Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to Rise up at work. I'm Dr. Deepak Bhutra and today we are unlocking the work life you were meant to live. You're watching now Media Television.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Hey everyone. Hi Dr. Deepak Bhutra. On this show, Rise up at Work, we explore how real professionals grow, lead and create impact in today's fast changing workplace. Today I have the absolute joy of bringing in someone very interesting.
My guest is Dr. Ornan Davis and I need to be honest, I love building careers. I like the hiring process, resumes, interviews, credentials. But he brings something very different. Let me start off by how I saw his title and had to scratch my head and I thought I'd seen it all.
Dr. Davis is a self actualization engineer. He's a human capital consultant, he's a researcher, he's a coach, he's a startup advisor and at nights he's also principal investigator at the Quality of Life laboratory. Or laboratory, I got to learn to pronounce that one day. His work focuses on helping people do and be their best and on building more rigorous talent systems that move beyond conventional hiring assumptions towards methods designed to better predict success. Oren, there is so much you do, there's so much there that I've said it's a mouthful. Could you, in simple terms tell me what pain do you solve for my listeners out there?
[00:01:19] Speaker C: I figure out how to get the right people in the right places and then enable and empower them to do and be their best.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: I, I, I can live with that. I can absolutely live with that. Thank you very much for that. So Dr. Davis, I want to really kind of look at where we are today. I am a career strategist. I spent a lot of time, my biggest bugbear is that the way we do hiring is problematic all over. I just don't sometimes I cannot connect how people put resumes together. And in a chat GPT Claude infused world where every resume looks sharp, I am gravely nervous. Let me start throw you into the deep end right up 1. Looking at conventional hiring, what do resumes and interviews often fail to reveal about a person's real potential? Could you dig in there for me?
[00:02:03] Speaker C: Talking about failing to reveal their potential implies that they reveal any potential in the first place and I would argue that by and large they don't.
I'm actually going to put this entirely around. I mean, let me start by saying I love resumes and interviews. They're both very, very good things, but we're not using them correctly. Let's start with what a resume is really about. A resume is really about laying out your experiences, the things that you've done, successes that you've had. It's a portfolio. And the implication of a resume is, I've done this somewhere else, now I'll do it for you. It's kind of what a resume is supposed to be about. But people are looking at this and saying, well, if you've never done it before, that means you can't do it.
I shouldn't have to explain how illogical that is because everybody's done something for the first time.
And if we hire on the logic that if somebody hasn't done something that means that they can't do it. We're only going to hire a very, very select group of people and we're never ever going to bring anybody new into any area whatsoever. So one of the things that we really need to start doing in the career process is doing skill tests for hiring. Now a lot of companies are doing this with coding tests, things along those lines, but they were first looking at resumes before they did the coding tests. We need to flip that. We need to start with the skill tests. Can you actually do this job? And the fact that you can claim that you did it somewhere else doesn't mean that you can do it the way that we do things here.
So, first step, skill test. Can you actually do the job? Are we convinced that you can do the basics, then resume? What kinds of results have you pulled off? But at that point you're already knowing. When you, as soon as you look at the resume, you're already knowing this person's got the basic skills, they can pretty much do the fundaments of the job.
Now where is their excellence? And now we're learning about them. What is their excellence? I also add that there's one more thing that companies should absolutely be adding to their hiring process, which is why do you want to work here?
[00:04:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I would have knew that working
[00:04:08] Speaker C: here are going to matter also. And what do you get out of it kind of thing. And then when we go to the interview, the interview is not about gatekeeping for skills or anything along those lines. If you're worried about that, make a test part of the interview day, like an on site test. And that's sort of a double check or something along those lines, something more complicated that you want somebody at the company to analyze.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: You're about to say, dog, I got to say something here because I just heard this screaming sound and I was curious what happened. It was a 21 year old about to get into the workforce. And he's listening to you now? He's having a heart attack. Why? Because he's at that point in his career where he does not have that impressive title. He has no long track record. His resume is kind of the only thing that he knows right. To make his capabilities available or visible. And now you are saying you need to actually do it the other way around. How does someone who's 21 year olds not misunderstand your statement? Could you clarify exactly how does someone like that, who has nothing to say and you're telling me that he has to lead with something else, how so does someone like that lead? How do we reconcile that?
[00:05:11] Speaker C: See, they're not misunderstanding my statement. It's the employers that are misunderstanding the statement.
Because the skill test is how that 21 year old proves that they're amazing and better than somebody twice their age.
And I've seen it happen. And I know people like, just for instance, there's a coach. I know she is relatively, compared to most other coaches, she's a total rookie. But she is better at the fundamentals than people I know that have been coaching for decades.
[00:05:36] Speaker B: Decades.
[00:05:37] Speaker C: She is amazing. And even though she's only been coaching for a few years, she's better than most coaches I know.
But in a skill test that would come out on a resume, it wouldn't.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: It's really interesting you say that because, you know, I just before this taping I got a message from a colleague of mine that I last dealt with year ago and it was under very interesting circumstances. She had been fired by the CEO, who himself got fired afterwards also.
So she, at that point she was like, you know, telling me that Deepak, I joined because he looked at my resume and I made the mistake. And I think they made the mistake actually never looking at cultural fit, as she called it. But it's, it's, it's. Are we talking cultural fit when we say about skills? Are we talking something different here? I just want to get some context on that.
[00:06:23] Speaker C: Cultural fit is where the interview comes in.
See that, that's the thing. There should be an entire progression. It's the skill test to make sure you can actually do the day to day of the job. It's the. Why do you want to work here? To find out your motivations. And that's your first look at the cultural fit. It's the resume looking at your excellence and figuring out where you shine. And then it's the interview to find out are you a cultural fit. Do you work well with these specific people?
Do we all get along? Can we all work well together?
And so your 21 year old, who may be amazing, can actually get in the door by excelling at the skill test. The person who got fired from the job would have found out during the interview. If they use the interview as a cultural fit, she would have found out during that interview, whoa, wrong company for me. Not a good fit. These people don't get along with me, I don't get along with them, and so on. And that's how it would have worked. So the whole system needs to change to update with the knowledge era, to update with the new technology, to update with the new way that we work.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: So this is getting really interesting for me because it's like my brain exploding with all the questions I have for you. Because we speak about skills in one breath, we talk about fit in one breath and suddenly I'm realizing that this seems like a selling function because I come from a B2B selling background and we are in always start off with a simple understanding.
To keep it simple, we I intend to sell something to you, but both keep the right to walk away because we're also looking for good fit. Does my solution fit what you're looking for? And let's have an honest conversation on it. Here's the interesting thing though. I came into this conversation and when we started off it seemed like there's an obligation on the company, but there seems to be obligation on both sides. And I really like this conversation because you're kind of calling out, here's the thing I wanted to ask you, and this is a hypothesis and I don't know what your conjunction on this would be, but for some reason I believe that interviewing a person first or having an interview first mindset actually leads to better resume generated because the person now can generate a resume that actually is contextual to how they intervene. But that would absolutely sound comical in any scenario. But I realized when I coach people that when I actually tell them no, we're not going to start with the resume, we're going to actually first understand understanding you understand how you think you're going to fit into the job and understand you and your value system and your strengths, weaknesses, and then we're going to look at the resume and say, ah, here's a template. This is how I think we're going to fill this template. Based on what I know of you and people still till this day tell me that sounds like a weird way of doing. For some reason I just wanted to get your opinion on that would you agree? Would you disagree with weirdos like me?
[00:09:00] Speaker C: It's an interesting perspective and it's a really different take on things.
I think definitely the system I outlined originally would still be the ideal that I would recommend. But relative to what companies are doing right now, even your way is better. And I think that the way I've been watching a lot of companies right now, you know what I would do, borrowing on your theory? Do it by lottery. You just. The biggest, the biggest challenge to interviews is the amount of time that they take. But you know what? Just take all your candidates, throw them in a lottery, interview a certain number of them and see what you get.
And I think that you might actually do a very interesting hiring process that way, and certainly better than, let's just look at the resumes, see who's done amazing things and do it again. You're going to overlook so many amazing people that aren't fitting the exact profile you have. And the problem with that exact profile, which is why your interview technique is so interesting, is that the companies don't actually know what they want. They don't know what they need. And so interestingly enough, as they start talking to 15 different candidates, let's say they're going to get 15 different visions of the position, which will tell them a lot. And they might just say like, oh my gosh, this person has this amazing vision for the position that I never ever thought of. What an amazing candidate. Why don't we move it in that way? And suddenly you find yourself completely revamping how the job works. The one downside to this is that some people interview very well, but they do not execute very well.
So you still want to make sure that there is execution and all the rest of those things. And, and that's where you still need like the skill test, the resume, finding out that they know how to execute, finding out perhaps that they have executed, although that's less important. Just knowing that the can is the most important part. And the resume, like understanding their excellence, helps you to understand where they might be best placed. It's not really so much a metric of their skill or talent. Most especially because research actually shows that the accomplishments we have in a resume are team based, even though we present them as individually based and we say, I did this thing, you did this thing, in the context of a supporting company, a team, a tech stack, all the rest of those things.
So identifying who is excellent from, from those accomplishments, less, less definitive. We should be using resumes to identify where people shine and where they might do their Best work. It's context for their excellence, not an indicator of their excellence.
[00:11:28] Speaker B: I kind of like this conversation. This sounds like socialism for resumes, right?
[00:11:32] Speaker C: And we have this phobia of socialism, capitalism. I'm not a socialist. I'm very much against it.
[00:11:37] Speaker B: No, no, you are. But I like the system that we have because this system actually allows people to shine. And when you say that, I like that because it brings the individual to the forefront, which technically might be right, maybe capitalistic. Right. But Dr. Davis, sir, we just opened up a can of worms, but unfortunately we need to move on to the next segment. I've enjoyed this conversation.
One of the things that I'm listening and listening to very carefully about is that it is a. I think one of the things you're saying is look at things the way they're structured, there are better ways to do it. And a skills led, a fit led, a cultural fit led conversation is far more better, more rich, enriching than the traditional recruiting model. I agree with that. I like it. I'm really excited about segment number two. And we're going to talk about how flow comes into things. I've always been intrigued by the concept flow. I want to get your perspective on it. I'm also going to start thinking about some of the things you said in the first segment and, and kind of push you a bit more and try to connect dots for our listeners. We'll be right back.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: We'll be right back with real stories, fresh insights and action steps to help you rise up at work without losing yourself. You're watching Rise up at work on Now Media Television.
And we're back. I'm Dr. Deepak Bhutra and you're watching Rise up at Work on NOW Media Television. Let's keep reclaiming your career and learning how to truly rise up at work.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Hello everyone. To stay connected to this show and every NOW Media TV favorite live or on demand, anytime you like, just Download the free Now Media TV app on Roku or iOS and unlock non stop bilingual programming in English and Spanish. And hey, if you're on the move, no problem or we got your back. Catch the podcast version at www.now media.tv. from workplace growth and leadership to business culture on Now Media TV. Streaming around the clock. Ready whenever you are. So before the break, we went all over. We had so much fun. It just felt like we were literally, you know, we had resume tied up to a stake and we were setting it on fire. We spoke about hiring systems, we spoke about real people behind the resume, behind the resume, the interview we spoke about, I don't know, skills we spoke about. Fit Orange research also includes a lot of work around flow, creativity and mentoring. And his coaching work focuses on helping people build self knowledge and personal growth trajectories.
Complex words, Very complex words, but very simple application. Sir, what is the difference between being productive and actually doing your best work? Because I look at people and they tell me I was at work till 8 o', clock, but I also know they were in lunch for two hours also. So how do I reconcile these type of things?
[00:14:09] Speaker C: So I want to create a working definition of productivity just to make sure that we're on the same page about this. So productivity is getting maximum output from minimal input.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: Wow, that's a lazy person's dream definition. Love it.
[00:14:23] Speaker C: Absolutely is. Because that's the idea of being productive. It's doing the most with the least. But along those lines, what we're doing is we've got this industrial era mindset of if you can make four widgets in one hour, then you can make eight widgets in two hours. But that's not normal anymore. We're not making widgets, we're coming up with ideas. We're doing knowledge work, we're doing human work. So two hours for lunch, who cares?
Get your work done. Are you getting the results that you need to get? And are you producing the value that you were expected to produce for the salary that you're being paid? That's all.
And why do we need to make it more complicated than that?
[00:15:01] Speaker B: I'm speechless because I actually am looking for a good argument to make and I cannot. I've gone blank. I love that. But doc, let me push on this. When I first bumped into the concept of flow, to be honest with you, I tried to read on it. And actually the more I read on it, the more confused I got. But when I started sensing it or feeling it in the work or the moment that I was in, then it started making sense to me. Could you, in your very interesting style of simplifying things, because I assure you, I've heard you give TED talks, I've heard you give very complicated seminars. And what is a breath of fresh air with you is that not once will you use big words like plausibility or anything else. You know, we don't hear that from you. But I do know you have the capacity to drown me with that. In simple terms, could you help me with your research? What are these conditions that make this concept of flow more likely to happen and what is happening at the workplace that interrupts it.
[00:15:55] Speaker C: So those are two completely different questions. But let me start with just, you know, what. What produces flow? So there's a couple of things, just straightforward, the things that you like doing for their own sake. So the mnemonic I give people is the climber climbs to climb.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: For some reason, I get that. Yes.
[00:16:16] Speaker C: Yeah, you just climb because you want to climb. Like, I experience a lot of flow dancing, and I'm a dancer. I love to dance. And I experience flow dancing because I love the dance. And it's not necessarily about win, lose, successful. And if people want to get into the win, lose thing, I sometimes experience flow. Playing chess. It's not about whether I win the game, lose the game, draw the game. It's about whether I feel like I'm enjoying the game. My, you know, my skill against my opponents. Do I really feel like we're getting into it and playing a good game? If it's a good game, win, lose, or draw, I come out happy. And so that's playing it for its own sake.
[00:16:54] Speaker B: I love it because, you know, my son's 24, and he's just caught on with this online gaming community on chess.
Whenever he's taking a break, he's sitting with his mobile phone playing chess. And I'm a bit confused because other kids are 24, you know, playing most likely blow up a castle or build a legion of dragons or whatever. So I said to him, I saw his squad, and I said to him, wow, I think that's the lowest score I've ever seen. Why are you even embarrassing yourself? This is what he said to me. Said to me. What? Embarrassed. Why? I'm having fun.
And I kind of felt that when you were talking that it's not about the score or the winning. It's about being in the moment, going with the flow.
And that's like I said earlier, that's when I actually understood the concept flow. In fact, the only reason why I'm terrified of flow is because I cannot pronounce me how checks comment is last.
[00:17:39] Speaker C: All right, so I'll simplify that one. It's mihai.
And then an English phrase that sounds kind of weird, but chick sent me high and a little extra E on the end. Chick sent me high.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: Chick chicks with me. Hi.
That is very interesting.
[00:17:57] Speaker C: It's pretty close to what I actually said. Hungarian. But ironically, in Hungarian, last name, first name. So in Hungarian, it's csikszentnihalyi mihaly. But in America, we do it backwards, so we say Mihaly csikszentmihalyi.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: Got it, Got it.
[00:18:10] Speaker C: I had to learn to do that when I was this grad student and I actually had to get out. Dr. Chik sent me high all the time.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: Yes, I stopped saying that, but I did like the work and then the thought process that he brought to the world. What I want to do though is let's stay in the flow, as we would say. Right, Staying in the flow. I know that you do a lot of work on identity and you and I have had conversations on this before.
I want to kind of would love to give you an opportunity to talk about how can a professional identity.
Not professional identity, sorry, how can a professional identify the kinds of problems, environments and responsibilities that consistently bring out the best energy and performance? I will come to identity as well because but for this segment I'm going to stick with professional being able to identify the kind of problems. So remind me to come back to identity because you and I had a great conversation on that.
[00:19:00] Speaker C: So I think that as far as professional goes, it's what about the field is irking you? And part of that is the self knowledge of what your value system is. What are your values, what are your morals, what are your ethics?
What do you see as problems in the field that may be impeding humanity?
Another way to think about this is what do you see that's working well in the field that you want to enhance or push forward that is also consistent with your value? Sometimes it's about you want to fix things. In some cases you're like, this is going well, I want to make this go even better.
And those things are things that align with your ethos and your value system. The things that you think are important to put out into the world and that make the world run well.
[00:19:49] Speaker B: So can I now force in the identity question since I opened the can of worms a bit too early because it's always bothering. When I really enjoyed our last conversation, we spoke about, you know, individuals on this call, right? So that we are working on our problems and our responsibilities and sometimes those problems impact our energy and our performance and we kind of move back into our shell. We take it personally. And in an earlier conversation with you, you kind of explained the concept of how we need to differentiate between what's happening to us and what's happening to our identity or self worth. Would you take an opportunity for my listeners who tend to be in a 21 to 30 year old age, how would you approach that and what is identity?
[00:20:25] Speaker C: So I think identity is, I'm Just going to say it simply is who you are.
Identity is who you are.
And part of that is it's the narrative that other people tell about you, but it's the narrative also that you tell about yourself. And I would argue that identity often comes in the alignment or integration of those narratives. And I do want to point out that's your integration, not everybody else's. So it's how you integrate those things and how you decide to put them forward. But consequently, there's a responsibility and a choice in that integration. You get to choose what aspects of those identity align with you and which ones don't. What other people say about you, what is that really matching about you.
And if it's not matching, if what people are saying about you does not match with who you are, then you got to do some thinking about that. How are you presenting yourself and so on. What are other people seeing and what can you do to make those align better? This is your responsibility.
And similarly, have you constructed yourself? Have you thought about your preferences, your values, your ethos, your philosophy? Have you actually taken the time to do that and build out a course of action to are we living those values, that ethos, that philosophy?
[00:21:42] Speaker B: Here's a question for you.
I hear all these words and I don't know, how do I start to do this thing? When you were introduced, I said that you are a self actualization engineer and you describe your work in those terms.
When I listen to also this need for people to do something. But can people deliberately design a path towards that or is it something they only recognize in hindsight? It's like, I don't know how to say this to you, but I start something, I don't know what I want, but when I get it, it's only then I realize what I've been trying to achieve. Is this like self awareness or is self actualization something different?
[00:22:15] Speaker C: Well, self awareness is different from self actualization. Certainly you need self awareness to get to self actualization, which I give a working definition is the fulfillment of your potential.
Very complicated construct, but let's give that as a working definition. But self awareness is knowing who you are, what you're about, your preferences, ethos, philosophy, values, and so on. And how do you get started on that? And I always tell people, like, and look, don't laugh this, I'm very serious about this. Just find out your basic preferences. What foods do you like? It is astonishing how many people ask them, what is your favorite color? They don't actually know what is your favorite color? What music do you like? What art do you like? What sports do you like? What activities do you like doing? And so on? It is astonishing how many people cannot answer that question.
And so I would start by just telling people, what are your preferences and why? Look at the patterns of your preferences. What do they tell you? For example, if you look at the foods that people like and don't like, you can pretty much figure out what their palate is.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:23:16] Speaker C: And so on. And then you figure out your palate. And I've used the example of food because it's a very simple and obvious one. But the fact of the matter is we can look at which problems in the world do we consider a big deal? Which ones do we consider a small deal? Which ones do we consider to be very impactful? Which ones do we consider to be minimally impactful? Which ones are really hurting us? Which ones are not? Even though we see that they are hurting a whole lot of other people, it may not be affecting us as much. And again, we look at that and you discover, in a sense, your ethical palette and so on. And so just looking at these things and thinking what matters to me. And part of that, when people examine their ethical palette, one of the things that they run into is the challenge of, wait, am I saying I don't care about this issue? Oh, my God. And the answer to that is, of course you care about this issue. You care about all the issues, but which ones do you prioritize? Because you just can't do everything.
[00:24:15] Speaker B: This is at least three more segments we need to do with you, sir. I'm going to move on to segment three. And in segment three, Orin and I are going to have some fun.
We are now going to push into a conversation that's become the biggest disruption in the workplace. Will AI take my job? Is the biggest question that I get. And I also tell people it's the most naive question one could possibly give anymore after two or three years of this onslaught. But I will come back and I'd like to ask Oren about which human capabilities become more important as machines become more capable? We'll be right back.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: We'll be right back with real stories, fresh insights and action steps to help you rise up at work without losing yourself. You're watching Rise up at work on Now Media Television.
And we're back. I'm Dr. Deepak Bhutra, and you're watching Rise Up At Work on NOW Media Television. Let's keep reclaiming your career and learning how to truly rise up at work.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: I'm here with Dr. Oren Davis. He is the principal investigator of the Quality of Life Labor. And when I read principal investigator, I just had a CSI flash moment or something, or what does that even mean? But as I dug in deep, I actually realized he does a lot of work exploring the boundaries between human skills and AI. That is an important distinction for anyone building a career right now. I get a lot of conversations around how do I stay abreast with AI? AI will take my job. How do I use AI to take my colleague's job? I've had questions like that as well. The question is no longer whether AI will change work. It has and it will. The more useful question that I want to dig into is which parts of human contribution become more valuable when routine analysis, which used to take hours, can be done in eight minutes? Things like drafting and plan, pattern recognition and execution. I do believe that execution can be supported, but still remains my purview. But I'm not so sure anymore. I want to dig into this with Dr. Davis. You study the boundary between human skills and AI.
Where do you, sir, see the clearest dividing lines today?
[00:26:12] Speaker C: So I think in our last conversation on the podcast, I was talking about the difference between algorithmic and heuristic tasks. Heuristic tasks are the ones that require the judgment, the insight, the really the human capabilities. And the algorithmic tasks are more like the recipes. And what we were talking about was the fact that there's always insight even on top of recipes, like the little extra details, the things that may go beyond the traditional path, like, you know, what's the difference between good and great? It's those little tweaks, those little heuristic tweaks to the recipes. Now, AI can always get you the basic things solidly. And that's the thing to keep in mind about AI. It will get you the basic things solidly. But do you want your birthday cake made by a robot, or do you want your birthday cake made just a little bit to your taste? And as the expression goes, baked with love.
And love is an ingredient that is just never going to be able to put in. And there's something to be said for the fact that when you go to, when you go to have your birthday cake, if it was made by your spouse, by a close friend, even if it's not as tasty, somehow, it still tastes better than the one made by a robot.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: It.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: I just love this because what I just had was this, this movie, and I think it's Demolition man, where, you know, he has come back out of Cyber Freeze, and he's sitting with this attractive female and she says, would you like to. And he's like, yes. They both put on headsets and he's completely confused because they've taken it into virtual reality domain. And to me, as he was speaking, actually realized love, at the end of the day is such an interesting concept, right? And we're not talking physically, we talk about. But yes, you're right, there's something that a machine will do which sounds like love, but it's not. I'm enjoying this, so I'm going to dig in further here.
So we speak about routine work, you know, repeatable work, and you call it codified, as I would call it. Right. There's some heuristic, maybe a little bit of it, I don't know, intelligent. What human capabilities do my listeners really need to understand that will remain valuable as AI becomes sharper and starts handling more and more routine or repeatable work?
[00:28:14] Speaker C: So the first one is going to be empathy, and that is a grossly overused phrase. And also there's a lot of types of empathy, so we do not have time to unpack that. But I do encourage people to look at all the unpacking about the different types of empathy, the constructs that comprise empathy. There's a lot to that. But empathy is always going to be an important one. Discernment and judgment and taste. Now, I hear people using those three interchangeably, but like the notion of what's good and what's good for humanity. And part of the problem is that's going to keep on changing.
But the jokes we find funny today are not the jokes we found funny 10 years ago, and they're not the jokes we'll find funny ten years from now. The music we like today is not the music we liked, you know, 20 years ago. It's not the music we're going to like 20 years from now. So being able to keep abreast of all that AI is always going to be a lagging indicator on that. If you try to see what kind of music AI is making right now, that's going to be the kind of music that used to be popular, but it's not going to be right up to date.
And even if you're using exactly today's music, the problem is that's like trying to take a snapshot of somebody who's in motion and running. You only you've got in a moment, but they're actually in motion and it's a blurry picture anyway because it's Moving,
[00:29:29] Speaker B: I'm with you. And we also don't know what that outcome was. Did he actually finish the race? Did he even win the race? But you got me thinking there.
Here's the fun part, right?
There's a organizational side of things as to how organizations embody support AI. For the first time in my life, Dr. Davis, something really interesting with it.
I come from a sales operations background. When we used to tell sales people, put your information to CRM, we didn't expect them to have their own CRM on the side because it just doesn't make sense. Now when companies spend on AI, I can assure you all the rockstar sales people I work with, they have their own tech stack, as they call it. They are second guessing and guessing their own company's stuff and information.
So now you have this very interesting scenario where companies are bring your own device, now we can bring your own AI.
How should organizations use AI to improve performance without outsourcing, judgment, accountability, creativity, or the human understanding of context, Knowing also human beings for the first time getting in control of this. What used to be power that used to ride in a large computer that no one could touch required specialized skills. And voila, here you are now in absolute English, having a conversation to which even my father can do it. Talking to his phone at times makes me smile. But help me make sense of this. What are organizations against are up to?
[00:30:52] Speaker C: So I think that one of the things I've been pushing on since before the era of AI, believe it or not, is the concept of job control.
And what I've been saying is to the greatest extent possible, enable your employees to do what they want, when they want, how they want. Now, there will always be limits to that, but my point is to reduce those limits as much as possible. So if you've got an employee that is successful with their particular tech stack, even if it's a weird tech stack, even if it's a weird method, if the results are legitimate, they work. And again, they're producing the value for the salary you're offering them, it works. Let them do their thing.
And you know, over and over I hear people pushing back on this, going, but what about this? What about that? Again, if they're doing good legitimate work and they're producing the expected value for the salary that's being paid, don't worry about it so much. And when other people are doing things differently, just recognize, look, this is the value you need to produce for the salary that I'm providing. And by the way, this also empowers workers to push back and say, look, I'm providing more value than the salary that you're providing me, so give me a raise.
[00:32:02] Speaker B: Oh, this is fun. I like that.
I like that. Anything that gives more power to the people, as we would say. But, Doc, as you were speaking, something also bothering me, and I want to ask you a direct question. We speak about AI. You know, when. When smartphones came out and everyone was on the smartphone, someone once asked me, what's your mother's phone number? And I honestly don't know. I still don't know my mom's number. But, Oren, I may not know my mom's number, but I call her more now and we are on WhatsApp, and I send her funny pictures. She sends me back emojis, and it's hilarious. She shares so much religious stuff that I just sometimes want to choke. She will share a YouTube video that makes her laugh but makes me cringe. So. But I'm more in touch with. I don't know a number, but I'm more in touch. But with AI for the first time, I was a bit rattled. As I speak to my customers and I talk to the young, young ones. Right. I certainly see something happening. There used to be a time, and I used to tell people, how do you build fortitude? You go to a gym, you work reps, you build muscle. And for me, being in a room with people, having a debates, having your, you know, people cut you down to size, I know it sounds awful, but the point was that you were having a conversation where you were sharpening your edges, people were telling you how your idea was bad or could be improved upon, whichever way you want to put it. Right now, I see people just ladling it out. With AI, there's no pushback. AI has its way of congratulating you for thinking very out of the box. That's a great idea, Deepak. And I can assure you, no one has ever said so many times that in a sequence. Do you buy that there is a notion that we are going to have learning disabilities? Someone actually used that massive word. I used to call it as cognitive drift. But someone said to me, no, no, there's going to be a learning disability crisis. Wait, let me just pause here. You are looking at this from a certain lens. Do you buy all that or do you see something different?
[00:33:46] Speaker C: The first thing I don't buy is when you said that getting cut down to size sounds bad.
Getting cut down to size. If getting cut down to size sounds bad, you've already got a learning disability.
Getting cut down to size is the key part of the game. And funnily enough, again, you were talking about your son's chess score, so I'm just going to come back to that.
The way I explain chess and getting good at chess is you lose your first thousand games, then you win a thousand games, then you lose a thousand games, then you win a thousand games, then you lose a thousand games, then you win a thousand games. And at each time you're leveling up, you lose your first thousand games because you're still trying to get the idea of the rules, the play and so on. You level up, you get that all down. Now you start beating people that were at your old level, but then you level up again, you start going to people at the next level. This is how it goes. And when you're trying to refine your ideas, the most valuable people to you are the ones that are capable of cutting you down and can defeat you, because the enemy is what shows you the weakness. And I hate, you know, using the word enemy because people add so much.
Add so much depth to that word enemy that I really don't like so much, so much connotation that I don't like to the word enemy. But opponent, let us say your opponent is the one that teaches you the best.
And when you lose, you learn a lot from your losses. Now, don't get me wrong, you also learn a lot from your wins. And in chess, they actually tell you, study your wins as much as your losses. Learn what you did right, what did you do right. But very often in victory, especially when we're coming up with ideas, we often know what we did right, but not always. And we don't always figure out what was weak in our win, even though we won, what was weak there. And so I sometimes look over the games that I won. I realize I made a blunder in that game. My opponent just didn't spot it. I got lucky. I didn't really win this game perfectly.
And studying our wins, also knowing what we did well, wow, I pulled off a great move there. I pulled off a great thing there. And it's the same thing with our ideas, our philosophies, everything about us. We put it out there and we let people try to chop it down, and that's what helps us. But if we don't do that, I don't know that I would call that a learning disability so much as, like a personal deficit. We've got to do that, and we've got to build the resilience and strength and emotional capability to get taken down like that without letting that get internalized and just recognizing it's an idea. I put an idea out there. I didn't put my whole self and my identity and all the rest of this stuff is what we're talking about on the podcast that we put. We. We tend to put our whole selves into these pieces of us. It's like, it's like a hologram. We only put. We put out the whole thing in the piece. Don't do that. It's a piece. Your idea got shot down. That's your idea. It's not you. And you learn from that and that's going to help you grow. Knowing that helps a lot. It's still going to hurt when your ideas get shot down, but that's okay because it's making you stronger. And especially when you're doing it deliberately. Be selective about where you do it too. So don't just do that anywhere. Do that. I'm going to. That are masters.
[00:36:48] Speaker B: I'm going to switch it up. Then we got the angle. I do think that we should actually just touch upon identity and a bit more self actualization. In the last segment. I think there's something more to explore because you just said something. Ultimately it comes back to you, the individuals. I want to spend some time on the individual again. We'll be right back.
[00:37:10] Speaker A: We'll be right back with real stories, fresh insights and action steps to help you rise up at work without losing yourself. You're watching Rise up at work on Now Media Television.
And we're back. I'm Dr. Deepak Bhutra and you're watching Rise up at Work on NOW Media Television. Let's keep reclaiming your career and learning how to truly rise up at work.
[00:37:34] Speaker B: Hey audience, to stay connected to this show and every NOW Media TV favorite live or on demand, anytime you like, just Download the free Now Media TV app on Roku or iOS and unlock non stop bilingual programming in English and Spanish. I have been having an interesting conversation with Dr. Oren Davis. We spoke about human capability, we spoke about AI. What I want to do now is I want to bring this final segment and I want to bring the conversation and focus back to the individual who's building a life and career inside while everything is changing around them. We all look at a career and a sequence of jobs, promotions and reactions to opportunity. Or it can actually be a deliberate growth trajectory which is built on self, knowledge, challenge, contribution, relationships and the kind of person someone wants to become.
I really want to now get Deeper into self actualization and what it looks like. This is a core competence, a core area of research for Dr. Davis.
Doc, when you talk about self actualization in a workplace context, what does it look like in everyday professional life?
[00:38:37] Speaker C: So I think it depends on whether we're actually able to do things that reflect our best competencies.
When we're at work. We actually, for many of us, we build our work into our identity. Not just our professional identity, but our personal identity. Now, not everybody does that, but if you're building on, for example, the work done by Ed DC on self determination theory, the idea that we need a combination of autonomy, competence, relatedness, we want our workplace to give us that independence and that feeling of control where we can put forth that which is ours in our best capacities. But similarly, to do things that we know are good, to do what we do well, and for that to be something as much as possible, to have our stamp of uniqueness on it, we do it, we do it well, and it's ours. And it also affects and impacts our relationships. And we have good relationships with people at work. And research actual shows that people who like their jobs do also have good relationships at work.
[00:39:41] Speaker B: But these, this word, good, right? It's so relative. I've worked across the world, I must be honest. I say it's relative, but I also do know that people do have an innate sense of goodness. And they, they do. But is there like some formulaic approach to this definition of good, or are you actually talking about good faith? I just wanted to just dig into that a bit. Talk.
[00:40:00] Speaker C: Sure.
Good is defined by you. And your definition of good may not match my definition of good, and so on and so on. Good is always a relative definition.
And even if it's just defined relative to bad, but also just good in terms of our values, our ethics, our ethos, all those things are related to us and our idea of what is good, what is the good life? What is our idea of good proportion performance? And at work, we're trying to get alignment between our conception of what good performance is and the company's conception of what good performance is, whether that's through the manager or the strategy, and so on. And once again, that puts an obligation on the company to make as clear as possible to the employee. Here is my definition of good. And I always say that a manager's job is to make sure the employee knows what a good job looks like, when it's due, what resources are available, and then to get the hell out of the way and let the employee do what they do best.
[00:40:56] Speaker B: So I'm going to talk about, and I like the fact that you spoke about, you know, this gap between what you think and what the manager thinks. And to me that I, for some reason, I don't know why, but I just saw the San Andreas fault and I just saw this fault line. I have a question for you. I am 21 year old and I'm listening to this conversation. Right. I also know, I've heard from my father that when he was 21 year old, he was told that work hard, you have a job for life. And now today we know that that's not true. I get that. The question that I want to ask is that how does someone build a personal growth trajectory instead of waiting for a manager or company to define development for them? Because honestly speaking, that contract is contract cut, construct is gone. That's my, my, my take on things. I don't think that we live in a world anymore like that. So how does someone build this personal growth trajectory and forget this waiting, take control? What would you suggest?
[00:41:45] Speaker C: So there's a couple things. One of the best tricks that I offer to folks at all ages is keep an internal resume. This internal resume is a record of all of your accomplishments, everything you do, the outcomes, the process you used, and to keep that personal diary of all of those things. And then similarly, since companies are no longer maintaining the psychological contract where if you work hard, you've got a job for life, that means you need to start building your own network of mentors and advisors and so on. And that also may have an eye on that personal portfolio and can give you that advice and to possibly sponsor you or coach you or connect you. And these mentors and advisors, they're the ones now that network that you have is helping you throughout your career.
And everybody has the potential to get those through their contacts, through their network and remembering that these are all organic relationships. But you do need to put yourself out there to make sure that people know that you need mentoring or that you want mentoring.
Sometimes you can get that within the company, but sometimes you can't. And I've seen companies try to force that and it turns into a disaster at times.
And what I think Bill Damon originally made this joke that instead of a mentor, it's a tormentor. And Csikszentihy actually conveyed that joke to me.
But I like that when you try to force this, you often get a tormentor, not a mentor. But you want somebody who's guiding you along those things and helping you see where the Challenges are that you can overcome and help you cement the learnings. Even if you have a routine, mundane project, there may still be something that you can learn from that, some aspect of the precision in the technique or something along those lines. You may not see that, but your mentor might, sometimes your boss might. But to ask, how did you do this well? How did you do this efficiently? Even if you had a very basic win, study the win, what did you do well? And by the way, put that in your internal resume, you did it. You did it, right? It's a routine job. Yes, but what did you do well? And how might you be able to do that better? And every time you're doing something well, you can actually ask yourself, first of all, do I want to do this better? Is it worth my while to do this better? The answer may be yes, but not at this company, because they're not incentivizing me to do it better, but I want to learn to do it better for somebody that will pay me more or give me a better incentive to do this better. Something along those lines. And again, a mentor and advisor. They help you see all that.
[00:44:17] Speaker B: So I am 100% aligned. People ask me sometimes, you've been very successful. The senior director that VP this, you've now left corporate world to do your own stuff. You were lucky. Other people have to grind till age 60, 70 to pay the bills and stuff.
What makes you so unique, so different? And my answer was, it's not what makes me so unique. It's that I was very, very lucky very early in my career, Oren, to realize one very simple thing. And this message came to me from my own mom.
And she if I take her English and I translate it, I think you will appreciate this. She literally wanted me to associate with people that are like a board of directors for me, board fm. And it sounded so weird to me. She said, find the people, Deepak, that elevate you in the same way that you look for a great partner in life. And I was listening to her and I said, oh, wow, that's very interesting. And the same approach that we take in how we form friendships, how we choose our. You can have the same thing, figure it out, but be looking at your resume to see growth makes so much sense, right? I mean, I go to gym and I see these guys walking around with a pen and paper, literally writing the reps down, right?
And then sitting and saying to me, I sat down and I opened up the book for the last six months. And this is how I see growth. This is how I define growth. You're spot on. Why do we not have the same rigor for your resumes? And you speak about the internal resume. I agree with you. There's. It's like a journal, right? You read a journal to grow. You watch your own resume. And I used to watch that at one point, my resume, my internal resume hit 14 pages. And Orin, at that point, as I leaned back and I said to myself, wow, it took a couple of decades, but finally I realized the value of recording growth. And my public presume it was maybe one page. But, sir, enough about me. This is about you. I'm going to come back to you, sir, I have a question for you.
I have an employee man was on fire, but he is now lately disengaged.
How and what can organizations do differently if they want their talented people to keep learning, creating and staying rather than just quietly disengaging? You know this.
What's with that quiet quitting? And that also came out as a new phrase and stuff. Help me understand this as a construct.
[00:46:17] Speaker C: So there could be a lot of things that are going on there. And you know, when I'm consulting for companies going in there, diagnosing that, there's a lot to figure out. But the first things that I'm usually looking at are the incentives.
What is this person being rewarded for what they do and how are they being treated? So you're looking at the interpersonal treatment, you're looking at the rewards. And funnily enough, growth opportunities is often an understated type of reward.
Very, very often what companies could be doing even though they're not, is that when somebody's successful, you give them a new growth opportunity, give them the chance to do more. A lot of companies are just going, this person does this so well. I don't want them moving from that spot. And they get stuck, scared. And the problem is when they get scared about that, when they're scared of holding on to the present, they stop looking to the future.
And that means they're not growing, developing their employees. And that means that they're, yes, they're doing a great job of excelling in the present, but down the pike, that employee gets bored.
Now they want new challenges and the company goes, but we need you to keep doing what you're doing. And the person goes, yeah, but I don't want to anymore. It's too easy for me. I'm done. And that's the quiet quitting. Or they're busting their humps trying to get things done for the company. And the reward that they get back is more overtime. The reward that they get back is, oh, can you fix this? Since you're such an expert? And so on. When you're not getting treated well and you know you're providing royally good work and you're not being given royally good treatment, that's a quiet quit and a half.
So again, it's. It's the effort versus reward.
[00:47:56] Speaker B: I'm speechless. I've forgotten your name as well. We need to come back again and again. I can literally dedicate sections and sections to some of those nuggets that you've been throwing at us. What I want everyone to absorb that they've been listening is that it's not about the job title, it's not about the performance review. Self actualization is. You got to figure out something that's happening that develops you. What are those environments, the skills that deepen your judgment? AI is there and I, we went through a lot of conversations. We've spoken about AI, we spoke about self actualization. Human for horns. At the end, there's something that I'm picking up. It's ultimately the person at the core. It's your resume, it's your work, it's your online resume, your offline resume. It's all about you, you, you, the person. I am grateful for having you on this show. And ladies and gentlemen, take this advice to rise up at work.
Thank you.
[00:48:46] Speaker A: It.
