Building LinkedIn's Culture: What Hyper-Growth Really Looks Like with Steve Cadigan

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So you've got a part-time CEO who's got six other jobs. He's a little bit of a maniac. A company that's been around less than 25 years that is worth more than Ford, Toyota, Honda, GM, BMW, and Mercedes. Worth more than them combined. Google make more money in a day than we made in a year. I mean, that's what we're facing.

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Can we talk about AI? I guess my question is, are the robots going to win? Are they going to kill us? Are they going to take all of our jobs? The companies that have been cutting staff saying, oh, it's all about AI. No, it was never about AI. It's about your businesses struggling and you look better selling a story that AI is taking those jobs. All those jobs that said are going to be gone like Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft. No, they're hiring like crazy. And they all realized that story they sold. I'm sorry, it was bullshit.

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What if I told you your company was going to grow by 10x over the next three years? How would you prepare for it? Would you be excited? Would you be sad? Would you be worried? Maybe it will help you look at talent, culture, and leadership development differently. But if you're thinking about these things, then this episode is perfect for you because today I'm going to be interviewing Steve Cadigan.

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Steve was LinkedIn's first ever CHRO, the Chief Human Resources Officer, and he helped them build their talent strategy from pretty much nothing to a phenomenal system where people were allowed to grow and develop and the company thrived.

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And so on the show a lot, we talk about how do we make sure leader development and people development is keeping pace with business development. In this episode, we dive into that in ways that maybe we haven't before. It's a great conversation. I could talk to this guy all day. I think you'll love it. He shares some really, really valuable stories and information. I can't wait for you to hear it. In this episode, I wanted to start back from the beginning and ask Steve about his very first days at LinkedIn.

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Take me back to 2009. Do you remember what LinkedIn looked like when you walked in, when they were 400 employees before they went to 4000? Do you remember kind of your start there? I definitely do. And you know what? In looking back on that journey, what was really unique for me were several things. One, I was a big company guy before going to this startup. You know, here is the company at the time, 2009, roll the tape back.

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Nobody on the team, nobody on the board, none of the investors forecast the success that LinkedIn had in front of it. And I certainly didn't either. I walked in going, okay, it's a startup. If this thing doesn't work, I could go back to big corporate America where it's fine. But I had no idea at that moment that building a company is entirely different than

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than going into a big company and just fixing and tuning and redirecting and sharpening what other people have laid before you. You go in, I go into LinkedIn and there's no policies, there's no architecture of job families, there's no compensation strategy, philosophy, there's no thinking about how many layers we want in the organization. There's just a lot of really smart people trying to build something to the best of their ability.

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And the other thing on top of that, and I know you've had a number of guests in the talent domain, is...

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I had a CEO and a leadership team suspicious of human resources because their experience had not been shockingly that constructive with human resources. Right? And so I'm like, you walk into that environment and you say, okay, I'm going to have to build from nothing. I feel like I've been in prior to LinkedIn. I've been in five other industries, worked in Singapore, Canada, U.S.

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I've seen a lot of stuff that could inform good thinking around how to build a good talent strategy, right? How to build a really good HR architecture, but I'd never done it before. And that to me was the draw. And, but also I grossly underestimated how hard that was, you know?

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So for example, my first staff meeting week one, an argument breaks out among the executives, should we do performance reviews, right? And so they don't know me. They don't know what I'm about. But they all kind of in the middle of the argument, they stop and they turn to me and they go, well, let's ask the HR guy, you know, thinking that I'm going to go, oh, yeah, we definitely need to do performance reviews. And I said, I really don't care. I said, I've seen performance reviews do more harm than good.

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The key is the belief behind performance reviews is that most managers are reluctant to share constructive feedback with people. And a lot of boards expect high performance comes from, you know, checking in with people. And also a lot of reward systems are based on these kinds of reviews. So we don't have to do it, but we're going to have to go explain to the board if we don't do it, what we're really doing to build a high performing culture.

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And so I'm, you know, what do you, what do you guys want to do? So I had my ex Googlers, I had my ex Yahoo people, I had my ex Oracle people, you know, and we all bring the baggage of what worked or didn't work where we worked before. And so I try to mediate that. And that moment for me was formative because it shaped, you know,

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for them that I'm not about laying down my playbook. This is how it's got to go. I'm more about let's build a playbook that you guys want. And that was, I think for them, surprising and hopefully refreshing in retrospect. And that's how we handle discussions on everything. And imagine this. I mean, I don't know how many of the listeners –

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have walked into a company that doesn't have any of this stuff and been able to build it. It takes a lot of debate. It takes a lot of learning. And what I've been fortunate enough most of my career is to work in technology and software and technology.

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What's great about that is the process of developing software is really a test. We're going to try A and B and see which works, and then we're going to double down on A or B, whichever is better, and then we're going to learn and do some more testing. And that kind of thinking bleeds into talent strategy. Okay, well, let's try this bonus structure. If it works, great. If it doesn't, we can fix it. There's an openness, if you will, to experiment.

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And that's healthy when you're facing a lot of unknowns, right? Like, yeah, versus this is our path and we can't veer from it. It might not work. Right. And so that was, you know, thinking back, there were so many new things, Tony. I mean, I was definitely out of my depth, you know, like, whoa, learning on the fly. Yeah.

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Yeah, well, that's a big jump. I think people underestimate the difference between being in maintenance mode and being a builder and then knowing which one they are, because I do think that's a different profile of person. Like some people hate the build. They want they want things to be set up and then they come in and they can plus it up. They can make it better.

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I am one of those people that I love to build. Bring me into the chaos. If there's nothing there, that's cool. That gives us an opportunity to build something great, and then I'll prepare it to pass it on to the next person. So it's interesting that you made that big transition. Did you know that you were a builder before you did it, even though you didn't have the experience? Is there something in your brain saying, like, I think I can build it?

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No, no, it was really, it was, it was massive naivete on my part thinking, how hard can this be, you know, and walking and going, oh my gosh, this is really, really hard. But really energizing, you know, to, to be given the opportunity to, to write the blueprints for, for an organization. And I was really scared about getting it wrong. You know, that's, I'm very risk. I'm generally a risk averse person. I think I learned that about myself, but I'm highly collaborative and,

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And one day we had so many great debates on the executive team. I miss being on my own for the last maybe 15 years or so. I miss the camaraderie of being in a team. And one day at the exec staff we had this debate, do you love to win more than you hate to lose, or do you hate to lose more than you love to win?

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I rejected that choice. I'm like, no, I like helping other people win. I get off on the assist. I like scoring, but I really like seeing your joy if I hand you a pass and you slam it home. For me, that's where it is. Those kinds of moments, I think,

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help you learn more about yourself. So I think, yes, I do. I always knew that I like a whole lot of crazy. If you're in HR and you don't like crazy, you're in the wrong place. Because every day presents a new challenge. We've got an issue in India. We've got a key employee who's got some family issues, and we've got to help them.

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We've got to close this candidate, and the company just made them a huge candidate. Everything is a new strategy, and that's what I loved. And that helped, I think, fuel my energy to face so many new things that I was like, okay, you like this, Steve. Remember, you really like this. You chose this, and see the opportunity for what it is. And I'm surrounded by some phenomenally talented, bright people. Yeah.

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Yeah. When you think about the scaling journey going from 400 to 4000 through an IPO and what, three and a half years, I'm sure there's so much that we could learn from that experience. What's I know you talk about this a lot. You probably get asked it a lot. What's a part of that journey that like maybe people don't ask you about enough that you wish they would?

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Great question. I would say, what's the biggest mistake that you made along the way, which I'll share. But the other one would be, imagine you're the head of HR and by default head of recruiting for an organization that's growing like crazy and your product is a recruiting product. That's what LinkedIn's selling. Yet your biggest mistake

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underperforming operational element as a company is recruiting. You can't recruit very well. And they didn't tell me about that in the interview process. So I walk in and I'm like, okay, what's the, what's the challenge? And, you know, lots of things to do, but really we need to build a moat. We need to build this company fast because we're worried Google's going to steal the market. We're worried Facebook's going to steal the market. We're worried Twitter's going to get into that. Like, yeah.

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this was really about scaling super fast or we could lose the opportunity. Right. And so it wasn't just, we need to scale because the customers are demanding it. They weren't at that point, but we knew we had something special. And so it's moving super, super fast. And what that pressure forced us to learn was that if you want to win the world of recruiting, um,

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You got to get out of the world of recruiting. And that's very counterintuitive. What you have to do is become the place the best people find. And that means culture. That means you need to build a place where if it's so great that the word gets out, the viral spread of the goodness that you're offering, the opportunity you're offering is so great,

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that it becomes less about hunting those people and more about, you know, sifting through the great people that want to join the problem you're solving. Right. And that's what we figured out. Even with a CEO is a little suspicious of culture and executive team is like that mushy stuff. Like what's that all about? And that's really worthy of thinking about, you know, and I tell us to entrepreneurs all the time. And I do a lot of work with entrepreneurs in Europe these days and,

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And they're like, well, tell us about that, you know, how you leverage LinkedIn in really creative, analytical ways so you could. I was like, no, that's not how we won the war for talent. We got out of the recruiting war, you know. And, you know, hey, I thought we were really good at recruiting. But what we were really great at was becoming the place where people could build the best careers, right? And you think about it, Tony, this is really funny. We didn't realize it at the time. But I'll never forget the story.

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The moment as an executive team, we were really struggling. I mean, the first two years there, like offer decline rates 90%. Like we couldn't, and we're getting outpaid, outbid, outwork environment, out everything by Google. Google make more money in a day than we made in a year. I mean, that's what we're facing. And their surroundings are surrounding us. And we didn't want to just hire people. We wanted to hire great people. And that's a different proposition. So it forced us to say, why would anyone want to work here?

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And that led to a conversation where one day we realized we're a professional network designed to help people find their dream jobs. If we're not delivering the dream job ourselves, we have no right to be here. So it's our birthright. It's our purpose. And once that light bulb came on,

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we realized, wow, building a great culture has zero budget. It's just about commitment. Do you want to do it? And that was really enlightening for us. And I literally think we turned the corner that day. And as a leadership team, we didn't agree on a whole lot, but we did agree we want to be the best place our employees ever worked. And that's about like, you start the interview with, where do you want to go? What do you want to do?

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And even if you don't want to stay here forever, that's fine. Oh, you want my job or you want to be a CHRO? I promise you when you come here, we will fill in all the holes and gaps in your portfolio to get you closer to that. And that's one that I think every organization could stand to learn from because the competition for talent has never been tougher, even beyond technology today. I mean, I deal with retailers, fast food chains, and it's like, hey…

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Nobody wants to work here. I'm like, yeah, why would they? You know, like you got to make it worth their while, you know, and it's not a captive labor market anymore. But that's a that's a that's a area I, you know, I could go on and on about it. But that was a big learning for us. Yeah.

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Yeah, I think that's great. I read about that in your book and it struck me for a number of different reasons. So I work with growth stage companies, usually 100 employees to 500, somewhere in that range, really small. And I talk to them about this back of a napkin talent strategy. Like if we were sitting at a coffee shop, here's what I'd write out for you. And I'm curious to hear what you think about this. But it's like...

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There's this triangle of are people connected, are people capable, and do they have capacity to perform? Those are the three things that I think about. And so when that connected pillar, it's like, is work personally meaningful for them? Sometimes when you have that conversations with CEOs, they're like, well, I don't care if it's personally meaningful. It's giving them a paycheck. And it's like, well...

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It has to be more than just a paycheck. It has to be more than just I'm going to give you a paycheck every two weeks or whatever the case may be and you're going to work here and you're going to take care of your family. But if we can take this personal meaning and bridge it with the work that they do every day, not only will they work harder at the work that they're doing, but the legacy that we get to build as a company of being the place where dreams come true

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Like it's almost I would say like you can't even quantify the impact of that. You told a story about how LinkedIn got their wellness program started and that gentleman that came to you was going to put in his arm and his resignation. Armin. Yeah. Like I thought that was a beautiful story about like you never know where these conversations can go. But it has to start with people believing their dreams can come true at your organization. Yeah.

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Yeah. And sadly, by the way, I love, I love the triangle. I love the concept. I will add another one. And this is going to riff a little bit with one of your prior guests. One of the things we discovered when you're growing really, really fast and you're building a new market, right? And that's really exciting when you're building a new space.

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But it's also really hard because there's no demographic you can go recruit from to help you, you know, who's built what you're building because no one's built what you're building. So you've got to put people in positions that they've never played before. Right. And what we found and this is, you know, you're working on a book. I'm working on a book right now on this particular topic, which is we found when you put someone in a position.

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that includes a lot of new things, and I was in that position in my role in HR. I mean, technically I've run HR, but I've never built HR, right? That unlocks massive energy that we grossly underestimate. And it turns out brain science shows that all the brain researches, when you tackle new things, you know, you're firing new cylinders, your creativity is higher, your excitement's higher, and as you said earlier, you know,

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when the, when the triangle is in harmony, you're tapping into an X factor that makes it more than just a job. Now, now it's really great and I'm growing. And what I try to suggest to leaders today is, you know, ask them, Hey, when did you have the biggest turning point in your professional journey? Like when, what was that moment? 95% of the time, well, somebody put me in a role I didn't think I was ready for. I didn't think I was really experienced and I crushed it and my confidence grew. My energy grew. Um,

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And I'm like, okay, so are you designing to do that in your company right now? Or are you designing to disable that from happening? Most of us, we don't want the big leap because we're worried they won't do it. Or my board won't be happy with me because we're going to miss the quarter because we've got too many people out of position, right? But I think what's really interesting about this moment when we're having this conversation here in the middle of 2026...

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One of the biggest things that's happening in the world of work is we need newer skills in our workforce faster than any time in history. Technology is greatly outpacing our capacity to build the skills to leverage that technology. And so we need new skills. We need new people. And so you've got basically three paths. One, you can get the stale skills out and hire the new skills.

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You can build the new skills or you can do a hybrid of both. And the only way, the only way forward is to become a place where people are growing and building. And I think, and this is going to be a little bit radical and some people are going to be a little bit cross with me for saying this, but I believe in the next five to ten years, you're going to recruit more people based on what they can learn than what they know.

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Because we know your job's going to change. Like in HR, we have a joke like, hey, you know how long a job description is accurate? That time when you hit print and you go walk over to the printer, that's how long it's accurate. By the time you pick it up, the job's already changed. So why are we hiring for that job? Because it's yesterday's job. It's not tomorrow's job. So I want to look at you, Tony. I want to say, hmm.

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Does Tony show me that he's got the capacity to learn, that he's got a, you know, there are clues in his portfolio that show me he's a, he's a, you know, a fast learner. He's got a growth mindset. He's curious. That's what I want, you know, because I know...

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He's going to face new stuff. Right. And that was something that we discovered. We didn't intentionally build that at LinkedIn, but there was no market we could hire from. And there was no hyper growth experience out there. So we're like, we're going to have to go discover it. And we made some, a lot of mistakes along the way. But over time we got smarter. Like, and this is the key, I think for growth companies, you got to hire builders. Right.

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And our biggest hiring mistake a few times when we realized, oh, we could become a billion-dollar company. Have any of you guys ever built a billion-dollar company? We all look around. Nope, I haven't. Have you? Nope. Okay, well, we better go hire some adult supervision here. And we hired some people who ran billion-dollar businesses, and they failed. Because we failed, not recognizing they ran billion-dollar business. They didn't build a billion-dollar business. Right?

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Right. And so we're like, Oh, okay. Building versus sustaining massive difference. And to your point, I think it's a great point. Some people don't know what their, what their sweet spot is, you know? And if you can help create that in the journey, it's a real advantage.

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You talk about bringing in adult supervision. So the concept that my book is written around is called the growth trap. And in the growth trap, companies grow so fast and they get to the point where the growth of the company outpaces the leadership capability of the company. And like when you hit that inflection point, you got to do something. You got to bring in adult supervision. You got to go. You got to go build more skills, because if you don't, you know, really bad things happen on the other side of that curve.

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I'm wondering when you all are having that conversation, what was the spark? What did something happen? Did you see stuff start to break and like no one knew how to fix it? Like, how did you look up one day and say, you know, I think we need some help. Like we need to bring someone in who actually has done this before because none of us have.

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The moment that it hit me that we needed a new plan was sitting in the board, and we'd just gone from 500 to 1,000 and 1,000 to 2,000. So this is like two years into my journey. We've already grown. We've already like quadrupled the size in the short period of time I'm there.

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And the CEO is really starting to recognize that if we don't lay this culture foundation right, like if we get the foundation off by an inch, we're going to miss the moon as on a rocket ship by miles, right? Like you got to get that. So he sits there and he says, hey, I want to talk to the board today about culture.

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in all your experiences with growth like this, what should we know? Give us some advice. And they'll look at each other like, yeah, we've never seen growth like this before. Our board, who's there to guide us and mentor us? They're like, yeah, we've never seen this before. And that's when I realized, we're gonna have to figure this out on our own. We're gonna have to really experiment. And at that time, 2009,

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Google had been through hyper growth, but all those founders were, you know, in their yachts owning islands, you know, they're, they're not wanting to come, you know, grind it out with us. And so we didn't have lots of places to go. And that's where it comes down to fast iteration, quick learnings, like, hey, let's, let's figure it out. And also a fair amount of mistakes, you know, you're just going to make them, you know.

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Yeah. And and so, you know, one of the things that I think we did really well is hyper focused on improving, you know, always like we we had a year or two where we're like, OK, everything you do, think about how you can do that 10x.

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And it was getting kind of like cliche. Oh, have you 10x, you know, eating food today? You know, like we would make a joke. But it's like, okay, if we can do that in two countries, we got to do that in 20 countries. Like, is that going to work? You know? And mostly, you know, when you're growing really fast, it's, is the trust high?

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Because when you're growing fast, stuff's going to break. People are going to get frustrated. And if the trust is low, it's going to fester and it's going to lead to a lot more distractions. But if the trust is high, the benefit of the doubt is given and people are more focused on let's fix this versus who screwed this one up.

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which is super dysfunctional and super filled with distraction. And that was a skill we had. And I give our CEO real credit for that. He was like, man, if something's not working, I'm going to, the only thing I'm going to focus on is fixing stuff that seems to be broken in our organization, whether it's something in product, something in recruiting, something in engineering, something, you know, and, or two departments that aren't getting along. Like we would, we would sometimes he would close the door and say, we're not leaving here.

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with two department heads until you guys, we have harmony here. Like I'll be here for three days. We won't leave, you know, until we figure it out. I was like, what? But that maniacal focus on trying to, you know, address our biggest concerns, super important. You don't have time for messing around and dysfunction when you're growing that fast. Yeah.

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I love that awareness acknowledgement that stuff's going to break and it's our job to fix it, not to point fingers, because I think a lot of people get caught there. You spend so much time being upset that something broke and it's like, no, it's actually supposed to. What worked at 40 million won't work at 400 million. Like that's just the math. It's just not going to. Speaking of that and fast growth culture in fast growth.

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I hear sometimes like, why do we need to build a culture if we're going to build this and exit in 18 months or three years or whatever the case may be? I hear things like there's impossible to create a culture when things are changing so quickly. I wonder, as you stepped into this environment, and of course, you're learning on the fly. You're figuring it out. You're being adaptable.

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Do you deliberately design a culture for where you are? Or do you try to project out to design a culture for where you're going? Yeah, we...

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Gosh, I had a master class on building culture while I'm at LinkedIn, right? I did not come in with a game plan. I'd never built a culture before. I had my suspicions around, you know, I jokingly used to say, oh, you know, do you have a culture in your company? Yeah. I said, okay, let me guess. Customer first, honesty, integrity, loyalty, hard work, respect your coworker.

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Like, yeah, how'd you know? I said, because it's just a bunch of garbage. You know, it's a, I see the same posters on the wall. And so, you know, we tried what we tried to really think about was changing that conversation of culture into how do we build an environment where people can do their best work?

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And it's going to vary. We all have different environments where we thrive better, right? And so how do we do that? And then really what forced it was when we started growing new offices in new countries, now we've got the regional culture, we've got distance taxes, and we've got all kinds of new things that are stretching us to think about how do we design something that's going to allow people to do their greatest work? And what does that look like?

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And so what we did more was had conversations about it and debates. Like, what does that look like to you? And, and we didn't try to top down this. We tried to bottom up it like, okay, here, you know, there's a, before I even got there, there was a task force that came up with our, you know, sort of our value set. Like, here's, here's what it is. And one of the ones is a leadership team that we were laughing about, like humor, like that's really part of our values. You know, how lame is it that we have to say, ha ha, we're having fun, but it turns out humor isn't.

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amazing depressurizer, right? It's a great shock absorber when you can quickly laugh and, you know, not take yourself too seriously, which can happen really easily when people are putting in tons of hours or away from their family. They're just like, we better get this right. You know, I got to get home to my kids.

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There's just a lot in play. And that debate was, I think one of the greatest strengths we had no blueprint. We're not, we weren't trying to mimic some other culture that we saw out there. We're like, let's take the lessons of what we, and it starts with what didn't you like about where you worked before and how can we change that here? Right. And that's true about human resources just in general, by the way, every company I've ever interviewed with, I'm like, so tell me about great art.

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great HR looks like. And they're like, well, it's not this, it's not three sixties. It's not performance. You're like, Oh, so you've not seen it. You've just been scarred by it, you know? And so, and, and I wasn't wanting to be the culture champion. I wanted to be the facilitator of you.

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we all own this, then, you know, you're not trying to pass my culture quiz every quarter. You know, you're, you're building it. And then there's that ownership. And here, here was a little bit of a hack that we had. Um, half of our company were sales. Okay. Half of it. And 90% of our, uh, field offices were sales. And I had the great luck of having my head of sales, this guy named Mike Gamson, um, um,

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He was in front of me on culture. He wasn't behind me. And usually the sales guy, you know, in HR, I'm watching you, bro. Like, oh, the off-sites in Vegas? No, it's not. You know, and usually the sales guys are the people that are pushing the extremes. No. He would have sales conferences where it's all about the values. That's all we're going to talk about, culture and values. And people are like, hey, when are we going to get the quarterly bogey? Like, what? He's like, no, we're going to talk about culture and values.

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And Mike, the fact that my sales leader who was running most of the field operations had that led to the CEO and I would go do tours around the world. And we'd show up in these offices and go, this is more energy and culture than we have in headquarters. Like we got to export this to headquarters. And that was so great to have.

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you know? Yeah. Um, and it's not easy. Here's another feature to this conversation. I want to make sure I add because it's counter to how a lot of people think about culture. We were so young and early in our journey that we invited people to come in and build a culture better. We didn't say,

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Here are the tablets. Study up. Quiz on Friday. We're like, here's what we have, but we want to invite you to make it better. Because we know it's going to need to grow and develop. So please challenge it. Make suggestions. And I'll give you a great example of how you do that.

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ritual every month on a Friday where the whole technical team would do a hack day. And they would either, guys would get together and girls and say, we're going to build a new product. Are we going to fix something that we think could work better in the company? Like, I don't know, online conference room reservations, something, you know, could be simple, could be really technical. And we just acquired a company.

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a couple of founders, and they went through Hack Day and said, hey, you know what would be a really cool idea is if your hack, and we would have a panel at the end that would judge the hacks and people would win prizes. You know, the top, and if you've got number one, hats off to you and so forth. But the new guys that we acquired came in and had an idea. How about if we allow the people who win the hack to quit their day job and go do the hack and build that?

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And so they came to me, they came to my office one day and said, hey, here's our proposal. And they're so ready for me to go, well, you know, blah, blah, corporate speak, you know, we can't do that. So I bang on the wall because the CEO's office is next to mine. He comes running over. I said, hey, Jeff, one of the co-founders name was Bowie. I said, Bowie, tell Jeff what you just told me.

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He goes, hey, and he explains the whole thing. And Jeff goes, yeah, do it. And they're like, what? What just happened? We just told the HR guy. He bangs on the wall. CEO comes in. Yes, that's how you make your culture better. And so what do you think those two founders are going to do? Do you think they're just going to go back to their cubes? No, they're going to tell everybody. Oh, my gosh. This is a new world.

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And that goes viral. And when you're trying to deliver a career transformation, you want to deliver those experiences. And it's pretty simple. But the CEO said, yeah, do it. He leaves and then he comes back. He goes, wait a second. Check with the VP of engineering first because we could have some project snafus. We just let everyone run away from their work and go do this. So just make sure he's okay with it. But generally, I'm okay.

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And I'm thinking like the VP engineering is going to say no to the CEO. No, you know, it's a home run. We're good, you know? Yeah. That's great. That's a new way of looking at work. A lot of times people look at work like, and I've heard this from the executive ranks, we want lifers. We want people that are going to be here for life. And it's like, bro, no one's going to be here for life. Just trust me. Like they're not going to do that. But I like to look at...

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I like to look at work as a new school. Like when I worked at a company named Defenders, they did talent really, really well. And I wanted to learn. And I felt like I was in college. Like I walked around that campus with a book bag on all the time, which I got made fun of for. But like I'm at school, I'm learning, I'm learning how to do this. I'm learning how to do this at the growth space company. I know what I want to do for my future. And this company is helping me do that.

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That matters to me. When I hear your line, retention is dead, growth is a new loyalty, I get excited. I do. But there's another part of my brain that says, I'm wondering what other people are thinking about that. Because you get the resistance of...

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We're going to pour into these people and we're going to develop them. Like, what if they leave? What if they get really, really good and they go work for our competitors? Like, how do you overcome some of those things when you're really thinking about building a career around growth and specifically growth towards what that person wants to accomplish?

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Yeah, great. This is great. And this is top of mind for everyone. Most of the leaders I talk to are really frustrated with the length of time people are staying in their organizations today, which, by the way, in the United States for people that, you know, the whole aggregate of the labor pool, call them professional workers, right now it's about four years. Okay, that's the length of time. Now,

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that that's not a shocking number like i can deal with people staying four years but when you look at the 20 to 35 demographic it's about 2.2 right now okay so wait we just finished your new higher orientation and you're out and that by the way is the median which means half the demographic is of that pool is less than two years so in silicon valley you know software engineer you know the median tenure is around a year and a half and you know we don't celebrate 10 year anniversary it's

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10 months, you're still here. Can I give you a hug? Like, it's great. But here's the truth. Um, that I think is really important for, for leaders to understand is, um, in a world that's changing really fast today. Okay. You need new people and new ideas and new perspectives. Um,

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dare I say, a diverse workforce. You know, like, it's kind of been a taboo word with this new administration, but new people with new ideas and new ways of solving problems is a competitive advantage. People who've been solving problems the same way, who've been reading the same playbook, are disabling your capacity to face a new frontier. And the greatest example of that is Tesla.

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right now. So you've got a part-time CEO who's got six other jobs. He's a little bit of a maniac. You've got a company that's been around less than 25 years that is worth more than Ford, Toyota, Honda, GM, BMW and Mercedes worth more than them combined. Okay. Wow. Now why is that? Because the market believes the new player that's bringing a new refreshing outlook that didn't hire a lot of people from

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you know, hundred year plus companies is the company that can out innovate people who've been doing it the same way. So that's why that, that's my first play to sort of knock down the people like, you know, we've all been taught the teams that win are the ones that stayed together the longest. We're,

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Well, that's not true with Tesla. They're destroying this old, stayed. Ford versus Ferrari has a great scene. When Carroll Shelby goes into Mr. Ford's office, he goes, that folder you're touching right there, it touched 16 hands before it got yours. We are not going to win the race with that kind of thinking. And so getting down to brass tacks, it's still frustrating. Why would I develop these people if they're just going to go,

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Because they're going to go. They are going to go. And if they go out as angels that you made better, they're more likely to refer people here. And here's the hard reality for a lot of business leaders. Thanks to Indeed, thanks to LinkedIn, thanks to the internet, I can see, my kids can see, your employees can see more opportunity than any time in history. And if you were a crusty, frustrated CEO who's probably in their 60s or 70s,

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and start your career, and every day see hundreds of opportunities, you're telling me you'd still be working in this bank, you'd still be doing the same thing? No, you wouldn't. You would have been tempted to go to the, it's like eating at your home and never going out to dinner, and then you go to Vegas and you go to the buffet and you go, whoa, I can have all that stuff? I want to try the shrimp, I want to try the king crab. Of course they're going to do that.

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So, you know, what I try to say is prepare for it. And the greatest metaphor for that right now, I'm a huge sports fan. I love college basketball. Right now, if you're a college coach in football or basketball in the United States, you know your best player is going to be there one year.

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And something amazing happened this past year. Indiana won the football championship in your backyard. Yes, they did. And Michigan won the college basketball championship. Indiana had a 60% roster turnover, and Michigan had every starter was brand new to the school that year, and they won a national championship. And now their coach is left to go coach the Mavericks. But that's never happened before. So what's happening? Well,

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those sports coaches realize if I only have players for one year, I need a simpler offense and a simpler defense. Okay. So what does that mean for business leaders? If you know people aren't going to stay for 10 years, you can't have jobs that take five years for someone to learn. You just can't. You're going to have to re-engineer your offense. You're going to have to say, if this job takes someone three years to figure out, I need to change that job. So it takes them three months or six months. And yeah, it may be hiring and yeah, it's hard and yeah, it's different. But,

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But if you do that, you're onboarding people faster and creating a new value chain system. And that's kind of fun. It's fun. Yeah. But yeah, it's hard. And I think that's the exciting way that I try to mitigate the frustration is, listen.

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Do you think people will stay? I asked him a simple question. All right, people are leaving fast. Do you think next year it's going to change? Do you think in five years, 10 years, something's going to happen in the global economy that's going to say people, we're going to go back to people staying their whole careers in a company. Will that ever happen? And the answer is always, of course it won't. Okay. Yeah. So what's it going to take for you to change your strategy to expect people won't stay?

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Right. That's called playing offense, expecting them to try to retain them. I think retention is defense. It's total defense. And that's why, and you know, a little bit ahead of our times, but building LinkedIn and the sales leader I was telling you about Mike, he began every interview with what do you want to be doing when you leave the company?

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And people are like, what just happened here? You're doing my exit interview? I haven't even got a job offer yet. Like, we know you're going to go. It's Silicon Valley. You're not going to stay. That's okay. Let's be honest, right? That's like you saw. It's the opening of my book. Like, let's start from there. And I believe if you help someone realize I'm going to get you on your journey, whether it's here or somewhere else, they're going to give you the X factor. And even if they go, they're going to be an angel for you referring their friends, right?

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Yeah. Yeah. And then maybe there's a bridge program where they come back and help with projects and help with other things. That's really great. Correct. Correct. And that's, you know, a bridge program. Another way of saying it, it's an alumni program. Right. I deal with hospital systems all over the United States. I mean, this is a this is a domain where failure is just not an option. I mean, medical care, a health care system is really in code red right now in the United States.

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It's higher nurse turnover, early retirements for doctors, fewer people going into those professions. I mean, we've got a serious issue. So I go into these hospitals and say, what's your biggest? Oh, nurse turnover. I was like, okay, so why are they leaving? Oh, because they can be a travel nurse and make four times as much in the next town over. And I said, so, okay, well, why wouldn't they do that? And so then I go to them, well, why don't you get in the travel nurse business? Why don't you keep them?

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on your payroll and allow them to go do that, and then they don't have to leave your domain. And by the way, no one wants to be a travel nurse forever. They're going to want to come home and either have kids and have a stability with school system or be close to mom and dad or whatever.

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Yeah. And they're just they look at me just like, what? No, we don't do that here. I'm like, well, why are you so broke their brains? You broke their brain. That's right. Like I got the answer. And then and then it gets worse, Tony. Then I go, OK, so your biggest operational stress is people. How many people on your board have talent experience?

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Krispy Kreme donut. Nobody. And, you know, I've done this in major hospital systems, basically volunteering. I will do that for free. You put me on your board, and I will bring a strategic perspective to your biggest problem. Are you ready for that? It's like, no, we'd rather have the sugar high of your presentation than just go back to, you know, what we know.

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And that gets, this is back to like, I still, I've been talking about this for five, six years. And still I feel like a lot of organizations are on the recognize we have a problem phase, not ready to make a change because they're so set in, you know, when you're under stress, most of us default to what we know, you know, that's true. And few of us say, I need a new approach. Right. And it's not till you really fail or the house is on fire. Oh, maybe I need something different. And even though I see it coming, they're not ready for it.

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Yeah.

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That makes me wonder, I'm thinking back to my sales days. It's like when I would go into, even now, when I go into an organization, one of the things I'm assessing is, and I don't know a better way to say this, like how much pain are you in? Is the pain of staying the same greater than the pain of change? Because if it is, you'll take the leap. If not, you'll just complain about it and you'll complain about it, but you won't actually do anything different. So yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting. Can we talk about AI? Yeah.

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I went to a networking event. They had a panel, of course. Everyone had a question about AI. I guess my question is, are the robots going to win? Are they going to kill us? Are they going to take all of our jobs and we're going to look up one day and we're all living in pods because AI is doing all the work. You see companies like Meta like, oh, we're going to lay off all these people because the robots. So what's going to happen with AI, Steve? Yeah.

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Yeah, well, the reason you're asking that question is because the narrative has just been carried so strong right now. You know, AI is here. And that's on the tail end of, you know, digital transformation, which are two of the dirtiest, like the worst words ever. You know, I always go to people and say, hey, when you hear those words, digital transformation,

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Are you thinking of like someone walking on a beach with a golden retriever puppy in their arm and a glass of wine in the other and just holding hands on a sunset? No, you're thinking cold, impersonal, inhuman robot. And that's the language we've been using to try to get people excited about the future. You know, I look at this frontier right now and say it's a big...

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You know, we're making the sausage with AI. I think one of the things we know for sure, it's going to be a part of our future. But to the extent that we've been told or sold or it's been hyperbolized, I think is just extreme. Right. And what's really great about AI is it's amplifying the fact that to thrive in the future, you need to be more human.

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Because, you know, it's how you communicate. It's how you resolve conflict. It's how you lead. It's how you build empathy. It's how you express yourself. It's how you can negotiate, how you influence. That's the superpower of the future in a world where knowledge, what you know, is increasingly going to be commoditized because of the access, right? So I think that's kind of exciting. It's a different playbook.

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Um, and my, my real concern right now is we've got a generation of college students that are booing speakers talking about AI because their first experience, well, first they're told in school, don't use AI, you're a cheater, you know, which is like, but the whole world's using AI and playing around with it. Like, why aren't we the pre-laboratory for the real world? Okay. That's a problem. And secondly, they're applying for these internships. If there are any left, because all the companies are like,

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oh, AI is going to cover that. Let's lay off the people we haven't hired yet because that's a lot easier. The new grads and the interns, let's lay them off because it's less painful than laying our own people off. And they're disabling access in their organization to the people who've been through the most crazy adaptable time in the history of education with COVID. These people can adapt.

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And they're probably more fluent at picking up AI than we are. Like, why wouldn't we want those people coming in and teaching us how to leverage this? So, but the biggest aha for me, and I've published a bunch of long form pieces on LinkedIn about this in the last few months is...

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The companies that have been cutting staff saying, oh, it's all about AI. It's coming out. No, it was never about AI. It's about your businesses struggling. You made some bad decisions in COVID. And you look better selling a story that AI is taking those jobs, right? It doesn't sell well. You don't look good to investors if you say, oh, business is down, so we're going to have to let some people go. It sounds, oh, AI is really replacing these people.

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There has been no research to prove that AI replacing people is materially improving profits for people. None. Okay. The McKinsey report that came out the end of last year, the state of the union of AI. And I have my own beef with McKinsey, but when their reports serve my narrative, I love them. Their report said that 88% of companies are...

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playing around with AI, 33% of them are seeing a little increase in profit, and only 8% are seeing a substantial leap. So they went to the 8% and said, what are they doing differently? And what they found was they're augmenting humans with AI, not replacing them.

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And if you're a company right now and you're listing this and you're beating your chest around, oh, look how AI is saving money by cutting people, that's called winning at subtraction. That's called your employees are seeing what you're doing. They know that they're next. They're not going to give you their best effort. Why would they? Why would they?

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And by the way, if AI can take away some of the work that your people are doing, why wouldn't you repurpose them to go after some new markets or build a new product or create some new value? Why is the play let's reduce? Because now you're not growing, right? And I promise you, AI will not create. AI will maybe increase some productivity, which is another word I hate. They're not going to increase creativity and innovation, which, by the way, is going to grow your business.

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Why are you doing that? And thankfully now, and this is my mission right now, Tony, is to show all these stories. Look how people are using AI to grow and develop. I give a hats off to the biggest employer outside the U.S. government in the United States, Walmart, who basically said, here's a generative AI product that we're going to put on your phones to 50,000 of their salaried workers and said,

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Just go figure out how to, how to, you know, play around with it. See if you can increase the customer journey. See if you can increase, you know, ways of leading your people more effectively and share those stories. And it exploded and people like, well, where's the training class? What you just giving this to me to just play around with it.

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And then the CEO said, you know what? AI is massive, but we are committing that we are not going to lower our head count in the next two years at all. And so that's like, whoa. Okay, so now you've lowered the fear threshold. And all the research, you know this, you know, if you read anything from Brene Brown,

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Fear creates underperformance. Why would you do that? And if you were beating your chest around AIs doing all this great to take away all these people, you're now serving your investors. You're not serving your people, which long term is not going to serve your investors, right? So I have to think about it. So we need to have the right conversations here, right, about AI. It's about how do we make people better? How can we create more greatness? Not how can we cut costs and expenses? That's the wrong conversation.

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And I'm just so disappointed with the narrative taking up to the point where should we be afraid? Because I had my moments. Like the last year, I've had really like, oh my God, my kids. Is there going to be work? Is the future bright? And I think we're starting to hit an inflection point where even the AI companies, who by the way,

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a few months ago was like, oh my God, in 18 months, all white collar jobs are gone. They're hiring like crazy. All those jobs that said they're going to be gone, like Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft. No. And they all realized that story they sold, I'm sorry, it was bullshit. You know, it was. And by the way, I was joking around because a friend of mine just took the head of recruiting for Anthropic. I was joking around saying, so what's your selling point when you recruit people? Come here, but don't get comfortable? Yeah.

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you just, your CEO just told the world it's 18 months. Like what's your selling point? Like come here and help destroy your career path. Like I, it doesn't make any sense. And so it's been overhyped. We need a, we need a reset and it's starting to happen. And I do think, um, in the next three to six months, by the end of this year, is reality is going to set in more and be like, okay, this is really powerful. How can we harness it in ways for rising rather than subtracting? Yeah. Yeah.

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Yeah, using that as a tool to innovate, to learn, to be better, as opposed to using it as a tool to replace your workforce. That's interesting. Those headlines are so sexy, man. I know, I know. They are, and they're eye-grabbing, and that's what sells them on the Internet right now. Facebook has made billions on hyping stuff that's crazy, you know? And that's what our eyeballs are drawn to, for better or for worse, you know?

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But here's a great story I want to share for you, for the audience. There's an insurance company, Prudential. I was invited to be on a panel in London a few years ago, and I was really punching these CEOs in the face, going, you guys are just so sorry with your talent strategies and you're using technology to cut people. And the CEO pulled me and said, no, we're doing something different here, and I want to show you. He goes, we had a turnover problem at Prudential,

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and we're so big that we knew we were losing people when they probably could have done something else in the company and they didn't know it and we didn't know it. So I got my technical team and my HR team together and said, I want you to match. And you ready for this? Like when you hear this and when, when I heard it, I'm like, why didn't I think of that? And why doesn't every company do this? And here's what they did. They said, we're going to match every employee that,

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to every job, not every job in your career path, in your ladder, in your, you know, in finance, here's everything you can do. No, every job in the company. So here's how qualified you are for something in operations, in manufacturing, in production, in engineering, in public relations, in marketing.

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And we're going to show you a bar chart of, you know, your 10% all the way to 100% qualified. And the minute you tell us what you want to do, you go select it. We will serve you the mentors that are available to you, the classes you can take, the experiences you can add to your current job right now that will make you bridge that gap that you have to be 60% qualified when you become a viable candidate. Can you, like, why doesn't that exist?

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Because we've been siloed in our thinking. Like we've built a world of work to develop experts. And that's not serving a world where things change and shift. And a world where when people do something new, they really deliver outsized energy and delivery way more than we think. So...

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That's when AI can really be used. Like let's go, you hinted at it, but I want to really click on it hard, which is we should be using it to discover the hidden talents and skills that maybe our people don't even know that they have. Or I can see, Tony, that given your pedigree,

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you could probably learn this thing over here really fast. And so would you be interested in going over? Because we need people over here doing this, and we'll give you a buffer of three to six months to kind of figure this out and serve you classes and coaching. Would you be interested? And you'd be like, what? You looked at me, and you discovered something in me that I didn't know? That's called...

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uncovering the X factor. Now you think you're going to be excited? Yeah. Tony's going to be real excited. So that's what we should be doing, you know? Yeah. It does a couple of things too. It flattens the organization. It also gives people a development path that looks different than the traditional development path. Like, oh, I need to be the individual contributor, then the supervisor, the individual contributor, then the manager's.

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But those people aren't leaving. It's a better alternative to what I see a lot of companies do, especially companies that do have tenure, a lot of tenure. They will just create these fake levels of like, oh, you know, technician level one, level two, level three. And the only difference is that technician's been sitting in the seat longer than that technician. There's no real skill gap. There's no real...

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You know, it's just a little bit of a tweak because they want people to feel like they're progressing and developing. So they build this imaginary ladder. It's like, no, there's a lattice that exists that if we actually articulated it well enough and set the structure up that we could, you know, move people around to different jobs or maybe even create jobs based on the needs and the skills that that already exists. So that's really, really good.

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Yeah. When we were growing LinkedIn, we were facing a company called Zynga and Zynga did the Farmville game. You know, it was a video game company. Yeah, I forgot about Zynga. They did exactly what you're talking about. They took a normal engineering career ladder of five levels and turned it into 25. So you're getting promoted every quarter. And that inflated false sense of elevation.

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It worked for a few years. I got to be honest. I was pissed off about it. And I would call their head of HR, who was a friend of mine, like, hey, we're offering a guy this, and you're offering a guy this. It's the same thing. You just changed the language in the game. And she's like, yeah, what are you going to do about it? I was like, well, it looks like they're going to go to you. Good luck with that. But you're right. I mean, there's – I think –

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what this moment really is going to present with us is a real need to rethink the architecture, you know, and one of the things I, I, I'm really concerned about is most of the architecture in organizations, particularly in HR is built on,

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around retention, right? Every reward is based on you stay longer. I give you more 401k match. I give you more vacation. I give you more eligibility for promotion the longer you stay, but everyone knows people aren't going to stay a long time. So why don't we acknowledge that and redirect an architecture that rewards growth and learning and uncovering skills versus the

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rewarding long tenure. I mean, it's all about that, but nobody believes people are going to stay a long time. And so that's, that's the business that I'm in. You know, if you're, if you're in a business and you're like, how do we change this architecture to reward different things? You know, like how about building an alumni community? Right. Right.

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So like all those hospitals, I go to like, do you talk to the nurses that left? And like those people, they get all Tony Soprano. Like you quit, you're dead to me. Like what? And I'm like, yeah, but they might want to come back. Like you said, like if you have no bridge, they're not going to come back. And by the way,

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I would say almost like 40% of people who go leave, like have buyers or more. It's like, Ooh, this is, maybe I didn't appreciate all the good things I had back there. True. And now, you know, they went all, you know, um, you know, scorched earth on me, you know, like now I can't, I can't go back, you know? And that's, that's a miss, you know? And if you get, you get that boomerang person back, they show up day one and they're ready to go, you know?

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yeah different level of motivation and they bring all of that institutional knowledge that walked out with them back to the organization which is good yeah and they're there for the re with a real purpose 100 yeah okay i got a couple i got a couple rapid fire questions for you before okay great um a couple of them um are you pro return to office or pro remote work yes

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Good answer. Good answer. There is no right answer here. I think I am pro be creative about it. Be creative about it. You know, one size fits all HR is over. It's done. You know, got to be creative. Love it. What's the best leadership trend that you've seen in 2026? Best leadership trend I've seen in 2026 is...

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So increasingly recognizing a leader is a coach more, I mean, we've been talking about this for years, but truly, really recognizing that they are the coach, not the oracle of truth, right? That I am here to connect the dots and make you talk to the person over here and send you over there rather than to me. And then I'll, I'll be the decider.

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Right. That's the, that's the greatest trend. Like I'm just making sure the right people are talking to the right people, not always having to do it to me. Yeah.

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What's the worst leadership trend that you've seen in 2026? Um, that list is really long, bro. I would say, uh, it is assuming in this moment that the answer lies in technology and not in human connection. I just so disappointing to me. Like, Oh yeah. Oh, we, you know, things are, Oh, there's gotta be a technical answer here. Nope. Nope.

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Yeah. Last one. Your thought on the TikTok trend that work is a necessary evil.

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Yeah, I read a book. Shoot, the name of it is escaping me right now. The author, his name is Fred Kaufman. He's an Argentinian. And I listened to it, and he's got this beautiful Argentinian English accent. It just makes me want to listen to him all day. And he said something really powerful. He said, why do we say work-life balance? He goes, because when I'm working, I'm living.

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And I told that light bulb came on when I heard that. Like, yeah, why do we do that? Like I feel alive. I love what I do and I know you love what you do and that's living. And so I think, um, a lot of people and you know, I post a lot on, on ticket to Tik TOK,

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And there's a lot of people who had really, really awful experiences with some really horrible leaders. And I call that in HR, we call that job security. But that's sad, you know, and you deserve better. And I think I know why people are feeling like that. But truly, what's really cool about, you know, my kids, they don't feel like that anymore. But for years, they wanted to be TikTok influencers. And I'm like, at first, I'm like, what?

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That's a, that's an opportunity that wasn't available when we were kids, which is I can create value on my own. I don't need to work for someone else. And that's pretty cool. So, okay. If works in essay, well, I think what you really mean is working for someone else. You know, it doesn't mean creating value on your own. That's probably what you're saying when you're saying that.

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So now you have all this, all these vehicles and platforms where, you know, I, I record all these training classes and someone else is selling them and, you know, I'm, I'm collecting the check or my book selling and I'm collecting a check. Like that's passive income. That's awesome. You know? Yeah. And building it was hard, but it was really fun too. You know?

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Yeah, that's good. Steve, thank you so much. Where could people connect with you? I know you're on LinkedIn, of course. I heard you just say that you're on TikTok. You can, seriously, Steve at CadiganVentures.com if you want to reach out to me. I'm a madman about LinkedIn. I still feel grateful to have been part of that journey, but I do check my, if you want to connect with me there, if you have a question, you want to follow up or explore something, it's just a lot.

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Yeah. So easy to find me. The book you can find on Amazon is called Workquake. I published it in 21, man. I think it is even more relevant today. I mean, you read it recently. Would you say it's stale or would you say it's like still fresh? No, it's really, really good. A lot of people, I have some people that actually are going to send it to because it's really relevant today. Awesome.

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Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Tony. And thank you for having me on this and thank you for what you're doing. I, you, before I was on your show, I was like, okay, I want to know a little bit more about Tony. And I, I was like, oh, I'm going to have to come back to this podcast. This is really interesting. You're the quality of how you do your shows is super high. Uh, so I'm going to do after this, I'm going to do what I can to get more people listening and learning from you. So thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you so much.