Workplace Stories by RedThread Research
Stacia Garr & Dani Johnson
Workplace Stories is a podcast for HR and people leaders who are tired of noise and need clarity that actually holds up. It is hosted by Stacia Garr and Dani Johnson of RedThread Research.Each episode features candid conversations with practitioners, thinkers, and executives who are navigating real decisions inside complex organizations. Not hypotheticals. Not vendor promises. Real tradeoffs, real experiments, and real lessons learned along the way.You’ll hear how leaders are making sense of skills, AI, organizational design, and culture when there’s no clear playbook and pressure to show progress is high. The focus is always the same: what’s actually working, what isn’t, and what leaders are doing next.Workplace Stories helps you make sense of complexity, build credibility with evidence, and move from ideas to action with more confidence.Want to be part of the conversation? Join our community for free and connect with others shaping the future of work.Learn more about RedThread Research here: https://redthreadresearch.com/home
Episodes
Mentioned books
Apr 20, 2021 • 48min
Learning The Many Languages of Skills: Mars's Nuno Gonçalves
“I think that in the future, what will be really necessary in terms of skills are people that talk different languages of skills… talking different languages of different skill sets will be something really, really important.” Why is it significant that become more expert seems so fused with speaking restricted languages? And what does it mean to have ‘intentionality’ about skills? How do you start to really understand the skills needs of an organization you join in COVID? This week, these and many other thorny but critical issues get exposed via our debate with long-time friend and highly accomplished CLO and talent leader Nuno Gonçalves, who is now starting to do at global confectionary, food and pet care giant Mars what he did at European life sciences player UCB: implement a cross-company, future-focused skills strategy. It’s an excellent conversation with a truly passionate learning ninja who’s thought deeply about these problems; we think you’re going to love it.
Apr 6, 2021 • 54min
The Realities of Building a Tech-Enabled Skills Framework: Sygenta's Madhura Chakrabarti
Dr Madhura Chakrabarti is one of our favorite HR thinkers and doers, so we jumped at the chance to hear of the genuinely pioneering work she’s doing for the 29,000 people who work for her employer Syngenta, a leading Swiss-headquartered science-based agtech company that helps millions of farmers round the world grow safe and nutritious food, while taking care of the planet. Despite COVID, in early December Madhura and her small L&D team launched an innovative cross-company skills framework supported by a new learning platform implementation. This episode is a great chance to hear about the real practical challenges of creating such a framework and how hard it can be to find the right partner to help, as well as the importance of people analytics in general: you’re really going to hear from the HR data and skills coal face here. Making this experience even better: Madhura’s charm, professionalism and fierce intellect. Truly, some great Workplace Stories this week!
Mar 23, 2021 • 49min
The Price of Skills Debt: Guild Education's Matthew Daniel
“When software releases went from Microsoft releasing once every other year to releasing 16 times a week, you know, like all that started to happen; our ability to keep up with the world around us really started to decline.” Whatever else he is (and he is many good things), Guild Education’s Matthew Daniel is genuinely passionate about skills. Scrub that: he’s agonized about them—and he’s even more agonized about the trouble we’re storing up for ourselves as a society around them. As we find out in our hour together, he fears we’re wasting a lot of time and missing a lot of opportunity chasing the wrong metrics about them, ignoring vast swathes of the ones our workforces (especially our frontline teams) have. But his agony does lead to positivity, and we think you’ll agree with him when he says the original purpose that got so many of us into L&D will help us win through.
Mar 9, 2021 • 57min
Designing the Skills Future: the d.school's Lisa Kay Solomon
“What I introduce [my students] to are the kinds of skills that allow them to navigate ambiguity.” If that seems like urgently-needed capability you or your team to have you’re in luck, as you’re about to find out a whole lot more about why you’d need such a thing… and why you won’t find it, alas, in today’s conventional curriculum (including corporate L&D). In the first full episode of our new RedThread podcast—our deep dive into what we’re calling capitalism’s focus on ‘The Skills Obsession’—we meet passionate educator, innovator and bestselling author Lisa Kay Solomon. Designer in Residence at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (‘the d.school’) at Stanford University, Lisa presents in her dialog with Stacia, Dani and Chris something of a masterclass in what thinking about the future actually needs to consist of—and how that feeds into her conviction that, “learning is the currency of possibility.”
Feb 22, 2021 • 23min
The Skills Obsession: Opening Arguments
This episode sets the tone for this season, with podcast hosts Stacia Garr, Dani Johnson, and Chris Pirie discussing why skills are so important now, how leaders should think about using them, and the challenges facing us all as we adapt to the future of work.
