Leaders, 

Today we talk with Asal Naraghi, ADP’s Global Innovation Leader, focusing on the Future of Work, alongside Maarten Hansson, Founding Partner of Workforce Insights, and former Global Head of Integrated Workforce Management at Novartis. 

Both are industry leaders in driving talent transformation. While Asal was Philips Global Head of Strategic Capabilities, she famously orchestrated delivering half a million ventilators.  

Equipped with data from ADP, the world’s leading payroll platform (8% of all American paychecks flow through ADP), and two global talent leaders, we’ll learn what every leader needs to be thinking about right now. 

Four themes keep emerging across the conversation.

1. Urgency: Talent leadership is challenged today more than it has ever been. Alongside a systemic talent shortage across every developed nation, talent is demanding and choosing to work in ways traditional talent structures aren’t set up for. This directly leads to the businesses’ inability to compete, catalyzed by an inability to react to uncertain and unexpected macroeconomic and societal events. Companies that embrace modern talent strategies in this episode can access the skillsets needed at the time and cost required to ship on time. Those that don’t will continue focusing on layoffs and re-org’s while their competitors eat their market share.
2. New Normal: Talent is at an inflection point, no less greater than technology’s inflection from floppy disks and massive mainframes to cloud computing, the internet, laptops, then mobile computing. The talent equivalent is from full time and physical employment to flexible and autonomous. Flexible means multiple different employment forms, full time, part time, freelance, fractional, etc. Autonomous meaning is chosen by the individual, whether choosing to work in person, remotely, at what hours, etc. How do talent leaders incorporate this magnitude of a shift?    
3. Courageous Leadership: Change is required but hard. Talent leadership isn’t historically incented for this level of change, and the change needed can look crazy for most. Would you tell your CHRO you recommend prioritizing external freelance talent over internal employees? Probably not…but you’d be no different than technology leaders telling their CEOs they should stick with on-prem solutions rather than adapting to the cloud. While on-prem seemed like the safe and stable option, within 5 years leaders that didn’t adapt would be out of a job. Sound familiar to talent leaders saying the default should no longer be full time? Right now 20% of leaders have the courage to take charge leading modern talent solutions within their organization according to Asal and Maarten. 
4. Partnership and Collaboration: Business leadership and talent leadership need to work side by side. This level of transformation is extremely hard, but both stakeholders now have the shared goals of growth, profitability, and innovation. In this episode, we’ll discuss how both stakeholders can talk and collaborate.  

As you all know, change isn’t easy, but Asal and Maarten introduced a process to make talent change management more predictable. 

• Step 1: Start from urgency by quantifying the cost, risk, and access to talent benefits.
• Step 2: Find your stakeholders. Stakeholder map HR, Procurement, and related business teams.
• Step 3: Generate top down support.

Throughout these steps, apply first principles thinking and Five Times Why analysis to address the most urgent problems. Choosing the wrong problems to solve can leave little room for success.

Are you ready to make 2025 your best year yet? If so, this is the episode for you. If not, the new Squid Games just came out.