Great Leadership With Jacob Morgan

Frank Tucker is the Chief People Officer of Taco Bell.  Working with the company for the last 23 years, Frank has made his way through the human resources department.  He has worked in designing employee processes, methods, tools and technology, and has become the Chief People Officer in 2012.  Taco Bell owns approximately 900 stores, which represents 40,000 employees.  A huge part of their business is with their many franchisees.  This adds another 6,000 stores, employing an additional 160,000 people.  Because they are located in all 50 states, it is hard to imagine anyone not being familiar with Taco Bell.

Taco Bell looks for really great people to start working with them. In some cases, they understand this may only be a stepping stone for certain employees in their careers. In other cases, there are many employees who want to grow and develop within the company. This includes employees who develop into managers and leaders who run their own franchise.  Education is also a key component for many employees. Taco Bell has supported education efforts with their internal training programs, with many college credits being earned from Taco Bell as well as a tuition reimbursement program. 

Attracting and retaining top talent is a focus for many companies, especially Taco Bell.   They believe investing in team members will give them a competitive advantage, no matter how long the employee’s career will remain in the company.  This speaks to their broader mission, the future of America is with its youth.  Not only is investing in team members the right thing to do, it resonates with Millennials and Generation Z.  Empowering employees to reach their dreams aids in employee engagement and the quality is raised for the customer experience. 

What You Will Learn In This Episode:

  • How Taco Bell Approaches Leadership and People Development
  • Age Differences in the Workplace
  • Frontline Workers and Knowledge Workers
  • Leadership Programs: The Mark, The Quest, and The Spark
  • How the Concept of the Employee is Changing
  • Advice for Future Employees and Managers

Link From The Episode:

TacoBell.com

(Music by Ronald Jenkees)

Direct download: Frank20Tucker20Podcast_DONE.mp3
Category:Business -- posted at: 9:47pm PDT

Mihir Shukla is the CEO of Automation Anywhere, an enterprise software company.  They are redefining how work gets done by introducing the idea of a digital workforce platform and digital workers that work alongside human employees.  This combination is designed to help the human employee accomplish more than they ever could alone.  Automation Anywhere has 300 hundred employees in 10 offices worldwide.  Mihir’s goal is to become one the world’s largest employer without having any employees. How will they accomplish this? Projections show in the next four years, Automation Anywhere will reach 3 Million software bots worldwide which are producing at the capacity of 3 Million people. While they are a software company, the production levels are so high that they are the world’s largest employer in the digital age.

Software bots are digital workers. They can complete mundane tasks, and also tackle more complicated problems as well.  Many employers want their workers to complete today’s problems and tomorrow’s challenges. However, we still have yesterday’s job to do as well.  Processing invoices, verifying documents, generating reports, data entry, and other tasks still need to be completed.  The workforce has been spread very far and work/life balance is not yet where it should be.  Introducing mundane and complex tasks to the digital workforce allows the human employees to think, create, discover, and innovate.  The man and machine partnership isn’t new, and has allowed the world to advance in countless ways.  This concept has now trickled down to our offices, and the outcome can be nothing short of spectacular.

Many people cannot tell the difference between if a bot or a human completed a task.  Automation Anywhere provides learning bots that learn from human behavior. There are many industries that use bots, and people interact with them on a daily basis without ever knowing.  Airline processes, car production, even a pen sitting on your desk could have been created using a software bot.   The addition to these bots have allowed workers to have less stress while doing their jobs, provide better service and even reclaim work/life balance in some cases. The bots have allowed human workers to be less of a robot themselves at work and reclaim their humanity while preforming their jobs.   

 

What You Will Learn In This Episode:

What Is A Software Bot?

Software Deployment

What Do Bots Do?

What A Human Robot Relationship Entails

What Types Of Skills are Needed For The Future Of Work

Should Robots In The Workplace Be Feared Or Embraced?

 

Link From The Episode:

Automation Anywhere

(Music by Ronald Jenkees)

Direct download: Mihir20Shukla20Podcast_DONE.mp3
Category:Business -- posted at: 11:32am PDT

Francine Katsoudas is the Chief People Officer of Cisco, one of the most forward thinking organizations on the planet when it comes to designing employee experience and thinking about the future of talent.  Cisco was started in 1983, and now has 70,000 employees in over 170 countries. It began as a networking company and moved into collaboration/video. They are a very philanthropic organization... one of the current projects in Francine's sector is called Corporate Social Responsibility. It offers networking academies around the globe that help students learn technology. In the last year, they trained a million students!
 
Francine has been with Cisco for 20 years, the first half of that being in the business field. She was always fascinated with human resources and finally made the move for a few different reasons, including the fact that HR at that time had a wonderful team that she wanted to work with. Francine has been CPO at Cisco for almost 2 years now. The role was originally CHRO until they developed a plan to build a new HR infrastructure. The history of HR was more about risk and compliance, while the new digital world necessitated anchoring on people, culture, and experience instead. With the title change, Francine's duties and Cisco's focuses evolved as well. 
 
Cisco now focuses on special experiences and moments that matter. Focus groups help identify which experiences could be better for employees by asking questions like "What is a good day at Cisco?" Cisco has also made performance management much more inclusive and stopped moving from system to system. Francine believes the future of work is all about people. As technology continues to scale and the world becomes more agile, people are at the heart of work learning how to work in different ways. An organization can have the best technology but if their employees' behaviors and attitudes aren't aligned, you just have problems.
 
 
What you will learn in this episode:
  • How to do business and be proactive in a world where work is moving faster than people are able to move
  • How businesses look at their results and measure what they can do to create powerful teams
  • How Cisco creates the best environment for the best teams
  • Getting the best out of your employees
  • Creating an environment that fosters risk taking
  • Driving the best employee experience possible
  • Cisco's people deal, how they did away with performance management, and their concept of moments that matter

Link From The Episode:

Fran Katsoudas on Twitter

(Music by Ronald Jenkees)

Direct download: Francine20Katsoudas20Podcast_DONE.mp3
Category:Business -- posted at: 8:12pm PDT

Kathrin Winkler is the Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC, a massive global organization that offers products that enable customers to store, manage, protect, and analyze data. EMC started with helping businesses store data but evolved as the economy has transformed into the digitization of everything. It is a $25 billion company with 70,000 employees all over the world.

Kathrin is a self-proclaimed geek with a pre-med background that ended up in the technology industry. She started in hardware, then worked her way into software, and eventually into networking. She joined EMC 13 years ago in the product management field. Kathrin helped create an informal sustainability program, working on how EMC could reduce its impact and make a more positive effect on the world. In early 2008, the CEO made the program official and established the position of Chief Sustainability Officer that Kathrin now holds.
 
Sustainability is more than just being green. It can mean many different things to different people but is basically a way of conducting business that serves the needs of the community of the planet, now and in the future. Kathrin believes that a sustainable organization looks at the world as a system to ensure that their business isn't coming at the expense of our children. Sustainability is important to customers and Kathrin has found that EMC's revenue through companies that care about sustainability increases year after year. It is also proven that organizations that invest in sustainability do better financially in general. But it is equally important to employees. People care about their legacy and want to know that their work makes a positive impact. They want to work for companies whose values align with their own.
 
Sustainability creates a common ground that brings employees together and establishes connections, which is especially important for a company that has employees all around the globe. It boosts innovation and employee engagement. Employees that are proud of their company are more productive and engaged. A result of engaged employees is creativity which continues to benefit sustainability.
 
What you will learn in this episode:
  • How employee engagement and sustainability are related
  • Is sustainability just about going green?
  • How organizational purpose and sustainability relate to each other
  • Why sustainability is becoming so popular
  • Why companies should be measured by more than just profits
  • The interesting things that Kathrin is doing at EMC to drive sustainability forward

Link From The Episode: 

Kathrin Winkler On Twitter

(Music by Ronald Jenkees)
Direct download: Kathrin20Winkler20Podcast_DONE.mp3
Category:Business -- posted at: 10:09pm PDT

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