The world of work is changing rapidly, and this swift pace of change is forcing employers to rethink the kind of talent they need within their organizations. Traits like curiosity, innovation, agility, flexibility, and problem-solving are now more in demand than ever.
However, despite the desire to attract and retain individuals with these qualities, traditional recruiting processes can often repel them, and talent management strategies may overlook those who are already part of the organization. Retaining such high-value talent is also a significant challenge.
So, what do organizations need to do to hire and retain the change catalysts and innovators they seek more effectively? And how can they better identify those already in their workforce?
My guests this week are Tracey Lovejoy and Shannon Lucas from Catalyst Constellations. Tracey and Shannon define catalysts as the visionaries within an organization who quickly process information, translate it into actionable opportunities, and are relentless in driving positive change. They have a vast amount of insight to share with employers about identifying and nurturing catalysts and lots of advice for catalysts themselves around managing their careers and reducing burnout.
In the interview, we discuss:
• What is a catalyst, and what do they have in common
• Seeing risk differently
• Identifying the catalysts in your business
• The importance of organizational context
• Repurposing recruiting processes for diversity of thought
• New ways of thinking about Talent Management
• Breaking down silos and getting stuff done
• Work trauma
• Dealing with burnout
• What does the future of work look like?
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Matt: Support for this podcast comes from SmartRecruiters. SmartRecruiters is your all-in-one platform for faster, smarter hiring, making recruiting easy and effortless. SmartRecruiters are making some big changes, revamping their user experience, adding AI features and refreshing the UI. I know from experience that they truly are a company that really values the recruiter and the practitioner. They understand the intricacies of the recruiting business and this has always been reflected in their functionality and customer support. So, it’s exciting to hear that they’re making a bunch of updates. If you’re ready to be part of the future of talent acquisition, head over to smartrecruiters.com and find out what they’re up to. Trust me, your team and your future hires will thank you.
[Recruiting Future theme]
Matt: Hi there, welcome to Episode 636 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. The world of work is changing rapidly and this swift pace of change is forcing employers to rethink the talent they need within their organizations. Traits like curiosity, innovation, agility, flexibility and problem solving are now more in demand than ever. However, despite the desire to attract and retain individuals with these qualities, traditional recruiting processes can often repel them and talent management strategies may overlook those who are already part of the organization. Suffice to say, it’s also a significant challenge to retain this type of talent. So, what do organizations need to do to be more effective about hiring and retaining change catalysts and innovators.
My guests this week are Tracey Lovejoy and Shannon Lucas from Catalyst Constellations. Tracey and Shannon define catalysts as the visionaries within an organization who quickly process information, translate it into actionable opportunities, and are relentless in driving positive change. They have a vast amount of insight to share with employers about identifying and nurturing catalysts and lots of advice for catalysts themselves around managing their careers and reducing burnout.
Hi Shannon, Hi Tracey and welcome to the podcast. It’s a pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourselves and tell us what you do?
Tracey: Absolutely. I am Tracey Lovejoy. My background is originally as a researcher. Thought I was going to be a cultural anthropologist and when I met the academic life, I realized that was not the life for me. And so, I pretty quickly pivoted, taking my anthropology training into the corporate world where I got to serve as a researcher. I worked at Microsoft for quite a long time, starting as a researcher working on product development and then moved into managing teams and my favorite was always working in the innovation lab. So, really getting to think about what do customers need? What is the future of where we want to go. I stumbled into a coaching class to support my leadership growth.
And it was an amazing blessing now, but at the time, it was so disruptive, Matt. It was the first time I had a sense of calling. And I was not looking for a calling at that stage in my life. I had a career. But when you find that, you have to have that reckoning and I did. So, for a few years I just kept coaching internally at Microsoft and loved and loved and loved and finally pivoted and left and opened a consultancy. Once I was a consultant, I was like, “Who in the world am I going to work with,” right? I don’t want to coach anybody.
And so that’s what set me on the path of what Shannon and I do today, is that I found that my very favorite people to work with are the folks that have amazing, huge goals in the world, the fire starters that are out there. And I tapped into my research self to really understand these things and these people. And what I saw was that there were all kinds of people around me that I already loved working with. And so, I was doing a set of interviews, and one of those people was one of my favorite clients at the time, Shannon Lucas. And so, I’ll tap her and then she’ll answer the question, what we do.
Shannon: So, when I intersected with Tracey, I was helping to build out the innovation program at Vodafone Global Enterprise. Just going back a little bit, I have a degree in art history, studied in Paris, quickly became a network engineer in the late 90s, because if you could spell TCP/IP, you were hired, [laughs] worked at Microsoft as well, did the dotcom thing, got into technical sales, because I was super curious about how people were using the technology, not just building it. So, by the time I got to Vodafone and was tapped to help build out the innovation program, was excited to explore how customers could leverage the technology to transform the business. But the way that we wanted to do that was through all of the positive troublemakers that were all over the world in Vodafone.
We wanted to stop reinventing the wheel, give them a common shared language and toolset, remove the barriers, all of the great things. We were wildly successful and I was pretty naive about the success at the time, because now I know as a catalyst, I can always see how things could be done better. But we are generating tens of millions of in year revenue, hundreds of millions in pipeline, new products, changing how we engage with our customers. And I was burning out and I was burning out because at that point, about three years in, we had almost 100 innovation champions, and they weren’t all showing up the same way. And because we were so successful, we had strong CEO support. So, there wasn’t really anything that I was lacking for in terms of support.
And I couldn’t move the needle to unlock why 30% of the innovation champions were showing up, sort of like I wasn’t, and some of the original ones were, but the rest, I was like, “How can I incentivize them? Do they need more training?” So, my college friend said, “Have you ever thought about getting a coach?” because I was burning out and struggling. And then that’s when our paths intersect. And when Tracey shared with me the research A. It’s like I could see all the way back to starting the recycling program in high school. And the thread starts to be woven about, all of the ways that I had always driven positive change. But it really explained also the community that was in front of me.
And as a side note, I had gone around the world and hand collected a bunch of executives that I thought were like me. I called it the global entrepreneur salon because I didn’t have another word for it then, but I didn’t want to own another community. I was like, “We can co-create this.” And the same thing was happening there. And so, I said to Tracey, “I have this executive community. There’s definitely a lot of catalysts in there.” I was thinking about doing a retreat, some good food, some good wine, a hot tub, Northern California, rejuvenate, learn from each other. I said, “Do you want to do that with me?” And she’s like, “Oh, that’s what the research says these people need.” And so, she said, “Yes.” And so that’s what we do today.
And then just finally, I stayed in the corporate world for a couple more years, exploring some other hypotheses leading Horizon Three innovation at Cisco and executive vice president of emerging business at Ericsson, super curious about owning the P&L and how that could drive transformation. And now we’re dedicated to supporting these innate change makers to create bold, powerful change in the world.
Matt: Awesome. You mentioned the phrase positive troublemaker there, which I love. Tell us a little bit more about what a catalyst is. I mean, who are these people? How do you spot one? How do you know if you are one? What do they do that’s different?
Tracey: Those are great questions. In essence, a catalyst is someone who takes in lots of information really quickly and translates that into opportunities and ways to make the world around them better. And it doesn’t stop at being a visionary. They have to move themselves into action to make that vision a reality. So, how do you spot one, typically, if you are one, you’re like, “Oh, I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me I wasn’t weird.” So, it’s like an instant recognition in the body. And if you aren’t one, you typically quickly think, I know one of those. That’s my spouse, that’s my neighbor, that’s my best friend, that’s my mom. And so, we have found it’s quite an intuitive way to spot, although in the workplace it can be harder. So, there are all kinds of words that we get labeled through the years, change agent, right? Troublemaker, you mentioned disruptor, right? These are the folks that are never stopping, cannot stay satisfied with the status quo. They see what’s possible and they execute. And I’m so curious, Matt, does this definition resonate with you?
Matt: It does sound very familiar.
[laughter]
No, it does sound very familiar actually. I think yeah that’s really interesting. I suppose as a follow up to that, are there common personality traits? Are there aspects of neurodiversity? Is there something that people have in common who like to work in this kind of way?
Tracey: Yeah. The definition of catalysts breaks into five or six key elements that sit within the definition. And so, it’s processing information really quickly, translating those into visions and opportunities. Sometimes, we don’t know we’ve seen a vision, because the next thing is we’re moving into action. From the action, there is iterative learning that’s often really intuitive. And so, the vision itself will shift as we move into action. The least self-aware catalyst doesn’t even know that cycle’s happening. It just happens. And so, people around them can experience them like a whirling dervish. The way folks talk about catalysts, which was really clear in the research too, is that they’re folks that they identify as risk takers, really comfortable with ambiguity.
That may not be how a catalyst themselves identifies, because if you’re someone who’s taking in lots of information and constantly calculating and iterating that with new information as you experiment, it doesn’t feel risky often.
Shannon: What we often say is it’s the risk of not doing it. That is the thing that we see.
Matt: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Tracey: In terms of personality. We see, for example, using the DISC assessment that folks fall in different quadrants. There’s a pretty high incidence of folks who have a couple of the styles there, but it is not absolute. In terms of neurodiversity, we’ve never done the mapping. We have heard from the audience a lot that there’s pretty high incidence of ADHD, definitely high incidence of being a highly sensitive person, and for some folks, people on the spectrum. So, without having done a deep dive into the research and mapping that, what I can tell you is that lateral thinking seems to be a really big part of the dot connecting and sense making that is what a catalyst does in the world.
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I know you’re busy, so I’ve created a concise online course that breaks down strategic foresight into easy to learn tools specifically designed for TA transformation. It’s quick to implement and will keep you ahead of the curve. You can learn more by visiting mattalder.me/course, that’s mattalder.me/course. There’s really never been a better time to shape the future of talent acquisition, so don’t miss this opportunity to make a lasting impact.
Matt: I think everyone listening, if they don’t identify themselves with that, will have worked with someone like that at some point. And I suppose, as you say, it’s sometimes quite difficult to spot these people in the workplace in all the structures and the restrictions that exist sometimes. What could employers do to get the best out? What’s really to get the best out of everyone in their workforce, but particularly people who think and work in this way?
Shannon: Picking up one thing that Tracey had said earlier is while we can often be like, “Oh, I know a couple of those people in my network, in my community whatever,” there’s often a lot of times when they’re hidden especially in the work environment, because they’ve been told their whole lives they’re too fast, they’re too much, they’re too loud, they’re too disruptive. And so, what we see often is that then they’ll just pivot their catalytic energy outside of work. And so, we love working with organizations to help them identify the catalyst, their catalyst in their organization. This is, in our mind, the new high potential. And I just want to be clear throughout this conversation, we are not advocating for 100% catalyst organizations, right.
But what you have is probably five to 11%, the research says, of your employee base is our likely catalysts. And these are the new problem solvers who are the get stuff done people who can do more with less. All of those things that organizations are asking of their talent now. So, we work with organizations, we run these catalyst programs. We listen deeply to what is going on in the organizational context. It’s really a scaffolding that we come in with because we want to find the catalysts who are going to be successful in that environment, not just catalysts writ large, necessarily. So, one of the examples that we use is like, you could be a lone wolf catalyst at Google and in your 20% time create Gmail and be wildly successful.
If you work at an older organization, 140-year-old industrial organization, if you can’t build collaboration and consensus in a certain context, then you’re not going to be successful. At the beginning, when we work with organizations, we really use research skills and co-creation to understand the cultural context, and then we open up the application. And that’s one of the big things, because there’s just in the self-selection process, if you’re not a catalyst. With the personality profiles, I was like, if you read the Myers-Briggs ones, “The one that lights you up the most is probably you.” [laughs] I mean, it’s like we have this affinity, right? But then we help them curate cohorts based on the desires of the executive team. So, what levels in the organization do you want to bring into this community?
What opportunities, strategic initiatives do you have that you want to just set this insane talent and ability to accelerate progress on that’s going to meaningfully move the needle? And so, people come out of the woodwork, and most recent one, they’re like, “I can’t believe that woman is a catalyst.” And they stopped and they thought about it, and they’re like, “Oh, well, she has written two books and she does run a nonprofit outside of work.” I mean, it’s crazy. But she wasn’t playing big at work because of whatever history. And we can experience trauma as catalysts too. We often become the lightning rod for change. So, we’ll come in, we’ll have done the sense making. We’ll bring new opportunities in service. Catalysts are always in service of making things better.
But if the corporate antibodies aren’t ready, and it doesn’t mean just because you’re a catalyst, you’re great at creating change. So that’s why we have this skill training to help them develop the self-awareness that Tracey was talking about, because if you don’t know, you’re operating like that when Tracey told me the research, I was like, “Oh, that’s painful, all the ways that I probably pissed people off and came off as really arrogant and insensitive.” So, let’s help them not do that [laughs] and then let’s create this connectivity tissue across the organization to break down silos and get stuff done.
Matt: I think that’s really interesting, particularly in terms of context and how people can be viewed in organizations. And, there must be people listening who feel that they’re in that position. And as you say, there’s a lot of trauma there. But also, you mentioned earlier burnout. And burnout is a big issue for everyone at the moment. But in this kind of context, how can people avoid burning out if they’re on a constant mission to change everything? And, we’ll never stand still in that.
Tracey: 100%. The way you frame the question is so spot on. One of the things that we see is different with catalysts than a general population when you think about burnout is that while these days, especially through COVID, almost every working adult can say they’ve experienced burnout at least once in their life, your average catalyst can point to multiple times that they end up experiencing burnout. And so, for the catalyst really the key is, first, growing your awareness. There are some very distinct patterns that exist for us as a population. We get so deeply energized by the new problem and the new challenge that we are solving that we let go of all the other things in our life that we know are good for us, sleep, exercise, connecting with people.
And so, once the challenge gets hard in the way Shannon was talking about, right? Their organization at first is like, “Yes, we want that change.” And then they start to feel the change, and they’re like, “I don’t think I want that change. And now I am really mad at that person who represents the change.” And so, all of a sudden, we begin to take on, maybe we’re experiencing gaslighting, maybe we actually have aggression coming toward us. And those can, of course, really impact your energy. You have now let go of all the things that help sustain your energy because you were having such a great time diving in and sense making. In addition, catalysts kind of suck, not all of us, but we suck once you get to that mode of the long-term implementation.
And so, if resistance plus implementation is happening, this is just the total key to burnout for catalysts. And typically, when you interview them, we step into this again and again, just not knowing. We feel like we’re broken somehow. And so, when you understand yourself and then you see your patterns, our promises to catalyst is you begin to see it coming. So, it may not be stopping burnout, because the truth is we love to run hard. And so, it’s more about saying, “Okay, I know that in a new challenge at work, I typically run hard in the first three months, so I have to build in a holiday at that point that really takes me offline and disconnects me. And so, I need to make sure everything’s set up for me to do that, because I always get sick at that point in a new job” or whatever the case may be, and then beginning to build your rhythms aligned to the reality of how you know you work and sharing that with other people.
And so, then our hope is that the time between deep burnouts elongates and the depth of your burnout is not as deep. But there are still catalysts, literally, that will choose. I know it’s going to be hard this fall, but I’m so excited for what we’re doing, and I’m totally willing to run hard, but then I’m going to take December off.
Shannon: I would just add organizations can have a massive role to play in this once they know, and this is important for non-catalysts to hear too. All of the normal stuff that organizations do to support mental well-being and burnout and all of that. And there’s a plus here, which is when catalysts are connected and in community, it is one of the most energy giving things that catalysts can experience. And so, when we do these catalyst programs, the reality is often, especially for the first cohort, because they aren’t convinced of the impact, they’ll have to do most of that additional work, additional to their job. They’re not getting some free pass, get out of jail free, whatever.
But what we hear when they’ll be like, “We came into our team meeting to work on this project and we were all totally depleted.” And by the end of our 90 minutes working session, we were totally re-energized, ready to go. So, it’s something for organizations to think about, like, “How can you connect your catalyst and give them that additional pool of energy?”
Matt: It’s such a fascinating time for work at the moment, everyone’s attitude to work is changing. The way that we do work is changing. And the traditional sense of having a career seems to be slowly moving out of the window. How does this impact someone over their career and how might that be changing now, say, compared to 10-20 years ago?
Shannon: Yeah, it’s so interesting when you look at catalyst, if you’re not sure and you’re going on LinkedIn, you’re like, “Oh, this person came in front of me.” One of the things that we look for is like, how long have they stayed in any given role? Doesn’t mean they haven’t stayed at an organization for 20 plus years. They may have done that, but to Tracey’s point, like, once they’ve ignited and accomplished a thing, the staying with it to just do the implementation or the execution over and over and over again is really not interesting. And so, you often see two years, three-year changes, whatever that looks like. Additionally, catalyst, and this is one of the reasons that it was so profound to me instead of the word intrapreneur, because intrapreneur defines people in a context within a role. I am in an organization. I am creating change.
As you heard in both my story and Tracey’s story, we have been in the corporate world, we’ve started our own ventures, we’re on a new company and so, catalysts will often go wherever they think they can have the most impact on the thing that they’re most excited about right now. Historically, obviously that makes catalysts look like, I remember interviewing for when they’re like, “You jump rolls all the time.” I was like, “Well, okay, I was in Silicon Valley and I worked at two companies for like eight and ten years.” So, by Silicon Valley definitions, that’s a lifetime. But that was the old way of thinking about it.
And I think now it’s interesting in these gig economies, these portfolio careers, we’re starting to see people lean in, and we can obviously do that more easily with the technology that allows us to work with organizations all over the world.
Matt: I think that’s a really interesting point about recruitment as well, because in some ways, you’re describing the classic definition of what certain recruiters would call a job hopper. And, unfortunately, there are still some of those biases and prejudice that are still applied within the recruiting process. What would your advice be to employers in terms of shaping recruiting processes that hire people like this, that get them that diversity of approach and thought within their organization and bypass some of the more older ways of thinking about talent?
Tracey: Any research that you look at today from any of the big houses or small, when they’re talking about what talent needs to look like to really support the world we’re in the future, all of it points to catalysts. So, the need for agility, that ability to pivot as quickly as the world around us is pivoting. The folks that are your natural learners, because what is it? And you might know better than us Matt, I think it’s expected that when you take a new job these days, the skills that you’re hired for are expected to be a new set of skills in 18 months. Like, that’s how quickly reskilling needs to happen. So, those people that not only want to learn, but they’re excited to figure out what needs to be new and then learn it themselves, the problem solvers.
And so, knowing that these are the people we increasingly need in our organizations, we need to have new rules, because these are the people as Shannon said, that are going to constantly want new challenge. You can’t hire that person and then expect them to stay in exactly the same role for 10 years. They’re the talent we need now and that we need in five years and ten years, because our world is changing so rapidly. And so, you can screen for these people, you can look for people that have a really high positive relationship to change. You can find people that have a track record of being drawn to solving problems, and they can speak to you about that and how they’ve done it.
And they can speak eloquently to the successes and the failures, because catalysts we know, we know that we come in and some of them didn’t work, but the iteration is what guided us and either told us, “Oh, we knew we needed to abandon or we had to pivot.” And that’s actually the sign that you have the right person for the jobs today. And so, we need to reframe, as you said, the job hopper, into understanding that that’s indicative of the skills that we need to hire for and Shannon and I can help you find the catalysts in the world. We literally have the questions that we can help you ask.
Matt: And so, as a final question, and I suppose in some ways, this is a summary of lots of the things that we’ve talked about or certainly been leading up to, what do you hope that the future will look like when it comes to work? So, if we’re having this conversation in two- or three-years’ time, what might work look like and how might it have changed?
Shannon: I actually have a vision that I would love to manifest at some point, which is that there’s the top hundred catalyst friendly places to work. Because when organizations understand the power of these innate change makers in the way that Tracey was just talking about them, I think they’ll outperform all of their peers across the industry. So that’s one hope. But underneath that, one of the things that doing these catalyst programs shows us is the power of taking the time to deeply see people’s relationship, to change in your organization and meeting them where they are and developing a plan that goes over and over, because it’s actually a blessing to have a normal distribution curve of change relationship in an organization.
But that all of that requires a new way of working that isn’t– Tracey was talking about the skill set that is going to change. The job description is likely to change in 18 months too. What you were hired to work on is really not necessarily what you’re going to be working on in 18 months or two years. So, helping to develop this, agility, resiliency, sense making across the organization is the only way now, I think organizations are going to do that. A final piece on that, though, is that the leadership really has to show up, right?
So, the leadership has to be doing their own work and their own evaluation of their relationship with change and the ability to lead transformation, because one of the worst things that you can do is go in and activate all of these people who are excited to create change only to hit this ceiling at the top that ejects people out of the building. So, I’m hopeful and we get more and more catalysts coming out of the woodwork who are just so excited instead of traumatized now about being catalyst.
Matt: Amazing. Tracey, Shannon, thank you very much for talking to me.
Tracey: It has been a joy to spend time with you, Matt.
Shannon: It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Matt: My thanks to Shannon and Tracey.
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