Welcome to the Bringing the Human Back to Human Resources
podcast. I'm Tracy Chernoff, and I've
spent my entire professional career in HR.
Each week, we'll explore the delicate balance between people
and business with the aim to reconnect the two and create
meaningful outcomes. Listen in as I share my own
experiences, challenge the status quo, and chat with guests
from various industries about our mission to bring the human
back to human Resources. Hi everyone, welcome back to the
Bringing the Human Back to Human Resources podcast.
Thank you so much for being here for another week.
You know what to do. If you haven't already, don't
forget to rate, review and subscribe wherever you're
catching this episode, whether you're listening or you're
watching. And if you're watching, I should
apologize for the bags under my eyes.
I was just telling Steve that it has been quite the week.
But you know, there's always an opportunity to make your week
amazing. And so let me introduce you to
Steve Cadogan, who is a globally recognized talent strategist,
advisor, and author who helps leaders and organizations build
the future of work, which is the topic of today.
And we'll be diving in quite a bit into this topic.
As the founder of Cadogan Talent Ventures, he has advised iconic
brands like Google, Cisco, Intel, Manchester United and the
BBC, as well as leading venture capital and consulting firms
including Andre, Scene, Horowitz, McKenzie, Deloitte and
Clock Partners, best known as Linkedin's first CHRO.
Yes, I did say that. Rewind it back in case you
missed it. Steve out scaled the company
from 400 employees through its IPO, shaping a culture that
became the foundation of its success.
In fact, I don't even think anyone goes a day without
talking about LinkedIn. It is in itself an iconic brand,
and his groundbreaking work has been featured at Stanford
University, where an entire graduate level course has been
built around the culture he helped to create.
Since 2021, Steve has been named a Top 100 Global Thought Leader
in Talent and People, and his insights have been featured on
Bloomberg, CBS and CNBC. He's also a sought after keynote
speaker and university lecturer, bringing decades of HR
leadership experience across industries and geographies.
In 2021, Steve published Work Quake, embracing the aftershocks
of COVID-19 to create a better model of working, which debuted
as the number one Amazon hot new release.
With more than 25 years as an HR executive and experienced living
and working in the US, Canada and Singapore, Steve brings a
unique perspective having sat on both sides of the table as
employee and employer. Today, Steve continues to serve
on multiple boards, advise progressive organizations, and
share his passion for building compelling talent strategies.
And when he's not speaking, teaching or writing, he's
coaching basketball, playing tennis, or spending time with
his family in California. And Steve, I, I, I think that
all of the things that you do are really inspiring.
And I know that there are listeners out there who are
like, oh, OK, Steve is going to be the person on my vision board
now because I want to be like him.
I want to do all of those amazing things.
So kudos to you for all of your accomplishments and all you know
what your entire career has looked like over the last
several decades. Yeah, thanks, Tracy.
You know, we, we face a really awkward reality in the world of
HR that there is no natural progression after you serve in
your operator roles. You know, in finance it's pretty
clear you go on to a board of directors as the audit committee
chair and in HR it's just not as natural progression.
So hopefully my crazy story has given some hope to people that
there are interesting futures out there after your, you know,
operator roles. Absolutely.
I think it's really inspiring and actually I have to.
I have to take it back to my dad for a moment because in one of
the very early episodes that I did when I first started my
podcast already, I think actually by the time this
episode launches, it will be 5 years old, which is so insane.
That's why they say the time passes whether you're doing
something or not. So, but my, you know, I was like
trying to figure out do I want to go into retail management?
Do I want to do HR? Because everyone, you know, I
was working at Target at the time and everyone was like, you
should go into HR like this is like a great path for you.
But you could do retail management too.
And they make like a lot of money and you should.
And I was like, oh, a lot of money.
That sounds great for paying off my student loans.
And my dad was like, look, you could do that.
That's a great, that's a great career too.
And it's like the yes. And right.
And HR is going to open so many doors for you.
And if you have this natural ability, then you should see it
through and you can always do something else after.
And my parents would always remind me, your first job is not
always your last job. And it's very hard to kind of
zoom out when you're like fresh out of college or trade school
or whatever you're doing and you're like, yeah, I can do
other things after this. Like to your point, I can do
things outside of whatever operational role I'm doing.
And that was really pretty life changing for me because I did
decide to go into HR, obviously, and I ended up probably doing
better than what retail managers were doing at the time because
of, you know, all of these opportunities that I was able to
kind of acquire for myself. And so coming back to what you
said and, and actually just thinking about and reflecting on
your career, not only does it open other HR doors, you
actually have all of these skills that, that you develop
and skill sets that you you hone that can be applied and
transferred pretty much anywhere doing anything, which is cool.
Right, without a doubt. And I had no idea of the choices
I was making when I sort of fell into HR about one year out of
college. I started in a company that
rotated talent around, and I started in credit and
collections. And I realized I was really good
at collecting money, but that's probably not what I wanted to do
for a long period of time. And then they asked me to try
out recruiting, and I'd never even heard of HR.
I mean, I was a history major, liberal arts, and my parents
were both in the nonprofit sector, Dad's administer, mom
ran daycare Centers for underprivileged families.
And so I had no business role model, didn't know what HR was
and what two things I found out pretty quickly, which were
amazing and very fortuitous. For those of you who've made the
choice already, which is number one, you're not bound by an
industry or a geography. You can go and practice this
craft anywhere and that makes you sort of downturn, sector
downturn, you know, immune. You know, it's the ultimate
career insurance, if you will, for people who have, you know,
face industry downturns and so forth.
The second thing is you are invited to dip your toes and
explore every crevice of the organization.
You get to hang out with the production, the manufacturing,
the engineering, the operations, the finance, the legal like you
are allowed to engage as much or as little as you want to in
every corner of the business. And that allows you to meet so
many fascinating people, solve so many unique problems that
you've probably never faced before.
And I love that puzzle, you know, and the, and the, and the
constant newness and the challenge.
I mean, if you're not a change junkie, you are in the wrong
place. If you're in HR like this is all
about every day is like Christmas, man.
It's a, there's a new present that you don't know what it is,
but you're going to unwrap it and something's going to walk in
your door. Sometimes it hits you in the
parking lot before you've even landed in your cube or your
office. And I really, I love that about
it. And I had no idea, you know,
that I would be in a in AHR path that would take me to do M&A all
over the world for years. So that would take me to be
posted in Singapore and run HR for all of Asia for a very, you
know, major organization or to be the first head of HR for a
startup company. And just like go through this
IPO growth experience, which I'd never never faced before.
And I think that's one of the coolest things that we have, is
a gift in this profession. Totally.
And you know, something that that dawned on me as you were
speaking is that I think sometimes there's a lot of, and
I know this even from listeners who reach out that sometimes
there's a lot of nervousness around, well, I don't know, XY
or Z thing. I'm not going to be qualified
for that particular role or that next thing.
And, and naturally for you, having been Linkedin's first
CHRO and to your point, you went through this IPO process, you
hadn't done this before and that's significant.
I think it's actually really important that listeners reflect
on that, that you were in this, you know, the, at the highest
level of, you know, HR leadership, at least, you know,
in, in terms of like within the business that someone can be.
And there were things that you were learning.
And that's, you know, of course you want to always have like a
learning mindset. But I think that's actually it
should dispel some of those fears that you're not always
going to know every single thing that your next job or your next
company is going to throw at you.
Yeah. And Tracy to amplify on what you
said, I think there is enormous, let's just say underestimated
energy tackling something new. I think that we've really under
appreciated that how we design job families and career paths
and like you can't apply for another job until you've done
this one for a couple years. I think in a world that's
changing really quickly, we really have to revisit our
thinking around that. And that's part of you know,
what I spent a lot of time with on leaders around the world is
listen, if you take a look at Silicon Valley, where is I call
it crazy, crazy town because it is just nuts and it is not a
perfect world. There's a lot of incredible
things happening there, but I don't think anyone can argue
that there's more creativity, innovation, new value creation,
more high market cap companies created in that small little
portion of the world than anywhere else in the world.
And it also experiences the highest amount of turnover.
And you have, and I tell this to business leaders who are
fretting over high turnover. I said, listen, Silicon Valley
has the greatest amount of innovation and creativity of any
geography in the world and the highest turnover and more people
doing something they've never done before at scale.
When we're building LinkedIn, not only was it a new
opportunity for me to go to a private company that was
relatively small, 400, and grow it into a monster, but we're
building a new sector. We're building a new business
that hadn't existed before. And many of the jobs were jobs
that people people were doing that they'd never done before.
And what I found in that, that that journey was that, man, when
you put someone in the seat of a job they haven't done before,
yeah, there's fear and there's uncertainty, but there's
enormous energy unlocked when you're solving something you
haven't done before. And the sad thing for the world
to work in, HR in particular, is we've designed historically to
prevent that from happening. I want to know that you know how
to do this. So I'm not going to put you in
something new because I want my trust and confidence in you to
be high. And I want you to be a master of
your craft. That's great.
In a world that doesn't change fast, in a world that's changing
quickly, we really need to think like, how do we get someone on
boarded really fast? How do we get someone up and
running quickly? Those jobs that take three years
for someone to sort of settle in, Yeah, they're leaving before
three years. So we don't have three years.
You've got 3. Months.
I was going to say, I don't even know if we have half that.
That's right. Look at the tenure of software
engineers in Silicon Valley. It's a year and a half, you
know, a year and a half to two years.
People go, oh, that's horrible. I go, no, it's not.
That's an opportunity because we get to leverage new people and
new ideas and new ways of solving problems.
That's what we need to optimize for, not making someone a deep
expert. Now, don't give me, I want my
best people to stay as long as the next person.
But if you think people are going to stay longer in your
company in the future than they do today, you really need to
pass me some of that dope that you're smoking because it is
just not going to be realized, right?
And and every leader I asked today is like, Hey, what's your
biggest problem? Say hey, Steve, we're really
struggling with people just aren't staying as long and our
business wasn't built for that. And think about HR.
Every reward that we deliver is indexed off of more.
The longer you stay were four O 1K match, more vacation, more
opportunities for promotion. It's all about tenure base.
But every leader I talk to is like, do you think people are
going to stay longer in the future and they're like, Nope,
probably not. I said so at what point are you
going to plan for that? At what point are you going to
expect my demographics probably going to be your Max five years
and on an average probably around 3:00 to 4:00.
So how do I build a vibrant value creation organization with
that dynamic? And the good news is we've got a
ton of great examples. If you look at Microsoft, you
look at Google, you look at Airbnb, you look at Apple, you
look at Uber, you look at Facebook, Meta, you look at
LinkedIn. These companies are median
tenure 3 1/2 years, OK, They're crushing it in terms of
innovation and new markets and so forth.
So, you know, don't be fearful of that shorter time.
Look for how you can optimize for that.
And and that's, you know, one of the things that really that's
back to your question about like, whoa, what were some of
the big, you know, experiences that LinkedIn presented to me?
That was like, whoa, I'd I'd have been a big company guy
before I went to LinkedIn. It was like all you do when
you're in big companies, not all, but generally is you're
fixing what other people have done before you and you're
modernizing it, You're tweaking it.
When I walked in the door at LinkedIn the first week in the
executive staffing, there was a fight over should we do
performance reviews? I'm sitting around going, this
company's five years old. You never figured this out.
You never talked about it. Like, no, we all hate
performance reviews. And I look at me like, go ahead,
Steve, defend performance reviews ago.
I hate them too. And they're like, what I say,
yeah. I've never seen an executive
tell me that the pivotal moment in their career journey was that
performance review they got back in 1970.
No. And so.
So that was really refreshing and terrifying to me that I'm
walking in and they laid no tracks.
Are we going to do performance reviews?
If we do, how often should we do them?
If we do, should we have a scale?
Should we have a ranking? Should we go one to three, one
to five, zero to seven? Should we go 4 decimal places?
Should if we do a rating, should we tell the employee?
Should we not? Should we also do it with stack
ranking people on performance and potential, you know, and
then you're just like, and should we tie it to compensation
or not tied to compensation? Should it be developmental or
should it be driven off a rewards?
And I was like, if you've never the great learning for me, I
mean, many learnings for me. And it was why it was exciting
and also terrifying was I'd never taken my function HR down
to the studs. Why do you do performance
reviews? What is the point?
And, and the best we could come up with is there is a belief
that measuring performance achieves, you know, the
continuity of feedback manager employee, because, you know, a
lot of managers left to their own devices would never give the
difficult, bad, you know, constructive feedback to the
employee who's struggling. So we want to ensure that those
tough conversations are happening.
But also there's a belief that high performing organizations
give a lot of feedback, right about performance.
So, you know, and we had a board of directors that's like, Hey,
tell us about your performance view process.
And we're like, oh, OK, I guess we better figure this one out.
So you know, there's that there was how many layers should we
have in the org structure? Should we have 30 layers from
the CEO to the front line or should we have 5?
You know, should the sales organization be like, hey, we've
got a European sales and Asian sales, AUS sales, and then we've
got an enterprise sales, we've got small medium business sales.
Or should we have one sales organization?
And then the big one was should we have a business unit org
structure or should we have a functional unit structure, which
means, you know, let's, let's take LinkedIn as an example.
We had three major business lines when I was there there.
Now there's like 5 or 6 because they bought a learning company
and some other ones. But right, right.
It was like we had the sales, you know, selling to sales
leaders to how to use LinkedIn. There's the recruiting product,
right? And then there's a marketing
product. And so we could have the
marketing engineering team, the sales engineering team, the
recruiting engineering team, or we could have one engineering
team. And so those are really big
decisions and big conversations. And when you're building a new
company, what's really interesting is everyone's coming
from their experience where they worked before.
So I had my Cisco refugee, my AMD refugee experiences.
I had my a bunch of executives that were Google refugees.
I had my Yahoo refugees. And everyone had a mixed
experience. And what's interesting about
leaders in HR is if you ask, you know, if you're ever
interviewing at a new company, what I always like to know is
where did they all, where did all the executives work before
and what was their experience with HR there?
And usually when you go in and you say, hey, what does great HR
look like to you? Like I want, if you want me to
be your next HR member, leader, whatever, what does great HR
look like to you? They'll usually say this, well,
not that. Well, not that.
Yeah. All right.
OK, So what does it look like to you?
Well, not that, you know, and and that's, that's miss, you
know, that's, that's unfortunately a big miss.
And it's it's unfortunate that most people haven't seen high
performing in my career. I haven't run into a ton of
people have seen HR just crushing it.
No, unfortunately. Driving great outcomes.
And that's an opportunity for all of us to show folks what it
looks like, right? And we also face this reality
that a lot of leaders are really defensive.
When I interviewed with the Ceoi was his first hire at LinkedIn.
He was very suspicious of me, right?
Like, oh, you're the guy. It's going to, you know, have
all the secrets and, you know, and have some sort of back
office black market for information.
I'm just like, no, that's not how I work man.
He's been triggered. You a little bit I could see.
I it's so true because no, you're so right.
I'm like, I had a flashback my own, my own like experiences
where people are like side eyeing you when you come in
because they think you're going to, you have like these inner
dealings or you're going to like work against them.
And but it's, it's, it's not us. You know, that's the thing.
That's why I was laughing when you were saying that because
it's like, you know, eventually over time they're like, Oh yeah,
yeah, yeah, this is good. Oh, this is a good relationship.
Oh, I'm learning something. I I'm becoming a better, like a
stronger leader because I have an HR partner I can rely on.
This is so yes, that's funny. I had, I did have, I actually
had a few flashbacks at 1 moment.
I was like, who am I going to think of first?
So thank, thank you for that good laugh.
But actually, I, I think all of what you said is so important
and actually you kind of touched on the mission of this podcast
and what you just said that, you know, so many people have not
seen an HR partner or had an HR partner who's like absolutely
killing it. And I mean, in some respects
that's OK because depending on the industry or where they've
worked and, you know, even just their own relationship with HR
in general, as from an employee to then a leader, those things
can alter their own experiences. But fundamentally, when I, when
I think about every single episode that I put out on this
podcast, I want it to go toward HR leaders absolutely crushing
it. You know, like people should be
walking away from these episodes thinking, oh, this is how I can
be better at my craft or if I don't.
And it's not to say that everyone has to agree, but I
think at some point there also has to be this internal
reckoning that if like you are not the kind of person who
really wants to live in this Gray between like the business
needs and the employee needs and, and be able to balance
those things out without feeling so conflicted that maybe it's
just not the right career for them.
Because it is a very difficult balance to strike that, you
know, you have all of these business goals that you have to
like drive people to achieve because most of the time, a lot
of the time we're individual contributors or we're in
operator positions and there's a lot of influence.
And then there's this other element where you know you are
people facing depending on your role is all of my roles have
been primarily like business partner roles.
And you have to be able to help those people understand their
impact on people and you yourself have to have an impact
on them and influence them. And it's, it can be, you know,
unless you have like a really strong level of trust between
all of your partners, which is a very critical part of being
successful. I think in HR you're, you're
going to, people are going to find that to be very
conflicting. And I think it's going to be
very difficult for them to find, you know, happiness in this
career or fulfillment. Maybe it's not happiness, but
really fulfillment in this career.
And when I think about what you said, especially around, like,
tenure and the future of work and how we all interact with,
you know, A, being OK with this, the status quo, and, B,
challenging the status quo and saying, OK, well, you know,
maybe we don't expect more than three years of tenure, and
that's OK. What are we going to do to make
those three years the best that someone has ever had at this
company then, You know, I think that's where when I think about
the future of work, there has to be this agility really from
everyone, not just HR leaders, but every leader in a business
to challenge their own deeply held beliefs.
And of course, a lot of a lot of thought leaders are talking
about like the gig economy and how that has dramatically
changed the way that people work and AI and all of these things,
which is true. But sometimes I think that
people are missing, you know, they're kind of just like
surface floating. They're not really like getting
deeper into what that actually means that people are looking
for this like optimal flexibility.
If they're in the gig economy, they want to essentially create
their own income through all of these different streams without
being reliant or beholden to a company.
And then you have, you know, people like these engineers that
you mentioned, software engineers in Silicon Valley,
they're jumping around because it's beneficial for them to do
that and it's beneficial for companies to have new talent.
And so how do you, to your point, how do we reconcile the
business needs for the continuity while also saying,
OK, well, this is this is the status quo.
Let's let's embrace it and figure out how we're going to
continue to innovate even without that continuity.
Yeah. And you know, we we really have
an opportunity here to reshape the language of works.
Couple of words that trigger me are things like engagement.
Like there's more things affecting the engagement of your
people out of your control as an organization than ever before.
So why are you worried about engagement?
I think I want to double click on something you said earlier,
which is building trust. If I look at my career or I look
at the Seminole moment I opportunity had at LinkedIn, why
were we able to grow, you know, double in size every year I was
at LinkedIn and double revenue every year when half the
organization didn't even know where the restroom was because
they just showed up yesterday. Like how can I don't think
people appreciate how hard that is when you're doubling the
size, you're quadrupling the number of countries where we
have new people. So there's distance tax, there's
language taxes, culture taxes, all kinds of new challenges.
So your complexity bar, when you add people, that's challenge.
When you add people in new countries, that's like 3X as
hard as just adding a new person in the same location.
Cuz now you got remote leadership and time distances
and all these other things. And I think the way you weather
inevitable confusion, complexity, disappointment,
misunderstandings is a baseline of trust.
And as an organization, one of the things we did really well at
LinkedIn was we had a lot of town hall meetings we had.
Let's talk about the elephant in the room.
All those people working in Silicon Valley who have to
commute from San Francisco are pissed off that we don't have a
free shuttle for them because all the Googles and all the
other companies have 1:00 and had to remind them, well,
they're those companies are making more every day than we
make in a whole year. So you know, when we make that
revenue, I'll get you the bus. Right now, we just can't afford
it. And by the way, you loud San
Francisco people who are having to commute an hour each way
twice a day, there's more people in other further locations than
you. You want them to have a bus too.
Like, you see how this is not as simple, we need a bus because
someone else has a bus. And those layers and layers of,
of, of challenges when you're growing are really hard.
If you have a foundation of trust that's going to give you
the benefit of the doubt when the sniper shot comes in or
something slips up and someone makes a mistake or whatever, you
have to have that. And for me personally, I think
one of the reasons I've been able to do as well as I've done
is I have, I don't know, it's because my dad was a minister or
what. I have an ability to build trust
really quickly. And you're one of the things
I've always said in in HR is the fastest way to build trust is
for something really scary ugly to happen and you get involved
and people see what you're made of.
Like, are you going to go, someone comes and just throws up
all over you about how they hate the CEO and this company's
screwed and they're like, OK, I'm going to see how you handle
that. Now are you going to go run to
the CEO so that I'm going to get fired?
Or are you going to help me sort through this?
Or how are you handling this really thorny, you know, turd I
just put in your lap, you know, like, how are you going to deal
with that? And I love those.
You know, that's why I love acquisition work because there's
stuff going wrong every day and people are going to see what
you're made of. Are you going to do the ethical
right thing? Or you going to, you know,
whisper something to someone you probably that you swore that you
would keep in confidence and you're going to betray the cop.
Like, what are you going to do? Totally.
And teachers really about two things that are very simple
level. Having thought about this for
years and years. It's about credibility and
judgement. If you are not credible, no one
cares about your judgement. And if you have poor judgement,
you will not be credible. And every day you're, you're
being given some precious materials that someone's live
delivering to you. And how you handle that is going
to build your credibility. It's going to build your, you
know, capacity to show your judgement.
And that is gold. And if you have that, you can
get a lot done, you know, and more stuff will be shared with
you. And that's, it's really hard
when you're early in career and you're like, how am I going to,
this is really scary stuff like how should I handle this?
I can't say nothing, you know? And one of the things that I
learned that's really helped me over the careers, sometimes some
HR people will do everything to keep the leader from screwing
up. And sometimes the best learning
they have is they have to screw up.
Like, hey, I'm thinking of promoting Jim.
And you're like, really? Why?
Because Susan and Sarah are way more qualified.
And if you promote Jim, all the people on the team are gonna
know that you've got a bias towards guys.
I don't think it's gonna go. Yeah, but I'm gonna promote Jim.
OK. I could have said no, I'm not
gonna let you do it. Or I'm gonna say, OK, let's see
how it goes. Promote Jim.
There's insurrection. People are quitting.
So how'd it go? How'd that promotion of Jim go?
Yeah, not so good. And who told you it wasn't gonna
go so good? Yeah, I did.
So, so and so, yeah, having to sort of let them fall, let them
slip, you know, obviously not something so egregious, right?
Something really scary if you want to step in.
But those kinds of things, like they have to learn.
It's just like kids don't go into the ladder.
Don't go into the oh, boom, hurt yourself, Boo, Boo.
Right, Right. So.
Yeah, it's so true. I had, I had another momentary
flashback there because it's so true.
You know, all we can really do is help to guide a lot of
decisions. And I think that in
organizations that have maybe a more positive outlook of HR
partners or HR as a, as a field of practice, they're more open
to the judgement calls that we have or the decisions that we,
you know, help to make and certainly some decisions we
don't make. Like, to your point, that
example of Jim, Sarah and Susan, that's not our decision.
But we, you know, we have this ability to, you know, share our
opinion, share our thoughts and concerns.
And then that leader then has the has kind of the the bull by
the horns and they decide what their their ultimate decision
is. And I've seen both sides where
organizations are like, yeah, if HR says that, you know, this is
a great idea, then let's go for it.
If HR says it's a bad idea, let's listen to it seriously.
And then I've been in organizations where they're
like, you're, you're, you know, why are you here anyway?
You know, I'm going to make the decision that I want to make.
And you can give them, to your point, all of these incredible
warnings that this is what's going to happen.
This is the fallout that you should expect.
And then they have to learn it for themselves.
And whether right or wrong and how, no matter how frustrating
that might be, there is value in that learning just as much as
there is value in being so trusted as a field of practice
and as a practitioner that, you know, your opinion is so deeply
valued. And again, when I think about
all the organizations that I've worked for that have kind of
fallen mostly in one of those categories, maybe I can think of
1 where it was kind of a mix of, of both.
I think that there are pros and cons to both of those things
because or both of those environments.
Because when you're in a place where, you know, leaders have
like such a positive outlook on HR, like which is amazing,
sometimes there isn't as much of a challenge because you're not
necessarily be being challenged on the things that you believe
or that you want to influence. And it's, you know, it's hard to
make these sweeping generalizations because
obviously everyone and every organization is so different.
But I do think that again, when I think about this, you know,
idea of the future of work, it does put a lot of onus on us as
practitioners in this field to I love what you said about
credibility and judgement. So true to build up our
credibility and practice better judgement.
And I think that even when I think about some of the HR
leaders who I learned from, because they were so terrible,
they had really bad judgement. And so I felt that they were so
terrible because they, they lacked credibility for me.
And, and this is it. It's, I'm going to take that
with me probably forever, the credibility and judgement.
So thank you for that. I love that.
And, you know, one of the things that adds to the complexity of
our role is one day we're here coaching an executive on how to
be better or coaching A-Team, and the next day we're having to
investigate a complaint. And then that really is hard to
build, you know, credibility and trust when you have to be the
guardian of some regulations while you're also the guardian
of everyone's development. You know, and that's, that's a
really hard line to play. You know, and as you said
earlier, we don't have organizational authority.
We have influence, right? And you know, some of the worst
HR leaders I worked for took an approach of, I'm going to build
so much power that no one can mess with me, OK, because I
control the budget for promotions and hiring and
rewards. And I'm like, no, I took
completely the opposite approach, which is I want you to
not need me. I don't want to build
dependencies on me because if you and I use this in my
interviews with, you know, mid and early stage am HR talent,
let's do a hypothetical. An employee brings you a
complaint. Hey, my manager's mistreating
me. I need you to fix it.
What are you going to do? And just generally, right,
they're going to, oh, I'm going to go talk to the manager.
OK, So what did the employee learn there that they did not
learn how to solve their problem?
They learned that you're going to take it on.
So now the organization needs you.
If you help the employee solve the problem, then you've got
less fires coming your way. You're just you're just creating
more work for yourself and you're creating a dysfunctional
relationship. That employee needs to solve the
relationship with the manager. You can help coach them on how
to talk about something really uncomfortable their manager, but
you go into the manager not the right, not the right way.
I want to be thinking about it. And the truth is there's so much
crazy in the world of work that we will never be out of a job.
So don't take me literally that I want to work myself out of a
job. But the best work I ever did,
Tracy, was not because I was the sharpest HR person or had the
greatest HR team was because my leaders Co owned the talent
agenda with me. And this was the biggest fight I
ever had with the CEO at LinkedIn in the early days.
He's like, tell me what the comp strategy is.
I go, you want me to tell you CEO of the company with the com
strategy? I can give you a recommendation,
but this is your company and you got to feel how we're mixing
incentives and stock and cash and signing bonuses serves a
purpose. And here's why I think this
makes sense. He goes, well, the finance
director, you know, he wrote the finance plan like he wrote the
business plan and the legal team, they wrote the legal plan
like you need to write the comp strategy.
I'm like, no, that's not how this works, man.
It's different. We Co own this thing, you know,
and yeah, I, I, I don't want to add more to your plate and I'll,
I'll serve you pros and cons of different strategies, but it's
not me owning, it's not good. Just like me owning the culture,
me owning diversity. That's wrong because now someone
thinks someone over there owns all that versus all the leaders
need to share the ownership. The worst thing I think we've
done in HR traditionally was say, oh, there's the head of
diversity. What?
No. Your wall are the heads of
diversity. That person can help you learn
how to lead diversity in your teams, but they don't own it.
You own it. You understand in this and, and
so it's a big shift and, and I'm sure listeners, you know, the
leaders I'm talking about who want to own everything.
I want to have the power and the leaders who like, no, no, no,
we're all about you becoming better.
And I really think there that that sort of we can serve
ourselves better by looking at our work.
Like how can I work myself out of a job by making other people
greater, right? And that's going to make you
more valuable and wanted more, you know, I really believe.
Totally. I agree 100%.
This idea of mutual ownership is something that I that surfaces a
lot on my show because I feel very passionately about this.
Like we cannot physically operate or operate well at that
to, if we're the only ones owning things.
I mean, even when it comes from to it comes to culture and, and
to your point on engagement, it's, it's very easy.
And I can tell you because my title is senior director of I'm
playing engagement. And it's something that I
actually really wish was different.
I wish that it was true because I, I work, I, I do HR, you know,
it's just that four years ago there was this like, oh, we got
to, you know, really focus on the culture.
But the reality is that every single person owns culture.
Every single person owns whether someone feels fulfilled or
unfulfilled at their job, including the individual, by the
way. And you know, at some level, if
you're not happy for, you know, a certain amount of time, you
have to make the decision, no one's going to make that
decision for you. And so this is something like, I
have my own internal conflict because I'm like, I don't agree
that my title makes any sense because all it does is
essentially create a scapegoat for when things don't work, if
things don't work. And fortunately that it's not so
common, but you know, that's that's the thing.
That's what happens when you have this head of diversity,
head of culture, head of whatever, honestly, any roles
within that doesn't even have to be had.
You then are like, oh, good. So when there's a diversity
issue, it's their problem. When there's a culture issue,
it's their problem versus, hmm, how do we all contribute to the
positive and the negative outcomes of this particular
topic? And that's honestly true outside
of HR too. We came up with that word
engagement because we want we want our people energized.
We want people like loving being here and that's a great
aspiration. I want that too, right, yes, but
I want I want to create an environment where people can
self discover that, you know, one of the, you know, sarcastic
perspectives on HR that I also have is you want to be sure
something's going to not work in a company.
Make it an HR program. Oh, Steve, we need we need to
really, you know, the managers are really feeling down.
We need HR program and get them really excited.
I'm like, you know, don't look here you.
Know don't look here. You know, like we need a
mentoring program because we need more mentors to get.
OK, well, what are you coming to me for?
Like go, go make a mentoring program, you know?
Yeah, go start mentoring people. You know, the totally for me.
And so, and that's sort of like people like what well, I've got
a day job just like, you know, this whole like, well,
recruiting your job, your job's to recruit like, no, they're not
working for me, they're working for you.
So and the best recruiters will tell you the best hires they
made are because the hiring manager was super engaged, you
know, and so it really is a partnership.
And, and I think we're in the spot because we have a lot of
those fiefdom HR leaders that a lot of us have have have worked
for in the past where we get to switch that to, you know,
leading people, engaging your people leaders is what it's
about. And I think the challenge is the
world of work is just going so crazy and so fast right now.
Managers are exhausted. You saw the Gallup survey came
out last month, the lowest leadership engagement since
they've been measuring it. And by the way, it's always been
really crappy, really 30 and now it's below 30.
So. It's really, really bad.
Excuse me? It's been on fire for decades.
Right and. That's a shame.
You know, we don't, we don't invest enough, we don't help
them enough. And that falls on us.
To your point, Tracy, we get a lot of the, we're such an easy
department to blame for stuff like so, so, so easy to, to
target for being the problem. You know, you blocked me from
promoting. Yeah.
And it was the wrong decision, man.
Yeah. And so that this pace of work is
really exhausting people. And I did, I did a, a podcast, I
got a just a very 5 minute podcast I release once a week.
And the last week's topic was boredom.
And these all these Harvard researchers have discovered the
greatest moments of breakthrough thinking are not when you're in
17 back to pack Zooms in a day. It's when you've got time to
think, when you're driving, when you're in the shower, when
you're sleeping, when you're waking up like and we're not
creating space for those moments here.
We're falling too far to the do more, faster, quicker, less
money. Be productive is like poison
right now. We need space to think and we
have overwhelmed our people in e-mail.
We still haven't figured out how to use e-mail.
All we do is weaponize our our emails to make people more
behind, you know, and this is yeah, you know, think about
that. You know, as we think about the
future work and sort of tying it to what we want to be talking
about here, which is are you creating the right environment
for people to do their best work?
That's what I looked at like I if you're a sports, you know,
coach, what are you doing to put the best people in the right
chances for them to win in the team to win?
Are you doing that not for today, but for tomorrow too?
You know, and, and, and sometimes we don't have enough
time to think, you know, and I remember seeking advice from
mentor when I got my first head of HR role.
I said, what advice do you have for me?
She goes, you're going to have more stuff to worry about than
you even know. You're going to have to find a
way to deal with that. And I go, oh, how hard can it
be? And a few months later, I'm just
like, Oh my God, you know, and the ideal.
And again, this is back to the days when we used to work in
person and it's different now. But when you walk into the lunch
room, you know, the back story on every single person in that
lunch room, she's about to tell her boss that she's pregnant.
He's about to be told that he's on a performance warning.
She's going to tell her boss that her husband just got
relocated and she might have to quit.
She he's going to find out that his request for promotion is
going to be done. Like, you just know, all this
stuff's coming out and you're just like, Oh my gosh, Oh my
gosh. And if you care, it's a really
hard profession to be in, you know, because your heart is
getting tugged a lot. And you got to find a way to
sleep with that. Yeah, yeah.
It's balancing. It's, it is.
It's balancing the care with the logic in a way, you know,
because it, I think it is important to care.
And it's also important to know when to, you know, disallow the
care from overtaking your entire, you know, person.
I, I, I, one of my more recent leaders taught me something
really invaluable, which is that.
Yeah, You know, Tracy, you care a lot and that's great.
And you also need to separate yourself.
You need to separate yourself from the things that you care
most deeply about. So it's not so draining when
something isn't going the way that you know it should go, but
it's just not going the way that you want it, that it that it
needs to. And it was really invaluable
advice because I think that's something that especially as
people scale in their careers, you, you know, the answer, you
might know. I mean, we just talked about
this in terms of like, oh, this is going to be the fallout if
you make if you promote Jim instead of Susan and Sarah, you
know, you might know the answer. But that actually sometimes
really doesn't matter because just as much as you know the
answer and you care that you want to prevent all of the
outcomes, all the negative outcomes that can come from the
opposite decision, You have to be able to be like, OK, they
decided something else. And that's that.
And you just you walk away and you continue on with your day
and you don't let it eat you up inside.
And it's it's one of the more, I would say, invaluable learnings
that I've had in the last five years because it's what has
allowed me to transform not only as an individual contributor,
but also as a manager of a team. Because I'm like, Oh yeah, I
have to be able to let certain things go, which is really just
very, very, very difficult. Yeah, I got the same feedback,
Tracy. At one point I was really upset
that the vibe of the company was really down.
We're just getting slaughtered in employee surveys.
We we're, it was the early 2000s afterthe.com bubble burst.
And think of this, this whole company as like 1500 people.
I was in Canada, about half our employees were in the States.
The share price had been like over 100 and now it was sitting
around $9. So everyone on paper had seen a,
a pathway to financial freedom and it just evaporated
overnight. And then that led them to
question leadership, even though, you know, everyother.com
company had been through the same thing.
People were pissed. So I go to, I see I was like,
listen, I think I'm going to resign.
Like this is the most miserable environment I've ever worked in.
And, and he was really a tough leader and people told me, don't
work for that guy. He's really sharp edges.
And I said, so I think I'm going to resign.
He goes, let me take you to lunch before you quit.
I want to have one more conversation with you.
And I'd he'd relocated me from Asia to Canada for this role.
He sat me down and he brought a book, Jack Welch's book called
Winning. And he'd highlighted the whole
book, which is basically an HR Bible.
If you haven't read it, it's phenomenal.
I haven't. It's phenomenal.
And he said, listen, I can be, I have not been the best boss for
you and I'm going to commit to be the best boss for you and
make this the best job you ever had.
And he made a bunch of other commitments.
He goes and I need to give you some feedback.
You're, you have too high expectations, you need to
appreciate that we are going to have to make some hard decisions
and making people happy is not in the plan right now.
It's doing right for the shareholders and doing right for
the company. And if we don't make these hard
decisions, the whole company's gone.
So it's going to be hard and you need to steal yourself for that.
And I can help you with that. And it just LED me down this
path of, no, we really, I think sell ourselves short if we over
index on happiness because happiness leads to mediocrity.
It leads to people not talking about the hard stuff or giving
direct feedback or saying disagreeing.
Like that's not a happy environment.
I want a winning environment and I want people happy.
But the goal isn't happy. The goal is winning.
And winning means tough conversations, difficult
conversations. And that's what we need to equip
leaders with today. And that's where we do
performance reviews, by the way, so that we build a muscle.
And by the way, the greatest leverage for AI in HR is help me
deliver a tough message. And you can get so many helpful
hints on that, right? And so that that, you know, I, I
share that story because I was, I was down and out and ready to,
you know, take my family out of the.
I was like a really hard decision and I decided to stay.
I'm like, what leader spends a whole, reads the whole book for
me, promises it's going to be the best I've ever had.
And he was 100% right. That became the greatest job
satisfaction moment for me. You know, it wasn't a company
that anyone ever heard of and no one ever talks about it.
And they've since been acquired and so their name is dissolved.
But it was PMC Sierra, and that's CEO Bob Bailey.
He changed my life. And he really, And that was
invaluable. Like the feedback you said that
you got like, hey, you know, we're going to have to do some
hard stuff here. And if you keep hanging on to
that and, and listen, we're in the service business, which
means saying no doesn't feel like you're doing giving good
service. But if you keep saying yes, you
will drown, you know, And that's my biggest challenge my entire
career is learning to say no. And also because I think I can
do it better than anyone else. So why would I?
Why would I have someone else do it, right?
So like, if you're a perfectionist, it's even worse,
right? It's like, I could do that.
I could do that too. I could do that.
I can keep doing that. And I could.
Yeah. And then ultimately you do you
do drown and you're like, oh crap, what have I done?
You find yourself at home with your kids and you're not at home
with your kids or thinking about that board deck.
You gotta get ready that presentation for tomorrow, that
big termination that the manager is gonna screw up and you're
just like, well, and it's just not a good place.
Not a good. Totally, totally, Steve, I have
thoroughly enjoyed our conversation.
I'm not ready to let you go, but I know that the listeners are
probably like Tracy, what's the you know?
We're gonna call this a double episode.
How about that right now? 2 for one people. 2 for one, I'm
not ready to let you go, but I know I know I need to and
especially considering how valuable your time is and I
would love to have you back on one day.
I mean, I think please, all of the things that you've shared
have been really, really profound, not only for me and
I'm I'm sure also for the listeners.
So thank you so much for your time.
And I'd love to kind of just pass to you one more time to
tell everyone where they can connect with you and maybe work
with you. Read your book.
Yeah, please. Yeah.
My book is titled Work Quake. Please check it out anywhere
books are sold. I have a podcast called Work
Quake Weekly and it's very quick, 55 to 10 minutes and it's
really fun for me. And I, you know, publish a
prolifically on LinkedIn. I hear it's a pretty good
platform. And so just find me on there,
connect with me. You can like I've so many
connections now. LinkedIn has not let me like
easily connect with new people. Connect.
Yeah, you can easily say follow, but if you hit the dot dot dot,
you can still connect with me. So if that's of interest, you
know, I'm pretty active there. I also have a TikTok channel
where I have a series called True stories from Corporate
America and if you want to hear about HR stories going crazy, I
know I can match and raise you one.
So check out that I've protected the innocent and but also some
naughty HR leaders that I've outed some of the stories from
that. So yeah, it's it's if you need
some Comic Relief, please check it out.
We always do, and we will make sure that everything is linked.
And again, Steve, thank you so much for your time.
Thanks for amazing. Yeah.
Hey, just before you go, don't forget to subscribe to the show
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