Thriving in the age of networked knowledge

Thriving in the age of networked knowledge with Linda Jingfang Cai from Aon

Leaning into the culture you're creating

I'm excited that you're joining me for an interview with Linda Cai. Linda is an organizational design specialist with a passion for change leadership and building effective teams. She has held leadership roles in organizational development and change management in the UK, US and Asia. She's born in Shanghai, completed her MBA at the London Business School and is now based in Chicago where she is the Global Head of Learning, Leadership and Talent Development at Aon, a global professional services firm. Linda is also the co-author of the book, Share: How Organizations Can Thrive in an Age of Networked Knowledge, Power and Relationships. Linda, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Andy. I’m glad to be here.

You have done a lot of amazing things living and working in Asia, UK, US, in different industries and now, leading global talent and a huge company like Aon. Let's start with a little bit of background of who you are and then we’ll get into some of the topics we had planned.

I was born and raised in Shanghai. I completed all my education there. I consider myself 100% Chinese. I spent the next twenty years navigating different cultures, having lived in the UK and US, being married to a Midwestern American man and also have a beautiful daughter, who is a typical Asian-American and didn't think she is a little bit Chinese at all. From a food selection perspective, 100% American. I spent about ten years of my career being a consultant. I’m exposed to a lot of business trends back then from Y2K process reengineering, technologies, workforce transformation. I found that organization and people are my true passion. The next ten years, I've been leading a range of culture change, change management and digitalization work for different companies in different continents. The book is a collection of the stories and the experiences that Chris and I both have had in those companies. I wanted to generate broader dialogue with people who also do the same thing.

Could you talk a little bit about your role now as the global head of learning and talent development at Aon?

My team have what I describe a very noble objective to provide learning opportunities to everybody within the firm. That is 50,000 colleagues across 128 countries. Continuous learning is a subject that's very close to my heart. I always tell my team in the company, I was born in China and my parents don't speak a word of English. Since I left China, there’s nothing they could help or teach me. To me, continuous learning is the only way that I'm able to be here and to do what I do. I believe that post industrial revolution, the access to learning and the constant evolving yourself is a basic human right. That's the only way we could stay relevant and stay employable in this increasingly uncertain and competitive world. The goal for the team is to manage Aon University, developing and evolving our digital learning platform, developing the leadership capabilities and skills for our population and increasing to what I was sharing earlier, continuous learning culture across the organization.

Coming Together

Continuous learning is huge. It's something that everyone in the learning and talent development field is probably passionate about. It’s something I'm big on. It has served me well. It’s something I wrote about in my book about how to prepare for future career change and the future of work, which is investing in continuous learning. Think of yourself like a doctor or a lawyer and always be looking for those opportunities. A question that came up in my mind as you're talking about that, you mentioned it as a human right. I've never heard it put that way before. It's a right, but who's responsibility is it? In the corporate world, is it the responsibility of the companies to provide learning to the workers or the workers to find the learning opportunities that they want?

Increasingly, we all agree this is a topic that the governments, higher education institutions and corporations need to come together to solve. I'm part of this round table called Rework America, which is funded by Markle Foundation. It’s also consisted of twenty American and global organizations including Aon, Microsoft, Walmart, etc. We came together to talk exactly that. There is a visible gap between education and employment. At least 60% of the Americans don't have access for whatever reason, to a four-year degree. The implication is that it significantly hinders their lifelong opportunities, economic mobility and earnings. How do we solve that in the knowledge economy where what you know, what you can do, increasingly not physical is going to determine whether you work for machines or you design machines? How do we help those people who have not started at the right place because where they were born or which part of community they came from?

At least 60% of Americans don't have access to a four-year degree, and that hinders their opportunities. Click To Tweet

We can't expect everyone is going to be looking for those. That's why the best companies are providing those opportunities, especially the right opportunities for the right people. Not just one thing, one size fits all. A couple of questions that come to mind. You've worked at a few large major organizations like HSBC, State Farm, Aon. Continuous learning is very important to those of us in the learning and development community. To implement programs, we often need support, sponsorship from the business, the C-Suite and executives. How do you get them on board and supporting a big initiative like continuous learning?

It’s a couple of things. One is instead of starting with technology, which is a key component for continuous learning, we made sure that there are three co-existing pillars in our initiative. One is technology investment, but the second is around experience. The third is around the community and the networks. The third is probably underrated in most of the cases. People forget that we are social animals. We learn. We also like to teach. It facilitates a good feeling that you are contributing or giving back what you know and helping other to grow on. A lot of times people do it without being rewarded completely spontaneously. We see a lot of continuous learning being ground up viral change to generate that energy and a buzz. We paid a lot of attention to purposefully curate or encourage those networks to form. We pull them together. We identify leaders who are oftentimes informal influencers across the business. We've led a series of social media campaigns on LinkedIn with leaders using their own words, talking about their continuous learning and a career progression, which generated a lot of followership.

People love to see and understand how others got to where they are. That's number one. The other aspect is for senior leaders. Sometimes I talk to them and very simplistically, “We need to put money where our mouth is.” They probably don't like me being that blunt, but what I'm trying to say is that we ask a lot of our employees. In the digital world, there was a stat saying that on average, American workers are joggling 24 different eSystems, from emails to instant messaging to WebEx to teams. It's a lot and we ask them to do work more and more efficiently, better, cheaper. On the flip side, what do they give to them? How do we show our investment in their career development sometimes with the company, sometimes outside of company, to show that we do care about their lifelong satisfaction and a career knowing that we all are going to work until we’re 80 most likely? It's going to be along ride.

Attracting And Retaining The Best

Aon competes for some of the best workers in the world, the knowledge-worker based professional services. In my studies and what I've looked at and talked to people over the last couple of years, what people especially younger workers want now is the opportunity for development, for continuous learning. If you want to be competitive and attract and retain the best people, to make a business case, you've got to be able to provide those opportunities.

Any company who can successfully build that brand as part of the investment into their people is going to go a long way in terms of attracting and retaining right talent.

Another question from my friend, John Hernandez, who's also in Chicago asked, “How do you enable and empower continuous learning at Aon?” Maybe getting into the specifics of how do you enable this and make this happen, especially in a global company?

Culture Change: The best companies are those that are investing in providing learning opportunities for the right people within their companies.

We did a lot of things, John. There are a couple of highlights. One is to tell the truth. I can tell you what I mean. It's not to scare people, but do make them understand that the workplace is fast changing. The reality is that we all are going to work much longer. We all are going to change careers. There's no job security. We are responsible and we can do things to ensure a very satisfactory career. I continuously investing ourselves and learn. I talk a lot about the macro context we are in. Sometimes it's a reality shock. To me, it's not to cuddle our employees by false promise. All these lifelong-employment are long gone, but presenting reality in a way that we are going to help you. We also need your commitment to do your part. That's number one.

The second part is using the peer pressure and a social environment to show that this is something everybody's doing in different parts of region. There are spontaneous campaigns and challenges run locally that has gone down very well. In Latin America, we did a learning challenge. We asked people to send a photo shot of them accessing My Learning, which is our digital learning platform on their mobile in the most creative way. The amazing creativity demonstrated by people's photos were mind blowing. There are people accessing My Learning from a hot air balloon or doing yoga and I love that picture. It was so endearing, accessing My Learning with their children. Those pictures, the visual stood out.

Keys To Effectively Lead A Culture Change

Being transparent and honest with people, bringing them along and telling them you're going to need their help and using social interactions, I forget what it's called, but bringing people in and showing them that everybody's involved, making it social and getting people to share. I wanted to pivot to something related to that, which is about culture and change management. You've been involved with a lot of change management over the years. A lot of companies are dealing with culture shifts, making a change. Everybody's dealing with change now as we’re in the middle of the COVID, Coronavirus crisis with everybody working remotely. How have you led culture change in the past or what would you say are some of the keys to being effective at leading a culture change?

Number one, I would highly recommend there's a lot more in the book, but to give you a little bit spoiler. We did, together with a lot of experience and these war stories, share a culture change approach, which is four steps. From discover what is important from each individual and then to define what it means for the collective group, the connection to the strategy and how the organization should compete. The third step is how do we develop a change plan and how do we deploy a viral change through communications? Those sound a little bit dry. To give you a couple of examples, every culture change needs to involve the masses. What I mean by that is you see some culture change started with the war rooms with a group of advisors or even worse, external consultants and senior leaders. I don't think they will ever fly.

The culture change whereby I see more successful was those started with appreciative inquiry, which is listening exercise to the field colleagues, to people who are close to customers, people who are providing services day in and day out. Those people tell you what the company means to them, why they choose to stay in the company, perform their duties and what are their proudest moments. From the time we did the HSBC culture change right after the financial crisis when banking was the place you don't want to be and the morale was low. The byproduct from that exercise was the culture was already being changed even when you are having those dialogues. That's how powerful conversations are. People are feeling a genuine collective sense of purpose when they are telling us their personal stories about why they choose to work for HSBC, why they wanted to be in banking at this moment, when they connected with a customer or a colleague. That's number one.

The second point is about patience. Oftentimes, I see culture change has a very definitive timeline, about 2 or 3 years. In my view, it takes much longer. There are any changes about changing habits and the behaviors and we are quite stubborn animals and we don't easily change. Oftentimes, you see executives wanting to make an immediate impact or difference. They are too definitive about what they want to see. People start doing it as a checkbox exercise. That's all going out of the window when we have a different executive and had a different articulation of what the values are. In reality, there are a lot of things that's longevity in the organization.

People forget that we are social animals; we like to learn and to teach. Click To Tweet

We often said that any institution is in the shadow of the founder and there are things that stay with us for a very long time. That brings up my last point. We have to be very intentional about the process we go about culture change. To give you a story where the culture work was doing is all about engagement, about caring. At the same time, we were going through a cost reduction. The ping pong table were put in to encourage people balance, work-life and having breaks. At the same time, they were being recorded how much idle time they or having not servicing customers and the ping pong table was left unused. It's about those processes, the intent and unintended consequences.

On the one hand, you say, “We're putting this ping pong table in here. I want you to have fun and take a little break.” On the other hand, we're watching everything you do and counting the minutes that you're not working. People are going to respond to the initiatives or the incentives that are in front of them. They're always worried about their jobs. They're not going to engage unless you provide the right incentives. You show that you trust them. Lean into the culture you're creating instead of paying lip service to it.

You mentioned the magic word, trust. Trust is underpinning everything. It sounds simplistic and intuitive, but oftentimes we hide behind corporate talk. We make sure we say the right party line. When leaders come out of their shell and connect with colleagues on a personal level, we see a lot of the power for change happening when people feel like they are heard, involved and understood. In fact, I read a stat that over 65% of the workforce now wanted to connect with company purpose on a meaningful level. Similarly, over 60% of the people are saying they want to be able to inference company strategy in some way or shape or form. That's across the board. It's not a Gen Z quirk. Even the 50-year-olds are talking about they don't want you clocking, turn up and collect a paycheck.

Everybody wants purpose. It reminds me of a conversation that my friend, Bennett Phillips, told me about. He was at a conference or a networking event. There was a panel talking about how the young workers want to connect with purpose. They want a purpose for their work. This older gentleman stood up and said, “I want purpose too.” Connecting to that purpose, and I'm glad you mentioned trust and transparency and communication, I do a lot of work in this area as well over the last several years consulting with organizations and working on culture change and transformations. It's so common that an executive team will spend months or a year working on a new strategy and come up with this long PowerPoint and expect everybody to get it when you know they're going to go on, on their daily lives, going back to their normal conversation. How do you get them on board? There has to be a lot of trust and communication. Often, they have to experience it for themselves as well.

Historically, and I'm saying this with a broad brush, I don't mean to offend, there are outstanding leaders who are not falling into this category. There's a tendency for CEOs and company executives to pay more attention to investors and externally, how the analysts to respond how their stock price will fall? They pay less attention internally, how do they get people on board or to a point they expect people to get it? The communication of certain decisions typically top down. The last thing you want people to find out about restructuring is through external news, but this happens every day.

Share

There are some companies that do a great job of saying, “Our most important stakeholders are our employees and our customers. We don't worry about the quarterly earnings.” A lot of companies do give in and are catering to investors and the employees don't often understand why certain decisions are being made. If you're in an organization like that, I can help. We have a lot of great solutions to help employees get on board and get aligned with those things. One more thing I wanted to ask you about is the book, Share. I know you wrote this with Christopher Yates, who's the Chief Learning Officer over at Microsoft. You spent a lot of time together talking over the years. What is the impetus and what is the book about?

Culture Change: The most successful culture changes start with appreciative inquiry, wherein you listen to the people out in the field who are close to the customers.

The book is a call to action to most HR organizational practitioners as well as executives. Chris and I, going back to a little bit how this book started, we spent a number of years working together. We entered Midwest America working for different large organizations at a similar time. Through numerous sets of tasks, we came to realize a few things. Number one, there's a lot of fear and anxiety in our work force given how much uncertainty there is in the world. Even going back to Y2K, then it's the September 11, then it's the 2008 financial crisis and now it's a pandemic. At the same time, a lot of the traditional relationship that's community-based has broken down. I’m thinking about the parent-teacher conference, the bowling club after work, the Christmas party companies we used to organize. Those are going away.

On the individual level, every company is talking about new skills that they have to go out and buy. They talk about digital data scientists, but no one had a plan to how do we develop that for our existing workflows. It's a very unsettling time. The book is challenging HR and company executives to look at how we are prepared for an unprecedented time of change and how we are reinventing our people processes to make sure that the trust, the support, the mission and the purpose are embedded in how we bring our workforce along.

I don’t know how long you've been working on the book, but I assume it's been a few months or more helping HR and other people prepare for monumental, unprecedented change in a global economy. As you publish it, we go into this major global crisis that's affecting workers around the world. It's timely. This is not a publicity stunt by you to cause COVID 19?

It's completely unplanned. We are all in this together. A couple of things, one is you are absolutely right. When we wrote the book, we were talking about things like we need to be more collaborative instead of competition. We were talking about ethics, ethical decisions, corporation’s increasing need to trade short-term profit versus long-term growth, to trade return on investment versus people. We were babbling around the topics like stakeholder economy, how do companies and governments coming together to solve big societal challenges like climate change. We didn't foresee there will be a pandemic.

Somehow what we are in now illustrated number one, how vulnerable we are as human beings. The anxiety, the fear, it's so clear in everyday news and on social media. Number two is we need to have a more sense of togetherness and we need to come together overcoming bias and judgment on everything, where way you come from, what value or language you speak or which political motto you have. We want corporates to going forward not forget about this experience. When we look at our value work, at the change, we need to facilitate to be more intentional about the underlying values we put in it and the assumptions we are basing our decisions on.

There's so much of a need to overcome bias and judgment. We've come a long way. There's more work to do and we're seeing some of it out there. I work with all kinds of different companies and talk to talent leaders from all kinds of big companies. Everybody seems to have a major DEI initiative now, which is nice to see, not paying lip service but making a business case, making investments. We're starting to see a lot of change there. It's something that is a big initiative at Aon as well.

We are responsible for ensuring we have successful careers. Click To Tweet

First of all, I'm very proud to be working for an organization that put colleagues’ and workers’ wellbeing at the forefront of business. To take COVID-19 as an example, we made some tough decisions on promotion merit so we could increase the emergency care and benefits for people who either their family needed the care or themselves unfortunately fallen ill and the needed the time and benefits. We had to make sacrifices collectively, the community, in order to protect the most vulnerable. Everyone gets that. No one complained. People know that's the right thing to do. That to me is DEI in action. It's not about lip services. It's about having that we are together. We don't differentiate. What kind of variables you could find in an HR system, but how do we come together to face those big challenges?

Within Aon very early on, our leadership as part of the business round table, which include 180 global CEOs have announced that we not only care about our investors, shareholders and customers, we also care deeply about our employees and communities we are in. That's the reality we are in now. It's difficult to balance all the stakeholders, but we have to because we are in this ecosystem and any decisions you make will have a profound impact on a lot of other parties. DEI for me, depending on the day you, could say women or people of color, but I don't want people to pay attention to certain segments because I or others happen to fall into those segments. DEI is about inclusion and being equitable with everybody that's working in the company and in the community.

That's what I think is the big change that people are getting now. For a long time, people talked about diversity. We need to get more women near the top or people of color or whatever. There wasn't a discussion about making everyone feel included, bringing their whole selves to work and having an equal conversation. That's what everybody seems to be focused on. There's been a big shift. That's going to make a big difference in the business world going forward. I love seeing progress like that. Let me shift to you, Linda. You've done a lot of different things, worked in different places and written a book now. What would you say has been your greatest accomplishment or proudest moment in your career?

I'm not sure. I was asked this question and I said I'm proud of the team that I was able to round up in Aon in the last couple of years. To give you a little bit of context, I had a technology team, a learning program team, an early career team and then deployment, which have all the communication, the logistics and coordination. For continuous learning, this initiative, everyone came together. It's fascinating and so energizing to see that people start to give ideas and they watch out for each other.

They gave me suggestions, “We haven't thought about this.” The change communication for continuous learning and everything we do was a team effort across the board. The campaign, the social media, all of these works were ground up. We did a Yammer jam. A lot of things that were not planned or scheduled, people felt like that was the right thing to do. To some extent, it’s starting to become a movement. This is how we see most things that caught fire on social media. I'm totally convinced that we can do that in Aon.

You’re getting started it sounds like. You built a great team. I do like to ask about the flip side. People often learn the best from mistakes and failures. What would you say has been your biggest failure or a mistake in your career and what did you learn from it?

Culture Change: It's so common that a team will spend months or a year working on a new strategy and just expect everybody to get it.

That's very personal, but I’ll be honest with you. Maybe you already know it. First of all, the hardest moment made you know who you are and what you are made off. I'm grateful that a couple of years ago I had this epiphany in my career that I realized I was not enjoying the type off work I was doing. I realized my personal style and what I'm passionate about is more the development side of things rather than the financial or restructuring side of things. I left a job that on paper was great and everything. I went into soul searching for a few months and decided I want to do learning. I'm grateful that I came to Aon. There's the platform, the team. There are a lot of great things we are doing now.

The learning I had from that is number one, we need to be honest with ourselves. Self-awareness doesn't come naturally. It comes with a lot of reflection and harder questions to yourself and maybe conversations with your trusted mentors. Number two is the courage to walk away from either good job or good pay and embrace change. It takes a lot of courage. You probably also did that to yourself. You had a big change in your career, but you are passionate about what you are doing now.

I’ve made some big pivots. I've made plenty of mistakes. I've also been lucky to have a great leader who discovered my strength. You talked about self-awareness. I talk about self-awareness all the time. It's one of the most important critical factors for leadership. Many people are not aware of their strengths, weaknesses, what they want to do, what success means for them. I've done a lot of inner work, studying, learning from others, figuring that stuff out. I hope that other people will do that. Sometimes we need help. We need feedback. We need suggestions from mentors, managers, leaders. I want to help leaders do more of that as well because we need it.

Talent Development Trends

We want people to end up in the best careers possible, doing their best work possible, live in their true potential. It's cool that maybe you made some mistakes along the way, but you figured that out and ended up where you are now doing some great work and being able to share more of that in your book. Next question I want ask is in the world of talent development, what trend or trends are you following right now that make a bigger impact in learning development, talent development?

There are a range of things that we are following in learning, specifically how do we balance the structures of learning and the self-directed learning? One side is when you're going to roll in order for career progression. You need a macro learning to get the basic competencies and skills in order to perform. The other side is more for personal enrichment and the YouTube experience. Much hype has gone into the right-handed that is fast change in dynamic. You search. You navigate. You learn whatever on the fingertip. We downplay the importance on the left. The implication of that is it can be very disorienting. I read that the most distressed population at work is the younger generation, people who are starting work.

It's not like back in the day, after two years you get here and what's required to get to the next level. The world is like a big ocean. They often feel like they are left on their own without sufficient mentoring culture or manager's attention. Their managers are probably struggling the same, trying to understand what do they do right and what they learned in their career probably are not applicable to coach the younger one, even after 5 or 10 years. The balancing part is important. At the next level, we are looking at a range of things from adaptive learning, using assessment and AI to recommend more personalized learning content. We're looking at more future-looking skill definition. Being able to articulate what digital means, what career you might have and giving people more engaging tools to develop their career.

Lean into the culture you're creating instead of just paying lip service to it. Click To Tweet

We're looking at a range of things. It’s increasingly a challenge I feel. I'm curious if anyone’s also dealing with the same, is how do we as a function, as professionals to translate experience into skills? If I look at myself, I've done a range of things. When I first was looking at say I want to do learn and talent development, coming from a consultancy and change management background, I find a more utilitarian way of sourcing from companies would be like, “You haven't done these positions, therefore you can’t do this.” I didn't grow up from learning per se, but I brought different perspectives into leading a learning function. How can we help talent development and talent acquisition to develop that understanding, help business look at transferable skills, translating experience into skills? That will help the talent in a broader sense.

Translating learning into behavior change is the greatest challenge in learning and development. Making sure that the learning sticks and people go take action and they have those new skills. It's a big subject. Is there a book besides your own that has made a big impact on you or that you often recommend to others?

I have several books that I love, but the book I would recommend is Sapiens. Many of the people are quite familiar with the book. I love most book that's written by anthropologists or historians. We often don't look back as we are busy looking forward to who we are as species and the power of storytelling and imagination.

Advice From The Pro

It's been a powerful tool for thousands of years and still is now. It's so important that people realize that. I've run some workshops on storytelling and how leaders can use storytelling. We forget about it, but it's how we got people on board with our ideas aligned and wanting to move forward in the same way for thousands of years. I've heard the book, Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari is good. Last question for you, Linda. For anybody reading who is looking for ways to take their career in talent development to the next level to achieve more success, what's one more piece of advice you would give?

I am very hesitant to give an advice because I don't think I’ve figured it out. I would say keep an open mind and keep working on yourself. I do believe that maybe that's part of the Eastern philosophy, which forms part of my background is a good leader in any age will need to constantly improve yourself and be open minded to adjust your own frame of reference and unconscious bias. Talent development has increasingly become a cross disciplinary topic. It's not about learning. It's not about training. It's about how do we provide the ecosystem where everybody of all sorts of talent could flourish. That requires experimental thinking. That requires the attitude of borrowing or copying from other disciplines. It's definitely not something that could stay static.

That's all we've got. The book is Share: How Organizations Can Thrive in an Age of Networked Knowledge, Power and Relationships. I know that's available on Amazon now, so go out and check out a copy of that. Linda, I know you're on LinkedIn if anybody wants to connect and get in touch. Anything else you would add before we close out?

Culture Change: The greatest challenge in learning and development is making sure that the learning sticks so people can take action once they have those new skills.

I'm pleased that you have this opportunity to connect with you. It's been super fun. Thank you, Andy, for this great opportunity. I definitely want to keep talking with you and get your experience on a few subjects you mentioned so great experience. Thank you so much.

You're welcome. Thank you, Linda, for coming on and sharing some of your knowledge, wisdom and experience with all of us.

Thank you, Andy.

• Aon
• Share: How Organizations Can Thrive in an Age of Networked Knowledge, Power and Relationships
• Rework America
• Sapiens
• LinkedIn – Linda Jingfang Cai