L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - Kindness in Human Resources: Earning the Trust of Leadership and Employees Alike as an HR Leader

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

It’s no secret that Human Resources departments often receive the eye of skepticism from C-suite leadership. But what is it that results in HR taking on the stigmas of being a blocker to progress, or just a compulsory administrative arm for hiring and firing? According to Jessica Winder, there’s a lack of forthright communication between HR and leadership, and HR has a tendency to operate within existing bureaucratic expectations. Jessica shares her insights on the kinds of conversations and initiatives that get leadership on the same page as HR early and effectively.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. This week, my guest is Jessica Winder. Jessica is a keynote speaker, career coach, and author of the book The Hidden Gem Within. She is a highly regarded human resources mastermind who has been tasked as the HR originator and first hire at a handful of high-growth startups. Jessica currently serves as SVP of people at Refine Labs, and she has previously held positions at Turner & Townsend, Timely Care, and General Motors Financial.

held positions at Turner & Townsend, Timely Care, and General Motors Financial. She takes on individual coaching clients through her brand Hidden Gem Career Coaching, for which she was voted a top 15 career coach in Las Vegas by Influence and Digest. She's also been recognized as a top 15 LinkedIn creator with a focus on careers and interviewing for the year of 2023. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay. And today I'm joined by Jessica Winder. Jessica, it's great to have you on. Thanks for joining me. Hello, I'm excited to be here and chat with you. You are pretty big on LinkedIn. You have 60 something thousand followers. Your posts do very well. And occasionally they go pretty viral. One that I saw is about how you interview

with somebody, received their salary expectation, and then you actually spun that around and you said to them, I think that you could make more. Here's a better number that I think fits you better. And here are some things that I think that you could do in the future, maybe to better identify your own skillset and interview better. And you kind of just coached them up a little bit. And this sounds unprecedented to me. I've never kind of just coach them up a little bit. And this sounds unprecedented to me. I've never heard of somebody doing this from a recruitment or hiring manager standpoint. But as soon as I read it, I was like, oh, yeah, like, let's be good people about those that we're trying to hire. And it just, it seems kind of intuitive when you describe the scenario.

And then I look through the comments, and I'm seeing people kind of explaining their perspectives on things. But I'd love to start here and just ask, what was your motivation to do this in the moment? And if you could tell, what was the outcome of this hire and this situation too? Yeah. So this comes up a lot, I feel like in recruitment and talent acquisition is, you know, what's the actual role of the recruiter? Like, is their role to like coach you, which I do not think every recruiter has time to do coaching. That is not what I'm saying. But I do, which I do not think every recruiter has time to do coaching. That is not what I'm saying. But I do, to your point, think every recruiter has enough knowledge to be kind.

And so if a candidate is telling you that their salary expectations are much lower than you know the salary band is, most of the time they don't have that information. Why wouldn't you just tell them? And now I will say that this happened to me before the whole craze where it is right now, where you post the salary range. At this time, five years ago, we weren't posting salary ranges and job descriptions. So this person had no clue what the range was. So they gave me a number and I said back to them, no, this is not the right number.

You absolutely can make this because I was a hiring for multiple people in this role. So I knew the range for other people that were going to get the job. I had just done an hiring for multiple people in this role. So I knew the range for other people that were going to get the job. I had just done an offer for somebody else, same role, and they had gotten like $25,000 more. And in my mind, why wouldn't this person get the same thing? Because what's going to happen is this person would join, they would figure out that other people in the same job, same experience, made more money, and then they would be pissed off. So why would you start someone's experience like that? So I think it's really important to just be honest with people

and tell them this is what the salary range is. And nowadays, people put that in the job description and it's much, much better. But it helped. And this candidate actually did start with us. They were so happy. I even think they ended up writing me like a review somewhere. And it was really nice. You know, I think it was on Glassdoor. Yeah, they wrote a review about how I coached them. And it was unexpected because they were interviewing with me. And at the very end of the interview, I was like, let me just give you some tips and tricks. And like, this is what you need to be asking for. And she just wasn't expecting it. I think it was just be kind. And that is the way to do it is to tell people the honest truth

about salary, because most people just don't know and they don't want to price themselves out. So then they like a lowball themselves. That's what I love about doing this podcast is how often I'm reminded that you can just be kind in business from all perspectives of what we're doing. And it's good to hear, especially in the recruitment and the hiring process, that being kind is something that you've actually pursued and have stories about because we just see so much about layoffs and being ghosted by potential employers, candidates being ghosted, and just all these horror stories. I've read LinkedIn posts about seemingly highly qualified people that have been out of work for six months to a year, you know, people that are in their sort of like middle age years that just can't find jobs now. And

it does just seem so simple. Like, why can't we just be kind? There's plenty of data about how kindness to your employees and a strong company culture and positivity within the workforce results in, you know, greater productivity, higher revenue, this and that. So it just feels like there's always this constant pushback to just stick to market rates, you know, squeeze people for what we can and just like maximize profit. But hey, kindness actually kind of pulls through in a lot of these cases. And I think we need to rewind and look at that. You mentioned early on, you know, what is the role of a recruiter? You know, is it coaching? And not everybody has the time to do that, but you do. You are a career coach, you know, leadership coach in some cases. You're an author.

And I want to call you like an HR savior, a human resources savior, because what you've done is... I've never heard that one before. I love it. I hope it sticks because what you've done is pretty remarkable. You've been like the first HR person at a number of companies and you've like built HR from the ground up. And I pretty firmly believe that companies that hit a certain point, if they didn't have a good HR person come in to do what they do, they're going to collapse because a lot of times leaders who are starting companies are very sort of product service focused and not so much internally focused and HR kind of comes in and sweeps up a mess, which I'm sure you've experienced very directly.

In another podcast appearance that you did, the description that was written about you says that you do it all with ease. And we discussed this a little bit beforehand in our pre-chat too, but there's a bit of a discrepancy that I want to address because you also mentioned that you think it's important in your process of, you know, creating an HR team and helping businesses grow that you don't like the idea of people wearing too many hats within an organization. You don't want people to kind of spread themselves thin. So you seem really good at that from a personal level and a professional level. But what is it that you think when a business is growing or when it's sort of in its early stages, why is that dangerous?

And what are like the alternatives to that? Yeah, it's very dangerous. And it's because specifically when I'm talking about, I'm talking about early stage companies, I believe in being a generalist. I started my career as a generalist. So early in my career, you name it, I did it. I did payroll, I did benefits, but I did all of those things to get a foundation to learn that some things I don't want to do. So for example, I never, ever, ever in my life want to do payroll

again. But I say that as an example of I learned how to be a specialist because I was a generalist. And a lot of times in a startup environment, the expectation is that everyone's just going to come in and be a generalist and people throw stuff at you that you don't know what you're doing you just figure it out that only goes so far and that is how a lot of things get broken when you don't have like the fundamentals so anytime i've done this three separate times and each time i sit down and i ask like founder ceo whoever is in charge what is it you want the culture to be? Because that's the foundation for me and the people in talent space. What is the foundation? Like, what is it you want? Tell me what the culture is. Tell me what you don't want the culture to be. Because that's also

a different thing of, you know, it's the pie in the sky. We're empathetic. We're quote unquote, a family, which I hate that word, all those things. But tell me what you don't want the culture to be. Do you not want the culture to be backstabbing? Do you not want it to be full of micromanagers? And how are we going to combat that? So making sure that people have specific jobs and they know what they're going to be held accountable for, this goes back to expectations. If I tell you, hey, I'm going to throw things out and you're just going to pick it up, then what is the actual expectation there that you are good at those things or just that it gets done? Because those are very different things. And a lot of times in startups, it's just get it done, but it's like

the difference between good and great. So you mentioned the pie in the sky type expectations. I can only imagine how many times you've asked a leader or leadership within an organization, what do you want this to look like? And they just describe either something that's super ideal and utopian, or they like, just don't even know what to say, because they're so engrossed in, like I said before, like the product, the service, just the cash flow, whatever's happening, that to them, it's just like, well, I want a bunch of people that are going to love what we do be obsessed with our vision and ideals for the future and the thing that we're putting out into the world. And they're going to work really hard to do it. And, you know, that's an ideal company. That's an ideal sort of mechanistic company. Like it's, you know, runs well like a machine, but

I've seen a lot of cases where founders don't think too deeply about the culture until it kind of slaps them in the face when they have enough people that relationships are forming and there's subcultures and all that sort of thing. So how are you prompting them? One way that you've already mentioned is, you know, what do you not want it to look like? But do you give them examples? Like if this were to grow really big, do you want Google or Facebook? How are you kind of facilitating that conversation where leaders might not be as capable? Yeah. One of the ways that I've done that in the last two companies is by writing a culture playbook. And normally we do this for recruitment, but it's also used for an internal tool to keep us accountable. So the first thing at my current

company that I did the first 90 days was go through and talk to everyone. At the time, we only had 40 employees, so that was doable. I talked to every single person and asked them to tell me, what's the culture here? Like, what is it right now? Don't tell me what you want it to be. Don't tell me if this got fixed, it'd be better. No, no, no. What is it right now? And then we can talk about what do we want the future state to be? Because a lot of times when you read sometimes these handbooks, it's very, to your point, utopian, like, oh, we aspire to be diverse and we aspire to hold people accountable, but you're not really saying what the truth is right now. And so that's where the hiccup comes in. And I know to your previous question about doing it with ease, the way to do

it with ease is with processes and procedures. And I know people hate to hear that and people think of HR and they're like, oh, you're wagging your finger. No, processes work. They work. And there is a way to write a culture book and tell the truth. And one of the ways to do that is to say what is actually happening. So don't just make it, when you come here, you're going to love it and you're going to get unlimited PTO. What is it actually like to work there? Do you have demanding clients? Are you going to have to work weekends? Like what is the true expectation? And that sets the tone because then people can opt out. So they can opt in, they can opt out. And that way you start from

that situation. Whereas instead of getting someone there and doing like the bait and switch, because recruitment is sales, period. It's all sales. And what are you selling? Just like the sales team is selling the product, you are selling the product, which is to work at the company. How do you get people to be honest with you then? Because I feel like we're going to get into this more deeply. But as HR, there's a certain expectation and it's like stigma attached to HR in a lot of companies and kind of universally, unfortunately, and we will talk about that. But if HR comes through and is asking questions, it usually gives people a bit of an upset stomach in some cases. So how do you get people to tell truthfully what the culture is instead of, you know, appearing nice and just,

you know, kind of complimenting the organization to keep themselves safe in that sort of thing? How do you give that psychological safety, for lack of a better word, in the moment so that people actually give you good feedback? I think it's going at it from a lot of different angles. So I talked to them all on Zoom. I sent out anonymous surveys. There's always someone I consider them to be the champion in the company. So there is always someone. They don't have to have a leadership title that people actually trust. That is a person that I always identify first and I make sure that they are bought in. So whoever that person is at this

company, it happened to be someone that was there from the very beginning. I specifically went after him and like explained to him what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, how I'm going to use the data, who's going to see the data, because I knew that he had influence over other people that work there. He was not on the leadership team, but he had been there from the beginning. And so making sure you have that advocate that basically is telling people you can trust her, that is where it starts. And I know that some people in HR are going to hear that and be like, what? And I'm like, to me, it's the only way I've seen it work. Because if not, people are afraid of me.

Yeah. So let's talk about that. People being afraid of HR. It sucks. I've been working with HR people long enough indirectly or directly directly to know how just downtrodden you can become when you're seen as a barrier to progress or something like that. And it's just so sad that it almost feels like, you know, it's government regulated. Every company must have an HR department to keep them in check. Like that's kind of the attitude that I see a lot of leadership take toward HR. And some people think it's just about hiring and firing and a little bit of

recruitment and policy and that sort of thing. But I think we all do understand if we think about it more critically, that HR does a lot more. So what do you think, especially when like starting an HR department from scratch, you have a really good perspective on this. How do we eliminate that very common bias or misconception? Is it with authoritative hiring of your team and making sure that you have really high class people that are just really good at their jobs? Is it continual demonstration of value? Whatever you're doing, you're making sure that the reports go through to leadership and that they're effective and you understand what they're looking for in terms of their success metrics? Is it about just

like actively communicating with them and just kind of like having a seat at the table? Is it all of the above? What do you think? It definitely is all of the above. But one of the things that any job that I've ever started with, one of the questions I ask at the final interview or when I'm talking to like the CEO or whoever I'm talking to is I ask them, what is their perception of HR? Because I want them to tell me, and some have told me that like, I don't like HR. Like I think HR people get quote unquote, get in the way. They're there to say no. And I always want someone to tell me that because I just want to know what have they experienced before? Have they had HR that was a team player that they felt like they could tell the honest truth to and kind of get feedback and it was more of a coach relationship?

Or have they been a blocker or barrier? And one of the things that I normally try to tap into as soon as I started a company is to let them know that I am not legal. I don't have a law degree. Like, do not expect me to give you legal advice. We need to have outside counsel or we need to have someone here. Like, I't have a law degree. Like, do not expect me to give you legal advice. We need to have outside counsel or we need to have someone here. Like, I am not the law department. The second part of it is I think it's really interesting to have HR people that have different HR backgrounds. So I will say someone on my team right now, her background is social work. She has

the ability to communicate and understand like the dynamics of teams better than I ever have because I've never been a social worker. I've only worked in HR. So even that component has been a game changer for like how we set up systems, how we talk about how we do presentations because her background is social work. So that has been, I would say,

over the last three years, something that I've unlocked that I just didn't know was even a thing was getting people that have actually worked outside of HR. It opens up a whole new revenue or a whole new avenue for what you could do. Same question as before. How do you get the leadership folks that you're asking, what is your opinion of HR to not lie? I feel like this is important. Like I've heard of a lot of cases, especially when you're getting into like the realm of DEI and things that

challenge convention pretty seriously, you know, convention in air quotes there. But a lot of leaders are very resistant to certain things. And they eventually get kind of resigned to the idea. And they say, yeah, yeah, I get it. And DEI is important. Yeah, yeah, I know HR is important. And they'll just kind of like, they'll resign themselves to just agreeing that this matters and that for some reason, they get that it has to happen. And that becomes their default response instead of like, I get why it has to happen, but I don't like it because X, Y, Z, their attitude is less serious toward it. So do you ever have to work and really kind of extract their true feelings when you have these conversations? Absolutely. The foundation

is trust. They have to trust me and that comes with time. Also, I'm crazy persistent. So I will not give up. And I know if someone is not giving me the honest truth. And a lot of times I will give them resources, like give them stories about like, okay, in this situation, this is what we could do. And this is the impact. So giving them very detailed, not just, you know, tell me why. And I want to lean in on the D&I question, because I definitely think that's the one that is like hot topic right now. A lot of companies, unfortunately, are rolling back their DE&I initiatives. But thinking through that, like, why would we do this? What is the business case?

A lot of times I know people say, well, you should just do it because it's the right thing to do. I agree with that. But that doesn't work when you're talking to like people in operations or your CEO. They want to know the business case. And there is a business case for DE&I. And I think you just have to make the business case. Like, how is this going to impact us in the long run? One of the ways this comes up with talent is a lot of times thinking about like, do you want your company to be a talent destination? Which is people are better off because they worked at

your company. So when someone leaves and they see this XYZ company on their resume, they know that they are a great employee. And this comes up a lot, like people think about this with like a Netflix or Google, like you see that on someone's resume and you feel like you know what you might be getting. And so that's another way to think about it is DEI ties to, are you a talent destination?

And if not, how is this gonna impact your business? So you mentioned a talent destination. I'm gonna raise you one and use the term talent magnet to refer to what you very clearly are. So I spoke with Roberta Matcheson on the show recently. She's another pretty big LinkedIn influencer, and she has a bunch of books, one of which is The Magnetic Leader. And she advocates for facilitating the whole recruitment and hiring process, talent discovery process, by being somebody that everybody wants to work for. And, you know, being an expert in your realm, in your field and presenting at conferences and just being out there so that people see you and go, damn, I want to work for that person. I want to be a part of their team. And you've already

kind of described to me that in your process of recruiting, you use your network, you use LinkedIn to find people. And I'm, first of all, curious, is this something that was your goal when you began to kind of develop your brand? It's very clearly working in that sense that you are a talent magnet, a magnetic leader. But was this always a part of your vision as somebody who's in HR? How did this ultimately start? No, absolutely not. In fact, I'm laughing because I'm like, I didn't have a plan at all. I literally just started writing on LinkedIn thinking it was something fun to do. Really, if I go back and look at my old posts, they are such a hot mess. I don't know what I was talking about. It's like going back and looking at your old MySpace page, like what song were you playing?

That's the vibe it would give. But no, it started out with, I would post like once a week about things that were going on in HR. And to be quite honest, one of the things that made me quote unquote get braver was the higher up that I got, the more I felt I could speak freely. I have been in a role before where I was told that I could not post on LinkedIn anymore because they did not like the things that I was saying. And I ended up leaving that organization because I thought you can't make me not post. And so I'm going to leave. So my personal brand is something that is very important to me, but every company that I have

worked at since sees my personal brand as something that they can leverage because they absolutely can. Having like 60,000 followers, me posting a job instantly like sends it out to 60,000 people. You know what I mean? Like it's a great way to boost the organization. So seeing it, my current company absolutely sees it as positive. From the very beginning, we have used my social media and my personal brand to push our product really. And so it has been absolutely helpful, but I will say it started out just as me wanting to be able to talk about things that were going on in HR that were quote unquote unconventional and people don't normally talk about. Even some of my posts about burn traditional HR to the ground, like people don't like that. I've said some things that people don't like, but it's true. I mean, that's a testament to

this idea of just, if you like this and you're enthusiastic about it, and it was fun for you to write these posts, like you're clearly dedicated to becoming good at it, learning about it, continuous learning. Like somebody like that is somebody that I want to work for in my realm of work. Absolutely. So it does make perfect sense. It's just really good to see how you've grown ultimately. At what point did you realize that what you were doing was actually turning into this, like a brand that was large enough for you to use it as a resource? And at that point, did you start to more carefully sort of capitalize on that and direct your content? I'm curious about the whole process as a marketer, honestly.

I did. And honestly, I think the first time someone reached out to me from a company and wanted to do like a paid post, I was like, wait, what? You would pay me? I did not know that was a thing on LinkedIn. I have friends that, you know, are content creators on Instagram, but I did not know LinkedIn had paid posts. And they do. And it was a brand, like it was a talent acquisition brand. And they wanted me to post about their products. And I like talk to their leadership team and like with the demo and did all the stuff. And so that's when I was like, oh, wait, like this is a thing that people, I could get paid for one. And two, like people are actually looking to what I have to say about their product, specifically when it comes to like HR and talent, you know, products. So that was

when it kind of like clicked for me that, oh, this is a real thing. I will also say people's feedback, people sending me messages of like posts that I've sent, like someone sent me a message just from a post I posted two years ago and was like, hey, you said this a long time ago. Can you tell me how you did it? And I'm like, wait, what? You've been following me for two years? So those have been kind of surreal. Speaking of things that are relevant in HR, I went to HR Dive to come up with some things to ask you today. And the very top headline just happened to be something that I think is directly related to my first question to you about when you kind of renegotiated the candidate's salary in their favor. The headline of this piece was something along the lines of giving employee development opportunities at critical moments greatly improves like relationships

between employees and organizations. And this means at the moments of advancement, so growth and promotion, and also at moments of transitions, so layoffs. The number was 87% of people agreed, and I think this was both leadership in organizations and employees, many of whom had experienced layoffs or advancements, agreed that having like transition help from a company that's laying you off or just when you're being advanced really helps that relationship. And it's a lot better than just being laid off and told goodbye. So again, like it kind of feels like just being kind, but it's like systematically kind of being kind. How do we make sure that, you know, we're letting go of these people, we can give them some sort of a package perhaps, but also like we want them to succeed and we have resources to give them.

We're a big company, so we have the ability to say, here's some data on your successes. Here are some ways that you can think about transitioning this to similar companies, competitors or whatever. But what do you think about that ultimately? Is this something that should be more universal? Is this another example of just kindness from a learning perspective? It absolutely is a show of kindness. And I think it could be done on a small scale too. So I will say I've gone through layoffs where the week prior, my team and I went through and got the job title of every single person that was going to be laid off and went and found jobs and literally created a whole document where we said, here are jobs that you should apply to

that have been posted in the last week. We then encouraged every single person in the organization to go for someone that was laid off, go give them recommendations. We gave people examples of like, this is how you could help this person that has been laid off. And these were no cost because to be quite honest, if you're doing layoffs, it's not like you have a lot of money to spend. And so a lot of companies, unless you're a big company, can't afford traditional off-boarding services where you pay for a company to do it for you. So it's up to the people team. And it took a lot of time, not going to lie. It took a lot of our time, but it was absolutely worth it. And I do think the way that you off-board people and the way that you promote people shows the culture that you have. And a lot of times what happens is opportunities are kept secret. So getting back

to people that are promoted. And so opportunity transparency needs to be the conversation along with pay transparency, because a lot of times you think like, oh, just be honest about pay externally, but you're not being honest internally. And you're not telling people the areas that they can improve so they can be promoted. Unfortunately, I see a cycle sometimes where it's like leaders have identified these three people. These are high potential people. And so then those people get stretch assignments or they get to show that they're ready, whereas there's other people that might have been ready, but they were never told about these opportunities. And so then you start this cycle of people that are getting promoted, but they're getting promoted based on the opportunities that other people didn't get. based on the opportunities that other people didn't get. I remember reading about, I want to say it was like the GE succession battle where they're all named Jack or John.

That was the funniest thing to me. But we're talking about the CEO at GE and how they had three candidates and then they kind of narrowed it down to two and they were flying them out to this and that place. And it was like a process of over six months. And I'm thinking to myself, like in that several month period,

like who's to say that somebody else couldn't have been doing something absolutely critical for this organization that just like rose above of their own accord without being, you know, given free flights to go out and meet the CEO. And like, it feels so systematic and so limited on top of the existing institutional systems that already generally restrict who has the opportunity to succeed executive positions, which I do want to circle back around to the DEI issue, because I think this is very relevant there. As you mentioned, everything is kind of under attack right now. On HR Dive, there's a meta list of articles from the website on sort of the setbacks that DEI has experienced this year and the many places that this is sort of going down. And I'm curious because I'm not as deep into this

in terms of implementation over the past many years, you know, at the organizational level, but it seems like a lot of diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging and justice efforts have been done poorly. And I can only imagine why, because a lot of organizations just probably went after it without really consulting the people that represent these things and just kind of tried to do it in a very insular way and without the real care that something like that requires and without the research that something like that requires. And I'm concerned now that a failure of implementation and a lack of initial care is beginning to look like, make it look to certain realms of the public like it was always a bad idea

from the start. Like this was never actually necessary. It was always kind of a farce. And it just seems like it's being doubled back on now, even though I think you and I are in deep agreement that DE&I efforts are very critical. So how are you seeing what's happening right now? Is this kind of like a political moment

that does represent a failure of organizations to just do it right? And what do we have to do next? Yeah, it's a really sad situation. I think a failure of organizations to just do it right? And what do we have to do next? Yeah, it's a really sad situation. I think a lot of organizations, unfortunately, with the things that happened in 2020, as fast as they could, I call it like straw men. They just put up these straw men situations and they really never asked anyone or consulted with people that are experts in the field. Or they just decided we're going to hire a chief diversity officer, but they don't have any funding. And we're going to stick them under HR instead of having them be like direct report to the CEO and held accountable throughout the

organization. And now they're kind of backtracking and saying, oh, we don't need these people. So unfortunately, what I've been seeing, and there's a lot of statistics behind this, is that during these layoffs, the DE&I team is the first to go, like most of the layoffs. And it's such an unfortunate situation because if your DE&I was embedded into every part of your organization, then how would you be able to let the entire team go the first round of layoffs? You can't have it both ways. And so it's really, really unfortunate. And I think to your point, what happened is organizations really wanted to show that they were frontline on DE&I and they were going to do all these things, but they really did not institute things that couldn't be easily torn down.

So you made it to where you could easily tear it apart, quote unquote, when this was over, which diversity and equity inclusion is never going to be over, even if you get rid of your head of diversity. And so it's really, really a sad situation. I've seen a lot of people in my network that are head of diversity that have either stepped down or have been eliminated due to the layoffs. This is like the crow cosmic version of what I think most people experience in their day-to-day when one of these events happens and all of a sudden racial justice is like back in the limelight and social media happens. People post, you know, Black Lives Matter or a black square. A black square. Yeah. That kind of feels like

what the organizations are doing. Like, oh, we're going to throw somebody in there and then just kind of like forget that this was ever an issue. And, you know, even delete that black square a little bit later. It just all feels so superficial and it's very sad to see. But what can these organizations ultimately do if they are, especially larger organizations, have just been historically built on, quite frankly, like systems of inequality, like institutional inequality is very deeply embedded in all of our organizations. So, I mean, this is the ultimate question, but how do we do better in the long term? To your point, it's long term. So, I think what has happened is a lot of organizations thought, we're going to throw a person over this. Now we're not going to give them money. We're not going to give them a

team, but we're going to make somebody the head of diversity and they need to figure it out. And we need to have a game plan in six to nine months. And the thing about diversity is it has to be ongoing. And the problem is around definitions as well, because diversity, a lot of times I've seen when I've been in an organization where I will ask employees that like, hey, diversity is important to us. I need to know the areas of diversity. So I need you to tell me, besides the things that are visible,

like how you might identify as diverse. And a lot of times that's come up with like sexuality, with religion, with other areas, but people don't want to give you that information because they're scared of how it's gonna be used or if it could be used against them. So it becomes this need for information to then ask for more funding or to ask for more avenues to do things, but you can't get the information. And it's really, really hard because I do identify with people that say, I'm not telling

you this personal stuff about me because what are you going to use me for? Especially now that we're now backtracking. These large organizations, they have to understand that it's going to take time. They have to get the definitions. Like, what does diversity mean in that organization? Like, truly, what does it mean for the leadership team? What does it mean for employees? And then how are you going to get there? One of the goals that we set at my current employer is we wanted, because we are fully

remote, is we wanted to be 50% women and 50% professionals of color. And we made it of color. And we made it very broad. And we're not there yet, but we have been tracking this information ongoing for the last two years. So data is also very important. It sounds like what you're describing is a lot of organizations, they just apply the framework that they know, which is a business framework. So they establish a budget, which in this case is almost always very limited. They give it a time frame, six to nine months, and they say, all right, let's come up with a solution for this problem. And then it becomes like a test for a new product, and then it fails. And they're like, well, we got to ax that part of the budget now. And that's not what this is about.

It's instead of applying a business lens, like maybe a sociological lens, which is kind of like the eternal ubiquitous outlook on this thing. It's a never ending system, which is kind of like the eternal ubiquitous outlook on this thing. It's a never ending system and it needs to be universally embedded. Sounds like kind of what you're saying, right? Absolutely. Yeah.

All right. Sloppy segue here. One category of diversity, perhaps maybe age diversity. I mean, you know, there's plenty of stories about ageism and that sort of thing, especially in tech companies.

And that's always been a conversation since I've been in the workforce. But what I've heard a lot in certain conversations about leadership is that younger generations are less enthusiastic about taking on roles where they're actually in charge of people, younger people. I think this is also brought on by just remote work and decentralized work and everything. It's a lot easier to not see yourself as in charge of people when you're never actually seeing those people in person. But this seems to be a common knowledge now that Gen Z and even millennials are less enthusiastic about becoming leaders of people. And you have described something

to me about how to allow people to continue to grow and pursue and advance if they aren't going to become actual leaders. So first of all, what are some of those things? What are some of those methods? And second of all, do you think this is an issue that we actually need to address, that we need more leaders in the future? Or can we address this difference of desire to lead in a different way organizationally? Yeah, I definitely think it's an issue. A lot of times, if you think about it years ago, if you wanted more money, the only way to get it was to be a leader. So people that were experts in their field who had zero desire to lead people could not actually say that because if they wanted more money, they had to

become a leader. And so we've set ourselves in this situation where we have a ton of leaders who don't want to lead people. Fortunately, that the younger generation is saying, I don't want to do that. Yeah, they're not lying about it. Yeah, like they're just not lying about it anymore. Like it's been true for quite some time. They're just telling us the truth. And so one're just not lying about it anymore. Like it's been true for quite some time. They're just telling us the truth. And so one of the ways that we've done this is we've created what we call like individual success plans

where you have a path of, do you want to be an individual contributor, which quote unquote would be like becoming an expert in your field and you don't lead anyone, you would lead projects, you know, if that's something that is in your field, but you become an expert versus becoming a people leader.

Because unfortunately, people think that you can just be a people leader on top of your job. And sometimes what needs to happen is you need to do less of whatever the job is and you need to do more of the people management part. And so it needs to be a 50-50 split, but a lot of times you're just expected to people lead on top of being an expert.

And I think that's where the problem lies. And that's why a lot of people don't want to do it because they feel the tug of I'm responsible for these people, but I don't actually have the time to commit to helping them and helping them grow. One of my earliest guests on the show was Ariel O'Farrell. And her book is about how many managers, leaders of people are those who are just really good at problem solving and demonstrate to an organization that they can take care of fires and they can do well when things aren't going very well. And that gets them promoted. And that

doesn't mean that they are good leaders necessarily. It means that they've, you know, looked good in the eyes of the decision makers and that they've put out fires. It means that they've, you know, looked good in the eyes of the decision makers and that they've put out fires. But ultimately, I'm just curious from your perspective, what should we be looking for in our people leaders, especially when it comes to this next generation? Because inevitably there are going to have to be, you know, those who are in charge of other people.

So are the characteristics going to evolve as to what we look for when we're hiring managers, when we're looking for managers? Are they going to stay relatively similar? And what do you think about that? Yeah, I definitely think one of the things I've done with my team, which some people might hate it or love it,

is I made every single person on my team get a project management certification. Because I think one of the main ways to be a great leader is you have to know how to project manage. And that can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different people. But if you cannot manage yourself in like projects, then you cannot manage people. So foundation, that's one. I know we talk about quote unquote soft skills.

They're not soft. They're great skills you need to have. And empathy is one of them. Do you have empathy? And do you have project management skills, I think, are the way to be a great manager in the future. Okay. You've advocated for sort of ubiquitous employee development systems. I think you talked about instituting a mentorship program where you are right now and coaching. Of course, you are a coach and you have advocated for coaching.

What would you say in terms of mentorship is the best way to implement a system like that? Because I have experienced a couple versions of those where when I first joined my first company ever, I was just directly paired with somebody who was like the second person I met at the company after my own manager. And she was somebody that was in my same job. I mean, it was a sales job, so you have lots of parity there and it's rather simple.

But do you think that just straight up matching people based on like job parity is a good thing? Some sort of loose incentivization that allows for more like autonomous mentorship system, creating like events and opportunities for multiple kinds of mentorships to arise. What do you think is the most effective way to institute mentorships? Yeah, I don't think it's best for most people to just match them. I do think they should have a say. And so what I've done previously is ask people, like said, like, here are the lists of mentors. We rolled it out on a quarterly basis. So we said, here are the lists of mentors who happen to be everybody on the leadership team,

because we made it a requirement. If you're going to be on the senior leadership team here, you're going to mentor. And so we said, here's the list. You tell me your top three picks and why, like, what is it you want to get out of this mentorship program? So is it you want to learn more about your skillset? So then we might pair you with a leader in your field. Do you want to learn more about leadership in general? We had someone who wanted to learn about like being a working mom, like it doesn't always have to be specifically about the job. And so then we paired her with a working mom, you know, so it can be that specific. And so I think it's really important to allow someone to give you feedback on what is it they actually want to work on. Because to quote unquote mentor someone is just so broad. At least you're setting them up to win if you know what they want to work on. Okay, so how about coaching? So one thing that you told me in our pre-chat is that you think it's really valuable to have an external perspective coach.

So somebody who's not inside the organization. Why is that? I think it's so important because the person outside of the organization can give you more of a robust viewpoint of what's going on. For example, if I'm mentoring you and I'm in the organization, I know some things that are going on. I can't really tell you, you know, so it creates this barrier. If you're a leader that you can only do so much, whereas an external coach is looking at things externally. They don't know, quote unquote, what's going in the business as a leader, but they know what's best for you. So they would be the one to tell you, hey, it's time to leave

this organization. Someone that's on the leadership team is not going to tell you that, you know what I mean? Unless they're me, I might. I probably would, honestly. I'd probably help you work on your resume because it just wasn't the right fit for this person. But you see what I'm saying? That's really rare. So it can taint the coaching itself. It can also taint the experience of the recipient of the coaching. But what about the idea of getting a trustworthy coach from outside the organization. Because I have heard some not horror stories, but challenge stories where a third party is brought in for coaching. And it can just be hard for somebody who's not inside the organization that doesn't get

all the minutiae of the hierarchies and the positions that exist in the organization, but also kind of the business model of the organization. So I guess my question ultimately is, what kinds of methodologies do you use as an external coach? What are the things that you find actually work best for your clients that result in the outcomes that they're looking for? Yeah, so with my clients, one of the things I lean into is I want them to tell me exactly what they want out of me coaching them. A lot of times people come to me because they want to be coached on their performance reviews. So they want to know how to ask for more money. They want to either be coached

on like the interview process. So I believe it's really important to be very specific on like, what am I coaching you for? What do you want to get out of this? Instead of a very broad, you just want like a leadership coach. Normally I would refer those people to someone else because I specifically want to coach on something that is action oriented. I am not a therapist. And like, sometimes I think people get into this like therapeutic coaching. Like, I just want to tell you all of my work problems and you listen to me that I'm not a coach. I want very action oriented. Am I coaching you to get an interview, to get a job? Am I coaching you to get a promotion? Am I coaching you to know, have a better relationship with your manager? And so it's really great to interview the coach just as much as you would their interviewing

you to be their client. Make sure you are on the same page. Because like I said, I've had people come to me where I'm like, you know what? I don't think this is the right fit. We don't see the same things. And so let me refer you to someone else. So this sounds like a lot of conversation-oriented objectives. So how to negotiate for a raise, how to have better relationships. Are you doing a lot of role-playing,

practicing these conversations and that sort of thing? Is that central to your methodologies? Yeah. I normally tell my clients, I'm going to give you the worst case scenario. So I'm going to go off on you and then you'll be like, oh, it wasn't so bad. Wow. Okay. So you hit him with the bad stuff. So prepare for the worst, hope for the best type thing. I love that. Okay, cool. Well, I think we're running up on time now. So before I let you go, I just want to give you a chance to let our audience know where they can learn more about you. You have a new book out as well. So if you want to give a brief pitch on that, I'll let you do that. But where can people find you on the internet? Absolutely. So I am very active. I post honestly almost every day on LinkedIn.

And then I have my website. My company is called Hidden Gem Career Coaching. And so you can find me there. And my book is on Amazon, The Hidden Gem Within. It is a career coaching journal to kind of push you forward in your career. Awesome. Well, Jessica, thank you so much for joining me.

This was a wonderful conversation for everybody at home. Thanks for joining us as well. We will catch you on the next time.