Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:02:16: The perfect storm around people and progression

00:05:33: Why it's easier to leave than to progress internally

00:08:25: Principles and ideas for actions…

00:08:59: … 1: career conversations

00:13:49: Idea for action

00:16:37: … 2: measure on people potential, not team performance

00:18:15: An approach to try

00:19:38: … 3: make career experiments easy

00:21:54: Ideas for experiments…

00:21:56: … Squiggly Career safari

00:24:58: … borrowing brilliance

00:27:57: … skills marketplaces

00:32:23: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper: And I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, where every week we talk about a different topic to do with work, and we share practical ideas for action and tools to try out that we just hope will help you to navigate your Squiggly Career with that little bit more confidence, clarity and control.  And today, we're going to be talking about how you can help people to Squiggle and Stay, so Squiggly in the title; very on brand!

Helen Tupper: And, it is also part of our most recent article for Harvard Business Review, which is super-super-exciting.  Getting our work into Harvard Business Review really matters to us, because I think it is something that we have read for a long time and we really respect, and it helps us to reach more people with Squiggly.  Also, this idea of squiggling and staying is such an important point for people's progression, and we'll come on to talk about that much more.

So, as an episode, this thing around how you can help people to Squiggle and Stay is really designed to help managers, leaders and sponsors support the changes that we need in organisations to help people develop in different directions.  But don't worry if you think, "Oh no, but I'm not a manager or a leader or a sponsor", that doesn't matter, because there's loads of ideas in the episode that you could maybe talk to some of those people about, or talk about them within your team.  But we do recognise that those people do have some of the biggest influence to make some of these changes happen, and that's why we really directed it towards them to really spark the change. Also, we want to just point out we have not got all the answers here; we have not got all the answers.  Can you imagine?

Sarah Ellis: Spoiler alert!

Helen Tupper: We have every answer to solve the issues that organisations are facing!  No, we don't.  It's an area we're actively working on, it's something that we are really, really passionate about, we think it's a big part that Squiggly can play in helping people to develop.  But if you have ideas that are sparked by this episode, if there are some great insights based on what is already going on in your organisation, or if you've got any feedback on what we share, please do get in touch, because we really want to learn with you and from you so that we can make these changes happen.  And ultimately, it supports our mission of making careers better for everybody.  

So, email us if you've got thoughts.  It is just helen&sarah@squigglycareers.com.

Sarah Ellis: So, why are we focusing on this right now?  Well, we've recognised that there does feel like there's a bit of a perfect storm around people and progression at the moment, and it's not new news that given the last couple of years, most people have reflected on, and in some ways reconsidered, the role of work in their lives.  So, about 65% of people apparently, at the moment, are maybe rethinking or reconsidering in some way the work that they do.  And we know that progression has always been a really important motivating factor for people.  We all want to feel like we're growing and we've got really positive momentum in our careers.

So, when we are thinking about how to progress and where to progress, only around a third of people are open to looking internally to find or form that solution.  So essentially, we are much more likely to look outside our current organisations than we are to look in our organisations, when we're thinking about how we progress. On top of that, as we did describe, it was a perfect storm as promised, people are also leaving faster and it takes longer to replace those people; so the worst-case scenario I guess for organisations, in that when people are making that decision to maybe do something different, or want to develop in a different direction, they're maybe not waiting it out as long as we might have done previously.  Perhaps because we have had so much change and uncertainty, there's been a spike in that over the past couple of years, it almost encourages us to get a bit more comfortable with that, so maybe we're more likely to take those leaps. Then maybe, it takes longer to replace someone, because everyone is moving and doing lots of different things, and it always takes quite a long time, I think, to get a new person, and people have to work out notices and all those kinds of things.  So, the pace of turnover is increasing, and it takes around 18% longer to fill roles than pre-pandemic, which I think it quite a significant increase.

Helen Tupper: It's quite scary, I think, for organisations.  I think those statistics, we have collated from a few different sources, and all the sources are in the HBR article, so you'll be able to find them there if you do want to evidence this internally.  But I think it's the combination of those stats that make that so significant.  I don't think we've ever been in this situation before, where so many people are looking to leave, where most of that leaving is looking at that being external, and that it's taking so much longer to find people to replace it. I think it's a really, really big risk for organisations, which from our perspective, I guess the opportunity is organisations can't risk not thinking about how they retain and develop people, because the organisations that do this well can hopefully buck the trend, but the organisations that ignore it, they're going to lose their best people. 

They're going to lose lots of the people listening to this podcast, and that is not want we want.  Also, I think when we're thinking about, "Why are people looking to leave first; why is that something?" a lot of what the research says is that people find it easier, and I have been in this situation, I definitely have found it easier at times, when progression was a priority for me, to leave an organisation to get to where I wanted to go. There's another HBR article, which we'll link to, which really unpicks the reasons why people find it easier to leave, rather than to look internally for those opportunities for progression, and they summarise it as first of all, awareness, so a lot of people find it hard to see what is available to them in a company, maybe it's not advertised on the intranet, for example; it's hard to know outside of maybe your immediate department what else there is.

The second is access; it just feels like a hurdle too far for people to go through.  They've got to have certain things in performance ratings, a lot of process at points in time in the year; and progression isn't like that.  If you want to progress, it's a need you have now, not necessarily something you've got to wait for until you've ticked every box and the right month of the year comes around. The third thing is around support.  So, a lot of people find leaving easier, because the support they've got within their current company isn't enabling them to develop in the direction they want to, and that can be because some managers can be a bit territorial about talent, so they're like, "I want this team to do really well and you're a big part of that team doing well, so it's important for me that you stay within this team".  So, it can be with best intent, but for that individual who wants to develop in a different direction, it can feel quite restrictive for them. Also, they might not feel like their manager is encouraging them to do something different.  So, they might want to do a sideways move, but because their manager has maybe never done that, they might not either be able to support them confidently, because they're not sure how to do it; or, they might not be getting the positive support, so they might be getting a bit of judgement like, "That's too hard a move for you to make", or something like that, and it's these awareness, access and support factors that are making people just go, "Do you know what, it's easier to look somewhere else and leave".

Sarah Ellis: I think one of the really big motivators for organisations to do this really well, of course to keep people and you want to do that, but also it really helps to frame progression as much more than promotion.  So, we've talked before about letting go of the ladder and some of these Squiggly swaps that we are trying to encourage within organisations, in terms of the words that we use, the conversations that we have, and just the framing around careers. I think, when we think about Squiggle and Stay, and when we talk about some of the examples shortly, where organisations do this really well, I think it just opens up everybody's eyes to, "Progression is just so much more than promotion.  Of course, it can bring promotion, but there are 15, 16, 17 other ways that I can also progress and grow in my careers".  I do feel like when this is done well, everybody wins. 

You win as an individual if you get to Squiggle and Stay, and your organisation and your managers and leaders can win as well. So, I think we want to start from this positive point of view that this is good for everyone involved.  It's not, "This is better for one party than another", I think it's, "It's brilliant for everyone", but it does require quite a few shifts, both in terms of mindset and skillset, I think, to make this happen.  So, let's move onto that.  So, what can you do if you are a manager and a leader now, and you really recognise what we've been talking about; and also, for every manager and leader listening, also you're probably recognising that you also want to progress and develop?  So, we're all playing lots of roles all at the same time. The first Squiggle and Stay principle, and for each of these we've got principles and then ideas for action, so this first principle is about focusing career conversations on progression and not promotion, so probably no surprise there, based on what I was just talking about. 

The reason I always think this is such, hopefully, a relevant and useful place to start, is that I really hope in most organisations, career conversations are already happening. This is not about doing something new, or finding new time, or you know when you think, "That's one more thing that I've got to make time for in my week", which always feels hard to do; what I'm encouraged by is I think sometimes this is about making small changes to the focus of these career conversations that can actually have a really big difference in terms of people feeling like they've got the ability to keep progressing and growing, and to make that Squiggle and Stay happen. The sorts of questions that I think can be good to have as part of these career conversations might be, what motivates you most about the work that you do today?  What are the talents you want to build a reputation for?  What career possibilities would you like to learn more about?  What we're really trying to do here, so if you're in a manager or in a leader position having these career conversations, is you're giving people explicit permission to explore progression and possibilities outside of your team, or outside of your department, and I think don't underestimate how important that permission can be. We hope that that might not be needed, but for a lot of people, they would still be worried about, "But if Helen is my manager and I work in marketing and I talk to Helen about, 'I quite fancy going to work in sales [or] in corporate responsibility [or] in procurement', does that mean that then Helen will think I'm not committed to my job today?  Is she going to judge me negatively?  Is that going to impact my end-of-year review?"  We have all these fears of judgement that I think might come our way, and we're also trying to create a bit of safety and security for ourselves in our jobs. So, these very open conversations are often not our starting point for career conversations.  So, I think managers and leaders have such a good opportunity to unlock some of these areas for discussion, rather than feeling like career conversations are more about, I remember having these conversations like, "Well, what's your next step?" almost like straight, "How are you going to get promoted?" or, "What do I need to do to get promoted?" and they are very single-minded and the opposite of a curious conversation.

Helen Tupper: I think as well, an organisation could create career conversation menus, which could be shared across managers.  We've given three questions there, which are I think a really useful place to get started and will create that space for a Squiggly conversation to happen, but there are more than three; and actually, I think managers could learn a lot from each other if they co-created that career conversation menu.  That would probably be a really positive way of focusing on these discussions and recognising that people might be doing things differently and learning from each other in a really open way, rather than feeling like, "I'm doing a bad job and I'm getting it wrong". Actually it's just, "This is a question that really unlocks someone's thinking; this is a question that took our conversation down a really curious path", and then people putting those forward and creating their own little conversation menu, because it can feel hard.  It's when, I think, a manager doesn't quite know what question to ask that you fall back to the ones that feel most familiar, which is like, "What role do you want to do next?" or, "Where do you see yourself in five years' time?" and those sorts of questions are just quite fixing for people.

Sarah Ellis: And in our workshops actually, we've done some of this crowdsourcing, where we sometimes ask managers and leaders, "What are some of the most useful coaching approach questions you've asked in a career conversation?" and we give people a big of time to just go away and think about those.  Everyone comes back and shares them, and there are such good questions there, but almost what makes them even better is the fact that you've had five or six groups of five people all doing that same exercise, and then everyone comes back with, of course there'll be those that have things in common, but there's always a few that are slightly different, or that you wouldn't have thought of. So, don't underestimate the manager and leadership community that you've got to be able to create those career conversation menus, because I think that can also be a really helpful starting point, where I do think sometimes you're having a career conversation, you'll have been doing very different things in your day; so, you might have just come out of a project meeting, or a steering group, or whatever it may be, probably something quite different to a career conversation. 

Then, you're trying to switch your focus into quite a different mode.  So, maybe just having these things is a good shortcut to get you started, and then see where the conversation takes you. A specific idea for action just to build on these career conversations, is this idea of creating connections.  So, managers play a really important part in prompting employees to then go off and have other curious career conversations.  So, we don't want someone's development to be dependent on one person, ie you.  We want to encourage people to go off and explore and have lots of informal chats, and get a window into other people's worlds. 

So, this is partly about prompting and giving permission, but also about creating those connections and making those introductions, because typically managers and leaders will usually have a wider range of relationships across an organisation. You probably know people that your team don't know, or you might work with other parts of the organisation that are just unfamiliar; and again, the power of a direct introduction to make something happen, I was reflecting on this even in our world, where we're not in a big organisation anymore, but I still have people that I've worked for and worked with who make these direct introductions for me, basically as if they were still my boss, which I really appreciate!  But you know that sense of, I think it holds you to account a bit, to go off and have these conversations. I'm always very mindful of, whenever someone's made an introduction, I will always then try and follow up quite quickly, I look forward to those conversations, I always learn something new, but I suppose, as a manager there, what you've been is a really helpful catalyst for a new connection. 

It probably is just first of all, recognising that you have those connections and appreciating that they're really helpful; and it's that small task of just writing a quick introduction and saying, "Oh, Helen, I think it would be really helpful if you went and had a chat with Tom who works in this area.  Do you know what, I'll just write that two-minute email to connect you together", and then you very much leave it to the individual, because you're not trying to spoon-feed people, and we want individuals to take ownership and accountability for their own careers.  But you're just being really supportive and I think facilitating that process to happen. Because you're actively given people nice nudges, you know, nudge theory.  I think making an introduction and asking these kinds of questions in career conversations, are nice, useful nudges to support people to Squiggle and Stay to get that process under way and help people shift that mindset as well of ladderlike to Squiggly Career thinking.

Helen Tupper: So I guess the question for people to reflect on is, "What connections are you creating?" and maybe just spend a bit of time thinking about who, what, when, to see what you might want to improve on.  Our second Squiggle and Stay principle is about measuring managers on people potential, not team performance.

Sarah Ellis: Controversial!

Helen Tupper: Yes, it is quite controversial!  So, I guess the context for this is, it goes back to that talent-hoarding thing that I mentioned earlier, which is that most managers and departments actually, the metrics they're measured on are all about team performance or department performance.  So, for a manager to do well, for a team to do well, you need to optimise the people in those roles.  So, the idea of letting your best people go so they can grow their career in a different place, or having somebody who might not be brilliant on day one come and do a secondment in a team, or something, that actually is a bit counterintuitive when we're trying to have the best people doing the jobs that they're best at today; because, that is what drives the highest performance. But it's quite a short-term mentality, because the result of that is, those people that are the highest performers, who are probably most likely to want to progress, are being constrained in terms of their career, and therefore they are most likely to be looking to leave.  So, it's a real false way of working, but you can see how it's happening, because the metrics for a lot of managers are designed to want them to keep their best people in the team, not to give them away to help them grow and help the organisation retain people.  It's a bit more individually-centric, rather than the whole organisation and the whole people and pool of talent within the organisation. So, what we think could be approached here, and I think this is probably the most contentious one of all the areas actually --

Sarah Ellis: I like the way you're saying this!

Helen Tupper: What we could, should, I don't know where to go with it, but we think it would be useful to try this out; it's developing a new set of metrics which are all around mobility.  Yes, there probably will be some team performance metrics that are important, but we think there could be some new mobility metrics.  These could cover the number of career experiments people have had, their development of skills within the team; we know organisations, they always have skill dashboards, and so they're looking on the skills that the organisation needs the most of, not just the team.  They look at the strength of those skills within the team.  So, there's lots of different things that you can do. Also, another one would be the amount of roles in the team that have been filled internally, rather than with external people coming into the team.  But three specific ones that we call out in the Harvard Business Review article, that we think could go on some kind of mobility metric dashboard, would be, employee-rated quality of career conversations, so that's a really important thing for managers to have feedback on; the second is the number of completed career experiments, and Sarah's going to talk a little bit more about career experiments in a second; and the third one will be that one that I mentioned about the percentage of roles within a team or a department that have been filled by internal talent.

Sarah Ellis: So, our Squiggle and Stay principle three is about making career experiments easy.  So, one of the things, back to where we started today, in terms of what gets in the way, why is this hard, is this point about access.  Often, developing in different directions within an organisation feels like a really hard thing to do; there's loads of process, performance hurdles; maybe there's not many people who've done that before, so it can feel like a really big deal, and quite a big risk.  I think it's useful to put yourself in someone's shoes who is developing in a different direction, and maybe you've done it; maybe you're listening to this and you've done that, so you know what this feels like. I've done this and I know what this feels like, and you are often leaving behind maybe the expertise that you've got, the relationships that you've built.  You don't know whether you're going to be good in that team, or whether you will find your fit.  So, it almost just often feels risker, and somehow it often feels riskier within an organisation than it does somehow than feeling like, if you go to somewhere new, maybe it feels a bit more like, "Oh well, I can start from scratch", and you know almost you've got no baggage, you don't take anything with you? But I do remember moving from marketing to corporate responsibility; that was moving out of marketing, it felt like a really big deal for me, that's where I'd spent lots of my career, into this whole new area, and I was making that full-on leap.  It was relatively unusual, and there weren't many people around me who I could see had parachuted into a new place and a new space. 

I think if we can make these career experiments just a bit easier to have a go at, and also we see lots more examples of people doing them across organisations, it will just free up the flow of people. I love some of these ideas, and this is probably -- obviously, career conversations and the metrics we know will really matter, and I think they are probably most connected to what's already in organisations.  But I've been sharing these quite a lot, these experiment ideas, quite a bit over the last few weeks and people are getting really excited about them; I think probably because, a bit like me, I go through these and think, "I'd like to do that". 

So see, if you listen to this, whether that's how they make you feel.  We'd love to know your feedback and also, as always, we'd love to know any other ideas you've got as well. So, three ideas for experiments.  The first one is the Squiggly Career safari.  The way that this could work, and you could design this within your organisation, however works best for you, is that employees are given two weeks' holiday from their day jobs to go and explore other parts of an organisation.  So, they just go on a bit of a career safari, and maybe you're just spending time with a team for two weeks, but you're all in, and it is an official holiday away from your day-to-day. When I first shared this the other week with people, everyone was like, "I would have loved this".  People were asking me, "How many weeks' holiday do you think we can get allocated?", because I think people are so used to this idea of holiday anyway, it's like, "How many days would I be entitled to?"  So, everyone was getting very onboard with this, and already starting to amend and adapt the idea.  I think it's because it's quite low-key, it's relatively easy to do, hopefully something you could offer to everybody, it's quite a universal idea. Then, the idea of someone coming to your team for a holiday for two weeks, you'll get a new connection, you'll get to learn from someone in a different part of the organisation; I think it already feels like it has this added benefit of, it encourages people to just understand the business that they are part of even better.  So, even if you go into that team for two weeks and then you realise, "Okay, well that wouldn't be quite right for me", you've probably got some new connections, you've probably learnt something new, and you will take that back to the job you were doing before.  And it just feels like one of those things you could make happen without too much process, or it needing to feel too formal.  What do you reckon, Helen; would you like to have a go?  Not now, obviously, don't leave me!  But in theory, could you imagine doing a Squiggly Career safari?

Helen Tupper: I would.  I mean, it does make me think of a few questions, which you could imagine people listening are, "But how would this work?  What would you do about that?"  I think if you do a Squiggly Career safari expecting it to go perfectly for everyone the first time, it might not do; but the idea that, "What questions have you got?  What worked well?  What would help you to transition into that team even more quickly or effectively?" I think it's about insight, I think, the first couple of times that you do this, so that you can experiment with what be a small idea today, to think how you could scale it much further in the organisation.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think that's a really good point, just like any other experiment.  It's okay if you design it in one way and it doesn't quite work.  So, two weeks might not be right; it might be one week twice a year; it might be a day a week for a month, and maybe it works better that way in your organisation, depending on the type of industry you're in, the type of company structure you've got.  But I just think this idea of going, "It's accessible, it's easy", the expectation isn't really you go to deliver; you go to learn, you go to understand, you go to ask some good questions.  I would just be fascinated.  I really hope that some of the organisations that we're talking to are going to give this a go.  Also, I'm very enthusiastic about it, so I'm hoping my enthusiasm will get people under way! So, the second idea for an experiment, and I think probably each of these increases in intensity a bit more, in terms of commitment; the second idea we're calling "borrowing brilliance". 

So, this is the idea of creating short-term roles, where a team can borrow some brilliance from a different part of the business.  The idea here might be, there's a project, and you work out that within your team, you don't have the skills or the strengths for part of this project, so you create a short-term role that might be two days a week, or a day a week, that will depend a bit on what that project is; but the point is, what is the brilliance you need to borrow?  Is it that you are doing something where you need to create a lot of change quicky?  Are you doing something where you need someone who's incredible at processes?  What is the brilliance that you need? You very transparently advertise the role, but based on that brilliance, going like, "We need some help", essentially, "we need to borrow some brilliance in ideation, creating change", whatever it might be, "this is what we think that commitment will look like.  It's one day a week for a month [or] it's one day a week for three months", and then you just basically borrow that person.  Maybe it's half a day, maybe it's an hour a week; you just need a brilliant ideator for one meeting every week for three months, but I would love to do that, as an ideator.  If someone just said to me, "You can come into a meeting --"

Helen Tupper: Help us with some ideas.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.  Oh my God, it's the dream!  I would just be like, "What, so my job is to come and just get to say, 'I've got another idea', which everyone else gets quite annoyed when I say; but you are telling me you want me to do more of that?  Absolutely perfect!"  I think what we like so much about this idea is back to that point about, everybody wins, because we know that when you use your strengths in different situations, it stretches them and makes them stronger, so that's really good for me.  If somebody asks me to be an ideator, but in a very different team, different part of the business, that's going to help me to grow and to progress, and I get to share my strength, making it even stronger again. At the same time, I'm also learning about a different team, I'm getting a window into someone else's world, probably in a more specific way than with the Squiggly Career safaris. 

I think the Squiggly Career safaris, you're just there to almost spend time.  You know, you go on holiday to absorb the culture and wherever it is you're visiting, and I think that's just about being spongey.  I wonder whether those Squiggly Career safaris are more about being spongey. Where you're borrowing brilliance, you've got more of an active role, I think.  You're not just being spongey, you're also more specifically giving.  You can offer fresh-eyes feedback, but you've got a role and there's more of an expectation in terms of, if somebody says they want me an hour a week for ideating, I don't just turn up and be spongey and just observe and notice and just be part of that conversation, I'm there to contribute actively and to give something.  So, I think that is a bit more involved than the first idea, but equally motivating; I would enjoy that.

Helen Tupper: And our third experiment is all about skills marketplaces.  This is the one that I think is the most system-like in terms of how you would approach it, because there are some organisations like eBay, for example, that have skills marketplaces, and the way it works is that projects are advertised internally, and then people opt onto those projects based on the skill requirements. So, I might say, "I'm doing a project to launch a new website, I need somebody who's good at writing, I need someone who's good at design, I need somebody who's good at project management", those sorts of things, so you break it down into its component skills, then you advertise the project.  And, people from across an organisation can apply to be part of it, based on a skill that they either have got and that they want to demonstrate, because it might build their brand; or, perhaps they've got but they want to develop, because they're doing it by stretching their strengths with different people in different places. I say that it's more of a system-based one, because there are some tools that help organisations to do that. 

But I think you could prototype this and do it in a small way, before you look to scale it, with an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever your organisational equivalent is of an Excel spreadsheet, where you might say, "Let's profile four projects across the business.  We'll break those projects down into the subset of skills that you need and we'll advertise them out, we'll position this as an experiment and we'll see how it works, and then people can apply". Then I think it's both, what's the level of interest from people in applying to be part of it; and then, I think it is also some reviewing on how effective that project is when people, who apply from across the business, come together to work on it, even though they might not be connected to the context of that project on a day-to-day basis, or they might not have worked together before, because I think those are the two -- interest and effectiveness are part of the review criteria for skills marketplaces to really work effectively.

Sarah Ellis: What I really like as well about this idea is, we know that when people and organisations started to do a lot more work on, "How do we encourage flexible working?" that one of the small experiments that organisations tried that had a really big difference was just advertising roles, where at the very top of those roles it said, "Open to flexibility".  It was as simple as signalling, "We are open to flexible working".  It then meant that people had very different kinds of conversations when they were applying for those jobs, and you got a much wider range of people applying for those jobs. I wonder, by almost advertising roles based on skills or strengths, you're getting closer to being more transparent and explicit about -- you're almost saying to people, "We want people to transfer their talents".  I feel you've got to sometimes signal to people going, "Well actually, these are the projects where we're really looking for people to do that, and we're not only signalling it, we're actually really actively supporting it".

I would be really fascinated to see sometimes whether, even just trying out in one department, or one team, whether you talked about roles in this way and moves that you could make, based on transferring your talents like, "We believe in transferring your talents.  We think your mindset is more important than your exact experience or skillset", some sort of words, and we're coming up with some ideas as to what those words might be, in case organisations want to borrow a bit of brilliance from us.  But I think they can make a real difference; it can be really simple things that just help people to have the confidence to think, "Actually, my organisation is really committed to helping me to Squiggle and Stay". Even if it's not for you right now, it doesn't mean that it's not for you forever.  So, I think if I saw my organisation doing any of these things, I'd feel really proud to work there, even if I was really happy in what I was doing, because I'd just think, "I love the idea that I've got that option, and I could do that at some point".

Helen Tupper: I guess then it goes full circle, if you can have circles and squiggles, but I think you can, which is that it's taking, at the moment, so much longer to fill roles in organisations, that if you then have people who are more likely to stay, because they can squiggle and develop in different directions, and are proud to work in the organisation, and therefore they're more likely to promote and advocate it to other people, then you're going to be keeping people.  But you're also going to be attracting people at the same time.  So, it has this double benefit that helps to overcome the challenge that we started this episode out with.

All of these ideas, and some more, are all in our new Harvard Business Review article.  We will link to it in the show notes, we'll be posting about it all over LinkedIn and on Instagram as well.  So, if you follow us in any of those places, you will definitely find that article.  And we would absolutely love it if you could share and support our work.  When you take our work into your communities, in your company and outside of it, it helps us to reach more people. Educating people about what better could look like, in terms of careers and career development, is a big part of how we inspire people to make the change, and hopefully take Squiggly and the skills that we talk about, and all the ideas for action that we share on the podcast, into those organisations.  So, you are a big, big part of how we can make careers better for everyone.  So, please do read it, support it, share it.

Sarah Ellis: And we're going to be doing loads more work on Squiggle and Stay.  It's not an article and a podcast episode and then we move onto the next thing; we've got lots of things behind the scenes, in development and ideas, things that we're really excited about to keep progressing.  So, if you want to find out more about that, because we're not quite ready to talk about it, basically because we haven't worked it all out just yet, please do email us.  We're helen&sarah@squigglycareers.com.

Maybe you're an individual who would really like to advocate for more Squiggle and Staying in your organisation; maybe you're a manager or leader who really believes in this philosophy and approach and wants to be that sponsor that we've talked about today; or, perhaps you work in HR or people development, and you want to make this more cultural change around careers.  It doesn't matter what role or what position you're in, we would really love to hear from you, and we really hope over the next year and couple of years, we're going to keep doing lots more work in this area, so you can give us feedback about what you need, any questions you've got, and of course we will steal with pride any great ideas you've got that we can borrow from you as well.

Helen Tupper: So, thank you so much for listening today.  We look forward to hearing from you and we're back with you again next week.  Bye for now.

Sarah Ellis: Bye everybody, thank you for listening.