podcast Archives - Page 13 of 39 - Future of Field Service

Episode 259

In this episode of the Unscripted podcast, host Sarah Nicastro fills listeners in on some exciting changes they can expect to notice with the podcast, some improvements as the former Future of Field Service Podcast hits a milestone, and what the live event landscape will look like for 2024.

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Sarah: I think the biggest opportunity in the name change is to help us in reaching more people for whom the content is relevant. One of the things that happens if I reach out to folks on LinkedIn that I don't already know or don't know me, they sometimes can say, well, I'm not in field service, where that might be the case, but the content is still very relevant to what they do, or what they might be interested in, if they're a guest that I would like to have on, etc. So I would say no foundational changes to be expected from the content, just a bit of a name change to better represent the things that we have been talking about for quite some time.

Sarah: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. Actually, we're gonna talk about that in a minute. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I am flying solo today to share a little sneak peek at a few bits of exciting news with you. So first and foremost, as I alluded to, we are changing the name of this podcast. We are doing a little bit of identity update and beginning soon, the name of the podcast will be Unscripted, discussions on what matters most in service, leadership, and business transformation.

So let's talk about why the change. I have spent over 15 years covering field service, and field service is very near and dear to my heart and always will be. And I want those of you who have been here along the journey to rest assured that you're not really going to notice a whole lot of change other than the name. But let me explain then why is a name change necessary. So, when I started in this space, field service was very much its own identity. And it still is, but it's far less siloed than it was all of those years ago and far more an integral piece of a company's business strategy, business operations, and business differentiation. And so, along the years that I've been doing this, a lot of the conversations have started to really branch out into things that aren't necessarily categorized as field service. So we're always looking at those things from the lens of the field service leaders that we interview. But we often find ourselves talking about things related to talent and company culture, leadership, and business differentiation, and revenue growth, and technology trends, and digital transformation. So when we think about what that means for the podcast, it's really an issue of the name just not necessarily being representative of the breadth of topics that we cover. And that is why we decided to update it. So, I don't expect that those of you who have been here and have enjoyed the content will notice a whole lot of change. It's still going to be mostly an interview-based podcast, still going to be focused on interviewing service leaders, and still talking about all of those things, field service and the elements that bleed into leadership topics and business transformation.

I think the biggest opportunity in the name change is to help us in reaching more people for whom the content is relevant. One of the things that happens if I reach out to folks on LinkedIn that I don't already know or don't know me, they sometimes can say, well, I'm not in field service, where that might be the case, but the content is still very relevant to what they do or what they might be interested in if they're a guest that I would like to have on, etc. So I would say no foundational changes to be expected from the content, just a bit of a name change to better represent the things that we have been talking about for quite some time. The website is still futureoffieldservice.com; 'Unscripted' will be housed there from a website perspective. And then obviously the podcast will continue to be available on Apple, on Spotify, all of your favorite podcast platforms. So hopefully you find that exciting. There will be a new look and all of that that you will see soon. If you do have any questions, feel free to reach out, we will be sharing more details, and we will make sure to share on social, share in The INSIDER, and on the website so that people understand that what has been the Future of Field Service podcast is now the Unscripted podcast.

So that is the first piece of news. The other piece of news goes along with that change, but it's just a little bit of an aesthetic update to the Future of Field Service brand itself. So you will see soon that we will have a new logo, a bit of a new look on the website, a bit of a new look on our social media pages, things like that. We're also going to take the opportunity to pair this bit of a brand refresh with more options for community engagement on LinkedIn, things of that nature. It's really hard for me to believe, but Future of Field Service as a brand launched more than five years ago. And so it's just maybe time for a little bit of an update. I absolutely loved working with the team that created the initial look for Future of Field Service and have also really enjoyed working with the team that has created the new look. So we believe really strongly in staying true to our core mission, of course, but we are always looking for ways to continually improve, and doing a little bit of an update to our look seemed to be a welcome change for five-plus years into doing this. There are a few people who work behind the scenes on Future of Field Service that are just incredible and have spearheaded a lot of these efforts. So I want to say, a huge thank you to them, as well as the partner that we worked with on the new look. So keep your eyes peeled for all of that. And hopefully, you will like the new appearance.

The third piece of news that I wanted to talk about today is to share that we have officially announced the information for the 2024 live events. So if you've been here a while, if you remember back in 2022, we did five events. In 2023, we did six events. And this year we are doing three. So there are a number of reasons for that change. But for those of you who maybe were hoping for an event in one of our former locations that we aren't visiting this year, rest assured that 2025 will likely bring a fuller schedule again. But for 2024, we will have an event in Stockholm on May 21st at the Volvo Studio, which looks to be a very cool venue. On June 13th, we will be in Cologne, Germany. And we are planning special participation in IFS's Unleashed conference, which is in Orlando, the 14th through 18th of October. And we will have more details on that soon. The information on the agenda items for Unleashed, the venue, and all of those things is available now at ifsunleashed.com. What we are working on is more details that we'll share soon on some of the Future Of Field Service-specific aspects. So we will make sure that there are content opportunities and networking opportunities, specifically for people that are there to engage from a Future Of Field Service perspective. I will say the Stockholm and Cologne events are similar to the events that we have hosted in the previous years, they're free events. There will be a day of content that consists of interview-based sessions with some round table discussions, networking opportunities, that sort of thing. The Unleashed event will be a bit different. It's a big event. It is a very lively, very exciting event. Tickets are required. So you will want to look at all of that information if you decide to come along at ifsunleashed.com. But like I said, we will make sure that we have some more intimate future of field service opportunities within those days as well. So really exciting stuff. I am hoping to see as many of you as possible this year. We're already quite a way into it, which is just crazy. But I hope that these changes are received well. The podcast name, the brand refresh, the event series, they are all things that we've been working on to, like I said, continually improve. And I hope that we can see as many of you as possible. And always look for ways to keep things exciting, to better serve our community, and to make sure that the work we're doing and the content we're putting out reaches as many people that it can help as possible.

So as always, I welcome your feedback. If you have thoughts on anything, questions on anything, feel free to reach out anytime. And you can find more always at futureoffieldservice.com. You can sign up for the Future of Field Service Insider so that you will get a monthly recap of our content delivered to your inbox. And as always, the Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. Thank you for listening.

Episode 258

In this episode of the Future of Field Service podcast, host Sarah Nicastro is joined by Sarah McKay, Vice President of Service Delivery at Concentrix, to discuss her career as a woman in service, her passion for sustainability, and the connection between diversity and sustainability.

Sarah is an experienced Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) leader dedicated to fostering inclusive spaces where people of various backgrounds can flourish. With over 26 years in the field, she began her journey as a Team Lead at HCL BPO. By 2006, she advanced to Concentrix, where she effectively managed a multicultural team across various domains, including digital, social media, technical support, customer service, and sales.

Watch the Podcast Video here:

Sarah Mckay: Personally, I feel so strongly that sustainability needs to be at the core of how business runs, right? We need to operate ethically in a way that improves our environment and contributes to our local communities because it makes business sense as well as it being the right thing to do. And so for that to be true, everyone in the company needs to be involved. It can't be a specific team or 20 people that work over there in that function that do our ESG stuff. It has to be something that everybody in the organization has accountability for. And I suppose when we start, then everybody does something. We position our ESG goals alongside our performance goals. So when we do our annual appraisals, when we submit our goals, we have our business goals, we have our personal development goals, and we have our social goals where we submit one thing that we can do to make things better.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast, where we deliver both information and inspiration on how to differentiate your business through service and lead through change. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro, and I'm here to guide you through conversations around the trends that matter most, from business transformation and customer-centric innovation to the service evolution and attributes of effective leadership. Join us on this journey as we welcome industry leaders, visionaries, and experts to share their personal stories of change, challenges, triumphs, and transformation. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today is the last interview in our focus in the month of March on talking about the International Women's Day theme of inspiring inclusion, sharing women's stories, journeys, and amplifying women's voices, as well as talking about the issues that are relevant to us creating more diversity in service and inspiring inclusion. So thrilled to be here for our last featured episode to talk about creating sustainable service. So I'm welcoming to the podcast today, Sarah McKay, who is the Vice President for Service Delivery at Concentrix. Sarah, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Sarah Mckay: Hi, thank you for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: It's Sarah Squared. I love it. And we both spell our name the same way, which is just makes it easier for me to not make any mistakes. So thank you for being here. Thrilled for our chat today.

Before we get into it all, just tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your role, Concentrix, whatever you would like to share.

Sarah Mckay: Okay. So my name is Sarah McKay. I have a husband, three children and two dogs. They are all boys. So I live in a very high energy environment. Personally, I love to travel. I love adventure travel, particularly hiking, mountain climbing, things like that. And in three weeks from now, I'll be heading to Patagonia to trek. So super excited about that. Workwise, Concentrix, we're a customer experience company. We combine human talent with technology to design, build and run customer journeys at scale. Like you said, I'm a VP of service delivery and I've worked here for almost 18 years and I've always been in an operational role. So for 15 years, I managed regional operations up to about 7000 people. My job is to make sure our people are happy and successful and our clients are happy and successful. And 18 years sounds like a long time, but really in that time, our business has changed and grown hugely. We've had seven acquisitions in that time. So I've had major opportunities to develop and change what I'm doing. For the last two years, I've moved into a more strategic role. I lead a center of excellence for performance management. So I define why we measure, what we measure, what our go-to processes are, and create an operating system to guide the team. But I also represent client success on our ESG leadership team. So working through our environmental or diversity targets and goals and working on those projects that contribute to our overall commitments.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. What a journey. Okay, so I have a couple of questions that aren't on our outline. How old are your boys?

Sarah Mckay: My boys are 15, 12, and 8. And I can tell you that just before we started recording this, my 12-year-old sent me a text message saying, Mom, guess what? I've got a girlfriend. So I am completely challenged. I'm not quite sure what to do with that information. But yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Oh, yeah. I don't think you can ever be ready for that. And then my second question related to what you shared is, so you have Patagonia coming up, but you know, thus far that you've been, what has been your favorite adventure travel destination?

Sarah Mckay: Without a doubt, Kilimanjaro. So this time last year, I was at the top of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. So it's pre-sanding mountain in the world. And I can't even tell you to stand at the top of Kilimanjaro and watch the sunrise over Kenya. It's the only point in the world where you can see the actual curvature of the earth because there's nothing on the horizon. It was just the most special experience. And my poor husband thought that that would scratch the itch on my adventure plans. And all it's done is introduced me to more people who've done more things and added more to my list. So once I go to Patagonia, then when I come back, I want to go to Slovenia and climb Mount Triglav. And the Julian Alps. So I now have a long list of things to do and places to go.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. So we're going to have to have a separate chat about this because I want to bring on some things, but I love it. Okay. So as you mentioned, you have been with Concentrix 18 years. You were for quite a big chunk of that focused on the strategy and execution part of it and now focus quite a bit on change leadership and ESG, et cetera. And so today we're going to be talking both about the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, about sustainability in service and also how that intersects with the themes of International Women's Day and this idea of diversity and talk a bit about your journey as well. So to start, when you think about the ways in which your company and other companies can be thinking about how to make service more environmentally friendly. So thinking about the environmental piece first, what are the things that you're going to be thinking about? And then I'm going to What's the perspective you have on that? What's the lens in which you look at that? It's a huge topic. It's something that I think everyone knows is important. People are committed to, obviously to varying extents, but how do you frame your approach to that journey at Concentrix?

Sarah Mckay: So there's so much commentary and pieces in the news and drama about the environmental crisis, climate change, all of those things. I think it can be quite overwhelming and it feels too big and people don't know where to start. So therefore they don't start and we do nothing, right? The approach that we take is we are a company of 450,000 people now, nearly half a million people in our company. So we have huge opportunity and huge responsibility to do something. So our starting point is every one of those people did one thing. Small or big, we would have a huge combined impact. That's where we start from. Personally, I feel so strongly that sustainability needs to be at the core of how business runs, right? We need to operate ethically in a way that improves our environment, contributes to our local communities, because it makes business sense, as well as it being the right thing to do. And so for that to be true, everyone in the company needs to be involved. It can't be a specific team or 20 people that work over there in that function that do our ESG stuff. It has to be something that everybody in the organization has accountability for. And I suppose when we start, then everybody does something. We position our ESG goals alongside our performance goals. So when we do our annual appraisals, when we submit our goals, we have our business goals, we have our personal development goals, and we have our social goals where we submit one thing that we can do to make things better. And that kind of helps. Drives that one concentric culture within the whole organization. So we do have teams of specialists who work on very specific and scientific things like our carbon contribution targets. That's scientific, that needs help. But we have 450,000 pledges from our game changers that could range from litter picking. It could be that they're going to support a local food shelter. It could be that they're going to take up composting. Everybody makes their own personal contribution in line with what they can do. And then that gives us overall a massive impact. And the truth is, it actually helps us build our employee engagement and our sense of belonging with the company. Because we can join people together. So if you live in Portugal and you want to do a beach clean, you can bring your team together and go and do that as a team building exercise. It hits multiple goals as well as doing the right thing. And one of the best things that I've done in my entire career has been leading what we call project change within our business. And it's a partnership with an organization called One Young World, who are amazing. But we go out and we ask the business, give us your ideas, tell us one project you'd love to do if you had the chance, if you were given the time, if you were given the resources to be able to do it. And we pick the top 10 ideas that come into us. And we have supported those and mentored those, given them the resources they need to deliver in our business. And what those people have done is huge. And they're from every level in our business, right from entry level, through the management level, through to accountants, through to salespeople, everybody. And these are things like we've had a girl in Brazil who had set up a migrant employment and refugee program. We've employed 70 migrants in Brazil through her training package, but not just giving them employment, help them settle. We have a girl in Brazil who is really passionate about bees and how bees support the ecosystem. She's adopted 600,000 bees. And in the next couple of years, we'll push that to 5 million. It's really opening up the eyes of our team to say, we're serious about it. We give you the resources. We help you to deliver and really just lights a fire under people and encourages them to do something. And they then in turn encourage the people around them to do something. And the effect is just like a ripple throughout the business. But that has given me so much energy over the last year to then take it to the next level. And I've just been on the rounds of completing roadshows to launch Project Change 2024. So we'll have another 10 people can do another 10 amazing things. And that'll be our growing network within the business from an activist point of view.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that. That's an amazing initiative. And, I think the point about how it helps with employee engagement and helps build that sense of purpose and connection to the company is a really good point. Thinking, I guess, taking a step back, right? And just thinking about advice for others, right? I think the point you made is a good one, which is because it's such a tremendous responsibility and a broad challenge, people can get stuck on how do we get started? So I think, are there ways, you talked when we spoke before about the idea of not needing to completely change things, but looking for opportunities to embed change into standard practices. Do you have any examples of that that you could share so that people can get a sense of how to take some of those steps without feeling like they have to change the whole world at once?

Sarah Mckay: Yeah, so I think the basic starting point for me is I don't know all the things. I don't have all the answers. I don't know all the solutions to all the problems, right? I am not going to be able to solve climate crisis and food scarcity and all of those different challenges that we have in the world. So I think it was really important to me to talk to the team. First of all, what are you passionate about? And we will see that depending on the country that people are in, they will have different focuses based on what's going on around them. So some countries are really experiencing significant issues through climate crisis. So they will be most focused on energy reduction and how we reduce our energy. But we go out and ask them. And in the UK, for example, the projects that came to us from the UK that people most want to work on are things around poverty. How do we support people who are struggling right now? How do we help with food banks? How do we contribute? And it doesn't have to be fundraising. We think of things in a give money, give time, give things triad. If you don't have the money to fundraise, well, then go and donate time. And that's how we structure it. But my starting point was to sit down and ask people, what would you like to do? In the framework of our ESG goals, what kind of most gets you excited and what would make you feel most like you had been able to do something? And then you can relate it personally back to that individual. For me, mentorship is something that I get hugely involved in and promoting women in business. And so I give my time to mentor schoolgirls in leadership because. That I can see the difference I'm making in that. My input to how do we reduce our carbon footprint in the business is now going to be great because I don't know. I don't know the answers. I don't have those skill sets. I think about what skills have I got that I can give to somebody else. And then somebody else will have the skills to calculate our carbon footprint and be able to reduce our utility consumption. And that's where that person's skills can most be involved. And we also sought out organizations who can help us. So One Young World are a great organization to be involved in. And they give you another level of mentorship and support for your team to help them understand how to develop their ideas and take them forward. Yeah, I think the basic starting block is where are you in the world? What are the primary challenges that you're facing in your region, in your town? And how can your staff help to make it better?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, and I love that point about step one is ask the question and do some listening, right? Because I think that's probably why it's so closely tied to employee engagement, because you aren't saying, here's what's important to Concentrix. Can you be involved? You're asking what's important to them and structuring the initiative that way, which makes sense. Okay, so the next area I want to talk about is around well-being. So can you talk a little bit about why well-being is such an important topic across what sort of layers? What's your take on this as a focus?

Sarah Mckay: So well-being is something we've really started to talk about in a lot of depth in the last maybe three years. And when I think about it, well-being has... Two meanings for me. We have our physical well-being and we have our emotional and mental well-being. And they're related, but two different focus areas. And when I think about physical well-being, right, it's looking after yourself and looking after your team, but recognizing things like burnout, having the tools and the environment and plates that gives people the opportunity to have conversations in psychological safety, safety, to talk about working styles, to be respectful of people working hours, especially in a global organization. If it's two o'clock in the afternoon, my time and I need information, I need to be respectful that it might be three in the morning for somebody else. So just not going to get it. That's not reasonable. Making sure and being observant that people are taking breaks, that they're taking the right time off, that they're not just extending their shifts. Globally and ending up working over 16 hours. And I think as leaders, we need to be really conscious that we model that behavior. So if I'm answering emails at one o'clock in the morning, that sets the tone for, well, maybe I should be doing that too. And that example flows down through the organization. So I know that I need to show that I value time away from work, that I value outside interests and that I respect people's personal time. And I, my team will tell you, I have a common phrase that I start with where I say to people, if you can't do the job that I'm asking you to do in 40 hours, then either you're not doing it right or you're not capable of doing it. So I don't give brownie points for somebody, you know, staying on and working to 10 o'clock at night. That's a red flag to me, not a green flag. And then as finding the physical wellbeing, there's the emotional wellbeing. And a lot of people talk about emotional wellbeing and supporting people in times of crisis and times of need. And I think that's a really important thing to do. And I think that's neat, but it has to be more than just having processes or EAP schemes around mental health. It's back to that concept of having a safe space where people feel okay to say, I'm not okay today. I'm struggling today. Or that they can say, I don't like that idea. I don't like where we're going. I don't like what we're doing as a business. I don't think this is right. And I think that starts from, you talked about it earlier on that sense of purpose in the business. So it's such an old story, but I love that story of the janitor in NASA. And when he was asked what he did in NASA, he said he put people on the moon, right? I love that because everybody in our business has impact. Everybody, regardless of what job they do. And just because I have the title vice president does not mean that I have greater impact than anybody else. I've been here for longer. I love sitting down with the team and figuring out what is our sense of purpose? What is it that we're trying to do? What is our why? When you think about the side and side, and all of his teaching and getting that collective vision. And I think all of that flows then into emotional wellbeing because you've got a yardstick and this is what we want to do. This is who we want to be. And if we deviate from that, then people have a clear idea that they can challenge. And in that space, I think that helps support emotional wellbeing from the foundation. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Do you feel like wellbeing is a topic that gets as much focus as it deserves?

Sarah Mckay: Yeah, we talked about this in the prep. I think when times are good, it's really easy to talk about well-being and really easy to talk about employee satisfaction. And that when the pressure increases and where performance isn't maybe where you want it to be, sometimes that collaborative and supportive approach starts to show cracks, right? You start to see more of the traditional command and control management styles that are driving cost optimization and things like that. And that's where people's workloads start to increase and people start to feel the pressure. And it's tough, right? It's really tough. But I think within Concentrix, the thing that helps us fight this tendency, and we're not perfect and we don't do it right every time for sure. We invest really heavily in company culture. We have nine culture statements. And actually, I've just been in London for two days with over a thousand people where we talked about our culture and has it changed and does it still fit? How do we live that? But why that's really important is because the whole leadership team say, this is what we want. This is what we expect. This is how we should interact with each other. And this is the sort of environment that we want to create. And that creates the language to challenge it if it's not happening. So if somebody is showing those cracks and if they're driving pressure and stress and anxiety in the business, it says, well, you're not really living up to that culture statement or I'm not really feeling that we're operating in line with our culture. And it depersonalizes the conversation and hopefully allows people to challenge. But sometimes that inclination to drive short-term success is overwhelming because you know, if you just push, push, push, you know you can get there. You can get to that number. But you also know you might break people along the way. And that's kind of a hard balance to really want to hit this number and I really want to look after my people. But the research points towards the fact that companies who stick to their culture have the sense of belonging, have a strong ESG policy, show commitment to well-being. A better growth race. It's better to do things in the right way. The numbers are there. Your business will be more sustainable. And Steven Bartlett, Simon Sinek, KPMG, Deloitte, all of those big organizations, all say that companies who drive purpose and sustainability perform above market average. So even if you're dealing with somebody who's a bit... I really about lovely concepts like wellbeing or like diversity. The hard facts are there and you can make comparisons between here's a company doing the right thing all the time. Here's a company that's just driving bottom line exclusively all the time. They're also different. So logically, for me, if people feel like a company cares about them and cares about the planet, they're more likely to care about the company and care about the results that we get. And so the results are mutually beneficial.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I agree. I think what's interesting, I was thinking of two things as you were sharing. One is, I agree with you and we did talk in our prep about the fact that when we talk about employee engagement and well-being and company culture, there can be this focus on it that is tested when it comes down to those hard decisions of, do I push too hard to hit this short-term metric? Or do I believe in the approach? And as you said, very staff-based. I think it can also happen the other way. In the sense of when times are bad, particularly with an individual employee or in a situation like COVID, we saw more focus on mental health and well-being than ever before. So it's almost like when we reach a crisis point, then it can be like, okay, let's scramble and figure this out. What do you need? And I guess what I'm trying to impart is we need to not let it. Get to that point. It should be something that's part of the everyday. So people shouldn't need to reach a breaking point to speak up, right? They should be able to do so beforehand. And that's obviously the responsibility of individual leaders and the company culture. The other point I just wanted to make going back to what you said about like being conscious of your time online and when you're messaging people, things like that. I've heard so many stories about the impact. Thinking about... The focus on women this month and as a mom myself. Thinking about the impact that that has also specifically from male leaders. So male leaders being conscious of showing that example of not always being on, showing that example of doing a school pickup or attending this event and how that helps normalize it as not only a thing moms will want to do, but that any parent should have the ability to do at times or have that balance. I was just thinking about that as well. Okay, so the next area that I want to talk about is diversity and how it sort of, so this leads into the focus of the month, but how it also factors into sustainability. So can you talk about that connection?

Sarah Mckay: Yeah, so diversity, we're all in the service industry, right? It's our job to service the customers, our direct customers, our clients, customers. We're all, we probably all live and breathe by our CSAT, right? How happy people are with us and whether we're doing a good job, as well as the efficiency of that service, reducing costs to serve, all of those metrics. But we're servicing a diverse population, right? Our customers are not all white middle-aged men. They are all races, all genders, all ages, all religions. So if we don't have people in the service industry who are making decisions about how to serve those people, then we're just not going to have the right answer. So for me, diversity means that everybody comes with a different perspective, different learned experience, different backgrounds, different preferences. So if we have all of those people at the table deciding what the plan of service looks like, then we get a better answer to our customers, get better efficiency, get better cost to serve and all of those things. So for me, diversity means innovation and growth. And if we have new people, new experiences, we'll get new answers. If we have the same people making the same decisions, we'll get the same answers. And that's why diversity of thought is so important to me. And it's not anywhere in International Women's Day, but it's not just based on women, right? It's based on religion, it's based on age. And the more diversity, the more different people with different perspectives that you can have at the table, the better the quality of the conversation is. And sometimes it's awkward, right? Sometimes I don't like the answers because I don't understand. No, I'm not comfortable with that. It's better to have that conversation and understand because we're all representing a portion or a subset or a cross-section of the community. So essentially, we're all championing our groups when we come to the table with ideas.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think that ties back to the cultural tenets that you have of it is better if we're all challenged and if we can do so respectfully and we can do so to align to our objectives and those sorts of things, then it, like you said, it creates context for people to operate within so that even if a conversation is uncomfortable because it's challenging you, it's not uncomfortable because any single party is being made to feel uncomfortable or different. It's more so just because it's a learning experience. Yeah. So thinking about the theme of inspiring inclusion, right? You've been at Concentrix about 18 years. So that's a good chunk of time to see a whole lot of change and transformation and innovation. What have you witnessed in terms of the diversity? And what are your thoughts on what needs to happen, not only within your business, but in service overall to create more diverse, inclusive, and equitable organizations?

Sarah Mckay: Yeah, so in some respects, there's been a lot of progress. We are being challenged to report on our gender equality, to be public about our percentages of whether it's people with disability or women in leadership or whatever it is. We have to declare in some countries our gender pay gap. So those are all positive steps. And we actively target in Concentrix our percentage of females in leadership, not through quotas, but through internal development and promotion. I was at an International Women's Day event the other day, and the most depressing fact in the world that I heard was that it's going to take, at the rate we're progressing now, it's going to take another 136 years before we achieve gender parity. And I thought, God, I thought we'd move further than that. The fundamental issues of childcare responsibility, flexible working arrangements, sometimes leadership style that sees women stopping at a certain level and not being prepared to move any further are still real issues. My own personal journey with this has been really interesting. I've always had male bosses, but I've been lucky in that I've had really supportive male bosses who've challenged me and pushed me on. And one boss in particular, at the start of my career, he kept pushing me to join networks like Women in Business or those sorts of organizations. And I fought him and refused to join because my view back when I was like 20-odd was I do not need special events to attend. I can network perfectly and happily in a mixed environment. And I took it really like defensively that he was asking me to do this. But through time, when you read stats like 136 years, my perspective has completely changed on that because the truth is women are starting from a lower base, right? We have more things and different things to deal with to get to the same place that men are at now. And so I actually have completely gone. And I feel that it's the responsibility of women who have made it in leadership roles. To seek out and support the next cohort of female leaders coming on because we can prepare them for the journeys and the challenges that they're going to have and we should be so that they don't have to experience the same challenges maybe that we did. Now I seek out groups and organizations who support women in business. I work with a local not-for-profit called Sisters Inn who work with 17-year-old schoolgirls to show them what it's like to be a leader in business. So they start to think about that as a career rather than teacher, nurse, doctor, lawyer. And we have a network of women in Concentrix which champions women in our business to support. And I honestly believe mentorship is one of the most powerful tools that we have as women to support each other and leave the ladder down as people coming along. I don't think I have all the answers to creating a more diverse organization, but I have a very logical mind and where I always start is to start with the reporting. So where are you at right now? What does diversity look like across your organization right now? Are there career levels or departments or functions where there's a clear gap? And if there is, that's where you go and you start to ask the question on why are women not coming into this function? Why do you not employ women? And then that starts to build your action plan for what you need to do next. And it'll be different in every function that you go into. But understanding that dynamic, I think, is really key. And I also think that being clear as an organization that diversity matters and it's valued and there's a business sense to it. So if I go back to better decision making, better outcomes, better results in a diverse environment. Setting that as the expectation rather than you need to get 50% diversity. I think that leads to quotas and I think quotas are really damaging both for women and for the business. But to encourage people to spend time thinking about how to achieve representation. And there's all sorts of leadership programs and mentorship and creating networks that will then start to shift the results. But knowing where to start is key. And I think something you said earlier is really important. Yeah. And I think that's really important. The rule of allyship can't be underestimated. So I think sometimes men feel like they are being disadvantaged if we are focusing on women to move into leadership roles. But actually, we need men to help model the behaviors that allow women to succeed. Not at the expense of men, but alongside men. So you know, our network of women includes, you know, as many men as women because they need to understand what our experience is like. I understand how to support us within the business and then understand what part they have to play in that story. And I think if we do those things that you know kind of helps turn it from a spreadsheet exercise if you need to hit this number to actually being something that's sustainable and grows within the business. But it certainly takes time.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that you shared you know your feeling about those women's groups early on because I've been challenged in creating content on this platform about women in service or talking specifically about gender equity or gender purity or talking about some of the challenges women face. And when I get that feedback, it's often, if you want equality, stop talking about it as its own thing. And I have reflected on that because I don't take feedback lightly and I want to think through it. But I think at the end of the day, I would love for it to not be necessary, but it still feels necessary. And I think for me, that's because sharing stories is a powerful way for people to understand that while there is in many organizations, these varying degrees of focus or goals around diversity, when you get into the layers of the business, there are often still very toxic biases, situations, experiences that do not create environments that women can thrive in. And so, the only way that I think we create better awareness about those things is to share them, to speak up both within the organization and in platforms like this, where we can share those things with one another and with others. So to me, that's really important. And I also agree that, I think women should feel a call to help others. I also think men should feel a responsibility to play a huge role in hopefully shortening that 136-year metric to the extent they can. We heard last week from Daniel, who talked about why he feels passionate about this topic and the actions that he's taking in his organization to really, I'm going to go back to that, but what I'm really trying to say is, I think that when we talk about It goes back to that focus on inclusion. Like you can have these, to your point, when people set these diversity goals, these benchmarks, it's, you can argue like what you measure gets attention. And so fine. But at the same time, if you are creating a goal to bring more women into an organization where they don't feel valued, they don't feel supported, you don't want to hear what anyone, not just women, anyone, anyone actually has to say. That's the difference, right? That value of diversity that you spoke about earlier comes from that diversity of thought. And that's only possible not when we're just trying to hit a quota, but when we value including all sorts of different people because we know it will make the organization stronger. So I think there is still a lot of work to do. And so that's why I think conversations like this are important to have and the work that you're doing both within the business to appropriately challenge, to advocate, to support, and then the work you're doing outside of the business to help young women see different potentials for themselves. It's hard work, but it's admirable and it's the right thing to do. So I really appreciate you coming. And sharing your perspective. And I guess my last question would just be after 18 years as in service and as a leader, is there any final thoughts, anything you would want to say to young women starting out or to anyone on the topics that we've been talking about today?

Sarah McKay: Yeah, so I think in the last 17 years, if I went back, how would I do things differently? I think I don't have all the answers, right? I think in my early career, I felt that I probably should. And if I was asked a question, I should know the answer to it. And that's not the case, right? So I think if I had asked more questions and been brave enough to ask more questions, I probably would have got things done a lot easier. And yeah, I would have learned more things. I think that was the first key learn is that if I don't know something, most likely somebody else in the room won't know it either. So just be brave and ask the question. And I think related to diversity. I think the core element of diversity is not to have the numbers match, not to have this percentage of women, this percentage of men, this percentage of people who are from the LGBT community, the percentage of the race. It's to have representation. And it's not that you need to be like them to get to that role. It's that we all bring something and we bring something different and unique. And that is valuable. And I think sometimes when you start your career and 17 years ago, you think, well, I need to be like him. I need to be like that person because they're really successful. So I'll model that behavior. And actually, you're in the role you're in because of what you bring. And that's different to everybody else. So those are the two learns that I have. And I love to lead through collaboration. I'm not a, I do you, I say you do, you type of leader. So I love getting everybody's input into a problem. I love it when somebody has an idea that I haven't even thought of. And going through that process of getting to the solution, together spending my time asking people with opinions and thoughts rather than just thinking about my own and then telling everybody else how clever I am. That's my style of leadership. And it doesn't have to be confrontational, but I am genuinely interested in people. I love hearing people's stories and I'm honest with my thoughts and those that honesty and openness. I think it's something that Concentrix has helped me learn and develop over the last 17 years and has given me. It's been to make mistakes, to relearn, to have it, to do things differently. So I've been very, very lucky to grow my career here.

Sarah Nicastro: I love what you said. And I think that's, it's a great note to end on, but I think part of the power of diversity is that sense of freedom that no one person needs to know everything or be good at everything. But if you bring a group of people together that have varied experiences and knowledge and insights and perspective, then together you can achieve these great things. I was nodding and smiling because often now when I speak, when I do a keynote or a session and event, people will come up to me and say like, oh, that was so great. You're natural. And I think back to when I first started, it was very similar. I was horrible at it because I was on stage thinking I have to be the smartest person in the room if I'm going to stand up here and speak to everyone. And over time I realized like, no, actually, if I just be myself, that's when people appreciate what I'm saying. And value my contribution. And when I leaned into that, that's when things changed and I became more comfortable, but I also became a lot better at what I was doing because I wasn't trying to be something I wasn't. I was just embracing the fact that like you said, we all have unique value. And if you just bring that to the table and are willing to learn and listen and work well with others, that's where the beauty of it comes from. So. Thank you so much, Sarah, for coming and spending some time with me and sharing your experiences. I really appreciate it.

Sarah McKay: It's been great. Thank you.

Sarah Mckay: Yes. If you've missed any of our other podcasts from this month, I encourage you to go back and have a listen. You can find them all at futureoffieldservice.com. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with ISS. You can learn more at ISS.com. As always, thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to The Future of Field Service podcast. We hope today's conversation has provided you with a light bulb moment or given you some valuable food for thought. To learn more about any of the topics discussed in this episode, visit us at futureoffieldservice.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to rate us on your favorite podcast platform to help others join the conversation. Also remember to hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications so you don't miss a future episode. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. To learn more, visit IFS.com. On behalf of everyone at Future of Field Service, I'm Sarah Nicastro. Thank you for listening.

Episode 257

In this episode of the Future of Field Service podcast, host Sarah Nicastro is joined by Daniel Trabel, Director of Field Service EMEA at Thermo Fisher Scientific, to share the success his organization has had in bringing more women into field service roles and why he feels those who ignore the need to take action to improve diversity will fail.

Daniel is a committed and visionary leader in service with a proven track record in the clinical diagnostics, life science, medical device, and biotechnology sectors. Before joining Thermo Fisher Scientific, he served as a Service Manager at Germany South for Waters Corporation, a Service Engineer at Cochlear, and held multiple roles at Bio-Rad Laboratories.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Daniel: At the end, I think they will fail because they can't unleash the power of people and they can't unleash the power of this diversity, which is necessary to be successful. And we are dealing in a situation where when we talk about STEM, there's only a handful of people who can cover open positions and everybody is keen to get someone from somewhere. But if there is no someone, then there is no somewhere. And that's why I think we need to open up the talent pool. And if you don't do that and you are not thinking of changing your plans and your strategy in the long run, I think those companies will fail.

Sarah: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast, where we deliver both information and inspiration on how to differentiate your business through service and lead through change. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro, and I'm here to guide you through conversations around the trends that matter most, from business transformation and customer-centric innovation to the service evolution and attributes of effective leadership. Join us on this journey as we welcome industry leaders, visionaries, and experts to share their personal stories of change, challenges, triumphs, and transformation. Let's dive in. Today, we are going to be talking about why equity and inclusion are everyone's responsibility. This is a conversation as part of the focus content we're doing in March to discuss the International Women's Day theme of inspiring inclusion and talk about some of those related topics. So I'm thrilled to welcome to the podcast today, Daniel Trabel, who is the Director of Field Service for EMEA at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Daniel, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Daniel: Hello, and thanks for being here.

Sarah: Yes, thank you for being here. So before we get into our conversation for today, which I'm very excited about, tell everyone a bit about yourselves, your role, and Thermo Fisher.

Daniel: Yeah, maybe I'll start with the company because probably the majority of the listeners don't know what the Thermo Fisher is. We call it a hidden champion. It's a huge organization with more than 120,000 people worldwide. We are in the scientific research, analysis, and diagnostics market where we operate in different various segments like in the life science, clinical diagnostics, and the analytical instruments and healthcare business. We have a mission, and that mission is to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. And that's a strong commitment, I would say. And I'm representing here the Instrument and Enterprise Services Organization, which is the service organization for our chromatography and mass spec instruments. Those instruments were used for water analyzers, for drug testing, for drug filtration, and also for any other diseases like rare diseases, like cancer resurgence. So it's an important area. I'm super proud of, let's say, supporting our customers in their business. A bit about myself. I am now 20 years in field service, so it's already a long time. I'm based in Germany, so excuse my bad accent, but that's okay. I'm the father of two four-year-old twins. It's two girls, and I'm super proud of the two. And that is also one of the reasons why we are speaking here and why it's important for me to bring more women into field service.

Sarah: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's sometimes when these issues become personal, it takes on a different lens. So I appreciate that. Now, we're going to talk today about some of the methods that you have had success with at Thermo Fisher, increasing gender diversity among field technicians. But before we do that, what I'd like to talk a little bit about to sort of frame this discussion and expand on what you just mentioned is the theme of International Women's Day this year is Inspiring Inclusion. But they talk even on the website about how everyone plays a role in that, right? And so we're focused at Future of Field Service this month on discussing the themes that are related to the International Women's Day focus. We're amplifying and sharing women's voices of leaders in service. But I think it's important to recognize that everyone, men, all different types of leaders, all different types of roles within the organization across the board can play a part, have to play a part in this issue. So men need to listen, engage, be allies, et. cetera. So what are your thoughts on that? And how do you perceive your role in this idea of gender equity and inclusion?

Daniel: Yeah, so I think it's a change over the years. So especially in service, there was a male environment and it was easy for male to network because everybody speaks the same language, the same thoughts. But it's also, I would say it's difficult because with that, you can't develop further and because it's like when you're in the same family without any input from a site, fresh ideas, great thoughts. Again, about myself, I think one of the reasons why I'm so, let's say, pushing for this year is because I don't want to have my two little girls only thinking they're in gorgeous, they're pretty and they are, let's say, good looking, but they are strong and intelligent and also self-confident. And that's something I'm trying to tell them every day. And we need to ensure that women don't feel that they are, let's say, the weak people and they can't do the same male do. So that's why I think we need to change a bit our thoughts about that. And it's not only the women's network. We also need to my overarching, let's say, in leadership positions to push that. Otherwise, it's difficult to drive that behavior change.

Sarah: Absolutely. And I think it's a good point that it's the idea of gender equity is something that it's not fair to expect for us to achieve that if it's women trying to take that on, right? It's a shared responsibility. I know one of the ways beyond what we're going to talk about today in your talent recruitment and hiring processes, but I know another role that you play is you sponsor the Women's Employee Resource Group in Germany, correct?

Daniel: Correct, yeah. We have a network of BRGs. We call it Business Research Groups, resource groups, where we also have a network between all those local groups. And I'm sponsoring the one which is located to the entity we have in Germany. Yeah, we have all over the globe as we have many entities and many divisions, networking groups where they start to network. This one is a pretty young one, I would say. It's about one year-old now, while we have others, they already do a lot of activities like external speakers, like sharing training and sharing ideas and articles and so on. But it's important that it's not just something for women. As I said, it's also important that we open this up for all the males, the men in the organization as well, to ensure that it's not a soup which you can't put your ingredient in because of your gender.

Sarah: Yeah. And you mentioned earlier that one of the risks of not working toward gender equity in field services is that you have a group of people who get stuck in similar thinking. The same thing could be true of a women's employee resource group that is only women because they can go and share challenges and commiserate and network. But we need people there that don't think that same way to understand better and to understand the issues, understand the challenges and think creatively about what we can do to take that back into the business and make changes. So I think you're absolutely right that it has to be inclusive of all and it has to be viewed as an issue that is important for everyone to think about and to be creative with, etc. And so that's a good segue to what we're going to talk about, which is really getting creative then within the business about, okay, so we know this is a challenge and what can we do differently? What can we do to solve it? So we have an issue here where in service across the world, there's a talent gap. So companies are already struggling to bring in talent of any sort. And then you marry that with the desire for more gender equality. And that led you to make some changes in your organization that have had some positive results. So to start, can you just give an overview of that journey?

Daniel: Yeah, so exactly that was our starting point. We had a problem to fill roles. We had a couple of open roles. It was only a few people applied or people which are not at all qualified for those positions. And it's a big cost for a company like us. I have an organization of 500 people. And if you have an attrition of 5%, imagine how many jobs we have always open in this. It's a cost, while on the other hand, it's a missing revenue. So there is a desperate need of having those roles filled as soon as possible. So we started the conversation, the discussion around the reasons of why we seal this male environment. Because we thought as a leadership team together that we need to have more women in the organization. And we need to attract more women to make sure that we create also a bigger pool of talents for those open roles. So we did that together with HR, together with TA, with engineers, and also with the managers. And really explored the reasons behind and how we can attract female. And so one of the barriers we identified was the entry expectations to those jobs. So typically what we were looking for is engineers with a long experience in the field, electronic skills, and let's say all the pallet you want to see. Ideally only 20 years old. So all this stuff everybody wants to have. But that's not applied for most of the females. So that's why we thought of how we can change that and how we can ensure that we can open up some kind of entry role to our organization. And also fit that into the business needs. And we said, okay, one of the systems which could work is so-called PIQ engineers. So we call it for preventive maintenance installation qualification. Because we are in a qualified environment for most of our instruments. And with that, you cut off all the expectations of repairing skills. So you can really, let's say, focus on the first level support things, on maintenance and get new hires more easier into the roles. And with that, also the benefits of having hot areas identified with a smaller radius of travel with less overnight stays. And also with more flexibility and a better work-life balance as a result. And what's quite interesting because this also gave us the opportunity to increase the response time SLA. So the improvement of the response time for our CM customers for the existing engineers. Because we were able to reduce the PM for those engineers so they can focus on repair jobs. So that was a benefit which came as a second. And then we looked at our job ads because we thought that the jobs were pretty male buzzwords included. So engineering, manage, technology, executions, all this stuff where you as a male can get that strong. I take that. And that's exactly what I want. So we use an external tool to analyze those job ads and think of how we can change that in a more human attractive way. And we found words like support, mentor, advocacy, recognition, flexibility, and really try to bring that and also reduce the expectation, the entry expectation. Even if we might have high expectation, we just didn't wrote that in the job ad. And what's quite interesting because of the results, we had a lot more applicants also from women. That was good.

Sarah: Okay, yeah. So that was step one. Step one was identifying the need and the opportunity to kind of look at this in a different way. And I think that's important because oftentimes when we talk about the lack of diversity in technicians, we want to change it, but we're not always willing to go to the extent of actually making changes, if that makes sense. It's acknowledged challenge that a lot of companies would like to see change, but they're not necessarily willing to dig in and say, okay, but what do we have to do differently to get a different result? And so I think that awareness and then willingness to take action, to try something different, to break out of the way it's always been done, right, is incredibly important.

Daniel: Yeah, I think you need to identify this as a need and not just say it's because it's woke. So if you want to change, I think you need to go for the change and also need to consider there's always a risk. But you need to take the risk. That's absolutely key.

Sarah: Yeah. And so then this analyzing the job postings, understanding, and I like that you brought in an external tool to do that because, again, a lot of times, even when we have good intention, you can get stuck in your own thinking or whatever the historical process has been. So having this new objective view on, okay, the way these postings are written or the qualifications that we're expecting or the way that we're positioning this, how might we be limiting ourselves on who would potentially apply or who would see themselves as a potential fit for Thermo? So you started there. We talked about the fact that with the introduction of this new role, you were able to then have the opportunity to not have as strict of entry-level requirements that you had before. I think, again, that required you, if I'm understanding you correctly, essentially taking what before was all rolled into one person's duty and sort of splitting that out, right? So again, it's a redefinition internally of, well, this has always been one person's job. Okay, but what if we change that so that this portion is a different role? This portion then can be more effective at this role. So it comes back to that creativity and willingness to think outside of the box. Now, you mentioned this briefly, but I want to go back to. Who all did you involve in this process? Because I think it's important to think about the cross-functionality of that and who was involved in the decision-making, et cetera.

Daniel: Yeah, so again, the decision to change that is not only from the management. And we need to ensure that if we change something which also has an influence to the team, that we include the team in this conversation. Especially those engineers which are already working in the organization. They have some fears that if they only focus on corrective maintenance, that they need to travel longer distances because they don't have the nearby PMs anymore to cover. And that were definitely talking points and risks we saw. At the end, it really turned out it was not the case. And they do basically the same what they did before. It's just a matter of being more flexible to our customer needs and giving the new hires focusing on this local PM and installation activities and give them the chance to work there. We also include a talent acquisition because they have the conversations up front with the talents and HR to understand also from a non-male environment what they think we should think about. So let's say that we as a male leadership, and to be honest in my leadership team at that time, there was only male, only men. And you have a specific way of thinking and you might have, let's say, any different facets, but you don't cover it all by everything and the diversity you might need for such a program. And we got a good feedback also on the fact that, let's say, male might apply for a position if there is only 50% they can match with, while women say, no, I'm not able to do this. And this is only a small portion, so I'm going to apply. So that's also the reason why we lowered the entry expectations advertised in the [inaudible] .

Sarah: Yeah. No, I think that's important because you can always have more discussions, right? I mean, this is just the first impression with folks, the first outreach to get people to apply. You can always talk further about what the expectations are. But I think the challenge is in an environment where we are struggling so much to get talent, if you are limiting yourself from the very beginning, you're missing a lot of potential, right? And so, if you lower that initial barrier to entry, then in those conversations, maybe you will find someone who doesn't meet every single requirement, but that you just feel has huge potential for your business. And then you as a company have the ability to make those decisions instead of them, you never coming across them, right? So absolutely. All right, so talk a little bit about what the results were here. So with this new segmentation of work and having sort of the repair work and the preventative work separate, you created six new positions and four of those were filled with women, which is really exciting. Talk a little bit about what you found and what the results ended up being.

Daniel: Yeah, that was quite interesting because at least I was expecting that high percentage of first application. But also second later, we really found great talent and we not just selected the women because we were looking for them. So they really stand out against the other applicants and they had a strong presentation and a strong background, which fits perfectly into the role as expected. Interestingly, also in the beginning, for sure, there was a bit of a bias from one or the other team members. And it took a while to get this digested. Also because the role was not as seen as a normal Field Service Engineer role. It was seen as, let's say, an Field Service Engineer as a second class maybe for one or the other. So it took a while to get on it. Now, interestingly, because they are so strong in PM, in qualification, because they do it every day, some of them already now move to a mentors as role, where they support new IS, which are going for another position, which includes repair activities. So they really are a subject matter expert on the areas where they are working on. While we have also two of them moving now to other positions and really stepped up the ladder and on their career progression. So that's a great result. I was not expecting that in such a short timeframe. So we're talking about three years here. That's what's [inaudible] . And I'm really excited about it.

Sarah: Yeah. There's two things I want to go back to. The first I was thinking actually about the success you had. So you created six new roles with this sort of redefined job posting, redefined entry-level criteria. And what I was thinking about is if you expand this conversation for just a moment beyond gender equity, and we just talk about diversity overall, right? The other thing I'm assuming you have the value of is when you have the entry-level expectation of this qualification, this qualification, this many years of experience, et cetera, you're bringing people from a set of very commonly shared experiences where when you change that to having less strict entry-level criteria, I'm assuming you see more diversity in background. Like, where people are coming from different roles, et cetera. Is that true?

Daniel: That's true. And there's another thing I want to mention, because also the fact that we have more diversity in the team gives us or gave us more soft skill variance means that more, and it's not applicable for any, but for everybody. But I think the, let's say, percentage of women having a more focus on mediation or let's say different way of tackling problems, different way of communication that really influenced the team spirit and how the team bond and work together as a team. And that really brought an asset to my team. But secondly, as you said, background is a point because we are dealing with customers which are running their own applications on our systems. So it's an open platform where you can develop methods and they do it day by day. And the women we attracted, they were former customers. So that means that those new employees were able to speak the same language and they brought in their skills and their experience from their life as a customer. And it made it much more easier for them to understand. What are the customer problems and also to identify we're talking about a technical or maybe an obligational situation and problem. And we're able to identify that upfront before roping up the whole system and exchange, I don't know, 10 parts at the end and realize, okay, it was not any single broken part. So that was my hope.

Sarah: Yeah. I'm just thinking, you mentioned earlier, this topic isn't one where it's, well, we need to care about this because we want to be woke or we're trying to check a box on a certain level of gender diversity. The companies that are really making progress are doing so because they know that diversity of thought is important to a business that is innovative and creative, right? And thinking about how reflecting on your job postings and your hiring criteria, things like that, not only helps you potentially recruit more women, but just helps you bring people into the business with more diverse backgrounds and more diverse thinking really helps you build teams that are more well-rounded, more creative in meeting customer needs and just strengthens the business. And I think. That's a really big point.

Daniel: Yeah, there is a saying, I think Albert Einstein said that ages ago, an evening where everybody has the same meaning is a lost evening. And that happens when you have a team where everybody is with the same background and with the same, let's say, character and everything is the same. So we need to have diversity to have high performing teams.

Sarah: Absolutely. So the other thing I want to go back to, which is just such a, I think, really impressive point is that of those six new positions, you have people that relatively new to the business are already progressing into leadership roles. And I think this is important because we need to think about not just how do we bring more diversity into the business, but how do we support and enable that progression, right? So that's one of the challenges we see is because bringing in frontline workers is an acute need for the business, we can focus all of the efforts there. But ultimately, you want to have diversity reflected in all layers of the business, right? And so the fact that the people you're bringing in are already progressing through, I think, is really impressive.

Daniel: Yeah. And it's also interesting and something I can share is that our German team is now led by a woman. So the more than 100 engineers which were on their own before end, they are now led by a woman. That's a massive change. I already see some benefits. So it's really good to see that.

Sarah: Yeah. And so that leads me to the question then about how has this focus on bringing more women into the business? How has that made you then need to reflect on what is their experience like once they're part of the team? Because I have to think there's some evolution there in what the culture feels like. We have to make sure that if you change the job postings and the hiring criteria to get more women in, that's great. But then you have to make sure they're coming into an environment where they do feel it's inclusive and they don't feel ostracized or uncomfortable or have a negative experience. So is there any work you had to do to sort of carry the focus through to make sure that once they were a part of the team, they were having a positive experience?

Daniel: Yeah, I think we haven't done any specific, but for sure, when you have a small team where you're the only woman in the team, there might be difficulties, especially when you have, let's say, a lot of engineers are doing service for many years without any influence of a woman in the team. So there's always a stalling phase in team building and the team had to go to those phases. But it's the responsibility of the line managers to take care that every friction identified is turned away and the whole management team stand behind this program. That's why we included them in the very beginning. At the end, I think they feel happy. The whole team appreciates the diversity we have. And we're not talking about diversity, just male and female. We're also talking about people of color and not so many in Europe, but also in North America, my counterpart and any other. And we as a company, we embrace employees for inclusion and diversity. And we have a corporate program where we always share success stories and so on. And in fact, in case of the field service, we work closely with the sales department. We work closely with application support where we have a lot of women in the organization. So there's a lot of touch points. And also the fact that we have these ERGs giving them the chance to connect between each other, even if they're maybe only one in the male and dominated team, and that they give them the sense of belonging.

Sarah: Yeah. I think when I'm reflecting on what you're saying, I think there's three aspects to this. One is you mentioned you had support from top leadership down on this initiative. And I think that's important because you're going to make progress on what you're paying attention to. And when things arise that need to be navigated, it needs to be a shared and aligned objective that everyone understands the importance of. The second thing is, to your point, being willing to address problems as they arise. Don't ignore things that are potential issues. Don't sweep things under the rug that shouldn't be swept under the rug. Be willing to face things head on and be willing to dig into any behavior or thinking that needs to be changed and work with the teams to do that. And then the third is, whether it's through the business resource group, whether it's through these new team members, direct supervisor and above, make sure that they feel connected so that if they are having experiences that aren't comfortable or aren't ideal, they can surface those as well and figure out how to work through it. Make sure that they feel supported, not only in the performative aspects of their role, but in the mission of, we want you to succeed here. And so we want this to be an inclusive environment. We want this to be a positive culture. And if you are experiencing things otherwise, we want to work through that. I think if you can make sure you're focused on all three of those components, you're getting ahead of anything that could potentially be a challenge. And it sounds like obviously, in your scenario, if these people are already progressing through the business and leading teams, you're doing a good job of that, or they wouldn't be growing within Thermo Fisher, right? So that's good. So Daniel, I'm hoping with the success that you've had in this area, what have you learned that you think is replicable in another area of the business or by another company in terms of, if you are committed to this, these things work?

Daniel: Yeah, it's not always that you can adapt one by one. In our case, we have the lucky situation that's because of the application background and the fact that our customers are, let's say, focusing on application. We had some kind of synergy in areas, I can assume, where this is not the case. It might be a bit more difficult. But nevertheless, I think it's important to ensure that you understand that you need to change something. You need to think about how you can lower the criteria and how you can find a solution as an example, and that was also one of our issues in the beginning, due to the fact that they don't have an electronics background, we had an issue with the electrical safety. So we decided to go for an internal program and implemented that certification program with safety officers. So we got rid of that risk and that criteria. And we were now able also for them to that they can sell from their own undercovers and replace a board if necessary and so on. So there is always a solution. And don't think about the problem, think about the solution. Once I tell you, gets an elephant in the room, you will think about the elephant, but not about the solution, how to get the elephant out of the room. So I think it's important to really step aside, step a step back and say, okay, that's my problem. Okay, but how should my solution looks like and how can I get to that point? And it doesn't matter which business you cover. I think it's important that you really map the situation and try things out. And maybe you're disruptive and you take a risk. But when you don't change it, you will fail from the very beginning.

Sarah: Yeah. And I guess, what would you say to the people who are unwilling to get creative with this issue? Or maybe don't even recognize the importance of it?

Daniel: At the end, I think they will fail because they can't unleash the power of people and they can't unleash the power of this diversity, which is necessary to be successful. And we are dealing in a situation where when we talk about STEM, there's only a handful of people who can cover open positions and everybody is keen to get someone from somewhere. But if there is no someone, then there is no somewhere. And that's why I think we need to open up the talent pool. And if you don't do that and you are not thinking of changing your plans and your strategy in the long run, I think those companies will fail. That's my clear statement here.

Sarah: Yeah. And I think often the objection is, well, it's more effort, it's more cost, right? But at the end of the day, you can point to these specific things you've done to review job postings, to create new roles because you understand what the barriers to entry are for more diverse candidates. You redefine things to reduce those barriers. You mentioned you have this electrical certification that is necessary, but rather than expecting people to come in with that, you looked for a way to provide that internally. These are all changes that you have proven are possible if you are willing to do the work. And I think you believe that the effort is well worth the outcome.

Daniel: Absolutely is.

Sarah: Yeah. Well, thank you for coming to share. Your little girls are lucky to have a dad who has the perspective you have and is working really hard to make changes that are benefiting diversity in the workforce now and will certainly have an impact once they get there. So I appreciate you caring about this topic personally, but also coming to share specifically what you've been able to do that has had a direct positive impact on the business so that others can hopefully be inspired to make some of those same changes.

Daniel: Thank you for having me here, Sarah. Really appreciate it.

Sarah: It's a pleasure. All right. You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. Be sure to stay tuned throughout this month as we continue to talk about topics that are important to inspiring inclusion. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to the Future of Field Service podcast. We hope today's conversation has provided you with a light bulb moment or given you some valuable food for thought. To learn more about any of the topics discussed in this episode, visit us at futureoffieldservice.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to rate us on your favorite podcast platform to help others join the conversation. Also, remember to hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications so you don't miss a future episode. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. To learn more, visit ifs.com. On behalf of everyone at Future of Field Service, thank you for listening.

Episode Resources:

Daniel Trabel on LinkedIn
Thermo Fisher Scientific Website

Episode 256

In this episode of the Future of Field Service podcast, host Sarah Nicastro welcomes back Dot Mynahan, who recently retired from her role as Executive Director of Field Operations at Otis Elevator after nearly 32 years with the company, to discuss her journey and her thoughts on the International Women's Day theme of inspire inclusion.

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Dot Mynahan: "I think the first lesson learned is never be afraid to ask for help. Especially at Otis, there was a culture of if you ask for help, people will make sure that they help you. And from day one with the organization all the way through my last day at the company. I mean, even now, I could call up anybody at Otis and say, hey, I need help. And I would get it. They're amazing. It's an amazing team. I think the other lesson learned is to think about your career as a lattice versus a ladder. Everybody seems to think it's important to get to the next step. But if you go up vertically, you lose the breadth of knowledge that you can get if you take some laterals. And so I think that there's great value in a lattice approach to your career."

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast, where we deliver both information and inspiration on how to differentiate your business through service and lead through change. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro, and I'm here to guide you through conversations around the trends that matter most, from business transformation and customer-centric innovation to the service evolution and attributes of effective leadership. Join us on this journey as we welcome industry leaders, visionaries, and experts to share their personal stories of change, challenges, triumphs, and transformation. Let's dive in. Today, we're going to be talking with Dot Mynahan, who was formerly the Executive Director for Field Operations at Otis Elevator Americas and spent nearly or just around 32 years with Otis and in services. So we're going to take a look at her experience as a woman in service over the span of a few decades and just hear a bit what that was like. So with International Women's Day on March 8th, the goal this month is to amplify the voice of women in the industry as well as elevate the topics related to the International Women's Day theme of Inspire Inclusion. So Dot, welcome back to the Future of Field Service podcast. How are you?

Dot Mynahan: Thank you, Sarah. I'm well, thanks. And I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you again.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. I'm so glad you're here. So you are someone, you've been on the podcast before, and you are someone who has stood out to me in my time in field service as a woman voice in this space. You've done a lot throughout your career to advocate for women and to help support women. And I'm thrilled to have this discussion with you today. Now, you just recently retired from your role with Otis after nearly 32 years with the company. Just congratulations, first of all.

Dot Mynahan: Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, you look tan, you look rested. So I would imagine retirement is treating you well.

Dot Mynahan: It's treating me very well. Thanks.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that. So I guess to start, 32 years with Otis is a major accomplishment. And can you just share with everyone a bit what your career journey looked like?

Dot Mynahan: I'd be happy to. Thanks, Sarah. So I started as a temp. Believe it or not, I answered a newspaper ad in the Portland, Maine newspaper looking for a service clerk. And so I started and Otis had a policy at the time that all new hires had to be hired as a temp. So I started October 1st of 1990, and I was supposed to go permanent in December. And at the end of November, they implemented a hiring freeze. That put me in limbo until a position opened up once the hiring freeze was lifted. So it was a little nerve-wracking, but I knew when I worked there, I was like, I know I'm going to love this industry. I just knew it. Like it was just a perfect fit. So I hung in there and they were very good to me. Even as a temp, I hung around. And then June of 92 was actually when the first opening became available, where I was hired full-term as a service clerk. And then shortly thereafter, I was offered the opportunity to go into a training program to become a supervisor, which meant I spent 18 months out in the field working as a helper. So working with the tools, working with the mechanics, invaluable experience. And I would say the last four months of that time, the regional field ops manager who was overseeing my program had a really unique idea of every supervisor in New England who reported to him who went on vacation, he would send me into that office to cover for the week. So think about this. I have a year of field experience under my belt, a few years with Otis under my belt, but walking into an office and sitting in the chair of a supervisor, who typically had 20 plus years experience, many, many years in the field. I think the first supervisor I sat in his chair, he was a 40 plus-year Otis veteran. And so the mechanics would come in the office and say, who are you? I'm like, well, I'm Dot. And I'm training to become a supervisor. But what it did was build an incredible network. So I was able to meet all of the folks in all of the Otis offices across New England. I knew the supervisors, the branch managers, the sales reps, and started to know the mechanics. And then also, it was interesting because I knew the systems, I knew parts, but I had worked in the field. By the end of the week, I typically had a line of mechanics sitting at my desk asking me for help to fix things. Whether it's problems with what the equipment was that was on their route, but they definitely took a liking to me by the end of the week. So it was a lot of fun. From there, I actually got my first supervisor job. I went from Providence. I was there for about two years up to New Hampshire. Otis has an employee scholar program. So I went to school at night, got my MBA. At the end of that, I became a general manager, first in Albany, then back to Portland, Maine. And then I had the opportunity to become a general manager of a larger office in Boston. And then the transition happened to field ops. Solely field ops, where I came out of the P&L, went to the D.C. Area, and was the regional field ops manager there from 07 to 15. And then in 15, I had the opportunity to go to Latin America as the director of field operations. Didn't know Spanish, didn't know Portuguese, but was willing to take the job and give it a shot. Loved it. And then in 2018, I transitioned into my Executive Director role for the Americas.

Sarah Nicastro: Wow. So quite a journey. And I always say that I think it's really interesting when, so specifically thinking about like women in service and that team. I think it's really interesting when I speak with women about their progression. Like you started as a temp and you ended as the executive director of the field operations for the Americas. That's obviously very telling of your drive and your character and your abilities, right? It's also telling of the organization, I always think. When someone has been with a company for 20, 30 years, it does let you know that there's things going right. Otherwise, people would not stay around. And I think particularly when you see women advancing into leadership roles, it's representative of a company really making an effort and putting action behind this idea of equity and inclusion. So really good stuff. So looking back, what are a couple of your proudest moments?

Dot Mynahan: I think the biggest achievement I have was starting forward, which was the employee resource group for women in field operations. We started that in North America with a group of 12 women. It expanded to over 500 women internationally and really has made a difference in the careers and career ladders, not only for women in field operations and the offices, but even in the field. Because we talked a lot about career ladders and there are career ladders even within the field organization, that I'm proud to see a lot of the women getting the opportunities that they deserve. So it's just been an incredible organizational structure to have that employee resource group that Otis supported as well as they did. And so that's probably my number one goal or achievement. And then I think the latest one, I want to go current, is the integration of Otis ONE, which is our IoT product, into our service operation. So whether it be improved maintenance, guidance. I was looking at where faults are occurring and where should maintenance occur on your next visit. Looking at the time it takes to troubleshoot a callback or even if you need to respond to a callback, if we can see that the car's running. It was just a lot of fun and a lot of energy in looking at what's possible with that data. So that's been a lot of fun. I've really loved that a lot. And then I think the other one is we're just getting ready to go into production for a new equipment product called the Gen3 Core. And we took that through pilot and achieved our targeted installation hours. So just a lot of work, a lot of input from the field. Fantastic team on my team that just really drove the design of the product and really making it field friendly. And I think the customers are going to be thrilled. It rides like a dream. So I'm really excited to hear the feedback from the customers.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that. What's standing out to me about your answers is. And so I'm going to tie this back to just the theme of leadership as a whole, right? You are not going back to the glory days. You could easily. I think many people would. Just without thinking about it, go back to some fond memory of this, that, or the other thing. You're pulling really recent examples. I'm talking about how exciting the potential is. And I think that this, it reminds me of the importance in leadership today of bringing that positivity to change. So the only real difference between a challenge and a possibility is the attitude you have about it. But if you are a leader who can not fake it, but be excited about the potential, okay, this new technology, yes, it may be complex and we have a lot to figure out, but it's going to be so cool. That attitude is everything, right? And so that's what I'm thinking about as you're responding with these really recent examples is you're not going back to a lot of people that have been in a company for 32 years would just revert to the good old days and that sort of thing. And you're looking at these really recent things. And I love that. So when you think about the journey in terms of, are there any challenges that stand out to you of being a woman in a male-dominated field?

Dot Mynahan: I just never felt it. Of course, you run into those situations where a mechanic isn't thrilled to have you as their boss. I had a mechanic at one point in time come up to me and say, day one, walking into this office, I'm now their supervisor, saying, I've never worked for a woman before. I'm not going to start now. And I said, well, you have two options. I'm either your boss or you can go work someplace else. There's not another option. This is the structure and I am your supervisor. And why don't we just give it a shot? Let's see what we can do. And by the time he retired, he came up to me and he said, I remember day one. And I remember what I said to you. And I'm so sorry. You're the best boss I ever had. Because he gave it a shot and he was willing to give it a shot. And I think that spoke volumes for him. And there are times where I go, I would go to meetings. I'd be the only woman in the room. But I never felt that. I just never had that feeling of being a one-off or not being able to sit at the table. And maybe it's a cultural thing at Otis, where I was so accepted. But I was. And so it just wasn't really difficult.

Sarah Nicastro: I think thinking about your response to him, you were firm, but you were also, you showed like you were firm in I'm not going to take any crap. Okay. Like you're not going to treat me poorly. We're either going to make this work or you're not going to be here. You were firm, but you were also then, and I want to make this work. Like let's make this work, right? But that did make me think the ability to do that, I think has to be rooted in feeling empowered, right? There would probably be women in that position if they didn't feel supported and empowered in the role they're in fully. That wouldn't have felt comfortable saying, look, I want to make this work. Let's make this work. Or you're going to go need to go find something else. So I think that probably is part of it. And this is where I think it's always a combination. It's always a combination of that tenacity and that drive and the right type of support within the organization. A thought of an extra question I want to ask you, which is, I'm sure this is hard to answer because you only know what the experience has been. You can't really project what it would have been otherwise, but do you feel like having a woman CEO has an impact on what this has looked like for you at Otis and for other women at Otis?

Dot Mynahan: A hundred percent.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Dot Mynahan: I think there's a couple of things. First of all, UTC started our relationship and our commitment to Paradigm for Parity, right? Which is saying that we'll be at 50% parity in leadership roles by 2030. So UTC started it. We became an independent company. We've continued our commitment to it. Judy is extremely committed to it. And I think I always go back to, if you can see it, you can be it. And I think Otis does a good job of highlighting and sharing success stories so that you can inspire others to look for those roles and know that they can be successful and know that they'll be supported. And so I really think it's a culture at Otis to ensure success.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's a good point. And just to be clear, by asking that question, I wasn't trying to infer that Judy herself has made this so. It's more so that it's indicative of a company culture that is really valuing diversity and putting their action where the talk is, right? So that's what I meant. I don't think that in any way, you need to have a woman CEO to create a positive environment or to have that impact. I was just thinking about how it's telling of the company's focus. Okay, Dot, so we talked about some of your proudest moments, we talked about some of the challenges. What would you say are a couple of the biggest lessons you feel like you learned over the course of your leadership career?

Dot Mynahan: I think the first lesson learned is never be afraid to ask for help. Especially at Otis, there was a culture of if you ask for help, people will make sure that they help you. And from day one with the organization all the way through my last day at the company. I mean, even now I could call up anybody at Otis and say, hey, I need help. And I would get it. It's amazing. It's an amazing team. I think the other lesson learned is to think about your career as a lattice versus a ladder. Everybody seems to think like it's important to get to the next step. But if you go up vertically, you lose the breadth of knowledge that you can get if you take some laterals. And so I think that there's great value in a lattice approach to your career in order to expand the breadth of your knowledge and your experience, also your network.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I was thinking about when you said early on that role where you would go and fill in with the supervisors, you got to know different teams really well. And I think that's another thing I was thinking about in the back of my mind in terms of leadership skills is you can never minimize the impact of face-to-face time and listening and learning and not just going to say, okay, I'm in charge. But getting to know people and getting to know their challenges and understanding what it is that's going on in a particular functional area or region, that makes a lot of sense.

Dot Mynahan: Right. And I think the last piece of the puzzle is to always take the interview. If someone is approaching you about a potential, they're seeing something in you that they believe makes you a good fit for the role. And I think that the fit the lesson for women is men will apply to a job if they have 60% of the credentials and women will apply if they have 100. So I did a lot of mentoring, a lot of coaching over the years to a lot of women who had been approached to roles or I was approaching them for roles. And I'm like, look, I understand that you may not think you're ready, but if we look at all of the skills that you bring to the table and what you're capable of, then this role will take you to the next level. This role will take you from a regional footprint to a national footprint. And then there's learnings there. And even if you go to an America's level footprint, some of that is influencing remotely. And that's a big lesson for a lot of leadership to learn is how do you influence when you're remote? Now, obviously, through COVID, a lot of us were forced to learn that. But pre-COVID, that was a big part of me going to Latin America was how could I influence, learn to influence remotely? So there's a lot to be said there. And I think that always taking the interview, even if you're not successful, you've met a person in leadership who you may work with or for down the line. And I can cite several examples of that happened to me. And I was so happy that I took the interview, even though I wasn't successful, that I made those connections, which later on in the career ended up becoming great friendships.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, because they might come back and say, hey, Dot, we didn't think you were a fit for this role. But now that we've met you and we know a bit about you, there's this other thing and you would be great for that. Yeah.

Dot Mynahan: And there's always somebody better. There's no harm in applying for a job and there's a better candidate. You still learn something from the application process, the interview process. It's okay that there was someone that was a better fit for that role. There could be other roles in your future.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's good advice. So the theme for International Women's Day this year is Inspire Inclusion. So what do you think about when you hear this year's theme?

Dot Mynahan: I love the word inspire. I think it's a great verb when you think about it, right? Because to me, inspire invokes passion and an urge to act, an urge to do something, right? So how do you create in others an urge to act? And so when I saw the theme, I was like, oh, my gosh, they nailed it this year. That's such a great theme. And so I think I was excited. I was excited to see the theme and I'm excited to see what people do with it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And this will be reflected in our content this month. They talk on the webpage for about the theme, inspiring inclusion is everyone's job. Yes, on this platform throughout this month, we want to amplify women's voices, but we also want to talk about the role everyone plays in inspiring inclusion. That's very important. So when it comes to areas of service that are still struggling with not only bringing more women into service, but diversity as a whole, what do you think are the reasons that as an industry, we're still not where we want to be? What do you think needs to happen next?

Dot Mynahan: I think the number one factor is unconscious bias. When you think about when you interview people, you feel very comfortable with someone who looks like you, thinks like you, went to the same school, you know, that you have a lot of things that you share in common. And so I think that there's just a tendency to default to those candidates because they're comfortable candidates, right? But diversity of thought brings a lot to the table. And diversity of candidates brings a lot to the tables. I think we just have to look at and address and really think about unconscious bias and try to eliminate it. So if you're part of a hiring panel and you're having a discussion post-interview process and reviewing the candidates and somebody is advocating for a candidate and you're like, okay, why? What makes this person the better candidate, right? And I think it helps too if you start the whole process is to have a diverse slate, force yourself to develop a diverse slate of candidates. Because you'll have a gem in there that you didn't expect to have.

Sarah Nicastro: It's hard to really make progress if consciously or unconsciously you're still selecting from a pretty homogenous group, right? I mean, you have to first think about how do we articulate the roles and post the roles and reflect on the requirements that we're listing and things like that to make sure that you aren't imposing that bias before you ever even get to an interview situation, right? And again, knowing that there's that difference between men and women on men will apply at 60%, women 100%, you really have to think about are we inadvertently turning potential candidates away by the terminology we're using or an outdated requirement or something like that? That's a really good point.

Dot Mynahan: We had a great example of that in Brazil. So we would hire 20 to 40 trainees every year to become route mechanics to go out and do routine maintenance on maintenance routes. And we hired from local electrical, mechanical, engineering type students, like graduates. And in the years prior to Forward, maybe we had four to six women who would apply and be accepted into the program. Through Forward, we worked with HR and through the president of the region, he said, I want gender parity in this next hiring. So it really forced us to think, okay, if you want gender parity in the result, what do we have to do? So we changed the advertising, right? Just like you said, the advertising said this year women are encouraged to apply. And we took a graduate from the program and we had her picture with another male technician in all of the advertising that we did. So they could see that a woman had been successful in the role. Over 400 applicants applied, women applicants applied out of 1,200. And we achieved gender parity.

Sarah Nicastro: Part of it is remembering if you don't do different, you're not going to get different. So I think especially in field service, there is a lot of, whether it's, I don't want to say unwillingness, whether it's not really wanting to change or whether it's just habitual. Like the requirements have been the requirements for however long and we just haven't sought to really dig in there, right? It's that, like you said, it was that prompt of, okay, well, we need to achieve this goal. Now what do we need to do differently? I think everyone needs to be thinking about that. You mentioned that with Forward, how you worked with HR to get better at that piece. Looking at the work that you did with Forward and how it grew over time, what are the other sort of, if you were to bullet point a couple of its sort of missions and purposes that it played within the company? Because I'm just thinking listeners could reflect on, do they have something similar? Or if they have a group, is there areas of action that they might be missing? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Dot Mynahan: Yeah. So one of the things that we did was had training, technical training as part of our meetings. Not every meeting was technical training. Maybe once a quarter we would have a technical training topic. And the women were happy to have that because they felt comfortable asking questions in that environment because they knew it was a mostly female audience. Whereas if they were in a regular training class and they were one of few, then they would feel uncomfortable asking questions. So that was very successful. The other thing we did in talking about career ladders and lattices is we celebrated different roles in the company, even within the field, right? If somebody was a field employee and had progressed within the field from an apprentice to a mechanic to maybe an adjuster level mechanic or had taken a role as an education instructor for the union, like we celebrated those and we showed their picture and we had them speak at the meetings. And we did the same thing with an Otis to show that most of the people who were in leadership roles and who were being successful, not only had the career ladder, they had the lattice and they also put themselves out there in leadership roles, right? Even as a field employee going to teach at union school at night. So then they were leading a classroom and learning those skills. So we really celebrated that. And we tried to share and put pictures and names to success so that the old adage of, if you can see it, you can be it. We lived that. And tried to share everything that we could to just show that to encourage other women to apply. And then if somebody approached us about a job or an opportunity, we would do coaching on maybe at night. I'd have a call and say, okay, you're going to apply for this job. Why do you want this job? What's your interest in it? Okay. Let's talk about what the job entails and what you need to think about as you're interviewing for the role. And think about the experience because a lot of people say, well, I don't have that experience that another person has who's applying for a role. Okay, that could be true. But what do you bring to the table? What have you done that you bring to the table?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I think there was a point I wanted to bring up, which is this idea of when we think about, I wanted to first comment on the point you made about showing pictures and names and having people speak. Because it brings me back to the reaction you had to the term inspire, which I think is rooted in its emotion, right? And we're people, we're humans, we connect with other people. So rather than putting up a stat, in the meeting that says, this month or this quarter, six women advanced, okay? It makes it personal. That's when you have that connection to, I see them doing this, I could do this too. And so I think it's something to keep in mind. The other thing is related to a lot of the coaching and that sort of thing. I think programs like this are important because when we go back to the theme of inspiring inclusion, that isn't at one level. The goal should not be, let's get more women or more diverse candidates into the organization. It needs to be at every level. And that means helping people understand their strengths and progress throughout their careers. And whether that's lattice or ladder, that's not the point. The point is the job isn't done when we are successful, like getting those 400 applicants and even hiring parity, it's all the way through. I think obviously at Otis, having a woman CEO is helpful because you have that relational point all the way up. But there's a lot of organizations where that isn't the case. And companies, I don't think, are putting as much thought into not just the initial task, but what happens all the way through. Are there any other things beyond the coaching and mentoring that you think are important in making sure that women are progressing through roles within the company?

Dot Mynahan: I think that comes to the coaching piece of the puzzle is part of what we would talk about as well. When I talk to women who are interested in progressing with the company is, okay, so you want to be a leader. You're not a leader now. You want to be a leader. What can you do that would show your leadership skills? So whether that's a volunteer opportunity where you set up a volunteer opportunity in your branch. And then you take a picture of yourself leading it, you post it on LinkedIn, you're leading it, right? And not that it's me, but just the visual of you're in the lead, right? Now people associate you with a leadership position. And the same thing with the employee resource groups, right? Become involved in those, take a leadership role in those. Everything that you can do, whether it's at work or outside of work in the community, where you can share that you have leadership capabilities. Do it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Dot Mynahan: Do it. Put it on social media. Let people know I'm interested.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. And that's where we come back to talking about at the beginning, your journey. It's part personal responsibility for owning your journey and your growth and your expansion of knowledge and your expansion of your network and your engagement in resource groups, activities to continue to work on yourself. And it's part company mission to, and leaders, leaders and company itself to figure out what role they need to play in building programs and processes that are targeted toward removing that unconscious bias and taking real action behind this topic. Awesome. Okay, so you're retired. Is there anything you're able to share on what's next for Dot?

Dot Mynahan: I call it, I tell my family it's Dot 2.0.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Dot Mynahan: So it's really a chance to do what I want to do. And I can choose to stay retired. I can choose to go back to work. I'm still vacillating between that. But in the meantime, I walk the talk. So I'm going to be participating for the National Elevator Industry in a SkillsUSA conference in Atlanta, which is a student-run organization that helps place graduates into ready for trade roles. And so I'll be helping there. I'm also very much involved in Tradeswomen Build Nations, which also helps our women in the field. And I'll be participating in New Orleans this fall with that. And then I'm really looking for opportunities, whether to be served on a board or to maybe work for a smaller company and help a startup or help a PE-backed company that's looking to get into digital transformation of their operations or how to integrate IoT into their service operations. Like all of the stuff that I was passionate about at Otis, I have the skills to share. So I'm willing to entertain those possibilities. But I just think, like, the future is so open for me. I don't want to constrain myself in my opportunities. I just want to be open to them and see where it takes me.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, what a wonderful spot to be in. And congratulations to you again for getting yourself there and a wonderful 32 years and the work you're continuing to do to help support women in the trades and diversity in the trades. And we'll be excited to see what comes next. So thank you for spending some time with me today and sharing your journey and your knowledge and really appreciate you.

Dot Mynahan: Thank you, Sarah. It's been a pleasure.Sarah Nicastro: Thanks, Dot. Thank you for listening to the Future of Field Service podcast. We hope today's conversation has provided you with a light bulb moment or given you some valuable food for thought. To learn more about any of the topics discussed in this episode, visit us at futureoffieldservice.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to rate us on your favorite podcast platform to help others join the conversation. Also, remember to hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications so you don't miss a future episode. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. To learn more, visit ifs.com. On behalf of everyone at Future of Field Service, thank you for listening.

Episode 255

In this episode of the Future of Field Service podcast, host Sarah Nicastro discusses how Future of Field Service plans to celebrate this year’s International Women’s Day theme of inspiring inclusion and shares some of her favorite words of wisdom from women featured on the podcast this past year.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Episode Highlights:

[03:25] - In episode 206, Cait Donovan challenges the common belief that avoiding burnout is solely an individual's responsibility, arguing instead that it's a broader issue tied to societal and organizational factors.
[04:32] - In episode 209, Trina Stargard Nielsen enlightens us with her wisdom on leadership in the era of digital transformation. She champions the essence of humility in leadership, highlighting the necessity of embracing a team where members may surpass you in intelligence, education, or even salary.
[07:00] - In episode 217, Mita Mallick unpacks the myths holding us back from real progress. In her latest book, "Reimagine Inclusion," Mita challenges 13 common misconceptions, encouraging us to confront the uncomfortable truths that prevent meaningful change.
[08:40] - In episode 221, Marie Cobessi stresses the importance of gender equity within the organization, advocating for increased representation of women at all levels, from technicians to management. She believes the visibility of women in diverse roles is crucial for inspiring change and promoting the idea of "Why not me?" among potential female candidates.
[11:00] - In episode 224, Lauren Winans highlights the importance of treating employees as human beings, stressing that neglecting soft skills can lead to significant turnover costs. She advocates for viewing every business element through a lens that asks whether it will benefit or harm employees.
[12:50] - In episode 226, Christine Miners and Rick Lash share priceless insights on redefining leadership beyond simple task completion. They note a common pitfall where leaders equate their value simply with getting tasks done, neglecting the essential roles of reflection, clarity, and empowerment. This mindset shift is crucial for fostering a culture of innovation and empowering employees.
[15:05] - In episode 236, Sara Smith unveils her inspiring journey from a toxic background to becoming a trailblazer in field service by overcoming gender-based challenges and harassment in her early days as a service technician. Her story is a powerful reminder of the importance of creating supportive and inclusive workplaces, especially for women in technical roles.
[18:54] - In episode 241, Linda Tucci underscores the role of authentic communication, compassionate leadership, and the power of vulnerability and self-reflection. Linda's journey highlights how facing challenges can deepen our understanding of leadership, making her insights incredibly valuable.
[21:26] - In episode 246, Caroline Häggström Marklund dismantles the myth that putting people first is ineffective, highlighting how it empowers teams, fosters complex problem-solving, and enhances customer relationships. By trusting and enabling her 400-strong team to navigate their roles with autonomy towards shared goals, she showcases the importance of adaptability and trust in today's work environments.
[24:20] - In episode 248, Ann Sørensen explores the shift towards valuing attitude and behavior alongside technical knowledge. This approach, increasingly adopted by service organizations, underlines the critical role of diversity in all its forms, not just gender equity but diversity of thought, background, and perspective. Such diversity fuels innovation, creativity, and growth, which are essential for business evolution.

Episode Notes:

Episode 206: Busting the Biggest Burnout Myths
Cait Donovan’s Website
Episode 209: A Logistics Leader’s Perspective on Innovation, Digital Transformation, Diversity and More
Trine Storgaard Nielsen on LinkedIn
Episode 217: Debunking the Myths that Impede Workplace Inclusion
Mita Mallick on LinkedIn
Episode 221: The Pillars of Transformation in Focus at Fnac/Darty Episode
Marie (Sabet) Cobessi on LinkedIn
Episode 224: Is the Soft Skills Gap Growing?
Lauren Winans on LinkedIn
Episode 226: How Can Service Leaders Nurture Empowerment?
Christine Miners on LinkedIn
Rick Lash on LinkedIn
Episode 236: Reimagining Change Management for Today’s Service Needs
Sara Smith on LinkedIn
Episode 241: What I’ve Learned About Leadership Through My Breast Cancer Journey
Linda Tucci on LinkedIn
Episode 246: Vattenfall Customer Service's Prize-Winning People First Strategy
Caroline Häggström Marklund on LinkedIn
Episode 248: Building Competence in Service – Today and Into the Future with Alfa Laval
Ann Sørensen on LinkedIn

Episode 254

In this episode of the Future of Field Service podcast, host Sarah Nicastro is joined by Frank Odogu, Director of Lifecycle Services at Atlas Converting Equipment, for a discussion around moving beyond seeking only technical skill in service and taking a more holistic talent approach to meet future needs.

Frank has over eight years of leadership experience in the global service sector at Atlas Converting Equipment, where he is committed to providing outstanding customer support and leading revenue growth. Frank holds a Six Sigma Green Belt certification and is highly skilled in IIoT solutions, process engineering, and enhancing manufacturing processes.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Episode Highlights:

[02:46] - Businesses are increasingly distinguishing themselves through superior service, which demands a workforce skilled in technical aspects, emotional awareness, and business acumen. This trio of skills is crucial for delivering outstanding customer experience. However, finding talents who excel in all three areas is challenging, especially regarding business awareness and emotional intelligence. Developing these competencies requires a thorough approach, including training and real-world application, to prepare a well-rounded and effective workforce.
[12:03] - Effective leadership is key in steering the focus of talent beyond immediate tasks to embrace the broader organizational vision. This involves providing teams with the necessary tools and knowledge for their roles, as well as fostering a culture of engagement and continuous improvement. Leadership should recognize and develop solutions that serve both customers and employees, ensuring the integration of digital innovations benefits all stakeholders.
[16:00] - Navigating the challenge of balancing immediate needs with future planning, especially in talent management, is essential for sustained growth and innovation. Frank highlights the importance of integrating long-term strategic planning with daily operations through effective budgeting, stakeholder engagement, and management buy-in. By setting aside time to review and adjust strategies regularly, businesses can ensure they are meeting both current and future demands.
[24:25] - To foster growth and retain young talents who crave career progression, companies should offer a dynamic work environment where employees can explore various roles and responsibilities. Mapping their strengths and interests into different areas of business expansion allows businesses to create personalized growth paths. This enhances employees' skill sets across a broad spectrum and keeps them engaged and motivated.

Watch the full episode here:

Episode 253

In this episode of the Future of Field Service podcast, host Sarah Nicastro is joined by Hany Salah, Head of Services Sales at Schneider Electric, to dive into skills, approaches, and tactics in selling today’s service solutions. They also touch on storytelling, customization, and talent challenges.

Hany has over 23 years of experience, mostly in the service sector, and has been working at Schneider Electric since 2008, now leading the service sales team for North East Africa. Besides his corporate role, Hany has a parallel career in education and learning, serving as a certified instructor and consultant in project management, accredited by the Project Management Institute and the Egyptian Syndicate of Engineers.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Episode Highlights

[04:02] - Today's customer-centric sales landscape success lies in understanding and valuing the customer's journey, prioritizing their experience, and aligning our offerings to their specific needs and benefits. The key is to question and validate your assumptions about customer needs, engage deeply to understand their expectations and ensure every interaction adds value. Instead of focusing on what you offer, shift towards a consultative approach, customizing your services to address the unique challenges and desires of each customer.
[06:30] - Regarding the evolving service landscape, Hany has witnessed a transformative shift, expanding beyond traditional service roles to embrace a digital, insight-driven approach that fundamentally enhances the value proposition for customers. This change highlights the critical role of digital transformation in scaling service capabilities and enriching customer relationships through 24/7 connectivity and advanced data insights. At its core, service remains a people-centric business. However, the integration of digital tools and AI capabilities has multiplied its impact.
[13:32] - Embracing a holistic, customer-centric approach is essential in today's service delivery, moving beyond simple additions to deeply incorporating solutions across all service areas for a seamless customer experience. Personalization plays a key role in this transformation, highlighting the importance of understanding and segmenting customer personas to tailor services effectively. From addressing unique challenges faced by data center managers to meeting the expectations of facility managers, customizing your approach based on a deep understanding of each persona ensures that your services resonate with the specific needs and expectations of each customer segment.
[17:08] - Integrating storytelling with smart customization and personalization strategies allows sales professionals to create compelling value propositions that truly meet customers where they are. Keep in mind that this approach goes beyond simply presenting a product or service; it's about creating a narrative that resonates with the customer, incorporating real examples, success stories, and lessons learned to demonstrate value. Listening is the first critical step towards a customer-centric approach, ensuring that the sales narrative is more than a list of capabilities but a tailored story that reflects the customer's voice and priorities.

Watch the full podcast here:

In this episode of the Future of Field Service podcast, host Sarah Nicastro welcomes back Roy Dockery, Vice President of Field Operations at Flock Safety and author of the new book "The Art of Leading," for a discussion around the mindset and practices that lead to impactful and effective leadership.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Episode Highlights

[04:21] - Embrace love as the cornerstone of leadership for transformative outcomes. Leading with love isn't just an attractive ideal; it's a practical strategy for cultivating empathy, inclusion, and genuine care in the workplace. Contrary to traditional views that sideline love is inappropriate for professional settings, Roy argues for its power in building deeper connections and ensuring everyone feels valued and heard. In its broader sense, love empowers leaders to create environments where employees thrive.
[17:12] - Authenticity in the workplace is more than being genuine; it's about respecting and valuing your unique qualities and encouraging others to reveal their true selves, creating a ripple effect of mutual respect, understanding, and empowerment. Being authentic means sharing your interests, passions, and vulnerabilities appropriately. This fosters a culture of openness and mutual support. Leaders can kickstart this positive cycle by gradually sharing more of themselves, showing it's safe for others to do the same.
[25:20] - Embracing acceptance and authenticity is key to leadership and personal growth. It's about recognizing the power of not having all the answers but instead valuing the unique contributions of others. This mindset fosters diversity, unleashing the potential within teams by appreciating various experiences and perspectives and challenging the outdated notion that leaders must know everything. Besides, it highlights the importance of work-life harmony over balance, promoting a seamless integration of personal and professional life.
[35:15] - Creating a positive and inclusive workplace culture relies on authenticity and leadership by example. Leaders must demonstrate honesty and embrace life's demands, including family commitments, to develop an environment where employees feel valued and understood. Encouraging open communication, acknowledging the individual needs of employees, and ensuring that actions reflect the company's values are vital, as well as addressing toxic behaviors and maintaining a culture of accountability and respect.

Watch the full podcast here:

In this episode of the Future of Field Service podcast, host Sarah Nicastro draws on recent enlightening conversations to compile a list of six focus areas that leaders should be prioritizing to improve employee engagement and satisfaction in field service.

The six focus areas Sarah’s six focus areas are belonging, connection, clarity, purpose, inclusion, and appreciation. Sarah also dives into how people-first leadership transforms business outcomes.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Episode Highlights:

[00:24] - Shifting to a leadership and business ethos that genuinely values employee satisfaction as a cornerstone for customer satisfaction and overall business success is not just ideal but essential. This approach challenges outdated leadership styles by highlighting that a focus on people, through creating a supportive, engaging work environment, directly impacts financial performance positively. This concept, far from being altruistic or "fluffy," underscores the importance of transitioning from a short-term, revenue-centric mindset to one that recognizes the value of employee engagement as a critical driver of long-term business success.
[07:18] - The first three crucial elements of employee satisfaction within field service roles are belonging, connection, and clarity. Drawing inspiration from Marco Hugo Gutierrez's insights on Tetra Pak's approach to enhancing employee well-being through active listening and engagement, Sarah recognizes the unique challenges faced by frontline workers who often operate in isolation. It's essential to foster a sense of belonging by maintaining open communication and building strong relationships, ensuring employees feel an integral part of the company culture and mission. Additionally, facilitating connections with resources, leadership, and peers empowers them to contribute meaningfully and feel supported. Clarifying expectations and career progression paths also play a vital role in employee satisfaction.
[15:26] - Understanding and highlighting purpose is crucial in today's workplace, especially for younger employees who seek to understand the impact of their work on the company, customers, and the greater good, including environmental considerations. Equally important is fostering an inclusive environment where diversity of thought is valued, encouraging input from all levels, and recognizing contributions through various means, including service awards. Lastly, appreciation plays a key role in employee motivation, often surpassing material rewards. Personal gestures of gratitude, celebrating team milestones, and acknowledging individual efforts contribute significantly to a positive work environment.

Watch the full podcast here:

Sarah welcomes back Dan McClure, System Innovation Architect and Choreographer, Innovation Ecosystem, and co-author of the soon-to-be released book Do Bigger Things: A Practical Guide for Doing Powerful Innovation in a Changing World to discuss how innovation will change in the next five years and how technologies like AI are impacting the ways organizations innovate.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I am thrilled to welcome today's guest back to the Future of Field Service podcast. The guest today is Dan McClure, who is a system innovation architect and strategist or choreographer at Innovation Ecosystem. Dan was first on the podcast episode 124, of course I had to look that up, August of 2021 to talk about innovation, which is his whole area of focus and expertise. And Dan is soon to be releasing... He's co-authored a book that will be released on February 13th called Do Bigger Things: A Practical Guide for Doing Powerful Innovation in a Changing World. Dan, welcome back.

Dan McClure: Hey, it's really great to be here. Thanks.

Sarah Nicastro: It's great to have you back. I reference our first conversation to this day. And I didn't realize quite how long it's been because time flies, but there are a lot of things that I think about from that first conversation. And I'm excited to revisit some of those points, but also dig into some different things today. Before we do all of that, why don't you just give everyone a little bit more introduction to yourself? Our listenership has grown quite a bit since you were first on, so tell them anything you'd like to tell them about Dan and Innovation Ecosystem.

Dan McClure: Yeah. I am, as you've said, really an innovator, but maybe a different kind of innovator than a lot of folks think of when they bring up that word. I've never been a particularly good technologist sitting in the garage with my soldering iron trying to duplicate Palmer Lucky's experience, et cetera. I am someone who looks at the world and sees Lego blocks and then imagines how we might put those Lego blocks together in a different way. We call it an ecosystem innovation. And it's really been exciting because even since we've talked, so many of the challenges and so many of the opportunities of the world seems to be flowing this way. And so I feel like after a number of years, I've finally come into a world that really wants and needs the kinds of things that I and people like me do.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And the book obviously is talking about in a changing world. And even since 2021, the pace just continues to speed and so we have to sort out what ways we can keep up. I think every company and the leaders within those organizations that would be listening to this podcast are trying to innovate in some way. It can look different for different organizations, but no one, at least they shouldn't be in a place of complacency and very satisfied with that. Everyone is aiming to keep pace and to sort out what their role is in this changing world. I love the way you frame that. And can you talk a little bit... I know we talked about this on the first episode you were on, but I loved it. And this is one of the things that I have thought of many times since. Explain why you like the word and use the word choreographer; what that means in your universe.

Dan McClure: Yeah. I think it's helpful maybe if I could do just a quick recap of the types of innovation, like the way organizations have responded to all that change. Because I agree with you, there's almost no organization out there now saying, "Well, I'm good. Nothing's going to happen to me."

Sarah Nicastro: If they are, yeah, it's not for long. You know? Yeah.

Dan McClure: Yes. It's like nature will sort those folks out. But that doesn't mean that everybody's responding to the challenge in the same way. And the tale of the choreographer is really tied in with this shift in how people are responding. If you were mid-20th century, 1950s, '60s, a lot of the innovation was around really technical detailed work. You would sit down, do a detailed design, create a project plan, and you'd go out and build a bridge or build an airplane. And it was the kind of thing that analysts, engineers, project managers, really helped advance the craft. And so when you look at the innovation books from the '70s and '80s, they're talking about that kind of innovation.

Then you had Denning come along. And he said, "It's all well and good that you want to build a new factory, but can't you make that factory work better?" And he came up with the idea that you can incrementally improve the operation and performance of things like factories but also things like products, continually making small tweaks and changes that move them forward and makes it more efficient, it makes them more valuable. And so there was-

Sarah Nicastro: A lot of process-based?

Dan McClure: Well, it's process, but also we've seen a lot of feature-based stuff. Go out and talk to your customer and find out what new feature they want and add the feature to your mobile app or to your physical product. And so that became another layer of innovation. And it didn't invalidate the previous step, but you got this new layer.

And then 2000 comes, the whole digital web. 2007, mobile phones are launched with the iPhone. And you have this entire new digital open field for people to rush into, and so you got the idea of digital product innovation based out of Silicon Valley product managers, user experience designers. Eric Reese is the titular god of this practice where you fail fast, you have minimum viable products. And it's resulted in millions of mobile apps being out there. All of those roles of innovation are tools that leaders are adopting.

But here's the thing: The world is now getting more complex and messier challenges. When we talked about the idea of change happening faster, you said, "Everybody needs to respond to change that's happening faster." It's not just faster, it's oh my God, we're being run over by a truck kind of innovation. And it's not the sort of thing that you're going to incrementally improve yourself, it's not the sort of thing that you're going to be able to launch a mobile app for, you're going to have to really reimagine your entire organization. Or if you're dealing with something like climate change, you're going to have to imagine a big, complex solution. And therefore, you need a kind of innovation that's designed to do complex stuff, which is a really long way to get to the point that choreographers are the innovators who help you do complex stuff.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. And how would you describe what traits make choreographers uniquely able to do that?

Dan McClure: Yeah. If we imagine what complexity is about, it's about having a lot of different parts, right?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm.

Dan McClure: And hooking them together in new and original ways. Well, what kind of traits would be helpful there? You're going to be a big picture thinker. You're going to see more than just a narrow challenge. You're going to be a natural generalist. Instead of a jack of all trades and a master of none and you slinking away into the corner because you haven't been able to focus, you say you're very proud of that. I've learned all sorts of different stuff, and I can talk to you about all sorts of different things and bring them together.

And finally, there's a rebel storyteller involved with this. You're in a position where you see the big picture, you know how to bring lots of different pieces together, but a lot of folks can't do that. And therefore, you have to be the powerful storyteller that brings them along. And you've got to be willing to cross the boundaries and barriers of the status quo to help them make that change. Big picture, generalist, rebel, storyteller. You get those four things together and you can go muck about in the world.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I think that the reason I love this is I identify with those traits very much, right?

Dan McClure: Yeah, yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: But here's my question then. For folks like me that hear that and think, yes, that's me, what if you are within an organization that is maybe more traditional, maybe more accustomed to some of those earlier phases or variations of innovation you spoke through? How do you position that ability in an organization that isn't already doing it, that doesn't already get it?

Dan McClure: Yeah. Well, this is $64,000 question for choreographers.

Sarah Nicastro: And to the listeners, bless Dan because I'm completely off script, so thank you for going with me.

Dan McClure: Well, did I mention the other thing about choreographers is that we don't stay on script very well? Either as listeners or talkers. Yeah. At the grimace side of this is that you don't, and you get crushed by the jobs. In some organizations we go into and we look at them and we say, "Where are your choreographers?" And they're like, "Well, we don't have any of those. We've got project managers and we've got detailed..." And I say, "I bet you I can find them." And I go look for all the poor performing project managers. And those poor performing project managers are often choreographers in pain. That's what happens with some of them; you just basically get fit into a box that you're miserable in.

There's a second strategy, which is you go rogue. You get a little bit of space. Maybe somebody isn't paying attention to you. This is what I did on my first job is after hours, I was going off and doing choreographer stuff without necessarily any permission to do that. In some cases, you can find a sponsor for somebody to help you go rogue. You just go rogue. The challenge with being rogue is that eventually you get caught, and that means you may get pulled back into line, it may mean you get fired. There's a really cool study that was put out a number of years by Bozalan that basically said the people who are this choreographer profile as executives get fired a lot more than the other types of executives.

But the best scenario is that you actually use your storytelling skills. You use your ability to make people understand complex challenge, and you bring other people along with you. And it would be nice if they were already there, in which case you just revel in the fact that you've got a supportive environment. But oftentimes, because this is new to people, you're going to have to actually help them take the journey along with you.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think the rogue piece sounds very lonely.

Dan McClure: But it can be exciting in a rogue sort of lonely way.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. And I think what's interesting to me about this is we're talking... We've talked about how innovation has changed, and I want to talk next about how you think it will continue to change. But I do think for the people out there that are identifying with these choreographer traits, I think one thing I have found myself trying to tap into more is patience. Because I think those organizations that aren't quite there yet will have to get there. And so sometimes, I think it's biding your time while also honing your storytelling skills, right? And so I think-

Dan McClure: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: ... I don't know if an innate characteristic of a choreographer is impatience, but at least for me, I have not always been someone that's willing to play the long game, right?

Dan McClure: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: But I think to some degree, because of the fact that this isn't slowing down, it's not going to go away, companies are going to have to catch up to this need. I wouldn't suggest anyone stay miserable in a role that they're miserable in by any means, but I think part of it is waiting for the characteristics and the culture to catch up to one another. Does that make sense?

Dan McClure: Yeah, although I must admit I have that same sort of urgency, so if I'm not going to be a hypocrite, I will tell you I've never been very good at that. One thing I would observe though is since we've last talked, I've really seen a sea change in the recognition of the types of problems that organizations face and the need for this type of response. We do a lot of work with humanitarian organizations like the UN and international NGOs and things like that. And the UN was not the place where you saw a lot of pioneering, unstructured thinking, and partly because of the job they're doing; it's hard, difficult; people's lives depend on it.

A couple of months after we last talked, I was part of a UNOCHA meeting. And they had brought half a dozen big organizations from around the world to talk about their latest initiatives. And what was interesting is every one of them was suddenly talking about them as complex systems challenges. And I would've said six months before that, almost none of them would've been. There is this kind of sea change, I think, going on where organizations are realizing they need to act boldly and in big ways, and that you can't do that with the techniques and tools of the past. Yes, maybe we need to be patient, but maybe we don't need to be quite as patient as we would've before.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that makes sense. Okay, if you were to get out your crystal ball and think about... We talked about these iterations of innovation. Where do you think we're going in the next five years? What do you think is going to be the biggest themes?

Dan McClure: I guess I don't have another revolution in innovation after the one that we've already seen, partly because I think we've been filling in the spaces of different types of innovation challenges. And this ecosystem innovation where you're putting together complex stuff fills in the last block that was missing. I could certainly be wrong about that, but it's still very early days so there's-

Sarah Nicastro: Do you know what I wonder?

Dan McClure: Yeah, shoot.

Sarah Nicastro: And maybe this doesn't fit, or maybe it's a characteristic of but not the next thing. I think a lot of it is going to come down to humanity. I at least see this shift, and I think it's tied in part to what you've said, but we've innovated so fast in these product-related and then-

Dan McClure: Technical function.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. And then the digital. And it's taken us more and more and more away from humanity. And I think that we're not going to be able to undo anything that's happened. And I'm not even saying that we take focus away from it, but I think that you see in the issues companies have around hiring and retaining talent, I see at least this big wave in leadership of sort of a very old-school mentality to a much more people-centric mentality. I think from a customer perspective, you've had such focus on and demand for speed, information, simplicity. And while no one is saying those things aren't important, I think what we're starting to lack is human connection. And I wonder if there might be something to that.

Dan McClure: Yeah. Well, one of the things that's interesting, if you look back on those prior three methodologies, they have humanity in there, humanity in a very narrowly constrained kind of environment. If you're developing a digital product, you're paying attention to the user, but you're paying attention to one user with one need so you're simplifying humanity. The thing, once you start building up an ecosystem that involves people, organizations, technology, resources, and you're mixing all of those together, you're deliberately embracing all the elements of humanity. You're talking about trade-offs, motivations, rewards, ethics. And I think that's what's exciting is this next stage of innovation, it isn't either/or, it's humanity is a necessary component of what we're doing.

Sarah Nicastro: That's a good point. It's how does it all fit? Which is what makes it the ecosystem.

Dan McClure: Yeah, how do you assemble something where everybody wants to participate, everybody's doing the right kind of thing? There's no real bad results out of the whole thing. And those are complex, messy questions which you need a choreographer to help you work through.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, I get that for sure. Okay, let's then talk a little bit about how I would say 2023, the biggest buzz was AI, at least in the world that I'm existing in. And it was interesting because for me, it was met with very mixed reactions. I had service and business leaders that were full steam ahead on the possibilities, and I had ones that were saying, "I'm so sick of hearing about this." How do you see continuing advancement in technologies like AI factoring into the innovation equation?

Dan McClure: Imagine AI is a Lego block. Somebody's arrived at our door and they have a case of new Lego blocks that you can use. There's a couple of ways you could do something with that. One, you could go find an existing function, pop out that old function, and put in the new Lego block. Imagine we've got a doctor's office. We could put in an AI to help support scheduling doctor's appointments or we could put in an AI to check prescription that are being made by the doctor. This would be taking your existing ecosystem, popping out the old Lego block and putting a new Lego block. Perfectly valid.

After a while, it begins to be like, so? It's all better. Yes, it's nice, and you've got to be concerned about ethics and issues around doing that. If you're making a movie and the Lego block you're popping out is the live actor and you're putting in an AI version, that's got some more issues maybe more than just scheduling doctor's appointments. But those are pretty straightforward advances, and they don't fundamentally change the ecosystem you're working on. I would put those back in the older versions of what is innovation about?

Where I think it gets exciting for me as a choreographer is saying, "What if I take that piece of AI and I use it to reimagine the entire ecosystem so it unlocks a completely new approach?" Let me do a little imagining around what healthcare might look like. What if the AI became your doctor? The AI was constantly monitoring your Fitbit or your Apple Watch, the AI is constantly watching your environment in your house, the AI is tracking all the health data in your community, and it's also looking at your health history and matching it up to people in Phoenix who have similar health concerns. Now you have an entirely different way of prescribing and monitoring care.

And yes, you might still go to your physical doctor's office for something, but the ecosystem around this is completely different. And when you start doing something like that, then the game changes, then entirely different forms of care are available. For people who might've been left out of the care system before, the barriers of, "I can't get to a healthcare provider, I don't have the money for a healthcare provider. There's no doctors in my area," all of those things are transformed. And that's what you see with some of these big ecosystem shifts. That's where I think it's exciting is when the technology unlocks a new ecosystem.

Sarah Nicastro: Then the role of the choreographer, though, is to keep afoot in both of those worlds, right? Any company has to-

Dan McClure: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: You're not leaping from plugging out one Lego block to a whole new ecosystem, you need to be able to take the more incremental approach while looking toward but what does this mean for us in five or 10 years? And then-

Dan McClure: Yes, I'm going to challenge you there because I think, yes, you still probably should be looking at how do I swap AI at specific spots? If I'm a doctor's office, I should be making my prescription practices better, I'd say. But the time to invent a new ecosystem is almost always now. The path to get to that new ecosystem is not step-by-step change. Think about it. When the Ride-sharing concept came up, it wasn't cab companies that made the step-by-step shift up, it was somebody coming up with-

Sarah Nicastro: It was disruption.

Dan McClure: ... a new ecosystem that came in. The question is do you want somebody else to invent that new ecosystem or do you want to?

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Yeah. No, that's really interesting. Okay, let's talk about the book, Do Bigger Things. Tell us a little bit about what it's all about, but also what prompted you guys to put this out into the world?

Dan McClure: As we've already talked, there's a lot of excitement that both Jenny and I have around this idea of doing ecosystem innovations, making these disruptive new ways of doing things in the world and the choreographer roles that come along with that. The challenge we always had was people would say, "Oh, good. Tell me what book I should go read."

And what we found was there were really two problems. One, the ideas and concepts were scattered all over the place. Here's a list of forty-three books that you could go and get little pieces of this. And the other thing is it was still being held hostage by the PhD academics and the systems engineering optimization folks. Even when you did go read it, it was a little bit of modeling theory, et cetera. What we felt like was necessary and what we've seen has been true in the past is new innovation practices get adopted when the idea behind the innovation is laid out clearly, the roles are laid out clearly, and then there is a straightforward understanding of what the practice looks like. And we just didn't see that anywhere so we ate a little bit of our own dog food and did a choreographer bit around how do we present a complete picture of this ecosystem innovation practice?

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. What can people expect to find in the book? Who is it best for? And what will they be able to take away from it?

Dan McClure: We really tried to write it in a very accessible style. The book is based around stories and examples. We tell the story of choreographers doing amazing things with cataract surgeries in India and commercial innovators like Airbnb and community innovators who did amazing things during the pandemic. It's around these ideas of if you're going to understand something as complex as ecosystem innovation, you need to see some ecosystem innovations to see how that fits. That's the structure we've used.

We lay it out really basically three parts. What's the idea? Why do you need to do this? What are the people? And then what's the practice? And if you are somebody who wants to be a choreographer, this should be your handbook is our goal. If you're somebody who owns a gnarly, ugly problem or whose company is about to be run over by a bus, this shows you a path forward, and then you can go out and get your choreographer.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, very good. When we think about organizations who are today navigating change, trying to sort through what type of innovation they should be focused on, et cetera, what would you suggest they be thinking most about keeping in mind?

Dan McClure: I think all of this is rooted in understanding just how big a change you need to thrive in the years ahead. This is true whether you're trying to run a business and Amazon's going to come in and just completely disrupt your marketplace, or it's true if you're an activist and you want to do something like make a real progress on climate change or want to make real progress on inequities in the world. You need to understand that little haphazard steps forward is not going to be enough for you. I think that's the beginning part. And as a leader or somebody who's actually driving their own actions, just embracing I need to be aspiring to make a bigger impact than simply the next mobile app or a little bit better change in this or that.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I'm wondering, though, one of the challenge has to be for organizations particularly that have a long history to figure out how to have the objectivity they need to determine how big that change needs to be. I think when you are the one that's been a part of what's always worked for so long, is it possible to be objective? Or is there a practice of involving the right people to really assess what the innovation need is?

Dan McClure: Yeah, I think you need to invite some choreographers into the conversation. You're right, if your entire world has been focused on making the status quo work really well, you're going to be the kind of person who that's an important question for. And it's also you're going to have an investment deep into the status quo. One thing I think, though, that can help is changing the question, not asking, "Looking back, how much do I need to change what I've got?" But rather looking forward and asking, "What's the big new possibility here? And then how do I get there from what I've got?" And I think that makes it maybe not less scary, but certainly more exciting.

Sarah Nicastro: To me, this is the point where this conversation ties in with some of the leadership conversations that I've had recently on the podcast, because I mentioned earlier that I see this shift in more traditional approaches being replaced by a more modern approach. And there's layers to that, but I think we have leadership that has been rooted a lot in command and control, right?

Dan McClure: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: And those leaders have historically felt the responsibility of knowing what's right and knowing what needs to come next; a personal responsibility. I think this is where a modern view of leadership is important because I think more modern leaders are humbled in knowing they don't know it all, they don't need to know it all, but they need to surround themselves with diversity of thought, right?

Dan McClure: Yep.

Sarah Nicastro: Because when you can do that and when you actually can genuinely ask... You may have choreographers, like we talked about earlier, within your business that are miserable because they're just trying to do the job that you've told them to do that have a lot of these ideas, so I think part of it is just becoming more open to the idea of welcoming creativity and brainstorming and listening to what people think and not subscribing to that very outdated mentality of, "Well, if I lead this organization or this function, I should have all of the answers." I think that puts people in a position of weakness.

Dan McClure: Yeah. And I think there's kind of three steps here. If there's the top-down control, "You're going to do what I say," then the next step up, as you inferred, was you have permission to talk to me. You have permission to bring ideas, etc. For me, the most exciting organizations are the ones where we see where the organization leader is saying, "I demand that you bring big, bold ideas." And this is what we're about is big, bold ideas. And you can just feel the energy change in those organizations because when the leader stops saying, "I'm grudgingly going to let you pitch things to me," and more saying, "The future is threatening to us if we don't act boldly," and just keeps reiterating that message in everything they do, you just get a different kind of energy.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, yeah. We're talking about the organizational view. In terms of individuals, how do you recommend leaders that want to help drive innovation, how do they stay energized? How do they ensure they're effective? What advice do you have for those people? And obviously reading the book is one step, but just if you were to share a couple of those things.

Dan McClure: Well, of course the answer is read the book no matter.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, of course.

Dan McClure: Do you need to make tomato sauce? Read the book. No. I think it's really three parts here. First, it's understand the challenge and get excited about the future. I find, and I think this is true of most choreographers but I also think it's true about most leaders, being excited about what's ahead just makes all the rest of the stuff better. And if you're not living in dread but instead thinking, this is a world of huge change, and that empowers me to do something great, that just pushes you along.

The second bit, though, is you've got to make it easier to actually follow through on that vision. Now imagine if you wanted to rebuild your house and completely new floor plan. If you wanted to rebuild my house, which is this 100 year old house that I'm sitting in, you'd have to raise the whole thing, flatten it, and then build it up again. That would be traumatic. And I think that's the way a lot of folks see organizational change is we're having to take a bulldozer and just smash everything and then put the pieces back up. No wonder everybody finds that an awful experience to go through.

On the other hand, if you had a Lego house, what you could say is, "Here's the new future. We need to readjust it." Pull the Lego parts together and put them together in new ways. That becomes less painful, and it allows you to more quickly and effectively adapt to new opportunities. And so this is, I think, the organizational design part that comes along with the leadership. It's one thing to tell people you've got to change and you've got to embrace these new opportunities, but you've got to build an organization that's designed for change. And making it more like Lego blocks, for lack of a better metaphor, I think it's a big part of that.

Sarah Nicastro: What do you think makes an organization more able to change? The idea of the foundation of the house versus the Lego blocks, is it communication? What are the elements that allow that agility?

Dan McClure: I think there's just some how do you build out the pieces of the organization so that there's lines between them? Ironically, modular things have stronger lines so that you can hook them up in different ways. It might seem intuitively like you want to have infinite communication, but you really want to have ways to know how people interact and communicate with each other.

Technology can make a huge difference. I think one of the most underestimated management decisions that Amazon made was that every piece of technology they built would be able to be deployed separately in the cloud. And as a result, they built an organization whose technology was designed to do new things. And you see them doing radically new things. They enter healthcare, they enter publishing. They've entered all these new fields, and partly it's because they've got Lego blocks that allow them to do that. I think you can use your technology, you can use your organizational design, and then you've got to get managers who are on board with the idea.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. You talked about the mindset of, I guess I'm paraphrasing, but not looking at what lies ahead as overwhelming dread, but more so excitement around the possibilities. And we talked about some different aspects. Any other advice you can share on mindset or tools or practices that you think help move toward impactful change?

Dan McClure: Yeah. One of the things that came out of the last generation of innovation practices, the digital product innovation, was the useful concept that failure wasn't a catastrophe, that risk is okay. And in fact, we should be failing fast. And I think there's a lot of context where that makes sense. If you're trying out a lot of little ideas and you want to find out which one sticks, failing fast is cool because then you don't invest too much in an idea that didn't work.

If you're going to be building ecosystems, you don't get that opportunity. You don't get the chance to say, "I built out an entirely new ecosystem. Ooh, I've failed. I'm going to throw that all away." And in fact, every move you make, because now we're involving people and we're involving organizations and we're involving real decisions and choices by folks, you don't even get to test it a whole bunch of different times. You've got to test it, understand what's going on, and then adapt.

I think one of the biggest shifts that you're going to see with innovation is moving away from the idea of failing fast and just throwing out the losers to how do I learn and adapt quickly and well? And it's a different skill. Learning is still important, getting fast feedback still important, but now your response is, "How do I take this big, ungainly, messy thing that I'm building and adapt it based on that part?"

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Not throw it away, but figure out how... Yeah.

Dan McClure: Yeah, continue to morph it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yep. Yeah, that makes sense.

Dan McClure: It's more like a marriage with the future than a first date.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that's great. All right, I love this. This has been a great conversation. The book comes out February 13th, right?

Dan McClure: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: And where will everyone be able to find that and you? Let them know how they can connect if they want, et cetera.

Dan McClure: Yeah. The most obvious place... And we're trying to make this available as much as possible around the world because the work we're doing and the choreographers we engage with are really global. That's part of what makes it so exciting. Amazons and all your different Amazons around the world, we should have that available. There will be availability in bookstores, but that will be dependent on which market you're in and to what extent there's printing. I would say Amazon and those other online channels are the best place to grab things. We'll have it in digital audiobook. We've got a really cool Aussie speaking narrator for our audiobook. It's fun.

And then, yeah, if you want to reach out to us, innovationecosystem.com is the place. And just to let you know, as a preview, we're setting up a community for choreographers, which will be hosted on LinkedIn. And so that's another place you'll be able to hook up with not only us but our peers in the choreographer community.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. And when will that be happening?

Dan McClure: I don't know. We're still building the ecosystem. We're hoping in weeks kind of thing as opposed to months and months. But it's work in progress.

Sarah Nicastro: Follow Innovation Ecosystem on LinkedIn, I would imagine-

Dan McClure: Yep.

Sarah Nicastro: ... to hear more about the community. And we'll do our best to link everything in the show notes as well so people know where to go to find everything we've talked about. But thank you so much, Dan, for the wonderful insights. I appreciate it.

Dan McClure: Yeah, this is such exciting stuff and such exciting times. I really appreciate the chance to get on and ramble on about it.

Sarah Nicastro: No, it is exciting. And I think one of the things that's important and what I like about the idea of what you're doing with the community is the more you can surround yourself in content, in interactions with people who are excited about the possibility instead of nervous or threatened, it helps you feed off of that energy. And so I think the idea of the community is great, and I'm personally very excited to read the book.

Dan McClure: All right. Well, thank you very much. Have a great weekend.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. Thanks, you too. You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service Insider, which is our monthly newsletter, to make sure that you don't miss any of our articles or podcasts. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. And as always, thank you for listening. Okay.

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