Joe Fuller: Corporate recruiting and early development practices have not kept pace with business and cultural change. Firms in some sectors have struggled to attract and retain a diverse workforce. They’ve often been slow to recognize younger workers’ concerns about the moral purpose of business and the prospects for personal growth. As many jobs move online and working groups become more insular, those hiring practices can amplify racial and gender-based inequalities. It’s no surprise that the younger and underrepresented professional groups increasingly seek out career coaching.

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School Professor and Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. I’m joined today by Edith Cooper, former partner, executive vice president, and head of human capital management at Goldman Sachs. Following three decades on Wall Street, she co-founded Medley, a career and life-coaching firm for young professionals. Medley helps its clients to find the role of work in their lives and develop skills to overcome the obstacles they will inevitably encounter. It also provides employers with the means to offer young talent training that goes far beyond the enterprise’s traditional programs. Edith joins me today to discuss the evolution of work in professional services and more broadly. How has the hard-charging, traditionally white male-dominated culture in professional services changed? How have the expectations of younger workers evolved? How do issues of purpose, equity, and work/life balance factor into today’s corporate settings? Edith, welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast. Edith

Cooper: Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m so looking forward to our conversation.

Fuller: Edith, you’ve led a very interesting and diverse career, particularly as it relates to the management of people at work. You were in banking, you were a line partner at Goldman Sachs in banking, and eventually became CHRO, chief human resources officer, of Goldman. Could you tell us a little bit about your career path and what that transition was like—to go from line to such an essential staff role in a professional services organization?

Cooper: Certainly. And as you described, I was so fortunate to have had a diversity of experiences, starting out running revenue businesses. It was about making sure that we had salespeople and bankers and risk-takers who were 100 percent attuned to understanding the businesses of our clients. And in each instance, I got much smarter at what it really took to be a leader—first and foremost, understanding your clients; secondly, and perhaps equally as important, understanding the team that one needed to have in place to really reach those clients’ goals, ensuring that everyone had the potential to perform and thrive in the environment. After almost a couple of decades of doing that at Goldman and other institutions, I was asked by the then-CEO to take on the CHRO, chief human resources officer, role. At that point, I had had the opportunity to get dropped into a number of businesses where I certainly wasn’t the expert in the room but had judgment on those three things: How do you understand the client needs? How do you make sure that you have the right people on the team? How do you pull all that together for results? It was an extraordinary opportunity to, with my colleagues, push ourselves to take the human capital management function at the firm to the next level.

Fuller: In most companies, of course, human resources, much like the law department and IT and other areas, is the province of specialists who came up in the function. It’s unusual for someone to come into a human capital management leadership role that doesn’t have deep experience in it. And also, my observation of dealing with companies is, many of the people we’ll call “operators” or “line managers” at best have a sense of the human capital function as technocrats who run processes and ensure compliance and, at worst, have them down as people who are constantly putting the brakes on what the operators want to do. How did you find the transition from that operating role to running that function?

Cooper: Well, I suppose I brought to the conversation and the role an appreciation for the fact that, within the leadership of the division, there was deep subject-matter expertise that I respected and didn’t have. And quite frankly, that was always my operating model, whether it was interacting with HR or technology, legal, finance—at Goldman Sachs, we call those functions “The Federation”—was on par of significance as my interactions with my fellow revenue leaders or business leaders. Everything that I’d heard at Goldman, with respect to our culture being grounded on being able to attract, retain, and inspire people, was actually the most important thing that the firm had to do and had to get right. That’s where the culture starts, that what enhances and evolves the culture to be more inclusive and dynamic, and that’s where the firm is most vulnerable if you get it wrong. I brought to the role a sense of significance, a respect for the deep subject-matter expertise, because HR, human resources, is incredibly complicated. You know, 35,000 people operating in jurisdictions all over the world. You hire, you pay, you promote, you invest, you develop, and you do that around a center core of any firm’s culture. For me, my experience in getting involved in restructuring functions that I knew nothing about was very, very important, because I was never going to be a compensation expert in line with the individuals who are in my rewards function. My job was to really understand the drivers of every business’s success. That was a real benefit of having run P&L businesses and how to really create partnerships between myself, my business leaders within HR, and those leaders who really, quite frankly, were equally responsible for setting the tone where their people could really excel in the organization. Additionally, of course, there are some—I call them “guardrail responsibilities”—to make sure that people were doing the business the way that you should be doing the business. And that was something that I took as seriously as I did partnering in creating a spirit of collaboration and, therefore, innovation and productivity.

Fuller: Edith, here at our project, we’re interested in how work is evolving. I’m curious to hear your thoughts about how you saw the attitudes and expectations of, particularly, your younger colleagues evolve over the course of your career. And, particularly, what were the needs they were expressing and the anxieties they were expressing about work, the goals they were expressing for their careers that you were hearing when you were in the human capital management role? How did that differ from your experience as a young colleague and the young colleagues you had supervised on your way up in the organization?

Cooper: I think there was a real evolution of what employees expected from the workplace in the last decade that I spent running the human capital management division at Goldman Sachs and what I experienced earlier in my career. In my younger years, I think the overwhelming expectation was that it was an employee’s role to become the culture of the organization. As a young woman entering finance, it came down to everything from how you dressed and the way you presented yourself. And one was more successful in some ways if they had an ability to meld themselves into the culture—which was then and probably still now—very dominated by white men. So you can imagine that that had its challenges. But there was also this, I think, contract that existed between employees and companies at the time, where you worked hard, you advanced in your career. You would keep your job and you would advance and you would financially do well—albeit, certainly way more challenging for those that were diverse, broadly defined. Fast-forward to the time that I ran human capital management at Goldman. I took on the role in the spring of 2008, shortly before the financial crisis that struck finance and the world in the fall. In that time period, we were faced with some real existential threats. We saw some of our competitors fail, a government intervention that had not taken place on the same scale since the Great Depression, and many, many people lost their jobs. At Goldman Sachs, we found ourselves in the center of everything that was evil and wrong in the world. The financial institutions, many of whom suffered, certainly I believe played a role in the hubris and the way the market ultimately toppled. And for us at Goldman, we were really forced with decisions around whether we shirked the blame entirely, or we did work to really understand what our contribution was. I recall going to talk to potential employees—young people who were thinking about finance—and what really struck me was how direct these potential candidates were around the questions that they were asking—questions regarding whether we were responsible for financial ruin, questions around family members who had lost their homes and how they should feel about working in an organization that potentially contributed to that. That, for me and for my colleagues, was a real awakening and a step change from people saying what they thought you would want to hear versus people asking questions that they would not settle for anything but real answers. There was an increasing expectation around us being able to clearly articulate the purpose of our work and how they, in their roles, would contribute to that. One of our new hires asked me whether I was comfortable bringing my “true self” to work. It was this growing insistence around the workplace being able to understand the perspectives and the experiences that so many of our colleagues were bringing into the workplace. And it was our role to understand that and to be not just okay with it, but to be really accepting of the differences and understanding that we needed to be a place where were creating an environment where people could be themselves and, therefore, perform to their best potential. That was a significant shift that has certainly continued, that has certainly become front of mind for so many, given the environment that we are currently in with respect to the pandemic, racial equality, and other challenges that have significantly impacted all of us.

Fuller: There’s a meme, a trope, out there that young people—and particularly highly educated young professionals—are somehow more brittle, less resilient. They’re just not prepared to deal with frustration, disappointment, lack of rapid advancement, however those concerns might be experienced. What’s your response to someone who brings up that trope?

Cooper: I remember very clearly hearing that among many of my colleagues at the most-senior ranks at Goldman Sachs. I, in my role as head of human capital management, had, I think, the real luxury of talking to people all day—that people had an expectation of real human connection with the people that they worked with and really were not going to be comfortable just doing things the way they’ve always been done “because…” When I sat and I sometimes listened to my colleagues talk about, “Oh, when I started, I did whatever it took. I got the coffee. I stayed up all night in the printing room. I wasn’t afraid of hard work. And that’s the issue. People don’t understand, it’s just going to take a lot of hard work.” So I felt very strongly, as did many others, that I co-opted into the thinking that, instead of being dismissive around things that we thought were suboptimal, let’s just really get in there and understand the difference in perspective. I would say, the genius of the generation that was really centered around the fact that it’s technologically enabled in a different way—getting the information wasn’t the art, understanding the information was—is it bad for someone to have the expectation that they should understand why they were doing the work that they were doing? It seems kind of rational to me. Listen, are there going to be people who feel like they aren’t going to be tolerant of not getting to CEO? Yeah, of course there are. There are people in my generation who are like that. But to overly stress that that is the key tenet of a generation, I think, is really missing the point. I chose to take that approach, versus scolding people on how we worked harder back in the day.

Fuller: As you think about this, one of the themes that they were consistently observing in the market for talent and when we talk to executives through our research and our podcast, that there is a heightened competition for a certain type of talent, and that the supply-and-demand imbalance for certain types of talent—talent with technical skills, degrees, also very high-order social skills—is going to get even more intense. What do you think a company in the future is going to have to offer in terms of quality of work life, in terms of engagement of the type you were illustrating earlier, in order to be considered and to get and attract the talent that is going to be so fiercely fought over?

Cooper: Well, I think that you’re seeing in the way that leaders and CEOs are speaking up and out about a company’s roles in society as a lead indicator of what it’s going to really take to attract extraordinary people. There is way more openness and connection to things that are impacting humanity. The outcry against racial inequality in the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others is terrific and way overdue. It is happening because employees at companies expect their leaders to be leaders not only of the companies that they are charged with, but taking a lead position in issues that are relevant to a broader universe of people, to broader society. Secondly, I do think that our experience over the course of the last year with the pandemic has really highlighted that the work experience is not only, in fact, perhaps not as much about the walls of the building that you work in, but is being defined by the way that you’re interacting with your colleagues. If it’s an environment where individuals—from the most-junior people to the most-senior—enter working together in a collaborative, open way—where you feel as though your perspectives are valued, but also there’s a culture of learning and trust—you will be able to attract a type of person who is going to show a level of commitment and engagement that, in my mind, will no doubt lead to the innovation and growth mentality that all companies need to stay relevant. The third thing is that it’s going to be important for companies to demonstrate that they are willing to think outside of the boundaries of today. And that’s particularly true for large companies—perhaps most importantly for companies that are in established industries like finance, where you are the No. 1, 2 or 3 in all the different rankings. You’re going to have to really still have an environment where people who work there don’t believe that you are really 100 percent focused on just preserving your strength from the past. Because I think the pace of change is so rapid now that people, employees, they want to see not only how you are going to protect history, but how are you are going to make sure that you are part of creating what future excellence looks like. That’s going to be very important for companies and leaders to be able to project to potential employees.

Fuller: Edith, let’s talk a little bit more about large companies putting aside some of their old practices through the lens of diversity. Not only were you a woman in an industry historically dominated by white men, you’re a woman of color in an industry historically dominated by white men. We have, I think, a genuine-felt commitment by a lot of large companies to make a lot of progress on the diversity issue and issues of inclusion, as represented by things like Project OneTen that Ken Frazier at Merck has been spearheading and lots of declarations by corporate leaders that they want to revisit diversity in their workplaces. What do you think that’s going to take to actually work?

Cooper: I think that the focus on racial inequality broadly, but specifically within the workplace, is overdue. I would say as well that, however, this isn’t the first time organizations have had these “aha” moments around the lack of representation that exists at the most-senior ranks of companies, at the board level of companies, and quite frankly, throughout. I was very pleased to see the openness around how so many people in the majority admitted how little they actually knew about the experience of people of color, Black people specifically. And that led to an incredible, I would say, gut-wrenching outreach to Black people within organizations to sit down and really share and talk about what their experiences, our experiences, Black people, has been in the workplace guided by an interest of learning from those that are in the majority. I would say, however, that what I’d like to see is that those same intentional reach-outs to people of color around understanding their experiences of being Black continue, with respect to how one is progressing professionally. I’ve often reminded many of my CEO friends and former colleagues that they should look at their calendar and see how many of those conversations that they’ve had and make sure that they are having follow-up meetings with those people on a periodic basis to get to know them, to get to know where they sit in the organization, so that they can be helpful to them in their career, to make sure that they’re included in those key accounts and relationships, to ensure that they are recognized for their extraordinary talents, and equally as important, to ensure that they’re getting the feedback that everyone needs to be successful. At the core of making sustainable progress, with respect to having representation at every level, is intentional focus and behavior. Intentional. No one rises through an organization by accident. Nobody. White men don’t rise through the organization by accident. It is a result of intentional access to opportunities that they have had. That is what’s going to be required for Black people to be represented at every level of an organization. I’m confident, if that happens, we will see a difference. We will enrich the culture of companies, and we will see companies that excel further as a result.

Fuller: Edith, since you’ve left Goldman, you’ve started a new venture called Medley, focused on working with groups of younger workers. Can you tell us a little bit about Medley and what was the animating idea behind it, what need you saw that you thought you could fill through launching a venture like that?

Cooper: Sure, Joe. Medley is a membership where we curate groups of eight people and a coach to focus on personal and professional growth. I state those things specifically because what we’ve seen over the last several years, but has been really accelerated by the pandemic, is that people are living a blurred life. They not only want to, they expect to be able to create a life that gives prioritization across a number of dimensions, a number of things personally and professionally. I found professionally that, when leaders create environments that are authentic, real, and trusting, people perform to their potential. We created Medley to give people an opportunity to be in small groups with a coach to explore things across their value systems with other people for the benefit of themselves, but also contributing to others. Initially, when we envisioned Medley, we thought about it as an in-person experience, because we still believe, and we did then, that interacting with people in-person is important. We, like so many other organizations, had to revisit that business model as a result of Covid, and we repositioned the Medley experience to be virtual. And the benefit of that has been extraordinary. We have members now from nine countries. We have people from 22 different states across America. We’ve created a vibrant membership, where people meet on a monthly basis with their coach, but also participate in programming throughout the month that gives them opportunities to learn and grow in areas that perhaps are quite different from them. We also have learned that our audience is not limited to just people who we believed were, at that point in their careers, in their late 20s, early 30s—although I still hesitate to label people with age. But what we’ve realized is, we actually have people who are at different stages of their career and actually want to be part of Medley because they want to benefit from the different perspectives that different generations have. Jordan, my co-founder, and I represent a cross-generational team. She, as my daughter, is coming to things with a completely different lens. We have similar value systems, but I bring a perspective based upon my experiences.

Fuller: Is the curriculum or the content that you create for a group tailored to that group and their interests or some kind of diagnostic? Or is it a more general, broad-based introduction to different topics that you’re pre-identified as things you believe will be relevant to your subscribers?

Cooper: Well, when people express interest in Medley, we ask them to fill out a—we call it an “application.” I’m struggling with coming up with a better term, because really what it is, is an opportunity to get to know them, asking them questions about what’s important to them, their value systems, their priorities. We use this in an algorithm that is based upon behavioral science and other sources to create groups that are connected and cohesive in really important ways. There is a curriculum that is set forth, particularly in the first sessions, around the norms of the group—what one’s individual priorities are, their expectations, et cetera. But we always leave enough room for the group to create their sense of priorities and where they want to spend time. We know, again, based upon research, that when groups set the norms of the group, they have more commitment and agency. That certainly has proven to be the case. We have 85-plus percent attendance in the groups, and we’re now on our fifth or sixth sessions. We believe part of that is because this is not a doctrine, where this is the Medley way, and we want everyone to sign up for it and talk the Medley talk. Yes, there’s structure, informed by research and science, but it is also a reflection of what the group brings to the conversation. And we want to celebrate that as well.

Fuller: Is Medley primarily designed as a self-help platform for individuals or a platform for companies to provide a provocative service and educational platform, which will help address some of the concerns you addressed earlier about how you engage with young talent and how you motivate them to stay aligned and engaged with your organization?

Cooper: Sure. We are both what we call a “direct-to-people” business, versus direct-to-consumer. We’re a direct-to-people business. So many of our members have joined Medley as individuals. In some instances, their companies have paid for the membership. But we also have several companies who have come to us and asked to be founding business partners with Medley, because they believe that investing in their people produces greater connectivity and growth. From a learning and development perspective, historically, so much of the learning and development dollars has been skills based. How do you model something? Or how do you become a better tactical leader? And the list will go on. But there hasn’t been as much done on, how do you think about how these different aspects of who you are as an individual fit together, and how you learn, how you think through that—not just in isolation, but through and within other people. There is one thing that is important to highlight, is that, for those companies that are investing in their people through Medley, they are not in groups with other colleagues. And that’s part of what we’re offering. We believe that it’s important for companies going forward to understand how important it is for their employees to interact with people, not just in other companies within industries, but from other walks of life.

Fuller: Well, certainly the same thing also applies with a number of the groups that engage—even senior executives in uninhibited conversations, you don’t have your competitor in the room when you do that. There’s no role-playing, posture-striking going on, if people are from different backgrounds. And certainly, our research at the Managing the Future of Work project confirms the idea that employees who feel that their employer is investing in their growth, cares about their growth, are consciously giving them learning opportunities, get paid back with a significantly heightened sense of alignment and commitment to that employer. And that the employer that’s just doing skills training and isn’t thinking about the development of the individual employee as something other than an investment that makes them more productive tomorrow in the service of the company is a company that’s going to benefit from this type of expense. Just as a last question, can you share with us what are some of the topics that, in those applications and those self-diagnoses, were of greatest interest to the Medley population?

Cooper: Sure. At a very high level, how does one think about setting goals and prioritizing different aspects of their life? As part of that, who and how do you bring yourself forward to priorities in your life, conversations on the inner critic? And what are those things that are present in your thinking that are holding you back? How do you understand those things and turn them from constraints to potential prompters to move forward? Perspective is something that we’ve heard a tremendous amount about from our members. If you think about it, what happens is, you find yourself really over time staying in your lane. And, therefore, when we come to difficult, challenging things that are happening in society, so many of us are just ill prepared to understand those things. And how to be present and to bring your best self and openness. Creativity actually has been something that people have really enjoyed. How do you give yourself space to be creative when we’re all trying to get things done and move things forward? Those are some of the examples of topics that are discussed within the groups. I would also say that, outside of the groups, as part of the membership, there is programming. And there’s a never-ending interest and appetite for learning. We’ve had speakers on criminal justice reform. We’ve had many sessions on leading through uncertain times. We’ve also had sessions on parenting during the online-learning phase. It is very much a reflection of what’s top of mind. But at the core is, regardless of what’s coming at you, what are your value systems, and how do you think about being present and intentional in everything that might be coming forward and coming at you?

Fuller: Well, that’s an interesting list. And I think it speaks well for the self-awareness of your applicants, that they’re thinking beyond learning that they could be doing or could reasonably expect to achieve on the job to get to issues of self-motivation and how one both specifies and achieves life objectives earlier in their lives than many of us got around to doing it. Well, Edith Cooper, thank you for joining on the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Cooper: Thank you for having me, Joe. A very interesting conversation.

Fuller:We hope you enjoy theManaging the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.