The Janus Oasis - Rob Baker - Personalization at Work

[00:00:00] Nola Simon: All right. This is another episode of the Janus Oasis and I'm Nola Simon. I'm the host to do. I've got Rob baker on the show and he is the author of personalization of work. And he is also the founder. And what do you call yourself? The chief disrupts.

[00:00:21] Rob Baker: Chief positive deviant as in a subset of positive psychology, good, positive deviance is all around how organizations and people are distinctive and different in positive ways and how we harness that.

[00:00:32] Rob Baker: So I love the term and that's why I've stolen it as part of my job

[00:00:37] Nola Simon: title. Yeah, no, I I think that's awesome. And your firm is tailored thinking. Yep. And the reason that I've invited Rob, is that I am fascinated with this whole concept of personalization. I really do feel that it's going to be the future of work.

[00:00:52] Nola Simon: We personalize everything, we personalize Netflix. We have personalized recommendations. We get shopping recommendations from Amazon. Why. [00:01:00] Personalize our work. And Robin did a Ted talk. I came across, we're connected on LinkedIn and we have chats in there. So he was kind enough to join me because I'm fascinated with how job crafting can really be employing.

[00:01:14] Nola Simon: To help people actually do work better and to do it in a way that's actually going to help them thrive because there's a whole wellness aspect to that. And also he's launched a, something that he's called the job canvas, which helps employers really co-create a job description that's reflected and personalized to the individual person.

[00:01:35] Nola Simon: So I'm going to ask job to start with explaining what job crafting is, because I know it fairly well, but. There's much more to know and, he's definitely delved into it. So that's here

[00:01:46] Rob Baker: and thanks for the opportunity to speak to you. And thank you for a little LinkedIn chat. You mentioned I really appreciate and value them.

[00:01:51] Rob Baker: And also how you described. The canvas and other things, we might talk about a really nicely and succinctly done. I'm going to steal from you, maybe interested in [00:02:00] those ideas because sometimes it's nice hearing them have other people talk about them rather than hearing about them yourself. But joke half day, what is job crafting?

[00:02:08] Rob Baker: And if you explain to someone. Joe crafting is around crafting and personalizing and tailoring your job. Generally, people do this in small and subtle ways to make it a benefit to you as an individual. So if you think about, I often talk to people about imagining their job a bit like a suit jacket and the UI that you might buy.

[00:02:29] Rob Baker: And for some suit jacket, you're able to take them and you can take them to a tailor or even some short. Enable you to do this the day before you got to, we give you the jacket, we can take the sleeves up for you or make it a better kind of fit to your individual dimensions. And what you're doing with job crafting is the same thing to your job.

[00:02:45] Rob Baker: So you're not, you're going to be thinking about a jacket. You're not, you can't change the fabric of that jacket. You can't change the the style of it. That's fixed. You can make the dimensions better fit for you as an individual. You're doing the same with your job and job crafting is you're not radically redesigning museum.

[00:02:59] Rob Baker: You're [00:03:00] not setting fire to. Person descriptions or role profiles while you're doing is making your job a better fit to your strengths, your skills, your personal interests. And we can dive into this that there's a compelling of avalanche of data and research that shows that when people feel that they're a good fit between.

[00:03:17] Rob Baker: Themselves and the work that they do, there's benefits for the individual in terms of wellbeing and performance, there's benefits for their colleagues and there's benefits for the organization. Yep.

[00:03:27] Nola Simon: And I found it was funny because it almost like when I came across job crafting, I think actually it was an Adam Grant book where I found it originally.

[00:03:34] Nola Simon: He did like a small little thing about a 20 year old survey. But it helped me put words to things that I had already done. So I used to have this friend. And she was incredibly smart, but she had a real tolerance to do busy work much more than I did. And we used to have to do these. Like list of transactions and make sure that there were new duplicates and I hated doing it.

[00:03:57] Nola Simon: Like it's just a waste of my [00:04:00] talent and it's just work. That drives me bananas. But she loved it. Because she would get in the zone and she found a meditative and. It just, it was a, she was a real achiever, so she could check a box. So I procrastinated on that test so much. So we ended up trading off.

[00:04:16] Nola Simon: She would do my transactions and I would do like writing newsletters or like creating like different things that I found. More suited to my skills that would help her as well. So we did templates and did different things. And we would just trade off. And it's just, when I found the whole description of job crafting, it's oh, that's essentially what we were doing.

[00:04:37] Nola Simon: Yeah.

[00:04:38] Rob Baker: Yeah, absolutely. And I, yeah, you were ahead of your time, so there's being work. And and I've Google stole from you, but one of the things

[00:04:47] Rob Baker: they call them task swapping. So exactly what you're saying. So getting people to actually think about what you're good at, what you enjoy doing and what, how you can reallocate those amongst the teams. So again, you're not getting rid of the task. Some people will find those tasks more [00:05:00] engaging than others.

[00:05:01] Rob Baker: And I was with a team recently, this was the last week and to work in human resources. And there were some people within that team that were saying, I really like doing disciplinaries and employee relations issues. I enjoy the investigation side of it and collecting evidence and that side of things and the other people that were saying, there's nothing that feels more dread than doing that.

[00:05:22] Rob Baker: I find it very negative in terms of. And yet there were both, everyone was equally expected to do these tasks and then they had this aha moment was like why didn't we actually reallocate this stuff? So the person who loves doing it, it's good at it does a bit more of it than the other people.

[00:05:35] Rob Baker: And I think that flexibility in terms of our thinking about how we do tie. It's something that we were not very good at traditionally within organizations, we don't create the space or the encouragement to do that. So you did that. I imagine. No, the proactivity, you said you didn't use the name. Being told you though, you've only even didn't put into there even secretly a little bit without kind of thinking.

[00:05:59] Nola Simon: [00:06:00] We, we found a much better to to ask forgiveness than ask permission. You never got the permission.

[00:06:06] Rob Baker: And if you look at job crafting, when you survey people, you will find people will be crafting their job. So that when I described this idea of shaping and personalizing, some people, a lot of people were like, yeah, And the research has about 40.

[00:06:17] Rob Baker: If you survey people, you might get 40% of organizations putting vaccines on. Yeah. I recognize I do that pretty regularly, but you'll also find that they tend to do it in secret. So they don't actually tell other people about it. So yourself and your colleagues would have that you swapped would have benefited from it, but actually, maybe there's some other colleagues that would have, could have used it could have benefited from it as well, or it would have been.

[00:06:39] Rob Baker: Better for you to do that with endorsement and encouragement your manager, rather than doing

[00:06:42] Nola Simon: it by yourself. But you know what we did. This was a really hard one to get away from. And it, it persisted in everybody had to do it. And like you said, there are people who hated people not, and management's response was really, we're going to create a list and we're just going to harass people who just don't do it.

[00:06:58] Nola Simon: And so if you ended up on the list [00:07:00] and it's oh crap, I got to do it. So I'll get it done. But the solution really was when we started having all these innovation challenges management actually started asking for things that could eliminate a whole lot of work and add to cost savings.

[00:07:16] Nola Simon: And so it wasn't really until AI and technology caught up with this, that they can create scripts to actually automatically get rid of all these duplicate transactions and just close them off. And it took 10 years of us. Creatively, like job crafting and just avoiding it and coming up with different solutions.

[00:07:36] Nola Simon: And then this innovation challenge is fixed within three months. It was the best.

[00:07:44] Rob Baker: And then there's so many things like that. I think that if we, so I often talk about the, the, why the, what and the how of could work and what we do. And if you think about the, how there's so much stuff, probably that we could do better and differently, but we don't, [00:08:00] you have to wait for the innovation challenge, tickets to be taken seriously because you'll fix it. You'll find fixes if you're proactive and you're interested into to making what better, but. As individuals or small groups. And, but yet if we created that space and encouraging the could have that reflection on a wider basis for organizations, there was.

[00:08:20] Rob Baker: Benefits. And there's so much opportunity to do things, but I think people are just, there's lots of reasons why they don't happen. It just doesn't. So I'm, that's what I'm trying to do in terms of, and it's great that we connect and we talk about these things. It's just trying to get, spread the word and saying, look, this is something that rather than.

[00:08:36] Rob Baker: Be hidden rather than being something that you're going to worried about. Actually let's tap into this. The idea is that we have in the new workforce. Yeah.

[00:08:44] Nola Simon: And that's where I come to it from like a thing about hybrid work and it's like the autonomy and the flexibility. Yeah. And the ability to own your tasks.

[00:08:53] Nola Simon: I think that's just a healthier thing and you're actually tapping into intrinsic motivation so that when [00:09:00] you come to work, you're doing the work that you choose to do that, you thrive, what am I doing? And how can we actually make. And use that to make all of the work a better and healthier place.

[00:09:12] Nola Simon: And that's where I come to the concern about wellness. And we talked a little bit before we started reporting about the pandemic forced people to be at home. And it forced them to work in a different way that wasn't necessarily the ideal way of working. So sometimes that work became longer.

[00:09:29] Nola Simon: But it's also what were you procrastinating? And then did you. Start dragging out your work. And then the time that you used to use for commuting where you just not working efficiently and that's where the productivity didn't necessarily decrease because you were working more. And I have a whole concern about how that affects wellness when we actually come back to actually return to office, because if you are already using all that extra time and do extra work, I'm not working efficiently.

[00:09:59] Nola Simon: [00:10:00] When you add in an hour and a half commute. My concern is where does that work out? Is there something that you can let go, right? Are organizations proactively working with individuals to, to rejig the workload so that. It's going to be a healthier transition. So I know that's a very long description.

[00:10:24] Nola Simon: There is a question in there. The question is, what do you think of that opportunity to use job crafting and your job canvas, to be able to help organizations help their people reject?

[00:10:36] Rob Baker: Yeah. So everything you said resonates with me, I think in terms of, and I think we, but we're in a. An amazing opportunity.

[00:10:43] Rob Baker: I think if we seize those opportunities. Yeah. I think everyone sees that opportunity where we've gone for. A lot of us have had alcohol have been shackled to get to working from home and having to work in a different way. But working from home has had to, for a number of reasons, some of it has been very [00:11:00] uncomfortable, has forced us to maybe do work some of the work differently and in different directions.

[00:11:03] Rob Baker: We've had an experience of doing things, deflects. We've had two. And now the kind of we're being unshackled little bit in terms of a, certainly from the UK. And because of the U S and Canada you've got a little more flexibility, autonomy into the way you do your job.

[00:11:16] Rob Baker: There's an amazing opportunity to have the conversation about actually how can we design work in a way that works best for the individuals, the colleagues and the organization. And I don't think it needs to be mutually exclusive, but I don't think it needs to be. This is going to work for the organization, but it's not going to work for the individual vice versa.

[00:11:33] Rob Baker: I think there's an opportunity to have that conversation. And so what I will be encouraging people to do. And with that, ideally with our teams and with the support from their managers, is we really digging down into the things they're looking at, the work and the profile of the work that people are doing and thinking about actually could have, what is it I do when do I do it?

[00:11:52] Rob Baker: Kind of, where do I do those tasks best? What are the things that I can do to make me from a wellness perspective that could have, I know that really helped me underpinned [00:12:00] me working well, so in terms of some people may have found that actually working from home that taking a lunch break, if they were, can do it and getting outside from their house.

[00:12:08] Rob Baker: That's been a bit of a game changer for them and something they didn't do when they went to the office because they were the commute was there. So it's okay, you've learned that by yourself. That gives you an edge. You don't have your 3:00 PM slump because you've gone out and have the lunch break.

[00:12:19] Rob Baker: How can you bring that? How can you bring that into your work, given patterns in, in the future? So you don't lose the good stuff. And then also you don't lose good stuff, you build on it. And there's also bad stuff from potentially the hybrids of maybe missing face-to-face connection in terms of certain meetings and that our ability to connect with people informally.

[00:12:39] Rob Baker: Or in certain meetings to throw ideas around more informally, which is easier to do for some people than doing it over things. How can you say, how can we capitalize on that? So there's something that's not working. How can we make that better? And so I do think there's an opportunity to get the best of both worlds, but you need to be open and.

[00:12:56] Rob Baker: To that, the opportunity, I think in terms of organizations. And I [00:13:00] think there's a temptation I'm seeing in the UK and certainly from the data from the from the U S I'm not so sure about kind of Canada, but I'm sure you probably wouldn't be too far out of step where there is a temptation of saying we're going to go back to the old good.

[00:13:12] Rob Baker: Just going to get back to what we know, which was the old ways of working. And then as you're saying, you've got the. The challenge there, there's a mist kind of connect people trying to plug in ways of working and productivity that are now out of step as it were. I recognize that, that problem, but I think it's fixable.

[00:13:28] Rob Baker: And I think all you need to do is create the space and the opportunity to try and do things differently. And I think that's where working with people like yourself and that led to really, you can capitalize on hybrid working to make it work.

[00:13:39] Nola Simon: Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing because you're rejigging it and because you're looking at it from the very highest levels of the organizations, it's not just being done at like the individual team levels.

[00:13:49] Nola Simon: You're rejigging and you're planning. Like strategy to incorporate the hybrid of remote going forward. How does that make the office work? How does that [00:14:00] allow you time to look at that? I don't know if you've read Lynda Gratton, his new book. I ordered it from the UK because in Canada, in us, it won't be out until June.

[00:14:07] Nola Simon: I've just started it, but you'll be interested to know that her very first step in her process, that's where she talks about purpose and looking at all the job families and. Going through this very same process. If you don't know who Lynda Gratton is, she's actually one of the Thinkers 50.

[00:14:27] Nola Simon: And she's really well respected in terms of redesigning work. So it's an excellent book so far, but yeah she's in agreement with us. She doesn't know that she's in agreement with us.

[00:14:36] Rob Baker: I add to that. If the show notes, you can have the link to that really harshly wrote great Harvard business school review, which I think is a front page of that, of the study.

[00:14:45] Rob Baker: We terms of which there's some of the things that lead into the book. I haven't read the I've read. I've the number of interviews with her. And again, I think. I think we, the three of us and we can put ourselves in the same negative. In fact, I like the I'm comfortable doing that with [00:15:00] myself, but the, in terms of adapt the research, I think it's maybe not our step from what we see as practitioners, I suppose if we're wearing a different hat.

[00:15:07] Rob Baker: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:08] Nola Simon: Oh, that's good. That's cool. So your job canvas. Like HR and managers to really sit down with the individuals in teams to really craft. And it's a living document. So you look at it what once or twice a year, she made sure that, the goals of the organization, the team, and the individual are all updated to make sure that it's instinct.

[00:15:32] Nola Simon: Essentially the person is going to be doing what is going to help them be successful, help the team be successful, help the organization be successful. So can you talk a little bit more about

[00:15:43] Rob Baker: sure, sure. Thanks for mentioning this. And this is something that's, I've been tinkering, in my garage.

[00:15:48] Rob Baker: I don't, I'm not going to tinker in a gallery. Does that mean? And my kind of my work, he like a theoretical garage for about three or four years, just in terms of just a lot of being, testing it out with. With clients who [00:16:00] have the opportunity and refining it. And so fundamentally the reason I was exploring this job canvas was that I had a frustration with job descriptions in the fact that as a, as an HR practitioner is under someone.

[00:16:11] Rob Baker: So if someone who gave them to other people and someone who actually also. I have one of themselves and the fact that they tend to box people out rather than necessarily set them free. So it's it's, they're out of date as soon as you've written them, that don't necessarily add value to the person or the organization apart from maybe from a remuneration check-in occasionally over recruitment and they don't necessarily reflect the current common roles.

[00:16:36] Rob Baker: And also didn't talk about purpose or values. And the majority of times you talked about what you did rather than why you. And yet again, the research shows that when people discuss the why, that's the thing that actually lights them up and brings that idea of intrinsic motivation that we've talked about before.

[00:16:52] Rob Baker: And so the canvas with something that. And I'd seen a few of these when I was developing my business [00:17:00] into the developing strategy and business and value propositions, whether saying actually a canvas is something that is not static. It's something that's going to continually intuitive and developed and evolved.

[00:17:11] Rob Baker: And so I was thinking, could I bring these ideas when I first came across these canvas from a business perspective? And can you bring those ideas to a job? So it, and it turns out you can, so I've developed the nine different kind of elements of the role of which the sentence the center is, the core value and purpose.

[00:17:28] Rob Baker: And what you find is that when people complete the camp, And it gives them a bit of a 360 review of how they do that job. And they think about the component parts of it in a way that often you're doing job without you either work that you do without realizing it, this idea of efficient in a in in a, an, a goldfish bowl could have not known that they're surrounded by water.

[00:17:49] Rob Baker: Cause they're just immersed in it all the time. They don't think about, and it's the same way with our work. We just do lots of things and also pilot. And so getting people to to [00:18:00] complete canvases gives them an insight to how they do their job and the important parts that they do. But it also then gives the managers the opportunity to actually see how other people see their jobs as well.

[00:18:11] Rob Baker: And sometimes the managers, perceptions of the job is slightly different from the. Individuals perceptions of the job and there's no, no one's necessarily right or wrong because everyone has different modes, but it's really enjoyed that kind of insight where you're saying, oh, okay. So again, recent, a recent example from because the HR team did something recently to the.

[00:18:32] Rob Baker: So one group within the HR function was saying my customers for the senior leadership team of the customers of the business, that's what I'm here to. I'm very and they, that person was actually a lot of the tasks were very strategic. That's how they saw things in terms of, in business orientated, someone else doing exactly the same job.

[00:18:48] Rob Baker: So their key customers and employees. And saying, actually, I'm here to enable and encourage the employee to do great things, to support our customers. So both of them are right in terms of their role, where they saw that job differently. And what [00:19:00] the manager said afterwards, which is really interesting is that there's that kind of, I couldn't put his finger on why they operated in so different ways.

[00:19:07] Rob Baker: One of them, a great kind of feedback from employees. And some people didn't want it from a great feedback from the leadership kind of group and the billion on the sound. Couldn't quite why. And then just this exercise really made it really simple. So they just saw that key customers, the priority as being different.

[00:19:23] Rob Baker: So that's generally where they spent their time and their energy. And so in terms of the kind of hybrid coming back to hybrid work, or in terms of when we're coming back to looking at doing things differently, Covering this framework in place in terms of saying, what are the component parts of this job?

[00:19:39] Rob Baker: And then maybe having that conversation about kind of work, where there was a technology need to do hybrid working well, 200 to make that work. What are the meetings of your task that you do that need best done in person or can be done remotely? What are the times of day that you need to be doing certain kind of aspects and things have.[00:20:00]

[00:20:00] Rob Baker: Holistic view and they wish you to kind of design and shape your job and to maximize the opportunities that are hybrid working. Yeah,

[00:20:08] Nola Simon: exactly. And that's really where I find there's a huge opportunity for that because. There needs to be transparency and what other way to be most transparent, but how you're actually making your treatments, actually the breakdown, the job description on a regular basis.

[00:20:22] Nola Simon: Personally, I always found job descriptions to be limiting because I was in my job for an awfully long time. I worked the same job at various different levels over 16 years. And so by the end, Like it, when I left, it took 14 people to replace me. There wasn't one person who could do everything that I did.

[00:20:44] Nola Simon: I was told so often, like just Stanley or lane, like that doesn't concern you. And it was just like, okay, it doesn't concern me, but it could help. But I got no reward from it. Nobody. People would recognize that some of the stuff that I did was valuable, but it's there was [00:21:00] nothing to tie it into.

[00:21:02] Nola Simon: What my actual job was. So it's just I think that could have been beneficial, but there's also this visibility thing. I'm sure you've heard the comments about people have faced stay at home. They work from home. They work remotely. You're risking not being visible people. Aren't going to know how to promote you.

[00:21:20] Nola Simon: You're sacrificing opportunities at the water cooler to get, have people get to know you well, if you're personalizing and individualizing your job description. And through that process, they're finding that you do your job in a unique way, and that skillset is really valuable and helps you stand out from other people.

[00:21:40] Nola Simon: That's a huge way for you to become visible.

[00:21:44] Rob Baker: Yes, absolutely. And I think we need to just building on that. I think often the, I understand this to a certain point. The organizations treat differences, a bit of a threat or an inconvenience at best. So like you want to do things differently.

[00:21:58] Rob Baker: Okay. We'd be much easier if everyone did it the [00:22:00] same way and it was easy, but actually if we turn it on its head, Tapping into individuality and seeing that as a source of advantage, competitive advantage can be massive for an organization. So the way that I often think about it, if you think about your colleagues and people who are having light bulbs above their head, like treating everyone the same, it means that you might get one person with that light bulb lit brightly.

[00:22:21] Rob Baker: And then a lot of people might be dimmer because they're just not there. The way they're working, doesn't suit them. So wouldn't it be amazing if we found ways at work and it's not difficult. To light everyone's light bulb up just a little bit more energy. They've got that intrinsic motivation. Like they've got the discretionary effort that ruined the job and all it takes is to recognize them and value them.

[00:22:39] Rob Baker: As in as individuals. It's not I think that's the, there is this perception, I think often with them, with organizations that is going to be difficult, it's going to cause kind of problems, having a diversity of people and. Who took him around. He, one of the quotes he said I could research this when I was looking at the book said why is it [00:23:00] one on one, a pair of hands.

[00:23:01] Rob Baker: I always have a head attached to it. Like his view is very much I just want someone to be able to do the work. I don't want them to think, but I turn that on its head again, saying what if you could just think about people had to like, just tapping into that and actually take advantage of it was thinking, and by, by just recognizing and volume as.

[00:23:17] Rob Baker: Yeah,

[00:23:18] Nola Simon: I, I think you recently shared on your feet, I'm not sure if it was you or Chloe, but it was about Henry Ford and like the black car, initially when incarceral east, you could only get black, but it was when the personalization, the customization of the car is actually exploded and you could get different colors and you could get different options.

[00:23:37] Nola Simon: And for me, it's like how many cup holders you have? You can never have enough cup holders. That's when. The car really became a thing, the industry exploded, but you'll have to think like your employees are really representative of your customers, right? So like how can you create your business that is treating your employees as solely, like one [00:24:00] way and expecting your business to be able to adapt to the reality of the diversity of your customer.

[00:24:06] Rob Baker: Ah, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. And I think that again, I think intellectually, you can understand it's happening, but I don't think, I don't think organizations can recognize that we recognize that customers really value it when they get there. So that's great. We get great feedback when we allow them to personalize things so many advanced years, and yet it's good enough for our customer.

[00:24:23] Rob Baker: We're not going to, we won't want to do that internally because it's going to cause problems and difficult. We don't know what's going to have me either. And I think we've got. I think the kind of the, in the next 10 years, the organizations that we're going to see really thrive and to thrush as it could have as individuals, they're going to be the ones that actually really celebrate, tap into that and find a way to harness that individuality rather than treating it as that threat.

[00:24:48] Rob Baker: And I really do believe, and we talked a little about this at the start that's going to be a game changer, I think. And I do think that Kyle would working in particular. We're just [00:25:00] at such, there's such an opportunity to do this and to push through with that agenda. If you, as an organization have the courage and the confidence and the conviction to do so I'm super, super excited about it, but I'm also. So excited and optimistic about the opportunities, but I'm also realistic in the fact that I think that we're going to, this will be a wasted opportunity for lots of people as well. And maybe that's why we're seeing the great resignation that we are the moment because people are saying actually, do you know what this isn't working for me?

[00:25:28] Rob Baker: And so I'm going to find and vote with my feet and do something else instead

[00:25:33] Nola Simon: of it's that whole aspect of choose your own adventure. I've seen more references to the books, the choose your own adventure. In the last year, actually, even like the last six months I have seen for years, I used to, they used to be my favorite books when I was a kid, but there's an aspect of gamification that we talked a bit briefly to you and we don't have time to get into right now, but it's You've got one life.

[00:25:53] Nola Simon: You have to live it the way you want to live it, and you have to make the choices. And if you view all of these choices [00:26:00] as like a large game that you're opting into and you're personalizing and you're optimizing for what works best for you, the whole world's going to benefit. So your mission, should you choose to accept?

[00:26:14] Nola Simon: Is to embrace personalization. So I think we can't end this on a better note, unless there's something else you wanted

[00:26:20] Rob Baker: to add. No, I think that would be amazing. The one thing I often leave people with the challenge in terms of saying the job crafting. So the one thing, the research shows that job crafting tend to be small when people do this, there's 20 minutes a day or an hour a week.

[00:26:32] Rob Baker: And the people who were successful at your grafting really tap into things that they want to they're. They enjoy doing. And as you're saying, they make their life fulfilling. So my challenge there were listening with saying, what's one thing you could do to next week to make your job 1% better.

[00:26:46] Rob Baker: So it was an experiment we're not looking for a hundred percent. Just what's one thing that you can do you think would make your job 1% better. And if we all did that and we were all looking for those opportunities all the time, the world would be a very different.

[00:26:58] Nola Simon: Yep. So I started writing on [00:27:00] LinkedIn personally, and five years later, I'm interviewing you.

[00:27:07] Rob Baker: Exactly. I don't think, yeah, I won't get sidetracked with a whole different discussion, but I think trying new things, trying things differently, you tend to find it benefits you, but there's unexpected outcomes that benefits other people too. So I'm benefiting from this as well. And the people that you're tuning in and watching this and others were benefiting from it as well.

[00:27:26] Rob Baker: So you're although it's for you that you've driven this through our benefits that. To others. And again, that's the thing we find a job crafting and personalization is that when people do things that work for them, it, they will find there's an unexpected consequences of the work for other people as well.

[00:27:41] Nola Simon: I'm very much invested in role modeling. So I am not a teacher. I'm not, I don't have that level of patience, but where I Excel is blazing a path and role modeling. And that's how it. So fantastic. Anyways, I'm going to hit a stop but [00:28:00] I really appreciate you joining me and I am super excited. I could geek out on this all day, but we have to end it now.

[00:28:08] Nola Simon: So thank you. I appreciate it.

Rob Baker 

Personalization at Work