Trust, Talent & Taking Up Space with Betsy Gardner

Well, I've been focused on it since I lived in your country.

I lived in London, uh, from 2009 to 2014, and while I was there, I worked for a, a Mayfair consulting firm that was designed to help primarily women get ready for global roles, C-suite, and executive roles.

Oftentimes, these were women who were maybe first-generation Oxbridge graduates who had performed well.

They had risen to the top of, of the competency chain in their organizations.

But certainly, you know better than I do, England runs on a system of backroom influence, and if you don't know how to navigate those back corridors of power, you're really not gonna be able to occupy one of the tippy-top seats, right? So this organization was formed following the Davies report.

Lord Mervyn Davies authored the report challenging the UK to achieve 20% of women on FTSE boards by 2020, which sort of seems now almost anachronistic and, and ridiculous because we all know now that gender-balanced teams perform better commercially than ones that don't.

However, at that time, there was a proliferation of all-male boards, one of which my favorite is the story of the business called Mothercare.

I don't know if you're familiar with that company.

Yeah.

Yes.

Um, well known in London.

At one point, Mothercare...

Prior to Mothercare's going out of business, I thought one of the most stunning features of Mothercare's business history was that it had an all-male board for a company that sold products literally to mothers to help them raise their children.

Now, of course, there were men making some purchasing decisions in that environment, but primarily, those purchasing decisions were made by women, and they had absolutely none of that reflected on their board.

So that's an example of the type of, of soft skills gap that, that's missing, and we actually can put a price tag on it.

Right now, last year it was measured that soft skills failures in the US accounted for a $1.3 trillion productivity deficit.

So these are not HR fluffy things that we should be focused on like teddy bears and kittens.

This is actual hard business results-driven stuff that if we don't do well, we can't actually tap in to the full potential of the talent capability that's available.

And as we're all trying to win talent wars, we need to do a better job of making sure that the people who have got the hard skill talent actually have the key to unlock the soft skill capability that presents a full talent package, and that's...

Unfortunately, what we're hearing is that we need it now more than ever.

Everything that's hard skill-driven looks like is heading toward AI being able to handle those tasks and handle them efficiently and cheaply.

We really have to have people with the business history, sophistication, strategy, the ability to connect dots and really understand what's behind the numbers.

Those are all human skills.

Those are the skills that AI cannot perform, and those are the skills that will endure in the time of disruption that we're in.

And so now more than ever, this conversation is deeply relevant.