In this episode, Dr. Bev Kaye, a career development and retention/engagement expert, shares four decades of wisdom from the field, as well as her conviction that unpacking experiences and learning from mistakes is crucial for all of us (but especially when it comes to retaining talent).
Dr. Bev Kaye is recognized, internationally, as one of the most knowledgeable and practical professionals in the areas of career development and employee engagement/retention. She has won five lifetime achievement awards for her work and, today, we have the pleasure of talking to her about:
- Talent mobility
- The importance of unpacking and anchoring experiences
- Acknowledging and learning from mistakes
- How to facilitate safety and growth, as a leader
- Why external validation can be lacking
As Bev shares and T.S. Eliot said, "The sad thing is to have the experience and miss the meaning."
Slow down and listen to this episode. You won't be sorry!
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Dr. Beverly Kaye is recognized internationally as one of the most knowledgeable and practical professionals in the areas of career development and employee engagement/retention. Her contribution to the field of engagement and retention includes the Wall Street Journal bestseller, Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em: Getting Good People to Stay, which is now in its 6th edition. Her recent books in the career development field include Up is Not the Only Way and Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go, which provided overwhelmed managers with a way to blend career conversations into their everyday routines.
In 2018, ATD honored Beverly Kaye with their Lifetime Achievement Award recognizing "her advanced knowledge and extensive practice across the talent development field." In 2018, ISA awarded Dr. Kaye their Thought Leadership Award for her body of work in the support of work-related learning and performance. In 2019, IMS awarded Dr. Beverly Kaye its Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to the field of career development and employee engagement. In 2019, the Best Practice Institute awarded Beverly Kaye with the Lifetime Achievement Award based on her significant contributions as a founder of the field of career development. In 2022, i4CP awarded Beverly Kaye their 2022 Industry Legend Award in appreciation of her outstanding contributions and commitment to the field of human resources and leadership.
To learn more about Bev and her work visit bevkaye.com or connect with her on LinkedIn.
- I'm Celine Williams and welcome to the "Leading Through Crisis" podcast, a conversation series exploring resiliency and leadership in challenging times. My guest today is Dr. Bev Kaye, author, thought leader, and keynote speaker well known in the field of engagement, retention, and career development for over four decades. She is also the recipient of five Lifetime Achievement Awards and has been on the show before so I'm very grateful that she is back again. Welcome, Bev.
- Thank you. It is nice to be back.
- So the last time you were here was over two years ago. Things have changed a little bit since then for everyone I feel. So I'm going to ask the question that I start all of these episodes with, which is, when you hear the title of the podcast, "Leading Through Crisis," what comes up for you now? Things have changed. I assume it's probably not gonna be the same as two years ago.
- And I would say, why is there always a crisis? Always. And, you know, it's interesting. I found an article that I wrote like in 1978 when there was another big downturn. And I am rewriting it and I almost don't have to because it's like the same thing repeating itself. And yeah, I'm giving some of the same advice. And some of it is, you know, of course, updated. But, you know, there's always a crisis. And where I'm lucky, and I thank my lucky stars for it, is that the specialties that I've chosen for whatever reason have been evergreen for all four decades. Career development, evergreen. Since 1982 when I published the first "Up Is Not." And then the other retention and engagement, since 1999 when I first published "Love 'Em." So by whatever, you know, whoever's up in heaven looking down at me and saying, "Choose the right specialties." You know, I did. And they continue to keep me alive and keep me reading and keep me thinking to make sure they're up to date.
- Yeah. That's incredible that you were able to, that you chose these areas of specialty that are still as, and I say as relevant with a caveat that I was gonna say probably even more relevant now than they were before. So as if not more relevant than they were when you first started talking about them. And also there's some, and then not so great irony in the fact that an article that you wrote about crisis 40 years ago is still relevant.
- Right. And I wanna scream, why haven't you listen to me, you know? I mean, now for instance, talent mobility is hot. Moving, it's been hot for a while. Moving people inside. And the phrase, up is not the only way, which probably is what I'm known for, you know, it's been never been more serious and I think it never may be have people had open arms just saying, "Well, tell me about that. Tell me about what other ways." So, you know, I thank heavens for that. I love the saying a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. And so you're not wasting it. I'm not wasting it. Let's pull up our sleeves and go to work.
- Yeah. Again, I love the saying up is not the only way. I love it. I think it's beautiful for so many reasons. And I will fully, fully own that I can get on a bit of a soapbox about this idea that we promote people to manage people and take away the thing that maybe they're best at in doing it, which I will never, ever, ever understand. Not everyone wants to lead people. It's nuts.
- And then what happens when someone says yes to an upward move, and then it doesn't work, or they say, "This is not what I thought it would be," instead of saying to their manager, "You know, I think I made a mistake," they will leave the company and take that technical position or contributor position somewhere else. So it's why when I first wrote "Up Is Not," you know, one of the options is to go back to what I used to do. Maybe not exactly, but there has to be a way to return. Otherwise I do leave.
- I think, yes. I was with a team last week and that is one of the things that came up that was really unique about the organization that the team is in, which is that the inside of that organization, there are many, many stories of people who, you know, took on a promotion, tried a new role, it didn't fit, it didn't work whatever reason, they were able to go back to their old role or a similar role or go somewhere else in the organization.
- In the organization.
- And it was welcomed as a conversation. And this came up from some of the newer people to the team who were like, "I've never worked in an organization where that was possible and across the board possible." It wasn't a shameful thing. It was, you know, it was transparent. I'm not enjoying this. I'm not doing well at this role. What can we do? Because I do love this organization. And in hearing what you just said, it reminded me of that because why, I'm not saying you have the answer to this, Bev. This is me whying generally. Why do we not allow failure, and a failure in quotes? 'Cause it's not really failure. Why do we not allow experimentation in organizations in that way that then allows us to retain wonderful talent that is beneficial, even if it's not in this one role that they tried and didn't thrive in?
- And you know what the answer might be? Because we move on. We fail and we say, "Goodbye, I'm moving on," instead of having someone a tiny bit wiser say, "Let's explore that failure. Let's talk about what you learned and what you gleaned and what you'll never do again." Because that's what's precious about any failure. And I think any failure is not as big a failure as we think it is. 'Cause if you look back at it, you said, "If not for that failure, I wouldn't be here." And I think there's a really interesting piece of research around failures and where they pushed you and what they taught you that we don't spend enough time on. Absolutely.
- Yeah. I agree with that. It's fascinating to me how many people, and I'm broadly generalizing, which I hate, but I'm gonna do it right now anyways. But how many people act, pretend like any mistakes that they make, anything that they did that did not work out the way they were hoping from the beginning, let's call that a mistake or failure. It didn't have the outcome I was hoping it would have. How many people pretend like those things never happened. Act like that's just a thing I did and then I moved on 'cause that was the intended outcome as opposed to revisiting, learning, or, I mean, I say this, I talk about this with relationships when I'm talking with friends, which is, there's no such thing as a failed relationship. It was a successful relationship that ended in a way that allowed both of us to move on, learn lessons. That's not a failure. That's just a successful relationship that ran its course.
- Exactly. And you know, I'm writing about for a long time unpacking the experience. And I think we rush from experience to experience without stopping even for five minutes and saying, "What did I just do? Who would do it differently? How else might I have approached it? You know, and what am I taking away?" And I think it is, if not the duty of the manager or the leader to do that, but maybe it's us as peers helping each other and saying, you know, "Well, so it didn't work the way you thought. You know, what did you get out of it? What else?" And maybe we don't have to wait for someone on high, a higher level to unpack that suitcase, but we need to do it for each other. And those of us who have good friends, I know I use my friends that way all the time. Help me learn from this. And they do, and they can where I can't for myself always.
- I mean, there's a saying, right? It's hard to read the label from the inside the box. I just totally messed that up. But there is a saying that it's something along the lines of-
- It's something like that.
- Right. But it's true. It's hard when it's our experience and our journey and we're in it. It can be really tough to unpack that and see what is valuable in it for us when we're in it. And friends, peers, coaches, therapists, whatever it is where there is that safe space created, that is the opportunity to do that.
- That's right. And yet, we let it fly by us 'cause we're in a rush to get to the next thing. Oh.
- Yes, yes. It's, you know, the go go go, that hustle culture, I think has fed into that in just a really unhealthy way, you know, across the board, whatever you're doing.
- Right. You know, I just came back from a wonderful two and a half week vacation celebrating 50 years of marriage.
- Congratulations, very exciting.
- And we took our daughters, and I've always taught my daughter to do something called anchoring, which is when you have a wonderful moment or I'm having a wonderful interview right now with you and I'm enjoying it that I just double click on it in my head. And I've had her, everybody do it, put it somewhere on your body, you anchor it somewhere. It comes from a neurolinguistic programming where you wanna program your brain to remember that delicious feeling. So we went to Italy. With every wonderful meal and every wonderful clink of the glasses, we anchored. And then supposedly when you have a bad day, if you touch that spot, all those good moments come back. So I haven't tried that yet, but we have to anchor moments of success. And maybe we have to anchor learnings from failures too 'cause it's from that that we grow. So.
- And there's something so powerful about anchoring the learning and not cycling in, shedding the shame associated with guilt, whatever it might be, the actual, quote unquote, failure. And I love that perspective shift because I do think that people avoid the getting to the learning and the unpacking and they do jump to the next experience in order to avoid those things because they don't want the shame, guilt, having to relive whatever it is. But if you do that to get to the point where you are anchoring a learning that becomes the key, call it memory of the experience, imagine how much more powerful that is-
- Exactly.
- For your future.
- So here's a quote for you to remember.
- Yes, okay.
- T. S. Eliot said, I love this. "The sad thing is to have the experience and miss the meaning." "The sad thing is to have the experience and miss the meaning." And I remember doing some work with high potentials. It was a year long project, and we gave them all T-shirts with that saying on the back so that, you know, what's the meaning of this for me?
- Yeah. And I wanna take that and shift it slightly because I also feel like there's a real opportunity for leaders, people leaders, I don't care what their actual title is, I'm saying people leaders, to use that with the people they are leading in a positive, reinforcing, beneficial, retention-focused potential, like, whatever you wanna call it way that many of them probably don't even realize is an opportunity to be doing that.
- You mean like for a leader to say, when they see they've upset someone, maybe, "How could I have said that differently? I see you pulling back. I could see it in your face. How could I have said the same thing in a different way?" Wouldn't that be great?
- I mean, absolutely. Yes.
- Or a parent to a child. You know, tell me how I could have said that differently.
- Yes. And I think also potentially to, my god, I was gonna say something, but I just need to go back to that for a second. If people had the opportunity, parents, leaders, if they were to take the opportunity to pause and actually with the person who is upset, who has been hurt in some way, reflect how it could have been different, what they could have done differently in the moment, imagine how much more valuable feedback in general would be because people are actually opening up a real conversation in the moment to remediate something that could be avoided and deescalate a situation as it is happening. Let's have more of that in general. That would be amazing. So, yes.
- Right. And, you know, just one last side thing. We adopted our only child when we both were 45. We'd been married 50, that's a late time to adopt. And so I was going to all these parenting classes, and in one class I remember the leader saying, "What is the one thing that a parent can say to a child that will ensure that that child grows up full bodied, ready for the world?" And everybody's saying, "Compliment them, tell 'em how great they are," and they named many things. And the professor, whatever said, "No, no, no, no, no. The thing is, if you say to your child, 'I made a mistake.'" And I wrote it down. I went home, I made a mistake, I made a mistake, right? And it's true. That is something many don't say. Many bosses don't say, peers don't say it to each other, parents don't say it to their kids. And it's just right, so all of that.
- Well, and I think that we are in, and I'm gonna say North America 'cause I'm not gonna speak for, I know there are some differences in other cultures potentially, but North America, I think generally speaking, no authority figures whatever they are who have a, quote, position of power, an authority over us, teacher, parent, boss, leader, pastor, whatever the case may be. I think the vast majority of them are almost taught never to say I made a mistake because that devalues their authority which is horse manure.
- Right, right. No, you're right. Isn't that something? Will it ever change? I don't know.
- I hope so. I mean, I genuinely hope so. I think from what I have seen from younger generations and younger leadership teams, even if they're, you know, younger being even 40s and 50s, they are much more likely to get to that point earlier on than the teachers that I had, or my parents were. Let's put that out, some of the bosses I had back in the day would never, ever have said those words.
- Right, right.
- I have joked before that I'm 100% certain that my mother died knowing that she had never made a mistake in her life because everything she did was right, Bev. She was sure of it. So.
- In a way, I mean, wow. So it's all about good leadership whether you're a parent or a newbie in an organization. Yeah.
- Yes. And I wanted to go back to before I forget, besides just a leader admitting that they made a mistake, the other opportunity I was referring to inside of what you had said was I think that leaders holding the space for the people that report to them, to help them unpack, to help them get to what a lesson may be and what an opportunity may be. That feels like a skill and an opportunity for people leaders to work on, figure out, use with their people. And I don't think a lot of them are doing that or even thinking of that.
- Right, right.
- And I would ask, and please feel free to be like, "No, Celine, way off base. That's not a thing." Please feel free, but I'm gonna assume that there's something in what I said that may be okay. Assuming that, how can they do that? How can they create that space? What would you say to them to even get started? Because I think a lot of people are really afraid of starting those conversations.
- Do you mean starting a conversation about a mistake?
- Yes. So not their own mistake necessarily, but you see someone that's reporting to you and they are one of the people who's jumping from experience to experience who's not really reflecting on. Whether it's, and I'm not saying you need them to find a specific lesson, but it doesn't seem like they're even taking it in. They're not. They're just jumping and jumping and go, go, go. How can you help them pause?
- You know, sometimes when I'm working with career material, I'll say to an audience, or think about a time when you were absolutely at your best and you could feel it inside. Like, "I'm on it, I'm on point." What told you that? And get some of that information. And then I might take them to think of a time when you knew you blew it. And what was it you blew and how did you feel and what helped you step over it and move ahead? So maybe it's about storytelling. And maybe then if the manager said, "Here's one thing for me, here's what happened to me," it gets others to say, "Oh, well come to think of it, yeah, I had something like that." You know, we don't make time even in our team meetings for those kinds of conversations. You know, in career development, often we say managers, you've gotta talk with your people about what's going on in the world and how it could affect the work your own team is doing. And so we'll say, "Bring in a quote from the newspaper, from a magazine, from a podcast that either excites you or scares the bejesus out of you about your own future. Bring it in and let's talk about it." And those are some of the most wonderful sessions I've led where they just ripped something out of a magazine. "This really scared me." And that's a great way to get people, not only to share, but to look deeper into an experience.
- Yeah, I love that. I think that's a really, I mean, I think that's a very easy, simple, maybe is a better way of putting that. It's not necessarily easy, but it's a simple thing for people to do, to open up conversations. And, you know, stories are always, they're such a connection point, right? It's always stories. And it's funny when you said the example of, you know, here inviting someone in. "Here's the thing that happened to me. Here's where I made a mistake." It allows people to go, "Oh, here's a connection." And it's so funny 'cause it goes back to a leader in some way, shape or form, whether or not they're admitting a mistake saying, "Hey, guess what? Also not perfect."
- Right, right, right. So maybe we have to have some not perfect classes and a not perfect whatever theme song or-
- Honest to God, we could just start the academy of-
- Not perfect.
- Also not perfect, yep. 'Cause I mean, this is a related sidebar for a second and I'm sure that you have dealt with this in your career is when people talk about perfection. Whether they are perfectionists or they're looking, it has to be perfect. You know, it's done when it's perfect. You hear a lot of that when you work with people, I feel, full stop.
- Oh yeah.
- And I say that because one of the things that is one of my favorite things to do and I hear that is I'll pause people and I'll go, "Amazing. What is perfect?"
- Right.
- And it's astonishing how nobody ever has an answer truly for what is perfect. So the not perfect academy here I feel has a real place in this world.
- Great. We'll form it. We'll make a marching song.
- I'm in. It's truly, you are a pleasure to get to speak with and I appreciate your insight and your openness and your willingness to share your knowledge with me and with the audience. It's really just incredible. You have an incredible body of work and I wanna acknowledge that. And I also want to, if there's anything that we didn't get into or that you want to make sure you note or state or restate before we wrap up, I want to give you that opportunity. 'Cause I know we could probably talk about 100 different things.
- You know, I've been around for so long. You know what's interesting? Just as an aside, when you introduced me, you said, "And Bev received five Lifetime Achievement Awards."
- Correct.
- Here's something. Those awards when they were given depressed me more than they elated me because I thought it was a sign, your time is up.
- Interesting.
- You've done it. And once I could let go of that funk, and say, "Okay, now what's next?" Then it went away, but they didn't fill my cup. Do you know what I mean? And I smile at that because people think, "Well, isn't that wonderful?" And yes, yes, of course it is, but it didn't make me happy in the moment. Interesting.
- I really appreciate you sharing that. I think a lot of people experience a version of that when they receive accolades, whatever it is for them in their industry, their world, when they receive accolades of some sort. And I think we often think that that recognition is going to make us feel a certain way. It's gonna allow us to, you know, exactly. There's pride, there's something in it. And I think more people then are probably than we know when they receive that, it isn't the thing that fills 'em up. It isn't the thing that makes them go, "Well, I've arrived. Now, everything is going to be easy."
- Right, right, right. True. Life, huh?
- Right. Thank you for sharing that. That's very vulnerable and open. And I think it's important for people to hear especially from someone who has received five Lifetime Achievement Awards, which when you hear that, I mean, it is impressive, Bev. Please don't get me wrong. It is very impressive, but also sounds very impressive.
- Yes, but see already, I'm crunching my... Anyway, so thank you, thank you. A pleasure for me too, to just have this conversation.
- Well, I appreciate that. So thank you again for coming on. It's truly a pleasure. Thanks for joining me today on the "Leading Through Crisis" podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please take a minute to rate and review us on your podcast app. If you're interested in learning more about any of our guests, you can find us online at www.leadingthroughcrisis.ca.