Donna Brown

▶0:00IntroWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce.

▶0:42HostHi and welcome everyone. I'm excited to welcome Donna Brown, uh, the founder of Cultivation HR to the Built by People podcast today. Donna, thanks so much for joining. As a starting question, I always love to ask if you can share more about your career journey. What got you here.

▶0:58GuestYeah, thanks. And thanks for having me today. So I've been working in HR and technology leadership roles for over 20 years. The majority of that time has been in-house with Fortune 100 global enterprises. The last 5 years, I've been the head of HR at a couple of SaaS startups. So took that, took that leap. And now I've become a— begun a fractional HR advisory practice where I bring my Fortune 100 experience to small and medium-sized companies to solve challenging organizational issues.

▶1:30HostI love that. You have a very diverse background too. So that's really cool that you can pull from multiple experiences to kind of cater to your now clients, right?

▶1:38GuestYes. Yeah, exactly. And I've been really fortunate in my career to have had such a breadth of experiences that, you know, part of what drives me is, is scaling that. How do other people, you know, get to, get to utilize, you know, all of that expertise and, uh, and creativity?

▶1:59HostWhat do you feel is the biggest challenge you're currently facing in HR, or maybe what your clients are currently facing in HR?

▶2:07GuestUh, boy, without a doubt, it's AI. You know, HR professionals are wrestling with how to embrace AI's efficiencies while protecting against risks. And I think the challenge lies in balancing in a innovation with governance, the sexy with the not sexy, if you will, ensuring that AI tools don't compromise fairness, privacy, compliance, while still driving real value for workforce.

▶2:34HostThat makes a lot of sense. And along those lines, right, if I were to shadow you for a week working with a client, where would I see you maybe spending most of your time on things that maybe don't feel strategic, or where are your clients spending time that doesn't feel strategic. So what are some things that they're focused on that maybe AI could help with or that aren't feeling strategic right now? Kind of the noise.

▶2:57GuestOh my goodness. That's such a great, um, sort of combination question because just like every other HR person on the face of the earth, answering routine questions, dealing with recruiting logistics, um, you know, HR platforms, all of the things, all of the operational things that you have on your plate. Which sometimes can crowd out those strategic things. You know, looking to my big company background, I think it's one of the reasons why a lot of big companies adopted a model, right, where they have HR business partners out there trying to do the strategic things, you know, and then you've got centers of expertise, and then you've got operations. They've been trying to, you know, parse that out for a while. But when you're a small or medium-sized company, your people still have to do it all. And I think that it's easy to fall prey to that to-do list, which can crowd out that strategic capacity. And, you know, not that I, not that I thought that we'd be talking about this necessarily, but AI is one of the places that can help people create and generate that capacity.

▶4:03HostYeah, no, absolutely. And I've seen that as well. We do a lot of different podcast episodes. That's kind of been a recurring theme of, evolving and adapting, right?

▶4:12GuestAnd learning, right? It's still so new. It's going like crazy. I've been around long enough to remember the advent of the internet and before there were apps and everything else like that. And I think, you know, really 30 years later, oh my goodness, you can't even imagine, you know, a world without all of that capability. It's gonna be the same thing, but I think even faster with AI.

▶4:35HostAbsolutely. So maybe you've worn multiple hats than you're currently wearing now. So maybe it'd be a unique perspective to see what was keeping you up at night when you were at the Fortune 100s, right? What was keeping you up at night during these different phases? What's keeping you up at night right now? Right? So within HR, what's keeping you up at night right now, Donna?

▶4:58GuestAll right. Well, before I say AI again,

▶5:02HostLet

▶5:03Guestme focus for a minute on, you know, maybe when you say right now, meaning really right now, approaching the fourth quarter of the year. Typically the fourth quarter for businesses and really for HR, it's a duality. And it's a super busy time for those of us in the HR field. Because on the one hand, you're pushing towards year-end, performance management, benefits renewal, goal achievement are all top of mind. But on the other hand, you're engaged in strategic planning for 2026 and building that tight alignment between the business plan and the HR roadmap. What is HR going to do to accelerate the business plan and accelerate growth? And when you're a small HR team, you know, when I was, when I was, you know, back in the Fortune 100, there is a zillion people running around trying to work on all of this stuff. So, you know, it was relatively easy and coordination was the challenge. I think if you work for a small or medium-sized company, the challenge is again, that share of mind. You've got all these things that have to happen by a deadline that are operational in the fourth quarter. And then you have this, not necessarily blue sky space because, you know, the business strategy is probably baked and you've got some ideas about a plan, but if you're going to do anything other than run behind the business and support it, You've really got to be present with your leadership team and building that aligned roadmap. So I think Q4, um, you know, is definitely a hair on fire time for HR people. And then back to what really keeps me up at night, which is AI again. You know, the promise of AI is huge, but the reality is really messy, really messy for HR. Choosing a trustworthy platform or platforms because platforms do different things. Addressing employee fears about bias or job loss. We're all navigating uncharted territory. And when you're tasked with making AI both ethical and practical in terms of operations, it's super challenging. I'm actually working on an AI certification right now so I can help organizations navigate some of these complexities. But, you know, when you think about it, even companies that are AI native need help because there it's all about the product and/or the engineering if they're a technology firm. But what about the rest of the business, right? Your product and, and tech people in a, in an AI native company are not worrying about ethics, removing bias, ensuring people are, are trained, you know, figuring out what the impact is gonna be on jobs and everything else like that. And how is the company gonna operate in this environment? And HR has a real opportunity here. Because in my experience so far, AI adoption has been largely tool-driven. And in these cases, HR can influence where it accelerates growth, like enhancing recruiting, personalizing learning, improving workforce planning, um, and this ensures that AI investments are tied to business outcomes and the employee experience. That's where HR needs to step in because, as I said, your product and engineering people are not, you know, they're thinking about their product wizardry and how they're going to beat the competition and things like that. They're not necessarily thinking about how to operationalize AI within the workplace.

▶8:33HostI love that. And that, that's a great perspective. What other tools or partners are kind of most critical to you today? If you could wave a magic wand, and maybe fix one system or process, you know, what would it be as well? So kind of layering on two, two questions there for you.

▶8:47GuestYes. Yes. So, if I was really snazzy with my HR skills, an avatar would be talking to you right now. I did manage to create a cartoon of myself, so that was pretty fun. But, um, I use AI every day. I use a couple of different AIs, and it really depends what I'm doing. ChatGPT. Has become more and more of a go-to for me, especially with their most recent iteration. I also use a tool called Perplexity. I like that one. ChatGPT's doing this now, but it didn't do this in the beginning, but Perplexity sources all of your data. So it's going to give you that, like, bibliography, if you will, if you remember back in school creating, you know, your research paper, and then you had to have all of your citations. You know, especially in the world of, of potential AI hallucinations and nonsense things that it makes up, or that somebody has fed into Reddit and it's totally not true and it's picking it up. So Perplexity cites its sources. And then there's a tool called Claude, which I think is particularly good at writing. And so sometimes I'll even use a combination of tools. I'll use ChatGPT or Perplexity to generate sort of my stats and my benchmarking and, and things like that. I'll write, you know, what I think about all of that, and then I'll pop it into Claude to zhuzh it up and make it really reader-friendly. So, yeah. So that is sort of my story with HR. In terms of my magic wand, and AI is today being used to help solve for this, but— I think performance reviews are the bane of everybody's existence. And so I think there are some systems out there that are starting to use AI to prompt managers to do things outside of an annual review, right? There's, there's been a lot of innovative thinking in this space, but the majority of companies still rely on those outdated annual processes, which really don't work for anyone. Except for maybe HR, because we only have to worry about it once a year, right? But then for the rest of the year, we have to deal with all the performance management issues that stem from not having clear goals, not ever giving feedback, surprising people at the end of the year. So there are practices that companies like, um, Accenture did this a while back, Adobe, where they're eliminating annual performance reviews, which I'm in big favor of, and introducing this sort of notion of ongoing coaching-focused performance management. And there are some great platforms out there. I don't know if I'm allowed to drop names or anything, but there are some really great platforms out there that take that notion of continuous coaching for performance. And, you know, as I said, like drop in little nudges for managers, you know, what's going on with your one-on-one? It'll evaluate, all right, here, here are your notes that I took for you from your one-on-one. Here's some areas for improvement. Here are the things that you're gonna follow up on with your person. Here's sort of, you know, something I was listening for underneath the words where the tone and the words didn't match. So you might wanna follow up on that. So there are some pretty sophisticated tools that are now making the notion of continuous performance coaching more of a reality than it's ever been in the past.

▶12:17HostYeah, that's, that's phenomenal. And the one recurring theme that I drew from, from that part, right, is it's using— utilizing tools to evolve to this tech-forward way of thinking, but also keeping the human aspect.

▶12:32GuestOh, for sure.

▶12:33HostWithin it, right? It's just augmenting what you're doing as an HR professional. So I really like that perspective there of not being fearful of the, the tool per se,, but being able to utilize it to be more efficient, but also just even dig deeper, like you,

▶12:48Guestlike you were mentioning. Yeah, that's totally right, Dolan. And the nice thing about it is, is that people can start small, like throw in a job description and have it fix it up for you. You know, it, it takes several hours, right? Typically, unless you have a great library of job descriptions, which hardly anybody ever has. Right? It takes a few hours to, to generate a good job description where it can be seconds that AI can do this. And I guess the only thing I would say is if you're gonna experiment with AI, um, in all of the tools in your settings, there is a little toggle that's gonna say, use this information to improve my learning. Turn that off. Because that way, none of the information that you're adding in there is gonna go out to anybody else if you mistakenly put personal or private information in there. I, in the early days, you know, uploaded my resume and, and didn't take my contact information out of there. And I was like, woo, good thing that I have that little toggle. So mistakes will be made. That's the beauty of experimentation. But if there are people out there that haven't been thinking about just some really easy things that they can do, you know, separate and apart from, you know, rolling out AI to their company and those big strategic things I talked about, just little improvements every day. We all have that list, like the question that you asked me, right? What's that stuff that, that crowds— crowds out our ability to, to be really strategic? We all have that list of, uh, if I could just automate this away. And we probably have automated a lot of things away over time, but now AI gives us that real opportunity to go even deeper and also enhance our learning a little bit because You know, you're just not going to put something into AI and then like send it out to somebody. You've got to then look at that information, make sure— let's stay in job description land for a minute— the information is correct, the tone and the style are right for your company and your culture. There are no, um, there's no made-up information in there. And when you're doing that, when you're now relooking as a human on what AI did and you're making your own adjustments to things, you're like, ah, I didn't think about writing this this way or structuring this that way. So it's sort of a really nice learning loop where not only are we, you know, reducing the amount of time certain repeatable tasks can take us, we're also probably learning some things in the

▶15:26Hostinterim. Yeah, I love that. And that's a perfect segue to kind of our, our close here of, you know, if I came back in 12 months and we, you know, spoke again, what would you have hoped has changed within HR in general, but maybe even the HR organizations that you're, you're currently working with?

▶15:46GuestUh, yes, I would say, and I'm trying to figure out a way to say this that's not, that doesn't sound self-promoting, but I'm going to stick to small and medium-sized companies. And, and not the, the fortune companies. HR departments are usually pretty small wherever you go. They're operating on a shoestring. And in small and medium-sized companies, you've got great HR managers, great HR directors that are spinning all of those plates and making sure that people operations is happening— payroll and benefits and compliance and all of that stuff. I think that there is an opportunity for HR to start thinking about resourcing in a similar way to how businesses have been thinking about it. Sort of a multi-staffing, you've got full-time, you've got part-time, you've got contingent, you've got 1099ers, you've got consultants. There are a lot of people out there today who bring HR service delivery to bear in lots of different ways. And if you are an HR team of 1, 2, 3, 4, Don't settle for what your internal team can deliver because you're constrained by that capacity. Think broadly about who else can you bring in and who can you partner with to either extend that capacity or extend capability. I've got to do something about HR. I don't know where to start. You know, calling in a fractional HR person like me can help people actually, you know, crack those nuts and bring good solutions to bear without being, you know, afraid that it's going to pass them by.

▶17:26HostI love that. And I, and I think that, that serves a purpose not only just for the orgs that you're working with, HR in general, but even the community that we serve, right?

▶17:35GuestYeah.

▶17:36HostYeah. For this podcast, I think that's just a great way to maybe think outside the box, try to do more with less.

▶17:43GuestHR in all kinds of different ways.

▶17:45HostThese days.

▶17:46GuestAbsolutely.

▶17:47HostYeah. Well, thank you so much, Shana, for joining us today and being on the Built by People podcast.

▶17:51GuestThanks for having me. It was a blast.

▶17:53HostYeah, it was a pleasure having you involved. Thank you so much.

▶17:56GuestThanks. Take care.

▶17:57HostBye.