Enrique is an HR, Tech and Future of Work expert and keynote speaker and founder of Hacking HR, a global learning community at the intersection of the future of work, technology, business and organizations, with thousands of members from all over the world. Enrique is one of the top 100 HR global influencers. Enrique was the founder and CEO at Management Consultants, a firm specialized in Human Resources in Venezuela. Before Management Consultants, Enrique worked in the telecommunications sector as a Senior Project Engineer for Telefonica and several other companies. He is also the cofounder of Cotopaxi, a recruitment platform focused on Latin America. Enrique is a guest author in several blogs about innovation, management and human resources. Most recently Enrique worked as an advisor to the Chief Human Resources Officer at the Inter-American Development Bank. Enrique is a Fulbright Scholar, has over twenty years of experience and is an Electronic Engineer with an Executive Master’s in Public Administration from Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

Topics:

• Transition from electrical engineering to HR. 
• What is Hacking HR and biggest challenge about putting together a global HR conference. 
• In your own words, what does the phrase Human Resources mean to you?
• Common myth or misconception that people have about HR
• How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted your thinking on the future of work.
• What are some of the skills we need to develop to prepare the workforce for the disruption of exponential technologies?
• What kind of technology do you find the most interesting for HR these days? What HR technologies are you curious about and WHY?
• How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?

Episode transcription:

[00:00:00] Enrique Rubio: [00:00:00] What I want you to do with that. Instead of focusing on the 50 calls a day, I want you to talk to five people a day and make sure that you are making a difference in the lives of those employees. When you talk to them, meaning asking them what they need, how you can support them, being there for them, creating the platform and the infrastructure for them to succeed and thrive at work.

[00:00:21] Thank you for listening to Ivy podcast, where we feature weekly leadership conversations with thought leaders and industry experts. Now here is your host, Cesar Romero.

[00:00:37] Cesar Romero: [00:00:37] Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Ivy podcast. In today's episode, we're going to be diving deeper into the world of HR. And if you are a professional in HR or really anyone that's interested in putting people first. I think this episode is for you. We're going to be talking mainly about what are some of the things that need to change in HR and what are some of the things that you could do to better prepare for that future that's already here and today I'm excited to bring on. And Enrique Rubio, who is an HR tech and future of war experts and keynote speaker. And he's also the founder of Hiking HR, which is a global community of HR professionals that is at the intersection of the future of work technology, business, and organizations with thousands, thousands of members across the world. He's also the co-founder of Cotopaxi, which is a recruiting platform focused on Latin America and Ricky has written multiple blogs on innovation management and hand resources. Enrique, thank you so much for being on the show today.

[00:02:05] Enrique Rubio: [00:02:05] Thank you so much for inviting me. I am really, really excited about this conversation. So thank you.

[00:02:12] Cesar Romero: [00:02:12] Yeah. So before we dive into HR, I want to start with your background because. I understand that you were not always in HR in that you got started as an electronic engineer. Let's talk about that. Like what prompted you to make that transition and what was the aha moment?

[00:02:38] Enrique Rubio: [00:02:38] I lost my way from engineering. I got lost. When I was growing up, when I was a teenager, I went on to be an astronaut andI was thinking back in Venezuela, the place where I was born, I was thinking there's no anything related to, or helping me to become an astronaut here. So the closest thing for me to be that would be an engineer. So I ended up becoming an electronic engineer, which I loved, and I still love very much my decision to become an engineer. I practiced engineering for about 10 years in the area of telecommunications as a project manager in telecommunications. And then I switched to HR because part of my career in engineering at the very end of my tenure as an engineer, as a practicing engineer, I worked in technical sales and I found out that he really loved having that relationship with people. Right? I mean, not that I didn't have it before, but it was a little different being a sales person. And I said to myself, well, what, I'm not sure that I like sales that much, but I do want to work with people on for people. And of course I discovered HR. So I switched. I became a consultant in the HR space. My masters at my master's degree was focused on HR. Then I worked in the corporate world for a number of years, and then I found that hacking a char, which started as a community to discuss technology and HR, which are my two backgrounds. And it's evolved now into way more than that.But the reality to me, for me is that having an engineer. Mindset in the world of HR has been a fascinating journey because it really helps you think differently about the work of HR. So I always tell people in HR, you don't have to become an engineer, but do something that is not just HR practice, something different, really going to help you sort of expand your vision. And this is true not just for HR. If you're an engineer, go to a char for a little bit of time or to sales or to marketing or to finance, this idea of cross-pollinating experiences and expertise and professional professional sort of fields is incredibly powerful.

[00:05:04] Cesar Romero: [00:05:04] Yeah. I totally agree with that. Because that's where innovation comes from. Right? When you take, when you borrow different frameworks from different disciplines, right? And you just like, make your own. So tell us more about the engineering framework that you bring on to HR. Like what are some of the things that you implement, that you took from your engineering background into HR.

[00:05:31] Enrique Rubio: [00:05:31] I know I'm thinking about something that happened very often, by the way, and I'm sure that you and everybody listening to this podcast will relate know when an electronic device wouldn't work at home, you would first get really annoyed. You would unplug it or whatever, and then you would punch it. You would hit it. What the hell is going on with this device? Right. So we in engineering, we do that, right. I mean, I remember working in telecommunications, working with devices and when you got really frustrated, it would have started like shaking something or like hitting it because you were like, you thought somewhere in your mind, but a little cable was disconnected somewhere in there and that by shaking that thing or punching it, it would connect again and it will start working. So, what happens is that, I mean, that may be a meaningless kind of example, but the reality is that as an engineer you have to get really creative with what you're doing. You really have to very often use your imagination about why things work in one way or why things don't work at all. And that's a little piece of mindset that I bring to the HR space. I'm not one thing that I met my friends in this space. They laugh at me because they know that I'm this way. I don't like rules. I don't like being bound by a barbed wire preventing you from going and seeing the world. And I feel that in HR, our profession was designed to be that way. It was designed to be a scare of what, on the other side of the barbed wire or on the other side of the wall, where our professional HR was designed for. The people practicing the char to run away as far as fast as possible from risks from using creativity or for doing something that in any way was a little deviated from the standard of the way things should have been. And this is not true for engineering. There are standards in engineering processes and there are rules that the only way for you to invent something is to create something new to solve. Problems that come via systems or devices. You've got to get really creative. And you have to really think outside of any given box, because sometimes engineering boxes do not define what the problems or challenges could be. So that mindset really helps me in the world. And that's why actually I named this community hacking, hacking has been considered a technical constant. Right? I mean, when people think about hacking, they think about, first of all, they think about something negative, but it's not really just negative, but they think about technology. Somebody hacked the system, somebody hacked the bank, somebody hacked the government, somebody hacked the steam. And the reality is that hacking in the technical perspective is you bow down to the very foundations of whatever you want to change and you hack it. What I was thinking was I want to go back to the foundations of a char and hack them. I want to change them because it is obvious by now, that at the moment that I create a hack in HR, that the traditional HR is not really working, and is not delivering value. So anyway, that mindset of creativity, risk taking intolerance to B2B, to being bound by walls that don't let you see what's out there. In that mindset, it's what I bring to the world of HR from engineering. And it really helps me.

[00:10:00] [00:10:00] Cesar Romero: [00:10:00] Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And now that we're talking about that. What, well, first let me say that. I definitely agree with you because I have worked in corporations, banks, institutions, and I have definitely felt that way that HR was there just to, I guess, to follow the rules. Right. And it was for the corporation, not for the people. So what are some of the things that HR traditional HR is doing wrong? And what is your vision of what HR could be?

[00:10:45] Enrique Rubio: [00:10:45] Yeah. Great question. I think that by exclusively focusing on the administration and the transaction of processes, I think we are doing a big disservice to the atrial profession. We're making a big disservice to the corporation of the company or the organization that we work for. And we're making a big disservice to our people. As simple as that, you've got a nature professional that is just focused on hiring, firing, ensuring compliance and paying people. And that's what they do, what we are missing out. If that's all we did, we would be missing out on such an incredible opportunity to number one really help the organization that we work for become its best version of itself. At the end of the day, we in HR are business people. We happen to work in a car, but we are business people. And what we want is, or what we should want is our organization to succeed and be just a transactional HR professional. It helps the organization just go day in and day out the way things were before yesterday and the day, the way things were will be the day after today, but that's pretty much it. So we gotta get out of there if we want to help our organization succeed. Now, the key here is that we help our organizations succeed with the success of the people. Hmm, when we build the foundations and when we help our people at work succeed. We are helping our organizations succeed, but we don't do that. If all we do is high, higher fire pay and a shoe compliance. How do we do that by listening to what people are going through by providing them opportunities for growth and flourishing at work, by providing them opportunities for learning, by creating systems, processes, policies that are flexible and can change with the circumstances that we may be going through. We do that by truly understanding what our business, what our organization wants from all of us, and also translating what we do into something that makes sense for the organization. So the mindset here is completely different. Now it might have, I even said that we don't have to fire higher pay and ensure compliance. No, I haven't said that because we still have to do that, but that cannot be our full focus of attention, because if that was the, if that continues to be the case, we're missing out of an incredible opportunity. As I said before, and I want to give you one example of what I'm saying right now, digital transformation is perhaps one of the most important business strategies, business drivers for innovation and change transformation. And of course, businesses are staying alive and thriving. Now this transformation is intrinsically a human process that is supported by technology. Digital transformation is a process that is the bottom line of how we make our processes better, more efficient, more effective for our internal and our external customers is for the people. So it is intrinsically a human process that is supported by technology. If this is true, if what I'm saying is true, that this is the transformation is a human process supported by technology. Who should be leading digital transformation in any given organization? Shouldn't it be the person in charge of the people's operation of the organism? Yeah, it should be maybe marketing or sales, but that is not true. Who are the leaders of digital transformation are generally in the technology side and not in the human side. Why is that? The answer is very simple. It is because those who are in engineering, generally they know more about the way people work and how to serve them via technology than HR leaders know about how technology works and how technology can serve people. So we are the gap from all is way larger than they got for them. So we've got to close that gap and that's why this traditional HR is not enough anymore for us to be the leaders of the transformations, whether it's digital or people or marketing or any other kind of transformation that our organizations are demanding from their leaders. And we should be stepping in to do that. So that, to me, it's two completely different mindsets in HR.

[00:15:43] Cesar Romero: [00:15:43] Well thinking, reading for that. And I had not considered how digital transformation starts in a company and you're right. The people are in it, in other departments, they typically embraced that first. And then it trickles down to HR when it should be all the way around. And I felt this way when I was working there, in corporate, where I saw HR as a place where I would just go for the transactions, right. To, I dunno, to benefit or to fix some admin stuff that my manager would say, Hey, you need to go to HR to do this. Or it would be times where I would be in trouble, I guess, for not doing something that I was supposed to do. So. Yeah. I definitely agree that it needs to shift from the administration and compliance to people first. Right. And with that, I wanted to shift gears to talk a bit about hacking HR, because I am amazed at the amount of work, the quality of content, the quality of speakers, and how you are able to pull this together, not just in terms of the conference, but also the community. So I wanted to talk a bit about that and what have been some of the, I guess, biggest challenges in putting together this level of a conference where you have industry leaders, speakers, and the quality of the content, how are you pulling that off? I guess, that's where I wanted to get it.

[00:17:29] Enrique Rubio: [00:17:29] It's just, to me, it's a little bit about the way I see most things in life, which sometimes it's a blessing sometimes depending on what happens after you actually make a decision. But, to me, it is about accepting the challenge and learning along the way, how to do it, how to make it happen, that are people, I'm a runner. So I'm a competitive runner. This is what I do outside of my working in hacking HR. And, I remember the first time that I signed up for a Nutra Race and Ultra Race competition back in 2013, I signed up for a 50 miler. Well, at that, by the time I signed up, which may have been like four or five months before the actual race, the longest I had ever run was like 10 miles or something like that. So I had never run anything longer than 10 miles. Now I signed up for that. Because I knew that by setting myself up to the challenge, I was going to have to force myself to learn how to get there, to that place. I trained, I did the race, which I had no idea how it was going to go. I ended up being physically broken, like a really broken leg. Everything was hurting. Like I couldn't even move forward. A month and it, I became hooked to it. I loved it. And ever since I learned, and now I know how to do this racist, it's the same thing in the world of what I'm doing with hacking guitar. I'm going to set up a challenge for what I want you to do. I wanna, last year, this was at the end of 2019. I said to myself, why the hell do people have to pay so much money to go to a conference? Where 80% of the content is just sales from a marketing company that is selling them something. And the company is also paying to give that sales speech. So when I was thinking of, wait a second, these companies that are organized for these events are making it. Total money out of the registrations from participants, which by the way, happened to be the same people all the time, because I've been to many of these events. And it's like, if you guys had, so you like two months ago in the other conference, and last year in the same conference, it's always the same people. And then they get money from that and they get money from the sponsors and then people participate in those kinds of events. They have to pay for the registration. They have to travel because the events were happening there, in New York or San Francisco, Las Vegas, Orlando. And I said to myself, I need to change this thing. I can't believe that in this day and age, the only way for people to get access to these amazing speakers speaking at a conference would be to have to pay thousands of dollars to be there. And I said, this was at the end of 2019. And I said, what, I'm going to organize a gigantic conference and I'm going to pull it together online and it's going to be free. And I did it. I had no idea. It's funny because this, I started organizing about. Actually it was not in November. It was like August of 2019, November was when I consolidated everything. And even in November of 2019, five months before the conference, I didn't even know what technology was going to use to myself. I'm going to have to figure it out, but let me get to the speaker's first and then figure out the technology. So that is to me, the way I address some of these things, right. It is, let me set up the challenge. I accept the challenge. Nobody's putting a gun to my head to say, to get into the challenge. I am setting it up for myself and then they learn along the way. How to do it at that conference, 2020, we got about 11,000 people registered 225 speakers, people from all over the world. And I did offer my computer. Literally. I was sitting at my computer and all, I sat down for an entire week, doing all for my computer. This conference that is happening in March of 2021 is larger. We have many more people signed up and many more speakers. There are many areas that I'm asleep, feeding and out, but I learned, and now I'm in a cadence here. So anyway, the bottom line here is, and this is true, not just for HR. It's true for anything else in life. If there's something that you want to do. And you don't know how to do it, set up the challenge for yourself, set up the challenge for yourself. You can do it, you're going to learn how to do it. I'm not talking about the kind of things like, I'm going to beat Michael Jordan in playing basketball. That's never going to happen. So I'm not going to be a stupid to set up myself for failure, right. For something that I know will never happen. But if it's something that I know it's hard, it's difficult. It's challenging, but it's doable. Set up the challenge for yourself and learn how to do it. Do you want to go and run a 50 miler? Everybody can do it. Everybody can do it, set up a challenge, backtrack and get, and plan how you need to get ready for that thing. And that's the way I see things with hiking a char and that's the way it is. Sittings with a lot of things that I do in my life. So again, sometimes this is great because I'm very driven. Sometimes it's like, I'm like one week before the thing. And I'm like, man, I haven't figured out how I'm going to do this thing.

[00:22:36] Cesar Romero: [00:22:36] It's yeah. I love it. I love the story, t's almost like reverse engineering, right. Start with the goal set, sign out for the event for the challenge that you wanted to.

[00:22:47] Enrique Rubio: [00:22:47] Yeah, backtrack. And if you think about it, it's different coffee in the book, the seven habits of highly effective people. He said this 25 years ago, he said with the end in mind. So, the goal. There are two principles that are fascinating to me. One begins with the mind, meaning you begin with a Y with a goal, Simon cynical successes, right? You begin with what, where do you want to go? What you want to do. And then the second thing is. Also as set by as different COVID is everything in life is created twice, one in the mind and one in the actual physical world. So when you set up your goal, when you begin with the end in mind, you backtrack and then you start thinking you create in your mind how you are going to make that happen, and then you actually make it happen. But you got to think how you make it happen, that there will be several questions along the way, but that's okay. You will figure it out.

[00:23:48] Cesar Romero: [00:23:48] I love it. Yeah. It's so true. Right. Because then you have no choice, but to figure it out once you have that challenge.

[00:23:55] Enrique Rubio: [00:23:55] Correct.

[00:23:57] Cesar Romero: [00:23:57] Awesome. Enrique, let's shift gears here and I want to talk about the pandemic, right? Because it's a topic that 's on everybody's minds. And I want to ask you, for you personally. How has dependent mate and COVID-19 changed your thinking about the future of work and what that means?

[00:24:24] Enrique Rubio: [00:24:24] That's a great question. What I think is that we're dealing with so many problems before COVID. And now some of those problems, we knew that were there, we just were ignoring them, or we just didn't want to tackle them. Right. And like, for example, deep inequality. Hmm. I'm not just talking about social and racial inequality. I'm talking about technological inequality. The fact that when you send the entire world into lock down, you have to make sure that people have the internet to connect. You have to make sure that they have a laptop at home to connect or a computer at home or a webcam or headphones. Yeah, we discovered that that was not true. We discovered that a lot of people, actually more than half of the people in this world, don't have access to the internet. So what the pandemic date works on earth, not only equate a bunch of problems in itself by the pandemic, all these tragedy of so many debts and people are ill because of the virus, but it, our nurse many problems that we were ignoring, or we were bearing down because we didn't want to tackle them before. And the pandemic made those problems way more evident than they were ever in the past. So that is one thing to me. The second thing is this, I tell people this the metaphor that I use, we are going through the dark tunnel of the pandemic. And people always say, I want to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I say the same thing, but what I don't want is that light. To be the same kind of light that we left behind when we got into this tunnel. Yeah, because that light that we left behind, it was not working for everybody. And it was only shining upon a few people and not everybody. So we want to get out of this dark tunnel and not to miss the opportunity to change things so that they never happen again in this way the light at the end of the tunnel has to be very different from the light that we left behind. It has to shine up on more people. Hopefully everybody, we have to be more inclusive. We have to take care of each other. We have to prepare for things, which is another thing that happened to the pandemic. There are many things that we were told were going to happen, and we didn't want to believe that they were actually going to happen. Like, for example, I remember president Obama in 2015 saying another pandemic will happen in the next 5 to 10 years. So the government that we had during the pandemic didn't prepare for something like that. Right? Bill Gates said this 10-15 years ago, he said the biggest challenge for humanity is what if a pandemic like the influence of 2018 and 19 and 18 happens again. And we were caught off guard in many different respects. So it is to me, number one, addressing the problems that were there before then now are amplified by COVID number two. It is creating a better, brighter, more beautiful light at the end of the tunnel, so that those who are suffering before they'll have to suffer again. And we don't have to go through all this. Pain that society has gone through because they lied before, was so selfish for some people and not for everybody. And number three, it is preparing for things that we are told could potentially happen and believing that they were going to happen. And I just want to give you one example. We came about this last thing for the past, at least one decade. Experts institutions have been telling governments, organizations, technology, especially automation will replace a gigantic number of human jobs. Do you think we're remotely ready for this? The answer is no, we're not remotely ready for this. And what happens with technology is that it goes at the beginning very slowly. But then once you get to a certain inflection point, it starts going pretty quickly. So for example, self-driving cars, self-driving trucks, very slowly governments are still like I don't know, safety, all of that. We're going to get to an inflection point where we will get to a place where now self-driving technology is basically infallible. What's going to happen with the thousands of people that are actually millions of people, driving taxes or driving trucks. Most likely they will lose their jobs. Are we ready for that? The answer is no, even though we have been warned about this for years. So anyway, preparing for a future that we are being warned about, but we seem not to believe that it will actually happen.

[00:29:18] Cesar Romero: [00:29:18] Yeah. So I tell them that. So one of the things that I want to talk about here, but I want to focus on members in the audience that got caught off guard because of the pandemic. And now they have to pivot right in their careers. What advice would you have for the saving of the audience that is trying to prepare right for the future, but might not know what to do or what skills to, to learn or skillsets, right? Like, what would you recommend, what would you advise for this segment of the audience that is trying to pivot? Because they either got furloughed, they got laid off because of the pandemic. What would you recommend?

[00:30:07] Enrique Rubio: [00:30:07] Yeah, this is what happens. All that I just said for the person who is very busy, sounds like. I mean, you want to break it, just forget about that. And then I'm going to go back to my day to day thing. The first thing is that everybody's busy in this society at work with personal things and whatnot. So everybody's busy and everybody's like, I don't have time to learn what I'm going to need for the next five years. I need to learn what I need for tomorrow. And that may be true. I mean, I know that's the priority and you need to focus on tomorrow rather than the next five years. But if you can. If you can allocate 5% of your time, 5% of your time, it's 15 days, 17 days a year to learn about things that even though they are in the back burner of your mind because you don't need them today. You may think that you will need them tomorrow or in a year from now or in five years from now. Did it get a little bit of the energy to do that? Not number one, number two, make sure that whatever you are putting that 5% of your time into is not just in your knowledge silo. What I mean by that is I am a better professional because I am an engineer who works in HR, who also happens to want to learn about a lot of other things like nutrition and mental health and all those things. That makes me better. So, if you think you are going to get, if you are a nature professional or an engineer who thinks that you're going to get better just by learning from engineering, if that's your style or by learning from HR, if that's your style, you're making yourself a gigantic disservice because you may be getting better on a vertical that may be significantly disrupted going forward. So make sure that as you learn, that you don't learn necessarily vertically or across the board, but you are learning more diagonally, if you will, meaning you are getting better, not only in your own silo, but in other areas that can help you be better at your own work. For example, for me, people in HR, you guys need to learn about finance. You guys need to learn about marketing. You need to learn about technology. Yeah. It's all overwhelming. And people may say, Oh my God, that's a lot. How am I going to learn about all those things in such a short period of time? Nobody's asking you to learn to be a professional marketer in a week dedicated. One hour of your week, one hour watching a video about marketing on YouTube, you don't even have to pay for it. You go to YouTube and you go to Gary V or whoever, Seth Godin or one of these super amazing marketer guys out there. And you look at one video one hour a week, that's it. Next week you may get hooked to marketing. And you say in the next two months, I'm going to watch one hour of videos every week. And then at the end of two months, you say, what I'm going to get certified on this marketing strategy. You never know. Right? They may not be helpful at all, but they may be number one, 5% of your time, a year, a month, awake to learning of things that may not be the day to day fame. Number two, learn about silos that are not your own silo. That's going to make you way better in your own silo, or if you need to transition to another style going forward. And the last thing is Albert Einstein said that the last human to know everything that needed to be known about the world was ice at Newton, in the year, in its 16th, 17th, centuries. I don't remember exactly, I think 16 hundreds and something. And Albert Einstein said that because he said all of the books, all of the documentation about science that had been written at that moment, I start Newton, had it in his library. He had all the books, he had all the things, he had all those things today that are just impossible. Nobody can know everything that needs to be known about the war or about anything for the matter anymore. So how do you resolve this conundrum of how do I know what's going on in my field? Get together with people that can inform you, can make you better and can help optimize the flow of information as much as possible. If you are in a leadership position, make sure that you are creating enough avenues, building bridges and channels for people to come together with the USA. Hey, I heard this about HR and we're not doing much about it. Let's just keep it in the back burner of our minds, but you have it in there because there's no way that you can control or know all that needs to be known about your silo. So 5% make sure that you're looking at other areas and number three, collaborate with others that can optimize this flow of knowledge and information.

[00:35:17] Cesar Romero: [00:35:17] Yeah. It's crazy, right? Like, how things have changed from Isaac Newton to now. But I really loved your advice because especially with the community, right, what you're doing with hacking HR and just being around people that are in that same mindset of learning and getting to know others in the industry and other industries to cross-pollinate as you mentioned, and, I mean, it's so true. Start small, 5% of the time, video or a blog, whatever it is, right. Like, just start small in it'll just like how technology, right. It starts small. And then it gets to an inflection point.

[00:36:07] Enrique Rubio: [00:36:07] Yeah, you'll become an avid reader and once again, the reality is all of these things that we're discussing, they are doable. You don't need, you don't need money. You don't need permission. Nobody has to give you permission to put one hour of your time in your phone while you are in the bathroom. If you want to be in the bathroom, just looking at that video, right? Nobody has to give you permission to go to LinkedIn or to the Hacker Lab or whatever it is to reach out to somebody else and say, Hey, I'm going to reach out to that guy because he's done some stuff that I want to do. I want to ask. Give him or her how they did it, right? Nobody prevents you from doing that. You don't need permission from anybody, make it happen. One of the things that brings me the most is to see people comfortable in the place where they are and it pains me because I think they are making a mistake by thinking that what is happening in the world will not happen to them. And it will.

[00:37:15] Cesar Romero: [00:37:15] Yeah. Yeah. It'll happen eventually. Right. If you get too comfortable now with that, with that in mind, I know we talked about from the perspective of an individual contributor. But what about the perspective from an organization? Right? If I'm not HR leader, besides the things that you already mentioned, what is one thing that I should be looking out for to make sure that my workforce is prepared, resilient, adaptable, flexible, and that they're always thriving. What is one thing besides what you mentioned? Right? Like the 5%, the community. What's one thing that I, as a leader in the organization, I should be looking out for?

[00:38:02] Enrique Rubio: [00:38:02] If there was one thing, I mean, I could tell me the things, but if there was one thing, this is what I would say, create the formal and informal avenues. For people to exchange information and to cross-pollinate ideas from different areas of expertise. And I am not just talking about HR. I am talking across the board in the organization, creating the formal and informal avenues for this to happen. The formal avenues could be down-home meeting sessions where everybody comes together, not to hear from the president of the company, but to tell the president of the company what's happening in the world, or to exchange ideas with each other, with leader sitting in each table where there are nine tables or physical tables sitting together and discussing about what they are staying in the world and how those things may affect the workforce and the people. Purpose of that organization. So that will be formal, but informal, it will be something along the lines of creating a culture where people are not afraid of reaching out to others in other departments to say, Hey, you work in finance. I just, I just looked at this thing that had to do with finance. I don't understand it that much, but I just wanted to bring it out because it may have an impact on the work that we're doing, or it may help you do it better. So that kind of informality. Of the interactions that happen at work is incredibly powerful. Because once again, going back to what I said before, nobody controls or can have a finger or the pulse on all the information that is created about anything in life anymore. So what better than maximizing the opportunities for coalitions cross-pollination interactions at work, both formal and informal. So I would be, if I was a leader, I would find a way to make this happen.

[00:39:53] Cesar Romero: [00:39:53] I love it. So create opportunities for people to collaborate.

[00:39:57] Enrique Rubio: [00:39:57] Yeah. And informally within the organization and even outside the organization as well. Of course, as a leader, perhaps the priority will be making it happen within the confines of your organization.

[00:40:10] Cesar Romero: [00:40:10] Yeah. No, I think that's valuable now, Enrique, I wanted to shift gears with. Talk a bit about tech, right? Because take it's everywhere these days, right? Even in HR, what are some of the technologies that you are excited about as relates to HR?

[00:40:32] Enrique Rubio: [00:40:32] Well, without necessarily naming any specific company, I think it excites me that with artificial intelligence, we will be, we can potentially be able to sort of optimize some processes for which we are not good at. I mean, transactions and paperwork, documentation, and more transactional work. That is really exciting because if we do things right. And I'm hoping that we do the things right. If an organization has Enrique and all Enrique is doing is answering the phone every day to respond to transactional questions and a chat bot can do that. Maybe I'm going to ask them what now you don't have to respond to 50 posts every day to respond to questions that are in the employee handbook and can be responded to by a chat bot in seconds. But what I want you to do is that instead of focusing on the 50 posts a day, I want you to talk to five people a day and make sure that you're making a difference in the lives of those employees. When you talk to them, meaning asking them what they need, how you can support them, being there for them, creating the platform and the infrastructure for them to succeed and thrive at work. So they might work to become the real human development people centered kind of work, not the responding phone calls like a call center kind of thing, which can be done by technology. No, no, no, no. I'm focusing now on truly optimizing human relationships and I'm making sure that the business succeeds, because people are doing well and they are succeeding. So that's a very different thing. So that comes because automation and artificial intelligence will give us that opportunity. And it is already given that opportunity to many companies. I'm hoping that it becomes more prevalent and, and cheaper so that more companies can do some of that.

[00:42:29] Cesar Romero: [00:42:29] I love that. And, yeah, having AI and the new technology take care of the transaction. And that frees up time for HR to develop people. Put people first as, as it should. So, yeah, no, that's exciting. And so many companies out there, I think, are already doing that. So now let's have two more questions here. But I want to talk about failures. Like I said, I'm a big believer that failures can teach us more than success can. And I wanted to ask you, if you have a favorite failure of yours that taught you a lot, and that shifted your mindset or your perspective.

[00:43:28] Enrique Rubio: [00:43:28] I'm failing a little bit every day. I prefer the small continuous failures rather than a big messy one, right? Which comes together with taking risks. I think when I was way younger, I was really perhaps too direct to the point of borderline with being aggressive in my approach to human relationships and that hurt some of my relationships to my own family, with my friends, with potential colleagues. And it's been through the today hitting walls when this happened, that I realized maybe this is not the way. And even today, I mean, it's not that I don't get upset at people or things, which, because I do, and I get frustrated and I went to write an email saying like, go to hell, but I don't do that. So what I do nowadays, I try to be very mindful about other people's journeys and where they're coming from, and I don't think this generally comes naturally to a lot of people. That's let me sit down and reread my email to make sure that I'm being correct and understanding. I think you got to make an intentional decision for this to be that way. Right. And I try to, when I'm writing something, reread it. And I stopped myself from like, this is not good, I mean, sometimes I still make the failure or the mistake of not really thinking what I'm saying. But then I have to pick up the pieces and that's not easy. So to me, that's being, perhaps what's taught me a lot. Be careful, be mindful, be understanding, you don't know some of the people's journeys and they may be going through a very hard time. And now you're going to add some harder time by being so aggressive with an email or with a message or something. And, so I'm going to say that that perhaps it's been my main area of everyday work because I continue to work on that in myself basically every day.

[00:45:50] Cesar Romero: [00:45:50] Yeah. That's the same with me. To be honest, that's something that I work on every day, especially that now that we're remote, right. I'm communicating everyday via email or whether it's a voice note or video, but mostly emails, right? It can be misinterpreted depending on how many exclamation points you had to.

[00:46:15] Enrique Rubio: [00:46:15] Yeah. I invited people to speak at a conference and there were some people that I really wanted to have. They never responded to my invitation, unfortunately, but I send them like four or five LinkedIn messages. And the last one, it's funny because when I sent it three or four months ago, the headline said of the last message in capital letters with an exclamation point in PLEASE BE A SPEAKER. The way I originally intended the message to come out was please be a speaker for the conference. But when I'm ready now, three months later, It sounded like please be a speaker, you have to be a speaker. So it made me think like, I'm guessing that it probably burned some bridges in there and I'm going to have to pick up some pieces because that message could be misinterpreted in a way that I didn't intend it to be, but now me, myself reading it again, I'm reading something completely different from what I had in mind back then. So you gotta be very mindful about your messages and your writing style and whatnot.

[00:47:17] Cesar Romero: [00:47:17] Yeah, absolutely. Now to close it off, I wanted to ask you, especially cause you mentioned this, right? Like read something every day, one video. What is one thing that you're reading now? It could be a course, a book or a YouTube video that you saw. What is something that you would recommend to the audience to check it out?

[00:47:40] Enrique Rubio: [00:47:40] Well, I don't know if I would recommend it because I'm developing the hacking next to our lab. I have gotten very much involved in programming. I'm not a programmer. That's not an area that I find any joy or any interest in. But I've been learning about Heroku. Get home, react to this user interface and user experience design. So all of those things are really funny because they are awesome skill swaps. I'm not saying that I'm saying the people have to become a programmer, but developing a technology platform. It's not easy. So I think that's, I'm not reading anything about it. And sadly only when something happens that I have to rate like, okay, now what do I do? Right. How do I explain this to my programmer so that they understand what I'm saying and how do I understand them? So I think that's the one thing that I've been dedicating most time recently , because well, I need to make sure that this lab really works well. In terms of books, I got a bunch of books in there that I happened to read a little bit of one, and then I moved to another one after the one that I was reading before, depending on the mode I was just finishing reading, actually the book, the great influenza, the name of the other John Gary. And the book about the influence of 1918. And it's just fascinating. It's fascinating to rate what happened in 1918 when we had nothing like we have today. Right. And so you can tell that I really like to get my hands into. Nothing with what I do for work. I love reading books about evolution and human evolution and I love them. They really help neuroscience, another my favorite topics. So, I read a little bit of everything basically every day.

[00:49:38] Cesar Romero: [00:49:38] You're the second person to recommend the great influencer. So I'm definitely going to check it out because I've heard that it has a lot of similarities to what we're going through now.

[00:49:47] Enrique Rubio: [00:49:47] Very much so. Except back then, we didn't have the technology, but there's a lot of the same. So, that's what I was talking about before being prepared for things that we know are going to happen again. I mean, by the way, COVID is not the next pandemic of 1918 is the worst pandemic of 1918, but there have been other pandemics going around. So, we've got to learn from the past.

[00:50:18] Cesar Romero: [00:50:18] Absolutely. And to close it off, what will be one of the takeaways to leave the audience with and that you would really want to absorb from our conversation today.

[00:50:33] Enrique Rubio: [00:50:33] I would tell people to believe that the things that are affecting others could potentially affect you or impact you not necessarily affecting you in a negative connotation, but impact you make sure that you're investing in yourself. You got to invest in yourself. There's this great leadership guru, Jim Rohn, and he used to say, don't invest in you as an employee, investing in yourself and the skills that will make you employable because it's different. You invest in yourself just as an employee of a given company that you invest in yourself to be employable going forward. So invest in yourself, don't see these things as opportunities that your company has to give you to learn or to grow if you happen to come across a leader or a company that are giving you opportunities for learning growth development. You are in a great place, but more often that's not the reality. So that means that you are going to have to sit in the driver's seat, not wait for anybody to tell you this, or here is the course that I'm paying as a company for you to take. Don't wait for that. You sit in the driver's seat and invest in yourself. Learn, learn, learn.

[00:51:59] Cesar Romero: [00:51:59] Enrique, thank you so much for being on the show. And I really love that. We're closing off with that. I agree with you investing in yourself. And don't wait, right? Take that into your own hands. And I really enjoyed this episode and I'm really looking forward to having you on future episodes, like catching up with how hacking HR went and any other projects that you might have with you, but for now, thank you so much.

[00:52:28] Enrique Rubio: [00:52:28] And I really appreciate you.

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