Donovan Mattole

▶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.

▶0:39HostI'm excited to welcome Donovan to the Built by People podcast. Donovan, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always have to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:49GuestAbsolutely, Dave. Great to see you. I started in HR indirectly. That wasn't my original plan. It just grew from my passion for people and training and development. I was going to grad school in Jerusalem Israel studying Middle Eastern studies, of all things, came back to the US and got a job at Borders Books and Music, which was a large retailer that's unfortunately no longer here. Within a few months, got promoted into manager. A few months after that, was leading a store and ran 4 different Borders stores and realized after about 5 years that I was— what I loved the most was training. And development and engaging employees. And that kind of led me at Borders to get into HR. And so it's been 25 years of being in HR.

▶1:43HostI know company culture is extremely important to you and you've worked for some fantastic global companies. What do you think is foundational to creating positive company culture?

▶1:57GuestI think it's really important that the company understands who they are, what their purpose is, what their mission is. And then culture really comes out of the values piece of that. You mentioned great companies. I worked for Mars for years, and Mars is known for M&M's and Snickers, Wrigley gum, but their largest business is pet care. And I started on the pet care side across every single division of Mars. What really keeps the culture aligned is their 5 principles, which are their core values. And they have a number of unique values like mutuality and freedom. As I've progressed in my career, I worked for Brentag for years. The core values were absolutely critical and really spoke to the culture. And that's— it's true at Langen. I've been here 18 months. So for me, the culture should be aligned. And if you see some breaks in that, a lot of times it's because the culture is not aligned to their values.

▶2:55HostDonovan, how do you ensure that core values are lived and maintained and not just holstered on a poster in a conference room?

▶3:06GuestYeah, you want them on the posters. I think that's important. If it's on the poster and not truly lived, then there's gonna be a big disconnect. You can put a lot of marketing in place, but you can't not be authentic with your culture to your employees. Employees really know if it's lived. I encourage leaders to talk about them all the time, really use them for decision-making, and really go back to the values regularly so they're not just that poster on the wall, but you're really saying, hey, our core value is blank. Citizenship is one of our core values at Leggand. We say that we want to foster positive change in the communities we live and work.? And are we doing that? And if we're not, our culture's not aligning. So that's what I would say. Talk about it, make sure employees know about it, and then use them for decision-making. And if you're not using them for decision-making, then you're going to not be driving it to your culture. And sometimes the values may seem to be conflicting with each other. And I love when that happens because then you can really dig deeper and say, okay, Does this got— we have this value of what, whatever freedom was a huge value at Mars, which was all about not having debt, having the ability to make decisions in a private environment, not be externally driven, but really we make decisions at the core. But then mutuality was another value, which was all about employees and vendors. And sometimes those mutual decisions were not the most economically profitable. And so you had freedom and mutuality, and that led to some amazing discussions.

▶4:58HostDonovan, I know Langen recruits the majority of their engineers right out of university, and how you fostered a unique company culture that engages and retains a predominantly Gen Z workforce— what strategies have you implemented and what have been the key outcomes?

▶5:15GuestYeah, we are— 80% of our employees are millennials and Gen Z. 50% of everyone we hire is Gen Z. And I would say most of our senior leaders are boomers or Gen X, right? So you have these different generations with different values. And so I look at connecting our values. So when we have our interns in, I always do a presentation around values. And how important that is. And we have a value around citizenship, which really ties to purpose, which is a big piece that Gen Z is looking for. They want to find a company that really is making a difference in the world. And then there's opportunity, one of our values. And so that's really focused on their career. We're a professional services firm, so we're looking for employees that don't want to jump from company to company. They want to build their career here, and we put in a lot of things that will help them develop. Each individual is different, but there's some general characteristics, and things like flexibility is really big with Gen Z. They want agency in decision-making, and so we try to be deliberate on rolling out policies where they have a decision So we have a hybrid work policy. So we're not going to just roll out a policy where we say everybody has to mandate and come in 5 days a week and these are the hours. So having policies around those type of things that are important to the generation, I think, is critical and helps us not only recruit, but really retain, which is just as important.

▶6:56HostDonovan, in your experience, how can organizations balance the integration of Gen Z employees with leadership from older generations still maintaining a cohesive and productive work environment?

▶7:11GuestI think having conversation is a big thing and having understanding and then talking to both generations about some characteristics that are important. So I mentioned a couple of characteristics that are very important to Gen Z. Well, one of the things that's very important to Gen X is work ethic and putting in the time and those type of things and having control as well over what they do, but really being able to manage that work-life balance, which they may not have seen in their parents and the boomer generation. And so sharing that, we know that's important. That's also important in this new generation. It may just look a little different. And then talking about those differences really helps bring the two together.

▶7:59HostDonovan, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶8:03GuestOne thing I, we were talking all about company values, Dave, but personal values I think is extremely important. And as a leader, a number of years ago, I did an exercise where I said, Donovan, what are your personal values? Because you're aligning with company values, but At the end of the day, each of us are people and we should really understand what those personal values are. And then you can understand when there's conflicts, right? Positivity is one of my top values. And I realize now that I know that when there's negativity and I see it, I know it's going against one of my values, but it allows me to be self-aware more because I understand that value and I go, okay, that's conflicting with one of my values. It's not necessarily bad, right? I just need to be self-aware and understand that. And there are times when I've now identified things that are in conflict, like I mentioned before, where something is conflicting with a value of mine and it allows me just to be aware of how to manage it. So I would just encourage our listeners here to do an inventory of your personal values, spend some time thinking about the times your life has been impacted the most, and for good or bad, and then what value was that it impacted and come up with that list.

▶9:33HostDonovan, thank you so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶9:39GuestDave, great seeing you again and thank you. Enjoyed the conversation.