Tom Griffiths: This is Learning Works, a podcast presented by Hone. It's a series of in depth conversations with L&D experts, HR leaders, and executives on how they've built game changing learning and development strategies, unleashed business growth through talent development, and scaled their global L&D teams. Tune in for the wisdom and actionable insights, the best in the industry.

I'm Tom Griffiths, CEO of Hone. Welcome to Learning Works.

 Welcome to another episode of Learning Works. Today, I'm joined by Jeff Diana, a hypergrowth advisor, board member, former Chief People Officer, investor, and entrepreneur. Jeff is a seasoned HR leader with deep experience in talent management and organizational development. He's made his mark in a variety of industries, including tech, healthcare, and more, leading game changing people initiatives at SuccessFactors, Atlassian, Calendly, and more.

Jeff also serves as an advisor and board member for several hyper growth companies, including Hone. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us. 

Jeff Diana: I think I need to sign off now. I can't do any better than that intro. So 

Tom Griffiths: yeah, I think you can. We did a webinar with you recently and it broke our zoom chat.

It was so popular. So we wanted to get you back for more. 

Jeff Diana: Happy to do it. Look forward to the chat. 

Tom Griffiths: Absolutely. Well, I thought we could kick off with just a bit of history. Maybe you could start by telling us a bit about your journey in HR and organizational development and what drew you to the people space.

Jeff Diana: Yeah, it's funny. I was working my way toward being a university professor. Actually, I was going to be a professor of sociology. I was working on my PhD. I was down to everything but my dissertation. And I still remember the watershed moment for me. I actually was publishing an article with a professor of mine, which of course I naturally thought was, wonderfully enlightening and thought provoking.

It was the role of the entrepreneur in collective action problems, I believe was what it was called back in the day. Very fancy, right? But it still hit me when the professor called me in to say we, we were getting published in the journal and he just put the journal on his shelf and went right back to grading papers.

And it was this moment for me of wow, if I really want to impact at scale and have more of my hands in the mix, I've got to get out of academia, and I've got to get inside the institutions where work happens. And I happen to be taking most of all of my graduate courses in the International Business School at the University of South Carolina.

And they had an HR program run by an ex head of HR from AlliedSignal, a very well known factory for HR execs. And so it just all fell together to me of, if I'm going to really have the level of influence I want and maybe not do it through others, but be more directly a part of it, I've got to make a jump.

So that moved me into the people space. I still think when I'm fully done with HR stuff, Tom, I will teach, or at least maybe guest lecture at somebody's class or two cause I really enjoyed what that was, but that moved me into the people space. And I've really never looked back from there. I started at Bell South, an old telco company getting reinvented by technology, broadband, and all these other things were coming up that were changing that industry.

Started in there as a recruiter. My first job was filling third shift. So the midnight shift, Russian speaking temporary operators in Miami, Florida call centers. That was, how's that for an easy rec? Wow. That's quite specific. It's quite specific, but was a great, Start for me of a really storied company and an industry that was going through a lot of change.

And then I really had my world turned upside down in a good way. When I joined GE and I was there during Jack Welch's time and then the transition to Jeff Immelt and really got to see HR at a scale and at a true nexus with the CEO of value that I had just never really understood was possible. And it set a lot of my perspective on business orientation and Six Sigma process orientation, and just how impactful the people function can be when it has the right opportunity for voice, which obviously it's up for us to create. But at GE, it had been created. It was part of the history of that company. And that sort of took me on the journey. You've seen me go from there. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, that's amazing. It's a great backstory. And I think it's so inspiring to see how you've been able to take some of those well established principles from well established companies and bring them to startups that are coming of age or going through a hyper growth phase and help them see around corners or accelerate their thinking and how they think about their people, functional, organizational development. And so on that point of moving from academia to industry and having greater impact and leverage, it's great to see you now doing that, not just in one role, but as an advisor across a number of companies that's great.

Jeff Diana: Well, it's been great. I think one of the things I learned from GE was as much as it had this wonderful system, the idea that you lift and drop a set of approaches to another company will never work. Right. And I had done at the time I was at GE it was 300, 000 plus folks. And like the pinnacle of American industry, amazing to see it's fall and then rebirth now into three different companies.

But what I found personally was I love doing this work in the growth curve because it's so challenging. You have to compete with scaled companies. You're not so, so small that you don't have any budget or you're really focused on much more transactional stuff. But you don't have all the tools and systems in place.

So it's really a great place to really have impact with our craft. And that's what drew me to the advisory work was all these companies in early stages, where you've got these amazing leaders like yourself and people that have got great ideas that are trying to figure out just how do I get them to scale and sustainably perform at scale.

Was a nice blend between having seen scale and then loving doing my work during the growth curve. And it's kept me humble and somewhat on the cutting edge of what's going on and really kept me reinvigorated than just doing a singular job inside an organization. I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

Tom Griffiths: That's great. Yeah. And it's so helpful to have folks that have seen the whole journey and what scale can look like to tell you which pieces to deploy now versus not to worry about until later. And so, the company's always changing as you scale. And so navigating that change with a guide is really helpful, but of course, that's the internal environment. The external environment, it feels, is changing more than ever now as well.

And so as company leaders, as talent and people leaders, we're having to navigate all of that. And so. Crazy few years. What would you say are some of the biggest trends that you're picking up on right now in HR and what's here to stay versus what feels a bit more transitory or fad? 

Jeff Diana: Well, I'm going to start with, I know everyone sees the doom and gloom, the macro environment, and we've talked about selling economies and inflation, although we've started to get a little better news recently on some of that front.

And the fact that capital is no longer free from an investment perspective. All of that has really put a lot of pressure on organizations and, therefore, the people function as we've had to change strategy and do with less resources. But I'm here to say that I'm actually excited about it. And the reason why I'm excited about it is I think it's getting us back to an elevated amount of business impact.

We have the potential to have greater business impact now than we've ever had. And it's because of the trends that you were asking me about. First of all, it's short-term focus. The days of "capital is free and we'll just throw a lot of money at stuff" and everybody's going to go up to the right and their revenue curves are gone.

So there's a much shorter term focus. So when you do things, you have to be looking for efficiency. From a business perspective, everyone's talking rule of 40. So profitability, not growth these days. And it's really all about, can you elevate performance of an organization? So it's a little bit of that. You hear a lot of founders will mention this when they yearn for the early days of, "I miss the lean days," like when we just ran with a lean mindset because we had to be scrappy.

I think organizations at all levels of scale are now thinking that way and being forced to think that way because it's such a tough environment to grow in. Valuations are inflated still for most organizations and access to capital is less and expensive. So it's really, I think those trends, I actually think those trends are here to stay.

Do I think growth will come back at a greater pace? Yes. Will it loosen on valuations a little bit in capital? Yes. But I think when you talk to CEOs and other executives and HR leaders alike, I think there's an acknowledgement that maybe the pendulum swung too far to one side of the go days of, maybe three to five years ago.

And I think that push for efficiency and productivity and things of that sort is here to stay. And I like it because it keeps us from being the happiness police, Tom. We can be about business impact. And we got away from that. In the years where capital was free and everyone was fighting with each other over talent, it was just make people happy, keep people happy at all costs.

And we took our eye off the ball in my opinion. And I think that is probably gone. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, I totally agree with you. And I think we see the same thing as we help customers to your point about. The HR team or the L&D team, not being either happy police or that snacks and fun events coordinators, but more the support team to the C suite or, part of the C suite to help drive performance of the team from a kind of return of the ROI equation.

And then, manage costs from the I side of the equation as well. And so What we're getting asked for a lot is more classes on performance management or more classes on how people can be more productive and we're seeing that deployed because it's got a, a closer relationship to that high performance organization that people are trying to build.

And so that's definitely a transition for HR teams and L&D teams to make. Be curious if you see or have identified the kinds of qualities or skills within HR or L&D leaders or professionals that are helping them support in this new or reverted environment. 

Jeff Diana: Yeah. I think, look it's the skill that I always tell folks in HR is the greatest differentiator.

And it still is. It has been my entire career is just business acumen. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah. 

Jeff Diana: The more you can really understand the business and understand cash flows and understand LTV to CAC. If you're thinking about things from that perspective. And what is this rule of 40 thing? And the better you understand business, the more differentiated you'll be.

It's still a gap for us as a discipline. 

I think that gap is getting highlighted now more than ever, because of some of those terms, those trends you and I talked about, right. Going on in the market where we just have to be more effective and efficient. We don't have the flexibility and freedom we had before to not focus on efficiency and productivity.

So business acumen reigns true to me. I think the ability to communicate and market or sell your work has never been higher either, because in this environment of less resources, less investment to make, and therefore less time to divvy up inside an organization. It's getting harder and harder to get people to focus and back the work that you want to drive, whether that's the price tag of an investment in technology or just an initiative you want to drive, because everybody's focused on what they have to get done.

So that ability to market and really communicate what you're doing and why you're doing it, which again goes back to that business acumen, I think is really important. And HR is notoriously sucked at marketing our work. Like we just stink at it. Which is too bad because we do so many great things that people care about, but we rarely take the time to market and string them all together to help people understand all the different bits that we're driving in a given focus area.

So getting better at that is a key part of this. And then the last one I'd probably say for me is just being systemic thinkers. Like organizations have always been complex, but I think there's a premium around org design now that we haven't had in the past and geographic footprint. And, is it return to office or not to be hybrid or remote? Like all of this design oriented stuff.

And the new element on top of that, Tom, is now we have to take action for impact today. That hasn't always been the case. We've been able to get by and say, but we're doing these longer term bets because again, everything's going up to the right and capital's free. And we can do all of that. Now you have to be a systemic thinker and really be good at balancing short and long term at the same time.

And that really was not the case, I would say for a five, 10 year run in there, we mostly could just focus on the long term. And the rest would come now it's requiring a sharper lens. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah. Those are really helpful in specific things to work on. And like you say, there's a through line where, it starts with business acumen.

I think in parts of the C suite leaders, CEOs, CFOs feel like you understand their world and your kind of teammates alongside them. And you're working together to get an outcome and you happen to be, you know, the people partner Building a people strategy to support the business strategy, as opposed to coming in with a orthogonal agenda where you're trying to make everyone happy or something else.

So if you can convince through how you storytell or present that you're starting from the same place and goals, then I think it makes it easier then to justify your decisions and initiatives that you're asking for. So, yeah, great points and all tied together nicely.

 Again, as part of the transition from, the hyper growth times to the leaner, more focused performance oriented times, what we see in companies, and it's well publicized in the press that there's this shock to the system, whether that's at the leadership level first, or then across the culture and the rank and file employees second. Something that we've come to call at Hone the "hypergrowth hangover" where expectations are set in a certain way, and then reality hits in this new world. And so curious if you see that kind of shock to the system and where the areas of misalignment can be and how to remedy the hypergrowth hangover.

Jeff Diana: Yeah, I think it's a great phrase. I think it's really true. And again, with cost of the capital at next to nothing and everything growing, right? Everybody was doing well. It was degrees of success, but everyone was being successful. All of a sudden, you get this pullback of over investment that was going on.

And then I also do believe, and this is something we have to recognize. I do believe there is a belief from businesses that the relationship with their people was out of balance. It got out of balance slowly over time, and they're taking back balance because they have an opportunity to do so. So part of it is purely economical, part of it I think is a strategic attempt to shift how that relationship is aligned.

I think for me it comes down to a couple things. First, I think you have to be candid with your people. People are smart. They read through things. The greatest way to erode trust is not to be candid. I know a lot of leaders are struggling with this, and it's putting HR in a tough spot where even CEOs are like, "yeah, I want to change all this stuff.

I want to not have those programs. I want less perks. I want people to work harder," whatever the drive is, but they don't really want to get out in front of that and own that, but you have to be candid and own that message. The challenge that we have to be able to do that in HR is do that and still instill confidence in where we're going, help people get excited about the opportunities in the new phase of where we are, right?

We're not growing at 50, 70%. We might be flat or growing at 10% and cutting costs. Well, what could be good about that? Well, it's actually a great place where you all play, honestly. In those changing conditions, it's a great chance to drive personal growth. It's really a different experience, and again, I think the pendulum has swung, so we'll see some of this going forward.

Maybe not to the extreme it's moved, it'll balance back a little bit more, but this opportunity to really grow and develop yourself. Why? Because you have to be leaner. You have to be scrappier. You have to be a better system thinker and process oriented person because you need to get scale and efficiency out of the work that you do.

You have to find a different way to inspire people if you're a manager. All of these components can add to your skill set. And we just have to take the time to help grow our people in those skill sets and give them the opportunity to practice and learn and experience this new situation, this new reality we have in business.

So, yeah, we may not be doing all the same things up and to the right and have every perk on the planet, but most of that stuff honestly wasn't driving why we were at an organization or the impact of our work. So how do we get reenergized and focused on that? Take advantage of this set of experiences to better develop ourselves and learn in a new set of conditions.

It's the same as me going from a really large enterprise to a startup. Totally different set of conditions going from one industry to another, a growth business to a small margin business, right? All of these things make us more skilled, more adaptable. And so we have to sell that. And don't sell in the sense of make up the value out of it. Just help people understand there is a lot they can get out of this. And what a personal brand opportunity to say, not only was I part of this great growth curve, but I helped a company or my function grow through that in this new world that we're going to see a lot more often. Now I'm not only a well branded talent for hyper growth but for situations where growth is harder to find, that's only going to make us more marketable. And in this market where there's not a lot of opportunity right now, that further improves my career brand. So there's things we can show people and talk about as long as we're candid and honest.

The last thing I'll say, and this one I love, just like we talked about the broader trends and why it might be a tough time to do this work, it might also be an amazing time. We have always talked about, it's about the mission, the work in front of us, and our culture. We've always talked about it.

Every CEO talks about it. Every HR professional talks about it. How much of that was really our value prop? I might challenge how much of that really was. Yep, we talked about it a little bit. It really wasn't the core of our value prop. It was equity. It was perks. It was promotion rates. It was cash compensation.

It was a lot of monetary stuff. Now it has to be about that stuff. It's got to be about your mission. It's got to be about your culture, which is what we always yearn for as HR professionals. And it's right there for us to reorient and pivot around and find the people that are compelled by that. And the ones that aren't may go find something else when the time comes.

I understand quiet quitting and all of that because times are tough, but it's going to go full circle and we have a chance to take advantage of that reset. But it starts with being open and honest with people about it. And then just instilling some confidence and excitement, which we can do. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, there's so much wisdom and sharp observation in all of that.

It definitely echoes what we see in the market right now too, starting with from earlier discussion, business acumen from helping people through that candor understand where the business is at, what the business is actually trying to achieve. It's not growth at all costs. It's efficiency and margin and real affordability, et cetera.

If you can understand that, then you as a team member can interpret the decisions of senior management and help relay them to your team in a more authentic way rather than seeing just the negative impacts. So that's a growth opportunity. Love the point you made about making yourself more marketable in this new time.

Because I, as a hiring manager, having hired hundreds of people over various companies, sometimes you're a little wary of the folks that were at the hypergrowth companies that were just doing amazingly and anyone that was on the ship was taken along with them. Folks that could really make a change and a positive change in the difference in a difficult environment, those are the folks that you want on your team in future roles. So, love that as an opportunity for people right now. And I think, yeah, whether you're a leader or whether you're an individual, there may not be a ton of open org chart ahead of you in the way that there would be in a scaling company.

So you're not climbing the ladder, so to speak, but you are really building your battle tested skills and getting battle scars that add to your abilities again, like you said, as a leader or as a team member that will make you more marketable in future through learning and development.

So that's definitely where we see companies bringing us in is "how can I continue developing my high performers?" If we were scaling, these folks would be managers or leaders by now. We don't have that headcount or that org room. But we do want to help them sharpen their skills. So it's a great outlet and opportunity on the L& D side.

Jeff Diana: It's funny when you think about the world has gotten tougher. You pick up any thing you want to look at that talks about the broader world. It's a tougher world. I worry about that with my own children and things like of what I grew up in versus them.

And I think the ability to take tougher times and learn how to be successful, find personal enjoyment out of it, find a way to have impact. I actually think it's going to be a great life skill for our people at all stages and all generations of the workforce. Because I think that's also just a macro trend out there.

I don't think it's suddenly going to get to be a friendly or happier place anytime soon in that macro set of conditions, but it doesn't mean you can't find joy and fulfillment for yourself and others. And figuring out how to do that here at work, I actually think will help outside of work as well. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, I totally agree with that.

And philosophically that all makes sense. And we see, I would say enlightened company leaders understand that connection between employee development and their sustained success in this harder environment. But getting down to the nuts and bolts of it, when HR leaders or L&D leaders are trying to sell these kinds of initiatives internally, it can just be difficult operationally to get those through regardless of our big philosophical arguments.

So what advice do you have for people on how they're positioning learning and development initiatives these days? 

Jeff Diana: Yeah, I think you're right. One has never been easy for us in HR, I think, to fight for budget, but it's definitely much harder now than ever. And it's not just budget, it's just focus, right?

Cause the things we always drive, I always sit and remind CEOs of when I'm in marketing, I own my function and I get to set everything I do. When I'm in HR, I own nothing. I have 1% of the head count and everything I get done gets done through others. And everyone has an opinion and is passionate about everything people.

 So getting everybody supportive and to put energy around it becomes as hard as getting the financial side of it. And to me, the marketing we drive around our work has to recognize the macro environment. And to me, it's fairly simple. We have to do things that we talk about driving productivity and performance now. It has to be about business results. I have to show "oh, I think this is going to better the business this quarter, next quarter," not in 2 to 3 years. And if I can show that what I'm going to drive will lessen time constraints inside the business, allow people to get more of their work done better faster.

That's a big play around technology. That's a big play around getting new skills, right? Those types of things are really important. It's not about making people happy, it's not about this is the right thing to do. It's not about, this is what we need to do for the long term. Those things don't recognize the reality of business today.

Now we have to care about those things. So don't hear my message wrong. Those things matter. But they're not the driving force in what I do, nor are they the driving force in how I sell the investments or the time I need out of the business. I just need to know, yeah, I need to do some things for long term sustainability and these things do matter.

I do want my people happy. You're not productive if you're not happy. So they correlate, but we have to package around shorter time horizons and more concrete productivity and business result oriented stuff. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, I agree. And I think there used to be a strong argument around employee retention.

And I think that's still there because it is costly to have to replace an employee. But the talent market has tipped more towards the employer's favor now. And so I think you're right. It is more about how can we get more done for less with the people that we have, rather than how can we cling to their precious talent that we've got in case they go somewhere else.

Cause there is a kind of employer favorable pool. 

Jeff Diana: Here's the other point on that, Tom, I do think because we hear it all the time well, I want to make my case, especially around learning and development around activities around retention, right? People leave if they don't feel developed. And that is a true statement.

Right? However, that same work around being developed to drive retention, I can make around if I make people more productive and the business is more successful, guess what? People want to stick around. People are happy to be part of winning organizations. They're happy to be able to get more work done or done easier, right?

Like that stuff matters as well. Just like this broader concept of, well, if you don't invest in me, I'm going to leave. But we forget this part of that retention equation when we talk about it and we just park it around. People want to be developed, which to an employer nowadays sounds like I'm lucky if I make payroll or survive the next couple of quarters.

I don't care if someone's happy to develop skills for a year or some other company. That's great. We can still solve that desire for our people. But talk about the fact that if we make people more productive and the business wins, guess what? Our people are going to stick around. It's the same outcome, but back to that marketing and packaging.

It's packaged around what the business wants to hear, even though we know what the employee will say is, yeah, that's all great. But I also want to be developed because I want to grow myself and grow my career and all of that. And we can accomplish that. It's just not the leading headline in our marketing material.

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, it's such a great point. I think it's a great connection for folks on people teams who do feel drawn to the work of creating a great culture that people want to be a part of because yes, some of that is longer term and in the good times was about benefits and events and extras, but really at the heart of it, what gets people going is being part of that winning team.

And so you can channel that desire to create a powerful kind of magnetic culture into now, how do I make us perform better? How does this help us win and navigate this difficult time? Because then that's what's going to differentiate us actually in a space from where other folks are flat or challenged. That's going to make the difference for our culture.

So it's such a great point. How would you frame it in a slightly different scenario where you were successful and got some budget for some learning and development, and now you want more because learning is a continuous thing. And the CFO or CEO says, "Oh, I thought we checked that box last year.

We've done this already." How can you change the story so that you get another shot? 

Jeff Diana: Yeah, I don't think the core elements changes in that context, meaning it's still about linking to business outcomes. What we're driving, right? Yes, we got benefit. And so then the argument is either.

We're going to take a step back in terms of that improved productivity. Or we can take it to the next level by doubling down on that investment. And, there's always a desire for, well, give me the quantitative thing, the exact measure. And yes I care about whether people enjoyed the experience of learning.

Absolutely. What I care most about is usually two sort of questions, and you can paraphrase these, but two questions I ask about any investment, frankly, any process, whether I do a performance review, a comp cycle, or anything. I ask people within the context, and let's use learning as the example, do you feel better capable to carry out X, whether that's the work or a skill, as a result of your time spent on this?

If people feel like they're better at it for the time, that's a measure that really matters. The other one I asked just bluntly is, was your time spent on this worth it versus what else you could have spent your time on? 

Because it's all a prioritization. Time is the currency right now for us. Less resources, constraint on capacity, which equates to time for an organization. And so if I can get people to say, "yeah, I'm better at it for that time." It's easy for me to help leaders understand then how that skill will help. And we can talk about that as well. And if people just, you ask him that gut check was it worth it for you? And if you get a yes, I think that's really powerful from the user perspective as we're figuring out how we dial the offerings and the experiences.

The business leader is going to say, great, that's all great. How is it going to improve my business? And usually for me, it will go to things like, actually, we're going to hit our OKRs. We're going to hit a higher percentage of our OKRs. We're going to actually deliver on the op plan for the quarter. The strategic initiatives you're looking to drive that may not be individual OKRs, but at the company level we want to do these five things.

Were we able to accomplish them either in less time, at a greater level, with greater quality? Like those types of quantitative elements around the business outcomes. And yes, you can argue I can't draw the perfect straight line from that L&D investment to that outcome. But you know what, if we were hitting 80 percent of our OKRs before we did this and we're hitting 92 percent afterwards, I'm pretty comfortable we were part of that journey because we chose a type of skills that we know were important. Now, how do you know which types of skills are important, Tom? I think this comes down to, back to that business acumen, you have to understand your organization's strategy for growth. What's the business strategy?

And you have to peel that back into capabilities. What capability does the organization need, right? That could be everything from a process we're missing. A system we're missing. Classic skills, we talk about all the time. It could be geographic coverage. There are capabilities inside an organization that we need to deliver on our strategy, and if I can show, especially in learning, that the things I'm doing are going to reinforce the capabilities that we said are critical to our business strategy, I'm off to the races.

I don't have to quantify every bit of that. But I have to show logical connection to strategy. And when they agree on their strategy and they agree on the capabilities the organization needs, it's much easier for me to sell ideas. I said, but you told me that capability is critical and we don't have enough of it.

We agreed on that. I'm telling you, this is going to get us there. Why are we arguing about it? I don't have to reinvent and re argue every investment I want to make on its individual merits, if I've generated this buy in on business strategy and key capabilities. And I'm talking about how these things will drive those, especially in the learning space, it really helps make that a much easier process.

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, truly. And I'd love to come back to the capabilities in a moment, but I think just to reflect on the three ways you just described of justifying business value here in L&D, there was the good use of time, according to the participant. There was the business outcome framed as OKRs and how well we're doing at hitting those.

And then there was the capabilities. And I think what I really like about all three in particular, the first two, is that it's role independent. And sometimes you can get people saying, "how much sales did this increase or how much developer productivity do we get out of this?" And every different function has a different output and would need to be measured in a different way if it even indeed can be measured.

And there's so many conflating factors with, who's on the team, how they're feeling that day, how well informed the project is, etc, that it can be hard to unpick the training. But if you trust your people and they're saying, yes, this experience was a good use of my time, and by team, their OKRs are relevant to them and meaningful to the business by definition, and they're doing better on them.

That's just a great universal way to measure impact. 

Jeff Diana: Yeah, because think about what you said, Tom you talked about the three layers, individual, team, and company, right? Like you're checking the boxes across all three layers. And I'm happy to go toe to toe with CFOs or CEOs when they get a little more suspect on HR stuff.

Cause I will be like, interesting. So marketing makes a bunch of investment. Can you prove to me which investment drove the greater leads that you got and whether or not they closed. Product, interesting. We have a higher CSAT from the end user. Do we know what drove that? Was it a change in the user?

Which particular function? We extrapolate, right? We do activities and we see outcome measures move. As long as they're moving in those right directions, why would you mess with that? You'd say, yes, let's keep doing those things because our trajectory is moving in the right directions.

If I could prove it causally, great. But again, in the spirit of time and speed and lean mindset, I don't need to waste all that time to do that. I can see that they're moving in the right direction and I can go spend some more energy on the next thing rather than trying to over justify something that we see is having a positive impact.

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, a hundred percent. I love that way of thinking. The other thought experiment that I do sometimes is, okay, imagine we cloned our company. And one of the companies made the investment and one of them didn't, which one would you bet on to win? If you think that there's no difference, then don't make the investment.

But if you believe that, say, investing in your manager capability to make them 50% more effective managers, is going to have an outcome on who wins that race, then you should do it. 

Jeff Diana: I love that. I think that's great. Sometimes we overcomplicate stuff for ourselves or we allow others in the business to overcomplicate it for us.

And sometimes we just have to take people back to just good, sound logic. And you go, Hey just step back and think here for a minute. Right? And I love that model you mentioned, I may steal that. That's a good one. 

Tom Griffiths: For sure. Well, capabilities. There's a lot of talk of this. We're seeing AI tools now that can help infer what skills or capabilities are needed or present or not.

And so I'd just be curious on your thoughts on how these days you can do a growth stage company kind of capability approach. I know that the big guys have big teams that do this in detail and perhaps at the lower end for smaller startups is less of a focus, but yeah, what would your recommendation be for growth stage and how to do capabilities?

Jeff Diana: Yeah, I think some of this again, goes back to a little bit of logic. There's a lot of talk now about running your organization on skills. I can do everything from workforce planning from the beginning to hiring to everything around skills. I can run my business on skills, but it's a very daunting task.

And if you hear organizations try to do it, it's a hard concept for them to land. And usually when I give advice to folks on it, I start with something simple, you have to know what matters to your stakeholders. What are they facing? What matters to them? What's the scope of their role?

What are their goals? What are their challenges? And how can I help? If I can hitch on to something that's going to impact what they're trying to drive, that will be a win. When it comes to capabilities, it's an easy conversation. I can sit down with the CEO and say, "Hey, who do you worry most about competitively?"

Okay. Company X. What's their secret sauce? Are they winning on product? Is it marketing? Is it sales? What is it? What do you think they're doing that's kicking our butt? And when they tell me what that discipline looks like, you can go out and you can do this either anecdotally yourself on LinkedIn, or there are plenty of technologies out there now that do this, that will give you a profile of the people in that organization and the capabilities that they have.

And so it's a great visceral place to start because organizations have already made up their mind that this is a threat and they know it's a threat and this is how they think those people win. And it's great, here's what they look like capability wise. Now let's use that same set of capabilities and talk about what we look like in those same jobs.

And then it'll easily show you a gap that you then have a great opportunity as an L&D person to come in and say, let me close that gap. Or as a TA person to say maybe I can hire those people from that other company or someone else who has those skills. And I've changed the skill profile as we hire, or I've changed the skill profile for talent management people when we go to promote people, right?

All of the disciplines in HR can be touched by that type of logic around capabilities. And if you don't want to go out and buy some of those tools, and there's some really cool ones out there that do that with fairly good ease, and it's not a fight over taxonomy of skills and competencies.

And it's it doesn't matter what model you use as long as we're judging both populations with it. But you can also do that yourself with LinkedIn, but you have to ask the questions of the business. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah. 

Jeff Diana: Once you get those answers, you can go out and get a pretty good story together to create compelling interest in the work you're trying to drive to close those gaps. 

Tom Griffiths: I like that angle. And it harks back not to sound like a broken record, but to business acumen and then the positive effects of winning because the CEO is always thinking about competition and how can we win, differentiate. And skills and capabilities are as much a dimension of that as your product functionality. And so again, framing and marketing or selling the HR and L&D initiatives in the frame of, this is going to help us beat competitor X or equalize or neutralize one of their advantages is really powerful and certainly gets attention. 

Jeff Diana: Now we know in our own conversation, we're going to be like, great.

It's going to make better managers. Less people are going to leave. We're going to have less employee relations issues and we're going to have a better brand. Like we know all the other things that it feeds in our world. It's just not what we package and sell off of. 

Tom Griffiths: Such a good point.

Cause you, it's not necessarily a Trojan horse, but it's more knowing your audience and what matters to them. Packaging it that way and getting all of the goodies that come along with it that have the extra impact. So, what mistakes then do you see people make? This sounds great in theory. In practice, do people trip up on areas here and how can we avoid mistakes when we're pitching a C suite?

Jeff Diana: I think the place to start, a lot of people don't take the time to really analyze their stakeholders. What makes them tick? What are they facing? What are their challenges? It's a chessboard and everybody's a piece on the chessboard and you're trying to move them in different directions, right?

And it's not meant to be a cold or callous type of thing. Like it's, back to my fun university days, it's a collective action problem, right? Like we work in teams, in organizations of people. You have to take the time to really understand that, number one. Number two, you can't be tone deaf to those macro conditions.

What I'll hear a lot of people come in is and say, it's the right thing to do. And that phrase is lightning right now to people that go, the right thing to do. The right thing to do is for the business to survive and who decides what's right. And this is why some of the DE&I stuff has struggled a little bit, super impactful, can really drive business.

It is also the right thing to do, but in this market, doing things cause it's the right thing to do is not moving the audience. We have to package it around, it's going to lead to greater business impact, right? Which it will. All the studies around that talks about diversity of views and talent drive business results.

So the right thing to do, I worry about. It's about employee happiness, doesn't sell or you're doing something that you go, well, we have to do it now because 2 to 3 years now down the road, it's going to matter. Again, it's not knowing your stakeholders or the macro conditions. So those that's probably the biggest

bit I can tell you there. The last thing I'll say is get yourself some sponsors. Think about it, especially as an L&D leader, a head of HR, there's what, 6-8 executives that run different functions. They all then have some big people underneath them. Like in any org of 250 or more people, there's 25 or more people whose voice will get heard.

And when it comes from their voice or with their voice backing it and not just our voice. Man, that stuff moves way better. So you've got to build sponsorship and stakeholders and you will find people by understanding all those stakeholders to go they're going to care. And I know why they're going to care.

And if I get leaders asking for it, or at least supporting my message, I'm going to get way more success, less scrutiny of the idea, etc, than if it's just HR coming in saying, well, it's the right thing to do. We have to make our people happy. Nowadays you're going to get the door shut, right?

Those are probably the best tips I can give you. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, that's great. And I think, like I said earlier, if you can start from a place of partnership where you're speaking the language such that they believe that your motivations are the same as theirs, there's not this separate agenda with, you say it's doing the right thing or trying to make the people happy or even setting up for a future that may or may not materialize if we do it. Starting from the same vantage point and then navigating in their world. I think it builds your credibility and conversely, every time you come with that case that gets the door shut, not only does that end that initiative, but it erodes your credibility for next time and has the guard up a little bit, wondering if this is just repackaged. So I think there's a kind of credibility bank account that you need to make deposits in as you show and demonstrate that you have those business needs at heart.

And maybe don't push an initiative that previously you would have and show that's the sacrifice that you recognize you or the business should make. But then that gives you clout when it comes to the real important ones. 

Jeff Diana: And you know what? It allows you if the majority of your tactics on your initiatives and investments are that, it actually allows you to use on the rare occasion the "it's the right thing to do." Or to make people happy like you can play that card once in a blue moon, but if it's your drum beat people in this market are going to say, "Boy, they just don't understand what we're facing here," to your credibility comment. So by shifting this strategy ironically when you really want to use that card because I am here to make sure we do the right stuff and I play it really sparingly, I probably get to play it, whereas otherwise they're going to go, Oh, it's just the same old thing.

So it'll have more impact. 

Tom Griffiths: Jeff, as we near the end here, I would love to hear your thoughts on, yeah, sure, there's some difficult trends in HR we have to learn and adapt, but there are also opportunities in this moment in the HR function and L&D world. How do you see those opportunities at this time? 

Jeff Diana: I'll give you three ways because I'm really excited.

I've hit a couple, and then I think I'll double click on one that maybe we haven't talked about a ton. The first one is we have a chance to help our function like never before. If we shift to being much more about business with a lean mindset, I think we can elevate our discipline, which I know we all want to do and has been talked about since the beginning of my career, and I'm sure before that of the role that HR can play.

The second opportunity in these tough times is what we talked about, which is We've always wanted to make our value prop around our mission and our culture. Now we again have that opportunity to do that because it has to be front and center as we've trimmed off some of this other program and perk and benefit spend.

So again, let's take advantage of both of those opportunities, which will help our organizations and us with our agenda and what we know is great for our people. The 3rd one, we probably haven't talked about as much, which is, and I talk to folks all the time, whether it's the software company selling software or the HR person trying to buy software or drive an initiative of, "now is not the time to do it." I would actually argue now is the exact time to do it. And the reason why is while we're in this state of sort of slow growth and less hiring and less activity, more focus inside an organization. Now is the time to drive critical initiatives and/or technology changes so that we can really get those bedded down.

Because if you look out 12 to 24 months and beyond, the markets are going to come back, valuations are going to go up, capital's going to be freer, economies are going to grow better. And when that happens is the worst time to start implementing a whole bunch of new initiatives. You want your machine well run and those initiatives that you know are going to drive growth, now is the time to do it, even though, yes, our teams may be smaller and organizations may have limited focus. If we can find the right few things, if you want to drive a big learning initiative to upskill people, do it now. So when the curve goes, they have the skills to put to work and to win because the opportunity cost will be much higher when markets are roaring, if we're not able to take advantage of them, than they are now because there isn't as much growth. So look at what you're driving, look at your tech stack, look at your initiatives and challenge yourself to find the couple things that are really going to be a difference driver in 12 to 24 months as the economy comes back and get them done now. So you can win while your competitors are building them while the markets are growing and you're already leveraging the fruits of your labor. 

Tom Griffiths: Such a great point because just operationally, when there's fewer folks to deal with, you can transition more easily in that world. Clearly when the curve comes back, you're going to be worried about a bunch of other hair on fire problems, like hiring and culture and scale and etc, etc, new geographies, compliance, blah, blah, blah. And actually, I think, as a CEO hearing that sends a really great signal to me that you're thinking strategically out into the future, but it also sends a good signal to the company to say, "Hey, look, we recognize the time or the phase of the game that we're in right now. We believe that this is going to come back and we're putting ourself into an even better position to win in the future."

So it's a nice kind of cultural impact as well. Love that. Jeff, great conversation. We'd like to wrap up with our rapid fire start, stop, continue round. We think of the emerging people leaders earlier in their career getting started and listening to this. What would you recommend that they start doing?

Jeff Diana: Deep dive the business and the macro environment. It's not well enough to know your business. Know your industry, your competitors, macro trends like you can never know enough. Deep dive. Learn that business. That would be number one on my start. Number two, on my start, build the groundswell and ID champions for the work you want to drive.

Spend the time to build those relationships, get people excited about your work before you bring the work for the investment to whoever that decision maker is. And third, quantify your impact. And you can do that by tying it back to business outcomes. If you do those three things, I think you're in a much better place to win from a start perspective.

Tom Griffiths: All right. What should they stop doing? 

Jeff Diana: Probably the couple of things I mentioned earlier. "The right thing to do," if that's your lead in tagline, if you make things about making people happy per se, not bigger business benefits, that's another thing I would stop. And I think if you want to pitch stuff that you can't tie to having short term impact and only long term impact, I think you're going to be in trouble.

Tom Griffiths: And to give them credit for what they're doing right now, what should they continue? 

Jeff Diana: I think what they should continue doing is one, push the business to have the right conversations, own the changes they're driving. It's one of the best things we can do. We didn't call this out earlier, but change management has never been more important than now when you have tough shifts in businesses.

So keep going after helping leaders get out in front and help them see that they can put these messages and trust our people to stick with us through those tough times. That's number one. Number two, I would say, keep having an eye on the future. We know the work we need to go do. So don't give up on driving the right work.

If you're struggling to get investment or what not, you have to keep fighting the good fight. Just try some of these new tactics and how you sell it.

Tom Griffiths: Phenomenal. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks for sharing all that wisdom. I think some really powerful, tactical, executive grade approaches that people can really apply after listening to this.

And really appreciate you sharing your wisdom today. So thank you. 

Jeff Diana: My pleasure. Always great to spend time with you. I love the stuff you all are building. It's stuff I highly recommend. And I saw the impact myself in Calendly. So keep up what you all are doing as well. And to our audience, thanks for making time.

And I'm always happy to continue the conversation. And let's go have great impact for our people and our businesses and tie it all together at the same time that we elevate the game of the people function, as I know we can.

Tom Griffiths: Right on. Thanks so much, Jeff. 

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