Disrupt Your Career with Antoine Tirard and Claire Harbour I S2 Ep 3

On this episode, we’re pleased to speak with Antoine Tirard and Claire Harbour. 

Claire Harbour is a coach and global talent expert, the founder of Culture Pearl and a speaker, consultant, and writer about all things to do with optimizing talent across borders. 

Antoine Tirard is a talent management advisor and the founder of NexTalent. He is the former head of talent management of Novartis and LVMH. 

Antoine and Claire are thought leaders in the space of talent. Together they co-authored the book- Disrupt Your Career- How to Navigate Unchartered Career Transitions and Thrive. They are also frequent contributors to INSEAD Business School’s knowledge portal- INSEAD Knowledge, as well as other journals and publications. In addition, they also run a successful podcast, Disrupt Your Careers. 

In this episode, we discuss how the linear career path has been disrupted. Antoine and Claire offer some practical tips about how we can prepare ourselves better for the inevitable disruptions that occur throughout our career lifespan.

Recommended readings:
“Disrupt Your Career : How to Navigate Uncharted Career Transitions and Thrive”, by Antoine Tirard and Claire Harbour-Lyell, Lulu Publishing, October 2017. 

“Reinventing Yourself After a Setback” by Frédéric Godart, Claire Harbour and Antoine Tirard, Career article in INSEAD Knowledge, May 2023.

“From Adversity to Advantage: Building Careers After a Setback”, by Claire Harbour and Antoine Tirard, with Frédéric Godart, April 2023. 

“The Power of Career Conversations: How to Foster Growth and Retention in the Workplace”, by Winnie Jiang, Claire Harbour and Antoine Tirard, April 2023.

“The Hidden Power of Workers From Humble Backgrounds”, by Claire Harbour, Winnie Jiang and Antoine Tirard, Career Blog in INSEAD Knowledge, October 2022.    

Listen to the Disrupt Your Career Podcast

Connect with us on LinkedIn:

· Vanessa Iloste (Host)

· Vanessa Teo (Host)

· Aaron Wu (Producer)

Transcript

[00:00:00] Vanessa I: Welcome everyone to the next episode of Career Transition. This week we invite to our show Antoine Tirard and Claire Harbour. Antoine and Claire are thought leaders in the space of talent. Together they co authored the book Disrupt Your Career, How to Navigate Uncharted Career Transition and Thrive. They are also frequent contributors to INSEAD Business School Knowledge Portal, INSEAD Knowledge, as well as other journals and publications.

Tell me, Vanessa, what can we expect from this episode? 

[00:00:37] Vanessa T: Well, Vanessa I, I'm really excited this week because we have both Antoine and Claire who have such rich practitioner and research experience, having been through major career transitions themselves. And they're going to share more about their collaboration with prominent academics into the space of career transitions.

And what struck us, especially in this episode, was all of the useful frameworks and practical advice that they offer for both individuals and organizations. 

[00:01:07] Vanessa I: That sounds exciting. Well, we thank you for joining us and we hope that you will enjoy this new episode of The Career Transition.

[00:01:20] Vanessa T: Hi, everyone, and welcome to our new episode of Career Transitions, where your hosts, Vanessa Iloste and Vanessa Teo. 

[00:01:28] Vanessa I: Today, we are honored to have on our show Claire Harbour and Antoine Tirard. 

[00:01:33] Claire H: Thank you for having us. 

[00:01:34] Antoine T: Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. 

[00:01:37] Vanessa I: Let me introduce you to our listener.

Claire is a coach and a global talent expert, and she's the founder of Culture Pearl, and as a speaker, consultant, and writer, she is talking about all things to do with optimizing talent across borders. Antoine Tirard is a talent management advisor and the founder of Next Talent. He's the former head of Talent Management of Novartis and LVMH.

[00:02:05] Vanessa T: Antoine and Claire are thought leaders in the space of talent, and together they've co-authored the book, Disrupt Your Career, How to Navigate Uncharted Career Transitions and Thrive. And they're also frequent contributors to the Insead Business Schools knowledge portal, Insead Knowledge, as well as other journals and publications.

[00:02:27] Vanessa I: Both Claire and Antoine speak regularly at conferences on the topic of talent, leadership, and careers. And to top it all off, Antoine and Claire are also podcast hosts. They run a successful podcast called Disrupt Your Career, like their book, where they speak with those on the forefront of talent and career management to explore the most interesting and cutting edge ideas in the world of career transition and development.

Welcome to both of you to our show. It's a real pleasure having you here with us. 

[00:03:00] Vanessa T: Claire and Antoine, both of you are accomplished thought leaders in the space of leadership and career management, but you've also both had very diverse careers leading up to this point. So we're very curious to understand what are some of those significant moments in your very own career transitions.

[00:03:17] Antoine T: In my case, I have to admit following high school, I didn't know what to do with my career, except that I wanted to be a rock star. I was playing the guitar. And so after high school, after two years of wandering around and trying to be successful in a musical career, I started to think seriously about what I wanted to do.

I was lucky to get some advice from senior professionals in headhunting and HR, and they talked to me about their careers, what their work was like. And for me, it was a real aha moment. And I thought, yeah, that's what I want to do. Bringing together organizational performance with developing people. I'd like to do this.

I also liked the fact that HR required a broad set of skills, you know, psychology, law, management, communication. So I was attracted to that approach. So I did a master's degree in HR. And from there, I deliberately planned and built my career with the idea of becoming an HR leader. Now along the way, and this is like 30 years of career, I made a number of significant transitions.

I would say the first level of transitions was geographical transitions. I worked internationally in different cultural environments. My first HR assignment after university was in Casablanca in Morocco for a French car manufacturer. And I had a, an HR assignment there. There was a steep learning curve.

It really challenged me. Later on, I moved back to France, which is my home country. And then I worked in the German speaking part of Switzerland. And later on, I then relocated to the U S in Atlanta, Georgia. So, I experienced a number of geographical and cultural transitions. I would say the other levels of transitions in my career were transitioning across sectors or industries.

I worked in the cosmetics and luxury goods industry with L'Oreal and LVMH. I worked for about 10 years in healthcare and pharmaceuticals with Novartis, and I also worked in professional services. And then lastly, the big transition, which is the most recent was that I left after 20 years in a corporate world, I decided to set up my own activities and become an independent talent management consultant and leadership facilitator and executive coach.

And this was a big transition for me, not very comfortable. You need to learn to operate in very different ways on your own. You need to build on some of your former skills, but also build new skills. Now, as I reflect on this, even though I experienced many different transitions from many different perspectives, geographical sectors, and types of job, I think they are all connected to the very same purpose for me, which is to use insights, to use connections and caring to help individuals, to help teams, to help organizations realize their full potential and hopefully make a positive impact around them.

That's been my driving force and my career purpose all along those years. 

[00:06:12] Vanessa T: Excellent. Thank you, Antoine. And how about you, Claire? 

[00:06:16] Claire H: Well, certainly Antoine is, and I definitely am a poster child for disrupting careers, many faceted careers. I guess I would start by saying that I've been telling stories since I was a small child.

I started writing them down, telling them to anyone who would listen, even making up pretty outrageous fables, like how I was the daughter of Russian defectors who were a ballerina and a conductor. That definitely wasn't true. But I used to tell people it was. So that, coupled with my disproportionate sense of justice, led me to spend pretty much all of my school years gearing up to be a journalist.

Then, really late on, with this brilliant strategy, I realized that I didn't have the emotional strength to go to war zones and to see tragedies close up and daily. And I was kind of stumped, but I made what I guess was my first uncharted career transition. I thought about the experience of being a journalist, not just what a journalist does, but the whole experience and what I craved from that.

And one aspect was exploration, being far away and overseas. Using the languages I had been learning and understanding what made people tick in foreign cultures. So I found a company in a continent I hadn't yet explored, but they didn't recruit women, deeming their work a little too difficult for us poor flowers.

So I decided to change that, wrote them a letter telling them exactly why it was time for them to change, and believe it or not, they did. I became one of the first two women to join the Swire group management trainee program. So I worked in the fashion industry for them across Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Thailand.

And throughout that, what I loved most was transforming and moving people around to share ideas, skills, and information. And I also loved the independence of being given the opportunity to run companies single handed from a very early age. What I didn't love so much was the military approach to career management, which meant that there could be a next move at any time at the drop of a completely unconsultative phone call.

I had no say on where I would go next. Nor what I would be doing. It was exciting for a few years, but I could see that that would not be sustainable as a way of life forever. So then I came back to Europe, to INSEAD, to do an MBA, to learn the theory of business that I'd been kind of making up as I went along, and then I did some fairly predictable post MBA jobs, like working for LVMH, we've got a lot of that in the room, as managing director of Louis Vuitton UK, where I learned to drink vintage champagne and dress beautifully in clothes borrowed from Dior, Kenzo And then sooner or later, I inevitably drifted into strategy consulting, but I always had the people focus and the overall story of the organization in the front of my mind.

According to the founding partner of the strategy firm I worked for, there were never enough numbers in my presentations. I spent about five years producing and raising four children, which was the hardest work of my life, but by far the most rewarding. And I also found myself divorced when they were three, five, seven, and nine.

Which was not in the plan. Unfortunately, I was given no choice in the matter. So I found my way back into work via intercultural training, learning and development, and fell into coaching by accident, almost against my wishes. But this is my calling and I've been getting on for 12 years now. People, growth, collaboration, co creation, that's my jam.

So working alongside Antoine some of the time, egging each other on, together or apart, is a huge pleasure and one that I know will continue for years to come. 

[00:09:41] Vanessa I: Well, it's great to know that you have found each other and that you can actually produce these incredible pieces of research together. So one of the ways we actually came to rediscover you because I had met Antoine a couple of years ago face to face is through your article that you published recently called Re Inventing Yourself After a Setback.

This is an article you published in May this year. And we thought it was very interesting for me and Vanessa to call you because, you know, this is one of the things we have been ourselves reflecting on and researching, which is sometimes not easy, which is what, you know, people can do to help themselves to bounce back after a setback.

So one of the questions we had for you is actually based on this research. What are the thoughts and the thinking that you can share with us on the way we can reinvent ourselves after a setback? 

[00:10:36] Antoine T: Yes, we wrote this article in collaboration with Professor Frédéric Godard from INSEAD. He had written a case study about Al Gore, who, you may remember, failed to become the next U. S. president back in the year 2000. and managed to reinvent himself or reinvent his career to become one of the most prominent environmentalists. So we had that question, which was, how do you reinvent yourself? If you touch the deep bottom, how do you recover from a career defeat or a significant setback?

How do you manage to bounce back? We also interviewed a couple of individuals, Shelley and Frederick, who had experienced extreme cases of setbacks or let's say adversity in their life because both of them had a criminal record and they actually spent time in prison for... for different reasons. And we were really drawn to their case because their resilience, their ability to renew their career was just amazing.

So while these stories are extreme, we think they hold valuable lessons for those of us who are also encountering some kind of setback in terms of the insights and the takeaways from having interviewed and interacted with people like Shelley and Frederic. I think there are a number of things, and I'm not going to describe all of them, but perhaps we'll focus takeaways.

I think each of these individuals, they put structure in what they're experiencing, and they try to understand the rules of the game, so to speak. What I mean by that is they familiarize with themselves, with the institutions, the rules and the routine around them. And they try to leverage these to fight back, to fight back and overcome the setback.

And in both cases, they use the legal frameworks in their favor. Another big factor for bouncing back, I think, is influence and meaningful relations. We probably will talk more about networking and connection, but again, in both Shelley and Frederick's cases, they focus on convincing and creating coalitions with people who could support them and protect them.

They really looked for advice from mentors and advisors, people who could advocate for them. In the case of Shelley, for example, she invested significant effort in engaging and convincing those who were able to support her. Another big factor which applied to all of them is their resilience in terms of their identity and their ability to not only build on their inner strengths and motivation.

And determination, but also redefine their identity using this determination that they had, but really reframing themselves and their circumstances. And then the last one, which really I think was striking for Claire and I, is those who recover from setbacks and who can reinvent themselves, they often show a strong sense of mission.

In the case of Shelley, for example, she was really driven by her faith. And that proved a very important guiding principle for her. And just for the record, she spent time in prison and she managed to get hired by Microsoft. And now she's a very successful professional in Microsoft. Her faith really helped her to persevere.

And I mentioned, um, Al Gore, same thing, right? Al Gore was driven by a mission to save the planet. So identifying and aligning with the mission and the values that you have really helps you build your authentic leadership and ultimately succeed in reinventing yourself. 

[00:14:05] Vanessa I: Thank you for sharing. I found the model very interesting and we were very intrigued by it when we read it with Vanessa, when you published the article.

May I ask you as a follow up question, if there is one of the dimension that resonated with you personally the most? 

[00:14:21] Antoine T: I think for me, meaningful relations. If I reflect on my own career, whenever I was navigating or thriving through different changes of circumstances in life. So what has always helped me is my network, my connections.

Ranging from very close friends or mentors or even bosses to my broader network.

[00:14:41] Claire H: I would say almost certainly that as well, but I think we could also talk about culture. Understanding whatever rules and values of the place or context that you're trying to get to actually look like, feel like, and demand of you if you're going to play the game by those rules.

If you want to reinvent yourself, whether you're moving from Google to Facebook or whether you're moving from prison to Microsoft, you need to understand what's going to make you be accepted. And usually that is learning to play by the local rules, the way people do things around here. And that is utterly crucial.

[00:15:17] Vanessa I: Thank you for sharing. Actually, it resonates with me as well. Even if I had lived in Hong Kong for many years, when I moved to Singapore, I also had to understand, you know, the inner working of society here and try to find my way inside it. So. It's not rocket science and, and there is nothing I think that is manipulative in the way I have read the way the culture works here, but I've actually spent time to study it and Vanessa helped me a lot in understanding sometimes some of my mistakes.

So you know, it's true that the more you learn about. the rules of the land, the way things happen, the things work. And you put some humility in there and say, okay, let me get the guidance of my good friend Vanessa in this and let me ask her. I feel I've made a mistake. It's actually something very powerful.

So thank you for sharing about that. 

[00:16:07] Claire H: What resonated with me in your article was also the piece about networks and relationships. So both of you mentioned that. And we've, through the different episodes that we've interviewed other guests as well, this piece about having a good network and really relying on your relationships, whether in or outside of work, has also come through in many of the, the interviews that we've done.

So thank you. That resonated with me personally as well. Now, in recent times, we've also witnessed some of the volatility of the world's political and economic situations. And, you know, in many cases, there have been quite a few organizations who've also gone through reorganization and, and in many cases also resulted in restructures and redundancies as a result.

Now, this is, of course, one of those setbacks that occur in someone's career, and we're just wondering if the two of you have any practical advice that you can offer to individuals in situations like this. Definitely. And of course, much of it is going to closely resemble what we've just been talking about in the extreme reinvention.

But what we would start by saying is that you need to step back a little bit and be prepared all the time. This is really, really important. You never actually know when your career is going to be disrupted, and it will be. There are so many ways this might happen, and you can either choose to just close your eyes and pretend it won't happen to you, or you can build and maintain agility and resilience so that when it does, not if it does, you're ready.

In fact, we're busy working at the moment on a new article about what happened to those who've been affected by the current massive tech layoffs over the last year or so. We're learning that those who do best were prepared already. They continuously spent time reflecting on their career. They identified different options and scenarios for what their next version of work life after Google, Meta, Amazon, whatever might be, and even experimented with some of these options.

For example, they were already involved as side gigs or pro bono work in other things like startups or board memberships. And so on and there's a huge similarity with the qualities and behaviors needed for the subjects in the reinvention article, but let's talk more about how emotional management and resilience can support this kind of reinvention.

Cause this is also a reinvention. Whether you're moving on to a similar role elsewhere in that different culture. Or making a more radical change. The importance and need to manage anger, because you will feel angry when you're first reorganized out. To manage that anger while during that state of adversity and turning it into a positive energy to help rebuild a future life is absolutely crucial.

This is similar to those stages of grief cycle that many of you will be familiar with. There's also the fact that however old you feel as a horse, you can learn new tricks. Old horses can learn new tricks and however long you've been there, however great your experience, however much you were perhaps expecting to spend the rest of your life at that company you were organized out of.

It is possible to find new ways to behave, despite the struggle that that might require, and a huge key to identifying and developing these new tricks is the creation of that disciplined, mindful lifestyle of study, chronicling, and reinvention from the very outset. And brand new personas can be created, whatever the past.

It's neither easy nor watertight, new approaches and behaviors, new social connections and circles. Renewed faith or courage and different convictions and belief can shape who we are to a huge extent without losing who our authentic selves are. Now, it's also not only possible, but desirable to build a narrative about whatever happened in the layoff and turn the negatives into something that you might be willing to share because they're not necessarily about you.

And even if they are, turn them into something useful to show your learning and make them useful for others. And because we never forget this, networking is always the answer, however much you think you might hate it. And even if it feels uncomfortable, as may well be the case, to admit that you've been laid off, being creative with new sources of ideas and energy can be critical.

And let me just say, once again, this is something that's going to happen. It's not a question of if, but when. So be prepared at all times to have this kind of thinking. 

[00:20:31] Vanessa T: I like what you talk about being prepared, building that level of resilience. And I think some of your tips are really practical. Now, let me build on one of the points that you just talked about, and that's experimenting.

You talked about one of those things about exploring different things and experimenting. Can you build a little bit more on that? You know, in the busy world that everyone's in, and we are just very busy getting the work done, and that's already busy enough. How do you create space to experiment and to explore some of those passions that you may not even be aware of or haven't spent enough time on?

[00:21:08] Claire H: It's a great question. Making time, you know, if, if we all had the absolute answer to that, then, you know, there would be 30 hours in the day, not 24. But it's often a question simply of being thoughtful and mindful of what's going on around you. Sometimes it's a question simply of spotting that there's a project going on over there in your company that you weren't necessarily involved with or invited into, but to which you might be able to contribute.

It might stretch your skills. It might develop a theme or an area of interest into something more than just something that you look at from a distance. And so being open minded, actively looking around, you know, the image that's coming to mind is, you know, the little animal that sticks its head up out of the ground and is looking round for more than just what's straight ahead.

And it doesn't have to be big. It could be, you know, an hour a week. It could be half an hour every two months, but just going beyond what you normally do and testing it, trying, do I like it? Did I enjoy it? Did I find it fulfilling? Did it put me into a state of flow? There are so many different ways to think about how you align your values with what you do.

[00:22:22] Antoine T: I mean, one example, we interviewed a lot of people who moved from corporate life, you know, business life to NGOs or nonprofit organizations. First of all, they explore that and they get a sense that it's really what they want to do in their work life. And so quite naturally, they end up talking to people who are working in NGOs. And then, like Claire said, you find the time to experiment with that.

So maybe you enroll into voluntary work a few hours a week, and that's how you get that experience, which reinforces your conviction that that's the next move you want to do. So indeed, time is limited. But there are many ways you can do this experimentation and that's really what works the best for navigating a transition.

[00:23:08] Vanessa I: So the transition to NGO is one of the chapters of your book that we have both read and we found it extremely interesting. So as we explained, the name of the book is Disrupt Your Career and it discusses about all kinds of career transitions including the one to NGO. You describe careers as uncharted transition and you talk about the way the world is today and you remind us that the simple, predictable, linear career is dead.

And one of the things we really appreciated is the fact that the book offers a simple, easy to use framework. You call the framework career transition navigator. And I found it personally very interesting to reflect on in my previous career transition. And I was thinking, you know, in order for all of us to benefit from this incredible framework, it would be great if you could share with us about the essence of it, if you can.

[00:24:02] Claire H: So the first thing to think about in your head as you're listening to this is a wheel with four segments. It's turning around and the segments are explore, which we've talked about a little bit, experiment, engage, and expand. And just very briefly, let's define what those segments mean. So exploring gives you the opportunity to reflect on who you are, to think about why and what you want to change, and to consider your career options.

The goal of experimenting is to try out these new things we've just been talking about, to build new connections that might help you in those directions, and constantly to be reframing and zeroing in on your search. Engaging will help you to find and launch yourself into your new role, whatever it might be.

To unlearn old skill sets and learn new ones appropriate to that new future culture and way things are done. And the last step expanding will allow you to deliver and thrive in your new role, to consolidate and expand your capabilities and to continue to reflect on your continuing career journey.

You're always on this wheel somewhere, and sometimes you're in more than one segment at a time, and becoming conscious of that is really crucial. What might influence your career transition is going to include aspects of yourself and of your environment. For yourself, it could be anything from your age and gender or financial needs and considerations towards your values, interests, and aspirations.

And for your environment, this runs from your family, your social circle, and your professional connections, and how you interact with and are influenced by them, and the change that you decide to make may be triggered by all kinds of things. Such as a life or professional events, often serendipity or some kind of epiphany or aha moment.

And Antoine will talk about the success factors and change outcomes in just a moment. 

[00:25:50] Antoine T: Yeah, Claire just described the four Es as we call them, but what we found talking to hundreds of career changes is those who do it best are those who have these muscles or attributes, which we call the career agility factors.

So, over time, they build that ability to go through several changes in their careers. And so even though there's a four step process to go through the change, we think it's very important to build these muscles, if you will. And we build this from a model initially by Mark Savickas, who had identified some of these factors and we complemented it.

And we call these the six Cs, six personal factors, which can really smooth the process of career change. And the good news is you may have strengths in some of them, but you can always build and expand those skills. So these six Cs, first is commitment. And the key question here is to what extent are you dedicated to the process of managing your career?

Oftentimes when we speak to people, they don't take ownership of their careers. And I think in the old days, companies were taking care of it. They would decide what you would do next. Individuals were going through the motion and through the advice of whoever, their boss or HR, the question is, are you really managing your career and take action?

Which leads to the second C, which is control, which is the extent to which you feel that you are in charge. The third one is curiosity. The question here is, to what extent do you enjoy exploring the world of work? I mean, Vanessa, you were saying earlier, the world of work is changing. The rules of the games are very different when it comes to the ways we work.

Are you curious about that? How do you learn about new roles, new responsibilities, new requirements? I mean, we talk about AI and the impact of AI on jobs. Are you interested in understanding that? The fourth factor is change agility. It's simply your ability to be, even though you might be uncomfortable with a new environment, yet you're going to learn about it and you're going to value new perspective and ultimately adapt.

The fifth one is connection. We talked about it already. It's all about your network, both building or leveraging your current network, but also building new connections day in, day out, not only during conventions or meetings. And the sixth one is confidence. Do you have faith in your ability to make and carry out wise career decisions?

So if you build these six muscles, we believe you have the ability to navigate through many different changes over time and ultimately, you know, find a fulfilling work life. 

[00:28:35] Vanessa I: Among the 6 Cs, I was curious because I felt like this was a very interesting model to reflect on. I mean, for me and Vanessa T, we take care of a lot of transition every year and we could use actually this filter as an analysis, you know, to see what is going well, what is not going well, how we can help people to be more aware of one of the dimension.

When you look at all the examples, because as you said, I mean, one of the things that impressed me in the book is the number of examples and real life examples you have been through. Which one of the dimension was the one that maybe surprised you the most in terms of you knew about it, but you didn't think it was that important or you knew about it, but it reminded you how important it is.

Is there one of the 6 Cs that really made you reflect or made you realize the importance of having it or not having it? 

[00:29:27] Claire H: I suspect that the most crucial one is curiosity, because if you bring curiosity to any of the others, if you bring curiosity to life. You're always going to be in a mode of discovering new ways, new thinking, new ideas.

So then, you know, if you're curious about how you become committed to managing your career, you'll find ways. If you're curious about networking, guess what? You'll meet more new people. So I think curiosity does become the umbrella. It's great that you asked that because I'm not sure we ever thought about that.

in this particular way, but thank you. The meaning of life is curiosity. 

[00:30:04] Antoine T: And I would agree with Claire. Curiosity is definitely a key contributor. I would say for me, it's also, and it's very much linked change agility. I have a particular person in mind, Subhanu, who we interviewed a couple of times. He's a great model for both curiosity and change agility in the sense that throughout his career, he was able to agree to be thrown in the unknown in quite adverse situations and still have an open mind and show a strong desire to learn new things and adapt. So, yeah, I think these are the sort of, uh, superpowers or super factors among this model. 

[00:30:41] Vanessa I: Yeah. Thank you for sharing because the two of us, we have still young kids and we are also thinking, you know, of the way to prepare them for the future.

And when you think about the 6 Cs, there is also the mission we have in terms of education, whether it's young people who work with us, our team worker that we are mentoring or coaching or also our children that we are supposed to educate in the right way. So it's an important question that comes, I think, to the, to the two of us very often.

[00:31:11] Antoine T: And for the listeners who are interested, just bear in mind that we have a little question there where you can go very simple. It only takes a few minutes and you can self evaluate against the six Cs. 

[00:31:22] Vanessa I: That's very useful. 

[00:31:24] Vanessa T: Yeah. Great. Well, the six Cs really resonate with me as we think about the employees who we are often speaking with and helping them through some of these career transitions.

I think it's, it's very valuable in a really quick way for us as well as HR professionals to be able to help to assess. So, Antoine and Claire, let's pivot a little bit and let's speak about the organization. In this world where we are frequently disrupted by whether it's business or economic situations that end up with various changes that we need to make as organizations, what are some ways that organizations can do to better equip and develop our people such that career transitions can come more smoothly?

I'm so glad you asked. Well, we would start by making the fairly bold statement that it is time for a new edition of the playbook on career management from organizations. We could talk about this all day, but we haven't got all day. So we're going to give just a few pointers, some things that anybody listening, assuming they will work with at least one other person could start towards tomorrow.

So here's a list first of all, and then I'm going to pick one of them to talk about a bit more. Antoine will do the same. Expand your view of the talent pool, understand and value career changes, core capabilities, tap neglected sources of talent and craft messages that appeal to them. Customize and contextualize your career management, create a flexible work environment to accommodate employees, life changes, provide disruptive experiences to your own talent and absolutely crucial enabled frequent high quality career discussions.

Now, I'm going to talk about expanding your view of the talent pool, and Antoine's going to go on to talk about disruptive experiences. So looking beyond traditional angles, avoiding just cloning the last person who did the job and using diversity strategically to truly harness the experience, culture, and perspective of everyone will result in enhanced value.

That's for sure. But what might some of these alternative talent pools look like? Well, they include pretty much everyone who might be ending up making a radical career change. Whether that's former athletes, such as the program that EY runs or SNCF to bring in athletes after their career is over or even during it, military veterans, such as those being brought in by Amazon or Starbucks.

Those returning to work after a long break, for whom there are programs at firms like Goldman Sachs or PayPal. And indeed, even those who are boomeranging back to an organization they've already worked in. The big consulting firms are really fond of this resource and work very hard to encourage it. 

[00:34:10] Antoine T: Yeah, I think some organizations are quite good at creating and providing disruptive experiences within their own organizations.

As opposed to, you know, recruiting clones and looking for people who tick all the boxes, they understand that that diversity of experiences build strengths and develop talent. So we found some companies are pretty good at that. Just to share a few examples, a company like GSK, they have their house program where basically some employees can do volunteer work in partnership with NGOs.

So they would go for six months. They may work in finance or marketing or public affairs. They'll spend six months for an NGO that's part of the network of the company, and they'll share their experience, but they also will experience very different things. And when they come back to the company, they have a completely new, different perspective, oftentimes very much connected to dealing with patient or dealing with, you know, advocacy or other challenges within an industry.

A number of companies are doing that. You can also assign a talented employee to a startup with which you have some investment perhaps, or some stakes. So we think there's a way to balance the sort of, you know, loyalty in the company and build a career within the company, but at the same time provide some different experiences to broaden the skill set.

[00:35:36] Vanessa I: Well, thank you so much Antoine and Claire for sharing all this learning, all this knowledge. I mean, I feel very privileged to talk to you today. And I think that the research and the teaching you have both done has certainly advanced the way many leaders and organizations are thinking about career transition there.

We are very grateful for coming and we are looking forward to following your podcast series too. 

[00:36:00] Antoine T: Thanks for having us and congratulations and well done on launching your podcast career transition. It certainly resonates a lot with what Claire and I are working on and we feel very grateful for having been invited to your show.

[00:36:13] Claire H: I would echo absolutely what Antoine says. It's lovely to be with you at the beginning or close to the beginning of your podcasting journey. We wish you all the best with it. It's an incredibly gratifying and fun thing to do. whatever the role you play. So thank you for having us along and allowing us to play with you for a little while.

[00:36:32] Vanessa T: Well, thank you both so much. I have learned so much from you today, both about your research as well as some of your very, very practical advice that you have for both organizations as well as individuals in terms of how you can go about disrupting your career. And doing something different. So for those of you who are inspired to pick up a copy of Antoine and Claire's book, Disrupt Your Career, or to read their contributions to INSEAD Knowledge, or to listen to their podcast, we will be posting the links in our show notes.

So thank you both so much for joining us today. And thank you to all of our listeners also for joining us today. Have a wonderful day.