and remind me with little nudges. It doesn't have to say, Oh, I'm going to make this nudge. And you should ask this question because of these 27 things. I don't really care.

But it can help me to dig deeper, to be more responsive, to be more respectful—quite frankly, all of those things. And I think that's where, especially on the talent side of things, the possibilities are, and obviously, organizations are doing some of this and some are doing lots of it already.

There's a whole lot of potential on that side of the world of work. Yes, that's great, and knowledge mining is great too. But I also think there's an amazing amount of potential for helping us to be better coworkers, better peers, and, quite frankly, more reasonable human beings.

Daan van Rossum: You mentioned that you were at that conference; did you see any interesting solutions, particularly to solve some of those challenges? 

Amy Leschke-Kahle: We didn't really look at any point solutions. It was a little bit more conceptual, but there were a couple of companies there who were talking about what's possible.

Again, that obviously means personalization, which happens to some degree now, but also the ability to not only personalize but to look at the conditions that are happening. And of course, that requires data in order to inform the model about what is happening, and I think one of the interesting things I see happening in the world, particularly in terms of talent, is that a lot of our data is so old. It's not real time.

We might look at someone's career profile they put in 18 months ago, or we may look at a performance rating, which is a whole different conversation and a whole different hot mess. But you may look at somebody's performance rating from even nine months ago. You might look at a piece of engagement data that's been aggregated over a team or an organization, and that's not super helpful.

Because work is moving too fast for that data to be useful. You need to have a critical few pieces of real-time data and form models to be able to help me in the flow of my work right now. Not based on data that I collected nine months ago, but based on data that's happening right now. And that's totally possible. We just have to connect all those dots together.

Daan van Rossum: Incredible. As you're talking, it's just incredible how different this world of work really is from even just 5 or 10 years ago.

And the culture that this requires to work in this way, where we even acknowledge something like data from nine months ago, isn't valid anymore. Whatever we were talking about about my performance nine months ago has nothing to do with where we stand today. 

How do companies optimize their culture for how fast things are moving?

Amy Leschke-Kahle: And that's not an AI thing. That's a people thing. That's a leader thing. And by leader, I don't necessarily mean someone like a manager. I mean an executive leader who sets that tone. I think oftentimes when we talk about culture, we say, and I know you've looked at this article that I wrote for the MIT Management Review around culture.

I talk about little “C” culture versus big “C” culture. Little “c” culture being those promises that we make to our employees. And we oftentimes think about culture as we do a survey, and we want to know how people experience work. I'm like, no, that's fine, by the way. But that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the promises that the organization is making to their employees that they never, ever break. I can count on these critical things. Like, are those things for your organization? And so I think when we look at culture and what those critical few things are, that's a human thing.

That's a leader's determination thing—not letting everybody else make it up. This is us as a leadership team, as an executive team, promising to you as an employee that this X, Y, and Z thing is going to happen every single time. There's no exception, and you don't need a hundred of them. You need three or four of those things.

So when it comes to AI and culture and all the things that big C culture, that's a leader's determination. Leaders get to pick that because that's what they get to do. And they shouldn't shirk that responsibility, by the way.

Daan van Rossum: No, not at all. 

But do you see companies getting better at that, or is it getting more difficult to do that?

Amy Leschke-Kahle: I don't think it's difficult to do it. I think they just don't do it. Leaders, it's hard. You don't want to make that promise because then you might break it. I don't want to really say that because what if there's always an exception, like we're going to do things except in particular situations, or it applies to these people but not to these employees?

So it's not hard. It's just a choice. Organizations have a lot of choices to make, and it's just one of the things they need to make. But most organizations never make the choice. They go with the standard; oh, we have a culture of integrity, or we have a culture of whatever.

I'm like, really? No! There's always an exception to that. There can be no exceptions to Big C culture.

But it sounds like companies are almost in a bind where the way that the company is being run already doesn't allow them to say that our word is our bond. We will practice with integrity because they already know there's a bunch of stuff going on that would not pass muster.

Going back to the theme of grown-up work, that was in context. I think more about things like hybrid work and remote work and say, Why are we even worrying that much about productivity or whether people are performing or not performing?

I think, again, in contrast to what we just talked about, it's not like the executives are doing so well. It's not like they are the ultimate role model for showing up five days a week in an office and being super productive because they also have their own way of working. 

Where is that debate settling? Obviously, you're based in the US, and I think it's still a pretty hot topic of where people should work, how people should people work, and how often and how much control we should have over that.

Where is that debate settling in your mind? 

Amy Leschke-Kahle: Where it's settling is that so many organizations are requiring employees to come back to the office. And we've got real estate organizations that have invested in real estate and buildings, etc., and there's still the old mindset that we cannot work together unless we see each other.

We can't be collaborative. We can't share. We can't be innovative unless we are sitting face-to-face. And I think that is just, for most of us, false. For some people, that is where they work best. But for a lot of us, the only thing that's missing in making that happen is intentionality.

We think about the water cooler—the kind of euphemism of the water cooler. I'm going to meet you at the water cooler, and we're going to come up with the next great idea, and maybe, but there's no reason why you and I cannot schedule a water cooler talk. Or there's no reason why I can't contact you on Zoom or WebEx or Microsoft Teams or whatever or Slack and ping you and say, Hey, do you have five minutes? I'd love to run this by you.

It's again part of that need to integrate that communication and partner into the flow of our work. We need to do it. It's totally possible. And in a lot of cases, for a lot of people, it's much more productive. It's much more creative. It's much more innovative. There's a lot of times we are more innovative when there's one or two of us in the room, when there's 20 of us in a room with a whiteboard, and we all end up with the same answer that we knew we were going to end up with when we walked into the room.

So it's just intention, and it's part of the rhythm of work that we need to add in. And we all did that during COVID; that's the interesting thing about it. It's like we figured it out for two and a half years—whatever it was, three years. We all figured it out, and it was amazing. We got great work done.

It's not that things stopped happening. In fact, work happened faster. More innovatively, and we all felt trusted. As employees, we felt incredibly trusted, enabled, and empowered. We felt empowered to own our own world. And all of a sudden it's like, Oh no, we don't trust you anymore.

That's what it feels like to the employee. It might not feel that way to the executive is making those decisions, and they have their reasons and that they need to do what they need to do, what they think is right. But from an everyday employee perspective, there are so many folks that I talk to every day that feel like, wait a minute, you don't trust me anymore. You trusted me just fine for two years when all the chips were down and we had to figure out how to do stuff on the fly. But now you don't trust me anymore.

So I think there's friction again between a lot of everyday employees and a lot of executives. And it goes back to choice in a lot of ways as to what the employees are going to choose. And I wonder, when we get the data back and we start to look at this longer term, what the longer term implications are for employee engagement, employee satisfaction, employee productivity, and people having to get up and get ready and get in the car and drive to work or commute or get on the train or the bus.

That's a lot of time and energy. And as we talk about things still like wellbeing and wellness, not as much as we did a couple of years ago, there is again friction between those two things. Oh, we're committed to your wellbeing, but we also want you to sit in traffic for two hours a day and make you late. You're late to pick up your kid from school, or whatever that might be. So I don't think we've landed yet.

Daan van Rossum: But then again, if you don't sit in traffic for two hours to come to the office, then where would you do your Zoom calls? So I don't think we hear that a lot. People say, Okay, I made that effort. I made that investment, and then I just end up sitting mostly on Zoom calls, because for most companies, the reality is that we're not working together in one space anyway.

We have people in other offices and in other locations. We work with clients. We work with outside partners. Our executives are all over the world. It's not like we come there and actually constantly sit with our team. Gensler just released some research around that. 

So it doesn't really make sense in a way. And then there are great examples like NVIDIA, Atlassian, or Dropbox, where people would typically say, Yeah, but those are tech companies. Of course, the techies can do it. Of course, NVIDIA can build a $2 trillion company on the back of a remote policy. 

What would you say to those companies? Because it sounds like you say this is really not about tech or non-tech, anyone can basically apply these principles. 

Amy Leschke-Kahle: It's about the work. When you talk about remote work, it's really about the work. And that's, I think, one of the mistakes that organizations have made if we've transitioned out of the COVID era, which is that they've made it about the person, not about the work.

If the work requires being on site, you think about retail or healthcare, for example, but even if the organization's determination is that this work needs to be on site, then it needs to be on site. And you, as an employee, know that's for sure. But a lot of organizations have gotten into the practice again of exception-giving, and what about this person? This person's not coming in.

I was like, It's not about the person. It's about the work. That's a game-changer. You got to keep it about the work, because if you think it's about the person now, I take it personally. And how can that person get to work from home? And I don't. All our customer service reps are going to be in the office. That's probably not the right call to make, but maybe it is, but just make that call. This is how we do our work.

Daan van Rossum: Yes. I love that idea. It's about the work, not about the person. And we're maybe focusing a bit too much on the mistrust, and I don't see that person. I don't see that person that much. What are they doing? What are they up to? 

It doesn't really matter; if the work gets done, the work gets done. So why do we even care? And then the other thing is that we are now seeing a lot more people trying to build a portfolio of work, trying to focus less on having just that one job. So even then, you were getting a lot more of a fragmented point of view.

How are you looking at leadership? Because obviously, you talk mostly to the really senior leadership. Does leadership need to change, or does leadership development change as the world of work is changing so fast? Even from this conversation, I just feel like there are so many changes, and they're happening so fast. How do you even train someone to become the next C-level leader? 

Amy Leschke-Kahle: I think we have to think about leading in lots of different ways. There are people who are leaders. There are knowledge leaders who may not lead at all. Teams are changing. There's a dynamic team. I'm working with an organization right now that is very committed to transitioning a lot more of their teams to a dynamic team model where you've got someone who leads a team for a short period of time. A sprint is not necessarily in technology; we think about it as a tech programmer thing, but it can happen in lots of different ways.

So I think when we think about leading, we often overengineer the world of leading. We have this assumption that there's some perfect model out there that we're all out of. There isn't such a thing; most of us don't want to be people's leaders. We want to make more money, get a better job title, and better support ourselves and our family, which we absolutely want.

Daan van Rossum: Why does that have to come with managing? 

Amy Leschke-Kahle: No, but that's just part of the job. It comes with it. And so part of the reason why people don't want to be leaders is that we've made it an affordable job.

So one of the keys to creating an organization that has, I'm going to say, good leaders is to focus on the critical few things. What are the critical things you need that leader to do to be proficient? I need you to connect with your people, your peers, or whoever it is. I need you to have really strong connections because, as we know from the data, that is a game changer.

Not give feedback, just connect with people about the work. Because I can talk to you about the work all day long. But as soon as I know that I have to talk to you about you and your soft, touchy, feely stuff, that's not happening.

If you keep it focused on the work and those critical things, it becomes a much more reasonable role for people to play to lead the work. And when you meet people like grownups, drama tends to diminish. It's always going to be there, but we tend to have less drama and less conflict. You're super smart. I trust you to go be super smart.

The whole vibe, or even you want to call it the “c” culture of teams, but that whole vibe starts to change. It just feels different. It feels like we're all really smart. Like, how fun is it to work around really smart people? It is really fun.

Daan van Rossum: Just split the emotion from the information. And again, just focus on the work.

So it sounds like there are opportunities to make the world of work better. And it sounds like there's still a lot of work to do as well. If we could summarize it in one wish for the future of work, what would it be from your side, personally? 

Amy Leschke-Kahle: Yeah, it would be to start treating people more like adults and less like seventh graders. Think about it: when we hire people into our organizations, we bring them in for all those unique pieces of intelligence, commitment, and quality, like all the things, no matter where they are in the hierarchy. We bring them in because they've got a lot of opportunity to contribute to our clients, our customers, our organization, and our colleagues.

And yet, once they're at the door, we don't treat them that way. I think we are missing an incredible amount of opportunity inside of organizations to again differentiate the work that we do, our companies, and we're humans, and work is work. Let's not over-glorify it. Work is work. We need to be paid. We need to support ourselves and our families.

But I think if we can help people walk out that door, virtual or physical, a little bit better, feeling a little bit better, maybe a little bit happier, the ramifications of that are game-changing, not just for our workplaces but for our employees, families, and the communities in which we work.

And we're not quite doing that well. And I think that's where so much of the opportunity lies. It's just to treat our employees like the super smart grownups that they are.

Daan van Rossum: Treat people like grownups and focus on the work, not the people. I love it! 

Amy, thanks so much for being on today. 

Amy Leschke-Kahle: Thanks so much for having me, Daan.