Episode 1: Adam Grant and Rachel Romer on the case for opportunity

The big question: What is the opportunity divide that exists for today’s American workforce? And…what can leaders do about it?

To build stronger and more successful organizations, we need to drive shared value for employees and owners.

Host Rachel Romer and Special Guest Adam Grant introduce “Opportunity Divide,” a six-part podcast series delivering fresh perspectives — from the frontline to the boardroom — on how to close the gap between talent and opportunity.

Tune into the inaugural episode, and join this critical conversation on how we unlock opportunity for America’s workforce.

“We want a world where opportunity is as abundant as talent. Right now, that’s not the case – and it doesn’t need to be that way.”

Rachel Romer, Guild CEO

Meet the guests

Rachel Romer

Guild CEO

Rachel Romer is CEO of Guild, a Public Benefit Corporation that provides employees of America’s largest companies access to education, skilling, and career mobility through their employers without paying for tuition or career services on their own.

LinkedIn

Adam Grant

NYT Best-Selling Author of Think Again

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and bestselling author who explores the science of motivation, generosity, original thinking, and rethinking. ​He is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 5 books that have sold millions of copies and been translated into 45 languages: Think Again, Give and Take, Originals, Option B, and Power Moves.

LinkedIn

Podcast Transcript - Opening Episode with Guild's Rachel Romer and Adam Grant

Rachel Romer [00:00:00]:

The most important business critical conversations we're having these days miss a crucial perspective the American frontline workforce. We know business and people leaders can drive better results by closing the Opportunity Divide in that workforce. But how do we actually do it? To build stronger and more successful organizations, we need to drive shared value for employees and owners. And in this series, we're going to explore with organizational psychologists and bestselling author Adam Grant how we're actually bringing insights from leaders. Leaders like Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Pink, Ken Chanal, Brené Brown and Jeffrey Canada. And we'll be discussing with them how we're uncovering leadership lessons from the frontline of America's workforce. We'll discuss how leaders and employers can help the workforce succeed and what models of collaboration will work best. And most importantly, how we best close the Opportunity Divide America's workforce. We lead them, we need them, we rely on them. But can they rely on us? I'm Rachel Romer, CEO of Guild. And this is Opportunity Divide. Adam, thanks so much for agreeing to take on this endeavor with me. I feel like we’re overdue for this conversation. How do we get more of the zeitgeist of America focused on the 100 million frontline workers?

Adam Grant [00:02:13]:

Look, unfortunately, in Americas, and this is true throughout the industrialized world, we tend to invest the most in the people who are most advantaged. And so that means if you're at corporate headquarters, if you're in a senior leadership position, you have extra access to knowledge, to thought leadership, to content. And the people that need it the most are often the least aware of it, and also the most stretched in terms of having free time to invest in it. Every senior leader I know has thinking time built into their calendar reflection time. I know a lot of frontline workers who would love to get a minute a day for reflection, let alone the hour. That happens in more senior jobs. And I think that for too long, we've really under appreciated both the stress and the importance of these jobs, but also the complexity of them. I think there are many frontline jobs that require extraordinary skills and an amount of juggling that most of us just can't fathom, which we're going to talk about with some of our guests in this series. So, yeah, I agree with you. The conversation is overdue. I think there's a lot of insight and expertise about how to build a career, how to keep learning, how to manage and lead effectively that is most important and most valuable on the front lines. And so it's time to get it there. Let's do it.

Rachel Romer [00:03:43]:

When we think about the backdrop of the economic climate we're in low unemployment, economic upheaval, so many questions, a different job report every month, it feels like. There's a sense, and I'd love to see if you share it, that things are going to get worse before they get better, that this opportunity divide is about to get quite a bit wider. Do you share that view? And what does your crystal ball look like as you think about it from an organizational psychology lens?

Adam Grant [00:04:10]:

Yeah, I think, unfortunately, the opportunity divide seems to be widening at this very moment. So let's think about generative AI tools like Chat GPT, which have made major waves in recent months. First of all, a lot of people don't have access to them. The vast majority of the workforce hasn't used them at all, which is a huge problem. There was an experiment that came out very recently showing that if you take people who are responsible for knowledge work, just sort of synthesizing information and you give them access to a tool like Chat GPT, they actually become more productive in their writing and the quality of their writing also goes up. And that's because they're able to shift the time that a lot of us waste rough drafting, basically procrastinating and spinning our wheels toward generating ideas and then editing, which are skills that humans are better at. So guess what? People who already have access to technology, people who already are aware of how to prompt a generative AI are benefiting from that – the rest of us aren't. And you could take that further and say, okay, if we bring that into the frontline workforce. There's another new study with salespeople showing that when it comes to dealing with really difficult customer problems, having access to an AI tool like Chat GPT makes you better at it, and your creativity in coming up with unexpected solutions to your customers challenge will go up. But guess who gets that benefit? The people who already are the best salespeople. Because an AI tool can essentially offload some of the grunt work that they would be wasting their time on and allow them to put their full energy into the complicated customer problem that they're dealing with, while the salespeople who are less successful are less able to benefit from those tools in the first place. And so I think we see the opportunity divide widening in both of those cases and for different reasons, right? In one case, because some people have access to a tool and others don't. In another case, because some people are more equipped to use a beneficial tool than others are. And that's just the AI story and we could take this a lot further, but I think it's a timely example of how the divide is widening.

Rachel Romer [00:06:20]:

Absolutely. Adam, as we think about the conversations we're going to have on topics like motivation, leadership, mentorship, mental health, self belief, as you think about our audience of HR leaders and as they translate this down to frontline workers, which topic are you most interested to see applied to that group and population?

Adam Grant [00:06:42]:

Can I choose all for 500?

Rachel Romer [00:06:44]:

Yes, and I'll push you harder. Which is like, which do you think that group is craving most? Like, when you think about frontline leaders and the folks who are just doing this incredibly difficult job every day, often without resources, if you had to give them one tome of leadership advice, which one do you think will be most useful?

Adam Grant [00:07:02]:

Probably mentorship. I think one of the biggest challenges I've seen in the frontline workforce is there not being a clear career path, there not being an obvious avenue for promotion. And let's be honest, that's where opportunity lies. Opportunity is not about sort of on the margin, being able to add one interesting, challenging task to your job or picking up one new skill. It's actually getting to rise into more developmental work, getting to take on more responsibility to solve bigger problems, to learn higher level skills. And so I think that mentorship is probably more important than any of the other factors we're covering in terms of opening those doors or maybe even getting people through a window.

Rachel Romer [00:07:53]:

Okay, that's a great answer. I'll tell you. Mine is different, but for the same reason. Actually, self belief is the topic I'm most excited to chat about, and I'm really excited to hear Brené Brown's perspective because I love that Dare to Lead starts with this premise that you can't lead others unless you can lead yourself. And I worry about mentorship at scale because at Guild we're thinking about 5 million Americans, eventually 100 million, who need what we do. And I worry that mentorship is getting harder to scale. But if we can create prototypes and archetypes of leadership that people can embed into their own self belief, maybe we can hack our way towards some of the outcomes of mentorship. So we'll see.

Adam Grant [00:08:32]:

That's interesting because I think you're talking about both leadership and self belief right? In that. So I didn't know I was allowed to pick two.

Rachel Romer [00:08:39]:

Okay, breaking your own rules, that's fair. Okay, I love it. You've talked and written a lot of powerful work around toxic workplaces burnout and quiet quitting. What do you see is the best way to create a healthy culture for the workforce? But and then let's make it specific to folks who are in frontline jobs, non desk, retail restaurant, hospitality, nursing, you name it.

Adam Grant [00:09:07]:

Well, I mean, the table stakes are let's remove all the elements of toxic culture. So if you look at the Donald Sol work, there are five markers of a toxic culture. They are disrespect, exclusion, abuse, selfishness, and unethical behavior. Empirically bad is stronger than good in most cases, right? So the harm done by bad cultures exceeds the benefit that comes from good cultures. And so I think at a basic level, it's more important to root out those markers of toxicity. It is non negotiable for me that if someone is disrespectful or abusive or consistently excluding others or acting selfishly or unethically, that person is not welcome in my organization. I mean, not only do they not get promoted, no matter how competent they seem to be at certain tasks, they no longer have a job here. And so I think that's part one. I think then part two is to say if we want to build a healthy frontline culture, what's missing first and foremost for a lot of frontline workers is autonomy. When we think about autonomy in a job, we break it down into being able to make choices about what you work on about when you do it, which is really critical if you're doing shift work, about how you do it and even who you get it done with. And so we know that the flexibility that people want most is not about place. It's about priorities, schedules. It's about purpose, it's about process, it's about who you collaborate with. And so I think we need to give people more freedom and flexibility about what they do and how they get it done, but especially more control over their calendars, more choices around how they spend their time. And that's the beginning of a healthy culture because it respects people as human beings and treats them with dignity around saying, look, everybody's time has equal value and we want you to have a say in how you spend yours.

Rachel Romer [00:11:00]:

I love that – and I often find that we have to have difficult conversations in corporate headquarters about how rational the frontline workforce is with their time. We often have people say, like, "why are only 10% of employees using this amazing free college program?" or "why wouldn't everybody consume education every year?"

Adam Grant [00:11:21]:

Where are they going to find the time?

Rachel Romer [00:11:22]:

Yeah, one, you shouldn't be going back to school every year of your career or else we're really doing something wrong. The four and 40 is dead – four years college, 40 years work – but hopefully it's more like the every four that you're going back to school not every year, but second. Exactly as you said. I find that the employees we serve are actually more rational about their time than many of my leadership team said playfully in that they know exactly the cost of an overtime shift. They know exactly the cost of being late to daycare for pickup – or worse – the consequences if they don't have daycare and they have to be at school at the drop dead time and when their shift ends and if transportation is late because they can't rely on their own transportation, they rely on public transportation, they are minutes from crisis. We are so often trying to convince people like your frontline workers are more sophisticated about the value of their hour than your headquarters workers.

Adam Grant [00:12:17]:

Yeah, I think there's been a generational shift here in part, and I should say I'm typically skeptical of generational claims because I think what masquerades as, oh, "this generation is different from another" is really just age and life experience that every generation will accumulate and grow through. And I think the evidence of that is extremely clear that most of the differences that we've attributed to millennials or Gen Z's are just what it's like to be a 22 year old or what it's like to be a 31 year old, regardless of what birth cohort you happen to come from and which two decades you were born in. But I think this is one that's real. There's some interesting IDEO research suggesting that the generation of managers and leaders right now that are supervising a lot of the frontline, they grew up with an ideal of work as something that maximizes your net worth. If we look at the entry level and this is certainly true on the front lines, people are as interested, if not more interested, in maximizing their net freedom as opposed to their net worth. And this is one of the reasons I think autonomy is so important, is frontline jobs are massively constrained, right? So not only are you restricted in the choices that you get to make during your job, but you're also then restricted in the schedule you keep outside of work because you have to fit everything into your life, as you were saying. And between your shifts on the job and then your shifts at home and trying to squeeze in whatever time you have left for sleep and health and family and friends, there's just not a lot of flexibility there. And so I think that if we're talking about people being rational and they're trying to maximize their net freedom, they're being denied the opportunity to do that in most frontline jobs.

Rachel Romer [00:14:01]:

That's fascinating the way you connected those two concepts. And on one level, there's a lot of probably positive behavior in that shift. Do you worry that some of that is also tied to where we are in terms of wages and the ability for wealth accumulation to actually have the compounding effect that it did in prior generations? Or to be able to put towards those big iconic dreams of the house paying for the kids to go to college, et cetera, that are suddenly getting harder and harder from a sheer index on inflation?

Adam Grant [00:14:35]:

I'm definitely worried about it. I'm not an economist, but I do like math. And I think that it's not encouraging when you see statistics about how increasingly we have a generation of people who will not be better off than their parents, which was a built in expectation to the American Dream, is that there were going to be generational improvements not only in wealth, but also in quality of life. That does seem to be in jeopardy right now. From everything I've read. I'm not an expert, far from it on this, but I think a lot of people are worried about it and I don't know that we have better solutions to it right now while we're waiting for policy solutions than saying, look, the most important driver of your financial state is your employment. And if your employer is not giving you opportunities to advance into a better job that's also higher paying, then your employer is basically squashing your shot at a better life.

Rachel Romer [00:15:33]:

Adam our primary research of the 5 million plus Americans that we have the privilege to offer guild to tells us that career mobility is increasingly the number one thing that people want from the company they choose to join, even in some cases, above pay. In places, especially where pay has increased a lot over the last three years, of COVID it's now even superseding. Is there broader research in your world that backs that up? How should we square that with folks who kind of shrug at us and say, like, well, people should just be happy with the job they have and retire in that?

Adam Grant [00:16:08]:

Well, yes, of course there's research to back this up in my world. There was a paper published by Chip Heath decades ago on the extrinsic incentives bias, which basically showed that managers overestimated the importance of small adjustments in pay, for example, and underestimated the importance of opportunities to learn and grow. And I think one of the reasons this happens is it's really easy to see the change in behavior when you give somebody a bonus. It's not so easy to measure. What was the effect of that little bit of extra freedom I gave you or that chance to master a skill that you weren't previously given an opportunity to pursue? And so quantifying all that is really tricky. And what a lot of managers do is they don't they don't quantify it and so they don't know. And once they don't know what it's worth, they can't value it. So I think that that would be the first data point that I would put on the table. The other thing I would say about this is career mobility is one of those magical goods that fulfills multiple motives at the same time. So it allows you to have a sense of learning and growth and mastery, which is intrinsically rewarding to human beings. It gives you a sense of status and respect, right. You feel like you've gained a degree of importance in your workplace and in your community and it also tends to come with perks and financial rewards. And so it's sort of the ultimate good in that sense. And I would be really surprised if anyone valued anything more than career mobility with the possible exception of a sense of meaning and purpose. But even that, as people advance in their careers, they tend to get more responsibility. As they move around, they can move into positions where they make more of a difference. And so maybe that comes along with.

Rachel Romer [00:17:54]:

Career mobility, too, and autonomy too, right? We know career mobility and autonomy are deeply coupled as people, especially out of shift work into leadership roles. My favorite thing in the world is good book recommendations. It's literally I joke that it's my love language because my top hobby is reading, because I'm a huge work. And you recently put out your list of book recommendations. So first, thank you. There's truly pathing I love more, and there's one on there that I'm really excited to dive deeper into, which is the case for Good Jobs. Can you share a little bit about that book and then feel free to connect other ideas in the research space around what does a good job look like?

Adam Grant [00:18:39]:

Yeah. So Zainab Tan's work on Good Jobs, I think has been eye opening to a lot of leaders. She's at MIT. And what she shows is that not only are good jobs motivating and satisfying, they're actually a source of competitive advantage. So they serve organizations, not just individuals. And as an organizational psychologist, it's often been said that the Holy Grail of our field is finding practices that align the interests of workers with the interests of companies. And here we have one. Create better jobs, and people are better off. And so too, is the organization. Her finding that I think has been striking to a lot of people is she studies how to create good jobs in places where you wouldn't expect to be able to do it. And a lot of this is in the frontline world. She studies very low margin organizations and industries, so she does a lot of work in retail settings. She's done a lot on grocery stores, gas stations, not the places where you expect to be able to strategically build good jobs. And what she shows is that the most successful and profitable organizations, compared to peers in those spaces, systematically invest in developing and promoting from within. So they take jobs that are normally seen as not desirable, like being a cashier, for example. And that becomes a stepping stone to becoming a more highly skilled worker. It becomes a ladder to becoming a manager. When you promote from within, you get a lot more motivation from people who are in jobs that aren't perfect because they see light at the end of the tunnel, but then they also because they see light at the end of the tunnel, they start to feel more attached to the organization and they want to help you succeed. So they invent a better system of collecting payments, they become more creative, they take more initiative in solving problems, they figure out what caused problems, and they prevent them in the first place. And so now, all of a sudden, this person that you thought was basically executing a very rote job description has innovated on the job description and figured out a more effective way to do it and engaged in what my colleagues Amy Resnesky and Jane Dutton have called job crafting, where you become an active architect of your own job. You make it better, you've created a better job for yourself, and you've also served the organization in doing that. I think part of the good job strategy is you slightly overpay. And that's a piece of the competitive advantage that you're able to attract people who are highly motivated to learn and grow. But more importantly, you reinforce that desire to learn and grow, and then you essentially build a self fueling cycle. Whereas as people come in motivated, as they improve their own jobs, as they're given better jobs, they rise, and that creates more opportunity for the people who follow in their footsteps.

Rachel Romer [00:21:19]:

I find that we're in this era of zero sum capitalism where the idea has been so often perpetuated that what's good for the company and the shareholders must be at odds for the employee and more dangerously, vice versa. That what's good for the employee must cause some sort of harm to the value of the company and the value for the shareholder. You have any perspective on how we got here and what we do to fix this? Is this what Milton Freeman wants to say? I don't think so.

Adam Grant [00:21:50]:

I blame Milton Friedman when he wrote that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. I think he might have done more damage than any other sentence in the history of shaping organizational policies that affect humans.

Rachel Romer [00:22:07]:

Wow. You heard that here first. I agree.

Adam Grant [00:22:10]:

It's just empirically false, right? So we could spend this whole conversation just rifling through all the evidence. But one of the cleanest examples is Alex Edmonds did a study of the Fortune 100 Best Places to Work, basically looking at them against match controls, similar companies in their own industry, and found that you outperformed the stock market over a quarter century if you invested in becoming a great place to work, period. Now, you didn't always see those dividends in a quarterly earnings report, right? So this is a long term strategy, not a short term strategy. But last time I checked, companies that only run short term strategy become obsolete, right? Like, they miss the wave of digital disruption. They end up essentially treating their employees so poorly that as soon as a tight labor market starts to shift and employees gain power, no one wants to work for them anymore, and they end up shooting themselves in the foot. And so I think, like I said, I could rattle off many, many studies. Let me throw out one more. There's a study by Kamal Birdie and colleagues looking at organizational initiatives that improve performance and profitability, studying hundreds of organizations and looking at all the manufacturing innovations that were supposed to pay off, like total quality management, for example, or just in time production. None of those practices have consistent financial benefits. The only practice of all the ones that companies implemented that had consistent benefits was empowering people I e. Giving them autonomy and voice. And that benefit of empowerment was accentuated when you had good systems for collaboration and teamwork and effective training for individuals. And if you look at that seriously, what Birdie and colleagues showed was that good HR practices actually outperform good operational and manufacturing practices in the long run. How much more evidence do you need to see we can keep going?

Rachel Romer [00:24:16]:

Good HR practices outweigh good operational investments. I mean, that is like, the headline that I feel is so often missed. Can I ask you if you were coaching an HR leader who's listening on how to have this conversation with their CFO? Because it plays out. Adam, I know you know this in every headquarters nearly every day, and it is so painful for us to watch these companies just wrap themselves around the axle on what they have been taught to consider cost centers, which are investments in their people, investments in training, investments in mobility and autonomy, and good job creation. What would you coach the HR leader who's walking into the CFO's office this afternoon?

Adam Grant [00:24:57]:

I would coach them to do two things. Number one, go to your CFO and say, look, I really believe that people are not just the most important resource in our company, people are our company. And I'm curious about what evidence would convince you that that's true. Let them outline their evidence and then bring them the Edmunds study, the Birdie study. You could look at Jim Harder's work on the organization level benefits of employee engagement, which is another strand of work that I think makes this case honestly. Almost my entire work life podcast is synthesizing the evidence to show that the way you treat people is ultimately as important as anything else you do in determining the future success of your organization. And so the evidence is there if you want it. The other thing you could do is I think you're highlighting something, Rachel, that we don't talk enough about, which is we really need to get CFOs to rethink their mental models of what HR and people investments are. And I think the best alternative I've seen comes from John Boudreau, who says, we shouldn't think about people as a cost center. We should actually think about them the same way that we do R&D, which is we can't tell you the return that you're going to get tomorrow on this. But we know that in the long run, if you invest in people just like you invest in research and development, that there will be all kinds of dividends that will pay. And we can try to map some of that historically in our own organization and document the benefits of places where we've done it. We can follow it prospectively and run a bunch of experiments internally to see the longer term ROI of Romer, of the commitments that we decide to make. But people are R and D. They are not cost.

Rachel Romer [00:26:43]:

I couldn't agree more with the mental model piece because I think too often CFOs think in terms of the PNL and the various statements, and we need to come up with a new way to account for human capital. And that sounds radical until you recognize that exactly 40 years ago, when you looked at the Fortune 1000 or the S and P 500, about 80% of their assets were tangible that they put on the balance sheet because they were buildings and machines and equipment and materials. And all those operational investments we were just talking about, it has perfectly inverted today, where now 80% of their investments are intangibles, aka humans and patents and ideas. But we haven't come up with a new way to account for that. We just call it intangible, period. Nothing beyond that. So I love the push on the mental model. Adam, you have a million things you could be doing with your time, and I also know you're really thoughtful about how you spend your time. And I'm so grateful that you agreed to have these conversations. What compelled you to have this conversation about the opportunity divide and how does it connect to what you care about?

Adam Grant [00:27:58]:

Well, Rachel, I think the first thing is I really think the work you're doing at Guild is vitally important. I think everyone deserves an opportunity to get the education they want. Everybody deserves a shot at the career they want. And I think you're challenging and also enabling the American workforce and more to move in that direction. So I'm thrilled to be a small part of that conversation. The second thing is that I guess teaching Wharton students, mostly MBAs and undergraduates, for coming up on two decades now, it's been frustrating to me that so much of the knowledge we create is sort of trapped in the ivory tower. And I guess I've been trying to democratize access to the things that I know that I think are important and that my field has accumulated through writing books and giving Ted talks and hosting work life and rethinking. One of the arguments you made to me that was really persuasive is there are a lot of people doing frontline work and leading and managing frontline workers who don't even know that those resources exist. And so the fact that you already reach these people is a chance to speak to an audience where they're often underserved. And I would love it if there's something I know or someone I know that could be useful to be able to share it. So your community creates that opportunity.

Rachel Romer [00:29:20]:

Well, I owe you so much gratitude for one ideating on. This concept with me and for helping bring these amazing speakers who are going to join us. It is going to be a true delight to welcome Malcolm Godwell and Daniel Pink and Brené Brown and Jeff Canada and Ken Chanalt.

Adam Grant [00:29:39]:

Well, you brought a couple of those yourself, so don't give me all the credit. It's your friends plus my friends, yes.

Rachel Romer [00:29:47]:

But I got to tell them that I would have Adam Grant joining me in the conversation. So I really am wildly grateful to you for doing this with me and I can't wait for the conversations to come. We rely on them. But can they rely on us? I'm Rachel Roemer. We'd love if you'd join us to continue these important conversations. To do so, click the link in the show notes next time.

Brené Brown [00:30:16]:

You can't ask people to be vulnerable and brave in systems that are not built for their vulnerability and courage.

Rachel Romer [00:30:25]:

It is such a privilege to have Brené Brown here for this conversation. As we dig into how leaders can facilitate tough conversations, I think we need.

Brené Brown [00:30:36]:

To help people check out the stories they make up, give them the skill to deconstruct the story and then also normalize some of that shame. It is real.