Cisco’s people chief: ‘We can’t transform our workforce without fundamentally rethinking how we lead’
“The biggest lesson is that we can’t transform our workforce without fundamentally rethinking how we lead,” Katsoudas says.
Key points
- If we want to innovate faster, we have to accept that some experiments won’t work and learn from them.” Eighty-eight percent of Cisco employees say people who try new and better ways of doing things are celebrated, compared with 65% at a typical global technology company.
- Give employees room to experiment “We can’t ask people to innovate if they’re afraid to take risks or try something that might not work,” Katsoudas says.
- “When leaders openly invest in their own development, they help establish a culture where personal growth is expected and supported at every level.” At Cisco, some executives are taking that a step further: They’re learning from employees.
“Our focus is building learning agility: the ability to learn, unlearn, experiment, and apply new capabilities as work evolves,” says Francine Katsoudas, Cisco’s executive vice president and chief people, policy & purpose officer.
Additional details
- “Understanding AI at a strategic level is very different from seeing how people actually use it in their work,” Katsoudas says.
- “Our first CAMP cohort reinforced that AI fluency is less about mastering technology and more about building trust.” That trust matters when employees are being asked to try new things.
- Cisco is preparing its 85,000 employees to learn new skills, experiment with AI, and rethink how they work.
- Research from the AI Workforce Consortium found growing demand for human capabilities, including ethical reasoning and systems thinking, in cybersecurity-related jobs.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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