Tim: Before we get into it, tell us a little bit about who you are.

Paul Falcone: I spent about three and a half decades in HR until about two years ago, Tim. And then I launched my own consulting firm, but I was the Chief Human Resources Officer for Nickelodeon Animation.

I was the head of international human resources for Paramount Pictures. I worked with that company's Viacom, which was the parent. I worked with them for about a decade. I've also worked in healthcare and biotech as well as in financial services. So it's funny. It's almost like my day job informed my writing. I wanted to work in international HR, labor union environments, nonprofits, startups, and Fortune 500 companies.

I moved my career along. These days I'm a columnist for SHRM. I've written for them for years. My 17th book just came out a few months ago, called The First Time Manager HR. It's with HarperCollins. I sit on the board of the American Management Association, and I am keeping busy as a consultant, mostly doing management training and keynote speaking as well as executive coaching.

So it's been a fun two years. I've been having a great time.

Tim: I can imagine it's been a fun, busy, fulfilling couple of years—17 books. I think I've got a couple of books in me, and I just can't get them out. And so 17, amazing.

Paul Falcone: Oh, call me sometime. I'll help you with that. Don't you worry. It isn't as bad; the funny thing for me is just a hobby. I just enjoy writing, and sometimes I got to the point where it's like when things didn't go right in the office.

I'd go home that night, and I'd write about it, and that was an article, and that came out as the article for SHRM, or whoever I was writing for at the time, or, Tim, for me, I was teaching at UCLA Extension for years in the School of Business and Management, and when you notice the students asking the same questions over and over again, there's another article, and after you've done so many articles, guess what?

You've got enough content for a book. So that's how the cycle just kept going and going.

Tim: That's brilliant. I'm going to call you up on that offer, Paul. So it's out here. It's live. We're not going to edit that out. So it's, I really appreciate that. I could now take all your time and just learn, but it's not about me.

We're talking about HR in the future of work. That's why this FlexOS podcast exists: future work. There's so much when we start thinking about the future. We know AI is here. When we look back at the year of 2024. This is when we're recording it; we think about not really using AI, but now it is prevalent everywhere.

Now we think about, we add on that layer of HR, who's now based on the people I'm talking with who have to embrace all this new technology, all the challenges that are in our world right now, and think about the future. That's a lot that I feel that weight. And what are you hearing? What are you seeing in the consulting, the people that you're connecting with in this?

Paul Falcone: I think it's the same thing, Tim. It's weighty. It's heavy. We're sitting on this. Wait, what is it? Is this the equivalent of us inventing the wheel? And we start from here. Is this bringing fire to the cavemen? We will finally be able to control the fire. Now what do we do? In so many ways we're moving in that new direction.

My main argument that I would make to most people is just take a deep collective breath. This isn't going to happen overnight, and it's going to take some time. We're ratcheting up, but when you're ratcheting up, it can take years. I've heard such extreme forecasts out there. Oh, all these jobs of millions of jobs will be eliminated, and millions of jobs will be created.

Yeah, quite not so fast. I think we have to get used to becoming an adrenaline junkie. I hate to say it, but we started in COVID, and everyone knows in HR how difficult it was to get through COVID. For all the different variations from the testing to the masking to the essential workers, there was just so much stuff changing all the time.

Truthfully, that's probably going to be our pace going forward. It is a time right now where it's exponential growth. This isn't linear anymore. This stuff is just like going fast. But again, we need to be the voice of reason. We need to be the voice of calm. We need to help keep things in perspective so that people aren't hyperventilating.

Our clients are scared too. The ones in the legal department, the marketing department, the research department—you name it. Unless they are hands-on employees, think of an RN, a nurse; you can't do that work remotely; you have to physically be there to do your job; they won't be able to outsource that, or at least the majority of it, so easily to AI.

But for white-collar people, white-collar jobs, all of a sudden it's, wait a second, this isn't just a blue-collar phenomenon; this is a white-collar phenomenon too. Lawyers are worried, doctors are worried, HR professionals are worried, and financial analysts are worried. And my argument is, yes, worry is not the worst thing in the world, but it's better to just be cautious; worried kind of infers anxiety.

I don't like the idea of worry, but just keep your eyes open to what's going on. There's a new software called, don't tell me, Galileo, the Josh Bersin who's big on the scene of HR, an author and a speaker. I guess he put all of his efforts into creating the first HR AI tool, and Galileo is new, and I went on the website. I think you have to be a member of his club to be able to get the free access to it, but I'm not sure what people should look up about what Josh Bersin is working with in Galileo. What can it do? What are the advances it's making? What are its limitations? That's going to come up in conversation.

So I think Tim, to the degree that people feel comfortable stretching the rubber band a little bit, again, the world is not ending tomorrow, but you do want to stay on top of this.

You want to be able to have a conversation about it. Don't let your boss come to me and say, Hey, Paul, Galileo, do you know anything about it? And you say, No, what's that? I do think we have to reach out there and become proactive in figuring out what's impacting the HR function.

Tim: I agree. And I think it's a tool; that's how I treat AI. That's how I use different AI tools in my workflows. For some, it can be scary, but I think it also poses some unique opportunities for HR, and I've got some ideas on what it could be, but I'm curious about what opportunities, like practical opportunities, you see AI has, whether you are a first-time manager in HR or a seasoned HR leader.

Paul Falcone: Yeah. When I talked about it in my book, as I said, keep this in perspective; let's go with three pillars. The first one is the HR function. And how is HR going to impact the HR function? You're thinking efficiency and employee self-service and manager self-service and all of that stuff, and that makes sense.

The second topic is really the employee experience, and I think that's critical too in the sense that you're going to have digital buddies that can do coaching for people. Well, we always have it. Now you can go to Gen AI and just say, I'm having a problem with a co-worker. What are some ways that I can resolve the problem?

But they're going to get better, these apps. They're going to get more specific. They're going to become better informed when it comes to L&D, learning, and development initiatives. They'll be more personalized, not just based on what's on my resume, but when I create my avatar, where my interests are, because I can now build that in, and it will start to see opportunities for me that normally might get bypassed.

There's a lot of opportunity. But there's a lot of disruption coming our way over the next decade, I would say, but some of the things are pretty hot. Really, Tim, when you think of the issues facing us right now in the HR trenches, the AI piece is important.

Certainly, the organizational impact of AI. They want data analytics. They want to know how the muscle is performing, where its strengths are, and what its weaknesses are.

That's going to come to us on an app. We're going to have to unlearn some of the assumptions we've made and be able to look at an app and say to the vendor, Teach me the AI stuff that your tool offers so that I can share that with people in my own company.

So, it's not impossible to upscale; it's not impossible to do this, but it is going to be a difference in mindset. I think we have to look at things a little bit more in terms of agility, in terms of flexibility, and in terms of adaptability. As long as that mindset is there, I think this will all fall in place.

Tim: You talk about mindsets, and that's, I think, a critical component when we think about anything when we think about the future. When we think about the future of work, when you think about the workforces, you mentioned employees, and we have to reframe our minds, and a little bit of time to talk about AI in the future work, there's other components to the future work, and AI seems to be dominating the conversation these days.

What are you hearing? What are you seeing when people are talking about HR in the future? Even when you're putting together your book for that first-time manager, what trends or what things should we be focusing on aside from just the technology?

Paul Falcone: Now, the biggest trend out there is going to be talent, definitely.

Talent development is going to have to, I do not want to say replace talent acquisition, but talent development, you gotta grow your own. We're not going to be able to run an ad on LinkedIn or run an ad on Indeed.com and have all the fish jump in the boat.

So much of this is going to be about how strong you are as a company at developing talent, so look at it globally for a minute when you think about talent acquisition, or I'd say this way talent scarcity is a problem for the rest of the century.

There's a great book, Tim; it's called The Next 100 Years, and it's by George Friedman, a New York Times bestseller, but the idea is talent scarcity is going to drive so much of the industrialized world. If you think about China's one-child policy, it went on for 40 years. It went on for way too long.

When you think about Japan, they have 125 citizens; now that number is going to be closer to 85 million by 2050. And the average age is going to be over 65. Who's going to do the work? South Korea has the lowest birth rate on the planet. In the industrialized countries, we have talent scarcity, and it will be for the rest of the century.

We've gotten a taste of what it means going through COVID because companies couldn't keep their doors open because they couldn't find people to do the work. But the reality is, if you're looking at one big overarching trend, when CEOs are talking about it, they want collaboration. They want agility. They want innovation and creativity.

The critical thinking, that's fine. It's all in that talent space, and that talent shortage means you have to get good at looking at where the bottlenecks are in your company. Where do you have problems promoting people from frontline operational independent contributor to the first year of management to the supervisor or to the manager, director, VP, or whatever it happens to be?

Smart companies are going to think about how to build those bridges, and one of the ways you do it is through certification. There are a lot of programs out there. We think of LinkedIn Learning as a MOOC, a massive open online course, but there are others: Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, edX, and FutureLearn.

There are all these programs out there where you can get your people certified in very specific areas taught by professors from some of the largest universities on the planet. There's a lot of opportunity out there, and now's the chance for us to reinvent ourselves. HR has always wanted the proverbial seat at the table. Guess what? We got it.

Now be careful what you ask for. But the reality of this, Tim, to me, is, man, there's so much good stuff out there to choose from. So much low-hanging fruit. And you can become a hero very quickly if you can show that you're moving the needle in terms of people's performance.

So that's what I would say talent would be the biggest issue out there, outside of the AI piece.

Tim: That's interesting. Talent agility versus talent acquisition. We are not adding more talent to the talent pool; we're either having to try and take talent from somebody else, which comes at a cost, often a large cost, unless they're largely unhappy. That's a whole other conversation, but it's going to come at a cost.

Practically, how does someone like an HR, like you said, HR wanted to sit at the table? We're at the table. And now our cost of hire is way too high. We are offering salaries. We just can't afford any more. We have to look within. What do we do? What kind of plan do we have to create in order to get ahead of this?

Because I want to prevent HR people from having that awkward conversation and being the leader in that conversation, saying, Look at these metrics. We can't keep this pace. Here's the plan.

Paul Falcone: The talent development stuff isn't new. We've been talking about career ladders for two to three decades.

This idea of how do you grow your own? But what I would say here is that the pace is faster. We're moving more quickly. Organizations are scaling and/or merging. There's going to be a lot of M&A coming in our near future. The presidential election is behind us. This isn't a political conversation, but we now know who the president of the United States is going to be, and the realities from what I'm hearing among CHROs is you can expect a lot more M&A.

The next thing I'm hearing from CHROs is there's going to be a massive change. People have wanted change for a while now. They've been keeping their heads down. This idea of what do we do when we have large-scale turnover? What do we do to retain them? And how do we keep them happy if a lot of people are feeling like they're treading water? They want to do more, they want to learn more, they want to grow more, and that 2025, from what I hear, they're projecting out to really be a period where there's going to be some mass scattering going on.

We've got to be prepared for that as well. And I think the wise mind going into this year, going into 2025, is thinking about these large moving pieces, right? Number one, talent scarcity. Number two, talent development. Number three, think about Gen-Z, the Zoomers, the 27-and-under crowd. Right now, they make up about 25% of the workforce.

By the end of this decade, 2030, they're going to make up about 60% of the workforce. They're moving very quickly, but they are one of the most studied generational cohorts in world history. We know everything about them, and they want career and professional development. And that means that you need to train your managers to become coaches and mentors and help them frame their comments and their constructive feedback in terms of someone's career and professional development.

We also know they want diversity of thoughts, ideas, and voices. That's the whole DEI movement. They want this idea of work-life family balance or control, whatever you want to call that. Truthfully, the idea of hybrid work is really here to stay.

We can't just say we want everyone back at 9 to 5 or 8 to 5, Monday to Friday, starting Tuesday. Companies are going to lose their talent if they do that. And I know CEOs suffer from what they call productivity paranoia. But that's also not really fair. It's like, yeah, it's hard to manage the unseen.

I understand that. You're worried that they're really doing the work, but a lot of CEOs are worried about, look, Gen Z, the Zoomers, keep testing out as the most isolated, loneliest, most depressed, and most anxious generation on the planet, even more so than people in retirement homes.

How do we get them to the point where they're feeling more included? There's the inclusion piece, and there's the belonging piece. How do we make sure that they can do their very best work every day with peace of mind? And you'll hear the CEO say things like, You know, when I was younger, Paul, some of my best friends were some of the best mentors I ever had.

In those early days, this whole generation is missing out for the sake of our culture, for the sake of team building, for the sake of camaraderie, and for the sake of innovation. We've got to have people on site. And Tim, I know that, but HR is going to have to push back a little bit and say, Yes, true, but we have to be careful not to push on the gas pedal too quickly.

We don't want to lose our key talent, and the reality too is we want to cast the broadest net that we can as the technology impacts, as the AI impacts all the jobs in the company. You don't necessarily need people who work within 25 miles of your location. When you can open it up to other parts of the country, or even globally, that could be a very big trend that we can expect to see as well.

Tim: There's just a lot packed into that. I appreciate you bringing in what you're hearing from other CHROs who are experiencing this, who are hearing that the sentiment from the leadership teams is that a word that's coming to mind is talent mobility. Being able to hire talent wherever they are versus, hey, everyone has to come back to the office.

And we will be seeing people going back to the office, but I think part of that conversation that we won't be hearing is engagement still where it is, or are we now seeing engagement plummet because somebody is going back to the office because this is the job and they don't have another job lined up?

So I'm going to show up, maybe do what I'm told, maybe not. And we'll see what happens. And so I'm curious about that.

Paul Falcone: The funny thing is we went through the great resignation, and then that turned into the great regret, and nowadays I'm forgetting the term for what we call it. Now it's called the great something else, but it's this idea of I don't remember the exact word because you know how we use these little pithy one-liners.

It's the great something. But the bottom line, the funny thing, Tim, is it's like this sense of people being complacent, keeping their heads down for the past couple of years, not a lot of job movement, fear of losing out on a job, right last and first out if they hired me most recently, I'm going to be the first one to be cut.

So they've stayed put, but there were a lot of things going on, especially in the United States with everything going on in politics and so many moving pieces. I think once companies knew, Okay, we know what we have going forward, at least in terms of the political front with the new administration.

Now they can move forward on things, but that sounds good, except it is careful what Josh Bersin said again, because it's one of those things where, again, there could be a lot of M&A activity, great opportunities for HR people to grow their skills.

You want international exposure; you want M&A exposure; these are cutting-edge kinds of things. Yet at the same time, it could mean layoffs, and it could mean very quickly, staffing up. And they could be happening at the same time, where the company is laying off on the left hand and hiring on the right hand, and they can't find the right people because they need the technology that they need.

This kind of schizophrenic market, when I say we're building the plane while we're flying it, I'm not kidding. We are figuring this out as we go. Just like we did in COVID. And so my argument to people is to remember what those COVID days were, and don't just say, Whew, glad they're over, just realize that the mindset that we were forced to create during COVID is probably going to extend, not constantly, but to the degree that we want to learn new skills, we want to get certified ourselves, but we want to maintain those certifications.

We want to be able to hold a conversation when it comes to technology in the workplace or whatever it happens to be. Staying on top of these trends is more important now than ever.

Tim: I want to go back to something. I think that you've said a lot of crucial information here. You said one thing that's, in the back of my mind, is HR also now needs to be coaches. And especially when we look at our workforce and the demographic, and as you said, by the end of this decade, by 2030, we're going to have 65% of our workforce made up of Zoomers, Gen-Z.

Also, people want career advancement. They want to know, where am I going to go? How am I going to get there? What are you going to do to help me get there? And I've heard arguments of organizations say, If you want to advance, go study on your own.

I've also heard organizations specifically in the HR space or HR leaders saying, No, we need to help them, and we also then have to not just develop L&D plans but also figure out how to coach in order to coach leaders or people to become better leaders. It's a lot. And I'll go back to what I said earlier. What we first talked about is, Oh, it's heavy. I feel that weight, and the future is exciting, but also, man, there's so much to do.

Paul Falcone: One of the big trends, though, is going to be HR's relationship with their line managers and their clients, their internal clients; it's one of the top things in the CEO surveys, because Lord knows there's a lot of CEO surveys out there too. But the one from KPMG that I'm thinking of that came out is global.

I know it wasn't global as a US CEO outlet. They were basically saying, Where is it that the CEOs are at these days? And they do want this ability in the pit to have emotional intelligence. Now, 30 years ago when I was growing up in HR, we used to call them soft skills, and they used to laugh at us and say, Oh, such an HR thing.

And I want to do soft skills training. And they'd be like, No, we don't need training, Falcone. Now they call it soft skills. And it's one of the top five things that CEOs are looking for. Why? Because what they realized during COVID in a hybrid environment where people weren't even allowed to come to work, if you remember, unless you're an essential worker, you really did for the first time realize that your most important assets go home every night, and they may not come back the next day.

All of a sudden they realize we need leaders who know how to bond that need to know how to have a sense of trust and respect with their workers to have people's backs to help people do their best work every day with peace of mind, even if they can't see them in the office day in and day out.

And so when you think about how the HR function is going to change, there's still very much a human element to it, Tim. This is not, we're not turning into robots. As a matter of fact, I'm going to counter-argue that all this technology gives you an opportunity, but more important than that, it pushes you to help your clients become better leaders and connect with their people.

Quick example, if I may. When you're talking with someone, don't say you've got a bad attitude. You always do this. You never do that. When you do that, people shut down. They feel judged. They become very defensive. They're not going anywhere with it. Take that same conversation and say, Paul, you know what?

The most important decisions about your career are going to happen when you're not in the room. That's the same for you as it is for me, as it is for everyone else. And there's something that may be missing awareness that could potentially hold you back over the long term in your career. When you're not in that proverbial room in the future to defend yourself.

Can I share with you what this looks like from my vantage point from time to time? Wow. All of a sudden, they're listening, and they're listening not because they have to, but because they want to. You're about to tell them the same thing, but it's almost like an iron hand with a soft glove. Don't make people feel judged.

Don't yell. You don't need all that. Whoever said, Oh, to be a respected manager or leader, you have to be feared. Baloney. That is not true. I had one boss in my career who scared the life out of me. I could not walk and talk and chew gum at the same time. I was so afraid of making a mistake.

If CEOs are looking for innovation and creativity and agility and collaboration, that's going to come because people feel like their boss has their back; they're not going to leave. It's no company can keep promoting people forever. That's not the formula. I understand that the younger gen wants to climb up the ladder.

But I'm a boomer. I was born in 63. The boom ended in 64. I was at the tail end of the boom, but I wanted that too. That's pretty natural. The reality, though, is that you can't grow people eternally, but I will tell you this: the most important factor in retention, employee discretionary effort, and performance is the relationship with the boss, and if you've got a boss that you trust, a boss that you respect, and a boss that, dare I say, you love, you ain't going anywhere for 20%.

Why would I leave for 20% after taxes? It's not going to amount to anything. And I'm risking leaving working for Paul Falcone to go for someone who may spit fire and throw chairs. I don't want to take that risk. I'm going to stay here. I'm happy enough.

Thank you very much. But that's where you need them to be. And there's that great book, Tim, First Break All the Rules. where the Gallup organization was studied, and they studied tens of thousands of workers and thousands of companies, and what about employee engagement and discretionary effort, and they came up with the famous line, People join companies, but leave managers.

And that's true. That's the factor that companies need to be focusing on. I started the training in 2022 right after we were coming out of the COVID fog because I knew companies would want to help grow that talent and build that frontline operational muscle so that the employee experience could be better for everybody.

Luckily, my timing has been really good. But regardless of whether you have an outside trainer, it doesn't matter. You need to do it yourself as the HR professional. What you need to think about is what you have to pay forward. How can you teach your managers to become better leaders and bond better with their employees? You will be a hero.

Tim: So good. I was just thinking to myself, I just want to keep listening to that because you're talking about something that is so near and dear to my heart, and throughout my career, with little education, I've had the opportunity to connect with various leaders and coach and develop and be developed, and you're absolutely right. And I agree that line from Gallup still remains true today.

I'm going to leave a bad leader. And so we could plan for the future work. We can think about all these AI tools, and we can get overwhelmed by that. But if we're not looking inwards at our people, how are our people doing? What sort of training and development? Can we offer, and maybe you don't need a big budget? You can now, with the power of AI, create some pretty cool pieces of training, but there's also a lot of low-barrier training that is out there.

Heck, there's just so many podcasts out there. Just say, Hey, listen to these podcasts, read these books. I know Paul's got a bunch. He's got 17, and we're going to come back in a couple of weeks and debrief these books.

We're going to put together whatever we can to upskill. And you know what? People are going to gravitate towards it. They might think it's that I don't want to do a book club or a podcast club or whatever, but you put a couple of people in a room and be amazed at what happens.

And that's, I think, where we also need to be spending a lot of time when we're talking about the future of work.

Paul Falcone: Tim, I totally agree. Everything I've always written about, I always say, keep it simple. Don't overthink this stuff. We're talking about human beings here, and especially on the emotional level.

I do an exercise when I teach at UCLA or whatever; I always say, Tell me about the best boss you've ever had. One or two characteristics about the best boss you've ever had. Don't tell me who, don't tell me where, but what did it feel like? And people would raise their hands and say, She was someone who always had my back.

She seemed to have more faith in me than I had in myself at the time, or he was someone who always challenged me. It was because of him; he valued education. Because of him, I went back and got my bachelor's degree, whatever. Then the next question is, what is it that you're ultimately valuing in these people that made them your favorite boss? The shorthand answer is it comes down to two things: their character and their caring.

That's it. Their character, trust, respect, ability to build your self-esteem, your self-awareness, and your sense of self-confidence. That's the character piece. And the caring. They cared about me personally. When you study again, Gen-Y, Gen-Z, and you look at what their priorities are, they want to work for an ethical company doing meaningful work for a management team that cares about them personally. Boom! Drop the mic! You just answered.

This is exactly in line with what they want: the degree to which you can align your company's management style with what Gen-Y and Gen-Z want. This is HR's responsibility: your company's management values what Gen-Y and Gen-Z want. You're just going to be smart.

Not to take away from Gen-X or the Baby Boom, we just weren't studied. We didn't have the infrastructure. Today they have the universities and the think tanks and the big four accounting firms and the big three management consulting firms. We didn't have that when I was a kid, but now we know.

So I'll study that and align what you're doing with those priorities. They're all noble priorities. They're good things. And before you know it. Everything's in rhythm, and everything is aligned.

Tim: Character and care. For those who are listening, you think about the future of work; we think about all the automation and all the tools we're going to be using and even leveraging AI to build out talent development plans. Whatever you're doing, I love framing it through that lens of character and care, and Character Matters is a great book on my shelf called Character Matters.

And it comes down to just that: it doesn't matter who we're sitting at the table with. People are going to stay because you're character and you care. And yes, maybe they get paid well; are they getting the most out of the performance if you don't care about them and if you don't have a strong character?

So, I don't think we can have this future work conversation without that foundation.

Paul Falcone: Very true.

Tim: Good. As I look to wind down the conversation, we've jumped around a few different things. I think we've landed on the theme, though, of looking at that inward talent. We're thinking about the talent and planning for that talent; somebody is listening to this. They're maybe overwhelmed with the 101 things on their plate, and maybe they're putting together their quarterly plan or their yearly plan.

And when we even just think about that quarter of that year, that is future work. We're looking at the future. Where should we start? What do we do when we think about, I think about our talent, think about the technology, think about how to lead in the most effective way?

Paul Falcone: I think that the bigger perspective is to look at all the big moving pieces, do your homework, talk to your boss, and talk to your clients and see what they need. In some organizations, the reality of this stuff is going to be that we need mental health and wellness because our team is all anxious, and they're suffering from this, and they're aware of it, and they're happy to talk about it, but the reality is, Paul, this is something that's really critical to us.

In other organizations, it's having multiple generations in the workplace. In my last company, where I was, we hired someone who used to work for us, who came out of retirement, was 78 years old, and she became our chief nursing officer. And it's like, great! But we also have 18-year-olds; you've got so much in the workplace.

There's the AI piece, and that's its own thing, but you also have to think about the work-life balance piece, the remote-work piece. We are in a situation where we're moving so quickly. The game Whac-A-Mole, where every time the little toy pops up, you hit it with a hammer, but then it pops up somewhere else and you hit it somewhere else.

Don't get caught in Whac-A-Mole. You'll go crazy. I think goal setting becomes really important at a time like this, and the pace of business moves too quickly, Tim, to do annual goals. You can have annual goals, but the truth of the matter is it can be more like quarterly goals. And realistically, you're going to have to listen better.

We are not great as human beings at listening, but as I always say, listen with your eyes and with your heart in addition to your ears; wait two seconds before you interrupt and let them finish their thoughts. But make sure you're asking the right questions of the right stakeholders and listening to see what those broader themes are.

I think companies that pull their employees doing environmental surveys and employee satisfaction surveys, I think that's brilliant, as long as you're willing to do something with it. You can't just listen to it and do nothing. You gotta act on it. But even just listening and taking that time to figure out what the big two or three moving pieces are as you move into the new quarter of the new year, and where that will go into Q2, Q3, and Q4.

There's almost like a chain. It's like this chain. They're all contiguous; they're all touching, and each step gets a little bit broader, a little bit bigger. The expression is you have to swallow an elephant one bite at a time. Don't get lost with the elephant. There's just too much going on out there.

We have to be the ones to self-regulate, which is a high emotional intelligence factor. We have to be able to be the strategic people who can look at what's going to impact the organization. Again, I'll go to what I said in the beginning. It's what's going on in the HR suite. It's what's going on with the employee experience.

It's what's going on at the organizational level, operational level, revenue level, or whatever you want to call that. Think of things with those three columns. And maybe you want to have one goal in each, or maybe you want to have three goals in one of those columns; I don't know. But you're not going to know unless you ask.

And if you second-guess just because you think this is what your company needs, if you don't have the CEO's buy-in or your boss's buy-in, or your key client's buy-in, you're going to be going against the grain.

So don't get too lost in all the fancy toys out there; just keep focused. You should be able to do this on the back of a napkin or the back of an envelope to talk about what my new year is going to look like, what my focus is going to be based on the six conversations that I've had with my team, my boss, my clients, blah, blah, blah, but that's how I would do it. I wouldn't go into the new year gung ho with 50 million things that you want to do; you will burn out, half of them won't get finished, and even when they're finished, you're not going to feel a full sense of completion.

Always think big picture, but make sure that third column, that third element, the organizational impact, is there because that's really the one that drives what's going on in the HR suite and what's going on with the employee engagement.

Tim: I think that's a great place to end the conversation. Now, I've got my pen in my hand. I'm going to go make some columns on a sheet of paper. And I think what also popped in my mind was almost like, go and have those six conversations. Like it's a job interview.

Hey, if you look at next year, what is the biggest impact that we can make from an HR team? Tell me more about that. Can I get to maybe some root cause or root cause analysis or some opportunity analysis and just have those conversations, maybe casually, over remote or in person, whatever it is? Nobody needs to know what you're doing, but what it is is building your game plan for the future.

So Paul, thank you so much for coming on. I can't wait to continue to have more conversations with you. I'm so glad that we're connected now. For those who are listening, where could people reach you? Where could people figure out how to do this? Find more; learn more from you.

Paul Falcone: That's nice, and thanks. The website is just paulfalconehr.com. So, the website has everything, including the links to my Amazon author page. And if anyone is interested in the YouTube channel with these little videos, you can do all that there from paulfalconehr.com. And also I'm on LinkedIn, paulfalcone1. If anyone wants to send me a LinkedIn invite, they're more than welcome. I'd love to connect that way too.

Tim: Amazing. And don't worry, we're going to have that in the show notes and on the podcast page as well.