Heather Daniels
Chief People Officer
ICBD Holdings
Episode 158
Beyond HR: Why Business Acumen and Data Drive Strategic People Growth.
Current chapter: Built by People podcast features insights from world's top HR leaders
Built By PeopleJune 6, 2025 · 17:11
Thesis
“Effective HR leadership requires prioritizing business acumen and operating as a strategic business partner first, deeply understanding the organizational ecosystem and leveraging data-driven approaches to proactively address challenges like hypergrowth and performance.”
Show notes
"I think as a business person first and an HR person second." Heather Daniels says this not as a personal brand statement, but as an operating requirement. Her career in manufacturing and healthcare, and her work managing hypergrowth at a healthcare startup, taught her something most HR leaders learn too late: you cannot design solutions for a business you don't understand. And understanding it means going to where the work happens — not inferring it from data and meetings.
At ICBD Holdings, she schedules time every week to walk the floor. Not as a leadership ritual, but as an information-gathering discipline. When you're managing a TA function the way a sales team manages a pipeline — tracking conversion rates, net hires, pipeline velocity — the insight from a floor walk can be the signal that changes your forecast. Heather teaches her TA teams to manage talent acquisition like a sales funnel: understand the conversion rates, identify the bottlenecks, and manage the pipeline with the same rigor a sales leader applies to ARR.
Her approach to performance management is equally evidence-driven. She overcame initial resistance not by mandating adoption, but by teaching leaders what the data revealed — and making the framework feel like a tool they owned rather than a process they were subjected to. Monthly "win" trackers, honest feedback culture, and continuous conversation replace the infrequent review cycle that most organizations mistake for performance management.
- "Business person first, HR person second" — the operating mindset that changes how HR designs and delivers
- Walking the floor as a strategic discipline — why field-level insight is irreplaceable, even in data-rich environments
- Managing talent acquisition like a sales pipeline — conversion rates, net hires, and funnel velocity as TA metrics
- Proactive workforce planning during hypergrowth — how to anticipate hiring needs 6-12 months out before the gap becomes urgent
- Overcoming performance management resistance — how demonstrating value wins adoption faster than mandating compliance
Previ is a private pricing network that is free for companies to launch and maintain. It saves employees $2,200/year on essential services like their cell phone and auto insurance bill. Visit here to learn more.
What you'll take away
- 1HR professionals should adopt a 'business person first, HR person second' mindset, deeply immersing themselves in the company's operations and external ecosystem.
- 2Proactive workforce planning, including field visits and strategic conversations with business leaders, is crucial for anticipating staffing needs, especially in hypergrowth scenarios.
- 3Implement data-driven performance management by teaching teams to manage their pipeline like a sales funnel, focusing on conversion rates and net hires rather than just individual reviews.
- 4Overcome resistance to performance management systems by demonstrating their value to leaders, providing practical tools like monthly 'win' trackers, and fostering continuous, honest feedback culture.
- 5Never lose sight of the external ecosystem (political, economic, industry trends) as an internal focus can lead to missing market shifts and competitive disadvantage.
What most organizations get wrong
- •While acknowledging some companies move away from traditional performance management, Daniels emphasizes its enduring value, especially in developing leaders to consistently provide direct, humane feedback, pushing back on the idea of completely abandoning structured feedback.
In Heather's words
“I think as a business person first and an HR person second.”
This quote encapsulates her core philosophy on the strategic role of HR within an organization.
“So I literally would schedule time on my calendar every week to just go walk the floor because otherwise we get, we all get so inundated with meetings that it's really easy for that just to take, hey, I'll someday get to it.”
This highlights a practical, actionable strategy for HR leaders to stay connected to the business operations and frontline workforce.
“And within TA, you're in sales. So, A, you gotta understand your business and be able to sell it to people externally. So, you've gotta have your elevator speech of why do you wanna work at our company? But then you also need to be able, just like any good salesperson, is manage your pipeline.”
This reframes the role of talent acquisition as a sales function, emphasizing data-driven pipeline management.
“I don't know a single leader in my career that has finished performance reviews ahead of time. It's always shepherding people in the process, but giving them the tools and tricks that I mentioned and engaging them on a more regular basis and making sure that they're having regular and ongoing conversations with their managers.”
This quote acknowledges the common challenges of performance management and offers a practical solution through consistent engagement and tools.
“Go learn your business. And what I mean by that is understand, so at a 30,000-foot level, understand the ecosystem in which your business and your business leaders are operating within.”
This serves as her overarching parting advice, emphasizing the importance of broad business and market understanding for HR leaders.
The problems this episode addresses
- •Difficulty scaling staffing rapidly during hypergrowth (e.g., 32,000% growth in 4 years) leading to reactive hiring.
- •Supply and demand imbalances for critical specialized roles, prolonging time-to-hire significantly.
- •Business leaders often lack clear foresight into their future staffing needs due to rapid change, making workforce planning challenging.
- •Resistance among people leaders to engage with performance management systems and provide direct, constructive feedback.
- •Companies becoming insular and internally focused, losing awareness of the external market ecosystem and competitive landscape, leading to loss of market share or price.
In this episode
Built by People podcast features insights from world's top HR leaders
Built by People
I've been in manufacturing and in healthcare for a large part of my career
Top Executives: Starting Out in Healthcare
Heather uses business acumen to address an organizational challenge
How to Get Ahead of the Curve in Healthcare Staffing
How do you encourage others in organizations to develop their business acumen
HR Strategy: Business Acumen
Heather says performance management played a critical role in her team's success
Performance Management in the Business
Heather says she overcame initial resistance to performance management systems at GE
How to Win Over Performance Management Systems
Heather: Go learn your business. And what I mean by that is understand
Heather Hewitt's Last Words
Topics covered
Organizations and entities mentioned
Full transcript
Expand transcript (0 words)
Transcript is not available yet.