Sarah Feely 8:33
Hello, hello. Welcome to the Compassionate Leader Circle Podcast. I am Sarah Feely, the Chief Learning Officer here at CLC I'm joined by my partner in crime and my dream doula, unofficial title Laurel Donnellan, CLC co-founder and CEO, and we're here with KeyAnna Schmiedl and Dr. Kelly Monahan. We're talking about the future of work, we're talking particularly about humans in the equation of the future of work, and I'll just give you some brief intros from our about our guests here. Dr. Kelly Monahan is a leading future of work researcher, best-selling author, and former director of Future of Work at Meta. She also served as the founding manager director of Upwork Research Institute. She's known for translating complex workplace trends, topics around future of work, AI, and disruption into really practical insights. I'll also add, Kelly, you bring a lot of hope and clarity in this conversation. And then KeyAnna is the Chief Human Experience Officer at the Global HR Tech Company, Work Human. She leads people, culture, talent, learning, employee experience. Did I miss anything?
KeyAnna Schmiedl 9:55
I mean, if I say yes, that would just be greedy. So, let's go ahead.
Kelly Monahan 10:00
Add it to your plate,
Sarah Feely 10:03
and she's just a badass, and among other things, is recognized as a leading voice in workplace well-being, belonging, leadership, the human experience at work, and we are so overjoyed and excited to have you here in the conversation. Before we get into KeyAnna and Kelly's expertise in this world of AI and future of work, Laurel, what do you think? What do we think at CLC? What are we talking about here?
Laurel Donnellan 10:38
I'm giddy with excitement about this conversation, by the way. I'm not nervous, I just feel giddy, you know. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about.. I think it's.. it's important to kind of pause and talk about what we're learning at CLC right now, and in preparation for this conversation, since we're talking about the future of work. I thought we'd talk a little bit about the past. So, I'm a baby boomer. I was born in 1960 When I was born, first of all, people didn't expect that I would have a career as a woman, number one, number two, they expected they weren't even counting career chapters or jobs at that point that came into the 70s and 80s, so they were expecting me to have one educational track and one job, maybe if I was a man. Fast forward to today Today the reality is baby boomers have an average of 12 jobs by the time they're 58 and six career separate career tracks. They really can't predict the future, but I tried to find some data today about futurists thinking about Generation Beta, which started january 1 of 2025 and they're predicting that humans will have 1218 to 30 jobs in their life and seven to 10 career chapters, and as I'm thinking about that, Sarah and I are working on different ways to help people do three things. Number one, you know, we've been around for 30 years, and our one of our foundational programs is helping people find lovable work, work that they're going to love, we work with leaders to help them provide lovable work, but we're adding a third one, which is lovable transitions. So, enjoying the journey, and I guess I'm going to take a stand and predict that employers of the future may want to help people with the journey and, and the white space between, because we're going to have lots of transitions, lots of disruptions, and that's my two cents for now.
Sarah Feely 13:14
Thanks, Laurel. There's a lot of fodder there. I don't know what thread to pull on. First, I'll start with you, Kelly. Kelly, and I don't know, you look, you do. You have something in direct response to that? Or, yeah,
Kelly Monahan 13:30
I mean, yeah, Laurel, just like I felt like gave us a softball toss up there. First of all, Laurel, I'm glad, as an elder millennial, that you have had as many career transitions as us millennials have had in about the first 20 years of our career, so welcome, baby boomers, to catching up to all these career hopping, but you know, I think here's my initial response, and I think this is something that we're going to struggle to grapple with to make what Laurel just said a reality, because I'm 100% in agreement that organizations who focus on the how and the journey will be the ones who get this right, but my fear is right now is organizations are wired for shareholder wealth maximization, and that means they're on a quarterly cycle. We have humans, which I believe are the most important asset to a company in the liabilities and cost section of the P and L, and that inherent mismatch is what makes me nervous, and I think that's probably what makes the generation coming after us, Gen Z, very nervous. Is we know the reality is, especially with AI, the career transitions will continue to accelerate, and that's okay. People will continue to manage a portfolio of careers. The question becomes, though, how do we take care of these people during the transitions, and I'm very concerned, and this is probably why Keanna, hopefully I'm giving you a softball toss with the work that Work Human does, but this is why it's so essential for companies like a Work Human or companies that are really focused on how do we help the humans in our organizations. To me, business is all about humans, but I'm concerned we don't have them wired that way.
KeyAnna Schmiedl 15:01
Okay, so there is so much here, and I'm going to both try to be succinct, but I know I will fail at it. So, here we go. I think that I would have to plus one everything that you said. The challenges I would actually say, in addition to thinking about work and quarters, is actually thinking about the outputs of a business as dollars as opposed to the efforts of the people from within that business, and so we're still trying to make this how many people out and how much AI in sort of transaction model to understand work and work exists because people say this is something worth doing, and we find value in this, and whether it's the individuals finding value in the work that they're doing versus the shareholders finding value in that output coming out of the organization, it's more of a value equation, and so until we kind of find the right language to be having that conversation, we're constantly going to struggle with work transitions, how to understand people, how do we think about tracking people and hours and work? Should we be doing that or should we be more focused on outcomes, and I think it kind of negates the biggest, most important part of the conversation, which is how do we keep people enthused about the ideas of working in the future, and we have never done a good job of solving for that. We've taken things that people love, called it work, and then stripped the parts that they love most out of it, and then said, "Go figure out how to do the rest of that elsewhere, because work is work. And so this is another one of those moments where you kind of see the tectonic plates come crashing together to then say, "Well, what gets formed next? And I think that we, as leaders, as people who have a platform to have a conversation, have the opportunity to shape the future of what kind of comes together and comes out of this, and what we think defines promising practice in the future.
Sarah Feely 17:15
I'm curious, Allie, you know, a lot of people are talking about what AI is changing, and I'm curious, what's a load of cooly? Right, what do you think is changing, and what's not changing with AI? Is there.. do we have a grasp on that?
Kelly Monahan 17:33
Yes, I love that question. So, it's funny, I was actually just talking to my former partner at Deloitte. So, I started my career at Deloitte 15 years ago, and it was the very first time we started talking about the impact artificial intelligence was having at work, so to me, a lot of what I see in the headlines does not pass the BS meter, to your point, because it is something that we've talked about for decades, actually, AI has been around since the 1950s it has gotten exponentially better at fooling us as humans, and that we believe now at times we can't detect whether or not we're talking to a human, so that is what has changed, is the technology has become more conversational and more human, it will continue to evolve and change, and that it will continue to then take action on our behalf through agentic AI, and so that to me is what's actually new today, if you think about a chat bot from five years ago to today, night and day difference, great development. Now, what hasn't changed is the fear of job loss. Is leaders trying to pursue a technology that is going to give efficiency and cut costs out of the business. We have seen that playbook and that lever played throughout the last several decades, and so I think that is what hopefully part of this conversation is trying to change here, is we need to change the mindset that we have around this technology. We need to remove the fear that's so loaded in this conversation and make sure that we're using this in a way that it actually is going to amplify what KeyAnna just described, the work that people actually love to do, and my fears, what I see in the research is what people, what's happening right now, and Glean just came out with this really great report on this, is we are offloading the work that we love to do to AI, we're then getting back kind of a sloppy copy or fake duplicate of that, and then having to redo it and get into even more menial, tedious tasks, so that is new, and that's what gets me up at night, is how do we get humans out of this menial loop, where we're actually outsourcing the work we love and our expertise, and that which makes us uniquely human. That I think is gonna be one of our biggest challenges.
KeyAnna Schmiedl 19:33
Yeah, and I think if I can just kind of jump in on that thread, look for us at work human, but also personally, how I think about this, it's if I'm going to give AI anything and say it's worth managing agents for any reason, it's going to be because they're doing the manual stuff that I don't want to be doing, nor do I want my people to be doing right. I want everybody to have this sense of when I leave at the end of the day, I feel like I did good work today, and I did it with people that I like, and I think you know, for a period of time, we kind of moved further away from that, and it was the hustle and grind culture, and the if your best friends aren't at work, then you're not working right, or whatever it was, and I gotta tell you, I don't just default to you're my friend because of proximity bias, although it would make my life a lot easier, I tell you, but I do think that it's an opportunity for us to say if we're going to ask people to expend any amount of energy on a tool or a resource, we need to be very explicit about what should be put into that? How much work it should take to get it to like good enough to send down the pipeline, and what we expect humans to be spending the majority of their time on. What makes me nervous is that the conversations across both the research, but also what we hear coming out of these companies that are laying off 10s of 1000s of people is still the well, you know, you got to spend as much time managing the agent as you do a person. Absolutely not. Why would I want to invest the same amount of time, or even more, in a technological solution than I would an actual human being? And so that to me is where I go, no, we are completely out of whack, we're not even thinking about value in the same way, and you need to bring it back to the human element. What is that thing that gets people excited that led to the last innovation that you had, or that surprise we didn't know this, and now we know this thing that happened, and I guarantee you it wasn't because people were trying to optimize for efficiency, it was just that people were excited about solving a challenge that seemed interesting to them,
Sarah Feely 21:45
so am I hearing you both say this is an oversimplification. It's there's two things at play. There's like Kelly, there's sort of this: are we creating this self-fulfilling prophecy? Are we creating this shared narrative that, like, you know, things are blowing up, and so therefore, right, it blows. It's sort of self-fulfilling, and we have to be really thoughtful about the work that is getting done by AI.
Kelly Monahan 22:10
Absolutely. So, like, and not to nerd out for a second, but there's this concept in social sciences called double hermedics, which essentially means the more that we talk about something, the more likely that is to occur. This happened with open office design, is the classic, like research example in academic world, of we told everyone, "Hey, you got to create community, we've got to be innovative and creative, let's tear down the cubicle walls and go open office design. 90% of them were terrible in terms of the actual outcomes they received, but it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, because so many people said this is what you should do to actually get creativity. We are always looking for simple solutions. At the end of the day, I think what's evergreen for leadership and business is we want creativity, we want innovation, we want what leaders tell me is I want my team to run through a brick wall, and so few people will do that today, and yet the words don't match. And so, you're absolutely correct. I think we're at big risk of this becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, where AI does leave to job loss, not because it can or should, but because that's the narrative that's dominating the headlines, that it does lead to more meaningless work, because that is the decisions we're making right now. And so I think that's the big watch out. These are choices we make every day. Leaders have agency. I'm in full agreement with what KeyAnna just said. I mean, the way I've been describing is, I think we've lost the plot about this is really all about.
KeyAnna Schmiedl 23:28
I mean,
Sarah Feely 23:29
so I
KeyAnna Schmiedl 23:30
definitely lost the plot. I, my fear is that we won't get to the point of collectively realizing that enough until the plot is way too far away from us to kind of pull it back, right. And so, as we continue to have these conversations, what is so frustrating is that, like, even if you go on LinkedIn right now and you type in AI, you're going to get a lot of people in the people space talking about how there are all these job cuts, how CEOs and boards are talking about, like, what's the benefits of AI? How are you reducing the cost in terms of people, and that has been the conversation about AI since the beginning. It's almost like it only had, like, 10 minutes, three years ago, of imagine what's possible, and then all of a sudden it became about how much money could this save us if we're now not saying that people are doing this work, I'm not seeing the same amount of energy put into well, how much is it actually costing you to run the AI solutions where your agents are communicating to each other, you know, we had shared around a bit of research that allows you to kind of go in and use this tool to see how much it would cost you just typing in a sentence into some of these typical platforms. I will tell you that the example that I give to everybody is that typing the word unbelievable costs four tokens, and that's just one word, and that's unbelievable. And so now imagine I've got an agent that's running my hiring process, I've got an agent that's running my onboarding process, and needs to talk to that other agent as part of the hiring process. It also needs to do the handoff to managers, and then that agent helps to train managers in new employee hiring. All of a sudden, you're generating a ton of cost that is not being driven by people, so for some reason we think about the cost of people as detrimental to the business, but the cost of technology and feeding that technology as a net positive, so it means that we can change that value proposition whenever we want to. We just have not put enough collective energy in saying change the value proposition.
Sarah Feely 25:50
Brilliant, I love it. And so it gets me to the question, KeyAnna, to you, How do humans need to change their leadership, if at all, nowadays, and I asked that in sort of two time horizons. One like to maybe manage this sort of more immediate anxiety, but are there any changes as you think about long-term leadership styles approaches?
KeyAnna Schmiedl 26:16
Yeah, so the ways in which I'll answer this. The first is around the how leaders need to show up, and I, you know, the research is out there. Leaders need to show up as more human, and what I mean by that is we need to throw this definition of leaders have all the answers. Leaders show up and they look a certain way and they talk a certain way and they exude confidence, whatever that means in whatever context, and put that out the window. We need to think of leaders as people who are then charged with being the stewards of ensuring that other people in the organization know the direction we're trying to row, why we're trying to row in that direction, and what we think is in it for them in order to then put this work into the business, I think that this idea of achieving a leadership title for the sake of achieving a leadership title has to go away, and you have to see it as the true work and value of it, of this work is shepherding the people, right, is helping everybody to come to an understanding of, like, this is why this work matters, this is why your contributions matter. And getting back to that is an uncomfortable place for a lot of people. It takes authenticity, transparency, humility, and a level of vulnerability that I think most traditional style leaders had, like, beaten out of them in MBA and business school, right. And so I think that that's one piece of it. I think the other thing is, as we're thinking about this work and the human beings that are doing this work, where are you creating empowerment opportunities for them to shape how the technology gets used. What is that process design? What is that work that they feel like if I didn't have to spend my time doing this, I could do these things. A lot of times, as leaders, you can underestimate the people at other levels in the company for maybe not knowing enough, or whatever the case may be. You have to throw that away and hear what your people are saying, like I truly believe in this idea of like crowdsourcing the genius out of the organization, and it's going to come from the people who are doing the work every day that know best what is the stuff that gets in the way of them leaving at the end of every day and saying I feel like I made progress on this or that thing, that's what you need to prioritize. My fear is that too many leaders are looking for that playbook of how did you get to optimization quickest, and then reduce head count by x percent, and then be able to say, like, yep, this was a successful pilot, and now do this everywhere else. I think that that's wrong. I think that we can move quickly while still being thoughtful. I don't want us to be too careful, because you can get into analysis paralysis with all of this stuff, but give the tools to people. Say, here, try it as you're going along. What else do you need to learn? What do you feel like you're missing, and fully grasping where the value in this is, and also that level of confidence in sharing where you don't think it will be valuable for this part of the work, then we can have a collective conversation about whether or not that's work that we think should still be done, but until we have all of this information kind of percolating at different levels, we're going to miss something quite critical, and this is where I think you kind of dovetail the two points of what is that skill set that leaders need to have with the how do we approach this now.
Sarah Feely 29:52
Thank you, Allie. I see you, not did you want to add anything to that?
Kelly Monahan 29:57
Well, yeah, I mean, you know, leadership, I think, is probably the root cause of why we are where we are today, in many ways, and I think it's also the hope of what gets us forward and gets us unstocked, you know, to reclaim the plot, and so to me, there's three things that I'm focused on right now with leaders that I think I'm seeing the difference between people, again, the whole goal is to get people to run through a brick wall, to, you know, put out fires as needed and bring their whole selves, number one, and this is a tough one. The very first thing, though, has to start with suspending your self-interest as a leader, and we just know through the power paradox, the higher up you go, the less you actually see people, the less you actually tolerate people. And so, really making sure to Keanist point that the inner work is done with leaders today is absolutely essential. Number two, the thing that we have lost so much in our pursuit of speed is curiosity, and so to get really curious, why is Gen Z driving you nuts? Why are you so angry about remote work? Why, what is the, you know, blocker here? Why do you want to adopt AI so quickly? Why do you want to get to this 15 to 20% headcount reduction? I think having a curious mindset and really having that actually then go through the way that people behave is so necessary, and people are looking, they're looking for leaders who are going to be curious about the world around them, because you need curiosity, there's too much complexity and too much change to not be curious, and the third thing that I advise leaders on, and again, these are all these are these are a lot easier to talk about in a podcast than it is to live. I mean, I've, I've managed large teams for a long time. I get how hard this is in practice, but the third thing is then being able to share your power, and that is where the rubber meets the road, and making sure that people have autonomy on your team, making sure that they have agency, and it's no longer this hierarchical leadership model that's going to get us into the future. It's not going to get you to move faster. It's not going to get you into a more creative team. To do that, you have to share the power that you have. And I think what I'm seeing is the exact opposite today, is almost this concentration of power. Listen, I'm coming from big tech, right? So we can just call the elephant out in the room. We are seeing this almost return to toxic masculine energy and power that we want in our leadership positions, and that makes me fearful, because that's what we need right now. That's the antithesis to creativity, that's the antithesis to actually getting us to move faster. And so I think those are the three challenges right now, but those are the three opportunities leaders who are doing this. There's leaders everywhere today doing those three things and getting results, I just want to jump in there, because one, I feel like you said what I said so much clearer
KeyAnna Schmiedl 32:30
for people, so like take down her three things, because that was great. I think the other thing, though, is we keep talking about leaders, and I fall into this trap myself, we don't spend enough time differentiating who we mean by leaders, and I think I agree with you, Kelly, in that I would actually look to the board, right, because most CEOs will tell you I get a certain amount of direction from the board, whether I agree with it or not, and then the C-suite leadership kind of, it trickles down from there, and I think that, or maybe it's more of a question. I wonder if this spike in generative AI exponential growth and maturation happened during the pandemic, if we would still see the same type of centralizing of power and controlling adoption narratives that we're seeing right now, because my fear is that we came out of the peak of the pandemic and into this mindset of well, the, you know, power had swung completely to employees, and now managers are trying to take the power back, and in this pendulum swinging back to leaders and managers, and the mandates of back to office, or what you know, whatever the thing is that you need to be curious about, still, that's then when AI started to peek its head out as this undeniable, you have to invest in it, you have to let's go, and so I do think that this is one narrative kind of co-opting a powerful tool and resource in service of that narrative moving itself forward, and so look, that I will tell you, I have done stints as a 100% remote person, I've done stints as a full-time in the office person, and I've done stints as hybrid, I know for myself personally that after the luxury wears off of me working at home or from wherever for a period of time, I do miss this idea of getting together with a collective of people who share that same working experience, so that we can go, oh my gosh, do you remember when this happens, but I know not everybody feels that way. I also understand the magic that happens when you get a group of people together, but it's almost like we're not talking about that anymore. We're like returned to office and AI everything, and so it's just this weirdness that I see happening, and I just feel like is it because of the point in time where we started to see all of this improvement in agentic technologies, especially that we're kind of talking about it in this way, and if that's the case, how do we then shift that narrative so that we're talking about AI as a solution for what ails all of us at work, and that feeling of like the drudgery of work.
Kelly Monahan 35:26
So, just quick comment on that. I think that's spot on. I mean, a lot of the research I've done with economists, if you were leaving, you would expect three to five economic shocks during your tenure as a leader, meaning customer behaviors completely changed, your industry value proposition has changed between the pandemic and where we are now. You have talked about almost a half dozen shocks in a very short period of time, where things have fundamentally changed. People have fundamentally changed their behavior, and coming out of the pandemic, most companies operated into a low to no growth environment. So the only people that won during the pandemic were tech, because we all moved our behavior online, and then they also got a pretty big down slope. Everyone else has struggled to rebound and resume to business as usual. So, I think it's spot on. We can't scapegoat that this is an AI issue all the time. I think that's part of the solution is this is a macroeconomic issue that most companies are facing. And then you want to throw inflation, and then you won't throw in tariffs, and then you want to throw a potential war in the Middle East. That is what's actually feeling the desire to cut cost and find growth. And I think AI is a shiny object that leaders are like, "Oh my god, this has been four to five really difficult years arriving. This is going to be the path forward. And I think that is where, again, we've lost the plot with the conversation. AI is meant to be an infrastructure, a tool to help find new value, to help you do things differently, better, find something different, not actually do the same things better, faster, cheaper, and that's the mantra, and that's not going to lead us to where we need to go, and so we also need a little bit of a slowdown in some of the economic shocks that are happening in the background, because that's not helping the story
KeyAnna Schmiedl 37:01
well, and I think, too, look, let's be honest about where tech has been. So, you talked about, like, a lot of tech companies. I was at Wayfair at the peak of the pandemic, right? It was amazing. I got all my furniture, and I got stopped to buy a bigger boat. Like, this is phenomenal. I own a boat now. Who knew? Yeah, but at the same time, then you come out of the pandemic, and it's almost like a different reality set in for tech, which was well, the value of everybody being home. It was almost like creating the 90s again, where there was like appointment TV, and everybody's like on one topic, and then you went back to now everybody's doing their own thing, and we can't quite pinpoint where the zeitgeist is, and I don't think that tech expected that significant drop off to happen. Definitely, I will 100% put out there, over hiring happened in tech a lot, right? Some malnutrition makes sense. I think that, aside from the bubble, the tech bubble in the early 2000s this generation of tech has not seen that shakeup that so many other industries have faced. Right, you saw the robots come to facilities, warehouses, things like that. You saw all of these other, you know, you saw like financial and fintech places have to go online, have to meet their customers where they are, move away from the dollar, and now it's credit cards and all of those things, but now you're seeing tech have this identity crisis, and I think we're just holding on to AI as the holy grail in a way that is completely unhealthy, because it's moving us away from the conversation that we really need to have, which is, how do we redesign the thinking around how tech works? It's no more kegs in the office, it's not driving anybody's interest, it's not also replacing that with kombucha and saying look, we're healthy now too, we have to fundamentally rethink how tech work happens. How white-collar jobs happen, that interaction in the broader economy, and not just sit in our own little bubble. And we were never good at that to begin with. So it stands to reason we'd have to slow down to think about how can we be better at this moving forward.
Sarah Feely 39:21
Laurel, I'm going to give you, do anything on your mind or anything you want to,
Laurel Donnellan 39:28
so many things. I love this conversation. I feel like I'm in the presence of geniuses, and in a way, we're talking to the choir here, like we're singing to our own choir. I just want to throw in this idea to our listeners that you know, because of my age, I've been through a lot of these technology bursts, and there's always fear around them, and I've had a lot of fear, and in my own year I kind of put a lot of effort into learning about the enemy, which I thought was AI, and I've kind of landed with it's as promising as it is scary. It's right now it's equal for me, and I would also throw out that part of that is because I went to 10 nine out of 10 days at South by Southwest, and listen, sure, a lot of technologists interviewed them for Forbes. And then I would recommend two things for all of us to do. If you haven't done them, watch the AI doc that came out because I think it does a good job of balancing, and I recently watched Cara Fisher Wants to Live, not Kara Fisher, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, who is a very solid journalist and thinker around tech, and she also created this series that's very balanced between the pitfalls and the promises of AI, and I also want to remind everyone that we are the economy, you know, the businesses that we decide to start, the people we decide to employ, the strategies as leaders we decide to employ what we choose to buy, whether it's furniture during the pandemic or AI bots, you know, we, we are the economy, we have a lot of agency, not all of us have privilege, not all of us, but those of us that have privilege, privilege have the moral responsibility to contribute to the economy and employ people and motivate people and provide good experiences for people. So I think we all have to step up on agency,
Sarah Feely 42:02
actually, Laurel. Laurel, you bring it. I had a note here saying agency, question mark, lack thereof. My question is, because what I heard from KeyAnna and Kelly in different ways is like it's sort of like this confluence of things that I think there's a lot of fear and a lot of froth where people feel a lack of agency or a lack of control or the train has left the station and I didn't get on and now I'm screwed and and so I'm curious like I guess starting with you, Kelly, for people who might feel like, oh my gosh, what do I do? Like, where is my agency? Is there any forwards or tactical advice or what.
Kelly Monahan 42:43
Yes, I think hopefully it's going to end up like hopeful, but I think hopefully like a dose of reality to where we are in this moment. So I think the hard part of where we are is, as you know, Laurel, you just shared, we have seen technology revolutions before. The problem is they mostly hit blue-collar rural America towns. This is the time we're seeing the technology come for high paying white collar jobs, and I think that is something we just have to grapple with. We have not had this level of reckoning where we did the, you know, you went to college, you got the job, you got the STEM degree, you were told to go be a coder. What's the number one thing AI is great at? Coding. I would never tell my nephew to go get a coding degree today. You've got to move beyond that, and so let's say you do have that coding degree. Let's say you're that, like, 40, you know, sandwich generation here, trying to take care of your parents, trying to figure out what to tell your kids. And by the way, now you might feel irrelevant in the next five years because of AI. What do you do to your point? Number one, we are always meant to continue to evolve, the goal in life is never to been, "Here's my job, I'm going to hold on to it forever. Like, I think that mindset has been slowly eroding over time, but this is certainly, if you have that mindset, that's going to be like a very difficult transition period. I think it's figuring out how do I evolve as a person and how does my job evolve. You get this moment right now where you get to control a lot of that, your boss doesn't know AI probably as good as you do when it comes to how it's influencing your job. So, number one, don't be afraid of the technology, learn the technology, but number two, do not outsource your critical thinking to this technology. What we are finding is people who give AI the driver's seat, they lose confidence in themselves over time, and they feel like they don't have the right judgment in place anymore to make good decisions, and so the most simple things you can do is learn and begin to start changing your job today, grounds up, and two, making sure that you remain in control of that cognition, that's what people are paying for you with knowledge work, is that brain, and making sure that you are retaining that driver's seat and keeping AI in the passenger seat, those are two things, and the final thing I'll end, which is again I hope it's hopeful, but also just like something we've got to grapple with, is if you have a 16 year old today or someone of what do you do, the reality labor markets are changing and what we actually need more of is electricians and plumbers and skilled traders. We need more people going into medicine and figuring out how to cure cancer. We need more people going into education and figuring out how do we make sure that we have equal access to education. That is actually where we need our best and brightest talent. So, my hope is, as scary as this labor market shift is, as terrible as it's been for a lot of people, especially in tech, getting laid off, this is actually a moment to go find more meaningful work into industries that need that tech talent, where you don't have to make up meaning, you don't have to wonder, what am I doing every day, is my actually doing any good. This is the moment to make that transition.
Sarah Feely 45:36
You know, Kelly and KeyAnna, what I've heard from both you, and then KeyAnna, I'll let you answer. Is this like we, we started zoomed in on AI and topics around AI, and what I'm hearing is really macro economic trends, principles, implications that if we can be very thoughtful about it and strategic and zoom out a bit, and by we, I mean, you know, some of the people who hold the small handful that hold the outsized power right now, but we can actually, and we should be making like really strategic shifts in our economy. So I just want to reiterate that. And sorry, KeyAnna, I'll let you go.
KeyAnna Schmiedl 46:21
No, no need to apologize. Look, I think all of this is so incredibly valuable. I want to add one thing before I get to the two parts of your question. The first thing I'll say is we need to continue to promote the conversations where people are talking about the successes that were led by them feeling like they had the most agency, I think there is something to the narrative that the algorithm loves when everybody's fired up and something feels negative, so so many of the stories that get promoted that get people's reactions are the ones where it's like, oh, you know, the block CEO is laid off all of his HR staff because they were creating problems and AI can solve the problem, or whatever it is, and of course I have thoughts and opinions on those things, but honestly, if I spend my time on the more positive aspects of where I see this work making a difference, where people are then reconnecting with the meaning and what they've always wanted to do that is of the utmost value, and then so specifically I think in work one to Kelly's point, be a champion of at least trying to figure out the technology. I'm not going to tell you how to feel about it, but at least know it well enough to be able to say this is where I can see it providing value for me, and here's where I actually think it gets in the way of me delivering at my best, because if you're having the conversation from that standpoint, it is very hard to kind of put you in the corner of, oh, those are just the naysayers that don't want to leverage the technology, so make sure that you're positioning yourself as somebody who has used it enough to know, here's what was surprising to me, and a good thing, and here's what I'm nervous about. I would love to then add your voice to those, those discussions that we're having, right? And that's what we have tended to find at work human ourselves, is we didn't start with our lists of what not to do and what to do. We said, here are some options. Go out, play with it, and then we want to just keep checking in with you to understand, like, where are you getting stuck? Okay, that then helps us to think about training themes, and then where are the places where you wish this went a bit further, and how do you then start to begin to articulate what are what would you actually like to do with this? A lot of times we expect that we put something in front of somebody and we go now go make your job easier. Where do you even get started? Right, so like let people figure it out, let them use it to draft their emails, and then realize actually I like it when I sound more like myself, but here's what's helpful, and then learn about those things and encourage them, because that's what's going to allow for folks to feel like they continue to have agency, and so they want to find more ways to adopt the technology, and then I think the last part of this is I have two kids, my youngest is about to turn eight, my oldest is 12. My husband and I, I've been having very serious conversations with him for years now about I don't think we value the trades enough, and I know this is where elections have been won and lost in many countries, but I do think there's something of value to say the end all be all is not necessarily white collar work. Sure, it's great to have these aspirations, but generationally you continue to find that what was the successful route in one generation is not holding up then to sustain multiple generations. So we also need to not act like, oh my god, if knowledge work goes away, whatever. Will we do everybody calm down. First of all, take a deep breath, and we'll figure this out together. There are a lot of challenges for us to solve. I think talking about healthcare, talking about education.
KeyAnna Schmiedl 50:14
My biggest concern is that our education environment is too slow to pivot to how do we then allow kids, children, young adults, adults, older adults, whoever it is that's trying to learn, the opportunity to understand the technology and how businesses are thinking about it, and how they should be thinking about it to already come in as leaders and influencers into an organization. Those are the things that I think we need to be spending more time on, while we just kind of maintain trying not to completely screw things up and trying to make it a little bit better. I'm very excited about what happens when you get new thinkers who haven't experienced the world of work and the shape of how work gets done in the same exact way to influence the work and how it looks in the future.
Sarah Feely 51:06
Do I have time, Laurel? I know you got to ask your two questions. Do I have time for one question?
Laurel Donnellan 51:12
I know how to ask questions fast, so you take as much time as you want. What you're
Sarah Feely 51:17
implying is that I might be slow. Okay, that's fair. Okay, Kelly, KeyAnna, if you could have 30 to 60 seconds up on a soapbox right now, what's on your mind? What do you want to get across to our listeners on any topic, preferably this topic, but any topic.
Kelly Monahan 51:34
Kelly, I'm gonna let you go first. Okay, you're gonna let me go first. Wow, this is a big 130. to 60 seconds, if we, if we could have anything. I think I'm going to lean in, actually super practical, because I want to make sure that your audience is walking away with not actually stuff to do here. So I want to provide a checklist of how do you know what good actually looks like using AI today? Because I don't think we have the mental model of what good AI adoption looks like. So I'm going to just share with you the three checklists that I go through to determine, was this a worthwhile endeavor with AI. The number one thing is, did this help me work faster? Was I able to do a task at a faster speed than I could by myself? That's like right off the bat, that is what AI should be allowing us to do. Number two is the output, is the quality better than me, just doing this task alone, so that's the second threshold that I think AI has to, good AI adoption has to look like, and then finally, this is the biggest one, and this is the one, this is the, this is the soapbox moment, this is, does it allow me to better get out into the physical world, does this allow me to better connect with humans by giving this task to AI, does this actually free me up to then go back out into the real world? For me, AI has to pass those three thresholds for me to say that's good AI adoption today. It's helping me work faster, it's providing higher quality output, and it's actually getting me back off the computer to connect to with my loved ones. So that's the three things I'd offer to your audience.
Sarah Feely 53:00
Awesome. Thank you.
KeyAnna Schmiedl 53:01
All right. Well, your third thing is probably my first thing. So, I guess what I would say is try to think of a moment where you felt like, man, I felt like I was nailing it at everything at work today. Those days are rare and far between, unfortunately. But then taking that, what was it that allowed you to contribute in the way where you felt most like you as your best work self? And then think about what are the solutions that AI can help me with to ensure that I spend more time in that space and playing to my strengths and less time in the stuff that is other duties as assigned in the way that I think about how I prioritize my work, and for the purpose of connecting with other people, there's so much value in learning from others, more than just how to get this job done, but talking to them, understanding them, how they approach things, and being for yourself. Ooh, I like this piece that they said I'm going to leave that other bit. I don't think that works for me, but now I'm going to try to apply this over here because I think it will be interesting. Find opportunities to get inspired because AI is allowing you to do that. If you're using AI for the purpose of to make me better at my job, to make me feel more confident, that's not what it's built to do. It is not made to make you feel better, although it will say sweet things and tell you you look great today. It don't, don't use it as your source of confidence, have that be other people and you knowing what it is that you contribute that makes you feel like I've delivered great work today, and I'm proud of what I've done, and also I'm proud that I was able to do that with other people. So that's kind of the advice that I would give.
Sarah Feely 54:55
Laura, it's away.
Laurel Donnellan 54:57
Thank you both so much. I feel like I.. I'm so excited, I get to write about this interview, because I have so much to learn from you both. I will just add that I think there's something really profound about valuing all types of work, and maybe we should even get rid of the word leader and just call everyone professionals, you know, we're all professionals, whether we're cleaning or leading, so that's my idea that I got out of this conversation. I think the other thing to realize is where the economy is changing, so the percentage of people that have jobs now is about 58 Some of these categories are overlapping, but it's, it's in the next 10 years is supposed to go down to 42 versus people who are entrepreneurs, that's going to go up, and I think AI can, you know, in the words of Mark Cuban, AI can really help entrepreneurs compete with bigger brands. I had a whole weekend with Claude this weekend that helped me write a new marketing plan. I probably spent a little less time with humans as I needed to, so I'll take that with me, Keyna. And then the gig economy is going to go from 38% to 52% meaning part-time freelance, you know, subcontract, all that. So the world of work is changing, and I think everyone would, no matter what they're, what they're doing with it, and also people that are caregivers, and mothers, and fathers, and volunteers, those, that's a big important part of our economy, and people that are in school. So, anyway, I think we need to value everyone equally and work equally. So, as we wrap here, and I don't want to let you go, but you're very busy people changing the world, so I'd love to hear from each of you, a life lesson and a leadership lesson, and then share how people can learn more about your work. And we'll start with Kelly.
Kelly Monahan 57:11
Sure. So, life lesson for me is to stay in your lane. I've got this like little card I have, like there is no traffic when you're in your lane, and I wish I probably would have learned that a little bit earlier, but I grew up in consulting, where you had to become almost all people. So, to me, I think operate in your zone of excellence is just for me where I find life most meaningful. I think when it comes to leadership, one of my biggest mentors, I would say that men's block, you know, don't know her personally, but her name is Meg Wheatley, and she talks about this concept of sane leadership, and how she defines that is the unwavering belief that people can be kind, generous, and creative, and I think what we need more than anything right now is that leadership belief back into the workplace that 99% of your people are going to be kind and generous and creative if you show up the right way as a leader is if you cultivate the right conditions, so to me, that's actually what leadership is all about, is getting back to the sanity, you know, if you will, of believing again in people and trusting people to do the right thing. So, to learn more about me, I've got a new book coming out, it's called Reclaim the Plot: How Leaders Rewrite the Story When AI Rewrites Work. It's all about putting agency back, like it's all about this conversation, how we get leaders back in the driver this moment, and by all means, come find me on LinkedIn. I'd love to come in, learn more about you. Awesome.
KeyAnna Schmiedl 58:30
Okay. Well, so a life lesson, I think one of the most important lessons that I've learned is probably that the people we struggle most to understand are the ones that have something important to teach us about them, about ourselves, about the world. So I definitely remember earlier days spending a lot of time trying to identify who shares my value and who doesn't as a litmus test for who should I try to learn from and spend my time with, and as I've gotten older, I've just become much more attuned to understanding what experiences, fears, hopes have driven somebody to their worldview and the way that they approach work or relationships or partnerships and collaboration, and then that has helped me immensely to then understand, okay, if this is where they're coming from, here's how I can sort of meet them where they're at, bring them this way, or actually take that into consideration and change my perspective. So I think the important thing to note is that it should never change or or make you abandon your values, but rather think about growth as standing on the edge of discomfort and deciding to take that leap, so I think that's really important. I think from a leadership perspective, curiosity is more powerful than certainty, so being that leader who is insatiably curious, who wants to know about the people, who wants to know about the work, who wants to understand and bring more of a systems thinking mindset to how to tackle a challenge or a problem, and also wants to surround themselves with people whose strengths are their weak areas, as well as people whose strengths might mirror their own, so that you lie at power of collective genius, and that leader does not have to be the end all be all. I think it's really important for leaders to understand that their job is more so to develop and kind of cultivate the people in an organization to be successful, and having stories to share about the successes that they've seen in other people who have happened to be on their team than it is to say here are all of the list of things that I've accomplished, because that's not one, that's not the point of your job, but two, it's also often not true. We do so much of this work together, so it's important to be able to identify that.
Laurel Donnellan 1:00:59
Thank you both so much for your time, Sarah. Thank you for being our Sherpa in this beautiful conversation. And we will be back in touch. Thank you so much.
Sarah Feely 1:01:11
Thank you, ladies. Pleasure and an honor.
Laurel Donnellan 1:01:20
We have stopped recording. That was so lovely, and we're excited about continuing the conversation in a way that's useful for you, and we'll share all our stuff. And thank you, thank you, thank you. That was amazing.
Kelly Monahan 1:01:33
Well, thank you for creating the space, and Laurel, thank you for kicking us, us, and like, such again, like modeling the compassion way. And so I really appreciate the time and space and the container you put for us together today,
KeyAnna Schmiedl 1:01:45
and ditto to that. I mean, this was fantastic, and I honestly did feel like I was talking to like-minded people who were also pushing me to think in slightly, maybe more refined ways, in some ways, and going, okay, all right, I'm on to something here. Kelly's thinking the same thing.
Laurel Donnellan 1:02:05
Well, maybe we can invite you back for a conversation in a few months and see where we're all at, because I think it's something that it'd be nice to follow up in some way. So, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Sarah Feely 1:02:19
Yeah, thank you all. Have a good rest. Cool.
Kelly Monahan 1:02:23
Thanks, Sarah. Great to meet you. Take care. Okay. Bye
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
