Why HR Leaders Are Set Up To Fail

Why Leaders Face Inevitable Failure, Shocking Insights into the Return-to-Office Dilemma, and the Game-Changing Tactics for Developing Future HR Power

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In this episode of the HR Leaders podcast, join Kelly Mendez-Scheib , Chief People Officer at Crunchbase as she delves into the intricate world of HR leadership.

Kelly explores the HR Paradox and future leadership, unravelling the secrets behind HR failure, office returns, and the delicate balance of AI automation!

Episode Highlights:

The HR Paradox and why most HR leaders are set up for failure
The truth about why companies are asking employee to return to the office
How she is developing the HR leaders of the future
The dangers of over automating HR with AI.

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🎙️ Automatically generated Podcast Transcript

Kelly 0:00

I really think that HR professionals for the most part are set up for failure. HR profession has navigated to this strategic space where we're supposed to be what I refer to is a strategic magician. But nothing has changed to remove the tactical and foundational elements that are also required that Campbell along with the quest to be strategic HR functions in general are not staffed appropriately to handle both. And often you defer to the tactical because it's what needs to happen. And you end up defaulting on the strategic work.

Chris Rainey 0:45

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the HR leaders podcast. On today's episode, I'm joined by Kelly Mendez, she, who's the Chief People Officer at CrunchBase. During the episode, Kelly shares the HR paradox, and why most HR leaders are set up for failure, the truth about why companies are asking employees to return to the office, how she's developing the HR leaders of the future, and the dangers of over automating HR with AI. Before we jump into the episode, make sure you hit the subscribe button, turn on notification bell and follow on your favourite podcast platform. With that being said, let's jump in. Kenny, welcome to the show. How are you?

Kelly 1:23

Great, how are you?

Chris Rainey 1:25

Nice. I'm good. I'm good. I keep seeing the piano behind you. For everyone who, who is just listening to audio. I really want someone to just play a piano on the episode one day, but I know you said it's your daughter who plays is that right? Or my

Kelly 1:37

three oldest children play. So I don't I have no musical ability at all. I had big hopes and dreams of purchasing a player piano once upon a time. And we couldn't afford it when my husband and I were first married. So we decided we would just make a bunch of children that could play the piano. So we've done that successfully. So my three elders play piano, my younger two will start piano next year when they're old enough to sit still. But I can do no helping or place. Before we jump

Chris Rainey 2:11

in tell everyone obviously yourself, your Chief People Officer at current space. But tell us a little bit more about your background and journey and also the business because you know, just for people that may not be aware of the organisation, as well.

Kelly 2:21

Yeah, wonderful country faces a remarkable organisation. But a little bit about me first, and we'll talk a little bit about CrunchBase. I like to consider myself one of the few humans who chose human resources as a profession. And I chose it from the very beginning. In college, a lot of people find their way into HR through a number of different avenues. I chose this and decided I was going to study HR and just fell in love with the profession. And I've been in it for 20 years, I've been touting the 20 year timeline for about five years. But this year 20. It always feels like 20. But you know, this is really your 20 because I officially started working officially in HR in 2006. So So for 20 years, I've done I think every role that existed in HR, right, so I would consider myself to be a true generalist. Not in any way shape, or form a specialist in anything. But so I'm a true generalist, they have super sticky fingers. And I like to play in all parts of HR. And I've done lots of different kinds of roles, most recently, nearly two years ago was given an opportunity to join CrunchBase, which has been a blessing. So CrunchBase is a SASS platform, we help people find information about companies and we have best in class proprietary data. And it's just this remarkable platform that has so many different use cases. So if you want information about companies CrunchBase is where you want to be I

Chris Rainey 3:51

use it all the time. So when we when we connect it I was like Oh this is cool, because I use your platform mainly look to look to do like competitor analysis. Yeah, that's sort of my my use case. I mean, there's a million use cases but I love to see like who the competitors of this company and like looking more all the information you have on it. It's like I spend a lot of time a lot of hours like digging into the information in the platform

Kelly 4:13

Android person and it's got the best data and we just the best team behind it so cool.

Chris Rainey 4:19

So yeah, just funny because I mentioned you when we first spoke we've had probably 700 Plus now searchers on the show scipios And probably like 20 chose HR along the way to your point why did you choose HR was there specific reasons it was there a family member in HR like what was how did you end up went down this route?

Kelly 4:41

No I so my interest is was really in labour and HR like labour relations. So union relations, I went to Penn State University and I was in their labour and HR programme. I wanted to work in an environment that specific We worked with unions, because I wanted your employers, you spend the majority of your life at work. And employers get bad reputations for making those years. Terrible, right? You know, people live to find their way into the workforce and then live to find their way out of the workforce at retirement. So that middle time, that time where you're earning money for a family, raising families, living your life, and you're at work and you're at work every day, my goal is to make that a good place to be. And so many people don't consider the length of time the amount of time and dedication that people give to work. So my job was to make work great. And that's why I was so drawn to the profession, no

Chris Rainey 5:53

surprise that has kept you going and inspired and motivated for 20 plus years

Kelly 5:58

to stay when he says just 20. Let's not I did

Chris Rainey 6:02

say plus, I didn't add the extra. I just realised when you said that I'm one year away from my 20 year anniversary, I started when I was 17. And I'm 36. Now so I'm ready to as well, not any like you but just be in the intermediate space in the HR space. Yeah. Yeah, one of the things I was really excited to talk to you about is is what you refer to as the the HR paradox. Can you explain to everyone what you mean by that, and we can jump into it in a bit more detail. So

Kelly 6:30

I, I really think that HR professionals for the most part are set up for failure. And what I mean by that is, if you study the history of HR, there's been like a quest, from personnel to HR to this big fight for a seat at the table to strategic HR. I actually teach strategic HR and I talk about this a lot. But one of the things that is really interesting is what hasn't, the HR profession has navigated to the strategic space where we're supposed to be what I refer to is a strategic magician. But nothing has changed to remove the tactical and foundational elements that are also required that came along with the quest to be strategic. So I always say that we're in this constant battle, this paradox, if you will, between being tactical, because it is required of our role. No matter what level you're at, you're going to be tactical and also strategic. What I would say is that HR functions in general are not staffed appropriately to handle both. And often you defer to the tactical because it's what needs to happen. And you end up defaulting on the strategic work. And I think that really is a function of the fact that HR staffs are low. The average or the, the appropriate ratio I saw recently was something like one HR professional to every 100 employees. That's ludicrous. And bananas in my world. Because you you if that is going to be your philosophy, you only want to tactician, you do not want to stretch. But lots of organisations are arguing for the need for HR to step up and play the role of strategists. Well, they can't possibly do that, if they're also in this other land of tactical.

Chris Rainey 8:39

They're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. You know, I need to deliver on a day to day like you said and be tactical, but you're also asking me to be strategic, but I don't even have the resources to be able to do that. And so you kind of you're also hearing that from your peers and your network. Does that curiosity from your colleagues, obviously, other CEOs that you chat to?

Kelly 9:00

Yeah, certainly the stretch, right, certainly the inability to stretch into strategic spaces, because of the tactical. I think another thing that's really interesting about HR, and I'm sure every HR professional would agree with this is every human that's in your workforce is a unique human, and they come with their own uniquenesses. And they need to be handled as such. And that takes a lot more time and a lot more care if done properly than most organisations are willing to staff for. Right. So the example I always give is do you get to be strategic? Or do you get to help the person who just had a pretty significant death in the family, right? You help the person who just had a significant death in the family, right? Do you or do you live in strategic land where you're working on succession planning and workforce planning or are you helping the employee because they're really struggling with housing right now. And you need to get them the resources so that they have a place to live. You live in that land, right? The care of employees is important, but we don't resource appropriately for it. So there is a big push, right? There's this like desperate quest to be strategic. But you can't do both. And you certainly can't do both. Well,

Chris Rainey 10:23

wow. How have you approached this, then? Is it something that you ask during the interview stages to really delve into like before you chose to work at crunch but that you'd ask the leadership team and stuff like that, it

Kelly 10:38

was really important to me to work for an organisation that had staffing, I actually left my previous organisation, because I, they were never going to make the financial investment. And I was never going to be able to scale to the work that needed to be done. And that was during COVID. Right. So during COVID, we were understaffed. It was horrific. But you know, CrunchBase, I'm very blessed to be with an organisation that is very well staffed from an HR team perspective. And as a result, I've been able to accomplish more CrunchBase than probably in the other 18 years of my career. Jeff, just in the last two years, we've just been able to do some remarkable things.

Chris Rainey 11:17

Yeah. You took enough of leaders like yourself that bold step of leaving the organisations, but many people are in those organisations right now that are struggling, what advice would you give to them? You

Kelly 11:29

have to quantify, I always I will argue this till I'm purple. The language of business is always very financial. And HR professionals don't always speak in financial terms. So I think as much as you can quantify the amount of time that you're spending in certain areas and quantify the ask of the employees and the care that you're providing to the employees and be able to present, you know, if if this is what I'm spending time on, this is the resourcing that I need to be able to support this or I also think having a very honest conversation with leadership within an organisation. If this isn't what we're going to stop for, then this is what you should expect, right? I don't think I do think that there's this almost desperate need to split yourself down the middle and try to be both and you will fail. Another thing that I would I guess stress upon is fix your foundation before you even worry about strategy. So when your foundation is filled with cracks, meaning your processes aren't together, your technology isn't up to up to par, you have cracks in your foundation, which is your tactics, right? So don't for a second think that you're going to be able to rise to the level of strategic at least strategic Well, if you've got holes in your foundation, so I would say like pull out your concrete and like fill that in, fill that in with really ironclad processes, and really phenomenal technology. There's incredible technology out there that will help you scale. But you've got to fix the holes.

Chris Rainey 13:07

Once you get to that position and more. So where you are where you do have the capacity, how do you prioritise your time, personally, on how you invest in each of those areas.

Kelly 13:19

I mean, I think at CrunchBase, we do it very uniquely, I do have a staff that allows me to play in strategic spaces, but I'm also very insistent upon growing my team to develop their own competencies and skills. So while at CrunchBase, we have departments within the function, we have a CSR function, we have an employee experience function, we have a recruiting talent acquisition function and people ops function. We also have what we call inside the house, the people project pool. So when we say that everyone can swim in the pool, so every quarter we build projects and their HR functional projects, and they are all led by a specific person and that person is the strategist, that person is the person in charge, we call it the SPOA the single point of accountability. And they lead the project but anyone can swim in the pool. So employees within the function can choose to swim in the pool in any project of development that they choose. And that allows for one me to not necessarily need to be like in the nitty gritty of every project because I've got spose we've got teams, but it also grows their muscle towards different functional and different areas of the function. So for instance, I have one of our senior recruiters right now working on a fair Labour Standards Act project. And that's completely outside of their scope of experience, but they're they're helping with that project right now. And that's all intended to grow the team and still allow me the space to focus on more of the strategy while not having to worry about the tactics as much.

Chris Rainey 15:05

I love that, right? Because I get to, you're also creating an agile HR organisation

where you're working on different projects together, I'm sure it's creating a lot of motivation in the team as well, because it's quite exciting, they're being challenged is actually exciting and motivating, as well. And having the opportunity to do that, in many organisations, they just don't, right, you kind of that's your work, you stay in this lane.

That's what you do. So and also, I'm sure like the collaboration, innovation, diversity of thought and perspectives for the different members that are working together that wouldn't normally also was great.

Kelly 15:42

100% And we're, you know, I some of this is built into the intentionality of us being remote, right? So making sure that we're connecting as a team, and we don't have those like very firm silos. Yeah. We've even started to explore the people or expand the people project pool into other functional leaders. So our other functional team members, like for instance, one of our, our head of branding is on one of our projects this quarter, specifically, because we want to like bring in people into the fold. And you know, I stand by the philosophy of anyone can swim in the pool.

Chris Rainey 16:16

Yeah. How do you think it's evolved? When you think about the HR paradox? Like is, how do you see this evolving? As you know, we've seen many different models, systemic HR, we've got all sorts of different models kind of coming out now. And various organisations are pivoting into different models, how do you see this evolving? Because this looks very different from when I first started 20 years ago, to our to where we are now,

Kelly 16:40

I do believe that the function will become more respected. And as a result, there will be more staffing associated with it. But HR professionals are going to have to one rise to the occasion of doing the strategic work and showing the value in that. But also be willing to kind of step up and say, Hey, we need more if you expect that, right. There shouldn't be a there shouldn't be a blanket expectation that you get both with no staffing. But I would anticipate based on what I'm seeing in society with the absolute desire to care for people to care for mental health to care for that many different elements that people bring to the table. You need humans in order to do that. My biggest fear, quite frankly, is they'll try to automate a good bit of that. And I think that that's pretty dangerous. That

Chris Rainey 17:32

literally was my next question. Because a lot of people are trying to automate that and to save costs to do exactly what you just said, What are your thoughts on that? Because that's something that I'm concerned about also, as well, as soon as I see it play out?

Kelly 17:46

Yeah, I'm worried about it. And I think what will end up happening is organisations will over index on the use of automation, and then end up pulling back when they realise the repercussions are significant. I spoke to someone recently about this, and the story I always use, and I hate to be so morbid, but when you I had an employee once come into my office and need an exception to a rule because their child had passed. And they needed an exception to the vacation rule, their vacation rule that was on paper. And it was without a question that we gave them this exception. I worry about the day where in order to get the policy, they type into a chat bot, they're given a certain number of days, and they're not able to feel like they can speak to a human eye. Interestingly enough, 20 years ago, I worked for an organisation that is not on my LinkedIn profile. So you'll have to do some super sleuthing if you're interested. But I worked for an organisation that had outsourced the majority of their HR function to a call centre in Costa Rica. And I started I lasted exactly six weeks in that role before I resigned, because employees would walk in with questions and they would give them a phone number. Now that wasn't a machine there was a human, but they will give them a phone number. And I thought that was the most horrific thing I had ever seen. And I left and I left very, very quickly. It's a very well known international organisation, but you're taking the human out of HR and goodness gracious for those for that core set of years that you're in the workforce. That sounds like a terrible experience. Yeah.

Chris Rainey 19:38

Yeah, it's worrying right? Because with AI and with chat bots is there's no context whatsoever. There's definitely no empathy there as well. And you're right it's just binary. Right is no human whatsoever. involved in that is scary, especially with like you said when people are going through some of the most toughest times in their lives and a chat Post says, Hey, no, I'll policies no on this. It's crazy. It's crazy to think of that. Right? That that would that would happen. I

Kelly 20:07

also think about it in terms of just you know, some of the simplest things that can be automated are some of your opportunities to connect with the human. So one of the examples I've always used is, you know, we have HR self service on HR systems, right? So you can go in and change your address. And I always say, I was like, oh, I want them to come to HR if they have an address change. And everyone's always looked at me, like I had 14 heads or like, why that is tactical, they can go in and do it themselves. I was like, you want to know why they moved? You want to know why that person moved. And the reason you want to know why they moved is because you either want to celebrate with them, yeah, you're gonna understand that they're going through a horrific divorce, or you're going to understand that their house burns down, right, like you're gonna understand something about the human. And I fundamentally come from a place where I care about the human and I want a team that cares about the human and an organisation, quite frankly, that makes space for that. So how

Chris Rainey 21:09

have you managed to achieve that whilst being because you are how remote? Are you? Like, is it what is the current? Chairperson? 100%. Right. Yeah, she

was make sure I didn't say that, before you get it wrong. So okay, how have you managed to maintain that stickiness and sort of culture and the human centred approach whilst being 100%? Remote?

Kelly 21:33

Yeah, it is, I'm going to use just like such a buzzword. It's very intentional to very intentional approach, but we have an employee experience team. So we have an entire team that is dedicated to building programming, and connection with employees. We're small right now. But I would never advocate for scaling to a place where HR didn't also scale to maintain that culture. We do a lot of very unique things at crunch base from weekly town halls with all of our employees, to what my team calls pop shops, which is people operation shops, where they meet with leaders and they meet with team members. We have a very robust ERG programme, we have a very robust programme, we have numerous different like ad hoc programmes within the organisation to build connection from parents at CrunchBase, to tech base to all sorts, I mean, there's all sorts of things, there's a book club, there's lots of different programming to build that connection. very intentionally, because we are remote. And it seems to work, I would I argue that it's perfect, no, and it will never be perfect, because you're always chasing better, I'm always chasing better. So I will never argue anything's perfect. But there's a lot of work that goes into it, for sure.

Chris Rainey 22:56

And to your point earlier, those are the kind of things that you can use technology to help whether it's nudging a manager to have a one to one, or whatever. It's like saying, Hey, you probably shouldn't email that employee because it's like, 2am, one hour at a time, like, those are the things we can use technology. But you're right, like, if you're fully remote, you have to be intentional about everything. Because it ain't because it's not just gonna happen by us, you know, we're gonna Bobby Lee, you're literally not gonna bump into each other at a water cooler. So you need to make sure those moments happen, especially I think, for the new hires that are just coming on board as well, because you don't have that sort of experience of coming into a place feeling the culture, building a net and building a network mentor ship, for example, is a big one sort of that knowledge transfer, you also have to be intentional about how that happens. And I love the way by the way you're doing that of your own team. I think that cross pollination and knowledge transfer amongst your team because I was gonna ask you earlier, how are you developing a team and you're ready to set it as as, as a great way of doing that. And it's gonna allow you to be more agile, but also build out the different skills exist in your own team as well, right? By doing

Kelly 24:06

Yeah, I mean, that's the goal, right? The goal is to have everyone be able to do everything. Because you're nimble, and you can flex and quite frankly, it shows people where they want to play, right. I've had amazing mentors and leaders in my career who have really given me remarkable opportunities. One specific leader, who I would think of gave me the opportunity to lead organisational development for a 14,000 person, fork. I mean, a subset of the 14,000 person org and I remember very quickly realising not for me not interested. And you know, I transitioned out of that role within a couple of years just because I had those opportunities. So I'm just trying to give my team as many opportunities as possible to grow and develop. I've had members that have worked for me that have very quickly moved on to law school because they realised law was where they wanted to be and I encourage I encourage that growth, you only have one live. It's

Chris Rainey 25:04

such an important thing whenever, when younger family members or people ask me, Chris, what should I do? Like one of my pieces of advice is on my taste as many things as possible. Because you may think that's the thing you really want to do. And many of us do that. And we're like, oh, we're really not enjoying this. And I'm pivot. So I, I was very lucky, I didn't intend to do it as a young adult, as a teenager, I had loads of different jobs. So I experienced so many different things. And I realised what I do like what I don't like, and I was like, okay, cool. Like it didn't see it as a waste of time, or that I didn't enjoy it. But you always learn something, or take something away from it. You mentioned lawyers, like I actually know many lawyers that have become CHR OHS. Yeah. Which I would never expect. Personally, I would never expect that to be the case, as well. But I'm always fascinated when I speak to leaders. As I said, you know, the vast majority didn't intend on being in this space. Do you think one thing I was wanting to ask you? Do you think that we're preparing adequately to HR leaders for the future, because I feel like what I see in terms of like the education, the sort of the mark, even sort of HR masters stuff, I see, it seems still seems like 10 years out of date, like from the conversations I'm having with you, versus the material I'm reading and what they're being taught. I'm like, kind of, again, being set up for failure, in many ways. So what are your thoughts? Hunter?

Kelly 26:27

I have lots of thoughts on this, because I teach strategic HR and see if its benefits, and I'm getting my PhD. So I I think you're right, and I think every programme is different. So I will say that I've reviewed content in the past that is outdated. I took a PhD level HR course, and was so disappointed. So disappointed. I mean, they you buy these $100 textbooks or multi $100 textbooks only for the laws to be outdated. Within 25 seconds of reading the textbook or highlighting the laws are outdated. Or information is outdated. You know, when I teach my students I'm teaching to present day HR terms, I'm teaching to present day HR themes. I was grading papers this morning, and I was talking about some of the interesting things that are happening with diversity and inclusion in the US, and different and you know, you better bet that my students are getting those articles to read and they're reading present day things. You know, I would never, I would never knock academics because I hope to be one one day, but I will tell you this, that I think the credibility that you get from being in the function is vast. So I think we should have more practitioners teaching. We should have more people who have been in the space who have played in the space as the professors of the programmes. Academic research is vast and wonderful. And I love digging into it. And I think that plays a part. But I also think that practitioners in the function, add value I was taught, I was taught staffing and recruiting and my Penn State Masters by someone who had never hired a person in their life.

Chris Rainey 28:22

That's normally the case. Right? In all education, most of education. Yeah. And that's just a shame. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I always found that really hard when the idea of going to university to learn business studies, and the person who's teaching has never started a business, I remember having that conversation be like, I can't pay to do this. Or learn from this individual who's never actually built a company before. Something about that just didn't sit right with me. And obviously, I didn't go down that route, not to say they're not good. Again, to your point, not to say it's not valuable, as well. And that's the whole entire philosophy around, it's literally in our name. Our company is called HR leaders. So all of our workshops, all of our summits or events, they're built by people like you to live and breathe it are in the trenches. And to understand it, yes, we still bring in different experts and educators into the conversation as well. But when you hear one of our events, or one of our workshops is from someone giving you actionable advice, of how they did it, the highs, the lows, the challenges, personally, themselves, how they, you know, to challenge professionally, the organisation, and now we're trying to bring into research and insights on top of that, and I think that's really rare, I guess, exciting. It is very exciting. Yeah, we were talking about remote work. And you said something really interesting around remote work about the lack of power that CEOs and board feels as one of the catalysts of why we're seeing the change could you could elaborate a little bit more on that I thought was really interesting. Yeah, I

Kelly 29:54

have a philosophy on this. I don't know if it's right. But I have a philosophy on this that I believe that, oftentimes what use and I think the data would would show it. Oftentimes what you see is CEOs and leaders who are fighting against not having power and control within their workforce. So when you are uncomfortable in a situation, I always use my children as an example, when my four year old is scared when she's lacking power, when she's lacking control, she goes to what is normal, she goes to what is natural, and she runs for what is comfortable, and that's generally me. So I'm pretty happy with it. Right? So but if she's uncomfortable, she runs to me, and I don't think and they run to what's normal. And what's familiar, and I think CEOs and leaders are, are very similar in that regard. I think when I think oftentimes, what you'll find and what you have found is a lot of leaders feel pushed up against a wall with quarterly numbers, not showing what they're supposed to show. And all of a sudden, you see a really strong push to like return to office. I think one of the recent, like UPS, for instance, just called everyone back into the office five days a week. Well, what you're not seeing under that tagline is they just reported some pretty poor earnings. Right. So I think what you see is poor earnings, followed by knee jerk, or lack of power, lack of control, followed by knee jerk reactions. And I think that that's true in a lot of contexts, not simply just remote work. But I do think what you'll see often times is just people feeling pushed up against a wall and running to what's familiar. And

Chris Rainey 31:48

my next question was, what's going to be the impact of that you already mentioned one, already.

Kelly 31:56

Yeah, the the pendulum as it relates to remote work is going to continue to swing back and forth, right. So it's going to continue to swing back and forth, you're going to end up somewhere in the middle, like my guess is, but at the end of the day, employers will still need to recruit talent, and they will still need to recruit good talent. And they will need to retain that talent. And when employees and mass are screaming about what their desires, our employers will have to eventually allow that to be the reality. So while I see the pendulum shifting back and forth, it will settle. And I do think you'll see a mixture, I never foresee us going back to like pre 2020 days, at least for CSR having some sort of balance between remote in person and hybrid. And I think different people have different needs. I always use the analogy of like, when my husband and I are just my husband and I sitting in my office or in my house, I'm probably going to want to be in an office. But right now, this is the flexibility that is remarkable for me.

Chris Rainey 33:07

Yeah. And I think people also now are not willing to compromise like they would in the past. Like I was speaking to a fortune 10 CFO, literally this week, who's they closed down an office and they had to relocate, he would have had to relocate to New York. And he was like, I'm just not willing to do that. Like I've built a certain lifestyle with my family. And I'm enjoying it. It's working really well. And I'm just not willing to compromise now and travel into New York every day and spend two hours, four hours a day, two hours there two hours back, commuting. When I had the last two years of a hybrid role that enjoying his family life, great relationship, his wife, his kids, and it's like, Chris, I'm just not doing that anymore. And I think a lot of people woke up during COVID. And it was like, yeah, like, Why? Why am I doing this anymore?

Kelly 34:00

Is when you can't point to any sort of negative effect. Right. So I think that there's plenty of research out there that shows that you're more productive. There's plenty of research out there. And it shows that you're happier that you're more engaged. Where I think a lot of employers fell apart is quite frankly, assuming that they could behave the same way remotely. Yeah, and be unwilling to iterate on what works I would not say that CrunchBase is perfect in this but I think we do it better than most and the reality is it starts with our CEO who is just this like remarkable human being who just sees the world who just sees the world in such a unique way and he's certainly a leader to me to emulate at this

Chris Rainey 34:49

time. Yeah. Before they go into ask you been in in this career for a long time. I'm not gonna say the number you're gonna get trouble again. What do you wish you would have known that, you know, now as a HR leader, what do you wish you would have really have known coming into this that you know now? Yeah,

Kelly 35:08

that you have to understand the business. And that's probably something you hear quite often, but I walked are thinking it was the HR function and I was to do the HR tasks. You can't be strategic, you can't even really be a partner to the business unless you understand what's happening within the business. And I didn't learn that. I didn't learn that until maybe five or six or seven years in it to my career where I would sit in a meeting every single week, a leadership meeting, and every single week, they would refer to a bunch of numbers. And then they would hand me a list and they say, based on the numbers this week, go lay off five people. And I would have to walk into a room and I would have to tell five people that they no longer had jobs. And I had to deal with the aftermath of what that felt like and emotionally and like all the things, it was terrible. And it was absolutely terrible. And they would do this week after week after week. And I remember finally just being like, what are these numbers saying, and let's figure out a way to not have to have the same conversation every week, because like, you're killing me, you're killing them. And it was like a merry go round. Because it was like we lay them off. We call them back. We lay them off. We call them it was terrible, terrible way to treat people. It was terrible. And, you know, once I got like more involved and more involved in the nitty gritty, I started creating cross training programmes and started creating different avenues to keep employees employed. And we stopped having layoffs, like it was like a moment in time where we stopped laying people off. And it was for the first time where I was like, I've got to understand what's happening, I've got to understand why the production line isn't running, I've got to understand why the suppliers aren't delivering. Because if I don't understand that I'm not going to be able to influence the things that influence the people. So that was I wish I had learned that earlier. I wish I always took the time to pay attention to it even now. Because again, we're in a paradox, right. But yeah, that would that would be like the tip for any rising HR professional. Yeah.

Chris Rainey 37:16

Hopefully they don't have to learn the hard way. Like you. Even though sometimes that is the best way, honestly. Because it really is not something you will never I could see even the motion of you just saying it. Have you thinking back to that time, right? It stays with you, doesn't it? Yeah.

Kelly 37:33

More people in my career than I've hired and I have hired a lot of people. So telling people that they no longer have a job is the absolute worst part of HR. But not but sitting back and just taking taking the edict as go do the task is way worse than at least trying to influence why the decisions are being made and making them in the best interests of the employer. Yeah,

Chris Rainey 38:01

at least I suppose you're gonna look in the mirror and go at that point, I did everything I could to make sure that this wasn't the case, right? Because you really did understand the business we did try and work as much as possible to make sure that all those avenues were looked into. Whereas before you didn't write, you're just taking a piece of paper telling you message being being a messenger I've locked sometimes, like HR functions are just messengers in some in organisations, as opposed to as a strategic adviser.

Kelly 38:30

And not being able to provide alternatives and not being able to I part time work or extended leaves or different, you know, HR has a lot of tools in their toolkit and being able to understand the business well enough to know when to pull. Yeah.

Chris Rainey 38:45

Last question. Where can firstly, where can people check out the company? website? And then where can people connect with you? If they want to reach out and say hi to you? Yeah,

Kelly 38:53

so LinkedIn is obviously the best place to find me. I would imagine this will have show notes. And I would imagine you're always happy to connect with HR leaders or anyone, quite frankly. And then CrunchBase is crunchbase.com. You can find CrunchBase. Everywhere. We are. We're everywhere. And that's, that's amazing. So please, you know, the platform is remarkable. Yeah,

Chris Rainey 39:20

amazing. And yes, everyone listening and all the links are in the show notes. If you want to connect to learn more about the about the organisation, but listen, I really appreciate you taking the time I started to show, you know, seven years ago to really kind of try and have a voice on the profession, and it wouldn't be possible for you like you. So I really appreciate you giving back to the community. And I wish you all the best and so when next week. Thank you.

Kelly 39:44

Thank you so much.