Episode 182: How to Embrace Long-Term Thinking in HR Leadership (an interview with Dorie Clark)
Do you struggle to be proactive with your long term goals? Are you constantly putting out fires, with no time to strategise for the long game? In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders Podcast, host David Green sits down with Dorie Clark, a distinguished professor at Columbia Business School, successful entrepreneur, and author of the influential book, "The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World."
Together, Dorie and David discuss invaluable insights into the essence of strategic patience and long-term thinking in today's short-term oriented world. Highlights from the conversation include:
Actionable advice on how HR leaders can carve out time from their busy schedules to focus on long-term goals;
The importance of prioritising and the strategic value of turning down opportunities to ensure focus on the most critical projects;
Insights on aligning objectives with business strategy while remaining flexible to adapt to unforeseen changes;
How embracing failure can drive innovation and creativity;
Understanding when to hold steady with your strategies and when to pivot;
This episode is an essential listen for any business or HR professional looking to break free from the cycle of reactivity and take a more strategic, long-term approach to their work and leadership.
Support from this podcast comes from global platform leader for employee experience, Culture Amp. Learn more about how Culture Amp can help you create a better world of work at http://cultureamp.com
[0:00:00] David Green: The world of work always seems to be in a rush. HR professionals are constantly having to juggle priorities, often feel overwhelmed, and are permanently behind. As a result, there can be a tendency to keep our heads down, focused on the next thing, and the next, and so it goes on. This reactive state, while sometimes unavoidable, can sometimes overshadow the proactive strategic planning that is essential for sustained success and growth. It's a challenging balance to strike. This is where the concept of long-term thinking becomes invaluable, not just as a principle, but as a practice for organisational agility.
So today, I'm delighted to joined by my guest, Dorie Clark, a distinguished Columbia Business School professor, entrepreneur, and author. Dorie has appeared three times on the prestigious Thinkers50 list and is the author of the fantastic book, 'The Long Game, How to be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, which we'll unpack in our conversation. In this discussion, we will dive into the key concepts of Dorie's book, discussing how as leaders we can prioritise effectively, set adaptable goals, embrace failure as part of innovation and cultivate strategic patience to not just react to the present but actively shape the future. So, let's get started.
Dorie, welcome to the show. You've got a great background, from politics to now being a successful entrepreneur and three times, I think, actually named one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, very prestigious list that one. So, to start, could you share a little bit about your journey, about how you got to where you are today? Yeah, David, thank you so much for having me.
[0:01:58] Dorie Clark: Yeah, David, thank you so much for having me. So, I came to the work that I'm doing now, consulting and speaking and advising in the management arena, in a bit of a non-traditional way. I originally thought I would be an academic and it didn't work! I got turned down by all of the places I applied to for doctorates. So, I had to come up with a plan B for myself, which actually ended up ultimately starting me on my path. I ultimately wrote a book called Reinventing You, which was about professional reinvention, but I did a lot of it early in my career. I worked as a political journalist, I worked as a spokesperson on a variety of political campaigns in the US, I ran a nonprofit organisation. But eventually, I started my own consultancy 18 years ago and so have been working with companies to help them and their leaders get better at that what they do and get their messages out in a crowded and noisy sphere.
[0:02:59] David Green: And you've probably had a much more enjoyable, fun career than you would have had if you've been an academic, which just proves that sometimes failing isn't a bad thing!
[0:03:08] Dorie Clark: It's true, and in fact one of the biggest lessons that I've derived from all of that is that I was really interested in the idea of teaching and interacting with students, and I've managed to get to do that anyway. It's really reinforced for me the fact that so often in our professional lives, we tend to think, "Oh, well there's one way to do this". You know, in my mind, it was, okay, if you want to be a professor, you get a doctorate, and then you go out and you get hired, and it's a very standard, traditional process. But there are actually exceptions everywhere in every field, you just have to find them, you have to find the side door. And so in my case, less than three years after I got turned down from all the doctoral programs, I was actually teaching at the university level. I had found another way in by teaching as a practitioner. I was a journalist at that time, and somebody literally sent an email around the newsroom saying, "Oh, hey, somebody dropped out, does anyone want to teach a media class?" And I'm like, "Yes, I will do that".
So, I think that it's a hopeful message. A lot of times people get turned down or blocked for opportunities that they want, and they say, "Well, it's never going to happen for me, I have to give up that dream". And the truth is, we often give up far too soon.
[0:04:25] David Green: So your book, The Long Game, which I'll put up there for the benefit of those on the video, excellent book, The Long Game, How to be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, has been going strong for almost three years now. And for our listeners, could you give us a brief synopsis of the book?
[0:04:41] Dorie Clark: Well ultimately, The Long Game, the subtitle is, How to be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. And what we're really trying to get at is understanding and recognising that, yes, we all have pressures that we face, whether it's needing to meet quarterly earnings or needing to respond to all the emails in your inbox. We have these obligations that press on us. But also, if we want to be successful, ultimately, if we want to have the lives and the careers and the businesses that we want to have, we can't afford to just be reactive all the time. We have to somehow find a way to carve out, even in the midst of all the mishigas coming at us, a path to identifying our long-term goals and pursuing them. And I do believe it's possible, and in the Long Game, I talk about the ways and the techniques that we can use to begin to carve out space for the strategic thinking that just about everybody says they want to do, but so few of us actually get to or make the time to do.
[0:05:47] David Green: So, in today's organisations, and actually, Dorie, for context, most of the people that listen to this podcast work in HR, so let's look at HR. So, I think particularly in HR, we tend to get very reactive. We're trying to put out bias and it's easy to get overwhelmed and it's difficult to take the time to reflect and maybe focus on the steps to achieving our long-term goals, or the long-term goals of the organisation as well. What are some of the strategies that we can employ to help us create that space for strategic thinking?
[0:06:20] Dorie Clark: Yeah, well I think that one of the ways you can pivot successfully from the short-term crises that erupt regularly, into a little bit more long-term thinking, is actually to apply some of the methodology of the Agile world. You know, Agile has become so popular in software and in other elements. But one of the premises that I think is really useful is the idea that every time you take a step toward doing something, you should be thinking and asking yourself, "Okay, how can I systematise that for the future? How can I avoid having to take that same step again?" and that's helpful. If a problem has emerged, whether it is some kind of a hiccup in a hiring process, or maybe something has gone wrong and everybody's confused about the new benefits package, or whatever, great, solve the problem today, but take a step toward recording it, creating a system, creating a fix upstream so that you don't have the same problem next year when everybody goes through the process again. And I like that.
Another question that has been very helpful for me personally is asking yourself, and I really try to do this regularly, "What is it that I can do today that will make tomorrow better and easier? It's really, I think of it as doing a favour for my future self. And so in a literal sense it's, okay, maybe you want to work out tomorrow morning, so you set out the workout clothes so that it's the first thing you see, you don't have to think about it, you're ready, you're going to do it. But what are work equivalents of that? Maybe it's taking time now to look at your schedule for next month and say, "Oh, I have that really big presentation that's happening. I should probably -- okay, I know I'm going to need to get this information, this data, these images for it. Why don't I send the emails now to people so that I can put out the call to get those things so that they come in three weeks in advance, and I don't freak everybody out by asking them 48 hours in advance?" That is a favour both to your future self and to other people's future selves.
[0:08:41] David Green: Is it also maybe sometimes questioning a little bit about some of the stuff that you're doing and actually thinking, is this actually adding any value? Not just to me, but is this adding any value if you're in HR? Is this adding any value to the business, to the stakeholders I'm serving with this? Because that's a good way sometimes of prioritising a little bit, isn't it?
[0:09:02] Dorie Clark: Yeah, that's absolutely true. And one of the points that I make in the Long Game is that, something that doesn't really get talked about explicitly, but I think we do need to raise it and name it, is that on a regular basis, I mean let's call it every year, for example, we actually have to get more selective about what we say yes to. It is a reality that as we ascend in our careers and up the corporate ladder, you are going to have more demands on your time more, potentially it's because you have more direct reports, but certainly at a minimum it's that more people know you, more people expect things of you, more people know that you know certain things so, "Oh, ask David, he knows". And as a result, the incoming is just increased.
I mean, when you're just starting out at a job, or just starting out in your career, I mean nobody knows you, nobody wants to talk to you, it's not a problem. You can afford to say yes to everything, and you probably should because opportunities will arise and you don't know. I mean, what the heck, you're not doing anything better! But as you become more senior and more successful, you have a lot of legitimately valuable things that you could be doing. Ultimately, the reason why people have such problems with it, it may bring up emotional issues for you. You might feel a little bit jerky saying no to people, you might feel like a bad person for not being helpful. But if we want to be successful at doing the things that matter for us in our career, rather than just being somebody else's errand boy, we have to become more and more systematically discerning about what we're doing and how we're spending our time.
[0:10:52] David Green: What are some of the strategies that HR leaders, frankly anyone, anyone can use to prioritise effectively and ensure their teams are focusing on the most impactful projects and maybe give permission for people to say no; what are some of the things that we can do?
[0:12:23] Dorie Clark: Yeah, I'm glad you raised that, David, because this is definitely a devil-is-in-the-details kind of thing. It might sound nice to say, "Oh, say no more often", but in practical terms, people really struggle with it because they want to appear responsive, they want to appear like they're doing the things necessary that their higher ups are expecting of them. So, that's why in the Long Game, I actually lay out very specific scripts and strategies that people can use, because at a fundamental level, you are never going to get to the strategic stuff, never, if your schedule is overstuffed with minutiae. There's just not space for it. It's not that it takes a huge amount of time to do strategy, but it takes some time and if you have zero time, you're in a time deficit, it's not ever going to happen. So, the first step is how do you clear out the dross and the dreck and make a little space for yourself. So, there's a variety of things that you can do.
I mean one, to the point of systematisation is, if people keep asking you the same questions, it's actually a really good idea to write it up, to literally have a document, or to put something on an internal website or whatever it is, so that instead of having to respond personally and privately, you can say, "Oh, great, here's the link, here's everything you need to know". So, you do it once and you answer the question for all time. And also, not just for you, but probably a lot of your colleagues it can be helpful, because then they won't be bothered with it as well. Another possibility is just, I'll call it deferring and deflecting a little bit. So, maybe somebody is coming to you with a request, "Oh, hey, I'd like your advice about this", and it's somebody that you'd like to help, but it's certainly not an emergency. And okay, so you don't want to be a jerk, you don't want to say no, but it's really not a priority for you. So, in that case, I actually really am fully in support of making people jump through some hoops, because that is essentially a way of ensuring that they prove themselves and they prove their seriousness.
There are so many people in the world that they're happy to fire off an email with, "Why the heck not? Let's see what happens". But then they don't have the follow-through, they don't have the resolve and they come off of it very quickly. You want to be investing your time in the people who actually are committed and who are just organised at a really basic level enough to follow up. So, if you say to somebody, "You know, David, I would love to talk to you about that. We are having a really busy patch right now for the next three weeks, but I would be happy to talk with you about it next month. If you can email me in three weeks, let's set up a time". And okay, great, put the onus on them. Well, guess what? If David is organised enough to email me in three weeks, he has actually shown me something really important. He's shown me he's the kind of guy that can get things done and is deserving of that half hour or hour that he wants to spend with me. So, a little bit of delay tactics can be useful.
Then finally, if something is coming from higher up, then I think oftentimes, we hesitate to do this, but it's useful to make them adjudicate it a little bit. You can say, if David is my boss, and say, "David, that's great, I would love to help with this. Help me understand. I was under the impression that topic A was the priority, and so I am going all-in on that. That is how I've been intending to spend my entire week, just pushing to get that done by Friday. So, I could keep with that plan and get to this next week, or if it turns out that this thing you're asking me right now is more important, I'm happy to move it to the front of the line. Please let me know what you think". And in that case you are being perfectly responsive, you're being perfectly helpful, but you don't have to make some crazy calculation, you're just being overt with it and they will make the call.
[0:16:35] David Green: How can you ensure your objectives are not only aligned with business strategy, which obviously is important, but also adaptable to future changes as well, because everything seems to be changing so fast as well?
[0:16:46] Dorie Clark: Yeah, it's certainly true. One of the themes that I really like to focus on is the idea of provisional hypotheses. Because ultimately, if we're being intellectually honest, that's what we've got. No one knows the future. Oftentimes, the future will proceed roughly the way that we expect. But it's also true, and we have all seen with things like the pandemic, there can be extremely sharp divergences that happen out of the blue that nobody predicts that are massively disruptive. We just don't know. And so as a result, the best that we can do is to have a hypothesis. You do need to have one because you need to be marching towards something, because again, most of the time things will probably proceed the way that you're anticipating. So, under the most-of-the-time circumstance, if you are working toward a clear goal, okay, great, you will march along and get there nicely. But ultimately, when things are disruptive, we just have to hold it lightly.
In Silicon Valley, there's a saying that gets thrown around which is, "Strong opinions, lightly held", and I think there's a lot of merit to that. I mean, yes, have your hypothesis, march toward it, but if the facts change or if the circumstances on the ground change, it's doing no one any favours to be wedded to it. Be ready to shift and pivot when the circumstances warrant.
[0:18:20] David Green: Often, we fear failure, which can set us back from achieving our goals. You gave a great example at the start where you wanted to go down one path, those doors weren't open to you, so you went down another path and eventually got to that, as well as what else you were doing. In HR, this this can be quite the paradox as we try to infuse a culture of innovation and creativity into the organisation, but we often resist applying it to our own function due to fear of failure. What's your take on this topic, and how can our listeners overcome this mindset and also ensure that it's instilled into the company culture as well?
[0:18:58] Dorie Clark: Well, I think you raise a really important point here, and a theme that I talk about in the Long Game is the fact that as long as we are naming when something is an experiment, to a certain extent that actually helps inoculate you against failure. Because if we're proceeding along, "Oh, yes, this is the way, I know the way, this'll work", and then it doesn't, well of course it's embarrassing. You lose face and everybody says, "Wait, I thought she knew what she was talking about here". But if we're really clear about what is established protocol and a fact that, "Yes, we know this is replicable", versus, "We're trying something new, we're experimenting, it might not work, but we will gather interesting data that will be helpful in the future", no one afterwards is going to be lambasting you for that, unless you've overshot and somehow put millions of dollars at risk, or whatever. Assuming it is a normal-sized experiment, you can say, "Look, we said from the beginning this was an experiment. We were going to try it for a month to be fully remote and see how it worked", or, "We were going to try it for a month with the new organisational design", or whatever it is.
You can have short-term pilots, you can have tests, you can have experiments and you see. And if it looks like it's working, you do more, and if it looks like it's not, that's fine. You can pivot without having failed. Failure is actually irrelevant when it comes to something that you have declared an experiment, because the success is in the gathering of data, not the yes or no.
[0:20:45] David Green: Yeah, and as you said, it's the experiment and be clear that we're experimenting, "We're going to try this, we're going to try it for X period of time, and this is how we're going to measure whether it's successful or not. And then when we get to the end of that, we'll have a discussion". And as you said, "If we think we've been successful, then we'll maybe expand it or we'll take what we've learned and maybe slightly pivot a bit". And as you said, it's not a failure per se. But how do you decide when it's time to pivot or persevere? How can we differentiate between the need for patience versus the need for adjusting our strategy?
[0:21:19] Dorie Clark: Yeah, you've raised something really important, because as I was exploring the topic of strategic thinking and the patience that, of necessity, has to accompany it sometimes, because inevitably some goals just do take a long time no matter how much we would like them to be quick, they're just not, what I came to understand is that so often the fear that many people have, I heard it again and again, is they were afraid essentially to kind of look like a sucker. They were afraid, "But what if I stay too long doing a thing that's not working?" And that's the thing, they don't want to look stupid. But the ironic thing is that in the pursuit of not looking stupid, like the last person attempting a thing, they often bail too quickly, and it almost systematically precludes them from having the success that they want and may well have achieved, because they just did not give it enough time to come to fruition. So, it's a really important question, how do you know the difference?
I would say that one of the most important things is actually an upstream answer. Sometimes we try to answer it when we're in the middle of it, and in the middle of it is a terrible time because you are subject to all of these emotions about, "Oh, no, it's miserable, it's not happening, I'd better quit". Well, upstream, before you start, that is a time that you need to be starting to establish metrics that are laid out, written down in advance. Well, how do you get metrics? Well, the good news about most things in corporate life is that while there are rare exceptions, in almost all cases, the thing that you want to do, whether it is coming up with a new compensation system at your company, whether it is switching over to a different CRM, whether it is coming up with a new recruitment strategy, whatever it is, it's been done by someone else in the past. Maybe it's another competitor in your industry, maybe you have to draw a little further afield, maybe it's a different industry, but somebody has done this before. And we often fail to do even basic due diligence, trying to understand, "Well, what did it look like for them; how long did it take them; what were some of the milestones there; what were some of the hangups?"
If we do even a modicum of research and try to get two or three different case studies, you can begin to triangulate. I mean, it's not to say that your process is going to be the same as everybody else's process, but if you look at examples, and it took these guys 24 months, it took these guys 36 months, it took these guys 19 months, it's probably not going to get done for you in 8 weeks. And so, a big problem is that because we haven't done the due diligence, we think that we have waited so long and we've been so patient, it's just so obvious it's not working, and yet we haven't even gotten halfway to where it should be on average because we just didn't check. So, I think that starting upstream and asking the right questions and understanding the milestones can help avoid a world of hurt once we get into it, whatever the it is.
[0:24:55] David Green: Dorie, if you were to leave our audience -- and we've got one question after this, actually, which is the question is series, but if you were to leave our audience with one key takeaway from the Long Game that could transform their approach to HR and to leadership, what would it be?
[0:26:01] Dorie Clark: Yeah, thank you, David. Well, I think that one of the most important things, and this was very salient for me writing it during the pandemic, was a concept that I talk about in the Long Game, which is, "heads-up and heads-down mode". And I think so often, people who are diligent and responsible operators are almost perennially stuck in heads-down mode where they are executing, they are doing the things, they are just grinding at work. And of course there is a place for that, that is very important. During the pandemic, that was kind of how we all needed to be. But I think a lot of us have stayed in that mode and that's great. But it's also equally important for all of us, both in terms of our career satisfaction, but also the strategic imperatives of our business, to recognise that that is not the only way to be. If we want to be successful, just like there's circadian rhythms in our bodies, there need to be rhythms in our professional life. And periodically, we need to go into heads-up mode where we are looking around and strategically evaluating the landscape. Have things changed? What has changed? What are the implications of that? Are the things that I have been jamming on, are those still the right things or do I need to change my approach?
Toggling periodically between those things is one of the most valuable things that we can do, and just reminding ourselves, because we tend to get in habits, we tend to have personalities that tilt more in one direction than another, but a successful professional has to be both and do both.
[0:27:46] David Green: I think that's really good advice. And if I think about in HR, it's very easy to be heads-down, focusing on the work that you're doing. But as you said, you need to put your head up sometimes, not just within the organisation as well, you need to look at what the external factors are that are maybe impacting on the company as well, and just think, as you said, is it time to pivot or is it time to persevere even more, because this is actually even more important than we thought it was? So, that's a great piece of advice, Dorie. So, what are the top three ways you believe where HR could play a pivotal role in creating a thriving organisational culture? And please draw from the Long Game if you want to draw from the Long Game, or the other work that you're doing.
[0:28:28] Dorie Clark: Absolutely. So, in terms of HR's ability to contribute to a thriving corporate culture, I mean, probably one of the most salient pieces, of course, is the talent pipeline. And so, when it comes to the playing the long game, I think a literal day-to-day challenge of HR is that everybody is sort of grabbing at your ankles, asking you these really basic questions about, you know, "Tell me about the healthcare plan, tell me about the retirement package", etc, and it's nice, you've got to do it. But ultimately, where HR is really going to be able to establish itself the way it should, as a trusted partner and collaborator for everybody in the business, it's about thinking through how HR can use its talents to further the overall business interests. And that means retaining people and it means recruiting the right people. And so, the more any HR professional is able to mitigate and deal with the sort of niggling operational questions, but reserve their time and their brain space for important business strategic objectives, and coming up with helpful, concrete, tangible plans that you can bring to business partners and say, "Hey, here's what we've come up with. Is this helpful to you? Let's talk, let's collaborate. How can HR be working hand-in-glove with you to help get you the talent you need to fill these essential roles for the future?" I think that's a crucial element right there.
I think another way that HR can be critical in building a powerful corporate culture is in creating the atmosphere of continual learning and professional development, and really sort of instituting that as the kind of growth mindset of the business. I give a lot of talks to companies where one of the things that they're dealing with is this sort of emerging reality amongst employees that of course has been brewing for 20, 30 years, which is that we don't so much have corporate ladders anymore. It's not so much, "Okay, you get on here and then 30 years later you get off there". It's much more, choose your own adventure, it's much more individually directed. You don't just get promoted for standing around for two years and then you move on somewhere else. And so, having HR really take a lead in helping everyone understand that this is your own journey, that you need to be autonomous and we will help you, but you need to be responsible for making important choices here, and here's a buffet of development options, but you need to pick some things and you need to be choosing that for yourself, I think is crucially important in terms of empowering employees to have the career that they want. Because so many still unfortunately are in the mindset of passive like, "Oh, well things will be done to me, I will be trained, this will happen to me", rather than you making it happen.
Finally, I would say that when it comes to HR and its overall role in shaping culture, I recently wrote a piece with my colleague, Alexis Redding, for Harvard Business Review, where we're talking about fundamental ways to build a culture of belonging at work. It's good for so many reasons. I mean, retention of course, but also just being the kind of company that any company wants to be, getting the most out of its employees because they are motivated to show up and work and do well. And none of it is crazy, none of it's rocket science, but it's feeling seen, heard and valued at a fundamental level. And so that means things like, which so many great HR people are doing, helping managers be thoughtful with their employees. Again, we're just saying it's both; employees are responsible for their own journey, and also, it is a mitzvah when bosses take the time to help them discover new opportunities that they aren't aware of, and think through strategically, "Okay, given your interests, given your talents, where can we go and how can we develop things?" and just creating a culture where people do get noticed, where if you have a hobby, other people take an interest in that, where people seem to value the things that you say and take them seriously. And when we put a stake in the ground and creating that kind of culture, it helps everyone.
[0:33:33] David Green: Very good. And I was thinking, when I was listening to the first one that you mentioned, Dorie, how technology can be a potential game changer here for HR to deliver more value, because all these more mundane requests that we get, as you said, about the retirement policy, about the health policy, if we can actually enable some of those questions to be answered via AI technology, then it allows us as HR professionals to focus much more on the stuff where we can really make a difference and really add value, both to individuals and the organisation. So, yeah some really good thoughts there on how I think HR can help create that thriving culture within the organisation. Can you let listeners know how they can connect with you on social media, find out more about your work, I think you have your own website for example, and also find out more about the Long Game and the other books that you've written?
[0:34:25] Dorie Clark: Yeah, for folks who are interested in this discussion, and in particular becoming an even deeper long-term thinker, I do have a free resource, which is The Long Game Strategic Thinking Self-Assessment. Folks can get it for free at dorieclark.com/thelonggame. And on my website, as you mention, I have more than 800 free articles available that I have written for places like Harvard Business Review and Forbes and Entrepreneur, and folks can get them on the Articles page of my website for free, just dorieclark.com
[0:34:55] David Green: Dorie, thanks so much for being a guest on the Digital HR Leaders podcast. I certainly recommend the Long Game to anyone listening. Thank you very much for being a guest on the Digital HR Leaders podcast.
[0:35:06] Dorie Clark: David, thank you so much.