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The best leaders know that a person’s skills—and their ability to learn new ones—is more important than the type of degree they have. Ginni Rometty, former Chairwoman and CEO of IBM, lives this lesson. She spearheaded a company-wide shift to skills-based hiring and development during her tenure.
In this episode, she shares how her mother’s commitment to education – without a formal degree—helped their family overcome adversity and inspired her approach to talent-management throughout her career at IBM. She also discusses why a skills-first mindset is critical to building resilient teams and organizations. This episode originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in March, 2023. Here it is.
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
The most successful people out there, in business or anywhere else, are those who are always ready to learn. They’re constantly thinking about how to improve, where they can grow, in short, what new skills they need to develop, whether it’s something technical, like a new coding language, or so-called softer stuff like communication and collaboration. The best leaders are also thinking about skill building on their teams and in their organizations, even across society as a whole to tackle looming challenges and seize emerging opportunities.
This is something today’s guest knows really well. She learned about the importance of training and development, first from female role models in her family, then by practicing it herself in her own career with focused study and stretch assignments. As she rose through the ranks to CEO, she infused her Fortune 500 company with an ethos of continuous learning and skills first talent practices. And now, as a public and private board director, she’s encouraging other organizations to do the same.
Ginni Rometty is the former chairman and CEO of IBM, an author of the new book, Good Power: Leading Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World. Ginni, welcome.
GINNI ROMETTY: Thank you, Alison. I’m very happy to be here with you.
ALISON BEARD: First, let’s talk about the young Ginni. How early on in your life did you develop this strong belief in the importance of building marketable skills through different kinds of education and training?
GINNI ROMETTY: It probably goes back pretty far. And I think the biggest impact was just really watching my mother, my aunt who found themselves really dealing with tragedies and had to get enough skill to really move forward. When I was very young, my father abandoned our family. My mother had had no education beyond high school. And to really save us from losing our home, being on food stamps, my mother went back and got some education. It wasn’t really a degree, but it was a set of skills.
Having just only gone to high school, four children, very young, age 32, she began to go back to a community college. And at first, it was just taking some courses in accounting and then some very basic courses in computing. Now, this would be the 1970s, so very different world than what we know today. But with those types of courses, she began to qualify for different jobs, which were first clerical, but then moved up with each little rung and in a way to make more money each time.
ALISON BEARD: And then how did the desire to challenge yourself in new areas and focus on your own self-development play out in your career?
GINNI ROMETTY: At first, when I saw my mother, the lesson I learned from the time when my father abandoned us was my mother’s decision to never let anyone, including him, define who she was. But the second list, the corollary to that was to absolutely be independent, meaning I was already watching her and saying to myself, “Look, somehow, some way I will always be able to take care of myself and not have to rely on someone.”
When I started school… And now, I did have an aptitude for math, but it was really problem solving. I always really wanted to understand how an answer got created, and math and the sciences are very logical in that order.
I did realize the more and more I learned, yes, knowledge was a door opener for me. And back then, it was the 1970s when I was in college, and at that time in engineering, I would be the only woman in many of these classes. And when you are the only one, that comes with its upsides and its downsides. I always thought about anything I said, somebody would remember because I was the only one there. And so knowledge became a bit of a shield then. It made you study harder because you knew if you’re going to speak up, people were going to remember it.
ALISON BEARD: And then as you started your career very early on in IBM, you seemed to identify particular areas where you really did need to learn and grow. You tell a story about walking into one of your railroad clients and spending a Sunday using the software on their machines, that kind of learning, the technical stuff, but also soft skills like communication, emotional intelligence, leadership. How did you pinpoint those areas as someone who aspired for greater things and then figure out how to get the skills you needed?
GINNI ROMETTY: Yeah, it’s a very interesting question because I think there’s two parts to this; how to get them, and then which skills. It did teach me the value of apprenticing; going into something you didn’t know before. And one way to do that is working with experts, and you just learn at their side. And I would do that many, many times in IBM, and that would be one way to get those skills.
Now, often that’s hard skills, but I often watched and I saw something else. And I think it’s a really important point that you can always learn from any situation is the soft skills are often more important. And at one time what I witnessed was how well other people communicated. And I can remember in my very early training being taught how to present to a customer or how to present a conclusion of a project or an engineering program we were working on. And I got such harsh reviews after this. And now, some people would find that very odd because many people today think I am a great communicator, but I was horrible to start. And that idea of not being defensive and then saying, “You know what? You can learn any of this.”
And, in fact, I believe very strongly many of these soft skills are a science that can be learned. And very early in my career, I would listen to what people said to improve things like communication skills. And then as time would go on, I would watch the best. And even though I was listening for the content, I was also… I had a little book, I would diagram the presentations and the speeches to say, “What was it that made people really memorable in what they said?” And there are some very… a short list of things you can do that will make what you say in benefit and, as it the words I use in the book, to be in service of someone else. It isn’t about you sharing everything you know. A great communicator says, “What do I want them to learn? And how can I make it really easy for them to do so?” And that would set me down a path of having gone from horrible communicator to, I hope, now good communicator.
ALISON BEARD: And then as a team leader, when you were a young manager with a small group of direct reports all the way up to CEO when you had the C-suite reporting to you but were responsible for the whole organization, how did you push your people to develop their own skills and make sure they were constantly training and had that same learning mindset?
GINNI ROMETTY: It would, over decades, this idea of always be learning. And one of IBM’s great values was an idea of a treasure wild duck. Always be looking for something different. But as time would go on, I think, actually, I watched the environment value more and more exact expertise in a skill. So I said, “Gee, we’re hiring experts. And that’s good, except sometimes when a expert has only done the same thing forever, that’s not a good thing. The world’s changing so fast, it means they actually don’t want to learn something else.” And as I would go on and then be CEO and have many direct reports, you really worry about how do you get a workforce that, yes, has the skills that you need, represents a lot of different groups out there?
And I had quite an experience very early on. We were looking to hire cyber skills. This is 2012; there weren’t many in the marketplace. And so we had had a little experiment with a high school that, in a very poor neighborhood working with a community college, we gave it some input on a curriculum, we went ahead and gave them electronic mentors of our people and a chance maybe to get a job even with an associate degree.
And lo and behold, wow, we witnessed people absolutely could get this skill. Maybe didn’t have a college degree. They had a wonderful curiosity and a willingness to learn. And it would teach me a lot about hiring people and wanting to develop and really reinforce for people who had a propensity to learn, a curiosity. That was a number one thing.
And IBM itself at the time had two out of 10 people who had skills for the future. Great skills for the current, but not the future. And it was really not just the workforce I would hire, it would then be applied to, actually, the workforce that was there. And we put such a focus on how do you build skills that are contemporary? And then the whole system to put transparency around that so the people then take responsibility to say, “Look, it’s my responsibility too to be sure I have a skill that is meaningful in the marketplace and I’m incented to continue to improve it.” And that happens with transparency and then being rewarded with it.
ALISON BEARD: You did step in as CEO at a time of massive digital transformation where you had to shift the company in a very different direction. Talk to me about just as when you were young, you identified the skills you needed yourself, to how, when you’re leading this global organization, how do you identify what those skills are and then approach recruitment and re-skilling?
GINNI ROMETTY: I think when anyone goes and attacks a transformation, what people talk about the most is what in the portfolio changes. What do I make that’s changing? What I would come to learn is that how we did our work and the skills we had would actually be equal, if not more important, and would probably be the tougher of all those things to do; change how work was done, and then change the skills.
And so in part, yes, of course you need different hard skills. We were entering an era of not just one technology trend, but you had cloud, you had AI along with it, all of this data, you had mobility, you had social networking starting. Unlike any time in history you had four or five trends all going at once, feeding on each other and accelerating.
Yes, there were those hard skills to teach, and honestly, we did something called Think Academy to impress upon people that we all had to change our skills. It was compulsory, first Friday of every month, and I taught the first hour. And so I had be sure I knew something that was worth sharing. And my point was not to be a great teacher, but my point was like, hey look, all of us, me too, we all have to keep learning these things.
But then there would be things like when I say how work’s done, to teach a whole workforce things like design thinking. Because we were an enterprise company living in a world totally influenced by consumerism, which meant, hey, even though this is a very complex enterprise, business to business product, hey, when I come to work as the user of it, I expect it to be as simple as my iPhone. That would lead to things like training in design thinking.
And so it was not just the skill, it was training in how to do work differently. And I come back to then how did you incent people? It was back to what I said a minute ago, very transparent with them about, well, let’s look at all of our own skill inventories.
And then we use things like AI to help people find what is the right pathway for someone with what might be my current skill to get a new skill? We could infer so much using technology by the kind of projects, what people did, their resumes, et cetera, that we pretty much had a good handle on what skill level people actually had. And then go down a path of a lot of experiential learning. And then, at the end of the day, you have to reward and pay people that way and promote them, the accountability systems would change the skills and putting the data in people’s hands so they could manage it themselves, and then a Netflix-type learning system that’s out there, and then an awful lot of experiential.
I can remember doing not the AI jam; at the time, it was the cognitive jam. It was really at the heart of a belief that AI should augment man and not replace man. How could people understand what it was, what AI was if they didn’t actually touch it, feel it? And we said, “Everybody in the whole company, form a team. Pick anybody you want, cross-functional. You can work on a client problem, your own business problem. Hey, something for society. And we want you to use all these AI tools and go build something. Even if you don’t know how to build, then get a builder on your team, put a marketing person on your team.” Anyways, almost 10,000 teams got formed. I tell that story because it was a massive way to take a couple hundred thousand people and put them in experiential training.
ALISON BEARD: Let’s talk about skills first hiring. How does it differ from traditional recruitment practices? And why do you think that it’s a better way to do it?
GINNI ROMETTY: I had back in the back of my head my mother who, while didn’t have a degree, actually was pretty smart and was able to get the skills to do some pretty tough jobs. Second, I would do all this apprenticing. I would actually build a consulting company and never have an MBA myself, but I would learn. Then the third, when I became CEO, stumbling upon this idea of, my goodness, instead of perhaps hiring all college graduates, I had found a pool of people, by the way, all from underrepresented groups that, if I was willing to re-credential a job that had been over credentialed, I could bring far more inclusion and get good employees into the workforce.
Many things started to now may have set, at the beginning seemed as isolated events all connected to me. And it got me starting to look and say, “How many people in the world have a college degree, how many jobs really needed to get started?” Even all developed economies, it’s about 65% do not have a college degree. If you look in America, Black Americans, it’s almost 80% do not. And my own experience had been, hey, did all my jobs really require a PhD or a college degree to get started?
And then we started to push more and more jobs. We were 95% all jobs PhD or college and from the finest universities. As we pushed and pushed, we ended up at only needing 50% needed a college degree to get started. Didn’t mean that you might not need one down the line. But this starts dawning on me that this is a really false barrier for so many talented people to join the workforce.
ALISON BEARD: And you mentioned the pace of change. If you got a PhD 20 years ago, what you learned might not apply anymore.
GINNI ROMETTY: Yeah, no offense to all of our great degrees, it may not apply or you got it in something that you’re like, “Okay, what am I going to do with this degree?” And technology skills were changing three to five years, and maybe even shorter at this point in time. I didn’t call it skills first to begin with. Actually, when we started hiring people that did not have a college degree, I really had to deal with the bias in the organization because people said, “Are you dumbing down the workforce?” Like engineers, we did a lot of studying of the results, and the net of that was, nope, after about one year, their results were actually equivalent to our degreed people.
And by the way, they actually took more education; they were thirstier, and a more diverse group we were hiring. And at first, we called them something called new collar. Not white collar, not blue collar, something new. Not a bad thing. Please don’t try to say, “Oh, well, you’re not as good as these other people or as bad as something else.” And that really worked for a while.
And then I started to say, “Well, this is bigger than IBM.” And by the way, I also then started to do this in, well, now it’s almost 30 countries around the world we got these programs going. This is a very universal thought. And so the idea was could I hire you for your skills first, not just your degree. And I was just talking to someone last night, and I said, “The point is…” They said, “Oh, you don’t believe in college.” And I’m a vice chair at a university. I said, “That’s not the point.” I said, “What I believe is that where you start does not have to determine where you end.” I felt like it’s an on-ramp much earlier for some people.
And by the way, I also started to now witness so many of the people that were skills first we hired, they all went back to get four-year degrees in many cases, but their pathway was different. I became, and am, such an advocate that skills first is not only a way to get access to a more inclusive talent pool; goodness knows in a lot of new areas we need talent. You do get a better company. I don’t have to help convince your listeners or of that topic. There’s plenty of data that says
