What I learned at Workhuman Live 2024

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend Workhuman Live in Austin, TX. While I had to cut my stay a little short, I did walk away with a few new ideas and some calls to action that I can start working on today. Putting the "so what, now what?" at the top for convenience.

So what, now what?

Details below... but here's what I'm going to do:

1. I will start my own at-home practice of learning about and experimenting with AI. I'm already doing this with the help of Sololearn , but I'm also going to read and / or listen on the topic weekly, starting with Ethan Mollick 's One Useful Thing Substack.
2. I will start embedding the idea of "making space" in our 可口可乐公司 Core Leadership curriculum, starting with our experiences that focus on building the Leadership & Growth Behavior of "Thrive in Ambiguity." I may also need to get with my colleagues focused on AI development to see if there might be some opportunities to cross-pollinate.
3. I will continue collaborating with my colleagues in the Talent space to ensure our solutions support the behavior changes we want to see, and to influence how our incentives might further reflect our commitment to specific actions we want leaders to take at Coke.

I need to learn (a lot) more about AI.

In general, the conference focused a lot on AI – some salient points included:

1. AI will disrupt our ways of working and living at a magnitude equal to the advent of electricity, the industrial revolution, and the internet... combined. Perhaps not a juicy piece of news for others; but I'd never tried to quantify the disruptive power of AI, probably because I'm admittedly so overwhelmed by it. This really blew my mind.
2. AI can be a time machine. How do we use AI to create more time? And for someone in my role, how do I make sure our leaders at Coca-Cola are able to help themselves and their teams create more time?
3. According to Brené Brown , AI might provoke our number 1 shame trigger at work: irrelevance. The jury is still out on whether that is where my anxiety is stemming from, but I'm not not worried about AI forcing me to reinvent myself in new ways. Yes, of course reinvention is an opportunity; but I'm allowing myself to be a little scurred.

ACTION #1: Create an at-home practice of learning about AI.

Leadership is about making space.

Again, you won't find rocket science here... not even terribly new and exciting ideas. But after getting more immersed in the many possible uses of AI, and in the context of Nancy Giordano talking about leadership as a verb (leadering, something dynamic and evolving), the idea of leadership and space-making really clicked for me.

I'm going to paraphrase Brené again... she said something to the effect of, "Leaders need to be space makers - recognizing that there is space between stimulus and response, and in that space we have the power of choice." We can choose to think deeply, or we can choose to react.

Wildly oversimplifying, but sticking to what I learned, there are two things at play here to explore:

1. How might we encourage leaders at all levels to embrace that space and make the self-affirming / productive / effective / <insert positive adjective here> choice prior to their response?
2. How might we enable leaders to make more time and space, perhaps with the use of the digital tools (read AI, but there are others) available to them, and how might we teach them to enable their teams the same way?

ACTION #2: Embed "space making" in our Core Leadership curriculum; this will likely involve some collab with my cross-functional skills-building colleagues.

It's hard to see, much less admire, your own evolution.

In his opening keynote, Eric Mosley shared a quote that I'm now going to paraphrase. I did some light googling... I can't seem to find the original author of this quote:

Butterflies can't see their wings. They can't see how truly beautiful they are, but everyone else can. People are like that as well. They don't recognize their true beauty and how much they grow and evolve.

Whether this is scientifically true or not, I like this quote, and I choose to interpret it as encouraging us to take a beat to try to picture the growth path we've been on. Perhaps we're not undergoing anything so extreme as what happens inside a chrysalis (or maybe you are... go you!), but growth - no matter how negligible - is worth celebrating.

In my role, it will be important to support leaders in determining where they are on their growth path today and to support them in both looking back on where they've come from and charting a path forward. The journey is the goal... becoming who you are is never done so long as you're living (thanks, Michelle Obama!).

ACTION 3: Collaborate across Talent and Development teams to ensure we are focusing on, building, and incentivizing a common set of leadership behaviors and actions.