HR Leadership with David Hanrahan

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.

Transcript

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Speaker 1 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show , one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros , talent execs , tech enthusiasts and business leaders . For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work , subscribe to the show , follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom and visit .

Speaker 2 0:22

HRGazettecom . Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show . Hello , this is your host today , bill Bannam , and in this episode we're going to consider the qualities that separate the best HR pros from the pack and why HR leaders should seek mentors from outside of the HR profession . We also consider ways that AI is impacting the HR function . My guest today is David Hanrahan , chief People Officer over at Flare . David's experience is a goldmine of practical knowledge , having served as HR Manager at Universal Pictures and then moving on to roles such as Director of HR at Electronic Arts and Twitter , vp of People at Zendesk , vp of People and Places at Niantic and Chief Human Resource Officer over at Eventbrite . I hope you enjoy this conversation that I had with David . David , it's my pleasure to welcome you to the HR Chat Show today . Thank you very much for joining me .

Speaker 3 1:26

Thank you for having me .

Speaker 2 1:28

So I'll be on my reintroduction . Just a moment ago , why don't you take a minute or two and tell our listeners all about yourself ?

Speaker 3 1:35

Great . Well , yeah , I'm David Hanrahan . I'm a Chief People Officer at a startup called Flare . It's a legal tech startup about 260 employees , and this is my career . I've been leading people functions mainly in growth stage tech companies . I've been in this function for about 20 years and really in tech companies for the past 15 of those .

Speaker 2 1:56

Perfect , and what is the best thing about your job ?

Speaker 3 1:59

Gosh , the best thing about my job . I just love the idea of this very tricky problem around unlocking organizational potential . So if we hire the right people , presumably , and then we bring them in , that's 70% of the company's operating expenses . Are we leveraging them the right way ? Are we unlocking their potential ? Are they flourishing ? Have we kind of pulled all the right levers to create a high-performing company through our talent ? And I think that's a challenge that we're never solving , but you can get better at it and it lights me up .

Speaker 2 2:34

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 2:43

Yeah , I was just thinking about this the other day . I love this question because it's very timely for me . Well , I was hired by Glenn Steinberg at Electronic Arts and I feel like that was a big juncture in my career where things started . I was just really fortunate to be around the right people at the right time . There at that company , we had these tremendous leaders in the HR function . And there at that company , we had these tremendous leaders in the HR function Gabriel Toledano , jeff Ryan , who's now at McAfee , steve Cadigan , who became LinkedIn's first chief people officer , colleen McCreary , who had a really long and storied career and work with Janet Van Hise , who went on to become Cloudflare's chief people officer , and Brandy Contreras , and just some amazing , phenomenal talent . And then my last person I would say who's been an incredible mentor and sort of an unlock for me in my career , where I had these great things happen because of this person , was Anne Ramondi , who's now , I think , is kind of the COO at Asana , and so , yeah , I've been really fortunate .

Speaker 2 3:49

Okay , thank you very much , so it's part of my homework . Ahead of today , I was listening to some other interviews that you've done recently . In one of them , you say that you believe that HR leaders , when they can , should seek out mentors from outside of HR . Why do you believe that ?

Speaker 3 4:17

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 victim mentality of like no one gets us , no one respects us , and well , why is that ? What is the view from outside of HR ? We are a service organization . We serve the organization , we serve leaders , we serve the rest of the staff . It's different than being an engineering leader who's building products . We want to make sure all those functions unlock their potential . So are we doing a good job of that ? Are we providing the right service ?

Speaker 3 4:41

So I think a really good chief people officer in this era right now should think like a COO or a CFO or even the CEO be a business leader first to tie the impacts of people , to tie our people , initiatives and our strategy on all things people and talent to the business to make sure it's actually having the right impact . And so you can't really get that if you're just in your own HR bubble . You've got to get that insight around the people that you serve from outside the HR function .

Speaker 2 5:06

You are a pretty successful , super cool chief people officer . Of course , I'd love to get your feelings . What are some qualities that separate the best HR or people leaders from the rest ?

Speaker 3 5:20

Well , aside from you know kind of the normal things , like you know , intensely strong work ethic and being , you know , collaborative , like we would say of any executive , I think a really good Chief People officer , building on that last thing I just mentioned , which is being a business leader first and foremost , is someone who can be intensely analytical around the work that we're doing . Is it having the right impact ? Did we investigate it ? Did we do a retrospective on this work ? Are we getting better as an organization ? Are we improving the organization through these initiatives ?

Speaker 3 5:53

I think that's someone who should build credibility with an analysis that they can perform on the work that they're doing and tie it to the analysis of the business , to be able to speak to a P&L and understand what that means and then be able to quantify the impact of work that we're doing , quantify the impact of the sales hiring machine , quantify the impact of work that we're doing , quantify the impact of the sales hiring machine , quantify the impact of leadership development work that we're doing . I think a lot of really good people leaders don't do that . They're still good , but they don't do that and maybe they rest a little bit too much on their personal brand or they rest a little bit too much on what other companies are doing , and that's the best practice we should do it to . I think you should be intensely analytical and be able to speak to the P&L .

Speaker 4 6:40

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Speaker 2 7:21

HRco . So a bit of a follow-up to that , then , is how can HR leaders help create a culture based on high performance ? It's part of your answer there . It all comes from the data .

Speaker 3 7:26

It comes from the data . And here's what I'd say . Unfortunately , one of the flagstones of any people function performance management , individual performance reviews . Unfortunately , there's really no tie there to creating a high performance culture as a company in a measurable way , meaning , hey , we're doing these performance reviews every quarter , you know , is it doing anything to the performance of the company ? You know , is it doing anything to the performance of the company ?

Speaker 3 7:53

I think performance reviews at the individual level so meaning like I have to sit down with my boss once a quarter , you know there's a rating there or there's no rating , or whatever your philosophy is on it there's individual feedback conversations .

Speaker 3 8:02

They need to happen . Performance management is governance to ensure those conversations happen , and we can measure those in terms of clarity at the individual level . Are you more clear on what's expected of you ? Are you more clear on where you stand ? You know , can we use that to make sure we're rewarding the right people and promoting the right people ? Yes , there's value there , but you know is are we a stronger sales team now because of this ? Are we a stronger engineering team ? And so I think HR leaders , in addressing that question , need to think about it at the team level . So you know simply and I'll stop here is team performance reviews and what is the leadership team's perspective in a multi-directional format of each other's functions and because we work together you know engineering works with sales , marketing works with the supply team , you know finance and the HR team work together we should have a view on functional performance as a leadership team and I think a lot of HR leaders don't go there and I think it's a big opportunity for us .

Speaker 2 9:04

Okay , so again a bit of a continuation . You recently spoke at an HR and AI summit with Q Hamriani and Stephen Horta , and there you spoke about talent development and you talked about a world where HR uses AI to better understand the skills and the makeup of organizations . You , of course , spoke about how AI can impact better data decisions . Can you tell us a bit more about that ?

Speaker 3 9:32

Yeah , well , gosh , I think right now it's a hot topic . If you were to look at where AI is unfolding in the HR tech stack right now , the vast majority is recruiting . Dane Van Rossum published some research to show like , in terms of traffic and popularity , where the top 40 was popular AI HR tools right now and recruiting is the biggest one Like much smaller percentage of that pie is talent development . And when you look at like , what does talent development mean ? It's skills , skills that organization needs . So if I was to ask my leadership team , if I was to ask the executive team , what's the most important thing for the business to accomplish in the next two years for us to be successful , they could give me three . You know , hey , here's the three biggest objectives .

Speaker 3 10:20

What skills do we need in an organization that we're currently lacking ? What skills do we need to accomplish those ? What skills do we need to accomplish those ? And then we might have a map of some skills we might have , like data literacy . We might have behavioral things like cross-functional collaboration . Like we are , we as an organization are not cross-functionally collaborating nearly as much as we can in order to succeed Talent development in an AI sense .

Speaker 3 10:40

The technology is starting to emerge that can actually measure the skills at a functional and behavioral level in your organization and also show you the gaps . Which is fascinating to me , because this is all this is like a Holy grail for people who are L&D leaders . Um , and and previously it's either like that analysis is too much we we'd have to be one of the biggest companies in the world to be able to even do that analysis , and it's because of manual or we rely on anecdotes . Um , now with um , with companies um , you know that are in that list from Dame starting to be able to be able to actually analyze skill level of your organization , which is a goldmine for us in terms of being able to impact the company's performance , be able to show hey , we have a machine learning deficit or we have a big cross-functional collaboration deficit between these two teams . And here's what we're going to do the levers to pull to get there , which is more about personalized learning .

Speaker 4 11:32

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Speaker 2 11:57

Awesome . You're not going to believe this , but we are already coming towards the end of this particular conversation . The HR chat episodes are not that long Before we wrap up , though . How can folks connect with and learn more about you ?

Speaker 3 12:10

Yeah , I'm on LinkedIn . Feel free to send me a connection request . That's where I share all my thoughts .

Speaker 2 12:16

Excellent . Well , that just leaves me to say 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 . If you enjoyed this episode , why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by hr gazette and remember for what's new in the ?