Forget Skills Lists: Build an Unstoppable Team Through True Human Connection

Title: Andrea Cooper, Chief People Officer at Talkspace Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:34:00 GMT Duration: 00:11:15 Link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/previ/episodes/Andrea-Cooper--Chief-People-Officer-at-Talkspace-e2uorlf GUID: c0dc041e-5cc4-456d-9a8c-0119d099e550 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Andrea Cooper describes her career as "a windy path, not a clear road." Twenty-five years in, she's come to believe that's a feature, not a bug — and that the winding is exactly what made her effective at one of the harder parts of HR leadership: managing a workforce reduction with empathy without losing the trust of those who stay.

As Chief People Officer at Talkspace, Andrea leads HR for a company whose product is mental health support — which creates an interesting responsibility. The cultural expectations are high, the employee population is often deeply values-driven, and there's no hiding behind corporate distance when things get hard. Her core thesis: great HR leadership requires you to show up as a full human being, not a polished representative of a function. That means vulnerability in layoffs. It means sitting with discomfort instead of rushing to resolution. It means knowing when to go deep and when to rise up — when to trust your team with autonomy versus when your direct attention changes the outcome.

Andrea's sharpest insight is about the failure mode of HR leaders who've reached senior levels: they stop adapting their style to the individual and start applying a default mode. She's built her practice around the opposite — investing real time to understand what each person on her team needs, how they receive feedback, what motivates them. That investment in cultural competence at the individual level, she argues, is what separates managers who retain excellent people from those who lose them to predictable attrition.

• Non-linear careers as a leadership advantage — why diverse paths build adaptive leaders
• Leading through workforce reductions with authentic empathy — maintaining trust on both sides of a difficult decision
• The "go deep vs. rise up" judgment call — knowing when to trust your team and when your presence matters
• Cultural competence at the individual level — adapting your leadership style to what each person actually needs
• In-person connection as a strategic investment for distributed teams — even minimal time together compounds significantly
• Vulnerability as leadership infrastructure — why authenticity builds the psychological safety that drives performance

Built by People is sponsored by Previ, the private pricing network that saves employees an average of $2,200/year on essentials like cell phone and auto insurance — free for companies to launch and maintain.