The Future Of Work Podcast With Jacob Morgan | Futurist | Workplace | Careers | Employee Experience & Engagement |

For several years in a row, Aron has been on the Glassdoor top 100 CEO list and in 2012 he won the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. UKG was rated the #2 best large employer in America by Forbes, it received a 100% on the Corporate Equality Index, and prior to the merger both Kronos and Ultimate Software were separately named a Best Workplace for Parents by Great Place to Work. How do you build an organization where people love to come to work? Aron Ain, CEO of Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG), believes it is all about trust, transparency, and collaboration. Contrary to past fads, creating an engaged workforce is not about free food, free gym memberships, and frequent parties. As Aron says, “I believe people join organizations because of the organization. I believe they leave because of who they work for.” In this episode of the podcast Aron shares: How to keep consistency among leaders in an organization. What it means to be an “un-leader”. How to deal with failure. Why showing true gratitude for e

What should you do if you work for a #leader​ that you don't like or don't get along with? If you're in this situation you typically have a few options. 1) Do nothing and suffer. 2) Have a conversation with your leader. 3) Try to switch teams. 4) Quit. 5) Focus on doing great quality work. Regardless of the path you take, I think the worst option here is the first one. If you do nothing and just complain about your situation then I'm sorry, but you deserve what you get. You have to take charge over your own personal and professional success. I talk about this more in the video. Let me know what you think. Have you ever been a situation where you had to take one of these paths? I sure have!

Manfred Kets de Vries is The Distinguished Professor of Leadership Development and Organizational Change at INSEAD, one of the world’s leading and largest graduate business schools. He has received INSEAD’s distinguished teacher award five times. Manfred is also the author of 52 books including The CEO Whisperer, Mindful Leadership Coaching, and Down the Rabbit Hole of Leadership. And he is a consultant on organizational design, transformation, and strategic human resource management to leading companies all over the world. From a young age Manfred was interested in psychology and human behavior, he was intrigued with trying to figure out why people act in certain ways. In college he studied economics and organizational behavior. Throughout his career he has focused on the intersection of these two areas and eventually he was appointed as the Global Leadership Director at INSEAD and he started a program specifically for leaders where 21 executives come together and Manfred creates what he calls tipping points

A lot of people are very uncomfortable asking for feedback. And rightfully so! Early in my career, I was one of those people who was weirded out by asking for feedback. But I realized that when you phrase feedback in a different way, it makes the conversation a lot easier and more directed towards your growth and development. Here’s how you can rephrase the feedback you want to get. 1. Can I get your advice? If you've created a solution to something and you want to get feedback on what that solution is. 2. What can I do better? If you want to improve yourself on a certain thing. 3. What can I focus on now to prepare for a future role? If you want to focus on your growth for future learning and development. I found these questions very effective to get the feedback I’m looking for. Try it out!

Deanna Mulligan is the former President, CEO, and Board Chair of Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, a 160 year old Fortune 250 company with around 9,500 employees. She is also the author of a new book called Hire Purpose: How Smart Companies Can Close the Skills Gap. Deanna was named one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” by Fortune in 2019 and she was named one of “The 50 Most Powerful Women in New York” five times by Crain’s New York Business. Prior to Guardian Life Insurance, Deanna held senior positions at AXA Financial and New York Life Insurance and she was a principal at McKinsey & Company. ______________________________________________________________________ In the financial crisis of 2008 nearly 9 million people lost their jobs. For four years unemployment was at an all time high, and people were having a hard time finding new jobs. It was at this time that Deanna started thinking about the concept for her book, Hire Purpose. She knew it was important to find a way to make su

Now, more than ever, we need to make sure every leader in our organization is practicing empathy. Empathy is all about putting yourself in somebody else's shoes to understand their perspective and where they're coming from. According to Dr. Brene Brown, there are 4 steps to practicing empathy: Put yourself into somebody else's shoes. Imagine you are in their situation and try to think of a time when you had a similar experience. Never judge too quickly when a person tells you something. You have to understand the whole story of what’s happening. Recognize the emotion that the person is experiencing. Communicate that you understand that emotion.

Joann Lublin is the author of Power Moms: How Executive Mothers Navigate Work and Life, which came out this month. She is also the author of Earning It: Hard-Won Lessons From Trailblazing Women at the Top of the Business World. Joann is the former Management News Editor of The Wall Street Journal where she created its first career advice column which she wrote up until May 2020. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and she won the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award, the highest accolade in business journalism, in 2018. ______________________________________________________________________ Over the past few decades we have made greater strides in workplace gender equality and we have seen more and more women step into leadership roles, but we still have a ways to go. There are still stereotypes and mindsets set in the past that give the notion that women have to choose between a career and having a family, they can’t have both. But as Joann has found in her conversations with female senior level executives, n

Can you really work with multiple generations of employees? A lot of people are worried about the new generation that is coming into the workforce. Here are three ways you can ensure that employees can work with multiple generations: ✅Avoid stereotypes Don’t assume that if somebody is older, they don't know how to use technology and if somebody is younger, they are great with technology. Let's not assume that every generation and every person from that generation acts or behaves a certain way. ✅Focus on the life stage We have to focus on the stage each person is at in life. They might be a younger employee who has a lot of responsibilities or an older employee with few responsibilities. ✅Practice empathy This is extremely important to any organization, especially when we think about working with different generations. We need to remember that different generations went through different things. These three tips will help create more cohesive teams, especially if those teams are composed of people from differe

Jeff Schwartz is the U.S. Leader for the Future of Work at Deloitte and author of the new book Work Disrupted: Opportunity, Resilience, and Growth in the Accelerated Future of Work. Jeff is also the global editor of the Deloitte “Global Human Capital Trends” report series, which he started in 2011. ______________________________________________________________________ Business leaders are always looking ahead to see what is coming in the future of work. The trends that we have seen coming in the next 5-10 years have been accelerated due to the pandemic in 2020. Things that we thought would happen in 5-10 years have happened in weeks and months. When it comes to the future of work Jeff believes that we are in the end of the beginning, and we are beginning the next chapter. We now have the technologies in place, in this new chapter we are going to see the implementation and scaling of these technologies and the new ways of working. “One of the one of my favorite quotes is a quote from Albert Einstein who said t

What’s the worst career choice you ever made? I remember when I was younger, everybody told me not to move to San Francisco. They said I couldn’t afford to live there, that I didn’t know anything about speaking, and that I was a terrible writer and couldn’t write a book. People would say that I should be a lawyer or a doctor, that I should do this or that. And I spent a lot of my life listening to other people and trying to fit into somebody else's mold. When I wanted to start a business, everybody told me that I didn’t know anything about starting a business and that I should get an MBA instead. Listening to other people was the worst career mistake I ever made. It took me several years to understand that I shouldn't be listening to other people--I should be listening to myself. It's ok to take advice from other people and to hear what others are saying. But ultimately, you have to take it with a grain of salt, because nobody knows you better than you.

Steve Preston is the President & CEO of Goodwill Industries International, the world’s leading workforce provider. He leads a team of around 140,000 employees across the United States. Prior to his current role Steve served as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and as the Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration. He orchestrated successful turnarounds as the CEO of two private corporations, Oakleaf Global Holdings and Livingston International and he was the CFO of two Fortune 500 companies — Waste Management and ServiceMaster. ______________________________________________________________________ The world looks very different today than it did just over a year ago. The pandemic and other world events have had long lasting effects on the way we live and work. Steve’s role at Goodwill has put him in the unique position of not only having to address these issues inside of his own organization, but because one of Goodwill’s main operations is workforce developmen

Leaders need to serve themselves. This is the leadership hack of Barbara Humpton, CEO of Siemens in the United States. While leaders need to serve their leaders, their customers, their partners, and their teams, they also need to serve themselves. Self-care can manifest in a lot of different ways, but for Barbara, it's about sleep. Oftentimes, sleeping on a problem can greatly increase your potential for better ideas instead of trying to solve the problem at the moment. Self-care is different for each person, as each of us is dealing with different kinds of stress. But the most important thing is that you take care of yourself so that you can then take care of others.

Ryan Hawk is the host of one of the most popular management and leadership podcasts in the world called, The Learning Leader Show. The show was chosen by Apple Podcasts as an “all time bestseller” in 2020 and it has received acclaim from Forbes and Inc. Magazine. He is also the author of Welcome to Management: How to Grow From Top Performer to Excellent Leader. It was named one of the 100 Best Management books of all time by Book Authority and it was named the best leadership book of 2020 by Forbes. ________________________________________________________________ Contrary to popular belief, top performers do not always make the best leaders. At the beginning of his career Ryan was in sales making cold calls for LexisNexis, and he was very successful at it. Because he was a top performer he was promoted several times and ultimately he moved to a sister company and became the VP of North America. Over his time as a leader he learned a lot and was able to gain the skills needed to lead, but thinking back to hi

Leaders need to become lighthouses. Why? A lighthouse is something that shines light into a sea of uncertainty. It guides other people so they don’t hit rocks and can find their way back home. But as a lighthouse, you need to remember that without ships in the water, you're not very valuable. It means you should always guide other people. You have to take other people along on this journey with you. If you only focus on yourself and become a wonderful lighthouse but don't have any ships in the water, then what’s the point? This episode is brought to you by my friends at ServiceNow, a software company that makes the world of work, work better for people by delivering digital workflows that create great employee experiences, and unlock productivity. If you or your company is looking to transform old, manual ways of working into digital workflows, then you need ServiceNow. They are trusted by over 6,200 enterprises customers, Check them out here.

Laurent Therivel is the CEO of UScellular, the fourth largest wireless carrier in the United States with 5,000 employees across 23 states. Previously he spent 12 years at AT&T where he most recently served as CEO of AT&T Mexico leading 18,000 people. Becoming the CEO of a company during a pandemic comes with a unique set of problems. A role that usually requires a lot of face to face interaction with employees, customers, and vendors has been mostly limited to phone calls and online meetings. Laurent joined UScellular as their CEO in July of 2020. He says he’s had to heavily rely on data and analytics to see how their services are working for customers across the country, and that’s been difficult. Usually he would prefer to interact more to get a better feel for how things are going. This past year there has been a fundamental shift in the way we live and work and Laurent believes that this shift has allowed us to take trends that would have taken 10 years or so and accelerated them to be accomplishe

Whether you are a leader or an employee, self-awareness is extremely important. One of the best ways to be externally self-aware is to be open to feedback. There are 3 ways you can get better feedback: Ask for it. Have a conversation with your leader or manager about what the feedback process looks like. Have open communication and set up the parameters around what the feedback will look like. Internalize the feedback you get. A lot of times when we get feedback, we take it personally and get defensive. Instead, internalize the feedback, absorb the information, and use it as an opportunity to learn and grow and apply the things you’re given. Focus on the effort, not just the end result. Don't discard the journey. Reward yourself for what it took to become self-aware instead of focusing only on the end result.   This episode is brought to you by my friends at ServiceNow, a software company that makes the world of work, work better for people by delivering digital workflows that create great employee experien

Mark Lashier is the CEO of CPChem, a company that produces petrochemicals and plastics with 5,000 employees around the world. 50% of the company is owned by Chevron and 50% is owned by Phillips Petroleum. Mark has served in leadership roles at Chevron Phillips Chemical and Phillips Petroleum for three decades. With the challenges that we have all had to face over this past year, we have seen organizations and leaders make changes to adapt to our new way of work and life. Mark Lashier, CEO of CPChem, says that all of the events of 2020 reinforced some of the basic principles he has always believed in. Ever since Mark first became CEO in 2017 he has focused on trust, transparency, and simplicity. And while those values are important at any point in time, they were even more crucial throughout 2020. In order to carry on with business Mark knew that his employees and his customers had to trust him and each other, he knew he had to be open and transparent with everyone to keep them up to date, and he had to remove

I love the way my wife Blake Morgan talks about customer experience. She says that we need to figure out how we can make our customers’ lives easier, even if that means our lives get a little bit harder. But what happens in most organizations is the exact opposite. We are willing to make the lives of our customers harder so that we can make our lives a little bit easier. We need to flip that around. The fact is that customers are willing to pay more for a great experience. Psychologist Thomas Gilovich looked at how our satisfaction changes depending on if we invest in physical goods or in an experience. What he found is that over time, if we buy a physical good, our satisfaction levels go down, but if we invest in an experience, over time our satisfaction levels go up. Clearly, this idea of creating experiences and serving customers has a significant impact, not just for our customers, but for the bottom line for our organizations. This episode is brought to you by my friends at ServiceNow, a software company

If there is one thing that’s true about being an entrepreneur, it’s that you have to get used to rejection and failure. These things are a part of the game when you have your own business. Entrepreneurship is all about innovation and curiosity and you can’t have those things without failure. The important thing is knowing how to deal with this reality and not letting it stop you from moving forward. We have both encountered failure over the course of our careers. The reason we have successful businesses now is because we learned to deal with that failure and we’ve used it to propel us forward instead of letting it hold us back. Here are some of the lessons we have learned over the years on how to deal with failure and rejection as entrepreneurs. Let yourself process the failure When you experience failure in your business, whether it’s a small error or a huge mistake, it is important to deal with the feelings and emotions that come with it. Don’t go into denial or try to cover your feelings with food, drinks,

Today, leaders need to be servants. We used to have this traditional idea of the pyramid where the leader sits at the very top and tells everybody else what to do. But we're starting to see this kind of inversion of the pyramid where the leader is at the bottom propping everybody else up. This is called servant leadership. When you show up to work every day, your job is to help make other people more successful than you. Here are some tips on how you can practice servant leadership: Remove stressors from the lives of your employees. Show appreciation and recognition to your employees. Understand your employees as individuals, not just as workers. Understand the moments that matter in the lives of your employees. Remove obstacles from the paths of your employees. Thanks to my friends at ServiceNow for sponsoring this episode. Make sure to check them out at http://bit.ly/servicenow21