The In Good Company podcast meets Julia Paulding, Chief People Officer at Lewis Silkin, the Lawyer’s Law Firm of the Year
What are the biggest challenges facing HR professionals today, and how can we start to address them?
The average person is dealing with five times the amount of change, and that means remultiplied challenge for HR and L&D teams.
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Julia Paulding draws on decades of experience in professional services to identify timeless skills, and novel approaches to meeting the people challenges of today. In this episode, listen to her refreshingly sharp perspective on how empathy and adaptability set organisations up to succeed, including:
- Back to the brilliant basics
- What work life balance looks like under conditions of constant change
- Why individualised attention and incentives meet retention challenges
- How an ethos of bravery and kindness makes the difference
- Why investment in leadership and management capability drives us forward
Watch the full episode here:
How do we address the biggest challenges facing the HR function right now?
Focus on the brilliant basics: equipping leaders with the skills to support their teams. Doubling down on communication in all its forms. Thinking about engagement, feedback, listening to people and retaining trust in different parts of the organisation as we navigate today’s landscape. It’s helping our leaders to never forget that nearly all of us as individuals, we want to feel heard, we want to be valued at work, and we want to have the opportunity to learn, maybe to progress with other people. And we really want to have work environments where we can enjoy working with our colleagues. Investing in our leadership has got to be the way forward: understanding how to get the best out of people, how to help filter the noise so that we can drive forward.
How can leaders support and retain people through five times the amount of change?
By understanding that people are individuals, they have individual needs, they have individual preferences, and they’ll have individual concerns. And really think about the individual and team impact of everything that’s going around us. People want some autonomy. They expect feedback in a different way. They like a personalised approach. They want to choose how they learn, where they learn, when they communicate with people. There’s need to personalise our reward packages as much as we can competitively. It used to be back in the day reward packages were pretty static. And now with all this choice, there’s pressure for us to really get that right for our employees in a way I haven't seen in my very long career.
What are the power skills that you believe people need, and how do you help people build them?
The power skills that relate to professional services are collaboration, involving communication skills of all forms, with a huge emphasis on listening, to make magic happen internally, and when speaking to clients. It’s the ability to be happy and willing to share knowledge and feedback with others, to be receptive and celebrate receiving other people’s knowledge and feedback. The leadership skills here are dialling up the empathy to be really alive to what individuals need. It’s only gotten more pronounced over the years: the expectation is they’ll be amazing technical lawyers, and we’ll support them to develop and have a structure for that which I won’t down-play, but it is a given, and it’s those other parts that set somebody apart, and help our firm to develop.
Bonus insight: what actually drives resilience?
How do you develop resilience? Well, to my mind, you develop resilience within a workplace setting by having really good line managers, having psychological safety, knowing that you can try something and can go wrong maybe, and you'll learn from it factually - you've learnt from it and that will build you up for the next time.
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