The story from Peshawar, Pakistan that explains why this channel exists — and what 35 years of leading teams across four continents taught me about the world of work.
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Hi there. I'm Todd Jensen. Welcome to "The World of Work." I was in Peshawar, Pakistan, a few years ago on mission with the World Bank. The story sets the stage for why I'm making these videos, why it's important to me.
I was there to train a team on a project we were working on with the World Bank. I was working for them as a senior advisor, and we had to go to the phone store to get some equipment so that we could run the pilot we were doing in a series of schools throughout the city. And these trainers were gonna be the ones teaching in all these different schools. And so I had spent the morning training them, and we spent the afternoon going out to get some of this equipment that we needed.
And we were standing outside the store, waiting for our driver to arrive to take us back to the facility where we were doing the training, and I asked them — here's these two Pakistani men and two Pakistani young women, both of them wearing headdresses and all of them in their traditional dress, me looking kind of like this — and I just said to them, "Have you ever done an exploding fist bump?" And they looked at me with, uh, what you might imagine, curiosity and vacant looks.
And I said, "It's like a fist bump," 'cause you know what a fist bump is. "But it's like a fist bump, but it's cooler." It was back then, probably not now. "It's cooler, and it's more expressive." A fist bump is: you did a good job, or this is cool. An exploding fist bump is: man, this is really awesome. So it's a degree higher than a normal fist bump.
Well, they were laughing at this point and eager. And so I went through, and I taught them all how to do an exploding fist bump. And they thought it was funny, and they laughed, and they enjoyed it. And it took them a couple times to get it right, but they figured out how to make an exploding fist bump.
And it was one of the happiest days of my career. And why is that? Because here I am standing in this city that's full of eager, talented, well-trained, hardworking people that are having a hard time finding work or having a hard time putting the training they got to use. And we were doing something about it. We were developing a project that would expand the kind of training that other people in that city could get to help them get digital work. And they were being hired and given a job that would look good on their resume, to do some training in digital work relationships and work activity with the World Bank.
And so they were excited and eager to figure out how to do that well, and it was a great feeling. I was there because I have a lot of expertise in working with people, old and young, in a lot of countries, in a lot of developing nations. My work had sent me to hire and build teams in lots of different cities — in the Philippines and Bangladesh and China, all over Africa.
And I'd worked on some projects that were designed to help encourage and build skill and build jobs that were going to be meaningful in some of those developing countries. Others were just — that's where the talent was, and they were really good at the kind of stuff they did. So I would go find them, and we would hire them, and my team back in the US where I worked would put them all to work and get our projects finished.
Well, I love that kind of work. I love dealing with people. I've supervised and managed a lot of people in my career. I'm 58 right now, and I've got a 35-year career of leading teams, leading supervisors of teams, leading managers of departments, leading directors of big departments, most of the time with a broad domestic reach.
But for the last 15, 20 years, I've had a pretty expansive international reach and set of activities. So I was there because of a collection of expertise that I had, and the World Bank put me to work with this initiative, and I learned a lot from that team. I learned a lot about what's making it hard for young people to find work.
But my takeaway, and what I'll leave you with in this video, is that all of that time sitting for hours and talking with young people — especially young people at the beginning of their careers all over the world — there are millions of smart, hardworking, eager, ready-to-work people, and not nearly enough of them able to find the kind of work that's satisfying to them, or that they want to do, or that they've trained themselves to do. So there's a lot of great people. Number two, there are a lot of obstacles that make it hard for them to find work and to succeed. And number three, I think I know some things about the world of work that they find useful, that helps them navigate the world that they find themselves in.
A lot of young people all over the world show up in the workplace and it's difficult and it's complicated, and there are things to know, and there are traps and mysteries and people that aren't helpful and opportunities that look like great opportunities that are not great opportunities. Well, I've seen a lot of those, and I love the kind of people I've worked with all of these years. So I'm gonna make a series of videos about things I've noticed that I think will be helpful to you if you're watching.
And I'll also be talking about leadership challenges. I've known a lot of first-time leaders, or young leaders that have a little bit of leadership experience but have come into leading in an organization, which is a different beast, and there's a lot to know. And in my experience, the training they've received — from maybe their parents, or from the early supervisors and team leaders that they had, or from professors as they've gone to school — isn't really adequate to prepare them to succeed in the work that they need to do. And that's one of the reasons they struggle when they get into those positions. I've seen a lot of those struggles, so I've quietly built a little file in my head: if I had a chance to talk to an audience of young people, these are probably some of the things I would tell them that might help them succeed faster and make a difference earlier in their career that gets them noticed and helps them take off and prosper.
So I want you to prosper. If you're interested in hanging out with me on this journey, hit subscribe and like this video, and I'll do a bunch more. Thank you.