Michele : Okay, so Laurel, can you share with everybody watching and listening a bit about your experience in HR? Because I really love what you’ve done?

Laurel: 
Yeah, well, you know, I always like to start by telling people, I’m not your traditional HR person. I consider myself a mutt, right? I started out in accounting in high tech. And then I did some auditing, I got my MBA and operations, international business, you know, went overseas to fit that. And then got into consulting around risk management. But in everything that I did, I was always a big part of hiring people, coaching people engaging with people, there was just something about that development and training that I was always doing. And, and then I was at an organization doing risk management in southeast Indiana. And I realized, you know, they really are not ready, they’re not ready for what we need to do. And they’re paying me a really nice salary to just kind of sit and do slides. And I’m just not gonna do that anymore. So let’s start thinking about something else. And I was actually involved at that time with all of the executives, it was a company that happened to have three divisions. So I was at the corporate headquarters. And so I was involved with all of the executives and the Board of Director every month because of my role. And one of the heads of HR for the casket company, his name is John Dickey, I’m gonna call him out because he’s an amazing individual. And especially because your last speaker was talking about sponsorship and Ally ship. And if you put that in the dictionary, you would see John Dickey, he actually was in a meeting with me, he was the head of HR for the casket company. Yes, I worked in caskets. And he said, Hey, have you ever thought about HR, I’m like, funny, you should ask. I was thinking about HR. And his position was, I’m looking for people who can think who are really good business people, because you can learn the HR stuff, because HR is not rocket science. And so I ended up going kind of the long way around to get into HR. However, my experience in accounting, my experience in auditing, my experience, and process design, my MBA, my consulting actually made me a really great HR person, because I can speak the language of business. And I think that’s what’s missing a lot of times in our HR field, and why, you know, why are our HR people having to call ourselves business partners, nobody else puts business partner in their title. And it’s because most of the time as you think about the growth of the function of HR, it has been about the soft stuff, right? If you think people, it’s the soft stuff. But really, HR is about helping an organization utilize the human capital asset to achieve the objectives of the organization. And that sounds really cold, but it’s not about being impersonal, you can still be compassionate. But the reality is, if the company’s not doing well, nobody has a job. So you have to be an HR person. Second, right? A business person first, and then you’re able to bring in that compassion and all of that, that data science and, and all the love you have for people to be able to make tough decisions and do the right thing from an HR space.

Michele: 

I love it. I love it. Oh, so for those of you who are like I am so not an HR Laurel just taught you. It’s okay to jump attracted to Yes. Matter of fact, just change complete stations, but you still in the radio business, it’s okay. Right? What should what not it no matter what, it’s transferable, you make you’re going to grow from it. So I love that I really, really do and what I love about it, you learn to speak the language of business. And we’ve talked about the human aspect of, uh, you know, HR like, Okay, we know the human, I didn’t want to deal with the data. Right. And we talked a bit about You came in for my county, like, I know these numbers, but these numbers are different.

Laurel: 

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I So first, let me say this, I tend to be a fairly controversial HR person because you know, my team before they call these Laurel isms, right? And one of the things that I said is we are not the party planners, we don’t plan parties. That’s not what we do. Right? We, that’s not what we do. And we don’t own everything. And if we don’t own it, you send it right back over to that manager to do the stuff, right. You are partnering with people, you’re part of the business, but we don’t own all the crap. That’s not what we’re here to do. And guess what, we don’t own culture either. We are the keepers of culture, we are the ones who are purveyors of culture, who give organizations the tools that they need to design the culture that the leaders say they want, we are there to keep people honest about what they say, but we don’t own that stuff. Right. So don’t, don’t take on all of that ownership and all that pressure of being the the thing for people, you know, I heard you mentioned with someone earlier, kind of the human back in human resources, that always makes me bristle a little bit. Because normally when they say that, what they’re saying is we want more parties, you don’t let us do what you want to do. I didn’t really manage this person’s performance. And now I want to get rid of them. And you won’t let me right. So when you think about then translating that into how do you become an HR leader, or an HR person, or a leader who has to deal with people, one of the ways to shore a lot of that up so that you can continue to be compassionate, you can continue to connect, but you can stay focused on the business objectives is to understand data. And people analytics is different than business analytics. So there are a lot of people who will say, well, we can do that. We know the business stuff we can do the people analytics, it is different. When you’re thinking about people analytics, not only are you looking at predictive, which is a big movement. Now how do we predict where people are going to go, how they’re going to leave those kinds of things. But you’re really looking at a whole idea of supply demand, internal and external, you’re looking at movement up, down and sideways, you’re looking at how it connects to the training you have given or not given. There’s a whole different piece around people analytics that relates to all of the the measures around the tactical pieces, right? hiring, retaining turnover, where are we going, but there’s also the pieces that give you insight into, you know, every time we go to this particular university, we may get two or three people but they only stay one year. What does that mean? Does that mean there’s a misfit in our culture? Does that mean, we just can’t keep them engaged? What does it really mean? Around the people side of this data, it is very different than business data. It’s the same principles, but the things you look at and the insight you gather from people analytics, helps you make decisions around the human capital asset. I know people get really upset with that. Because it sounds like you’re calling people, not people, but the human capital asset, and move that into something that is going to continue to drive revenue, going to continue to drive profit going to continue to drive your culture of a place that people want to be, because they understand how their stuff connects to where the company’s trying to go. You engage them in a way that drives innovation. And you understand through the data, how you are building and moving leaders, because leadership is about behavior. It’s not about position, because we all know a lot of people that are in really high positions who are really poor leaders. So you use that data from surveys from recruitment from Glassdoor and all those places that are informal, to form the landscape that you need to evaluate and gather insight from in order to take action that is focused on your ultimate objective. If you don’t know what your ultimate objective is, how do you know who you need to have on your team? And all that comes down to gathering the insight through the information?

Michele: 
I think somebody said that was HR one on one in five minutes. I just earned a master’s degree and have a PhD for HR and people i don’t i don’t know maybe that’s just me. But um, but this is this is Dr. Pearson. So she already has that PhD. So maybe it is obviously just me. So she will come in. I’m getting one.

I love it. I love it. So what you have given a whole story, or let’s say the framework, somewhat of people analytics, then what you can do with it. But let’s take a step back to really talk about why do origami as Asians you steer away from it too often? And then why they should lean more towards it? And to what extent?

Laurel: 

Man, that is a fantastic question. And I will say, the number one foundational piece that makes people run away from it is fear. And it’s fear because of that DNI space, right? When you think about analytics, you think about data. When you think about data around people, you think about demographics, when you think about demographics, you think about quotas. And so people quickly their mind quickly makes that transition to if I measure it, then that means I’m doing a quota. If I measure it, then how come this x person gets it, and I don’t get it, if I’m starting to measure it, that means I have to be accountable for it, and accountable not only for my action, but even more important, I’m accountable for the impact of the action that I’m taking whether or not those consequences were intended, right. So no matter what your intent is, you’re always, always responsible for the impact of the actions that you took. And so when you start talking people data, one, HR leaders, you have to make sure you got the right people on your team, because there is information and data that comes into HR that is highly sensitive, that can ruin not only people’s careers, but can ruin people’s lives. So if you can’t be trusted, you can’t be in HR, you couldn’t be on my team, if I couldn’t trust you with information, right? Because all of that stuff runs through HR. So you have to understand the sensitivity of the information that you have. But you also have to understand that what you’re looking for is insight in order to inform action. So yes, there are compliance issues for which you have to understand demographics. And you have to have the count, and you’ve got this many of this thing in this role. But the meat of that is, but what are you doing about it? Right? So I’ll give you a prime example. I had was challenged in my role to say, Wait, you know, we don’t have equity, we don’t have pay equity. I’m like we do have pay equity? No, we don’t. How do we know? Like, because we did the data, right? We do have pay equity. It’s a bit here’s the thing, when you are doing data and people analytics, you cannot have knee jerk reactions. You can’t go with the emotional response, do we have a pay equity issue, and pay equity is real. So don’t get me wrong, pay equity is real. When we went back and looked at our information, it’s like, you know what, there were a few spots where it looked like we were not paying, quote unquote, equitably. But there’s a very big difference in a systemic problem of paying people in equitably. And a historic change of people moving across an organization and PE getting off kilter, those are different. One has intent, the other is about time and not paying attention. And so when we looked at our overall data that happened to be around salaries, what we’re able to see is no, you know, on a whole, we are actually pretty equitable. And when we have issues, we make a concerted effort to be sure we’re getting people in the pay range, that we’re making sure we’re paying attention to how we’re doing it, when we had some that were very, really off. Again, data is just the facts, the power is in the insight through the information, we were able to go back and look and say, You know what this person is way off what’s going on? Well, you know what they started off 20 years ago as a switchboard operator. So as we move them up, and they’ve moved to different roles, we didn’t necessarily pay attention to the skills that they’ve gotten in order to ensure that we were moving their pay as well. So please understand people that are doing people analytics and data analytics, especially around pay, I need you to take the emotion and set that aside. Because emotion is different than compassion. And you can be passionate about equity. But this is about business. And so you want to make sure that your understanding what is the data actually telling you about the actions that you’ve been taking, and the impact of that action. The other piece around that people data is really going back and saying, you know, if we have some issues around leadership and representation in leadership, what is the real reason for that? Is that an internal supply? Is that how we’re interviewing? Is that the questions that we’re asking, or is that where we’re going to find people? And when you start digging deeper into those questions, that’s when you start hearing the cultural challenges of diversifying an organization? Well, we can’t go there. Well, we don’t hire them. Well, you know, the only people we need to hire really are folks who have done this thing using this thing in this situation. Well, all those people already work for us, you’re not going to find them. And by the way, do you really need them? Or do you need people who really think well and understand processes and flows because you’re going to train them on all the stuff that’s unique to you anyway, so by having the data and seeing the impact of the data, it enables you to start asking really deep, hard questions about why When you find out why you can determine a what that makes an impact on the ultimate outcome you’re trying to achieve. Hopefully that makes sense.

Michele: 
It does. And I love how you bought it back again to something we talked about, which is why,

Laurel: why? Yeah, yeah. That’s my favorite question. Why? Five why’s?

 Michele: Yeah, I love I love that technique, cuz you’re going to get to the root cause real quick. Yes. Um, and that’s why I love kids, everybody. This three year old here keeps asking me why. But you know what, that three year old start? Yeah, you have kids? And you said, That’s dumb. Why don’t adults do that? They ask why? Yes. It’s like, Wait, that is dumb. So I encourage you to if you don’t know what the five why method is Google it. It is a great methodology for you to go through sometimes yourself. To figure out how to how to stop do i Why am I doing this? Why? Yeah, so Okay. So we’ve looked at impact of actions in your organization, the data alone, the motion alone is not where you need to be. Right? You have to find that space in between to really understand what’s going on in organization. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.
You know, I think the challenge that people have, right, so especially if you’re in the HR space, or if you’re a woman, and particularly a woman of color, in corporate America, or even really big nonprofits, emotion, right can be seen not as passionate, but either as aggression, or you’re too emotional. And when you’re in a business setting, it doesn’t mean you don’t get to show up as you it doesn’t mean you need to cut it off. Because there’s a generation of women that also decided they had to, quote unquote, be like a man right to be successful. It doesn’t mean you have to be unemotional. But what it means is you have to really understand your audience. And if the point is to be heard, how do you recognize the environment that you’re in, communicate in a way that you can be heard in that environment, sometimes that means modification of behaviors, sometimes that means assimilation in order to be heard, but you do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do. Nothing that’s going to make you unsafe, nothing that’s going to be non compliant. And if you’re unsafe, you need to get out. But there are certain periods of time where I need you, especially in HR, where people already think we don’t think and we already think we don’t know anything about numbers, I need you to move the motion and put it aside, be compassionate, but speak the language of the business so that they can hear you and hear the impact of the actions they’re taking. So that you can then begin to influence new actions that actually make systemic sustainable change in the things that the data are telling you are incorrect, whether that’s how you hire issues with turnover, issues with culture that drives certain underrepresented people to be leaving, right at that mid management level, whatever the issue is, if you’re leading with emotion, not only are you not able to communicate, you’re not able to hear. And if you’re emotional, you’re not listening, you’re not listening actively, because you need to understand what people are saying, but also hear what they’re not saying. So that you can address the issue at hand. And emotion keeps you from being able to be focused, and detailed, and really understanding where you need to come. And if you can do that you can use the data as a tool. You don’t have to use it as a weapon, right? You can use it as a tool to impact systemic change within your organization to see sustainable, you know, improvement in those goals you’re trying to achieve.

Michele: 
Oh, okay. I want you to I want you to pause for a manager’s free. So I didn’t realize holding my breath. I was like, oh, okay, so let’s take a step. And because we only have a few minutes left, like this went way quicker. They all go quicker than I ever realized, right? We’re talking to HR leaders, and you’re like, Okay, how do I build this team? To help me do this work?

Laurel: 

Yeah. Okay, one you have to look to home first. Are you a business person? First, are you an HR person? If you can’t speak the language of business, it doesn’t matter what you want to do where your heart is, no one’s going to hear you. You’re going to be the party planners. You’re going to be simply relegated to just make sure the ER G’s are working, make sure we do the thing, right that the pretty thing, even from a DN, D and Eyespace if you don’t understand the strategy of the business and how D and I actually impacts the overall outcome and the overall profitability and innovation they’re trying to get too, it just becomes a check the box exercise that people can throw all kinds of darts at. So you, as the leader, as an HR leader have to be a business person. First, you need to know which levers to pull that cause which outcomes first. Then when you hire people, you want to make sure you’re hiring HR professionals who do understand that balance between data and compassion. It is different for different parts of the organization, you want to have really great, extroverted, wonderful people who are doing your consulting, who know how to sell it, but are also really honest about the organization who have an intestinal fortitude, and a courage to say, here is our culture, here are the things we’re working on here, the things we still need to work on. But we really need people who can help us get there and mean that right? Then you need business partners who can actually hold the company accountable for what they say they want to do, who can speak truth to power, you cannot be in HR if you don’t have courage. And I don’t mean being ugly. I mean, having courage because you don’t have to be unkind, right? To be direct, it is not necessary to be nasty. To be direct. It is also not unkind, to be clear. So if you are looking to build your HR organization, start with you as the leader, how connected are you to the business? How well do you understand the business? How well are you connected to the HR leader, or the other leaders in the organization to know where the business is trying to go? And how you can get them there? How do you then help your team understand that very few things are absolutely yes or absolutely no, they’re usually compliance related. Other than that, it’s a question of, Hmm, let me know where you’re trying to go. Because I can probably figure out a way to help us get there, you’re able to challenge you’re able to challenge in a way that’s forward moving, and you’re able to challenge with the foundation of understanding the business and because you’ve understood the business, and you can have just as deep a conversation about the customer about the profit, about the processes that are happening in the organization as anyone else in the business that builds the trust that you understand, so that you now have a platform upon which to talk about the more people related or softer things, but you have to be a business person first. And you have to be curious. I learned what I learned. And I was able to ask the questions that I asked. And I was able to build a reputation that I built. Because I was curious about the organization. I want to know how it works. I want to know how we make our chemicals. I wanted to work overnight. And I’m a morning person, not a night person. I worked nights at my plant because I wanted to know what those guys were going through on rotating shifts. I wanted to know what they had to say, when everybody else wasn’t around. I wanted to build a relationship with them. That said, I am not always going to tell you Yes, but I am always going to tell you the truth. You can ask me absolutely anything. And I will answer as long as it’s not about an individual or about somebody else’s performance. But if I don’t know, I will tell you I don’t know. And I find that and I’ll find out. If I can’t tell you, I will actually tell you, I can’t tell you and I’ll tell you why. So it’s about establishing as a leader, a level of honesty, a level forthrightness, a level of transparency in the realm of HR that gives you the platform and the trust to be able to make changes that are difficult for people to make. Everything you do in HR is related to people, every leader, every person who is building a team, because again, leadership is about behavior, not position. It’s about people. And so the data is the facts. The Insight gives you the information to make systemic change that impacts people. And if you don’t get that, as a leader, you’re not going to be able to find people who are going to get that on your team. And you’re going to be relegated to planning the parties, you’re going to be relegated to just doing the march and doing the banners and doing the events. And while there may be people on your team who love to do that, who understand the birthdays that when me right but I had people who loved it, you’re not really going to become a key piece of the business you’re just going to be that call center that they just relegate to the side and you won’t be able to be in the detailed conversations and you get caught flat footed and they just call you when they’re trying to fix it. So be a business leader first that happens to have especially in human resources and how to magnify the importance and the innovation of the human capital asset for the business. And if you can do that you will find people who work for you who will be able to do it to.

Michele: 
Laurel see I think we need it like three hours 35 minutes just blew by fast. Yeah. So it is but it’s always when the conversations good. It’s so so many tactics and things HR leaders have to own it have to do and then there are things that outside of that to have to work as well. Um, yeah, somebody I want to share this comment. Laurel, you really frame the gaps between HR teams and the rest of the organization. Named the gaps and how to get HR to become real partners to the rest of the organization. Thank you.

Laurel: 
Thank you Zoe for listening. Yeah, it’s not personal to me, guys. It can’t be emotional. It can’t be personal doesn’t mean you don’t take things personally. But it’s not. It’s not personal. It’s business. And if you focus on the business first, all the other stuff will come. I promise. I promise it will.

Michele: 
Absolutely. So how can people connect with you, Laurel?

Laurel: 
So the best thing I would love people to go and listen to download my podcast so you can get it on my website. LAUREL Rutledge comm slash podcasts. I’m also on all the platforms. They’re really quick short bytes 10 to 15 minutes. And I’ve got a big goal of trying to get to 17,000 downloads by the end of the year. So please like, share, download, if there’s something you want me to talk about soon, that too. It’s all about career and leadership. So we’d love to have you do that. I’m also on all the platforms. So you can find me on Instagram. You can find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, on Facebook and Instagram, it’s Laurel K, Rutledge, or the Rutledge perspective.

Michele: 
And I love this because Laurel, you wrapped up I don’t know if you caught the discussion that I was having with Marissa talking about leaders in the workplace like nah, y’all management. I can’t do that. And and you so broke down, what does that look like? And that was really, really phenomenal. For me. Thanks. So all right. Thank you so much. Laurel. Be sure to check out her pocket if you love what she was talking about. I know you are like, Wait, hold on. Don’t move. Don’t move yet. It will get I’m trying to get to the website. Right Laurel Rutledge, I’m pronouncing that all of the consonant. So Laurel rutledge.com forward slash podcast. Go to our website is the quickest way to find her or you can Google in Laurel K. Rutledge. Thank you so much Laurel.

Laurel: 
Thank you for having me. This has been lovely I really appreciate it.

Michele: 
You’re very welcome. Everybody say whoa, okay, y’all I cannot believe we’re in the final hour this them first three hours just flew by. I’m like the sun is like I’m awake. Now the sun the even like the sun out like the sun ready to get on like sun you always have the shot and you always have the shot is that maybe in Pittsburgh during the winter time. So we are going to do our last sponsor for the virtual Summit. I want to introduce you to this great Di Di consulting firm called Sun BrahMos founded by Casey Ada, Casey has a breadth of experience from working on Capitol Hill to being in the Peace Corps to even how about this having her own tech startup Chris, she helped reporters in other countries share what was going on, you know, reporters in certain countries get killed, right for sharing out certain information. She created a company specifically to help share this information is no longer around. But she was providing safety for these reporters to share information to share around the globe about what was going on in different countries. So she has done fantastic work. What she does now with some promise, though, is she helps organizations cultivate equity, inclusion and diversity in their in their leaders, right? training their leaders, helping their organizations understand where they are, and bring it in cultural competency as well. So if you are looking for someone to work with, I highly recommend you learn more at some brahmos.org It is a great organization. I’ve had fantastic time working with Casey over the last few years and I personally recommend this organization to you. And you like I don’t know you either. I know. I know. But you get to know me today. It’s gonna be better. I promise. I promise I promise