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May 15, 2024 12 mins

In this HRchat episode, we consider the qualities that separate the best HR pros from the pack and why HR leaders should seek out mentors from outside the HR profession. We also discuss ways AI is impacting the HR function.

The guest today is David Hanrahan, Chief People Officer at Flare. David's experience is a goldmine of practical knowledge, having served as HR Manager at Universal Pictures, then rocketed through his career holding titles like Director of Human Resources at Electronic Arts (EA) and Twitter, VP of People at Zendesk, VP of People & Places at Niantic, Inc., and Chief Human Resources Officer at Eventbrite.

Questions for David include: 

  • You've had a varied career. Can you point to some leaders/mentors who have made a positive impact along the way?
  • Why do you believe HR leaders should seek out mentors from outside HR?
  • What are some qualities that separate the best HR/People leaders from the rest?
  • How can HR leaders help create a culture based on high performance?
  • Tell us about some of the use cases that you, Q Hamirani, and Stephen Huerta discussed at the recent SXSW HR & AI Summit.

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's
most downloaded and sharedpodcasts designed for HR pros,
talent execs, tech enthusiastsand business leaders.
For hundreds more episodes andwhat's new in the world of work,
subscribe to the show, followus on social media and visit
hrgazettecom and visit.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
HRGazettecom.
Welcome to another episode ofthe HR Chat Show.
Hello, this is your host today,bill Bannam, and in this
episode we're going to considerthe qualities that separate the
best HR pros from the pack andwhy HR leaders should seek
mentors from outside of the HRprofession.
We also consider ways that AIis impacting the HR function.

(00:47):
My guest today is DavidHanrahan, chief People Officer
over at Flare.
David's experience is agoldmine of practical knowledge,
having served as HR Manager atUniversal Pictures and then
moving on to roles such asDirector of HR at Electronic
Arts and Twitter, vp of Peopleat Zendesk, vp of People and

(01:10):
Places at Niantic and ChiefHuman Resource Officer over at
Eventbrite.
I hope you enjoy thisconversation that I had with
David.
David, it's my pleasure towelcome you to the HR Chat Show
today.
Thank you very much for joiningme.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
So I'll be on my reintroduction.
Just a moment ago, why don'tyou take a minute or two and
tell our listeners all aboutyourself?

Speaker 3 (01:35):
Great.
Well, yeah, I'm David Hanrahan.
I'm a Chief People Officer at astartup called Flare.
It's a legal tech startup about260 employees, and this is my
career.
I've been leading peoplefunctions mainly in growth stage
tech companies.
I've been in this function forabout 20 years and really in
tech companies for the past 15of those.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
Perfect, and what is the best thing about your job?

Speaker 3 (01:59):
Gosh, the best thing about my job.
I just love the idea of thisvery tricky problem around
unlocking organizationalpotential.
So if we hire the right people,presumably, and then we bring
them in, that's 70% of thecompany's operating expenses.
Are we leveraging them theright way?

(02:19):
Are we unlocking theirpotential?
Are they flourishing?
Have we kind of pulled all theright levers to create a
high-performing company throughour talent?
And I think that's a challengethat we're never solving, but
you can get better at it and itlights me up.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
You've had a successful and varied career,
david.
Can you point to some leaders,maybe some mentors, who've made
a positive impact along the way?

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Yeah, I was just thinking about this the other
day.
I love this question becauseit's very timely for me.
Well, I was hired by GlennSteinberg at Electronic Arts and
I feel like that was a bigjuncture in my career where
things started.
I was just really fortunate tobe around the right people at
the right time.
There at that company, we hadthese tremendous leaders in the

(03:04):
HR function.
And there at that company, wehad these tremendous leaders in

(03:27):
the HR function Gabriel Toledano, jeff Ryan, who's now at McAfee
, steve Cadigan, who becameLinkedIn's first chief people
officer, colleen McCreary, whohad a really long and storied
career and work with Janet VanHise, who went on to become
Cloudflare's chief peopleofficer, and Brandy Contreras,
and just some amazing,phenomenal talent.
And then my last person I wouldsay who's been an incredible
mentor and sort of an unlock forme in my career, where I had
these great things happenbecause of this person, was Anne
Ramondi, who's now, I think, iskind of the COO at Asana, and
so, yeah, I've been reallyfortunate.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
Okay, thank you very much, so it's part of my
homework.
Ahead of today, I was listeningto some other interviews that
you've done recently.
In one of them, you say thatyou believe that HR leaders,
when they can, should seek outmentors from outside of HR.
Why do you believe that?

Speaker 3 (04:17):
own head around the work and sometimes we as HR
leaders sometimes we feel alone,Sometimes we feel sometimes we
have a little bit of a victimmentality of like no one gets us
, no one respects us, and well,why is that?
What is the view from outsideof HR?
We are a service organization.
We serve the organization, weserve leaders, we serve the rest
of the staff.
It's different than being anengineering leader who's
building products.
We want to make sure all thosefunctions unlock their potential

(04:37):
.
So are we doing a good job ofthat?
Are we providing the rightservice?
So I think a really good chiefpeople officer in this era right
now should think like a COO ora CFO or even the CEO be a
business leader first to tie theimpacts of people, to tie our
people, initiatives and ourstrategy on all things people
and talent to the business tomake sure it's actually having
the right impact.
And so you can't really getthat if you're just in your own

(05:00):
HR bubble.
You've got to get that insightaround the people that you serve
from outside the HR function.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
You are a pretty successful, super cool chief
people officer.
Of course, I'd love to get yourfeelings.
What are some qualities thatseparate the best HR or people
leaders from the rest?

Speaker 3 (05:20):
Well, aside from you know kind of the normal things,
like you know, intensely strongwork ethic and being, you know,
collaborative, like we would sayof any executive, I think a
really good Chief People officer, building on that last thing I
just mentioned, which is being abusiness leader first and
foremost, is someone who can beintensely analytical around the

(05:42):
work that we're doing.
Is it having the right impact?
Did we investigate it?
Did we do a retrospective onthis work?
Are we getting better as anorganization?
Are we improving theorganization through these
initiatives?
I think that's someone whoshould build credibility with an
analysis that they can performon the work that they're doing
and tie it to the analysis ofthe business, to be able to

(06:05):
speak to a P&L and understandwhat that means and then be able
to quantify the impact of workthat we're doing, quantify the
impact of the sales hiringmachine, quantify the impact of
work that we're doing, quantifythe impact of the sales hiring
machine, quantify the impact ofleadership development work that
we're doing.
I think a lot of really goodpeople leaders don't do that.
They're still good, but theydon't do that and maybe they

(06:25):
rest a little bit too much ontheir personal brand or they
rest a little bit too much onwhat other companies are doing,
and that's the best practice weshould do it to.
I think you should be intenselyanalytical and be able to speak
to the P&L.

Speaker 4 (06:40):
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(07:01):
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Speaker 2 (07:21):
HRco.
So a bit of a follow-up to that, then, is how can HR leaders
help create a culture based onhigh performance?
It's part of your answer there.
It all comes from the data.

Speaker 3 (07:26):
It comes from the data.
And here's what I'd say.
Unfortunately, one of theflagstones of any people
function performance management,individual performance reviews.
Unfortunately, there's reallyno tie there to creating a high
performance culture as a companyin a measurable way, meaning,

(07:46):
hey, we're doing theseperformance reviews every
quarter, you know, is it doinganything to the performance of
the company?
You know, is it doing anythingto the performance of the
company?
I think performance reviews atthe individual level so meaning
like I have to sit down with myboss once a quarter, you know
there's a rating there orthere's no rating, or whatever
your philosophy is on it there'sindividual feedback
conversations.
They need to happen.
Performance management isgovernance to ensure those
conversations happen, and we canmeasure those in terms of

(08:09):
clarity at the individual level.
Are you more clear on what'sexpected of you?
Are you more clear on where youstand?
You know, can we use that tomake sure we're rewarding the
right people and promoting theright people?
Yes, there's value there, butyou know is are we a stronger
sales team now because of this?
Are we a stronger engineeringteam?
And so I think HR leaders, inaddressing that question, need

(08:31):
to think about it at the teamlevel.
So you know simply and I'llstop here is team performance
reviews and what is theleadership team's perspective in
a multi-directional format ofeach other's functions and
because we work together youknow engineering works with
sales, marketing works with thesupply team, you know finance

(08:52):
and the HR team work together weshould have a view on
functional performance as aleadership team and I think a
lot of HR leaders don't go thereand I think it's a big
opportunity for us.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Okay, so again a bit of a continuation.
You recently spoke at an HR andAI summit with Q Hamriani and
Stephen Horta, and there youspoke about talent development
and you talked about a worldwhere HR uses AI to better
understand the skills and themakeup of organizations.

(09:25):
You, of course, spoke about howAI can impact better data
decisions.
Can you tell us a bit moreabout that?

Speaker 3 (09:32):
Yeah, well, gosh, I think right now it's a hot topic
.
If you were to look at where AIis unfolding in the HR tech
stack right now, the vastmajority is recruiting.
Dane Van Rossum published someresearch to show like, in terms
of traffic and popularity, wherethe top 40 was popular AI HR

(09:56):
tools right now and recruitingis the biggest one Like much
smaller percentage of that pieis talent development.
And when you look at like, whatdoes talent development mean?
It's skills, skills thatorganization needs.
So if I was to ask myleadership team, if I was to ask
the executive team, what's themost important thing for the
business to accomplish in thenext two years for us to be
successful, they could give methree.

(10:17):
You know, hey, here's the threebiggest objectives.
What skills do we need in anorganization that we're
currently lacking?
What skills do we need toaccomplish those?
What skills do we need toaccomplish those?
And then we might have a map ofsome skills we might have, like
data literacy.
We might have behavioral thingslike cross-functional
collaboration.
Like we are, we as anorganization are not
cross-functionally collaboratingnearly as much as we can in
order to succeed Talentdevelopment in an AI sense.

(10:40):
The technology is starting toemerge that can actually measure
the skills at a functional andbehavioral level in your
organization and also show youthe gaps.
Which is fascinating to me,because this is all this is like
a Holy grail for people who areL&D leaders.
Um, and and previously it'seither like that analysis is too
much we we'd have to be one ofthe biggest companies in the
world to be able to even do thatanalysis, and it's because of
manual or we rely on anecdotes.

(11:02):
Um, now with um, with companiesum, you know that are in that
list from Dame starting to beable to be able to actually
analyze skill level of yourorganization, which is a
goldmine for us in terms ofbeing able to impact the
company's performance, be ableto show hey, we have a machine
learning deficit or we have abig cross-functional
collaboration deficit betweenthese two teams.

(11:23):
And here's what we're going todo the levers to pull to get
there, which is more aboutpersonalized learning.

Speaker 4 (11:32):
Fidelio Inc is a consulting firm specializing in
improving human performance andwe're proud to support the HR
Chat Podcast.
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Our team offers an HR websoftware to manage systems,
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(11:53):
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Speaker 2 (11:57):
Awesome.
You're not going to believethis, but we are already coming
towards the end of thisparticular conversation.
The HR chat episodes are notthat long Before we wrap up,
though.
How can folks connect with andlearn more about you?

Speaker 3 (12:10):
Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn .
Feel free to send me aconnection request.
That's where I share all mythoughts.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
Excellent.
Well, that just leaves me tosay for today, David, thank you
very much for being my guest.

Speaker 3 (12:19):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
And listeners as always.
Until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Thanks for listening to the HR Chat chat show.
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